Title: On The Inside
Fandom: The Zeta Project
Date Started: 28 April 2007
Date Finished: 14 May 2007
Length: About 36,500 words; 15 chapters
Rating: Mature
Notes: This is meant to be a sensuous experience tied together with a little bit of plot. It takes place, according to my fanon timeline, the last week of April 2044, about a week before
Ro's eighteenth birthday (early May). Also, it's an ode to my favourite parts of Ohio, around areas I used to live, so beautiful during that especial time.
Disclaimer: The Zeta Project is under the license of DC Comics/Time Warner. The author acknowledges the rights of the parent company and its subsidiaries.
Author's Note 12.2009 You know, I'm really thrilled that this story has almost 4,000 hits, and averages about 100 views a month. But, seriously, you need to lay off railing me about the "sex scene," okay? You're forgetting one very important thing: This is FFN, people. EXPLICIT CONTENT IS NOT PERMITTED ON THIS WEBSITE. Please keep this in mind while reading and reviewing. If you don't like it, well, go write your own story. In the meantime, don't complain about what I've done. I did the best I could within the perimeters I had to work with. Thank you, and have a nice day!

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For Mims, who wanted me to write this — way back when.

SENSUAL, sen'shu•al, a. (L. sensualis, from sensus, sense. SENSE.) Pertaining to the body, in distinction from the spirit; carnal; fleshy; pertaining to the gratification of the appetites; grossly luxurious; indulging in lust; voluptuous; pertaining to sensualism as a philosophical doctrine.

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001 – Lessons From Art

For two years, Zee had known full well the freedom and limitations of innate curiosity. All he'd ever asked of Ro was that she teach him what it was like being human. She offered this unconditionally, easily, with a finely-tuned knowledge of what it meant to him. He'd never asked her for anything else.

What he learned from her, he tried to put to use in his daily life. But he clung tenaciously to inherent naiveté, though attempted, with some gallantry, not to let it show. With so much to know, so much to acclimate his mind to, his mannerisms, his mental adjustments, he acknowledged a robot's obsession with human nature.

The ways of life: the cycle, the symbiosis, the agonizing, twisting, tumultuous roller coaster rides of life. Every person he met, befriended, became as a storybook, a life untold, a fantasy unravelled. Every new friend expanded Zee's inquisitiveness; every new person a new experience.

It was while browsing an art gallery in Columbus, Ohio that Zee became aware of a simple flaw in his otherwise perfect plan of knowledge-gleaning.

In the midst of saving people, strangers, friends, forming allies—he'd forgotten, almost entirely, about Ro. He had acknowledged, plainly enough, over the last two years the thematic principles she'd taught him. She told him what he wanted to know, explained the black and white pillars of, to quote Voltaire, 'l'espirit et le coeur . . .' and 'ce qui s'appelle mourir'.

Yet he had not, not once, ever considered that she was a storybook unto herself. But why would she be different from a stranger, a new friend, a new ally? Surely she had hidden dreams, a story to tell. She respired as everyone else—and it'd taken him thirty months to comprehend this.

Ro lay in his conscious as an undiscovered land.

'Beautiful, isn't it?'

Zee glanced at the gallery owner, a tall woman with rich golden-brown hair and round grey-blue eyes. She adjusted the cat-eye frames against her nose, to better see the large canvas painting suspended before them.

'A Jou-Jou Matarek original. Are you familiar with his work?'

'Not in the slightest.'

This brought a warm chuckle from the owner. 'This is an early piece. Done in the nineteen-twenties. Notice that the colours are cold. Reflects a post-war era mentality.'

The colours. He didn't even notice the colours. Now he did. The hues of the sea and a distant shoreline. Greens, greys, broad strokes like waves of an ocean.

'But done before the Jazz Age came along and brightened up the world,' Zee added, thinking aloud to himself.

'Yes. Some of his work in the late-twenties expresses exactly that.'

'Did he always paint naked women?'

