by Mia Archer
It tore at my heart that I couldn’t go in there and do anything to help her, but I was going to give her the distance she needed. Even if I wasn’t sure whether or not distance was something she really needed, but she’d been pretty insistent about pushing me away.
But giving her that distance really sucked. I was supposed to be her girlfriend. I still felt like her girlfriend. I’d been her girlfriend that morning and nothing about my feelings had changed even if she couldn’t remember a damn thing.
I could still remember every amazing moment we’d had together, and it tore at my heart knowing she couldn’t remember any of it.
I sighed. Looked down at the cup of tea I’d brewed for myself in the lab breakfast nook. I was going to have to talk to her again, eventually, but it broke my heart every time I looked at her and I saw attraction there, but not the half cocked grin she gave me that said I was hers.
I took in a deep breath. Let out another sigh. I’d been able to stave off some of the loneliness of working in the lab all by my lonesome when I had Fialux around. I could always look forward to seeing her again and somehow knowing she’d always be there waiting for me made any project I was working on go by faster.
Maybe it was a little unhealthy that I was getting all of my social interaction from her, but it worked so why worry?
I was even more unhealthy about socializing before Fialux came along. Back when I’d been getting all of my social interaction from a megalomaniacal psychotic supercomputer who’d done his very best to kill me and take over the world.
Lucky for me that his very best turned out to not be all that good at all.
“Is something wrong?” a voice said from the entrance to the breakfast nook.
I looked up in surprise. Nobody was supposed to be able to make it this deep into my lab. If I heard someone then…
This time the sigh I let out was one of relief. It was none other than Selena standing there looking absolutely beautiful. She wore some pajama shorts and a tank top she’d brought over to the lab when it became apparent it would be easier for us to spend time here than at her apartment off campus.
To say I had a hell of a lot more space than your average off campus housing would be one hell of an understatement.
I hadn’t recognized her because that voice was quiet. Reserved. Unsure.
Not at all the proud confident voice I was used to hearing from her. This whole loss of her powers thing must’ve really taken it out of her if she was talking like a shrinking violet rather than putting herself out there in the world.
I looked her up and down again. That outfit was not the kind of distraction I needed right now when I didn’t have her crying to distract me from the sexy, but she hadn’t asked me my opinion.
“Where did you find those?” I asked.
She hit me with a funny look. “You know I almost didn’t believe you? Like, I thought that whole thing yesterday could’ve been part of some scheme you were running to try and deceive me for some reason. I mean I guess the reason isn’t all that difficult to figure out. There are a lot of reasons why you’d want to deceive me.”
I didn’t say anything. That did sound like the kind of thing I was liable to do. Except I would never deliberately delete someone’s memories as part of a scheme. Take over a college class? Sure. Delete memories? No way.
No, I only did that accidentally when I was trying to save their life. Great fucking job I did on that.
“But then I asked your computer for something to wear and it told me it had all of the laundry you’d done for me last week,” she said. “You do laundry?”
“Well it’s not exactly fair to say that I do laundry,” I said. “Mostly I put it into the automated laundry machine and the computer takes care of everything for me.”
Her eyes went wide. It was a look I well recognized, because she’d looked just as impressed the first time I explained the laundry regimen around here to her.
I held up a hand. “I know. You’re going to ask me if I really programmed a computer to do all that and then you’ll ask me to take you on a tour of the laundry facility. Once I show you you’re going to say it seems like a bit much for one person to avoid laundry duty when I could just throw stuff into the washer myself.”
Her mouth closed. She cocked an eyebrow at me. Clearly I’d just said what she was going to say word for word, because I’d already lived it.
It would be nice if she didn’t question every little thing I told her, but I could understand her being a little reluctant to believe everything I said considering the last she knew we were sort of flirtatious mortal enemies.
“I guess that’s a conversation you’ve had before?” she asked.
“You guess correct,” I said.
“Okay. So if I’m over here often enough that you’re doing my laundry, prove it.”
Now it was my turn to arch an eyebrow. “Prove it?”
“Yeah. You’ve got this big lab and I see a bunch of cameras everywhere. Prove that I hang out here.”
I sighed. “Those cameras only cycle on a twenty-four hour thing. The only thing you’re going to see is the past day. And there are a lot of places that don’t have surveillance cameras. A lot of places where they don’t run all the time.”
“So let me get this straight. You allowed me into your lab with my powers and everything and you weren’t monitoring me constantly?”
“Nope. I firmly believe in your right to privacy. Like I’m more of a stickler about that shit than the US government. I didn’t track you unless you happened to show up on one of the security cameras in one of the main areas I track.”
“Damn,” she said. “I was hoping for something concrete…”
I groaned. On the one hand I suppose it was expecting too much to think that she’d suddenly decide she was head over heels in love with me. That it didn’t matter that she’d lost her memory.
