“Why’re ya even doing this?” Rave asked, taking one blind step after the other. A cloth around her head ensured that she couldn’t see anything. Despite that, she walked pretty confidently, being led by the hand by her boyfriend. “I told ya I don’t like my birthday!”

“And I told you we’re still going to celebrate it,” John responded in a firm tone. “No ifs or buts, except for butts, we can have lots of butts.”

“Was about to say, that doesn’t sound like you,” the Lightbearer giggled, coming to a halt when John stopped. “So, what is this, my birthday present?”

“Yup,” John said, circling behind her and working on the knot of the blindfold. “We pooled some money and resources to get you something.” The vision-obstruction was removed. While Rave blinked, her eyes getting adjusted to the light, John put the blindfold into his inventory, to return to its place in the playroom later today.

“Uh, what am I looking at?” his girlfriend asked. A valid question, and what John had predicted, even if it wasn’t what he had hoped for.

They were standing before a building. Red bricks were orderly stacked, separated by white mortar, two stories high and twenty metres wide. It was a simple building, not plain but not extremely decorated either. A short walkway parted a lawn and led to a double-winged, black glass door. “It’s yours,” John said.

“Ya giving me a basic brick building?” Rave asked, looking at him with a simultaneously confused and anticipating look. She knew him well enough to already be aware that there had to be way more to this. “Where are we anyway? Is everyone else waiting inside?”

“Bay Circle – maybe,” John answered the last two questions first and kissed the back of her head.

“Ya giving me a basic brick building in the red-light district?” Rave’s question was pure teasing, there was no offense taken. “Ya wanna start selling me like common whore or something?”

“Common whore? I would never!” John defended himself. “That would be a wasted investment, I could get rich off selling booty pictures alone!” She giggled and leaned against him; his arms closed around her almost instinctively. Swaying to the beat of their hearts, they stood on the sidewalk. “I didn’t want to start decorating the exterior, that’s all for you. Now, let’s get inside and show you the actual present.”

“Alright,” Rave smiled, the sunlight catching in her wild pink hair, “let’s see what ya got in store, tiger.”

As plain as the outside was, the inside was furnished with the highest quality furniture he could find in a hurry. Black and white pieces with lots of polished bits combined to give everything a luxurious flare. That was just the entrance way as well. Resembling the Neonlights place they had been to in Amsterdam, as well as the Little Whirl, they were first led to a reception desk. From there, the rest of the building could be explored.

John showed her around the upper floor first. There was a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom, but all of those were only moderately sized, fitting for someone with an average income, rather than the luxury they were used to by now. That was because all of those were only meant for temporary stays.

The rest of that floor was filled with rooms designed for specific purposes. There was an office, a studio for photography, one for sound and singing and something that John unashamedly introduced as a porn set, including a couch, a bed and a professional stripping pole. Given that it was Rave whose fantasy was to get filmed sometime, she reacted to that with a lightly lewd giggle. The last room he showed her on that floor held one of the newly available teleport outposts of the basic range variety. With it, she could visit this building quickly whenever she wanted.

Despite their high-quality equipment, all of those places looked rather plain. “Like I said, we didn’t want to decorate the place for you,” John explained, while they went all the way down with the elevator, skipping the middle floor. “This is your little castle; you can use it however you like.”

The doors opened, letting them out at a little elevated VIP area over a large floor. The ground was separated into many large square panels, made from a plastic that was translucent but still gave an adequate amount of grip for the soles. Four pillars gave the room some structure and minor separation of segments. In the exact middle of the room was a tall platform with a bunch of technical instruments installed into the circular rim. Along the walls were seats, benches and tables, and one wall housed a bar. At the moment, everything was black and sleek, with some minor, neon decorations.

The area they were on overlooked everything like a balcony. A staircase led down, but John ignored that for now, instead passing the lavish couch that stood there and walking to the computer panel installed into the railing. With the touch of a few buttons, he caused the artificial light in the room to dim and be replaced with a myriad of smaller, coloured lights. The floor panels activated, glowing at pleasant levels in green, blue, red or yellow, the colours changing positions to a beat that suddenly kicked up.

“Aww, ya gave me a disco!” Rave laughed and took his position at the panel, to play around with the options. “That’s such a rich-man sweet thing to do!” She stopped pushing buttons and seeing what they did for just long enough to give him a proper kiss. Which took over a minute, all things considered.

“No money is worth anything if I can’t buy nice things for my lady,” John stated. “This building comes fully stocked with booze and all the other fun stuff you could need. How you use it, I’ll leave to you.” He shrugged. “You can rent it out, only use it for private parties every once in a while, use it as your office building, all yours to decide.” He booped her on the nose. “Just remember that you still have to obey the laws about public decency and noise complaints.”

