Neetra and Joe, Chapter One

“I wanted to save her, Joe,” said Neetra. “I tried.”

These remaining two members of The Four Heroes were alone atop the hill from which Nottingham Castle once towered, their backs to the wreckage that was all the war had left, and Joe’s eyes fixed on a point far beyond the rubble-strewn grass and the cliff’s edge directly ahead. He was staring somewhere above the outspread rooftops, somewhere into the heart of the endless sky. The news had not been good. Neetra and Joe were at more or less the very same spot on the castle grounds where they had sat together the day the Next Four completed their moving-in, and then they had laughed and made fond jokes to each other about how well their relationship seemed to be going. That memory now felt like something from another century that happened to a pair of strangers who lived then.

At great length Joe turned back to Neetra.

“Most would not have tried,” he declared softly.

Neetra kept her expression impassive, not without effort. Those words were a start, but she needed more.

Joe knew this as he gazed, and fell helpless into realms of feeling wider than a universe’s span. If he lowered his eyes, as one who felt himself unworthy to fix a steady line of sight upon the girl, then Gala and Draxu were at least a part of that. Both had peered uninvited into those depths of him where fermented the unrest which Neetra’s beauty had lately come to entail, so that standing in her presence for the first time since then Joe knew something of what had stayed Flashtease earlier on that day. Nor was Joe’s turmoil destined to be thrown off a second later as the Mini-Flash’s had been, for the accusations levelled at Flashtease were illusory and groundless, whereas for Joe there was shame not of mere thought but of actual deed to be borne. The terrible acuteness with which this guilt visited itself upon him now would have been mild by comparison to one who no longer cared. But Joe loved Neetra still, so suffered the more.

She saw he was trying to find the words. And she loved him. But that was the very reason those words must be spoken by someone. Delivering the obituary of the woman Joe had chosen in her place should not have fallen to her. That was asking too much of love. Neetra did her best to harden her heart, then drew in a deep breath.

“It’s not just you who’s felt like that for someone else,” she began to Joe. “You know what I went through over Steam, before you’d even set eyes on Gala. And while we were apart I met a guy. No-one you know, he was from the same planet as Flashtease…”

And it had been much easier to talk to other Mini-Flashes about this. Neetra had not anticipated the pain it would bring to raise the subject with Joe here and now, under these circumstances. Far worse than a nostalgic pang on recalling the sweet dreamy-eyed boy who might have been. No, something more bitter and selfish than that, deep down in the pit of Neetra’s stomach, was suddenly railing against her decision to deny herself and Flashthunder, all for the sake of this. Neetra as a child had never been prone to temper, but this brought back the rare occasions. Nothing childlike at all, however, about the other part of her that had also started piping up indignant reminders about everything she had missed out on.

“I waited,” Neetra resumed. The words were catching in her throat, fast turning into sobs. “I’ll never know what you and Gala meant to each other. But you could have waited too.”

She managed not to break down until the concluding sentence. As soon as it was over, Neetra and Joe were holding each other and weeping as one.

Here on the other side of that which had needed to be said were flooding tears and wrenching sorrow, to be sure. Yet also within the murmurs and motion of this inevitable embrace was suddenly some prospect of further talk, of reconciliation, maybe even of healing, where only tongue-tied hopelessness had hunkered before. Joe’s entire being was all but reduced by sensations which his fingertips and palms were first to communicate, as hands delved at last into the longed-for locks of Neetra’s hair and through those sumptuous fathoms found out the smooth familiar warmth of her cheek’s side-swell. The tender aroma of her, rising from her disarrayed tresses, touched almost unbearably on his other senses besides. And even despite his welling eyes Joe rapturously registered the way in which Neetra’s topmost tousles and curls were shining coppery red, as they’d always done when bright daylight was on them, that rich Scottish auburn burnished by the sinking sun.

Neetra clutched at him in turn with a fervour equal to his, her lower lip clenched between her teeth, not in any attempt to check her tears by now but simply from the intensity of it all. Her fingers ran over Joe’s thin physique, slipping irresistibly inside his jacket to hungrily range the known contours that lay under sparse inner clothing beneath. She’d noted to herself previously that he’d never been strong, not physically. But she loved that lean body all skin and bones. While Joe’s hand lovingly cupped one of her cheeks Neetra pressed the other hard against his half-naked chest, brushing her lips there and blotting him with tears as she whispered barely-formed choking words she had dreaded he would never hear.

Something quiet and new was upon the pair when they drew apart at last, to look at each other in the sunset. With a kind of meekness they linked hands, in not exactly the way they would have done when one was an early teen and the other a child. The identical light that glimmered in the eyes of each did not belong to that time either. It was a tentative glance they shared, to be sure, but it conveyed mutual agreement they should set off walking downhill. Neither one spoke, and nor was there any call for their accustomed mode of telepathy, for Joe and Neetra to know the direction their feet were taking them.

