Shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh

I don’t know how much time has passed in which I barely dared to breathe. My mind is spinning in panic, like a top. A top on amphetamines.

A haunted top on amphetamines that also screams with the voice of a frightened little girl.

Why in the Fuck’s name didn’t Bane tell me that SHE’S STILL HERE?!

(Maybe because you weren’t listening to him, and then you got angry and said ‘fuck’ a lot and then stormed off in a hissy fit?)

Oh, do SHUT UP WITH YOUR LOGIC!

I picture the scenario: a still-wounded Bane, an exhausted Rune, an angry A’Draht, a big box. Enter Valerie, rising from her coma like a zombie on a mission of universal female deliverance, making it impossible for the two guys to wrestle the aforementioned A’Draht into the aforementioned box. There must’ve been some fighting, some confusion. Perhaps my boys had just lost track of her themselves and weren’t sure whether she was still on board or not. Perhaps Bane had still been out of commission at that point.

In a spot like this, she sure is bound to become the hide-and-seek-champion of the decade. I mean, I hadn’t spotted her for a full ten minutes, while lying right the hell next to her. I probably wouldn’t have seen her there even if I had known that she was out and about.

So, this is what Pi Patel must have felt like when he found that he unexpectedly shared his tiny lifeboat with that freaking tiger, I muse after long minutes of absolute physical stillness and absolute mental breakdown.

(Except, of course, that the tiger was just a dumb metaphor and there’s nothing metaphorical about the rabid female lying a goddamned arm’s length away from me!)

(Out of all the fucking storage rooms and shelves on this ship, she had to choose this one. MY brooding shelf. Of fucking course.)

I agree and am equally enraged, nay, affronted, but this isn’t helping.

Should I stay still?

(How much longer? And until what happens, exactly?)

Run! Run! Run!

But how? She’ll kill me the second I move! And where to, anyway?

Or maybe talk to her?

(She probably doesn’t speak English.)

But maybe she has a translator, too?

What would I even say to her?

(Let’s start with ‘please don’t kill me‘ and go from there.)

And what if she interprets my noises as threatening?

My inner bitch doesn’t even answer that question. That’s how screwed I am.

Involuntarily I spend long minutes mentally yelling for Rune but nobody comes riding in on a white horse (or a horse-equivalent alien creature of any color) to save me. Maybe he’s too far away, or not listening in right now, or maybe he’s just catching up on sleep after long days of continuous work as my personal heart-lung machine.

I’m on my own here.

Well, I’m not, technically. That’s the problem. I’m sharing a shelf with a murderous stowaway.

Our ship is passing by a whole cluster of stars. In the stray light, out of the corner of my eye (because I don’t dare turn my head all the way to look at her – I’m stupidly convinced that she will recognize me as the one who clotheslined and strangled her with a chain if we make eye contact, and then she’ll rip my face off), I can see her arm and shoulder. She’s lying on her side, too, her back pressed all the way against the wall, facing me. Her skin is light gray like a cloud and speckled with darker dots.

(Pores full of venomous or poisonous stuff of some kind.)

Or they could be… freckles?

(… no, Val. They couldn’t. Grow up.)

After two eternities of feeling my heart lub!lub!lubbing in my throat, of sweating rivers down my armpits, praying fervently to Sigourney (again – it worked last time, after all. If I survive this one too, I swear I’ll build her a shrine) and waiting for my swift but bloody demise at the hands (claws, teeth) of the feral creature next to me, nothing has happened yet.

And I’m starting to get antsy because I…

I really have to pee.

Being in a virtual coma I probably didn’t have a significant liquid intake, but even a thimble full is plenty when my bladder has the loading capacity of a walnut, due to the gigantic spike Bane and I cooperatively put into the next chute over.

I hold on for another infinitely long couple of minutes but nothing happens, except that the pressure on my bladder increases steadily and by the second.

So in absolute slow motion, I shimmy and shift my legs, hips, and shoulders again and start sliding away from her.

Sliding.

Ever.

So.

Slowly.

Almost.

Imperceptibly.

Aaalmost-

Something cool touches my thigh and I yelp and jackknife up out of reflex.

Naturally, I smack my head into the bottom of the low shelf above us in the process. Right on the Oreo-sized horn I already have, too.

“Ow! Fuck!” Blazing pain.

The A’Draht gives a startled hiss-trill and suddenly we’re bumping into one another in several places, and I bang my left elbow into some box or another. My funny bone sends a sonata up through my arm, my hand goes momentarily numb, and I end up laughing at the way it hurts.

And then I just laugh and laugh and laugh because… nerves.

I’ve had too many close calls in too short a time. Or maybe living in paradise with two hunky aliens, doing nothing but foreplay, fucking, eating, and sleeping all day long has made me soft and unable to healthily cope with any kind of stress. Hence the psychotic laughter.

It takes me a little while to realize that, firstly, my shelfmate has neither killed nor so much as hurt me in the kerfuffle and that, secondly, I’m not the only one laughing.

As it turns out, an A’Draht’s laugh sounds exactly like I always imagined a Yorkshire terrier would sound if dogs could laugh.

Holy fluffing shirt! That’s obscenely cute!

I slap my hand over my mouth to stifle more laughter – this time at her expense – and she mirrors me exactly, ceasing her squeaky hiccup-y laughing at once.

Is she… copying me?

Why is she copying me? Is this Drahta hunting behavior? Do they copy their prey to… what end?

(Fear spoils the taste of your meat and when they copy you, you’re less likely to feel scared when they kill you.)

… I shall ignore that thought entirely.

In the waning glow from the porthole, I study her, propped up on one elbow and leaning slightly towards me as she is, while she studies me in turn.

