Oh, What Feeling is This? Chapter Five

Neetra, at very great length, dragged a forearm across her overflowing eyes.

“Here I am, wasting my tears,” she finally managed to articulate. “And I’ll bet right now he’s having a great time with her.”

For the shortest while she had been able to make herself believe it had only ever been about what her body wanted, and that such a purely physical desire might be fulfilled by Flashthunder, or by anyone. Now she had been forced to confront what she had known all along, that it didn’t work that way, that it had only ever been about Joe. But the bleakest part of it was that her body still wanted the same, that which Joe had not been ready to give, and this even even despite his desertion of her, and even though The Four Heroes were no more, and everything her love for him had stood for was gone. Nothing could make Neetra understand why it had to be that way. It seemed so unfair.

She turned to Flashthunder. Sitting here in her knickers she suddenly felt as silly as she would have done in a high school assembly, but far worse for Neetra was to think she’d ruined someone else’s first time along with hers. Reaching out a hand she touched the side of his face again, hoping that in the absence of any words that could suffice, this gesture might at least tell him something of how sorry she was.

Neetra was not wholly wrong about how Flashthunder was feeling. It did seem to him that she had ruined it. Indeed, as he looked back at her tumbled tresses of brown lying loose upon her bare pink skin, some of the long strands sticking to her sweat, and at the little damp island of white cotton and frill that was the sum of her raiment, and as he smelled again the last of what still hung in the air, he was in the mood to be just as selfish and just as self-pitying as he had ever been. But nor was it the first time Neetra’s presence had prompted Flashthunder to somehow overcome old habits, and he knew now with unshakable certainty that while she was suffering thus, vanishing as usual into his own weakness was the very last thing he could rightfully do.

He took her hand that was on his cheek, then her other one too, and holding both as she had earlier done for him, asked her softly:

“Are you sure – absolutely sure – he’s stopped loving you?”

Neetra coughed out a mirthless laugh.

“Well, let me think,” she pronounced dramatically. “He says goodbye to me by saying something about how he’s off to tell the truth at last. Five minutes later we’re fighting for our lives, against her. He mysteriously fails to show up for that battle, by the way. Oh, and all of a sudden she and her gang know everything about our top-secret plans. Then later Dimension Borg treats me to a little look at what they’ve been getting up to since, and it turn’s out the gang’s got a new member, because there they both are, working together, fighting side-by-side…”

A tiny glance from Neetra’s eyes flickered Flashthunder’s way. There was utter desperation in it. Please, the eyes implored him. Please, don’t make me go on with this…

But his steady gaze stayed on her, not forceful, nor even strong exactly, but pure and beseeching and constant.

One more time she tried to deny it. And then:

“No,” Neetra replied at last. “No, I’m not.”

The tempest this time was loud and lasting and long. Patiently Flashthunder waited until it started to subside.

“That’s what I’m really hiding from,” she confessed at last. “That’s what Li was for. Not because I know he betrayed me…but because I can’t face knowing. Because…you see, Flashthunder, if he did…if it turns out to be true…then that’s the one thing that would break my heart.”

Flashthunder’s next words did not come easy to him. It was the closest to assertive he had ever had to be in his life.

“You know how you told me,” he ventured, “that when all this is over, there was something I should pluck up the courage to do…?”

“That’s not the same!” Neetra insisted thinly, wiping her eyes. “You’ve never been through anything like this! Not knowing how it’ll work out…and feeling so scared…and thinking, what if…what if the answer’s not what I’m hoping for…!”

“Mine’s easier than yours,” Flashthunder granted her. “But it is the same. And you’re braver than me.”

No words could follow such a concise statement of all that was so inescapably so. They both sat quiet for a while, and simply watched. The place where they were now, which had turned out not to be their destination after all, was melting and reshaping into the pair of long divergent roads that remained for each of them to tread alone before they finally arrived where they had hoped to already be. It was the kind of prospect into which a cheerful word or two could hardly go amiss, so Neetra turned to Flashthunder and remarked: “I’m sure I’m right about Cherry. And, um, she seems really nice.”

“Oh, she is,” he replied gratefully at once. “Takes a bit of getting used to, of course, you know these performer-types. But you’d like her.”

“Good news,” observed Neetra. “Looking and singing the way she does, she can’t get that much from other girls.”

Flashthunder was starting to smile, though Neetra was at a loss as to what either of them could possibly have to smile about. “You sing something,” he proposed.

“I can’t sing,” our heroine returned wretchedly. But Flashthunder’s smile stayed on full-beam, and between that and the kind of eyes he had, the subsequent sweetness would have been hard for any girl to stand against.

“Please,” was all he had to say. Neetra suspected he knew it too.

“There are times I’m willing to swear you stepped straight out of a Rachel Renée Russell novel,” she grumbled. “Not all the time. But sometimes. Well, alright then, just as long as you’re not expecting Cherry or anything. I’ll admit it’d make a perfect ending to the kind of day this was.”

Then she took a deep breath, and began. As she herself had affirmed, she did not sing as well as Cherry, but no-one would have known it from the rapt way Flashthunder gazed at her and listened as if captivated by every line. And somehow, even from the very first notes Neetra sang, there was more. Could it even be that these simple artless strains had power to transcend the confines of Flashthunder’s sleeping-quarters, and the heat-field surrounding the ship, to work their gentle twining way across the ethereal fabric of the galaxy itself? It was almost as if Neetra’s soft untutored voice, not always pitch-perfect but never anything but sure and sound, were echoing in the light of the stars and from one solar beacon to the next heading gradually home. Her tender refrain was a road never travelled, winding through the universe, bridging where she was now with the blue-green orb she loved and had forsaken so long ago.

Flashthunder beat his hands in fervent applause, beaming at her, and she grinned back feeling better than she had ever imagined singing a song could make her feel. At length she turned to the window.

“Looks like we’re almost out of this,” Neetra reported.

“Better go rejoin the others,” Flashthunder agreed. “We’ll need to get to our stations.”

“I’ll need to tell them to give it a rest with that ‘Li’ nonsense,” Neetra added, and the smile she gave Flashthunder as she said it was destined to remain their secret and theirs alone until the very end of time. “I’m Neetra again.”

With that, she stood up. Then taking Flashthunder’s hands she helped him to his feet beside her, and together they put their tunics back on.

THE END