Nero III

The flight to Fortuna, Italy, could have been far better, but it also could have been a lot worse at the same time. Getting his weapons through customs had been a pain in the ass but through some miracle or another, the case was solved and he'd been allowed to pass, along with his weapons, his sword and his hand-gun. Nero had put this down mostly to good luck; in his life, apart from the problems his heritage and his own insecurities brought up, good things just somehow found a way to happen to him. This had been only one incident out of many in his life and somehow, no matter what happened, he usually found some measure of good out of whatever life threw at him.

As he thought before, the flight could have been a lot better but it could have been much worse. It was true that he hated flying, not because of any heights, but more because of the fact that he had to sit and do nothing for so long. Movies did not keep his interest for very long, especially not the romance films they seemed to want to play incessantly, trying to pass it off as in-flight "entertainment". Even with action films he could only watch half of the movie before he began to feel restless again; the adrenalin rush he got from watching said movies did nothing to help this feeling.

He'd forgotten to charge his iPod and he'd only been able to get three hours of music out of it before the battery had ran down completely. Similarly with his Nintendo DS, even that had failed him during his time of need. Still, he'd been happy to note that he'd wasted some time at least. There was nothing left for it apart from to try and sleep for the rest of the flight.

He knew now, that there was really no point in attempting such a thing. It was a useless endeavour; the seats were too uncomfortable, the noise of the plane's engine was altogether far too loud and there was a child behind him who thought it a great joke to kick the seat more or less constantly. He might have been able to ignore all that if the person sitting in front of him hadn't chosen to see how far his seat could recline and had then decided to keep it there for the rest of the trip.

Crushed knees had never helped a single soul go to sleep, and apparently half-demons weren't immune to these sort of effects.

Then Nick decided that since he had a bad stomach (aeroplane food just refused to agree with him), it would be better to swap seats so then he was sitting in the aisle. Nero watched all this with no great amount of interest, until he realized who exactly had come to sit by him.

Katie.

He said nothing for about half an hour, just looking through the window, part of him wanting to stay, the other part wanting to leap out into the blue world yonder.

'Interesting view, isn't it?' said a voice. And even though Nero knew who it was, his mind took an unsuitable amount of time to register it. He turned his head to look at her and instead of replying, he merely stared dumbly. Katie watched him before smiling benignly. 'All that cloud.'

'Mm…' Nero said, a half-hearted attempt at conversation. Katie grinned.

'Surely you can say more than that? We've got another three hours and I've wanted to talk to you for a long time,' she said, in her sweet soft voice.

'Um…'

'It's just that the chance never came before because everyone was so busy doing all kinds of things,' she continued, her eyes wide, excitement only too obvious in her voice. She seemed breathless and Nero couldn't even begin to hazard a guess as to why.

He looked out of the window and then back at the young woman, back to the clouds and again at the silken brown hair. He gave an inward sigh and decided to give himself up.

'Your name is Katie, isn't it?'

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Bustahead says: Or is it? Trinity, Katie, Kayleigh? Could be one of them or none of them. Bah. Thanks for reading!