The short flash I got of her in Tulun D’tel must’ve been entirely tinged with the stress of the situation. In my memory, she is a veritable monster, a grimacing, snarling creature that would’ve fit nicely in any low-to-mid-budget 90s monster movie. Think ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’ and ‘American Werewolf in Paris’.

Right now, she’s a lot closer to Zoe Saldana’s character in that blue alien flick from a couple of years ago, with a dash of Yolandi from Die Antwoord (- here’s to hoping that the similarities end there - ), a bit of Doug Jones in almost any costume he’s ever worn, and a sprinkle of Björk’s freaky and feminine beauty on top. She’s certainly unusual to look at but not unpleasant and not exactly frightening.

At least not right now.

Well, I mean. She’s a little bit frightening. Yeah.

Gotta say, if I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have guessed that she and my two big lugs are the same species. She’s petite, almost childlike both in body and face. Far as I can tell, her boobs are non-existent (although she does appear to have nipples. Four of them, to be exact.) and she has all the curves of Kate Moss during her coke phase – which is to say, none. She’s all wiry angles, edges, and concaves, and looks as resilient and tough as a silver thistle.

Speaking of Kate Moss, this A’Draht would fit the kindchenschema if it weren’t for the needle teeth poking out of the sides of her mouth like tiny vampire fangs. She has big eyes that are just a tad farther apart than seems proportional. Freakily, they’re inversely colored: The sclera, the parts that are white on a human, are a deep, glossy brown while her irises are the color of milk. Also, her black pupils are horizontal slits, like that of a goat on Earth. She has a stringy mop of almost colorless hair plastered to her head and normal-looking ears (which, as I now know, doesn’t mean much) in the normal spots.

And then there are the feelers. I count eight of them, two pairs growing right out of the angle of her lower jaw on either side and one pair on each of her temples, reaching back into her hair like a couple of wormy, udon-noodle-y-looking highlights. They’re as pale as her skin, about fifteen centimeters long, and constantly, gently moving like seaweed in a stream.

If she’s anywhere close to the beauty standard for Dryth, I have to count as aggressively ugly in a Dryth’s eyes. Note to self: Never ask Bane or Rune whether they think I’m pretty.

Before I’m entirely finished taking her in, she reaches out a hand and touches the side of my thigh with her knuckles. The touch is very brief, followed by her looking up to check my face.

Uh. Okay?

Then she does it again. And again.

And again.

“Yeah, you’re weird,” I mumble after the fifth touch-look- cycle.

She hesitates after I speak, then touches once more, letting it linger just a little longer. Man, her fingers are icicles.

Then she breaks contact and then blinks at me like she’s waiting for me to do something. Except I have no clue what that something could possibly be.

Touch. Wait. Look.

Touch. Wait. Look.

Touch.

Wait.

Look.

This is getting ridiculous. Has no one taught this chick not to play with her food?

I tisk and, without thinking too much, poke her in return, nudging her (impressively taut, muscled, disconcertingly cold) thigh with the knuckle of my own index finger.

“That means you’re it,” I tell her when she blinks at me and tilts her head in a universal ‘huh?’ sort of way. She clearly has no idea what I’m doing. Yeah, that makes two of us, sister!

“Look, d’you want to kill me or nah?” I ask her straight. “’cause if you don’t, I’d like to go potty now, yeah?”

She doesn’t understand a word, of course, but talking drowns out the whooshing of blood in my ears, as well as the small voice in my head that’s telling me to fucking stop bantering with the dangerous alien creature like we’re old gal pals.

My heart is still going roughly a thousand miles an hour as I decide to continue my earlier slide towards the lip of the shelf. 

“I’ll just, uh, remove myself from this immediately life-threatening situation and powder my nose, y’know? And once I’ve done that, I’m going to go tear one of my boyfriends a new one for withholding the rather important info that you, missy, are still running around on this vessel. Honestly, we might just have a general conversation about sharing of intel because, man, Dryth seriously suck at it. Of course, that would require them to not treat me like a freaking baby pet or something, but hey – that’s a learning opportunity right there, I’d say. You see, just a week or so ago-”

I don’t get to tell her all about what happened a week or so ago because right at that moment, she attacks me.

***

Her cold fingers, tipped with those scary pointy claws, reach for me in the half-dark, and then she’s right on top of me, even in the cramped space of the shelf.

The shriek gets stuck in my throat because I’m literally too terrified to make a sound.

Oh fuck, this is how I’m going to die.

And the last things I ever said to both Bane and Rune were decidedly unfriendly.

My eyes immediately start to sting – ugh, again with the weeping, Val? – and I screw them shut to keep the tears at bay, and also out of sheer terror. If she wants to claw my face off, that’s bad enough, but at least I don’t want to watch her do it.

And then…

Nothing.

As in, nothing happens.

I’m still alive.

I’m still alive?

Alive and whole, I think.

I squint and peek through my lashes.

I’m a lot colder than before and breathing is a little more difficult because the A’Draht is lying on top of me because…uh.

Why is the A’Draht lying on top of me, exactly?

(Maybe it’s a tactic to make you less scared so that your fear doesn’t spoil the taste of your-)

Give it a REST, will you?!

I briefly wonder if that’s just… her thing, being on top of other people. You know, like chickens always go for the highest possible point in their coop? Or maybe she has also done Rune’s Dryth Maga 101 and the only lesson she took away from it was the sitting-on-people part.

“H-Hey… hey? What a-are you d-doing?” I inquire through clacking teeth. God, if the A’Draht doesn’t kill me soon, I’m sure a heart attack will do me in.

Or, if it’s not a heart attack, it’ll be hypothermia.

“And why are-are you s-so f-fucking cold?” Good grief, this female is a snowwoman! Seriously, her skin feels clammy and icy all over.