After all, there was a lot that had happened between me being the professor at the front of the class talking her into revealing herself and deciding we were going to try and make the whole villain and superhero relationship thing work.
There’d been a couple of betrayals. A couple of big fights with enemies old and new. A couple of twists and turns that weren’t going to happen all over again because CORVAC’s circuits were all fried and Rex Roth was dust in the wind.
Literally.
Plus I totally thought I’d been doing a good thing by not recording her constantly, even if the temptation had been there. I’d been holding to personal morals by not recording her in my lab. But now it looked like that decision was going to come back and bite me in the ass.
It seemed like so many of my decisions had been coming back and biting me in the ass lately. I didn’t particularly care for that.
My face lit up. Recordings. All that stuff that happened between me being the naughty professor and us falling for each other. I might not have recordings of us in the lab, some of those would be pretty blush inducing thank you very much, but…
“That’s it! Recordings of us!”
I walked over to grab a remote. I hated that I had to turn the television on the old-fashioned way with a remote as though this was the twentieth century, but again, I was sort of running at a reduced capacity right now while I tried to decide whether or not I wanted to give my new computer assistant more autonomy.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
I grabbed the remote and walked over to her. Leaned in and gave her a big smack on the lips.
Her eyes went wide in a bit of surprise, but at the same time she didn’t exactly seem to hate kissing me.
Not that she’d exactly hated kissing me before. Actually I saw a blush come to her cheeks, and that always looked so cute. That was something she’d done even when we were together.
“Um…”
I turned on the TV. Went to my recordings. It annoyed me that I had to press like five different button combinations to get to my recordings, stupid Bell themed cable company and their st
upid entertainment package that never gave me what I was asking for, but eventually I pulled up the recording I was looking for.
I might not have CORVAC constantly recording everything I ever did in the city like in the old days, but I had been able to set up a recording of the twenty-four hour news coverage after CORVAC’s giant robot attack on the city.
That was the glorious thing about cable news even as it was the most infuriating thing about cable news. They got a story in their teeth and they ran with it. There was no way they weren’t going to get into the juicy story of a giant robot attacking the city and the world’s greatest hero teaming up with the world’s greatest villain to stop that giant robot from destroying the city.
Which meant there’d been plenty of footage being shown on repeat of us working together to save said city. Footage I could show Fialux here in the comfort of my breakfast nook. Footage that didn’t violate my personal morals about creating a mini surveillance state in my lab.
It couldn’t have been more perfect.
28
Home Video
This was perfect. Maybe I couldn’t show her footage of what our life had been like staying over at each other’s places, her coming over to the lab once in a while and me staying at her apartment close to campus, but I could show her what happened on the day we finally and definitively fell for each other.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Order some breakfast, because boy do I have a show for you!” I said.
I pulled up the news recording of our exploits when we’d last saved the city. The only time we’d saved the city that everyone knew about, come to think of it.
There’d been a couple of times when we’d gone out and busted some heads without the news cameras recording everything we did. I liked to say if you were doing your job right then it was splashed all over cable news and the Internet for the whole world to see, but that wasn’t always necessarily the case if you were doing hero stuff instead of villain stuff.
And of course there were the constant alien invasions to think of. It seemed like I was beating back one of those at the edge of the solar system every other month and the less the people of earth knew about that the better.
It would only throw them into a panic, and panicked people were difficult to rule. Anyone who tried to rule via the crisis model, keeping people constantly on edge with an external threat, was asking to have their back against the wall when that constant tension eventually reached a breaking point.
“Wow,” Fialux said. “We’re really fighting a giant robot together?”
“You bet your cute ass we are!” I said.
I blushed when she gave me an odd look. Yeah, she’d been my girlfriend a day ago and flirtatious stuff like that had been the norm. It was difficult adjusting to a world where that was no longer the case.
I shut up and let the recording play while we enjoyed breakfast. Fialux ordered up some sort of sugar loaded cereal that I totally wouldn’t be able to eat myself. Not without spending at least a half hour in the gym to make up for it at the end of the day. I looked down at my own oatmeal and frowned.
The sacrifices we had to make in order to look good in a profession where you had to regularly squeeze into the kind of skintight cat suits that would make Hollywood movie stars blushed.
Though as I looked at Fialux wolfing down her own food I wondered if she’d be able to continue packing away the calories like she used to. After all, if she’d been relying on some sort of strange accelerated alien metabolism to be able to eat whatever the hell she pleased and still look as great as she did then there was going to be a rude awakening at some point.
I figured it would be better not to bring that up just yet though. After all, the poor girl had just been through a hell of an ordeal. She’d had her powers completely stripped from her. She’d had the crap beaten out of her by a robot without seeming to realize she was having the crap kicked out of her. She’d been tossed into a med bay that had removed some of her memories for the time being.
I figured telling her she was going to have to start count calories when previously she’d been able to pack away the junk food like it was going out of style would be too much on top of everything else that had already happened to her.
