When Ren met Neerya

In order to figure out these characters more, I'm writing some back-story flash-fiction pieces. This is my first. I dunno, I think I rushed it. What do you think?


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She found him the first time, as she would find him often after, standing still as the sea parted around him.  She wasn’t directed; just carried along, looking for a place to drift to a stop.  Her grouping had fallen apart, with five of them announcing that they had joined the Beautifuls collective.  Three people were not enough to hold a compartment, so she had bid farewell to her two remaining friends and they had separated, seeking what they could find.  

She had never seen anyone stand against the current like that.  His eyes were closed and his arms hung at his sides, fingers flared, brushing up against the throng moving past him.  He was a lighthouse, a beacon.  She slowed, describing an arc against the current as people shifted to avoid her new direction.

She came to a halt before him, and his eyes floated open.  The soft noises of the crush receded as they regarded each other.  Then she unmoored, drifted to the side, and rejoined the current, the back of her hand brushing the back of his as she went.  For many moments afterwards, he held his hand up before him, looking at it, trying to figure out how he could feel so burned by her touch, yet see no effect at all.

She spent the night in the corner of a corridor, lulled to sleep by the padding footsteps of the multitude.

She found him the second time with his eyes open, in the Commons, watching a Vore flash-orgy with a combination of bewilderment and disgust and envy.  This tribe of Vores were all bald and overly plump, making it difficult to tell which were male and which were female, but that didn’t seem to dismay any of them.  She watched him watching them, turning his head and narrowing his pale eyes, frowning as he tried to decipher positions and associate gender.  When he leaned forward to get a better view of a particularly peculiar act, she laughed in spite of herself.  

He stood up, sheepishly running his hands through his hair.

“Sometimes, I can’t tell...”

“Where one ends and the next starts,” she finished for him.  “I know.”

“Especially when they’re so...” he waited for it.

“Puffy.”  She laughed again.  He grinned at her.

“I’m Ren.  And you’re the girl from the other day.”

“Neerya.  Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Stand in the way.”

He shook his head.  “I’m not in the way, any more than a rock would be in the way of a stream.”  Neerya hadn’t heard those words since playschool.  Ren sighed, seeing the incomprehension in her eyes.

“It makes me feel connected.  Like I’m the center of the Ark, and everyone is moving around me.”  He looked at her.  “You should try it some time.”

That night, the corner was occupied.  She wandered the corridors for a while, dodging Vores who hadn’t been satiated by the mob earlier.  Eventually, she found herself in an older corridor, not as wide as the others.  She stood and closed her eyes and let the current sweep over her.

She found him the third time in one of the cafeterias.  She brushed his shoulder as she sat, and he nodded wordlessly.  The viand was as it always was, tasteless and soft, but she found that, sitting beside him, it seemed more substantial, as if he was lending it weight.  

“Where do you sleep,” he asked her.  She shrugged.

“Here and there.”  

“My sister’s partner just left.  You could come stay with us.”

“I’m not really looking to get into another large compartment.”

“Oh, we only have four.”  

She leaned forward, excited.  “You have a foursome compartment?”  

He nodded.  “We’ve been careful to never get below three.  We’re three now, you would make four.  But if you don’t want it, tell me now.  We can’t wait.”

She nodded.  That night, she laid awake on the floor of her new home, listening to the noises him and his sister and the third one made as they slept.  As with every other place in the Ark, she was being touched, but in deference to her newness, she was given an end spot -- against the wall on her right, and Ren’s warm arm and leg on her left.

He was becoming her anchor, and she swung in arcs around him, eventually coming to rest, connected, whole.

She found him the fourth time in her heart and in his arms.