As if in reply she burrows her extremities into the warmest places of me – namely my armpits, the crook of my neck, and between my legs. It’s the opposite of pleasant to have friggin’ frigid limbs shoved into those places, but it sure beats being gruesomely murdered, so there’s that.

“Oh, okay. N-now we can b-both be cold, huh? I guess muh-misery does love kah-company,” I gripe even as I reflexively close my arms around the back of the woman who’s trying to physically climb into me, apparently in search of warmth.

Oddly enough, her back feels familiar to me. As I gingerly run my palms up and down the middle of her back, I encounter bony protrusions and textures I know very well by now, just in size XXL instead of her slender S. She’s lacking some slabs of muscle I’m used to feeling there, but the overall structure is the same.

She also purrs like my boys. It’s a more delicate sound, more halting, apprehensive, but it’s very similar.

Okay. Uh. Great. Now I’m lying here with a cold, purring, highly dangerous alien who might kill me any second in several dozen grisly ways and who doesn’t speak my language lying on top of me.

For a similarly terrifying experience, head over to the next zoo and cuddle with a purring alligator.

Fuck. I still really need to pee, though, and her hip is pushing right on my bladder.

This is the weirdest timeline, y’all.

***

An undefined length of time later, I suddenly startle awake and spend long moments trying to figure out who, what, when, and where I am. “What year is this?” I mumble lowly to myself, wiping some drool off my cheek.

2020, possibly 2021, or later. Valerie Greene. Space Prostitute turned Space Life/Sex Coach. Currently in mortal danger. Again. In dire need of a restroom. Again.

Oh, right.

I must have slipped into a shallow sleep. I don’t even know how it happened. I guess waking up from a coma followed by rough sex followed by a rollercoaster of absolute terror just takes it out of you.

I find myself lying on my side with the female alien still in my arms, her forehead leaning against my chest. I turn my nose away a bit because… not to put too fine a point on it, but my new girlfriend reeks. It’s the sour stale-sweat-and-dirt-and-long-unwashed-body-odor of a woman who has been trafficked. I know it unfortunately well. It’s the exact same smell on humans, too. My heart hurts for her.

At least she doesn’t feel cold to the touch anymore – which probably means that I’m verging on hypothermic myself. I neither feel particularly icy nor shivery, though – probably a bad sign.

Optimism is not exactly my middle name.

In a beam of light from the porthole I see that her eyes are closed(ish. She has a milky third eyelid that covers her whole eyeball while the other two leave a slit open) and she’s snoring (also like a Yorkie… fuck me, that’s cute!), so I gingerly extricate myself and then get the hell out of that storage room.

… where I proceed to freak out silently for a full minute for obvious reasons. Cut me some slack, yo. I just had a brush with messy death. Again.

And then that minute passes and I make a battle plan.

Step 1: Toilet. Step 2: Warmth. Step 3: Overdue conversation with my boys.

I want my nice, quiet life filled with nothing but wild alien sex back, and the only way to do that is to deal with this new development before it literally bites someone in the ass… or other body parts.

***

Trying to rearrange my butt on the tatami-like floor so that the pressure on the close-to-2x4-sized spike that’s making itself at home in my vagina is bearable, I look from one of my aliens to the other in utter, fascinated, flabbergasted confusion.

Funny how I’m several years and billions of light-years away from Earth and I can still learn something about my home planet. About Earth men, specifically.

I am learning that Earth men are veritable fountains of empathy, wisdom, and knowledge when it comes to their female counterparts.

At least as opposed to Dryth who…

Well.

“What do Drahta eat?”

Two Dryth look at me wordlessly, like I’m slowly growing two more heads right in front of their eyes.

“Are they omnivores? Vegetarians? Vegans?” I’m not sure these categories are even applicable in space, but what the hell. “Do they survive on love and air? What?”

Heads with three ears each. Out of my nipples.

“O---kay.” I blow a strand of hair out of my face. Maybe start with a simpler question.

… quick, someone give me a simpler question than that!

“Do they… drink, then? Water, maybe? Or do they, like, draw moisture out of the air through their skin like lizards, or…?”

No reply. Bane looks like a freaking statue of himself. Rune’s tail is tucked super tightly around his waist.

“Do they ever talk? Do they… Are they able to verbalize? Do they do the Morse alphabet? Do their feelers work like sea flags, or like…” I press my hands up to my temples and use my forefingers to form the letters in rhythm with the song. “Y – M – C – A!”

I look from one Dryth to the other and can almost see the thoughts flowing between them. They have many opinions on this entire conversation and the overall premise of it, even though they don’t deign to communicate them to me directly. Then again, they don’t really need to. It all boils down to “No, Va’l-ree” and “We are really pissed right now.”

I sigh and take my hands down again.

There was a lot of angry tail-whipping going on when I brought up the subject of the A’Draht Bane had picked up in Tulun D’tel, and even angrier tail-stillness when I told them that I had encountered her on the ship.

Bane and Rune had both demanded to know where she was.

And I had refused to tell them.

I could easily imagine them going and pulling her out of her hidey-hole – with their usual Dryth’ian tact and sensitivity – and trying again to put her into some ghastly box. And they probably wouldn’t be foiled by me this time.

Call me a soft-hearted goody-two-shoes, but I just don’t want to inflict such treatment on a clearly sentient, intelligent, thinking creature who’s been abducted (multiple times), who’s scared and hiding and cold (and snores like a tiny dog) and has no hopes of understanding what the heck is going on. We are just too much alike. (Except I don’t snore at all, of course. Ever. Not even adorably.) I’m not going to throw her under the Dryth bus. None of this is her fault, and we can fix this in other, better, less traumatizing ways.

