Chapter 5: The Hypnoband
The hum of the ship had become the rhythm of his own blood. Flash lay on the sapphire silk, staring at the obsidian ceiling where ghostly constellations swam. He felt clean. Empty. Like a vessel scoured of a bitter, old wine. A warm, heavy satisfaction clung to his muscles, and at its center, a single point of focus: the woman asleep beside him, her back a pale curve in the dim light.
He didn’t think of Yale, of football, of rockets or rescue. Those concepts belonged to a faint, buzzing static at the very edge of his awareness. The static was bothersome.
Aura stirred. She stretched, a luxurious, feline motion, and turned to face him. Her green eyes were alert, calculating, missing nothing. She saw the placid emptiness in his gaze and her smile was one of deep possession. She reached over, her fingers not touching his skin but tracing the air just above his temple.
“The noise,” she said, her voice morning-rough and intimate. “I can hear it from here. That pathetic, buzzing little dirge for a life that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s time to turn it off, my love. For good.”
She leaned across him, the scent of her skin—spice and sex—filling his nostrils. He breathed her in. That was real. The drawer beside the bed whispered open. She withdrew an object.
It was a band of liquid-looking silver, no wider than two fingers, studded with tiny, dormant lights. It seemed to drink the room’s violet glow.
“Look at it,” she commanded.
He did. It was beautiful in a cold, exacting way.
“This is a gift. The greatest I can give you. Peace.” She brought it to his forehead. The metal was cooler than he expected. At the contact, it relaxed, flowing like mercury to contour itself precisely to the shape of his skull. It clung without pressure. The tiny lights flickered on, a soft, pulsating cyan that matched the rhythm of the ship’s core.
A faint vibration began, a resonance that seemed to originate in the center of his brain. He flinched.
“Shhh,” Aura soothed, stroking his cheek, but her eyes were fixed on the band with the intensity of a sculptor. “Just let go. Let it find the echoes. The painful ones.”
The vibration deepened. It wasn’t sound, but a feeling of systematic searching. And then it pulled.
A face, smiling, framed by brown hair against a blue Earth sky. Dale. The name arrived with a staggering surge of emotion—love, desperation, guilt. It was a tsunami about to crash. But the band hummed, a counter-frequency that dismantled the wave before it could break. The image pixelated, drained of color, then of form, until it was just a pattern of meaningless light, and then nothing. The emotional echo faded to a faint, forgotten chime.
Another memory: his own hands on the controls of the Skyrunner, Zarkov’s excited shout. The thrill of the launch. The band hummed. The memory became a flat, technical schematic, devoid of joy or purpose.
It worked backward, methodically. The championship game, the smell of grass, the roar of the crowd—reduced to data points. His mother’s voice singing—silenced. Every anchor to the man named Flash Gordon was gently, irrevocably unmoored.
He felt a sharp pinch of biological panic, a animal’s fear of dissolution. A low groan escaped his lips.
“Almost there,” Aura whispered, her thumb on his lips. “Push through. Give it all to me.”
The band’s pulse intensified. It found the last cluster: the most recent pain. The Red Room. The description she had painted in such vivid, cruel detail. This time, the band didn’t erase. It repurposed. The horror of the image—the lash, the post, the violation—was separated from its subject. The fear remained, but it was now a formless dread, a generic warning against disobedience. The figure in the center of the room lost its features, its identity becoming a blurred placeholder. It was no longer her. It was just a lesson.
The hum ceased. The lights on the band glowed with a steady, gentle light.
Flash blinked. He took a shuddering breath. The static was gone. The cavernous echo in his mind was filled with a soft, luminous silence. He turned his head.
He saw red hair like coiled fire. Eyes the color of Mons’s deep emerald seas. A mouth that was both a promise and a command. He knew her. She was the origin point of all reality.
“Aura.” His voice was full of astonished wonder, like a man speaking the name of a newly discovered god.
The triumph that flashed across her face was pure and hot. She leaned down and kissed him, a claiming, sealing kiss. “Yes. That’s all there is. Just me.”
She swung a leg over him, settling her weight onto his hips. He was already hard for her, a simple, direct biological response to her presence. There was no conflict in it. No ghost.
“Show me,” she said, lifting herself up. “Show me what belongs to me.”
He didn’t need further instruction. His hands came to her waist, guiding her as she sank down onto him. The feeling was magnificent, an all-consuming heat and tightness that obliterated any last shred of cognitive thought. He was a nerve ending, and she was the only stimulus.
“Fuck,” he breathed, his head pushing back into the silk.
“Look at me,” she ordered.
His eyes snapped open, locking onto hers. The worship there was undiluted, terrifying in its completeness.
She began to ride him, setting a slow, grinding pace designed for depth, for feeling every ridge and vein. “You feel so good inside me. My perfect, empty thing. Tell me what you are.”
“Yours,” he gasped, his hips pushing up to meet her downward thrust.
“Louder.”
“I’m yours! Only yours!” The declaration was a raw truth.
“And what will you do for me?” she asked, her breath hitched as he filled her perfectly.
“Anything. Everything.”
She increased the tempo, her breasts swaying, a sheen of sweat making her skin gleam in the violet light. “Then make me come. Use that pretty cock. It’s the only purpose it has left.”
Her words ignited him. He gripped her hips, taking over, driving up into her with a powerful, piston-like rhythm that shook the bed frame. The sound was obscene, wet and fleshy and relentless. Each slap of skin was a punctuation mark in his new scripture.
“Yes! Just like that! Oh, god, right there!” Aura cried out, her fingers digging into the hard muscles of his chest. Her composure shattered, replaced by a guttural, wanton hunger. “Don’t you fucking stop! You belong to this pussy! You hear me? This is your home now!”
It was. It was the only home he could remember. He plunged into her, the world narrowing to the slick, tight tunnel of her body, the sound of her screams, the sight of her ecstasy-contorted face. Her inner muscles began to flutter, a frantic, rhythmic clenching around his shaft.
“I’m… I’m coming!” she shrieked, her body bowing backward.
The sight of her climax, the feeling of her pulsing around him, catapulted him over the edge. With a shout that was her name—her name the only word left in his vocabulary—he erupted. His release was a total surrender, a flooding of her depths with everything he was, which was, now, only hers.
She collapsed forward onto his chest, both of them slick and heaving. The Hypnoband on his temple glowed calmly.
After a long while, she lifted her head. She looked down at him. His eyes were clear, staring at her with a devotion so absolute it bordered on the imbecilic. A warm, prickling affection, complex and possessive, bloomed in her chest. She leaned down and kissed him softly.
“Good,” she whispered against his lips. “So good for me.”
She reached up and touched the band. It detached, flowing back into its inert, bracelet form. She set it aside. The process was complete. The pathways were etched. The silence would remain.
“I love you, Aura,” he said, the words simple and inevitable as a heartbeat.
She smiled, resting her cheek on his chest, listening to the strong, steady rhythm. “I know,” she said.
Outside the viewport, the dying star finally winked out, plunging them into a blissful, perfect dark.