“But where’s the fun in being First Lady if ya can’t break all the rules?” Rave pouted.

“Talk like that more and you’re in for a spanking!” John warned her.

“So ya giving me a reward?” she asked with a wink and hit the off button. All the lights went out, leaving them in absolute darkness.

For a moment, John thought she had made a simple mistake, then his girlfriend launched at him. The force of the impact sent him stumbling back. Laughing, he fell into the soft, leathery cushions of the couch. “The tour isn’t over yet! There are a bunch of side rooms on this floor for different genres and potential fucking, you know, like the Neonlights!” he let out the false complaint, while his hands found her round butt. In the lightless underground room, the pink lustre in his girlfriend’s eyes was the only source of illumination and it was only a truly weak one, barely enough to make their faces visible.

“I saw the floor plan on the console, we can skip that.” Securing her place, straddled over his legs, Rave ran her hands through his short hair. “Imma rock your world later,” she promised, feeling his growing erection in his pants. “For now, ya just hold me, alright? I want to say some stuff.”

John obliged readily, embracing her in a more decent, loving way. Their foreheads and the tips of their noses touched as they looked into each other’s eyes as deeply as they could. “Alright,” his voice was considerably softer now, keeping with the suddenly so tender moment, “I’ll listen when you’re ready.”

It took a few moments, during which Rave’s arms came to a still, wrapped around his neck. “John,” she whispered, very slowly, very carefully picking her words. “I love you. I say that a lot, I know, but it keeps being true. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing that’s really, actually, doubtlessly true.”

There was a pause but he kept silent. This didn’t feel like his time to speak. Not yet anyway.

“You’re… you’re just there. For a whole year now, you have been there. Even when you weren’t around, you were still with me in my thoughts or you still sought me out by whatever phone call or text you could. I don’t think there was a single day in the past year in which you didn’t enter my mind at least once.” Her brilliant blue, pink-illuminated eyes blinked once. The honesty inside them was undiluted, a reflection of love and presence. “When I feel like going wild, you give me the space to do so. When I feel like I am going crazy, you pull me back. When I feel vulnerable, you’re there to protect me. Being around you makes me a better me. I never knew that I wasn’t whole before I met you. As vulnerable as that makes me feel sometimes, I know that you would never take this happiness from me. I know that you and I, we’re going to last. For that, above all else, I love you.”

Another pause, Rave took a deep, audible breath. John recognized the pattern, it was the kind of breath one took to keep turmoil emotions in check. A gulp, then a laugh.

Rave raised her gaze to the ceiling and blinked a bunch of times. “Urgh,” she let out a frustrated sound. “I thought I could say some sentimental stuff without crying!”

“If it’s tears of happiness, I will gladly see them every day,” John told her in a serious tone.

“Oh mah lady Gaia, that’s terrible!” his girlfriend exclaimed. “What kind of corny, baritone beast are ya and what did you do to my boyfriend?”

“Well, what sort of sentimental beauty are you and what did you do to my girlfriend?”

“Shut it, ya big Brainiac nerdbag.” She gave him a small headbutt. “This is your fault!” The first tear ran over her face.

“I’ll happily take blame for that,” he said and gave her the small smile of a content man. “You don’t have to look at me if you feel more comfortable like that.”

Rave took the offer, their embrace tightening to the comfortable maximum. Her wild hair tickled his ear, cheek and nose, but it was all just a tiny bother compared to the adoring wonder that was her warmth pressed against him. “Maybe I just want to cuddle you more, ya big jerk,” she whispered.

Refusing to answer, letting the tender mood settle back into the dark of the room, John kept silent. He counted. Not seconds. Seconds felt like a horrible unit of time at the moment, an inadequate and mechanical tool, for rational thoughts. No, he counted her heartbeats. The intense, strong pulsing of a loving maiden’s core, it reverberated in his being more intensely than any other thing could have ever hoped to.

“You have given me so much.” He didn’t realize that it was him talking at first. “Because of you, I learned to be confident, learned to be more than I was. Wanting you, wanting to be with you, wanting to be more with you, it’s what drove me to do better and better. You are the face of stupid childish dreams I had and you made them real and you made them significant.” Now he suddenly felt the tears welling up. “You’re who made me unfold into who I am today. You believed in me, encouraged me and confided in me. You’re the first real friend I ever had, Jane, and that made all the difference.” The sob escaped him, and he partly buried his face in her neck. “I love you.”

They were both quivering. In the darkness, they felt only each other. Nothing of the remaining world existed. Not many tears rolled, but John’s insides were a sea whipped up into a frenzy by love, the emotion too intense at that moment to be properly controlled.

