Freebie Mondays: A Spark (Prompt Novel Chapter 21)

For 2024, I decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 21, the prompt was: “one character must overcome a physical or emotional scar to find love.”

This was part of the second batch of prompts I added because I felt I didn’t have enough room to create an entire story. It was evident by the time I rolled the second set of prompts that my plot distribution was also uneven. Ira, who emerged as the main character, had a fair number of prompts to wrap up her plot. But her counterpart, Alyial, got a little lost in the original shuffle.

So this prompt became part of the ‘catch up’ for the secondary plot so that both will feel equally addressed in the end. Consequently, it was one of the things that helped me form a concept for the ultimate ending.

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube!
. . .

The office was dark when Alyial entered. If not for the flashing lights on the server array, the small room would have seemed like a giant, yawning void.

It was one o’clock on a Saturday, so he shouldn’t have been surprised. Except he couldn’t remember the last time their office had been so empty. Babysitting the project had become such a regular part of their life for so long, he almost felt as if he’d lost a child. Except the new build was thriving, and its code had be reinforced by what they learned while Alyial was inside it. So he supposed he should be celebrating – not slinking to the office to drown his mind in work for a couple hours during his off time.

A sharp gasp sounded when he activated the light, as if he’d just doused a vampire with the full force of the sun’s rays. And the sound startled him so badly, he would have dropped his bag if it hadn’t been anchored around his shoulders.

As it was, Alyial leapt backward, clutching the strap in both hands. He didn’t know why his first thought was ghost. But with all that had happened to him recently, it would be just his luck if he wandered into the office while it was in the middle of being haunted.

The first sound was followed by a second – the mundane sound of someone shuffling free of a chair as its legs scuffed against the floor.

Alyial exhaled and stepped back through the door. In the bright illumination of the overhead lights, a singular form huddled close to the corner. He realized with a jolt that Nala, the other occupant of the room, was not extracting herself from her office chair but, rather, lowering herself into it.

She must have been huddling in the corner behind her desk – though that didn’t make any sense. Nala wasn’t the sort of person to cower. In fact, she didn’t strike him as the kind of person who would sulk in the shadows either.

Concern creased his face. Nala was the most brisk of his colleagues. She wasn’t the sort of person who wanted to shoot the shit and catch up on what happened with everyone over the weekend. But when she sniffled and rubbed a hand across her face to hide the moisture lurking on her cheeks, Alyial’s doubts evaporated.

“Hello?” he called tentatively as he shut the door behind him. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” He couldn’t fathom what kind of check Nala might need to run in the dark, but he had long since learned not to make assumptions with this team.

“No,” Nala replied as curtly as ever. But when she sniffed afterward, Alyial got the impression it wasn’t meant to be a snooty response to his question.

She had been crying. He could see the signs as he advanced tentatively across the room. Her eyes were red and puffy, the lids swollen. She had probably been at it long enough to feel uncomfortable, but she glanced at him with the same cold expression she always bore on work day mornings.

“Is everything all right?” Alyial demanded, this time putting his hands to his hips to express his expectation of a proper answer. “Did the serve die while we weren’t paying attention or something?”

“The project is fine,” Nala retorted, and it was impossible to ignore the slight nasal slur to her words.

Alyial didn’t miss her emphasis on the project either.

“What happened to you?” he pressed, crossing his arms in front of his chest. He didn’t want to look imposing, demanding or stern. But he did want to know what the hell was going on.

“I just didn’t expect anyone else to be in the office today,” Nala replied and turned her head to stare at a blank portion of wall beyond all the other work spaces.

It was clear she was trying to avoid Alyial’s gaze. Perhaps she didn’t want him looking at her either, though she made no attempt to hide her tear-blighted face.

Never in his wildest imagination had Alyial ever imagined he would see Nala, of all people, this distraught. If she had any family she considered close, Alyial wasn’t aware of them. Yet he could swear one of them must have died to reduce the woman to this state.

