Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dib had begged to stay home from school. First he lied, feigning illness the best he could, then he told the truth. His father had said that these silly endeavors could never get in the way of the pursuit of real knowledge and sent him on his way, almost certainly leaving Earth to its doom.

So here Dib was, staring down the clock as Ms. Bitters’ lecturing morphed into droning. He was rotting while he should have been seeking real information, and the process was agony. His mind was nothing but flashes, half-formed what ifs that led nowhere, ten thousand anxieties nipping and gnawing. Every now and then, he thought he saw a flash of pink or green in his peripheral vision, and his heart spiked. It was always nothing. 

Zim hadn’t been at school in two weeks.

It was normal for him to miss class, even a few days at a time. Dib was used to this routine, where a day or two of the alien’s absence was followed by some event of mass destruction. But he’d never been gone for this long. 

God only knew what he’d been able to build or devise or give life to or infiltrate in two weeks. The fate of the world balanced on a precipice, which seemed the case more often than not these days, but Dib knew this was the most crucial scheme of them all. And here he was, stuck in a prison cell of molded ceiling tiles, dried gum, and booger eaters. Here he was, learning nothing.

“Cultures from all across the globe have tried to answer this question,” Ms. Bitters intoned, tapping her ruler against the chalkboard. Scrawled on it, white against black, were the words Why am I here? “It is the root of many philosophies, such as existentialism…” 

What a stupid question, Dib thought, glancing at the chalkboard with narrowed eyes. He knew exactly why he was put on Earth: to stop Zim. And as soon as the bell rang 3:30, he’d do it.

Still carrying the burns from his previous attempt, Dib stood outside of Zim’s base, hiding around the corner of a neighboring house. All of his spying had amounted to nothing; the time of gathering information was over. He wouldn’t stand around and wait for Zim to throw the first punch. 

The rock was cold and heavy in his hand. The machine on his back perched in wait.

He creeped out of cover bit by bit, slowly so as not to attract the attention of the gnomes. He took a long look at his target and planted his foot. Then, summoning all his strength, Dib threw the rock. 

The window shattered. Immediately, alarms started blaring. A laser defense grid manifested on the lawn. Dib ran back behind the neighbor’s house, only peeking out enough to watch.

But Zim did not storm out of the door, or burst through the roof, or rise up from the ground. Several breathless moments passed.

Then, the door opened, revealing a little green and black “puppy dog,” who looked left, then right, then shrugged and shut the door. The alarms stopped. 

Dib growled under his breath. Okay, so Zim wouldn’t come out to face him. That was fine. If Dib couldn’t drag him out into the light, he’d plunge into the darkness with him. 

He cut across the neighbor’s yard to the back of the alien’s base, where there was no door, but no explosive vedettes, either. Attached to the boy was a contraption not unlike a big, metal backpack, with a long wand, or perhaps barrel, clipped onto the side and connected by a hose. He adjusted the controls, unclipped the wand, and took careful aim. 

A laser ate through the metal wall in a trembling line. Soon, Dib powered off the machine, and with a tap of his foot, the child-sized smoking outline became a child-sized hole. He strolled right into Zim’s kitchen. 

There was no sign of him or his deranged robot servant.

“Come on out, spaceboy,” Dib yelled, the name like venom on his tongue. “I know you’re in here somewhere!” (That wasn’t actually true, he realized. It was possible that he took off somewhere while Dib was unable to monitor his cameras. But then, that robot was all but attached to his hip…)

For a long time, there was no response. Dib walked further into the house, his steps careful, eyes scanning the walls and ceiling. 

Then, when his back was turned, something burst out of the fridge. 

Dib screamed sharply and whipped around, the laser slashing through the walls as he did. His eyes fell on a small, kind of pathetic looking robot wearing a green and black onesie. 

“Lemur!” Gir exclaimed, throwing his hands up and grinning. His expression immediately turned sour and he flung himself onto the floor, kicking his legs and pounding his fists and rolling around. 

