The stars were bright out here.

They were pretty, Gaz knew, when she took the time to look at them. But she usually wasn't looking- mostly now she lived inside her own head, rolling in her own darkness the thoughts of what she would do to Zim when she found him. As she would.

Tak's ship was cramped for a seventeen-year-old human female, even one who was as trim as Gaz. She had to fold her legs all the time to fit, crunched between food, drink and softly glowing, chirping computer equipment. For the rare hours when she emerged from the cockpit made humid and warm by her own body heat her legs thrummed with the rush of returning blood. As a passenger she looked almost incidental, only an organic afterthought scrunched between the unliving cargo. Freedom from the small metal cocoon was a rare release, spoiled by the girl's itch to on the move again. She stocked up on water or food or fuel as quickly as she could manage and all but ran back to her cramped quarters.

The ship did not want her there either. It had made this known when she had first crawled in, first reclined on the strangely curving seat, first dragged her hands over the controls that were furry with dust. "EUGH! Another one of you stinking humans! Where are you all coming from?! Why are you BOTHERING me?!"

The backtalk had stopped soon enough, put off by Gaz's snarling replies. Gaz knew that she missed it, because Gaz was used to constant babble, had submerged herself in the tones of one voice for all the years of her life. She had no real natural inclination to be a lone wolf. Things had just sort of happened that way. The world was such a disappointment, and the girl had curled inwards upon herself, bought a world where things were predictable and she could have perfect control. That was her games.

And now the rest of the universe managed to let her down as well. Gaz couldn't think of what Dib had looked forward to finding out here; aliens were as rude and petty and carelessly cruel as humans.

It was not such a strange land after all.

The ship needed no help from her. Everything was automated; it avoided obstacles and traced after the beacon that was Zim's ship all on its own. Mostly Gaz slumped in her seat and brooded.

She thought often on her father, who was… gone now. Membrane had never given her the attention, the consideration that she really craved but Gaz missed him all the same, missed the things that made him: how tall he was, his booming voice, the melodrama with which he talked of perfectly mundane objects. She remembered being very small, with purple hair up in two spiky pigtails, falling asleep during the long car ride home. Then, blurry and half-awake, feeling her father lifting her with his big, careful, scientist's hands to lean her head on his shoulder and carry her up to her room. Other kids had been a little scared of the lanky hero-figure that was her father, but Gaz was proud of him, of what he was doing. So proud.

That was when she had been four. It was the only time she could remember him carrying her to bed.

Gaz wanted earth back, wanted her games and her soda and her pizza and her family and her shuttered, perfectly controlled world to surround her again.

She knew she would never get it.

The last days on earth had been small and cold, spent in a reinforced bunker listening to the soft whumphing of bombs on the earth above. Gaz had imagined sometimes that she could feel the earth shaking gently around her, with the soft, terrified tremors of an animal that knew the end was near. Then she had looked at a seismograph in the lab and realized that the shaking was real.

Gaz tried not to think of the fact that she was hideously alone out here, a speck of humanity lost in a hostile world. Gaz could out-hostile anything that crossed her path. Or so she told herself.

And she knew that she could out-hostile Zim.

Gaz was just biding her time.

END

Yeah, I said this was a one-shot but then I talked to J. Random Lurker and it SPROUTED. Horribly. So thank her for this. And this was a tedious, short chapter but there will be more to come, which will hopefully not be tedious. :)

Thanks also to all of you who reviewed kindly.

Chapter finished July 3, 2004.