Another soft laugh. The gallery owner was growing fond of him, a man with innocent blue eyes that almost seemed appalled at the sight of a woman wearing nothing, lounging among rocks and stones that represented hardships and lovers lost to the Germans.

'He only painted this naked woman,' the lady informed, 'several times, in fact.'

'They were intimate.'

She appreciated the way he stated this, matter-of-factly, unhidden from the past. 'Her name was Alara. They had three children. None legitimate. All dead by the time the second war came around. She died in Rouen, France in 1951 of a broken heart.'

It seemed impossible that anyone can die of a broken heart. Ro had told him as much. But she knew so little about grief, not enough to count for a resolute conclusion of exactly what losing love can do. If given proper stimulus, Zee knew the heart capable of great motivation, severe loss, tragic concerns, and glorious reinventions. Ro had often said that she reinvented herself after every obstacle she passed. He almost believed it, in the same way he ached to believe broken hearts were legitimate causes of death across the globe.

Another patron entered the gallery, and the owner dashed away, hopeful for a purchase. Zee remained in front of Alara. Captivated, that was a word for him. He examined every brushstroke of her body, the representations of size and shape given by light and shadow, recesses and convexes. She was mesmerizing.

In the three years of his life, women were the same as everyone else; they were every second person he passed, every second person he talked to, befriended, worshipped from afar. Seen—but not really, thoroughly seen. That would have to change.

Ro came up beside him two minutes post-revelation. She slipped oversized sunglasses to her crown. Her big, youthful eyes landed on the portrait. Then her face squeezed together in alarm and disapprobation.

'Er . . . Been here long enough to get her phone number?'

'I—what?'

'Never mind.' She latched herself to his elbow and attempted to haul him away. 'It's a good thing you don't have the same sense of wanderlust that I do, Zee, otherwise I don't think we'd ever find each other. There's a whole wide world out there, you know, and someday I think I'll lose you to it.'

'I don't think that's possible anymore, Ro.'

She smirked thinly at this as they alighted on the busy sidewalk outside the gallery. Ro donned sunglasses and hat, protecting her pale skin from the sun's harsh rays. He liked her in the hat, a bit of change from the norm. Once, he'd put on a hat, a black Panama, and a black shirt and black pants to match. Ro told him to change out of it, never wear that hologram again, because he looked like an old-time gangster. Still, it was nice to know he could toughen up his image if required. To be fair, holding up a would-be thug with one arm, so that his toes scraped against the earth, usually sufficed in the toughness department.

'Where to now?'

In the plain movement to pin the hat to her head in a rising gale, Zee caught the same awing light he'd seen in the painting, at rest against the skin of her arm, the shadows against her toned muscles, the pointy bone at her elbow. He allowed his gaze to trace the outline, from her shoulders down her back, to the bend at the waist, the slight curve of her hips, and ending at the graceful feet. She moved to look at him, and he saw a stream of sunlight cut through the buildings and trees to rest against the hairs at her neck. A glow reflected at the round line of her jaw, against her rosy lower lip.

'Zee?'

She blinked at him. He awoke from the trance.

'How about—food?' When in doubt, he suggested food. She generally agreed.

'All right. Food it is. I passed a nice Mediterranean place two blocks up. Would that smell suit you?'

'Whatever you'd like, Ro'

'Enough with the subordination already. I think you're losing your personality. You never tell me no anymore.' Nonetheless, she took hold of his elbow anew, to be sure they weren't separated. Ahead lay the rest of this small, Midwestern realm, ancient and charming, set against a lush green landscape and a romantic smear of haze on the horizon. She inhaled deeply, with the scent of newly cut grass and flowering trees. 'I'm in love with spring.'

He heard the words but said nothing. Instead, he looked intently at the shape of her fingers, splayed against his sleeve. Then, aware of this frightening new sensibility, he soaked in the angles of her profile, to the sun and city reflecting endlessly in the back of her eyes.

His next thought surprised him.

Ro is just like a painting.

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