Yeah, that's my main issue with shipping fics, too. Not making sense, I mean. I think a lot of authors are just so desperate to get their favorite characters into a relationship that they ignore things like characterization and plot in their hurry to reach that point. I'm happy to hear I'm not one of them, at least from RKB's point of view. :)

20. What Had to Be Done

Gaz speaking

You did this to me.

I lay curled up in the moon-bed with Tak's voice echoing in my head, nauseous with guilt. You did this, she'd said. You did this. And she was right.

It was a new emotion for me, guilt. I'd never felt guilty over anything in my life. I had screwed over lots of people, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, and never once wasted time regretting it. When April went to pieces on the sidewalk, sobbing that she'd come out to her parents because of me, I'd wrinkled my nose at the snotcicles plopping into her latte.

When I dumped Kiri the day before her sweet sixteen, I'd congratulated myself for dodging the bullet of having to buy her a birthday present. When I did a thousand and one horrible things to Dib, day in and day out, to punish him for the crime of just being Dib, I'd zone out at school thinking up a thousand and one more.

But for what I'd done to Tak, I felt guilt plunging into me like a scalpel, twisting as if to bleed me dry. And it wasn't just because I knew that if they had her, they had me, too – because if I was lucky I'd spend my life as her concubine, festooned in golden chains, and if I wasn't I'd rot in this room. It was that it had gutted me to see her broken like that, and it would have stayed with me forever even if they had let me go.

Lying there in the moon-bed, staring into the blackness behind my eyelids, feeling Mimi's equally dejected presence beside me, I came to the startling (obvious, maybe, to anyone else, but startling – and a little bit horrifying – to me) realization that I cared for Tak more than I'd ever cared for anyone. It wasn't just that she was infuriating, and challenging, and fascinating. It was that I was falling in love with her.

Fat lot of good that did anyone now. It only made things worse. Bitterly, I wondered if it wouldn't have been better for everyone if I'd just stayed home on Earth when she left—and just as soon acknowledged that from the second I met her eyes through the shadows of the factory floor, there had been no chance of that.

I got up when Rel brought lunch – another gurgling monstrosity on a tray. Not that I'd have been in much of a mood to eat anyway. "I thought I'd give it one more try," she said cheerfully, setting her tray on a floating saucer near the bed. "If you still don't like it, I can start bringing the nutrient paste you were prescribed."

"Whatever," I answered, having barely heard what she'd said. I stared at nothing and poked my finger through a hole in my tights (worrying, seeing as they were the only pair I had).

After a minute, she began to rock nervously back and forth on her heels. "Should I get the paste? I should get the paste, shouldn't I?"

Unwisely enough, I widened the hole.

"You really ought to eat, you know," Rel said, her voice rising to a panicky pitch. "I've been told to make sure you eat. I don't know much about human biology, butIknowyouhavetoeatorelseyo u'lldieandifyoudieI'llbeinreallybigtroubleso—"

Her babbling tumbled into the sigh that left my lips, so heavy it filled my ears and drowned her out. "I just don't get it," I said, not necessarily to her.

"Get…g-get what, may I ask?"

Ah, what the hell. I didn't expect Rel to be of much help, but I figured it couldn't hurt to vent to her. "When we saw Tak, she was—weird. Not herself." I rested my elbow on my knee, my chin in my hand. "The way she spoke, the look in her eyes—it gave me goosebumps, and not the good kind. Nine must've done something to her, but fuck if I know what."

Rel brightened. "Oh, you don't need to worry about that. She probably just had her signals scrambled, is all."

I frowned. "Her what?"

"It's something Nine does for the Tallest, when they get stressed out. I've never seen it, but I've heard things from the crew." She smiled, pleased as punch to be able to tell me something I didn't know. "They say she can make you feel better about nearly anything, just by looking at you. She uses some special technology, it's called—umm—what is it called? A pacemaker? A windshaker?"

It dawned on me. The one thing she hadn't been wearing, above all of that crap they had her stuffed into. "A wavebreaker?"

"That's it! A wavebreaker!" Rel shrugged. "Whatever that means."

It gutted me to think that I'd made her the weaker life form.

Days passed. Maybe weeks. I had no means of telling the time, save for Rel's visits, and soon enough they too began to melt into each other. I ate enough of her horror-movie cooking to keep from keeling over, and after she'd gone, I paced in my cage; Mimi and I exhausted every option for escape, finding the room a fortress.

Not that it mattered. Had we found our way out via stealth or cunning or force, we'd have been herded back inside by those omnipresent guards with their cattle prods, with nothing but singed hair and bruises for our trouble.

And even if it weren't for them, what would we have done? What could I have said to Tak, to bring her back to who she used to be? I'm sorry I fucked things up, but I didn't mean to, and you need to snap the hell out of this before you lose yourself forever? This isn't the destiny I meant? I wanted like crazy just to talk to her, but how much would she even have heard?

So I waited. I languished, like Cinderella sweeping the fireplace – the last thing I'd ever wanted to be – and I picked at the run in my tights. Useless. Helpless. God, I'd never felt so fucking helpless in my life.

Then one day, I woke (well, 'woke' probably wasn't the best word, since it'd imply I had something to do that would've left me tired enough to sleep – Rel had offered to get me a shot of sedative, when she saw the grey crescents under my eyes, but I'd never sleep again before I'd let her pump my veins full of Irken woozy-juice) to the distinct sensation of stillness.

