"What's that?" Tak snapped, after Dib flicked out his light and dropped down the blinds. His room was dim, cast into a sickly glow by his computer monitor and by a pallid green light glimmering in speckles on his ceiling. Tak's pak sharpened her vision so she could see the five-pointed symbol pasted onto the old plaster, took a snapshot of the crude image and compared it to conventional terran motifs before the human even had time to respond.

"What?" Dib said, mostly occupied with shucking his trenchcoat and arranging it over his computer chair. He glanced at her, eyes gleaming like gold foil beneath dark brows. "Oh. Those are just old things. Don't worry about it."

"Dib," Tak sniffed. "Don't presume you can evade answering me. What are they." And why are they up there, explain to me.

He sighed, put-upon, but she knew he would oblige in the end. He was pliant if it meant she would give him what he wanted, and stubborn otherwise, taking oblique measures to confound her research efforts as if she hadn't seen similar ploys in Irkens ten thousand times before. "They're just stars, jeez," he grumbled. "Um, human representations of stars."

"Primitive ones," Tak agreed maliciously.

"Sure, primitive representations of stars," he echoed, rolling his eyes. "Anyway, they glow in the dark and kids, you know, they stick them to things..." He looked up momentarily, much taller than she. There was no recognizable pattern in the stuck-on stars, no attempt to recreate constellations; just the random patter of faked celestial bodies. Tak looked at him sharply, and he shifted to look back at her, his face beginning to darken and flush.

She grinned then, and flicked off the hologram. She went to him, pushed him down sitting on his bed, then sat beside him. Her key lime skin, the medicine-reflective eyes, the loop of metal at her temple – she knew it turned him on. Dib's peers called him queer, but in truth he was just such a little xenophile.

"A kid thing, hm," she smirked. "You humans are all children. You liked the stars then too." Worshiped them like pagans from the mud, more like; but all humans worshiped something, snarling little beasts that they were, conjured from mud, blood and snow in a boiling cauldron of a planet.

"Yeah, you could say that," he said. "So maybe stars are the smartest and best things a human can like." It was such a Dib thing to say; funny how he tried to come around as cool, when she could smell and feel the wanting rolling off of him.

A crow of ruthless laughter erupted from Tak's mouth. "Why? All of your problems come from them."

All my pleasures too, Dib said, with a long and slanting look. Enough, Tak decided. Time to do what she'd come to do.

"Those stars, are you a knight." she whispered to him, pushing him backwards and down and slipping one leg across his stomach so she perched on his belly. "A knight for the earth." He looked up at her, wincing with his eyes. She bent down like a heron spearing a fish until their brows touched, her large slightly convex eyes become his purple universe.

Dib shivered and rolled underneath her, like water. Malleable. Flowing. Tak pulled her lower eyelids up a bit; she disliked the reminders that sometimes arose, that Dib could be plebian and boring in his plots to make her falter in her quest for earth and then suddenly erupt into genius, that he was hard to entirely get a grip on even with all the high ground she held. She felt energy tremble in tentative fingers through the hypnosis coil set into her skull. Dib's eyes dilated, huge, until they offered their own universes, and unplumbed depths. Even his eyes were a defiance, a reminder of how tenuous her grip once was, how flimsy it might become again...

"Good," Tak murmured. "Stay like this." She opened her eyes wide again, sliding her palms around and pushing them into his chest, kneading, kneading. He pressed up into her, a small, beseeching noise emerging from his throat, and she ignored that, egging the coil on, eking out every scrap of convincing and drawing-onwards that she could.

"Tak," Dib said, his voice rough, and Tak said, "Quiet." She tightened her lean legs around him, worked his body with facility. Dib was tactile but rarely touched. He had learned pain, from daring to touch; but she'd reward him for it. For daring. For being the blithe, foolish, brave creature he was.

Light and color blurred in slipstream through her head, and Dib stiffened under her, his head snapping back, eyes rolling up and the coil touched him. His hands quivered on her thighs. As a child he'd resisted this, fought off the hallucination she forced on him; now, he wanted it. She wanted it too.

"I'll give you better stars," Tak told him. His throat clicked dryly when he swallowed; Dib was still in thrall to her, would remain so until the dream wore off on its own. She wondered what his vision was: of celestial bodies pleasuring him, brushing like angel down past his face?

Zim was so jealous that she'd gotten into Dib's head first. Tak got off of him and curled into his side, listening carefully to the thunderous smashing of his heart. She smiled a feline, proprietary smile for herself. It was a rare pleasure, to have such a superlative find come to her with, indeed, yearning and compliance. In her life where she'd worked for everything, and had no presents, he was her present: this simple, hungry creature, smeared with blood, choking on dirt, birthed in the cold.

END

August 12, 2007