So yeah, my boys are cranky.

Well, they’re going to have to cope.

“They hiss,” Rune supplies eventually in answer to my earlier question about Drahta talking.

Splendid! If there was a Cosmo on Planet Dryth, and they did a quiz about What Females Really Want, my aliens would score negatives. Double digits.

“Drahta keep to themselves,” Bane explains to me in the same tone you use on kids when they ask why they are not allowed to lick a power socket. “Dryth keep to themselves.”

“Yeah. I’m starting to understand exactly how much,” I sigh, then formulate a battle plan. “Okay. So. First order of business: Communication. We need to talk to her.”

Actually, I need to talk to her. I’m not sure I trust these two with that sort of monumentally revolutionary task.

And if I’m honest, I’m not sure I want her within talking distance of my boys, either. She might do the pheromone thing again and drive them both mating-crazy until at least one of them ends up fucking (and, if I remember Bane’s short treatise on the mechanics of Dryth-Drahta procreation correctly, inevitably impregnating) her.

I clench my teeth against a snarl. Yeah, I’m preemptively jealous. They are both mine and mine alone. Their cocks belong to – and in – me and nobody else(‘s vagina), dammit! If someone wants their babies or any of their appendages, they’re going to have to ask me first. Nicely.

I take a mighty breath, shake off the green-eyed monster rising for no good reason, and try to get my thoughts back on track. Communication, Val. We were talking about communication.

“You don’t happen to have translators lying around, do you?” I ask. “Or is there a planet on our route where we could get one for her?”

No reply again. That’s a No, topped with some intentional obstruction. Grr.

“Great. This is going so smoothly,” I murmur to myself. “Alright. Then we take mine out and give it to her.”

This time both of my aliens speak up immediately and in sync. “No.”

Tisking, I lift both hands in a calming gesture. “Look. The chip is pretty much right underneath my skin, here…“ The chip shows up clearly as an uneven, coin-sized bump just behind my ear now that I shaved my hair there. I turn my head, then point and wiggle the thing with my finger. “It’s not fixed to anything; it just sits there. One nick and it’ll slip right out.”

That’s the theory, anyway. If I remember the way that chip went in in the first place, it might be more complicated, not to mention painful – but now isn’t the time to object to my own proposals.

“Teacher.” Rune only says one word, but I hear several hundred in my head, like a whole choir of Runes.

Something happened to and with Rune (or maybe with me? Or both of us?) since I almost died in Tulun D’tel and he kept me alive. For want of a better word, his whole being is louder than before. It’s like my pulse is running against a little headwind, and that wind whispers his secrets to me.

Right now, Rune’s (not exactly super-secret) secret is that he’s uneasy and dismayed. He doesn’t want to see me bleeding again by my own hand (even though he’s a fan of the general idea of blood). He is, however, no fan of the change and uncertainty that my losing my language chip would bring.

“We can get a new chip for me somewhere, but right now, she needs it more,” I argue, holding eye contact with my worried crown prince, willing him to see my point. “And I’ll learn to understand your language, or you’ll learn to speak mine or both. It’s long overdue anyway.”

I realize that, A, I’m vastly overstating my language-learning abilities (Señor Santos was right, I am extremely vaga and my atención is not bien) (bueno?) (buena??) and that, 2, Rune’s learning Ain-g’lish could potentially complicate matters around his already troubling mind-reading skills… But I figure we’ll burn those bridges when we come to them. Right now, there’s a more pressing matter hiding and shivering in a storage room downstairs.

“I need that female to be able to understand us. We need to communicate with her. Otherwise, she’ll either kill someone -” Most likely me first, I mentally add. “- or she’ll die of exposure, thirst, hunger, whatever. You didn’t mean to fly her corpse to her home planet when you freed her, did you?” I challenge Bane and cross my arms over my chest.

I know he takes offense to the suggestion by the way his eyes go dim. Lookit, I got me a warlike alien lover with a somewhat intact moral compass! Those are rare.

“Once she can understand what we’re saying to her, we’ll see what’s what.”

I can see (and, in Rune’s case, hear and feel) that my boys aren’t convinced. But it’s the only way and the only plan I can see that might not result in a dead or pregnant and/or more deeply traumatized female alien, dead or injured male aliens, and/or a dead or injured human.

I need us all to somehow be friendly, and the only way to do that is to establish contact that goes beyond touch-wait-look and the occasional frigid snuggle.

And really, it’s not like my boys have a better plan. Or if they do, they aren’t willing to share it with me. Their fault.

“Well, then. That’s what we do, then. Or what I do, anyway.” I look from one Dryth to the other again. “I need you to promise me you’ll behave. Let me handle this. Alright?”

Again I can basically see the mental communication flowing between them as they eye me unblinkingly, full of reluctance and refusal. They really don’t want me near the A’Draht.

Fair enough, but I don’t want them near her, either. The last time they were near her, she attempted to fuck and kill one of them, and almost succeeded, too. The last time I was near her, she fell asleep on me. Awesomely Strong Barbaric Alien Overlords of the Universe: 0, milquetoast Valerie from Planet Maximum Suckage: 1!

“Alright?” I prompt again when I receive no confirmation.

Without a warning, Bane fluidly gets up from his flat rock where he was seated and comes towards me. Very slowly and on utterly silent feet. Like a freaking tiger stalking its tiny, tender prey.

It’s probably just me but I could swear the temperature in the room suddenly rises and the humidity goes through the roof. I stand and watch him come at me, rapt and speechless. Yes, speechless. Me. Still. After months of being with them, they’ve lost exactly none of their appeal. If anything, it’s getting worse. Hooboy, am I starting to salivate?

