Iron Maniac: Alexandra's Afterburner Adventure

I was no longer a young girl. I had grown older, but it was a strange kind of older. It wasn't like the movies where you are twenty one and then the next scene you are thirty five, but more subtle. There were the lines around your mouth and eyes, that you didn't notice when looking in a mirror every day. Your hair was shorter, or longer, or just different somehow. The mirror would break and you would buy another one that didn't fit as well over your vanity. You noticed these things because they happened to someone else and not to you.

I had been living with him for years. I knew he wasn't human. He had explained to me that there were others like him, many others actually, but the one who took me in was the only friend he had left after the war that threatened the Earth and humanity. He told me about this war, about how long ago it happened and how we were lucky that he won or humanity would have been gone from the planet all together. He told me how he ended up here, on Earth and how he made his suit to help protect us from our enemies on other planets if they ever came back for revenge for being defeated. I didn't understand any of it really, but it was exciting to hear about it nonetheless. Then one day everything changed when I came home from work and found him working in his lab, so I went into mine to get some work done while he did his "man stuff."

When he walked into my studio later that night, I looked up from my drawing and smiled at him as he approached my desk "What do you have there?" he asked with interest as he reached out for my drawing pad "Oh nothing important," I lied quickly trying to pull it away from him before realizing what I was doing. "Please let me see" he asked again so I handed it to him reluctantly saying "well...it's nothing really,"

He flipped through the pages looking intently at each drawing until he got to the last page which was blank except for two small words written at the bottom "Goodbye Iron Man." His eyes met mine and they were filled with a sadness that I hadn't seen before in all of these years we had spent together, "Why is this blank?" He asked nonchalantly as if something like this had never happened between us before and my heart broke just a little at the thought of what he must be thinking right now.

"Because..." I squeaked out quietly as I stared down at my hands fiddling with each other nervously on top of my lap "because I'm leaving..." My voice cracked on those three words as tears began streaming down my face uncontrollably. "Why?" He asked desperately looking at me with pleading eyes, but all I could do was shrug helplessly as more tears escaped from my watery eyes and down my cheeks "Alexandra," his voice was soft, almost broken as his hand touched my arm lightly causing me to look up into his steel blue eyes searching for an answer that wouldn't come for many years later when I finally said goodbye forever...