Little warning: As of the next chapter, this story's rating will change to M, for TELL ME WHAT'S NEXT ALIEN SEX (reference? reference? anyone?)

10. Lessons Learned

Thus began the first chapter of My Life in Space (With My Alien Girlfriend and Her Robot Cat). Shit. Who would've thought?

We lived as nomads, for a long time, because we really had nowhere to go. Having failed to 'prove her worthiness as an invader', Tak couldn't go home. If she showed her face in Irken territory, it'd mean a one-way ticket back to planet Dirt, and I was definitely not okay with tagging along for that.

So we amused ourselves zipping around from here to there, touching down wherever looked interesting and leaving when we'd seen all there was to see. Moons were good for that sort of thing, as were the smaller, less-colonized planets, and we'd often pinball through a solar system spending each night somewhere new.

And we did stop every night, or most nights, or what passed for nights. Maybe she didn't need to sleep, but I did, and I refused to be constantly waking up squished between the storage panels and the cockpit, cracking my neck and popping my back and still feeling like the filling in a sushi roll.

Besides, sleep or no, I had to get out of there now and then. The space and a chance to stretch was good for both of us, so I made Tak stop whenever I decided it felt like night; she bitched and growled and threatened to throw me out the airlock, but she always took us down in the end.

She'd switch on the landing gears and retract the windshield, and Mimi would hop out and march around observing things, and I would head off (clad in the appropriate space-gear) to wander through a fluorescent forest or poke through the wreckage of a downed ship or sled down a crater on a piece torn from said wreckage, and Tak would stick around her ship getting her OCD on, updating systems that were functioning perfectly, making repairs and adjustments that didn't need to be made.

So inevitably, I'd have to go back and grab her, to ask her what that thing with the sixty eyes was doing up in that cave, or show her a geyser spitting rainbows that ate through my shoes, or plunk her down on a makeshift sled and give her a shove before she could scramble off.

Or else I would just drag her somewhere quiet, to sit and watch whatever skyline the planet presented us with, and to talk. About anything, about nothing. It didn't matter, so long as it got her out of her I'm-a-trained-soldier mindset, and let the just-frickin'-relax-already brain waves in.

Eventually, we strolled back to the ship to make camp for the night. Mimi would curl up in the cockpit, set to Standby so that she'd take down any other world-wanderers who tried to mess with Tak's baby, and Tak would pull out something she called an environmental projector: a silver sphere the size of a golf ball, that created a dome into which any image could be projected and under which any atmosphere could be reproduced. It gave us somewhere dark to spread our bedrolls, even when it was light outside, and the promise of privacy.

As we had on Earth, we developed a routine. She would close the dome, encasing us in a canopy of artificial night. I would flop down on my bedroll, beckon her over, and corral her as quickly as I could, wrapping my arms around her and spooning up to her back. I had to, lest she think of something else she could or would or should be doing, and slip out to become the neurotic elf to my cobbler.

I would hold her like that awhile, nestled against her, breathing her in (the closer she let me get to her, the longer she let me stay, the more I realized her skin smelled like her mouth tasted – cardamom and smoke), stroking her antennae until her muscles liquefied. Until she was singing her little song for me, and she was ready to let me turn her over and crack her open like a wishbone.

And I would kiss her, and kiss her, and slide my arm around her shoulders and kiss her, and roll over on top of her and kiss her, and she would kiss me back, a little bit, before we came slowly unglued. And then I'd sleep, but not before I could tell she'd drifted off first.

As our wandering-days wandered on, I even managed to drag a few sounds out of her. It used to be she'd stay as silent as she could, while I kissed her, but soon enough I discovered what I could do to make her sigh. And when she did, and I could feel the fucking-loving-this waves crashing over her, it gave me a better buzz than a whole twelve-pack of soda.

But that time wasn't all love-nesting with Tak. I mean, I learned things. I was a frickin' intergalactic citizen now.

One day, about a week after we'd left Earth, we were trekking through a jungle on a planet called Glarp – me blazing the trail, Tak rolling her eyes halfway out of her head behind me, and Mimi tree-hopping like Tarzan above us. "Exactly what was it you said you saw?" Tak groaned.

"Lights. Up there." I reached into the brush on either side of us and snapped off a long purple branch, swinging it straight ahead. "Like the northern lights, only more…space-y."

