Think I Want to Twist the Plot This Time

Part 4

"Why, are you looking to change the world with your work?" Barbie looks up at him, blinking. He has a nice jaw, too, she notices. She wants to brush her fingers along it.

"Would that be such a crime?" On anyone else, the statement would sound so cocky. On Oppenheimer, it's effortless.

"Not at all. I just prefer to fly under the radar." Barbie loves wearing her anonymity most days. Tonight brought back that old magic, just a bit. "Well in that case, whatever success you have, it's as important as you want it to be relative to the rest of the universe. My..." Actually, she's not really sure how she should address Ruth Handler, other than her creator. "My mother once told me that humans only get one ending, but ideas live forever. And I think there's some solace in that kind of immortalization if you're the human that creates the idea."

"That seems to be the only sort of immortalization a human will ever reach." He takes a long drag, and Barbie thinks about the fact that he's most certainly dead by her time. Oppenheimer won't see a smart phone, or Titanic, or Toy Story, or land rovers on Mars. Kind of trippy, honestly. "A lofty goal, sure, but certainly achievable."

"Do you ever think about dying?" she asks, because she knows she won't be met with silence like with the other Barbies.

"The thought probably crosses my mind at least once a day, maybe a few times," he replies, nodding slowly. "I'm not sure if that's a normal amount, since it's not exactly a topic most people are comfortable discussing."

"That's probably about as much as I think about it now," she assures, sighing into his shoulder. She's luckier than most, she knows—she's going to live far longer than the average person just based on her previous sixty-odd years she has before becoming human, and the sixty or so years she'll have after. But so many of those years just blur together in a mesh of "perfect" days that are only highlighted by her different fashion styles. Barbie can't wait to get smile lines and spots on her hands, so she finally looks like she's lived a life worthy of them. "So either that's normal, or we're just perpetually sad."

"Pardon the assumption, but I highly doubt a woman like you is perpetually sad." Before she can berate him for being presumptuous, he adds, "You have too much of a vigor for life."

She sighs heavily. "I do. I love waking up every morning to a new adventure, even when it's mundane." Her hand moves up to trace his jaw, then up to his lips. "This certainly wasn't mundane."

"I should hope not." Oppenheimer chuckles against her finger, and she moves her hand back down to his chest, watching it rise and fall. They sit in comfortable silence for a moment, and Barbie closes her eyes, listens keenly to him inhaling his cigarette, the slight sizzle of it, his long exhaling. His fingers still moving slowly up and down her shoulder. On a normal night, this might even put her to sleep.

Then she says, "Name another one."

"Another what?"

"Another thing on your mind," Barbie clarifies, opening her eyes again.

He exhales, long and low. "That, up until twenty minutes ago, you've never had sex."

Oh. She did admit that, didn't she? Perhaps not explicitly, but it certainly was implied when she said she finally felt completely human. How could she let that slip? "Is that... okay?" Maybe that's why he acted a little weird when she came up to lay with him just now.

"It'll have to be. It's not like you can take it back—unless you plan on getting baptized afterward."

"Oh, I don't really have a religion," Barbie says. Gloria was brought up Catholic, from what she remembers, but Barbie likes aspects of every faith, and who's to say which one is right, or if they're somehow all right? Or all wrong? "Besides, you're Jewish. You probably don't believe in all that."