I brace myself for some physical contact, the Bane kind of physical contact. Ruthless. Owning. Contact that speaks.

Things inside of me swell and press closer together, and start lubricating in anticipation. Yes, I’m easy, thanks for asking.

But at the last moment, when I can almost feel the heat of his skin against mine – and my skin is absolutely yearning for it, too – he walks right past me instead. His luminous eyes stay fixed on mine with that intensity that makes the butterflies that just hatched in my stomach start having freaky butterfly sex with each other.

Holy hell, I don’t need any Princess Leia gift to know that he’s pissed at me and that he wants to bend me to his will right now... or just generally bend me (over). Me contradicting him equals fighting him, and – well, he told me several times that he likes it when they fight, didn’t he?

“Teacher,” Rune speaks up just as Bane passes me by, and my head snaps round. When did Rune close the distance between us? He was way over there a second ago and now he’s only an arm’s length away.

“Where is the A’Draht, Teacher?” he asks, and there’s a… coaxing in my head, like my thoughts and feelings are being petted by a warm, expert hand. It feels like I always imagined a tantric massage might feel, the type you only see on the “for women” category on HornPub, with the ridiculously wasteful amounts of warm oil which they spend fifteen minutes gently kneading your boobs with until everything is soft and supple and goosebumps-y, except that I suddenly feel like that on the inside of my mind.

Oooh. Ooohhh, not fair.

I take a deep breath and shake that gentle hand off, then try to scowl. “I told you, I’m not gonna tell you that. It’s for your safety as well as hers.” Another deep breath. “I am not going to tell you that,” I repeat because I suddenly need to remind myself of that fact.

“Where is it, Ree?” Bane’s voice startles me because it comes from my other side.

The scowl comes much more easily this time. I cross my arms over my chest (and my puckered nipples).

“She is not an It,” I snarl, “and, again, I’m not going to tell you. Let me deal with her. I can do it.”

“Teacher,” Rune says again… and boy, am I glad that human vocal cords aren’t designed for purring, or I’d be rumbling like a Ferrari right now. The soft whisper of emotions coming from Rune now tells me that he’s getting horny – that his horniness is laced with just a little, delicious bit of aggression – and that he’s got an itch in the tip of his tongue that-

“No,” I scold him, but my voice goes up at the end like I’m asking a question. My head is starting to spin a little, but I don’t think it is Rune’s doing. I think it’s just myself being me, reacting to him. “Don’t ‘Teacher’ me right now.”

I mean, I get it. My Dryth very much don’t want me near the A’Draht. For good reasons – she’s strong and ferocious and if she could hold Bane at bay, that means she can easily rip me in half (or quarters, or teensy tiny pieces of Valerie confetti. Valeretti.).

And really, it’s almost sweet, in that Dryth way. They want to protect and shelter me from harm. They may know truly very little about the female that’s hiding on our ship somewhere – where, exactly, that’s… uhm – but they still know categorically more than me because they have encountered other Drahta before, or they have heard about them in first-hand accounts, and despite their different outward appearances, they are genetically linked, so they are much more adequate in dealing with her than I could ever be since humans have such fragile skin and fragile-

“No, dammit!” I snap and glare at Rune, then actually walk up to him and physically shove him away. (Or I try to. He doesn’t move an inch. Ooh God, his chest is so fucking touchable.) “You stop that!”

“You put yourself in danger, Va’l-ree,” Bane growls from behind me – the same words he used in our frustrating conversation before, the one that made me so angry then.

They make me angry again this time, too. Like I think he perfectly well knew they would.

I whirl around to him, claws out, such as they are. “And I told you that that’s my decision to make! I am not your child! You don’t get to wrap me in cotton!”

Bane growls in response and gets in my face, crowding me, forcing me onto my back foot.

I am very aware of what’s happening, and that I might be in a bit of danger here. Even through the soft haze in my head courtesy of Rune’s brain, I know on a deep, mammalian level that they’re being scary. Any sane person would probably back away slowly instead of leaning in and getting in their faces.

Thing is, sanity and I have had a long-distance relationship these past three years. It was a mutual decision, really, and I think we’ve both moved on.

Being an insane person, I turn around toward Rune because all those whispers about lust and violence are flames that draw me like a suicidal moth, and I need to take care of that poor tongue of his – in that I really need to bite it right now.

So I do. I launch myself bodily at his mouth and groan long and loudly into it when we collide, and then moan wordlessly when he grabs and angles my head like he wants to so that he can reach deep into my mouth with that tongue, that tongue, oh my, oh God.

It's like he’s reaching into my mouth and all the way through and between my legs with his tongue. I’m so horny that that mental image isn’t even disturbing.

There’s a growly roar, and then a sharp zing of pain lances through me. Teeth. I feel teeth nipping at the side of my neck that’s now doubly exposed by my new haircut and due to the tilt of my head. The pressure of the sharp, white tips increases until there’s pain, then lessens, then sweetens as Bane sucks on my skin before he uses his teeth again, giving me pain again.

I must be truly insane because I want him to draw blood. I feel that that would be according to his nature, and I can’t think of anything more core-meltingly sexy right now than a male doing what his primitive instincts tell him to do to me. This male, specifically. Bane unchained would be utterly spectacular, I’m sure.

Then again, him holding back for me is also sexy as fuck. All that leashed power and need, molding itself to my comparatively fragile body – it’s enough to make my head and ovaries spin.

God, my brain is already a porridge made of oxytocin and endorphins and incoherent swearwords, and we’ve only just begun. I’m already dripping and the big spike inside of me feels like it’s swelling when it’s really me swelling, pulsing, throbbing around it.

“Where is the A’Draht, Ree?” Bane demands, his voice a rolling, rasping growl right below my ear, its sound driving straight into my abdomen and doing wicked things there.