Dib blinked. “Gir, what’s going on?”

“Something is wrong with master!” 

It took a moment for this information to settle over Dib. A smile blossomed across his face, and his eyes gained a sparkle yet unseen. “Zim? Sick?” 

“I dunnooo,” Gir mumbled, looking away. He started chattering and Dib didn’t bother to listen.

“Take me to him,” he demanded. 

Gir flung himself at Dib’s feet. “Can you fix him? Please? Please? Please? Pl—”

“Yes, okay, whatever!” Dib shook the robot off of his pant leg. “Just show me where he is.” 

“Hooray!” Gir cried, and ran back into the refrigerator. Dib hesitated only a moment before following.

Dib had only been in the winding Irken burrow a handful of times, all brief and unpleasant. It was dark and cold, everything in hues of red and pink and purple, and if he stopped to listen to the walls, he could have sworn he heard blood running alongside the electricity. But he needed to do this—the world needed him to do this. And even if they didn’t, he’d walk through hells much worse if it meant seeing Zim with his defenses down. 

He had to remind Gir a few times of why they were down here. He was wont to wander and get side tracked, and at one point, Dib wondered if he’d be able to find the way out on his own if it came down to it. Was this a trick? Had Zim led him into his labyrinth, trapped him in a maze of his own design? Dib imagined Zim chasing him down the tight corridors on his spear-like spider legs and told Gir to hurry up. 

Eventually, they came to a long room with giant tubes lining the walls. The tanks stood as sentries, imposing in their magnitude, bubbling and glowing, bathing the room in an obscene pink light. They seemed to stretch on forever.

“Master’s in here,” Gir said sadly, and pointed a paw to the end of the hall. 

Dib took one step past the threshold and peered into the darkness. Gir stayed behind. Gripping his makeshift laser gun a little tighter, Dib took another step, then another, and then he was walking. He tried not to look at the things suspended in the tubes. Some of them looked at him.

The end of the hall came into view soon enough, but he still didn’t see the alien. Maybe this was Zim’s plan, to lure him into this room and ambush him, to trap him at the very end and pickle him like a pig fetus. Dib’s pointer finger flitted over the trigger, not pressing, just a reassuring graze.

Then, he caught a glimpse of something wedged in between the wall and the curve of the last tube, something pink and green and black and very, very small. 

The barrel of the gun drifted towards the floor. “Zim?” 

His antenna didn’t even twitch. Slowly, Zim turned his head enough to give Dib a sidelong look. 

Zim was, at any other time, the very definition of overanimated. Everything about him was over-the-top and blinding, his expressions all caricatures, his voice like a flashbang. But now, there was nothing. His lip didn’t curl, his eyes didn’t narrow or go wide—he barely even looked at Dib before turning back into himself and curling up tighter.

“Go away,” he muttered, and Dib had never, ever heard him sound like that.

It had always felt good to see Zim defeated. It felt good to see him smeared in his own magenta blood and clutching an injury. It felt good to see him drop to his knees and howl, shaking his fists at the sky, or strike a dramatic pose and swear revenge. This right now, for some enigmatic reason, didn’t feel good. Dib would almost go so far as to say that seeing Zim like this felt… bad. 

“Uh, no? I’m here to stop you,” Dib stuttered, the words feeling idiotic in his mouth. 

Zim kneaded his upper arms slowly, his gloved claws pulling and stretching the fabric of his undershirt. 

Dib debated between resheathing his weapon and prodding him with it. “Um.”

Was it his imagination, or was Zim’s PAK glowing a little dimmer than usual? 

Against better logic, Dib eventually decided upon clicking the weapon back into place at his side. He shifted on his feet awkwardly. “Man, are you, like, okay?”

That got an antenna to flick. His claws dug further into the fabric. 

For a while, Dib thought that was all the response he was going to get. The question of what to do next spilled out in his mind in a million different paths.

Then, the alien spoke, a gravely hiss. “Zim is dead.” 