That or their grant money had worn out. But she said the project was fine.

He had given her ample opportunity to express her feelings. He would be well within his rights to spin on his heel, stalk to his computer and spend the next several hours ignoring her. And given the way she had treated him and several other members of this team, he couldn’t say she wouldn’t have deserved it.

But it wasn’t the kind of man he was. So he softened his posture, lowered his hands to his sides and said, “Seriously, Nala, what’s wrong? You can’t convince me it’s normal to spend Saturday afternoon crying in your office.” Most people went home for that. And Nala wasn’t like most people. Alyial was kind of surprised to learn she had tear ducts.

She turned her head back to face him and narrowed her eyes into a glare that might have killed a man on any other day. For a moment, it was easy to look past the emotion that clouded her eyes and reddened her cheeks. But then the woman sighed so heavily it heaved her shoulders upward before they sagged again, and she shook her head forlornly.

“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “I’m an idiot, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.”

“You are not an idiot,” Alyial retorted and waved to the office surrounding them. “Idiots don’t build premier computer simulations that are realistic enough people forget they’re inside virtual reality.”

Nala snorted. The barest hint of a grin turned the edges of her lips upward for half a second, but the expression vanished as quickly as it arrived. “Even if this project is a success, it can’t save me from all my other failures.”

This sounds like a personal thing.

Alyial hesitated. He didn’t like to pry into the personal lives of his co-workers, and he especially didn’t want to pry into Nala’s life. She was as private as they came – not to mention terrifying.

But something about the fact that she was here, in a less than private place, to deal with the results of her emotions made him think she wanted to share. She wanted to blurt her story to someone – why else wouldn’t she just go home?

“It’s none of my business,” Alyial declared, and held up both of his hands with his palms facing outward. “But it kind of sounds like you’re being too hard on yourself. Whatever happened, I’m sure you can fix it. After what you’ve dealt with the last few weeks, I’m sure you can fix anything.”

“Computers are much easier to fix than people,” Nala muttered. Her gaze started to drift away again, indicating that was all she was going to say. But then she shot Alyial another look and said, “What brings you to the office on a Saturday?”

He sighed, slid the bag off of his shoulder and retreated to his work station. He activated the computer and stared at the screen, but he knew he wasn’t actually going to get any work done. Probably he was going to open a browser and stare at the headline again.

“It’s complicated,” he muttered.

Nala snorted again. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

A tempting offer. But in the end, Alyial decided to spill the beans not because it meant a chance at hearing one of Nala’s secrets but because he simply wanted to say the words out loud.

“Delmar’s wife evidently solved a decades old serial murder mystery in her home town.”

Nala gasped when he spoke the words and, instantly, her fingers started moving across the keyboard of her workstation. “When did you hear about this?” she demanded through gritted teeth.

“This morning,” Alyial replied with a shrug. “It’s on all the news feeds. I imagine it’s in the papers in her home town too.” But that was too far away to have reached the big city papers. “Evidently, the FBI have been stumped as to what was going on, so it’s a pretty big deal.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “I imagine he’s going to fly out to be with her again. They keep demanding interviews but, so far, all she’s asked for is privacy.”

Nala’s fingers continued moving feverishly across her keyboard. When they paused, Alyial assumed she found what she was looking for. Their workstations were catty-corner to each other, so he couldn’t see her screen from this angle, but he did not her eyes furiously scanning whatever documentation she discovered.

For a moment, his coworker looked like a coiled spring getting ready to leap across the room. But when her eyes reached the base of her document, she deflated. All the tension went out of her so quickly, it was a wonder she didn’t slump in a heap against the corner of her desk.

“That’s it then, I suppose,” she growled. “He’ll be out there for awhile with her, cleaning up the mess.”

“Why do you care?” Alyial retorted automatically without pausing to consider what effect his words might have on her.