Fialux stared at the newsfeed with rapt concentration. She gasped at all the appropriate moments, and by the time she was done looking through a complete summary of our fight from multiple angles she looked at me and seemed very impressed.
Heck, I was impressed for that matter. Sure I liked to watch myself in action so I could pick up pointers for what to do in the next fight, but there was something about watching me and Fialux save the city together that was always impressive.
“You helped me do all that?” she asked.
“Well, you were the one who did all the work of taking out the giant robot.”
“But you were the one who tossed in the bomb thing that killed him and…”
She put a hand to her head. I leaned forward, on the verge of whisking her off to the med bay if it turned out something bad was going down, but she held up a hand and shook her head.
“Sorry. I had a flash of something. Of you being chased by a bunch of missiles and then… But it’s gone.”
I sighed. Those flashes of memory were a good sign, but it was going to be endlessly frustrating dealing with her almost remembering us. I wanted my Fialux, my Selena, back damn it.
“Trust me. You were the one who did the real work breaking through his armor. The bastard changed his specs without telling me and made it a hell of a lot more difficult for me to break through with my toys. You brushed through that armor like it was tissue paper.”
“If you say so,” she said, sounding unsure of herself. Though I couldn’t tell if that was because she was really unsure of herself or if it was that she was still suffering from that memory.
“I do say so,” I said. “I was just there to soften him up and triangulate the position of the real bad guy.”
Her face scrunched up in confusion. “The real bad guy? What are you…”
I waved a hand and stopped her. “There’s always a real bad guy behind the bad guy you think is the real bad guy, if that makes sense.”
That look of confusion never left her face. “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”
I sighed. “Look. It’s Villainy 101. CORVAC revealed he wasn’t in the location I thought he was hiding in because none of the stuff I’d put in place to kill him when he went rogue actually killed him. Security through obfuscation. Really an amateur move. From there it wasn’t that difficult to figure out he had to be hiding his traitorous circuits somewhere else. I also figured he wasn’t hiding all of his eggs in that giant robot chassis since that would mean killing the giant robot would kill him. From there it was easy enough to figure out he was controlling it from a remote location and and track him back to the lair he was sharing with that Roth asshole down by the docks. They were using an old abandoned warehouse they’d dug up. Probably some other better villain’s lair they moved into after it was abandoned.”
“I see,” Fialux said, in a tone that said she didn’t really see at all. “I can’t believe Rex Roth was manipulating me that whole time.”
“Yeah, it was a real son-of-a-bitch. Mind control stuff. He almost got me with it too.”
“How did you stop him?” she asked.
“Simple. I’ve prepared for just about every eventuality I thought someone might throw at me. Including all of the eventualities I’d invented to throw at other people.”
She frowned. “So you’ve used mind control on people before?”
An uncomfortable silence settled between us. I wasn’t sure that I liked this line of questioning. It was a line of questioning that was going to force me to admit something I’d rather not, and I never liked those all that much.
I decided I was going to choose my words carefully. After all, even my Fialux hadn’t quite known about that tech I’d developed. Something told me this was th
e sort of thing she’d continue to be perturbed by even after she got her memory back if I didn’t handle this delicately.
“I developed mind control technology, yes. Sort of a proof of concept. But I never actually used it in the field.”
I stopped. Thought about that. Realized it would be a good idea to be as completely and totally open and honest about this as possible.
“Scratch that. That’s not quite true,” I said. “I did use it one other time. To get the job in the journalism department that let me teach your class.”
“I wondered how you got that job,” she said. “You didn’t seem like any other adjunct professor I’d ever had. They’re always so terrified of losing their jobs that they don’t act nearly as brazen as you did.”
I shrugged. “What can I say? I needed to track you down, and it ended up working out. Until it didn’t.”
I frowned and looked down at my empty bowl of boring sugar-free oatmeal. Oh to have a fabulous alien metabolism that allowed me to eat whatever the hell I wanted without consequences in the calorie department.
Seriously. I’m talking when we went to the food court down on campus she ate like she was an Olympic athlete or something. Though considering the way she expended energy when she was flying around saving the world it was hardly a surprise that she’d have one hell of a daily caloric deficit, even if I was pretty sure she was drawing some power from somewhere else as well.
At least she had back when she had powers to draw on. That was getting uncomfortably close to territory I didn’t want to cover with her, though. Not right now. Not unless she tried to do something stupid that relied on those powers again.
“So it’s not something you’ve ever used any other time?” she asked.
“Yup,” I said.
“And you’re never going to use that again?” she continued.
“Villain’s honor,” I replied. Then, when she gave me a look that said that wasn’t a very trustworthy thing to swear by: “Trust me. I take that very seriously.”
“Right,” she said. “I suppose it’s a good thing you had that ready to go then if it saved our butts.”