It took a moment for the words to register, to go from sounds to meaning in Dib’s head. “What?”  He shifted back by one shuffling step. “Do you have some kind of like, terminal space disease?”

Again, Zim took a long time before answering. It was difficult to hear him, facing away and mumbling. “Your pathetic human mind could never comprehend it.” 

That was a bit more like it. “Yeah?” Dib challenged warily, “Try me.” 

“It is nothing of your business.” 

“You are my business.”

Zim went silent, leaving Dib to scuff the toe of his boot against the floor. 

“Seriously,” he tried again, “what happened?” 

“Where is Gir?” Zim looked over his shoulder again and scanned the floor. His brow was furrowed and his antennae were flat against his head. “Shouldn’t he be blowing you into space, or something? How did you even get in here?”

“He led me right to you,” Dib answered unkindly. 

“Stupid robot.”

Narrowly deciding it was worth the risk, Dib shuffled closer and crouched down to be eye-level with Zim. He looked into the alien’s face, and even without his contacts, it was obvious Zim wasn’t looking back.

The house thrummed quietly. The tubes bubbled. Distantly, Dib could almost make out the sound of cars driving by overhead. 

So when Dib spoke, it was halfway to a whisper. When Dib spoke, it sounded more earnest and concerned than he’d wanted it to. “Are you seriously dying?”

Zim curled up tighter and turned his head away. “I told you,” he hissed hatefully, “I am already dead.” 

“Okay,” Dib muttered. Mindful of the machine on his back, he shuffled into the other corner of the inlet formed by the walls and tank. He carefully avoided touching Zim. “You, uh, don’t really seem dead?”

“That is because you are stupid and know nothing.”

“Alright, fine. Care to enlighten me, then?” 

Zim pulled at the fabric of his undershirt until there were little holes, then dug his claws into the holes and pulled some more. He repeated this process until he was clawing sickly-green skin. 

Looking at it from a mile away, Dib was curious about how long it would take for him to draw blood. 

Then, Zim mumbled something too quiet to make out. 

Dib leaned forward. “What?”

He spoke up only enough to be audible. Hot pink welled up beneath his black gloves. “They disconnected me from the Collective.” 

Oh, Dib hated it when Zim was right. He had no idea what that meant. “And, uh, that killed you?”

Zim should have shot him a withering glare, or launched himself at him, or stabbed a PAK leg through the metal beside his head. Instead, his face drifted back into that mask of nothingness as he palmed the new scratches in his arms. 

Dib knew how to handle insult wars and fist fights and spaceship hacking and planet wrecking. He was woefully unprepared for whatever this was. 

“Why are you pestering me?” 

Dib chewed the inside of his cheek. “I came here to stop you. Y’know, from destroying Earth or whatever.”

Zim was unmoving, and Dib wondered again if he’d be able to get out of here with no guide.

“When you were gone for so long,” the boy continued, “I assumed you were working on some big, evil plan. Like always.”

If Zim had something to say about that, he kept it to himself. They sat in silence.

Dib had to break it eventually. “I think humans define being dead a lot differently than you guys do.”

Zim’s claws scraped over the dark green and pink lines again, not deepening them, just milking the sting. “I told you you couldn’t cognize it.”

“Yeah, well. On Earth, things are only dead when their bodies stop working completely. And you’re sitting here talking to me, so you’re still alive.”

His antenna flicked. His fingers curled infinitesimally.

Dib could only wait so much longer before asking, “When was the last time you ate something?”

One antenna perked up the smallest amount and, for the first time since he’d got here, Dib got the sense that Zim looked at him. “Do you have snacks?” 

Dib saw the opportunity and seized it. “I’ll go get some,” he promised, “but you have to lead me out of here.”

Zim debated this for a long, long time. Or maybe he just zoned out. Either way, he eventually peeled himself out of the corner, sluggish like the floor was actively trying to pull him back down. When he stumbled, Dib got the strange, misguided instinct to steady him. He didn’t do that, though, he just watched and got to his own feet.