"Space-y," she said dryly. "Beautiful."

"Don't roll your eyes too hard, Sticky. They'll fall out."

A moment later, I heard a rustle and a crash and a clang behind me, and Tak's deeply distinctive shriek. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw her wriggling out from under a heap of purple branches and glowing leaf rot, Mimi splayed sheepishly atop it. "Filthy, uncivilized wilderness worlds," Tak grumbled as she got to her feet, dusting herself off. "Why is this wasteland of a planet even here? If I were in charge of the Armada, dumps like this would be the first places I'd vaporize."

"Really? I'd have thought you'd fill them with snacks."

I could feel her glare boring into the back of my head. "Next time, I'm picking where we stop."

"Yeah? How about a nice ski resort planet? Or a beach planet – I could use a shrimp cocktail by the pool."

I heard her whip a laser out of her pak to waste a low-flying bug (Glarpenoid bugs being best described as mosquito-Pekingese crossbreeds with transparent exoskeletons and fangs). "At this point, I'd take a planet of rusty nails over this."

We had to round a few more bends and scale a few more boulders, and at one point my walking-stick bit me and skittered away. But eventually, we stumbled onto the source of the glow I'd seen from our campsite: a massive, silvery-barked tree, its canopy throbbing with multicolored light, and its branches dripping with bunches of blue fruit.

"Hey, sweet," I said as we approached it, taking in the roots thick as subway trains bursting out of the ground, the crevices tunneling deep into the trunk. "I bet there's a whole bunch of shit living in this thing."

Tak kept her distance, folding her arms and scowling up at the tree. "All the more reason to get out of here before it comes out and finds us."

Ignoring her, I headed for the spot where my hunch was calling me, a crotch between two smaller roots that I could use as a step. With the crags in the bark as hand- and foot-holds, I began climbing the trunk of the tree.

Mimi, propelled by her jets, zipped up to the lowest-hanging branch ahead of me, and flung her cable back down. I grabbed hold of it and rode it up into the canopy, greeting Mimi with a fist bump (from beaning the thing with a statuette to teaching her how to pound it – talk about your blossoming relationships) when I joined her on her perch.

"Mimi!" Tak howled despondently from the forest floor. "Don't encourage her!"

Mimi's shoulder-joints zzted as she shrugged and leapt up onto a higher branch, and I headed further out on the one where I stood. It was huge at first, so that I could walk without wavering, but grew narrower as it radiated out. By the time I reached the end, I was balancing like a tight-rope walker, then scooting along straddling the branch at the part where it split into fingers.

There was where the fruit hung, in dewy, smooth-skinned clusters. Each was the size and shape of an eggplant, but when I plucked one from its stem, it was soft like a ripe peach – and after a week of rationing the chips and cheese balls in my backpack, they looked more than appealing.

"What do you think you're doing?" No sooner had I bitten into the blue fruit than Tak popped out her spider-legs, clambering up the tree and down the branch in time to snatch it away before I swallowed. "Are you that stupid, child?" she snapped. "You don't know what this thing is! For all we know, it could kill you!"

I gulped down the fruit flesh in my mouth and smacked my lips, tasting sweetness, a little bit of citrus. Maybe mango? Cantaloupe? Whatever it resembled, it was delicious. Wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve, I shot Tak a grin, and said, "How sweet. Are you saying you'd care if I died?"

"What I'm saying is, don't blame me if you start bleeding from every orifice!"

"But it's good." I craned forward and took her face in my hands. "Here, taste."

I kissed her hard and felt her color, her cheeks warming against mine before she jerked away, deep green. She was getting better all the time about letting me love her up in private, but outside the dome – even if there was nobody else around to see us, save a Glarpenoid bug buzzing by – my courtship rituals made her twitchy, and I had to admit she was cute when she got flustered.

In any case, it had been a pretty lucky hunch, because I tromped back to camp with my arms full of the fruit from the silver tree, and persuaded Tak to let me stick it in one of her storage pods. After that, I came into a windfall of edible treasures, or at least scavenged enough to keep from starving.

Whether it was pebbles you could crack and eat the insides, or roots you could chew on for days before they went dry, or these little snail things that squealed when you bit into them but tasted – swear to God – like teriyaki chicken, I found food near everywhere we went. I even managed to find substitutes for water, mostly by sucking the juice out of fruits like the ones on Glarp.

