I cannot stress enough just how ordinary my day had been before I found out. As ordinary - I had assumed - it had been for everyone else on the planet. And I guess in a way, it was still ordinary, just a different kind of ordinary.

There’s a girl I like to sit next to in college: We only see each other twice a week for the units we have in common, but we always sit together when we see each other. At the time, I had no idea what Stella saw in me, but she was astronomically cute and liked dressing to flaunt it, even in cold weather, so I wasn’t about to complain.

We’d always pair up for the week’s practical assessment and walk together for as long as we could after class before going our separate ways. Conversation would include this and that, but would usually touch on the war, one way or another.

“Do you think we’re winning, Chris?” She’d ask.

“Of course,” I’d say, affecting what I imagined an alien might sound like while pretending to be human. “As a hu-man, I lack the cognitive capacity to doubt our mili-tary’s daily reports of success. As a galactic superpower, hu-man victory is inevitable! All glory to the hu-mans!”

She would laugh and roll her eyes and we’d change topics.

I was only slightly exaggerating, of course. Every morning, there would be new reports of planets, star systems and whole swathes of the galaxy declared completely sanitized of the barbaric Xolroxian aggressors. It wasn’t bad news as such - footage from the earliest stages of the war showed creatures that had even the most ardent monster-fuckers reconsidering their kink - but the relentless onslaught of uniformly positive news had become not just routine, but more than a little annoying.

Meanwhile back on Earth (and presumably across our multitudinous other colonies) things continued as normal. Suspiciously normal, in hindsight: The threat of galactic annihilation had united all of humanity’s myriad bickering factions, but despite the threat having been officially neutralised, they didn’t seem too keen to get their bicker back on.

Anyway, it was more than a second year college student could be bothered worrying about for very long, which is why it was the furthest thing from my mind when Stella and I were walking together and she looked around conspiratorially before asking.

“Hey, do you want to Commune at my place tonight?”

I want to clarify a few things before continuing: Firstly, you could absolutely hear the Capital Letter when she said “Commune,” secondly, she’d never mentioned religion seriously up to the point and more importantly, thirdly, she’d never invited me for so much as a cup of coffee up to this point, so you can imagine my confusion.

“You want to what at your where now?” I said, mind racing.

“Commune,” she repeated. “I think we’re compatible.”

After an awkward silence of desperately and fruitlessly trying to make sense of the offer, I decided honesty was the best choice.

“Stella, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Stella pulled a face and looked around again. “It’s just us here, we can talk about it.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. “No, I really don’t know. I’d love to hang out, but I’ll need you to show me what this “Commune” business is.”

She rolled her eyes and replied in a sarcastic, sing-song voice.

“Right, right, I get it. As a hu-man, you couldn’t possibly know what it is to “Commune”, as you have heard it said. Just come to my place at eight-thirty tonight. You can stop playing dumb there.”

The rest of my day was spent searching online for a definition of “Commune” that wasn’t mystic superstition or organised religion, with none of the results able to explain why it would be something two college kids would want to do together privately.

Nevertheless, I showed up at the address I was given, equal parts curious and apprehensive.

Stella greeted me at the door bathed in candlelight and wearing a bathrobe, which I thought was a bit odd until she had closed the door behind me, at which point she flung it open to reveal that she was naked underneath.

“Doesn’t she look great?” she asked, grinning at my stupefied reaction. “I was very fortunate to get a body this attractive.”

She looked amazing: Her pale body glowing in the dim light, the soft shadows throwing the curve of her breasts and the tone of her body into relief. It was like stepping into a movie scene where everything had been perfectly coordinated to capture the beauty of the woman presented.

I could only nod in silence, the strangeness of her word choice ricocheting clean off of my brain.

She giggled, shrugging off the robe in a single motion and sauntered toward an open door, beckoning me to follow.

Reeling from the sudden developments and giddy with excitement, I followed, turning into her bedroom to find her lying naked on the sheets. She waggled her eyebrows before giggling again, repositioning herself at the head.