“No meat,” Zim grumbled as he shambled away, not checking to see if Dib was following him. “Or beans. Or…” He trailed off into wordless mumbling. 

“Relax, freak,” Dib jabbed, “I know the kind of crap you eat.”

When they resurfaced, Dib left his laser-gun-backpack near the door, not wanting to haul it any longer and quite certain that Zim wouldn’t touch it.

“I don’t know, Gaz.” Dib tugged on the payphone cord and glanced behind him. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m fine after walking into the deepest depths of the enemy’s base. I didn’t want you guys to worry.” 

“Yeah, look.” Her voice was garbled and tinny. “I don’t think Dad’s even noticed that you left in the first place.”

He rubbed his knuckles against his sternum, absentmindedly chasing away the sting. “Yeah, well. I didn’t want you to worry.” 

“Whatever. So you won’t be home for dinner?”

“I don’t know, maybe? He’s really kinda freaking me out. I mean, I know he’s weird, but this is… I don’t know. I’ll be home when I can.”

“‘Kay,” Gaz said, and hung up. 

Dib returned the phone to its hook and slipped inside the gas station. 

The kids at school might have bullied him for having a basket on his handlebars, but it came in handy often. Right now, it was filled to the brim with corn syrup and citric acid in different formations. The ride back to Zim’s base was a surreal thing—Dib felt like he should poison his slushie or put a bomb in the Sour Patch Kids or something, but he didn’t. 

They had never done anything nice for each other before now. If he played his cards right, Dib thought, he could still spin this into something unkind. He could withhold the snacks and exchange them for valuable information. He could lure Zim into a false sense of security and capture him when his defenses were down. Or he could just turn his bike around, go home, and give Gaz the second Icee. 

Instead, he walked up to the alien’s house for the second time in as many hours, this time with no plan or real intention to hurt him. The gnomes paid him no attention. It felt bizarre to knock on the door.

“You’re home!” Gir exclaimed as he welcomed him in, beaming with hands raised to the sky.

“Uh,” Dib said, a little dumbfounded. 

In one smooth somersault, Gir went back to his place in front of the TV, lying on the floor with his chin in his hands and his feet kicked up. The show was playing on mute.

Zim was still huddled into the couch where Dib had left him, unresponsive to the boy’s presence. The better lighting made him look even worse. His skin was pale like the underside of a leaf, dark green half moons sagging under his eyes. It wasn’t often that Dib got to see him without his contacts, but he knew those ruby compound eyes to be striking, glittering with crimson and candy red like pomegranate seeds. Now, they were so dull and lifeless that for a moment, Dib wondered if Zim really was a corpse. 

This didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel good. It quieted the (rational, sane) parts of Dib’s brain that were screaming to take advantage of the situation, to drag his guts out into the light while he wouldn’t fight back. 

He could only stare and hesitate for so long. Against better instinct, Dib sat on the other end of the couch and dumped the candy onto the cushion between them. Zim didn’t uncurl from where he leaned against the armrest, but he did lift his head to look sideward at the offerings.

Dib thrust the half-melted cherry slushie into his mortal enemy’s personal space. Slowly, Zim sat up enough to take it, and there was a moment where both their hands were on it, Dib lingering to make sure he wouldn’t drop it. Their fingers almost brushed. 

He watched Zim put his mouth to the plastic straw in slow motion. Some stupid chamber of Dib’s heart was expecting one sip to make this all go away, like all Zim needed was something to eat and he’d be up and running again. Any moment now, he would burst to his feet and reveal the evil scheme, and Dib would realize he’d been tricked and trapped, and they’d fight over the fate of the world, and everything would be normal, and everything would be okay. 

None of that was happening. Zim remained nigh catatonic.

The slushie in Dib’s hands was sweating. He looked away from Zim, pinched the straw, and stirred it around, watching the light blue bits of ice mix with the dark blue liquid. His mouth was dry. His stomach felt weird.

The words jumped out of him without warning. “Are you really going to die?”

The only sound was Zim slowly, slowly stirring his drink.