Not that interplanetary foraging was the only trick I picked up. When I ran out of clean clothes, I learned how to use Tak's magic space washing machine (which she insisted was not a magic space washing machine, but something else with a name way too long to remember, involving particles and frequencies and microlasers and lots of interjected snark about how primitive it was to rely on water and chemicals to eliminate bacteria). And when I ran low on clean…ness, in general, I learned how to take a magic space shower, which more or less entailed zapping myself with the handheld component of her magic space washing machine.

I also learned how to be a badass space mofo, which was much more exciting than using a magic space washing machine and taking a magic space shower combined. Turns out chores in space are just as boring as chores on Earth, no matter how many lasers they involve.

"MIMI! Man the laser cannon! They're gaining!"

We had our share of epic space battles, which would've been cool if Tak had let me actually do anything. Instead, as soon as trouble threatened, she'd start yelling commands to Mimi and barking at me to get out of her way. Thus, I spent the action sequences of my life glowering at the back of Tak's head, scrunched in a corner of her ship.

"Keep on them! Don't let them get ahead of us!"

On one particular occasion, we were trying to outrun a couple of ugly slime guys we'd encountered on a moon of planet Rax – supposedly nothing but the ruins of several long-dead colonies, apparently home to some very unfriendly squatters. Unsatisfied with chasing us off their turf, they were coming up on us in a spade-shaped cruiser, pelting us with lasers faster than Tak could retaliate.

"We'll show these scum-sucking worms what's wha—MIMI! How many times have I got to tell you, keep on them!"

This is getting us nowhere. I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Skulking up into the cockpit (I couldn't even stand up in her ship, so I couldn't say I was walking – more like scooting the few feet from my time-out corner to the pilot's chair), I glanced at her rear viewscreen, watching Mimi fire blast after blast at the squatters to no avail. Mimi was a good marksman, but their ship's design – like a manta ray, nearly flat from nose to tail – meant she didn't have much to aim at, and the shots that came close, they dodged.

"I thought I told you to stay in the back!" Tak snapped when she noticed me. "Can't you see I'm busy up here?"

"Busy doing what? Getting us mowed down by a pair of Swamp Things?" She swept her hand across the control panel and we zigzagged quickly from right to left, swerving past a volley from the squatters. I found myself flung against the glass, then against her chair, and when I was sitting up again – wobbling like a bobblehead, maybe, but sitting up – I fixed her with a frown. "This isn't working, Tak."

"Really?" she said from between grit teeth. "What was your first clue?"

"We can't outrun them. And you can have Mimi drain the cannon trying, but you're not going to hit them this way." I elbowed her. "Let me try."

"This isn't the time for jokes."

"I'm serious. I bet I can do it better than you."

"Yeah, and you can get us killed better than I can, too."

I felt a growl rising in my throat, my hands itching to just shove her out of her seat. "Come on, I've played this game before! I can win!"

Suddenly, an incoming blast filled her viewscreen with bright white, and she lunged to hit the key that would take us out of its range. The ship swung downwards just in time, but sent her flying up, shrieking, and smacking into the windshield; rather unsympathetically, I took the opportunity to slide into her seat.

Keeping us riding a steady course ahead of the squatters, I searched the dash display for an icon that looked promising for my purposes, knowing what I wanted to do but unsure of how to do it. Tak, having tumbled down the windshield like one of those gummy octopi, scrambled to her feet and began trying to pry me from her seat. "WHAT ON IRK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!" she screeched into my ear. "I TOLD YOU TO STAY AWAY FROM—"

With one hand, I grabbed both of her antennae halfway down, yanked them up over her head, and pinned her to the dash; with the other, I found and activated the weapon I was looking for. The ship jolted as I fired a tow cable from its rear port, sending it and the three-pronged grappling hook welded to the end of it flying towards the squatters. On its first swipe, it only scratched the surface of the ship, the hook's prongs dragging across one wing before whipping out into space.

"I told you!" Tak growled, clawing at my fist with her hands and her spider-legs, trying to wrench herself free. "You're only going to egg them on!"