Nala drew herself up primly. “Why do you care?” she shot back.

Alyial sighed. “Because I haven’t heard from Ira in a couple days, and now I’m probably not going to hear from her for several weeks. We have… things to discuss.” And not just discuss but work out. Big things. Things she wasn’t going to be able to hide from her husband forever.

“I told Delmar.” Nala blurted the words in such a dead tone, Alyial would have spit his coffee had he been drinking it when she spoke.

Hell, he was tempted to take a sip just to spit it in her direction.

“You did what?” he demanded.

He knew what she meant – he couldn’t possibly not know. But her words so numbed his brain it needed a minute to catch up.

Nala turned her eyes slowly in his direction, and she at least had the good sense to look guilty when she finally met his gaze. “I tried to tell Delmar about his wife’s affair,” she said softly – so softly the words were almost lost in the gentle whirr of the server array.

“Nala, what the fuck?” Alyial growled. “As neither of the people involved in the situation, you had no right to go blabbing your mouth about it. And who says it even was an affair? It was a computer simulation, for fuck’s sake. Nothing that happened inside it was real.”

Except Ira had still somehow managed to get pregnant – his brain was still trying to wrap around that one.

He expected Nala to raise her chin imperiously, look down her nose at him and tell him to sod off. She had a holier-than-thou attitude on the best of days, and she was notorious for avoiding admission of her mistakes. Whenever something was going wrong, it was always someone else’s fault, never hers. So Alyial waited for her to turn every ounce of blame over this situation onto him.

Instead her shoulders slumped, and she made a tossing motion with both hands. “Not that it really matters. He didn’t give a shit. Can you believe that? He called me a liar. He acted like I was making it up so he’d get jealous. What kind of husband doesn’t care if his wife is faithful?”

It was on the tip of Alyial’s tongue to point out – once again – that everything that happened between himself and Ira took place in a computer simulation. At best, it was a shared figment of their imagination. And he had checked the logs after Nala’s threat. He knew she had no way of confirming exactly what took place. It would be her word against Ira’s if Delmar decided to press.

Alyial certainly wasn’t going to get in the middle of it.

“Well, what did you expect?” he said instead and heaved another soft sigh in her direction. “That he was going to drop everything and leave a woman he’s been with for decades on just your word? Without even talking to her? Without even asking if there was anything to your story?”

The glimmer in Nala’s eyes said the answer was yes. Agony twisted her face as she lowered her head again, and it took a moment for the smooth, emotionless expression Nala usually cultivated to settle like a mask back over her features.

It was all a show, Alyial realized. It always had been. Nala wanted them to see her as formidable, unshakable and logical. So she hid her humanity behind layers of false expressions.

She must be exhausted to let it all crumble in front of him now.

Or maybe she wanted someone to catch wind of her truth. Once again, he couldn’t help wondering why else she would come here to shed her tears instead of her locked and private apartment that no one else could reach.

“I used to be his best friend,” she said at last, and the agony that contorted her face choked her voice. “We were supposed to be soul mates, the two people who never lose each other no matter how far away we drifted. He shouldn’t have to question anything I say to him. He should know I would never lie.”

“You rejected his proposal, Nala. Did you think he was just going to drift around in the ether and wait for you to change your mind? That isn’t how soul mates work.”

Nala’s eyes shot in his direction, and outrage twisted her face into a wretched, almost animal expression. He expected her to bare her teeth and snarl. But instead, she threw her arms into the air and let her palms slam against the flat portion of her desk.

“I made a mistake. A stupid, dumb mistake. I thought I could get my career off the ground and then go back to him. I didn’t realize he was going to meet some floozy who would take his heart and then crush it when she was finished with it. How could he stay with her? And why are you more upset about the fact that he intends to? Don’t you want Ira for yourself?”