“Come on,” she said, propping herself up to watch me. “Don’t keep me waiting.”

I flung off my clothes in the steps it took to reach the foot of the bed, and I crawled up to join her. She took her time inspecting my up and down, and I did the same, drinking in the sight of her in the warm light. I had to assume based on her expression that she approved of what she saw, though she didn’t need to see my face to reach the same conclusion.

“Someone’s happy to see me,” she murmured and shuffled closer.

She kissed me briefly on the lips, pulling back to look into my eyes and giggled, kissing me again.

“You’re looking a little lost,” she taunted gently.

I didn’t have the courage to tell her that it was my first time, but I didn’t need to. Without waiting for an answer, she kissed my cheek, my neck and slowly meandered her way down my chest and stomach before breathing gently on my cock. I was so hard that it hurt, and she laughed at the way that it twitched with my heartbeat.

I let out a shuddering sigh when I felt the moist warmth of her lips engulf me, sliding gently up and down my shaft. All other thoughts melted away as my entire world was reduced to my penis and the mouth that was tenderly milking it. It was so much more than I’d ever experienced before, so much more than I could have even imagined and it was interrupted too soon by the coolness of the air when she let it slip out from between her lips with a slurp.

“Does he feel good?” she asked, peeking around my cock at me with her head resting on my thigh.

I nodded, again completely oblivious to the strange choice of words.

“Well come on, then,” she said, giving me a lick. “Come out and see me.”

Baffled at what I was sure would have made sense to anyone more experienced, all I could do was shrug helplessly, but it didn’t seem to faze her.

“Fine, I’ll go first,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But before that happens, you’re showing me a good time, too.”

She crawled back up along my body, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek - it didn’t even occur to me to be weirded out by lips that had so recently been wrapped around my cock - before kneeling over my head. Inexperienced as I was, I couldn’t tell you how she compared to other women, but in that moment she was perfect: The light above her creating a haloing effect around her face and the neat bush above her sex.

She grinned as she lowered herself onto my face, not placing her entire weight onto me, but holding low enough that I could reach her without too much effort. I kissed and licked the inside of her thighs, made out with the lips of her pussy and plunged my tongue into her as deep as it could reach, drunk on the warmth of her. She shuddered and moaned above me, slightly muffled when she clamped her legs against my ears.

I opened my eyes when she lifted herself off of me and laughed breathlessly while I wiped the traces of her off of my face.

“She feels amazing!” she panted. “This is so much better than doing it myself!”

I couldn’t respond, watching dumbly as she adjusted position so that the overhead light illuminated her whole body above me.

“Okay, I’m coming out now,” she said dreamily. “And then you’ve got no excuse, okay? I want to see you, too.”

Before I could ask for clarification, she closed her eyes and tilted her head up to the ceiling. As she did, her stomach shuddered, and something finger-thick and mottled bright blue slid out of her vagina, curling up to face me like a snake.

I didn’t scream. I couldn’t find the voice to. Instead, eyes wide and fixated on the thing in front of me, I said in a hoarse croak, “What the fuck is that?”

Bizarrely, the thing turned its… head? To the side and slid back into Stella’s body as she half twisted, half leapt off of me to face the open door behind her.

“What? Where!?”

It took me a moment to realise that she had thought that I’d seen something across the room, so I pointed at her, voice still only barely functioning.

“Between your legs!”

Panic now mixed with bafflement, she looked down at her crotch, then twisted and turned to inspect herself below the waist.

“What? I don’t see anything!”

“You had a snake in your vagina!” I choked out.

Stella’s expression of confusion quickly became one of annoyance, and she gave me the kind of look that conveyed “what the fuck are you talking about” more than the words themselves ever could.

“I’m not joking!” I said, suddenly doubting myself. Surely what I had seen was impossible, though I wasn’t too pleased at the possibility that this is how I would discover my family had a history of mental illness.

What I wasn’t expecting was Stella’s shift from irritated disbelief to sudden horror, or her hurried walk to the bedroom door, which she closed before turning back to me.

