Fialux flew towards me with her fist out in front of her. Her mouth opened in a scream of rage.

I instinctively winced and turned away. My asshole puckered just a little. All the times she'd kicked my ass in a fight flashed through my head. All the times she'd easily defeated me and then sent me on a not-so-fun flight to the authorities.

This lady singlehandedly bought my lawyer a boat with all the times he had to get me out of the hoosegow because she was pretty, but she never quite got the hang of the whole "due process" thing. Then again, there were a lot of government pukes who seemed to be having trouble with that lately too.

Though they really should've known better.

The point is, having a superheroine who'd made her name kicking my ass up and down the skyscrapers of downtown Starlight City heading towards me, even when I knew she didn't have her powers, wasn't a pleasant experience. Hey, you try having your ass handed to you by a hero time and time again and not have that reaction.

This was it. This was the end.

This was totally a touch of PTSD that hadn't manifested until I started training her on how to fly using the antigrav units in a suit I'd custom made for her. I forced myself to face her, reminding myself there was no real danger here.

She wasn't going to hurt me. Both because she loved me, and because… well…

Something changed. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened even wider, and her look wasn't really rage now so much as it was pure surprise. Pure terror.

At the last moment she veered off. Though to say she veered off because she was afraid she was going to hit me would be charitable at best.

No, one moment she was moving across the giant flight training room in full control of her flight, something I would've expected her to pick up pretty easily since she'd spent so much time flying around without the help of my little toys, and the next she'd completely lost control.

"Fuck!" she shouted.

"Just roll with it!" I shouted at her. "Smacking into walls builds character!"

The hazy sparkling outline of a shield appeared around her as she hit a wall. It was able to wrap all around her unlike with my suit. I was always powering so many things that I had to go with a directional shield, but her suit was only powering the antigrav units so I was able to devote the remainder of the suit's power to keeping her from hurting herself when she inevitably screwed up.

The Enterprise-D shield bubble wasn't as efficient in a fight, but it was perfect for flight training.

She bounced around the massive flight training room a couple of times. She careened off of one wall, flew across the room into another, bounced off the bottom and the top, looking for all the world like a three-dimensional game of Pong where the physics engine had suddenly gone terribly wrong.

Not that Pong ever really had a physics engine. Whatever. Bad example.

I put a hand over my mouth to cover my giggle. It didn't stop the giggle, but I the last thing I wanted her to see was me laughing at her predicament.

I was supposed to be the patient teacher here, after all. The Miyagi to her Danial san. Or maybe Danielle san. I definitely wasn't supposed to be laughing at her misfortune.

Plus she was sensitive about this whole situation. Not that I could blame her.

Finally I held my wrist blaster out and used my anti-Newtonian field to bring her to a halt. The thing hadn't been all that great at stopping her when she had her powers, it'd only worked the one time when I managed to catch her flat footed, but it turns out the thing was great for flight training.

It helped that the kind of flight power one of my suits could put out didn't hold a candle to what she could do back when we were tangling with each other in a nemesis sense. I much preferred the tangling we did with each other these days. Giggity.

Sure the anti-Newtonian field would still eventually break down even when used on one of my suits, I'd proven that in a fight with Dr. Lana, but it was perfect for slowing Fialux down when she went careening around the flight lab.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"So what did you learn there?" I asked.

Always phrase it as learning something. Never accuse the student of doing something wrong. It was frustrating, but she was already close enough to the edge without me standing there like an asshole and trying to push her over.

Fialux picked herself up from a heap on the flight lab floor. She looked a little worse for the wear. A little frazzled. She was a little wobbly on her feet.

"It's this damn antigravity flight system!" she said. Well, I suppose it would be more accurate to say she screamed. "How were you ever able to fly this damned thing long enough to learn how to use it safely?"

I floated over, the flight lab was too damn big for walking to be efficient, and put an arm around her. I'd meant for it to be a comforting arm, but she tensed. A fair reaction considering we'd only recently been archenemies, but it still hurt when she did that.

"You've heard the old chestnut about the villain who was asked how he got to the Carnegie Hall, right?"

She eyed me askance. "The villain? I thought that story was about a musician."