With some effort, I un-fuse my mouth from Rune’s, turn around, and catch Bane’s lips with mine, nipping and pulling at them with my teeth by the way of an answer. Not gonna tell. Never gonna tell.

I have no idea exactly how I’m going to keep my secret in the long run – this ship is large for three (four) people but it’s also not exactly the mothership from Independence Day. Or Bane and Rune could just follow me to that storage room. It’s not like I’m super-stealthy. In fact, it’s a bit of a mystery how they didn’t immediately conclude where I may have gone and encountered the A’Draht after my hissy fit. There’s really only one place I go when I want to sulk and I’m fairly sure they know about it.

Right now though, I have more acute, short-term riddles to solve. Like, I only have one mouth but two lovers to kiss. And both of those lovers are irritated with me right now, and they keep talking about some other chick whose whereabouts they want to find out when I, Valerie Magdalena Greene, am right fucking here and literally dripping.

Unless somebody has mercy on me and starts touching my clit right this minute, I’m going to start screaming the goddamned ship down.

Right after I’m done violently snogging them, that is.

Hours, days, weeks later, I’m starting to actually hurt for a touch. My pussy is pulsing hot and aching for more friction, my entire lower body tense and taut like a drum, waiting, needing to be struck. I have tried to press my thighs together, but someone else’s thigh was always between them, and I have tried to reach down and touch myself, but someone keeps grabbing my wrists with their hands or their tail and redirecting them.

Forget screaming, I’m going to break out in tears soon.

I make a last-ditch attempt to hump that thigh that’s lodged between mine, but again, I can’t reach, I can’t reach, “Oh, my fucking god, please!”

“Where is the A’Draht, my teacher?” Bane asks calmly.

“Fuck you!” How dare he think about anything else but me right now!? I want to scratch his eyes out! “Fuck me!” Right! Now! Please!

A zing of sensation, then pain, then the sound of a slap that in itself creates more sensation up and down my neck. The skin of my left butt cheek flares up like it’s been licked by fire. Then the right. And the left again. Slap! Slap! Slap!

“Oh, shit!” I can’t help it; I moan and grunt like a sow in heat. My entire body is shuddering with helpless delight and this new sort of pain that doesn’t make me want to wilt and cower like ordinary pain at all. As a matter of fact, this one makes me want to come. He needs to keep going and I will, I might, oh Jesus, I could come like this, I just need-

“More!” I gasp. Bane growls, apparently frustrated that this new method isn’t getting him the result he was aiming for at all, and then indulges me. Harder. A lot harder. I rock forward and against Rune’s solid, unyielding body, and cry out. My ass stings fiercely and I know that he’s leaving handprints and red swells on my skin. Red badges of honor.

My swollen pussy is weeping down the insides of my thighs in fat droplets.

Rune clasps me tight as Bane spanks my ass and the crease where my thighs meet my butt cheeks. Like the monster my crown prince secretly is, he hungrily swallows my yowls of pleasurable pain, his fingers burrowed into my hair and yanking on it, and holds me upright when my knees buckle, so that Bane can continue. I hear him purring somewhat viciously when I lean forward and bite his pec with all my might just to give all that painful lust an outlet.

Inside of my head, I can hear his arousal swell with each slap Bane delivers, with each of my grunts and cries. Still, he keeps my thighs spread apart and prevents my hands from wandering, and me from relieving the mounting pressure between my legs.

“Where is the A’Draht, Valerie?!” Bane growls between slaps, even using my full first name which… God, Freud’s ghost must be laughing himself silly. Despite all my protestations of not being anyone’s child, hearing that full name triggers a vision of him being my Daddy and spanking and scolding me like this regularly according to his parental duty, and I shudder with how much it turns me on.

“I won’t fucking tell you!” is what I want to say. I am not articulate enough anymore at this point, but I think they recognize rejection when they see it, maybe in the set of my shoulders or in the glare of my watery eyes. I will not back down. I realize my loyalty to that complete stranger is probably ridiculous and the sisterhood I’m feeling with her is one hundred percent projection, but this is about the principle of the thing. More than the principle, even.

I cannot be equal to my Dryth in many ways, I know that.

But in some, I can. And I will. Dammit all to hell, I will.

Before I know what’s happening, I’m suddenly on my back – thankfully not on my ass, which feels like raw, tender twin balloons of taut, pulsating skin, swollen to roughly twice their original size – and there’s a hot, wet, angry mouth French-kissing my pussy. And a long, clever finger nudging my asshole. A pair of hands maneuvering my head, tipping my chin all the way back and forcing my jaw open. A weeping, swelling cock slithering past my lips, down and back along the length of my tongue, all the way down into my throat.

Hands, arms, and tails pin my flailing limbs and writhing body to the ground, squeeze and press and pet me in all the right places. All of them, at once.

In my brain I’m standing on the edge of the abyss, half-dangling already, held only by my refusal to give in to the aliens fucking, sucking, and groping me. Or at least that’s what Rune’s voice whispers into my inside ear.

I know that if I tell them what they want to know, I will come – harder, longer, more magnificently than ever before. The muscles in my core, my abdominal walls, my thighs, and lower back are already trembling madly with it, my lungs are heaving whenever Rune allows me a breath (which is almost never), drawing in the air I’m going to need for my cry of ecstasy and the rush of blood to the head, my heart is ready to gallop right out of my chest, already ramming against my sternum like it wants out, out! Out! Out!

But I will not tell them. I will not let myself be patronized. Not by the males I love. Especially not by them.

I want them to trust me, I demand they trust me, and I will stand (or, in this case, lie) my fucking ground if it’s the last goddamn thing I do.