“Chris,” she said, as one might talk to someone on a high ledge. “Don’t mess around with me, okay? You’ve been playing games the whole time I’ve known you, but now really isn’t the time. Are you human?”

Now it was my turn to be baffled. “What? Yes, of course I am-”

“I said don’t fuck with me!” Stella shouted, her voice rising in panic. “Drop the act! You’re hiding inside your host, same as me, right? Right?”

It probably only took a few seconds for me to put two and two together, but it felt like an eternity before I was finally about to clear my throat and speak clearly.

“I think,” I said, hands raised as though I had a gun pointed at me. “That we need to talk about a few things.”

*

They didn’t have a name for themselves, because they didn’t communicate using language. They weren’t Xolroxians - they were the parasitic species that had been controlling the Xolroxian race when they were encountered by humans. Xolroxian physiology had been robust enough that they were able to travel the galaxy without any kind of conveyance, but their mounting losses against humanity’s technology meant that they had to adapt or die, which meant finding a new host.

“So we really did wipe out the Xolroxians,” I said, after she had finished. Stella had returned to bed, sitting next to me while she had explained.

She shrugged. “We’d already completely dominated them. They were just vessels for us to control. We thought that their natural toughness would ensure our survival for centuries, but I guess biology can only take you so far.”

I stared at her, trying to resolve the image in my mind that the admittedly still very attractive woman in front of me was being controlled by a lifeform that - until recently - had been puppeteering a two-ton bloodthirsty alien behemoth.

“So you just… left?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “Once we sloughed off our hosts, we were able to regress back to a kind of egg-state and launched ourselves into space. That was where the reports of mass starvation or disease came from: They just found our discarded bodies.”

“And when you launched yourselves into space,” I said, dreading the answer but needing to ask anyway. “Were you aiming for anywhere in particular?”

Stelle gave me a look. “Earth, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

She seemed to take pity on me. “We’d been brought to the edge of extinction, it made sense to colonise the species that almost destroyed us. Your bodies aren’t especially resilient, but you haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what your intelligence makes you capable of.”

“Thanks,” I said bitterly. “So now you’re here to dominate humanity instead?”

Stella shook her head. “There were only a few million of us left,” she said. “Even if all of us made it here, we could only take over less than one percent of your population.”

“How comforting,” I lied, but then something occurred to me. “Why did you think I was one of you?”

Stella gave me a look that indicated she was considering lying to me, but then sighed and shrugged.

“When we take over a body, we modify its neural network to broadcast a kind of psychic signal so that we know which other hosts are already being controlled.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t explain-”

“Chris, you’re broadcasting that signal.”

I sat in silence while the implication sank in.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes you are, Chris.”

“But I’m not being controlled.”

“I mean, maybe you just don’t think you are.”

“But I’m not.”

“You may not even be human.”

“But I am.”

“You might just think you are.”

“But I AM.”

I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but what worried me more than the prospect of not being human was how little that prospect actually bothered me. I mean, if I turned out to be a whatever living in a human meatsuit, so what?

“How long ago did you come to Earth?” I asked.

“I couldn’t tell you about anyone else, but I’ve been living Stella’s life for about three years now.”

“So since she graduated high school?”

The thing controlling Stella at least had the grace to look a little ashamed.

“She was just the first viable host I had contact with,” she said. “I didn’t choose her specifically.”

“No, but you seemed pretty jazzed to be in her body when you thought I was a puppet as well.”

“It’s a good body, and she’s got a good life,” she admitted. “And humans get to feel so much pleasure in so many ways. You don’t know what it’s like to be in a body built for nothing except to survive in the void.”

Stella shivered. I frowned.

“Is she in there with you? Can I talk to her?”

Stella averted her gaze. “I… when you talk to me, you’re talking to her.”

“Sure, but can she talk back? I’d like to know how she feels about this. Don’t lie to me - if you want me to trust you, I want you to be honest.”