I shrugged. "In my version of the story it's a villain. He was on his way over to shrink the place, steal it, and get a hefty ransom from the city of New York. Though this story wouldn't have worked back in the '70s when they didn't have any money, but I suppose now they're doing okay these days with all the gentrification so…"

"Right," she said, putting a distracting finger to my lips and stopping my rambling. "So what was the villain's answer?"

"Practice, practice, practice."

"That makes no sense at all," she said. "If it was a musician then…"

I shrugged and talked right over her. She was ruining my profound lesson. "Maybe it doesn't make sense with the role change, but the lesson is the same whether it's a musician trying to perform in a popular venue or a villain hell-bent on ransoming landmarks for a shitload of money."

"Right, and what's that lesson?" she asked. "Because I think it sort of got lost in the retelling there."

"The lesson is it's going to take practice. Duh. Whether you're a villain or a musician, you have to practice to get good at what you do."

"But I'm not a villain," she said. "And neither are you. Not anymore."

I turned away just in time to suppress the frown that percolated up as she said that. I wasn't as sure about that whole "no more villainy" thing as she was, but for the sake of relationship harmony that was one argument I wasn't touching with a disintegrator ray with an infinite range.

Sure I'd been doing heroic stuff, but that was mostly because I kept getting dragged into situations where my attempted villainy led to heroism. Talk about frustrating.

"You okay, Natalie?" she asked.

"I'm fine," I said, searching for a distraction. "But I'll be better as soon as you're back at flight training."

She let out a frustrated growl. She'd been doing that a lot lately. It was the kind of frustrated growl that might have me worried if it weren't for the fact that she was decidedly mortal now. Her anatomy even resembled a humans so closely that my medbay couldn't tell the difference.

Yeah. Whatever the hell Dr. Lana had done to her, she'd sure worked her over good. It was enough to make me want to scream in frustration.

Particularly since the villain had managed to escape every time I'd smacked her down in recent history. Once because she'd managed to legitimately escape. The second time because she'd used liberal application of teleportation technology to go rapid heal herself somewhere. The third because she'd exhibited a healing ability that went beyond anything that was natural. Then there was the fourth time when my dumbass lured her into a trap and then forgot that the last part of that trap involved teleporting remains to the dump where she was presumably regenerating right now.

Oops.

That healing wasn't natural. I don't care who you are. When you get shot right through the midsection and have a healthy chunk of your internal organs destroyed you're supposed to fall down and die, damn it.

The fact that she didn't was worrisome.

"Actually. The first time I flew using my powers it was kind of intuitive," she said. "It was like I could use my mind to control the direction I was going and that was that."

My mouth compressed to a thin line. I thought of all the times I'd been in crashes similar to what she'd just pulled. The big difference being I didn't have the advantage of a training room dedicated solely to flight practice back when I was first figuring out how to give gravity a big middle finger.

Not to mention I didn't have shield technology that was anywhere near as reliable as the stuff she wore.

"Yes, well I can tell you there's nothing intuitive about screaming through the air using a bunch of anti-gravity technology strategically placed around one of these suits. It's something you have to get used to controlling."

She held up the little control box I'd given her. It was a primitive thing. What I'd used when I was first learning how to fly with antigrav.

"But you never use anything like this," she said. "I should know. I've watched you pretty closely when you're flying around trying to save the city."

I put my head in my hands. That was one reference to heroics too many. I shouldn't have been as annoyed as I suddenly felt, but her talking about me like I was some hero coupled with my recent defeats at the hands of Dr. Lana had me feeling testy.

"Please don't say that," I said.

"Say what? That you don't use this ridiculous control thingy you're insisting I use?"

"No. The bit about saving the city."

I felt a hand touch my cheek. I looked up. Saw her smiling at me, and that smile was always enough to make me melt.

"But that's what you do," she said. "You've saved the city a couple of times now. Like it or not, that's who you are."

"You're rubbing off on me in all the wrong ways," I growled.

And then she was right up against me. I looked down at her in one of my custom designed suits. I'd done it up in her colors, and the effect was nothing short of breathtaking. It was even more breathtaking with the way she pressed up against me.

Talk about distracting.

"If you're trying to distract me from training you then you're…"

"Absolutely on the right track?" she asked, a huge grin splitting her face.

"Maybe," I admitted.

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