This story takes place as a follow up to my 'Supervillain Affair', the July Fourth holiday, as Eric Beale tries to turn a nightmare into a dream.

Princess Nell
by JMK758
Chapter One
Surprise

NCIS Analyst Nell Jones lets herself into her apartment at 2246 and the moment she locks the door and turns on the living room light she knows something's wrong. It's in the feel of her private space; that by some unnamed but carefully heeded sense she knows this space isn't private anymore.

Across the room is a bookcase and in the small box upon a shelf is a loaded .22 full automatic. That's the good news.

The bad news is that she's already announced her presence, and not at all stealthily, even before turning on the 200 watts. Hettie would have a lot to say about this, assuming she manages to make it into NCIS after the Independence Day holiday.

But the second complication is that to reach the bookcase, yank open the box and get her hand around the small grip, perfect size for her, she must cross the trail of red rose petals that extend, each touching the other, from her feet to arc left to the closed door of her bedroom.

Rose petals?

Closed door? Nope. Not when she left. Not ever. And an unbroken line trail of red rose petals? Either this is the most outré ambush since the last 'BBC in America' rerun of the Avengers - she's always preferred the ones with Tara King - or maybe she doesn't need the .22 after all.

She crosses the room, retrieves the weapon and thumbs the safety off. If she gets killed now, having decided this isn't an ambush, Hettie will track her down someday in Heaven and make her Afterlife an unliving Hell.

x

Her bedroom door has no latch or cylinder so, weapon up and ready, she follows the curved line of red petals to the door, raises her foot flat upon the wood and shoves, allowing herself to fall into a shooting stance under the door arch.

Weapon extended into the small, unoccupied room - there is no waiting assassin - the red sheeted and pillow cased bed in the middle of the room is still wrong.

For one thing, she decides as she walks in, the bed is red sheeted. It was a white sheet, pillowcase, upper sheet set this morning. Now while the bed is sprinkled with petals almost lost in the fiery material, there's something very alien lying upon it - and when she whirls right and aims her weapon into the only blind corner in the room Eric Beale is sitting on one of her kitchen chairs.

"Don't shoot," he suggests calmly, annoyingly calm for an intruder with a .22 bullet aimed at the bridge of his glasses.

She puts the weapon up. If Hettie was going to get aggravated at her getting assassinated because her guard was down in her own apartment, how would she react to her shooting her partner?

"You broke into my apartment. I could arrest you for this."

"I always thought things between us would eventually involve handcuffs," he tells her, far too smugly considering how angry she is at him.

"Well, if so, you're wearing them, my friend. I am not into bondage."

x

She puts the .22 on her dresser, wanting it out of her hands because she's not angry with him about the intrusion. Okay, she's angry but the petals take a bit of the sting out and the change in bedding actually intrigues her. But it's what's on the bed that heats her blood - and not in the way the petals had implied.

Laid out exactly as they would be if worn are things she'd thought never to see again. During an Undercover assignment that started in LA and unexpectedly wound up in the Hotel Meritz in DC during the Memorial Day weekend, at the Greater East Coast Comic Art Convention, while gathering information on the International Arms Dealer Grekor Kanyicska, she was obliged to wear a Science Fiction costume so her alter-ego alias Betty Willoughby could fit in.

On the whole that wouldn't have been so bad - she can be a Fan-Girl when the mood strikes her - but the costume chosen for her by Kanyicska was 'Slave Leia' from Star Wars Episode 5 and the mood very definitely did not strike her.

x

For three days she was forced, literally forced, to walk among thousands of people in a costume Carrie Fisher would have vehemently objected to if anyone had dared offer it. The distinction between the two was that Fisher got to wear brown cups in her gold filigree bra, while all she had to parade about the hotel in was the widely spaced gold filigree metal curves.

Utterly mortified to be trapped among thousands of people, photographed against her will tens of thousands of times - or so she remembers it - the absolute worst moment was when she was recognized by a local NCIS Agent, someone she knew as well as he did her.

Okay, that had actually been a turning point, and the first good thing that'd happened to her since she was spirited out of LA. She'd found a measure of solace and support from the man and his wife, also an NCIS employee - but that succor was negated by the fact that Betty Willoughby, her cover identity, had to submit to being used at will by Kanyicska and his gang.

She refuses to remember how many times that she had been with- no, been under those men. She'd called upon her Agent training to divorce her mind and feelings from what was happening to her body - and absolutely failed in every second of each and every attempt.

She thanks God none of the men had brutalized or tortured her, but each one had hurt her so thoroughly inside that she's spent what seems like hundreds of hours with psychologist Nate Getz over the past six weeks.

She'd come to understand the worst part of her pain had stemmed from helplessness. She'd been an impotent, helpless slave to those men and their pric–!