“Earth-die,” Dib amended, staring into the blue. Why did his voice feel so small? “Is your body going to shut down?”

Zim grunted quietly. “I don’t know,” he slurred, his tone saying that that was a stupid question. 

Suddenly, Gir was standing in front of them, his hands on the middle couch cushion. “What you mean, die?” 

Oh, shoot. Dib kind of forgot he was there.

Zim shifted. “It’s nothing, Gir,” he said. 

“You’re dying?” Gir whimpered.

The faintest hint of a snarl flashed across Zim’s face. “That is not what I said.” 

The robot made a very sad little sound. When Zim next exhaled, it was more like a sigh, long and impossibly heavy. Then, he set his Icee on the floor and gently unfolded, bringing one leg down from his chest and opening an arm. Gir climbed onto the couch and into his master’s lap like they’d done this a hundred times before. Zim put a hand on his head and held him closer, and Dib felt like he shouldn’t be watching this, like this was a confidentiality even he wouldn’t pry into. 

He went back to mixing his slushie. It was mostly liquid by now. 

Dib knew what he wanted to say, but the words caught in his throat. “Zim,” he started, then ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth and tried again. This shouldn’t have been so difficult, damnit. He thought he wanted this stupid alien dead. “What did you mean by disconnected?” 

Zim sat running his hand over Gir’s head for a long time. When he spoke, it was somewhere between a sigh and a hiss. “Irkens are perfect. The perfect products of a perfect creation. The Collective…”

Dib listened, just barely restraining unnamed emotions to his chest.

It was like the English language was a hammer where he needed a pair of tweezers. His words were clunky and slow. “...every Irken is tethered to it. Or, no, it’s inside us. We are borne of it? Eh, it…” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand it in a schmillion years.”

“So, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” Dib guessed. 

“What else is there to happen?” It sounded like Zim was trying to be bitter, but it just came out as listless.

“I don’t know, don’t you still want to like, rule Earth? Or wipe out humanity, or something?” Dib’s chest felt tight like something about to burst.

Zim just stared into the middle distance.

Dib wanted to snap at him. He wanted to throw his drink across the floor and get in his face, he wanted to fight, he wanted to piss him off and make him realize how stupid this was. He didn’t know why. He just wanted this not to be happening.

When Zim next spoke, it was not for Dib’s ears. “Gir, go play downstairs.” 

Gir made a noise like a kicked puppy.

“I’m serious,” he reiterated, and pushed the robot away with no real strength. 

Gir obeyed his master reluctantly, and Dib swore he saw tears somehow manifesting in his cyan eyes.

When he was gone, Zim shifted and spoke a little louder. “You should be happy, you sniveling primate.” He still wouldn’t look at Dib. “My mission on Earth is over. It was never…”

Dib watched as Zim’s hands returned to his upper arms, natural and unconscious. 

“They lied to Zim. They sent me here to die.” 

“And that doesn’t make you angry?” Dib turned to face him, only halfway on the couch now. His voice didn’t feel so small anymore. “You don’t want revenge?”

“Zim is not defective!” he bit, volume and heat in his voice for the first time, snapping forward with teeth bared. There was blood on his claws again.

Where Zim had jerked closer, Dib leaned back. He blinked, startled, and was quiet again. “Man, I didn’t say that you were.” 

“You implied it! Only a defect would act against his Empire!”

Dib glanced from his snarl to his scratches. “I didn’t know.”

“You know nothing.” 

For a long moment, the two boys balanced on the edge of something. Zim had exposed a nerve, shown Dib exactly what to prod at, exactly what to sink into. And it’s not like Dib wanted to hurt him (he did, though, didn’t he?); he just wanted him to snap out of it. Dib took a long look at the hornet’s nest and adjusted his grip on the bat.

“If you aren’t defective, then why did they get rid of you?”

Zim lunged. 

Dib went over the armrest and crashed onto the floor, his skull taking the blunt of the impact. His legs were up against the couch and Zim was on his chest and his hands were around Dib’s throat and yeah, this was more like it. 