“If I told you…” he heard a few notes sung wonderfully next to his ear, “…this was only gonna hurt.” He had only heard the song once before, but he recognized it immediately. That dance in Amsterdam had seared itself into his memory. The words of the song, her smile and her genuine love, they had just been as intense in the crowd then as they were in the isolation now.

“If I warned you,” he answered with the second verse, “that the fire’s gonna burn.” Together they sang the song from back then. Some of the phrases resonated with terrible precision. A result of random chance, perhaps, of humanity experiencing many variations of the same troubles and eternalizing them in text and song. That rationale didn’t take the beauty for him and her out of it.

“Would you let me lead you even when you’re blind? In the darkness, in the middle of the night?”

“If I told you we could bathe in all the lights, would you rise up - come and meet me in the sky? Would you trust me when you’re jumping from the heights? Would you fall in the name of love?”

“When there’s madness, when there’s poison in your head – when the sadness, leaves you broken in your bed.”

Together they sang, together they finished. ““I will hold you, in the depths of your despair, and it’s all in the name of love.””

Then there was silence and still. Their quivering bodies no longer moved, aside from the beating of their hearts and the rise and fall of their chests with every breath. John blinked the remains of his tears away and kissed Rave’s ear. “I will do everything for you,” he promised.

“Yeah,” she kept her answer simple, her tone reciprocal. “We’re still going to change, aren’t we, tiger?”

“For a long time more,” he agreed. “There’s still much to be done in this current chapter of our lives. Conflicts that could change us because of necessity…”

“Don’t ya sound that negative,” Rave reprimanded him lovingly, stroking the side of his face with one hand while rubbing her cheek against him like a cat on the other side. “We’re people with responsibility; there’ll be a lot of stuff we have to do, but we have each other, we have all our other girls, we have our friends, we’ll get through all of it with them.”

“Who sounds corny now?” John asked with a giggle.

“I do, I watch anime, I’m allowed to sound corny,” she joked in a silky soft tone. “If I wanna use the power of friendship, I will!”

“I’m sure, if somebody can manage that reality bending feat, it’ll be you,” he said, in complete seriousness. “Nobody else could possibly be awesome enough otherwise…” That compliment came out incredibly stilted, and John blushed when he realized that.

“D’aww, you’re cute when you’re awkward,” his girlfriend added insult to injury. Then, she suddenly got serious again. “We’re going to get married someday, right?”

“Yes,” John told her.

“Will that change us? For the better?” Rave squeezed his head a bit tighter than was comfortable. “I don’t know if I… trust myself there…”

“You’re yourself, Jane,” he told her. “We’re going to be a family. A real and proper one. You, me, Aclyisa, Eliza, Nathalia and all the others of our lovable harem. Things will change and we’ll grow closer together because there’s nothing more important than we are to each other.” After a few seconds. “And the children we’ll have one day.”

“We’ll have those…” Rave mumbled, knowing it to be true and letting out a single laugh at the realization. “Whenever I think about that, it strikes me as odd. Yes, we’ll have those… they better be adorable!”

“My genes might make that difficult,” John stated. “…Depending on whether or not Gamer’s Body rewrites my DNA down to the inheritable chromosomes. Otherwise, well, maybe if the girls come more after my mother than me, they’ll look kind of good…” He got a headbutt again, moderately intense this time. “Ow!”

“Ya ruined it,” Rave decided and straightened up. She gave him a little slap. “Ya ruined the moment with your science and hypothetical talk.” Getting up, she summoned a little glowing orb above her finger tip. With it, she quickly found the console and the proper light switch. The disco was flooded with electrical light and John saw his girlfriend stand there.

Despite her choice of words being rather accusatory, she had a big smile on her face. “Well, sorry that I have honest questions,” he said, as things quickly returned to their usual banter. That he could have tearful talks, honest talks and funny talks with her in quick succession reminded him of how well they complimented each other. They were both quick thinking people that took life seriously, but not gravely so. Well, Rave a little less than John, but she was willing to entertain him.

“Well, whenever we have a baby, she’ll be adorable,” Rave decided, “and she’ll have my hair.”

“Gender decided already, have you?”

“Turned into Yoda, ya have?”

“Just answer the question, you bootiful vixen,” John demanded.

“I have a fifty-fifty chance of being right, that’s better than my usual odds when I just babble along.” Rave grinned. “Anyway, ya still have to show me the actual main floor, right? Wonder what ya could have hidden there. I mean, what else is there aside from hobby place and party place?”

“Ah, well…” John had the feeling she might be underwhelmed by what came next. Either that, or she would punch him in the gut.