Stella hesitated before speaking carefully, like tip-toeing through a minefield.

“When we… become part of a host’s body… we connect to their nervous system and integrate ourselves into it at every level. That means that we make it a part of ourselves… regardless of whether the neurons are used to transmit sensations, manage motor functions, or…”

“...Or control thought,” I finished for her. She nodded.

“So what you’re telling me is that you ate Stella.”

“No!” Stella said, horrified.

“Fine, but you absorbed her. She no longer exists as a separate person - she’s just a part of you, now. And I’m guessing you didn’t give her a say in whether that happened or not.”

Stella looked defensive, but turned away.

“We don’t hurt them,” she said, finally. “We just… slide into their minds. Suggest different ideas. Give them new ways of thinking about themselves and the world. Reassure them that whatever changes happen to them are okay and that they don’t have to be afraid.”

“Pacify them,” I corrected her. “Make them easier to manipulate and control.”

She shot me another look, but said nothing.

I sighed, shrugging.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s find out if I’m one of you but somehow still dormant. Though I can’t imagine how you’ll actually do that.”

Stella hesitated before suddenly pushing me onto my back, lowering herself over my crotch and taking my soft cock into her mouth before rolling it around with her tongue. It wasn’t tender or sensual this time: She wanted me hard and it didn’t take long for her to get the effect she was looking for.

Releasing my dick with a satisfied pop, she raised herself over my body and looked down at me.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered.

“What?”

“I don’t want you freaking out while I’m doing this. Close your eyes.”

I did as I was told, and the soft weight of a pillow land on my face.

“No looking,” Stella said.

“I’m not,” I grumbled, heart racing.

I had a rough idea of what was going to happen, but that didn’t prepare me for the sensation of something warm and slimy coiling its way around my cock. Stella moaned above me and I felt her weight against my thighs as she lowered herself onto me, enveloping me and the thing coiled around me at the same time.

It occurred to me that despite this probably counting as losing my virginity, I still had no idea what actual sex felt like. Instead, I felt my cock being massaged not just by Stella’s insides, but by the creature inside her as well.

I was just about to ask how this was meant to confirm whether I was human or not when I felt something thin begin to tease the opening on the head of my penis. Before I could object, I felt it slide effortlessly into me, rendering me immobile with shock, my body reacting to being penetrated in a way that it very definitely wasn’t intended for.

Even stranger than the sensation of a living creature slithering down my urethra was the gentle prodding I felt deeper in my body. Whatever it was that had forced its way into my body through my penis was probing my internal organs, and my penis - too stupid to understand anything beyond being stimulated - jerked and twitched, causing Stella to moan.

I tried to cast my mind back to high school anatomy and decipher what particular organ was being poked, but it was impossible to think beyond the anxiety of being explored from the inside by an alien worm. What also didn’t help was that the regular, frictionless sensation of it entering and withdrawing along the inside of my penis had stopped being horrifying and started feeling good in a way that I was worried I could get addicted to.

Stella must have sensed it, because she pulled the pillow off my face and looked down at me, flushed and also clearly enjoying herself. She brought her face to mine, her breasts squeezing against my chest and the worm inside me shifting, making me jump. She giggled, kissing me and inspecting my face with a grin.

“I’m inside you,” she whispered. “How does it feel?”

I struggled to speak in full sentences, as every shift inside my body made me twitch.

“How d-ngh-eep are you?” I asked.

“As deep as I can go without hurting you,” she said, grinding her hips into me and holding me while I shivered. “You’re so warm and tight around me. I love it in here.”

The actual meaning of her words struck me, and I looked at her in shock.

“Wait, you’re saying that the thing inside me is you? As in YOU you?”

Stella snorted. “Were you not listening? This body is… is just where I live. I’m still in control, but right now, I’m visiting you. Here, do you feel that?”

The sensation of something inside me being gently stretched made me shudder and moan involuntarily.

“H-hoooly fuck!”