Dib smashed his Icee against the side of Zim’s head, but the plastic just dented uselessly, spilling syrup all down Dib’s arm. 

“Zim is not defective,” he hissed again through grated zipper teeth, leaning his weight into Dib’s trachea. 

The boy shuffled and thrashed and kicked, pulling one leg back and trying to fit it in between Zim and his chest. If he were a little more lucid, he’d realize that he was grinning. “Oh, yeah? Then why—” 

His taunt turned into wordless choking as Zim tightened his grip.

Dib writhed again, this time knocking Zim loose enough to get his leg wedged between them. In an instant, Dib planted his foot on the alien’s chest and kicked. 

Zim’s PAK legs deployed quick enough to keep him from slamming against the side of the couch, but not quick enough to prevent Dib from scrambling away. He grabbed his laser pack on the mad dash out. 

Dib did not own any turtlenecks. This had never been a problem before now. 

He’d locked himself in the bathroom as soon as he got home, leaning against the door to catch his breath. When it felt like he wasn’t going to pass out, he threw himself against the sink and stared at the mirror.

Bright red scratches decorated his neck, his own blood dripping and smeared. The faintest beginnings of bruises were starting to appear, and he knew it’d look a million times worse tomorrow. 

Alongside the red, there were faint smudges of magenta. Great. Zim’s blood on his wounds, that’s just what he needed—he probably gave Dib some kind of space HIV. Just great.

Dib ran his fingers over the blood, thinking. 

Chapter Text

Predictably, Zim was not at school the next day. Dib wore his coat with the collar popped in an attempt to hide the marks, but if anything, that only made the other kids stare at him more. They were always staring at him. Even with an earless green kid in class, they stared at Dib. 

He hunched in on himself a little more. What did they know, anyway? 

Something light bounced off against the back of his head. He flinched and looked behind him sharply. Torque Smackey grinned at him as he wadded up another ball of paper.

Dib was smarter than every other kid in this building put together. Hell, he was smarter than all of the faculty, too. He knew a lot of things—a lot of things, things humanity would balk at—but how to deal with people wasn’t one of them. He pulled his coat tighter around him and returned to his work, the pencil pushing through the paper.

He couldn’t stop himself from flinching when they hit, but he didn’t look back. 

This is Zim’s fault, Dib thought. He was never well liked before the alien showed up—no one to walk home with (besides Gaz), no one to eat lunch with (besides Gaz), no after-school clubs that would have him, no one to stand and talk to before class, no one to smile at him in the halls. (Not that he cared about any of that.) But he wasn’t actively hated. Kids tolerated it when he sat next to them. They didn’t cross the street to avoid him. And they only threw things at him every now and then. 

But then Zim had walked in, and everything changed. He put up with it, for the most part, because he quickly learned that involving the teachers just made it worse. 

He looked up at the clock—2:45. The third or fourth ball of paper landed true. More kids behind him joined in on the snickering, and he wondered how Ms. Bitters wasn’t noticing this, but only very briefly. Nobody ever noticed anything. 

He wished Zim had never come here. He wished his stupid spaceship had landed in the next district over, or the next town, or another country, or missed this planet by a lightyear, or blown up on impact. He wished Zim had shown up a hundred years after Dib’s time, and humanity would get what it deserved without him being caught in the middle of it. 

No, no, that wasn’t a good thought. He didn’t want humans to be wiped out on principle, not out of self-preservation. He was the savior of this world, no matter how idiotic and cruel and undeserving, damnit.

(Dib dreamed of Zim ever since he first showed up—Zim winning, Zim chasing him, Zim opened up on the autopsy table. But every now and then, he had this dream where the world was on fire and it felt good. Every now and then, he had this dream where they ruled in tandem, and things were beautiful as they fell apart, and it felt right to be at Zim’s side. In a way, those were the worst nightmares of all.)

God, he hated that alien. He hated what Zim had done to him, the mockery he’d made of his image, the mess he’d made of his life. 