Between the rocky cliff-walls that scrolled by to drop behind, and the tall angular shafts of blue disclosed in the spaces thus vacated, old Nottingham stepped gradually forth to renew acquaintances. Here was a garden wall covered in ivy, and there a remembered house-front, as the heroes traced back the journey. It occurred to Neetra what an awesome cover-version Shadow and Cherry and their friends could do of that old one about the small café and the wishing-well. Indeed, it was a pity this was only a flying visit. Neetra would have loved to get to know her Nottingham all over again.

She sighed, and laid her head against Joe’s shoulder as they strolled. “It’s not just us,” Neetra told him. “Couples go through this. But we’re The Four Heroes’ couple, the only one made up of two actual members, so the lives we lead have been a part of it. You dying and coming back, then Steam, then Flashthunder and Gala. And because all eyes are on us, some would look and say it’s only even been crisis and heartbreak. That we’ve never had the chance to love at all.”

They were approaching a corner. Neetra recalled when The Four Heroes had torn around that bend and hurtled off the way she and Joe had just come, bound for a conversation with Perdita who was then to spirit them away for their lengthy stretch of adventures in the year 2596. Joe had vaulted straight over the back of an aged dog when it ambled unconcerned across his path. The dramatic speech Joe was making while he ran suffered not the slightest interruption. Neetra’s mouth twitched, and she crinkled her little nose at the memory.

“You are thinking about that dog,” intuited Joe.

His companion giggled and beamed at him. “Because they’ll never know there were the times like that too,” she went on happily. “Like when I was singing ‘One Fine Day’ in the kitchen without knowing you three were watching me. How we used to go to the cinema, the four of us. Or I’d cook for you all – it was only by starting so young I got as good at it as I am now,” Neetra added seriously. “Even the time we tried to form a band, though maybe the less said about that.”

“We had star potential,” Joe put in.

Neetra smiled, her lips together. That attempt at humour was an excellent sign right now. It meant Joe’s heart was beating as wild and fast and strong as hers, and that he was every bit as terrified as she.

Battle-damage had cleared a block of buildings, affording the two heroes a shortcut. Joe led Neetra by the hand over mounds of mangled girders and presently clambered onto unkempt grass, at the foot of The Four Heroes’ garden which sloped upward before them to their house. Sliding his hands under and around the soft curves of Neetra’s middle Joe lifted her carefully down beside him. The healthy weight of that well-grown girl was a world apart from the small slight child of yesterday.

By the rockery the tree that had always stood there was standing yet. That was like the song too, Neetra noted to herself, although this tree grew not chestnuts but damson plums. She and Joe passed under its branches and there they stopped. Sun-specks filtering through the leaves overhead fell on Neetra’s upturned face like freckles of light, ever darting and skipping across the pretty features in the breeze that softly blew. She looked at Joe, and he had never seen a sight he loved more.

“Here’s how I know,” Neetra declared. “On that day when we first met Gala, Dimension Borg had already read the Prophecy. He knew about everything that was going to happen between the pair of you. Why didn’t he warn you properly then? And why, when I finally tracked him down, did he go and give me some crazy version of events tailor-made to turn me against everyone else? Why couldn’t he have just told the truth?”

“Who can truly understand evil?” was as much as Joe could venture.

But Neetra’s question had not been rhetorical. “When he was all done with his last great lie, he asked me to join him,” she responded simply. “And he really thought I was going to.”

Joe needed a minute with this. Technology was not his forte, and Dylan would have been able to connect the dots far quicker. But at last, Joe’s eyes widened.

“His programming,” our hero breathed.

Neetra nodded once. “It never completely went away,” she confirmed, with a small sad smile. “Somewhere, in the deepest-down and longest-forgotten part of Dimension Borg’s central processor, he still believed he had to find me.”

Tenderly Joe touched her, as if to settle the shifting freckles where they were. She continued, close to him by now:

“But even if Dimension Borg had never malfunctioned in the first place, never changed, never done anything besides what my parents instructed him to…even then, he wouldn’t have been needed. Because somebody else found me. And that was the way it was meant to be.”

Finally her lips sought out his, to stay there for a time which was without time. And the wind moved in the damson tree above them.

Even then, they did not hurry. It was true that the dusty neglected interior of The Four Heroes’ house, the lounge and the hall and the stairs and the landing, seemed to pass one by one in as many heartbeats. But still Joe and Neetra took their time, until the last footstep of their odyssey was all walked out and they were face-to-face in the latter’s bedroom.

Sunset was a blazing plane on the wall opposite the window, amidst whose gold the leaves danced their dance of today unmindful that their stage was as quaint and frowsty as the rest of the house. For the room’s two occupants however, the past peeked out everywhere their eyes lingered, from faded postcards pinned to the notice-board, from Neetra’s worn-out sneakers half-hidden under the bed, and from the pair of pink and yellow cheerleader pom-poms hanging on their peg by the door.

“We were both too young,” Neetra said to Joe. “That started you thinking it was only ever going to be wrong, and me that it was only ever going to be right. Nothing ever works out the way you imagined. All this time it’s taken us, all this distance we’ve come. Neither of us could ever have seen so far. But it’s right for both of us now.”

And she slipped out of her threadbare sweater, while a free hand unclasped the strange alien buckle on the waistband of her skirt.

Joe took off his hat.

END OF CHAPTER ONE