You can't feel every dip and swerve of a ship as big as the Massive, but you can feel the indefinable aura of movement; it settles into you after a few days onboard. However dimly, I was always aware that we were in flight, until that one day when we weren't.

"We've stopped. Haven't we?" I looked at Mimi. "Why have we stopped?"

I could divine no answer from her face, save the general impression of uneasiness. So we just sat on the edge of the moon-bed, and felt uneasy together.

Until Rel appeared, bearing a tray of grey, gloppy breakfast, chattering brightly as usual. "Rise and shine!" she trilled, using one of several 'alien' phrases she'd been thrilled to pick up from me. "This is going to be good, I'm sure. I mean, I hope. I think I've got the generator on the right settings now. I was going for—uhh—scrambled eggs, so—"

"Rel, why have we stopped?"

She paused with the tray still in her hands, looking slightly disappointed that I wasn't more excited about her cooking. "Well, because we've docked at the homeworld. For the Presentation."

"The presentation of what?"

"The presentation of Tallest Tak, of course."

I felt a slow-moving frost engulf each vertebra of my spine. She might as well have told me it was an execution, for all the difference it made. "What, like a coronation?"

"Sort of. It's just a little ceremony we have so that everyone knows who the new Tallest is—so it's official." She set the tray on a floating saucer and leaned against it, sighing. "It's one of the few things we still do on Irk itself, and everybody in the whole Empire shows up for it. Almost everybody, anyway. The Massive's nearly empty, except for me and the other service drones."

"It's—what?" I furrowed my brow. "Everyone just takes off and leaves the whole Armada floating here like fish in a barrel? That's kind of dumb."

Rel shook her head quickly, rushing to the rescue of her people's pride. Had I been in a more meditative state of mind, I might have reflected on how it never got any less weird, hearing Irkens who had been royally screwed over by their empire singing its praises so passionately.

"Oh, no, no," she assured me. "It's not like that. All of the retainer vessels go down to Irk with their crews; it's just this ship that doesn't, because it's so big. And its docking station has the best automatic defenses ever devised. If a threat in any form gets within a light-year of the Massive, they'll be able to eliminate it in less time than it would take to let us know it's coming."

I considered that. "But there's no one actually on the ship."

"Just you two and the service drones."

"No guards."

"No…" I knew it had clicked when her voice trailed off, her mouth hanging open midsentence. As I peered around her at her little portal in the wall, wondering exactly where her transport tubes transported you to, her cotton-candy-colored eyes swirled with wounded red. "You can't get out of here, you know. Guards or no guards. The reader won't accept your palm or mine."

"I know. But the main doors aren't the only way in and out, are they?"

Rel's gaze followed mine to the near-invisible indentation that was just about her size—the door I'd watched her open, after every breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a swipe of her palm. Her cheeks darkened with indignation, and she folded her arms tightly across her chest. "I'm not letting you leave."

"Why not?" I asked, swinging down from the moon-bed. "I thought you liked me."

"It doesn't matter whether or not I like you. My orders are to keep you alive and keep you in this room – and if I want to keep all my bones inside my body, I don't disobey orders."

"Come on. Don't you want things to change?" Half-consciously, I found myself slipping into the tone of voice I'd always used on girls who flinched when I touched their bra clasps, or tried to drag me home to meet their families. The buttery bell-tones – fairly sickening, actually – I'd always relied on to convince anyone of anything.

"If I got out of here and managed to do what I'm hoping to, I'd be in a position to repay you for helping me. You wouldn't have to be somebody's slave anymore. Don't you want to do something better with your life?"

For a second, her face sagged with sadness. "I've heard that before," she muttered, avoiding my eyes. "No one ever means it."

"I do."

She straightened up and set her jaw, fixing me with a scowl. "Well, I don't care. I'm going to do my job, and that means—"

All of a sudden – out of fucking nowhere – her voice stuck in her throat, and her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell to the floor with a thunk. Out cold. Blinking, wide-eyed, around the room, I turned back to the moon-bed just in time to see Mimi retracting her stun gun. Looking at me with eyes like slices of a blood orange. For the first time, her voice resonated in my head, absolutely clear:

And I'm going to do mine.

We pressed Rel's limp hand to the reader by her door, and an arch-shaped slice of the wall slid obediently away. The tunnel beyond was long and dark, no more than three feet on all sides. Mimi went first, her quick clinking footsteps echoing back to me, her eyes filling the tube with red light, and I crawled on my hands and knees after her.

We followed the tunnel through twists and turns, unlabeled forks in the path, vertical tubes where I just managed to stand before being suddenly sucked up into a new passageway. I had no idea where we were going, or even if Mimi knew. All that mattered was that we were doing something, finally, and it had to be better than sitting useless in that room.

Eventually, we squeezed ourselves through a portal that opened onto a red corridor—an unfamiliar red corridor, but that was okay. We could work with that. We decided, without speaking – without even Mimi's weird wordless way of speaking – what had to be done.

Mimi took off in one direction, and I in the other. Relying on the instincts that had shoveled us into this shit heap to dig us out again, I weaved through a maze of eerily empty hallways, and finally descended into the cool, silent darkness of the docking bay. Led only by the glow of the little lights studding the floating-saucer-cum-elevator (I really had to ask somebody what those things were actually called), I found my way to Tak's ship, sliding my palm over a wing I knew near as well as the scent of her skin.

Inside, I slid back a storage panel and grabbed my backpack, fishing through it in search of the secret weapon I'd saved for a time like this. Thus prepared, I situated myself in the cockpit, and took off to crash one hell of an Irken party.