Author Daecrist
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Villains Don't Date Heroes! 76: Proof
🕑 Added 2025-06-07 02:25:13 +0000 UTCI gave Fialux a wide berth for the rest of that day into the next. Things got a little awkward after she realized she’d been crying on me for the better part of an hour.
They got even more awkward when she politely asked for some space, but I gave her that space. I figured she needed it.
I was pretty sure from the medical readouts that she was still having one hell of a cry in her room. I’d moved her back to the rustic cabin buried deep under Starlight City suburbia. Not that she knew she was buried deep under Starlight City.
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. She’d been pretty insistent about pushing me away, and I’d respect that.
Even if 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. I 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. Knowing she’d 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 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.
“Is something wrong?”
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. Selena stood 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 an understatement.
I hadn’t recognized her because her voice was quiet. Reserved. Unsure.
Not at all the proud confident voice I was used to. This whole loss of her powers thing must’ve really taken it out of her.
I looked her up and down. 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. I took a deep breath and reminded myself this wasn’t my Selena, for all that she looked like my Selena.
“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 trick me. 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 trick me.”
I didn’t say anything. That did sound like the kind of thing I’d do. Except I’d 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 the laundry you’d done for me last week,” she said. “You do laundry?”
“Well it’s not exactly fair to say I do laundry,” I said. “Mostly I put it into the automated laundry machine and the computer takes care of everything for me. It even separates reds from everything else and sets aside stuff that’s lay flat to dry! Do you have any idea how difficult it was to figure that out? People think designing antigrav is difficult, but that’s my real crowning achievement.”
I was rambling. The situation called for rambling. I was nervous about everything happening here. I was nervous she’d decide she didn’t want to be around me anymore.
I worried what would happen if she went out into the world without her powers and without me there to protect her.
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 system 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 doing laundry when I could throw stuff into the washer myself.”
Her mouth closed. She cocked an eyebrow. Clearly I’d just said what she was going to say word for word, because I’d already lived it once.
“I’m guessing that’s a conversation you’ve had before?” she asked.
“You’re guessing 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 run on a twenty-four hour cycle. 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, or they don’t run all the time. I mostly keep the cameras in areas where I’m most likely to deal with an incursion.”
What I didn’t say was I’d never had to deal with an incursion. Mostly because my first layer of security, a far more deadly layer of booby traps and disintegrators, was so good the security cameras never got a chance to go into action.
“So let me get this straight. You allowed me into your lab with my powers 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 is these days. I didn’t track you unless you happened to show up on one of the security cameras in one of the sensitive areas I track. And you never wanted to go there. Your eyes always glazed over when I started talking about work.”
“Damn,” she said. “I was hoping for something concrete…”
I groaned. On the one hand I suppose it was expecting too much to hope she’d suddenly decide she was head over heels in love with me. Again. 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, but now it looked like that decision was going to 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 feeling.
My face lit up. Maybe there was something to her request.
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, but at the same time she didn’t exactly seem to hate kissing me.
Not that she’d exactly hated kissing me before. A blush came to her cheeks, and that was always so cute. That was something she’d done even when we were together.
“Um…”
I turned on the TV. Went to my recordings. I had to press like five different button combinations to get to my recordings, stupid streaming services that always buried what I actually wanted to watch under layers of their original programming bullshit nobody wanted to watch, 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 SCNN did have a special channel dedicated to their 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 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.
There was also an in memoriam for Rex Roth who was presumed dead in the giant robot attack, but I skipped over that one.
It couldn’t have been more perfect. Starlight City News Network had finally done something right.