Grunting and growling, they pleasure my body into submission, and beyond it. I want to scream with relief when Bane’s tongue lets up on my clit, but then there’s a shock of new and exciting pain. I writhe in searing, sexy agony, trying and failing to get away from the slaps against my spread cunt. I can feel my juices spray against my inner thighs with each spank and feel how my outer labia immediately puff up from the smacks. Smack! Smack! Smack! My hips twitch erratically, trying and failing to evade.

Rune wraps his fingers around my throat, doubtlessly feeling himself moving inside my esophagus, and holds me still, trapping my yells even more inside of me than they already are.

Bane holds me open. Rune holds me closed. Both just hold me.

It hurts a bit. It’s scary as hell because I can hardly breathe, and my blood is boiling in my veins, thick with adrenaline. My X-marked cheek throbs and stings from sweat and from the stretch. Tears and snot are pouring out of my face. I am shaking like a leaf. My skull is pounding like a bass drum at the mercy of some industrial death metal band. I know I must look like an angry, battered tomato.

I could die happy this very moment, no lie.

Even in my state, I do my darndest to give back. I lick and suck as vigorously as I can even as I spit and sputter and screw my eyes shut against the fluids that are dripping into them, and against the feeling of saliva, lube, and pre-cum running into my nostrils. I clamp my legs around Bane’s shoulders, my thighs around his head as much as I can, fighting a pointless fight against him and his abuse because I know he fucking craves it.

And I let my brain overflow with words and feelings of pure lust and fierce love and adoration and utter rapture, and I know, somehow, that both of them get it, whether they have the Dryth gift or not, whether the word ‘love’ is in their vocabulary or not.

In this strange, painfully aroused, physically unsatisfied but mentally sated, perfect moment, I am one with them. They know I love them, and they – after their own, alien fashion – love me back. Stubbornly. Torturously. The Dryth way.

I cry fat, unsightly tears and it’s only partially because Rune is ramming his cock into my throat and Bane’s frilly tongue lashes my clit in the best, worst way again and yet I won’t be able to have my climax like this. Mostly, I’m just so deliriously fucking happy, that I have the choice of either literally bursting into a bright shower of sparks, or crying like a little bitch from sheer euphoria. So, tears it is.

In order to hold on to this for as long as I possibly can, I vow solemnly to myself, that I will try anything, say anything, do anything, for love.

“Tell us where the A’Draht is.”

… but I won’t do that.

***

I am bruised and tender in the best of ways when I bob back onto the surface of consciousness like an apple in a tub. The shade sail gently sways above me. I look up at it for a longish time as my eyelids decide whether they want to fall shut again or not. After a while, they choose ‘open’.

Looking around, I see next to me, on my right, a shallow bowl made from one of the coconut-like plants that grow in the forest. There’s some water in it. On my left, there’s Rune, sitting cross-legged and still like a stone gargoyle. He’s wearing a loincloth for once. His sunset eyes gaze down at me evenly.

I reach out, brushing his knee with my knuckles (which are bruised. I’ve forgotten how that happened) just for the sake of touching him. He wordlessly helps me sit up and I take the drink that’s waiting for me to my right, sipping slowly.

As I contemplate my sore throat, my sore palate, and my sore everything else, I realize that Rune is in my head again. Not like a scary vengeful deity, like when he ordered me not to leave the ship, and also not front-and-center like during his vain attempts to coax the truth out of me. Rather, he’s like…like a dark bird sitting on a branch on a tree that’s growing in the back of my brain, observing everything from a polite distance. An innocuous passenger, a faint signal, the feeling of a small length of red string knotted around my left pinky toe.

I wonder whether that’s going to be permanent now in his vicinity, and why that is.

As if in answer, he nods and tilts his head slightly, and for the first time since I woke up after Tulun D’tel, I can see that the piercings that used to line his ears are gone. Only little puncture marks remain.

He once said that they give him constant pain which helped rein his gift in. Apparently, all bets are off now.

Maybe removing them was a necessity because he wouldn’t have managed to get out of Tulun D’tel with all three of us in tow without his full potential, or maybe he couldn’t have kept me alive otherwise. Maybe the pain had finally gotten unbearable after his one ear was injured in the fight with the Dryth who entered this ship.

Maybe he was just over constantly torturing himself and trusted that the full potential of his powers wouldn’t be a problem for either of his companions on this journey. (I like this explanation best, personally.)

This is one of those questions I have now learned not to ask him because he would never answer me. Asking a Dryth to dissect his motivations when they are more complex than just instinct-based is like asking someone to dig a hole in quicksand. Each grain of sand represents a facet and aspect of a reason. The reasons, multiplying through hindsight, keep coming in and coming in, much faster than you can dig, and in the end, you’re sinking, no wiser than before.

Still silent, Rune grabs the bucket of water that’s right behind him and puts it down next to me. Then he gets on his knees, dips the cloth in the water, and starts to wipe down my skin.

I sigh blissfully. This is the second time I’m being pampered within only a couple of hours and gosh darn, this is the life. I’m one cocktail with a paper umbrella away from perfection.

Smiling, I lean back on my elbows and close my eyes. I don’t think my aliens really understand why I feel the need to clean up all the time – seeing how they’re actively searching out and enjoying the dirtier, sweatier scents of me I’m guessing they’d rather not have me shower or wash, ever. But they have noticed that I have this urge and they cater to it readily because it makes me happy, and happy Val wants to get dirty again soon.

Or maybe they just like touching me. Either is good.

As per usual and just like his fellow alien, Rune is much more thorough and diligent than I could ever be. Freaking perfectionists. Every plane, nook, and cranny is cleansed at least twice, fastidiously. I doze off a bit when Rune tends to my torso and wake up when he rinses my groin area.