I reeled the cable back in and took another shot. This time, the hook landed squarely on the nose of the squatters' ship, and I could feel the cable snap tight. The resistance eased when they hit their boosters, surging up behind us, no doubt thinking I'd just opened us up to let them steamroll us straight into an oncoming moon.

No doubt Tak thought so, too. "YOUTHICKHEADEDCAVEMONKEYTHEY 'REGOINGTORAMUSINTOOBLIVIONAN DALLTHANKSTOYOURINSOLENCEICA N'TBELIEVEI—"

"MIMI, NOW!"

When I yelled, Mimi let loose the biggest blast the laser cannon could deliver. I hit the button to reel the cable in, and pulled back on the throttle as hard as I could. Instantly, Tak's ship jerked to a stop. The squatters, rocketing towards us at about a kajillion light-years a second, could only watch themselves collide with the cannon's beam. And I watched, through the viewscreen, as its force ripped through their cruiser and left it half-crumpled, half-fried, sputtering along still tethered to our cable, squashed from a manta ray into a banana.

Wordlessly, I let Tak go, and she straightened up too stunned even to snarl at me for bending her antennae. "Well done," she said, after a moment spent staring at the viewscreen. It was probably the nicest thing she'd ever said to me.

When she regained her composure, she brought her ship around to face (what remained of) the squatters', and via a speaker she produced from the dash, screamed at them for about five solid minutes in a language I definitely didn't speak. Then, her fingers dancing over the cable's controls, she wound it up like a pitcher's arm and chucked the squatters into a nearby field of asteroids, and we were back on track.

"That language you spoke to them," I said once we'd sailed along awhile, side-by-side in the cockpit – me basking in my own awesomeness, Tak silent in the pilot's chair. "Was it Irken?"

"Yes."

"But they weren't."

"No, thank the mythological divinity of your choice."

"So why would you assume they speak it?"

"For the same reason you'd assume most people on Earth speak English." A note of pride crept into her voice. It occurred to me that, for someone who'd been effectively expatriated from the Irken Empire, she sure thought highly of it. "We are the dominant race in the universe," she said with a haughty sniff, "so it makes sense that our language would be the dominant tongue."

I leered at her, slurping up a nice wet kiss on one side of her head. "I'll show you a dominant tongue."

"Eugh! Why is it that everything I say, no matter how innocuous, somehow prompts you to attempt to infect me with your revolting human germs?"

"I don't know. I guess I'm just romantic like that." My hand drifted over to caress the kink in her left antenna where I'd grabbed it, smoothing out the crease with my thumb as my thoughts brewed. She stiffened a little, automatically, but didn't shove me off. "You should teach me."

"Teach you what? How to be less irritating?"

"Teach me to speak Irken."

She snorted. "Ha! That's funny. You're amusing, child."

"Why not? I mean, I'd like to know what you're saying when you're cussing out slime dudes who just got their drippy asses handed to them." I raised my eyebrows. "And if I could read the letters on your dash display, I'd have found that cable a lot faster."

She looked at me uncertainly, almost uncomfortably. "I wouldn't know where to start," she hedged. "I never actually learned myself. I've known my mother tongue since the day I was born—it's all embedded in the pak."

"Okay, fine. But if I asked you how to say—oh, I don't know, 'thick-headed cave monkey'—in Irken, you could tell me, couldn't you?"

"Well, I—yes. I suppose I could."

"So teach me, then." I grinned and wound the swirl in her antenna around my index finger, tugging gently. "And when we're done with that, you can teach me how to speak British."

"What?"

Pursing my lips, tilting my head to one side, I wondered if we'd really never talked about this before. It seemed like something I had always meant to bring up. "When you speak English, you speak it with a British accent. Did you not know that?"

"I suppose I never gave it much thought."

"Well, I've always wondered how you came by it. I mean, God knows Zim never had one."

Naturally, I started cracking up just thinking about that, and Tak rolled her eyes. "When Irkens learn a language," she explained, "we learn it by assimilating it into our speech systems, based on the first sample we're exposed to – the first time we ever hear it used. If I speak English with an accent, it's because the first human I heard speaking English spoke it with that accent, though obviously I didn't know that at the time. It's not especially exciting."

"Maybe not," I said, my lips curling at their corners in a smile. "But I've always thought it was kind of sexy."

Her cheeks darkened. "There's no Irken word for sexy, you know."

"Then we'll just have to make one up."