“I’m nuzzling your insides,” Stella said, grinning. “If I wanted, I could probably push through all the way down to your balls. It would be uncomfortable at first, but you’d probably like it.”

I did my best not to move, for fear of accidentally pushing her further into me.

“I th-think this is abo-ah! About as intense as I can… can take,” I said through gritted teeth.

Stella gave my neck a long lick and every time she shifted her weight even slightly, I could feel it causing things inside me to move as well.

“Come for me, then,” she whispered. “Come with me inside you.”

I’d been barely holding it together until that point, and the demand began pushing me rapidly to the edge. Any protest I could have come up with was muted when she pressed her lips against mine. Her tongue worming its way into my mouth as she ground her hips against mine, the feeling of “her” sliding around inside me bringing me helplessly to climax.

It was very strange - possibly not as strange as having my urethra penetrated by an alien worm - to experience orgasming without anything actually coming out of me. What was definitely bizarre was a kind of rhythmic twitching that began inside of me and began to spread towards my penis. It wasn’t until I felt the tiny bulges crawling up my shaft and into Stella’s body that I realised: She was swallowing my cum and drawing it into her human body.

Stella herself had closed her eyes, nuzzling into my neck and mewling as the semen left my body and was sucked into hers. It took maybe half a minute until there was apparently nothing left, and I once again convulsed as she slid easily out of me, leaving my penis feeling strangely empty.

We lay there, panting and sweaty for a very long time before I remembered why I’d even agreed to let her violate me in the first place.

“So did you find anything?” I said. “Am I really human, or am I one of you?”

“You’re human,” Stella said, head resting on my shoulder.

“Well, I guess that’s kind of a relief,” I said, choosing at the last second not to say ‘disappointment,’ though it did give me another thought. “I guess I’ll need to be careful, though.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, if I meet another one of you and the realise I’m not one of them, they might try to possess me instead.”

“Oh, that’s not possible,” Stella said dismissively. “You’re immune.”

I lay in silence waiting for an explanation besides the obvious, but not came.

“Stella?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you try to possess me?”

“Of course I did.”

“Of course you did.”

We lay in silence for a while longer.

“I was able to establish a neural ink,” Stella said, unprompted. “It’s how I could tell whether I was hurting you or not, but I couldn’t control you.”

I sighed. One less thing to worry about, at least.

“Chris?”

“Mm?”

“You’re not going to tell anyone about me, are you?”

“No?”

“Because I do like you, even if you really are human. And I don’t… I don’t know what I’d do if anyone found out about me.”

“I said no.”

“There aren’t enough of us to really look out for each other, and we’re just trying to survive peacefully, we’re not hurting anyone!”

“Stella, listen to me.”

“I wish we didn’t need other bodies to live, but we do! And I promise we’re doing our b-”

I pressed my lips to hers, holding her tightly until I felt the tension leave her body.

Eventually I ended the kiss, holding her at arms length and smiling at her.

“Thanks for inviting me,” I said. “It’s… been an education, and I really did enjoy it.”

Stella kissed me back, just a quick peck before wiping the tears that had begun to form in her eyes.

“I’m glad you did,” she said.

*

The subject of dating came up, but neither of us felt comfortable committing at the time. It was going to take both of us a while to get used to the idea that neither of us was the species that the other thought they were. We still hung out after class, and occasionally we’d fool around at my place or hers. Nothing freaky: Just regular sex, though I suspect she knows that I sometimes think about having her inside me again.

I was at a cafe, lost in thought trying to come up with a way to broach the subject when the waitress brought my drink over. I was a regular and she always seemed to be on shift when I visited, so we had exchanged pleasantries and even a joke or two, but I was still surprised when she looked around and whispered to me conspiratorially.

“Hey, I finish work at eight if you’d like to Commune at my place.”

After a brief pause to confirm that I’d heard what I thought I had heard, I leaned closer and whispered back.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean by ‘Commune,’ but I’d love to drop by your place tonight and find out.”

Maybe it wasn’t so bad that Earth Didn't Win the War