“Water’s getting cold,” I mumble, complaining a little.

He is relentless. I sigh and cover my eyes against the vision of Rune kneeling between my legs and wiping me up and down, up and down, until my pubes are dark and slicked straight onto the skin of my mons. My clit stings and twitches a little with every pass and my labia and sphincter feel tender. I bite my lip and make some vague noise. Bane. What a scoundrel and ruffian.

When Rune is finished, he carefully folds the cloth over the rim of the bucket, regards me for a second, and then suddenly proceeds to slowly crawl over me.

Mind you, I’m not complaining, but I’m absolutely beat. Then again, the loincloth tells me that he has lost his spike during our last orgy. I don’t even remember that. It was just a whirl of crazy sensations at the end there. I don’t even remember whether or not I came eventually, let alone him or Bane – so maybe this is just a little cuddling?

Even though I’m not exactly used to post-coital Drythian cuddles, I don’t think I’d ever say ‘No’ to cuddling and possibly some light necking. I open my arms wide.

So we cuddle and neck lightly, without any hurry, and it’s like a balm over my beautifully chafed soul (and less beautifully chafed body. It’s already getting better by the second, but man, I’m sore.).

I somehow end up sitting in his lap, my still-raw ass couched against his thighs and my core against his loincloth, my legs on either side of his strong body while my torso is cradled against his broader one. Chest to chest, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. My favorite.

When I caress his left ear with my fingers – which is easier now that there are no earrings in the way – I encounter a rough patch just behind it that I’ve never felt before. A new scab? I break the kiss and lightly tilt his chin with my finger so I can have a look.

There’s a fresh cut towards the back of his cranium, maybe three inches long. For some reason, Rune’s wounds always remind me of geodes for their scraggly edges and how they form an actual fissure in the shiny, dark tissue of his skin as if some insectoid animal took an actual bite out of him to expose his crystalline insides.

“What’s this?” I ask him, then swallow a gasp down. “Did I scratch you or something?” Which is a ridiculous question. I physically wouldn’t be able to do that. My nails are puny and Dryth skin is tough. More likely, the Drahta got him during their bout in the city. But it looks new, and their bout in Tulun D’tel was a full week ago, so…?

Rune grabs the wrist of my hand – the one that has encountered that new wound – and drapes my arm around his neck like a garland instead, peppering it with kisses down to my shoulder. Then he brings his own hands to my face, sliding both along my cheeks. His roughened palms are so gentle it sends a pang of almost-sadness through me. I’m not sure where it comes from.

Cupping my face, he leans in and kisses my lips once, twice. When he pulls back, looking into his eyes is like looking into a hearth fire.

“D’jet thir Dra’hta nul-vyne,” he says, and my translator supplies me with “Drahta have a gill”.

I blink, still dazed and woozy from the kisses and the touches and the glow of his eyes, and barely manage not to ask, “Who’s Gil and why do they have ’em?” before my brain snaps into gear. A gill, like the thing that a fish has for breathing, Val. Duh.

Drahta. Gill. Uh. Okay. What does it have to do with his new head wound? Or with anything? I furrow my brow. Maybe they have finally kissed and fucked me stupid?

“Right here,” Rune goes on, sliding the tip of his index finger to where the side of my neck meets my lower jaw and painting a long, ticklish trail along my skin, all the way down to my clavicle. “It can be opened. Peeled back.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I catch his fingers in my palm before they can travel farther south and distract me.

“Perhaps the translator unit can be slid into the tissue there, right at the top,” he says, weaving my fingers between his. “It should be close enough to the root and stem of the brain. There would be no need for a new incision, in the interim at least.”

He reaches into a fold of his loincloth and pulls out a silver-green, roughly octagonal translator chip, about the size of my thumbnail. It glints dully on his palm.

Wound on his head. Chip in his hand. Helpful instructions.

Click. Click. Click - Ka-Ching.

My eyes go wide, and my mouth falls open on a soft ‘oh, no’.

Finally getting approval has never been so bitterly sweet.

“Oh, Rune. That’s… I didn’t want you to…” I trail off, suddenly brimful with a terrible sadness because when I’m searching his eyes, I can see in them that he cannot understand my words anymore. He’s observing my mouth, almost like he’s trying to read my lips, but he’s clearly lost. “I never meant for you to…”

I also see that he knows. He knows I never once meant for him to do this in my stead. It never even occurred to me that Rune also had a language chip implanted and that giving that to the A’Draht was an option. Judging by the truly massive wound on his skull, it also sat a lot deeper than mine does, so I probably would have vetoed it categorically anyway.

Rune puts the chip into my hand. It weighs about as much as a stamp and glints like a butterfly wing. “You will be careful, Teacher,” he beseeches me, but imperiously, somehow making it sound like a threat.

I can hear the worry and the care. I can feel it in my head.

Gods, this alien. Both of these aliens, really. They slay me.

I hold the chip gingerly but securely, put my free hand on Rune’s cheek and look him in the eye.

“I,” I intone clearly and articulately, gesturing to myself, to my own torso, with the fist in which the chip is nestled.

“Love,” I continue, trusting that he remembers that word from our earlier conversation, foregoing the gesture towards my heart that’s thudding heavily, profoundly in my chest.

“You,” I finish, poking him in the chest with my knuckle, then kiss him.

When that kiss ends and I pull back, he ponders for a moment, pupils dilating and constricting in his sunset-colored eyes.

Then he answers, in his slightly accented English, “kiss” and leans in again until his nose bumps mine – “kiss” – and then his breath slides over my lips, and then – “kiss, Ree.” – his tongue licks into me.

I smile against his mouth.

***TBC***