“She’s not a sandwich, Nala,” Alyial replied, exasperated. “I don’t get to decide how she feels. And honestly, I’m not sure how I feel either. I don’t like you calling her a floozy. She deserves better than that. But I’m still not entirely sure you can call what happened between us an affair. Most of it was just talking, connecting on an emotional and spiritual level. If anything, I would hope we came out of that simulation good friends. But I don’t really think she should call up divorce papers. She’s the kind of woman I could easily fall in love with. But I’m not sure I do love her. And while everything that happened inside the simulation may have seemed real to me, she knew all along it wasn’t.”

He didn’t know why she made the decisions she did, why she suggested and accepted a wild weekend fling before the two of them had to return to the real world. Certainly it might have been harder for her to convince him to exit if she had rejected his advances, but he didn’t think anyone could claim the time they shared was a necessary part of his liberation.

Whatever Ira had been thinking at the time, whatever reasons she had for acting as she did, those thoughts and feelings belonged solely to her. Alyial had spent a lot of the last few days making peace with that. And if Ira wanted to save and prioritize her marriage, he wasn’t going to get in the way of that.

It wasn’t an easy way of looking at the world, but it was what felt right. At the end of the day, he couldn’t live with himself if he crushed a flourishing relationship. It would mar the time he spent with Ira, and a tarnished relationship would be no prize.

But it was evident Nala didn’t see things the same way. She clearly wanted Delmar to return to her side no matter what it cost to get her there. In the past, he might have seen that attitude as conniving, and it might have made him hate her. But as he watched fresh tears shimmer in his fellow programmer’s eyes, all he could feel for her was pity.

He rose silently from his seat and crossed the small office to stand beside Nala’s desk. He expected her to push away and flee, or to push him away when he approached. But she allowed him to lower a hand onto her shoulder and even squeeze it gently.

“Some opportunities pass us by,” he murmured. And it hurt. Because if that simulation had been real, and if he had met Ira before she married Delmar, things might have been different.

But they weren’t. And no amount of hoping – at least not on his part – could change that.

“You can’t go back,” he added softly. “Trying to will only drive you mad.”

Nala turned a pitiful pout in his direction. Her lower lip trembled, and he could tell she was just barely holding her emotions at bay as they threatened to spill over.

It was still odd for him to see her like this. She was usually so self-assured! But he almost wished she would let go and let all of her emotions tumble free of her. Watching her struggle with this conundrum made her feel far more human that she ever had before. Especially after she bullied him into testing the computer simulation in the first place.

She was an ambitious woman in a male-dominated field. Alyial had always understood that and always assumed it was why she seemed so cold and calculating.

But today she was just a friend in need, a friend in pain.

A friend realizing that her life wasn’t going to turn out the way she wanted it to.

“I don’t know what to do without him,” she admitted, each word squeezed from her lips on the edge of a trembling sob.

“Start by looking for your comfort somewhere else,” Alyial suggested gently. “Have a conversation with another man. Seek the genuine connection that drew you to Delmar in the first place. No relationship arrives in our life fully formed. It has to spark out of something.”

Tears welled from her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. He expected her to place her head in her hands and sob into her desk. But instead she lifted an arm and caught the tears against her sleeve as they escaped her eyes.

Again, she looked at him with such a pitiful pout, it almost melted his heart. Then she said, “Would you be interested in having a conversation now?”

Alyial’s eyes grew wide. He almost said, me? in that star-struck, disbelieving way that fans often used when interacting with celebrities. He was certain she was only asking because he was here, not because she expected anything to come from it.

But he’d told her to reach out and she had. So he smiled slightly and said, “Yeah. Let’s get out of here and go to a bar. We’ll drown our sorrows and see what the sunset brings.” If she clutched his arm with something akin to desperation when she stood, he was willing to overlook it for now.

He retrieved his bag then ushered her free of the room and doused the lights in their wake. The future was still in motion, still being formed. And he found a strange sort of comfort in that as he linked arms with Nala and guided her free of the building.