Granted she had the satisfaction that Kanyicska's men are dead and she'd had an uninterrupted minute to revenge herself upon the hated man, but this satisfaction had been negated when that idiot Judge had set an affordable bail for a multi-billionaire and the bastard had walked.

x

She whirls on the man. "What the HELL are these doing here?"

Whatever Eric was thinking, and she's sure they were happy thoughts worthy of Peter Pan, they don't survive that blast. Splitting his glasses with her .22 would probably have been much gentler, or at least would have allowed him a rapid out he's not getting now.

"Well, I - that is I - I was thinking–"

"I really doubt it."

"Well, I was - errr - thinking about that Convention where - errr - where you–"

"Were seen by ten thousand people 95% naked for three days."

"Welllll, when you - when you put it like–"

"I gave those to you to throw away!"

"Yes, you did."

He hadn't done a very good job. "Well, where did you throw them?"

"My closet."

She is so completely unsurprised. "So why are they here? Did you think that somehow I'd look sexy in these–?"

"Yes."

x

And that's how a universe flips upside down. In that single, simple word she sees an Eric Beale she always knew and had never seen before; a comfortable friend who's suddenly as much a stranger - no, as much a... something as someone she hadn't seen before.

She knows his mind, knows his likes, but there's an unanticipated depth to him - and his likes - that...

She looks at the clothes on the bed, the gold filigree bra with zero protection - she couldn't even keep both nipples covered without constant adjustments that too often failed her; the two long and too slender bands of purple that reached from too low on her hips to bare insteps and Achilles tendons, held aloft to her hips by gold quasi-ovals; a crotch piece she still hasn't figured out the worth of, and swirling gold armlets that decorated her upper arms without function other than to announce 'slave' to the universe - and for the very first time she sees them with his vision.

Yes, they're iconic sexy - they wouldn't have survived three decades if they weren't - but for the very first time she sees them not as she had, a method of abusive humiliation and brutal slavery, not as thousands of people saw them over those three horrific days –

But as Eric sees them.

x

"Is this how you see me?"

He pushes himself out of the chair, slowly approaches. "As a slave girl? No. As a possession? No. As the most beautiful woman alive, insanely and maddeningly desirable so much so that it hurts; whose beauty transcends everything but can also be decorated for love? Definitely yes."

She looks at the clothes - such as they are - memories changing - and looks up into the eyes of the man, and in those seconds her view of him changes as well.

"You want to see me in these?"

"Ever since that Convention, dozens of websites, and not having been there. I felt like the only one who... I've lost so much sleep thinking about you."

"That's almost sweet... in a creepy sort of way." But she didn't want the hurt that creeps into his eyes. In fact, it was only thoughts of him and what he'd have done to avenge her honor, and then to comfort her while she cried in his arms, that got her through those terrible days.

But there's one thing she has to have if they're going to have the relationship she hopes for. She takes his hands in hers, stroking gently. "Eric Beale, I love you... and you are a liar."

"What?" He pulls away, outraged.

x

She won't let him get far. "Well, not exactly a liar, but not the whole truth either. You've lain awake at night thinking about me. Flattering, my friend. You don't want a slave girl. Good, because I'm never going to be anyone's slave and especially not yours." She glances at the bed, forcing his eyes to follow, at least for a moment before they re-meet hers.

"But those are the clothes of a strong woman brought down, one subjugated - or so he thought - by her captor / master. They're a super sex icon because they represent a woman dominated, controlled... used, and that's your dream too, just as it's every man's." His eyes flare. "Part of you wants me beside you, but there's still another part of you that gets a thrill putting me on my knees. Admit it."

She sees he would protest, would stand upon some moral PC High Ground, and much as she knows and cares for him, he has that same atavistic urge every man does. The caveman is not that far away from the technoscience wunderkind. "Admit it, or get out and go home - and don't come back unless I invite you."

x

For a long time he looks everywhere except at her eyes and the words, when they ultimately come, come hard. "I want you as my … that is..."

"Ninety eight percent of the time beside you, and two percent on my knees - in this thing," she finishes, directing his eyes to what he'd kept for weeks and tonight had laid out upon her bed.

"You're a man. You can't help it; it's in your genes."

"All right, I admit it! What do you want of me?"

"I want you to go out on the couch and wait - while I think about your atrociously sexist request." She turns him, herding him out. "If after an hour you look in and I've gone to bed you leave and go home and never bring this up again."

"An hour?" He makes it sound like a Death sentence, by slow torture.

"Sixty solid minutes." She takes hold of the door, her other hand on his back. "And if you put your nose through this door any sooner," she points to the garment, "you're walking home in this."

"But–"

She pushes him out, closes the door firmly, wishing it did have a latch. Turning, she follows with her eyes the trail of red rose petals that runs to the foot of the red bed and to the outrageous slave costume resting among the petals.