So why, then, couldn’t he bring himself to pull the trigger? Zim was probably still in that fugue right now. Dib could end it today. He could get everything he’d ever wanted right after class. But just thinking about how pathetic Zim looked, hidden away in the farthest corner of the longest room in the deepest part of his base—it felt like he was being stabbed. Zim was short, sure, but never before had he been small. And the look in his eyes, and oh, God, the claw marks in his arms—

Dib was knocked out of his thoughts when something wet knocked against his temple. He brushed it off in a flash, and his fingers came away covered in spit. 

Nope. This was intolerable.

In that moment, Smackey’s laughter echoing through the room, Dib decided he’d had enough. He’d never fought a human before, but scraps with the paranormal should count for double, he thought. 

When the bell rang and they were dismissed for the day, Dib took his time packing his things and left the classroom last, keeping a sharp but subtle eye on his bully-turned-quarry. He followed him at a distance, waiting for the right opportunity, and then, when they were sufficiently alone, he took a breath from his stomach and put on his most intimidating timbre.

“Hey!” Dib called sharply. His voice cracked. Goddamnit. 

Torque turned and studied him with a bemused grin. “Hey, Dibshit.” 

Dib had been very angry for a very long time. He was angry that his father had never showed up for dinner to question who’d tried to strangle him, and he was angry that last night wasn’t the first or tenth or hundredth time something like that had happened. He was angry that this world hated him, and angrier since they should really all be worshiping him. He was angry that he woke up screaming from the things he’d seen and still no one believed him. And most of all, at the moment, he was angry about Zim half-dead and rotting and the impossible, infuriating, downright inhibiting emotions that had spawned.

So, he punched Torque Smackey square in the jaw. 

The moment shocked both kids. For a heartbeat, they just looked at each other, unbreathing, eyes wide. Delicately, Torque touched his fingers to the side of his mouth. A smile spread slowly on Dib’s face, adrenaline and victory and something unnamed stirring in his chest.

Then he was against the wall with Torque’s fist in his stomach. He couldn’t breathe. His head knocked against the brick in the same place it had bounced off Zim’s floor, and it felt like it’d jammed a knife in the back of his skull. He couldn’t see.

A sound like lightning split the beating, and suddenly the weight pinning him disappeared. Torque screamed. Dib gasped for breath until his sight returned. 

“This is my victim, Earth creature. Begone with you.”

The scene appeared in blotches at first, Dib’s vision shrinking and swelling and swirling. Torque was doubled over and clutching his shoulder, bright red blood seeping through his fingers. Across from him, there Zim stood, poorly disguised and holding something that was clearly an alien weapon. 

Smackey ran. Dib had never seen anyone move that fast.

He tried to speak, choked on his own spit, and tried again. “Zim.” 

Zim held his blaster loosely and lifted it over his shoulder. A robotic tendril grabbed it and disappeared into his PAK. 

“You didn’t—I had it—you can’t just shoot people!” 

Zim was somehow paler than he was yesterday. His wig was askance. His body swayed and twitched and shivered. His eyes were wide and lifeless, and his voice… 

“Tell me more about Earth-death.” 

Dib studied him. He was not in the business of taking Zim’s demands, so automatically, the word no had already formed in his throat. 

Zim must have seen it on his face. PAK legs deployed with a click and a hiss, and in the next breath, the monster towered above him. 

“Zim,” Dib started.

He leaned forward and grabbed the collar of Dib’s coat. The boy only had a moment to protest before they were scaling the building, Zim holding him at arm’s length like a scruffed kitten while his mechanical legs scurried up the alley and fire escape. 

Dib grabbed the sides of his coat until his fingers creaked to keep it from slipping off of him. They were on the roof now, or rather, Zim was hovering above the roof while Dib dangled high above the street. 

Zim was expressionless as he stared down at Dib. 

“Okay, okay, fine!” Dib shouted, spinning. “Put me—put me down!”

He did, gently, on the edge of the roof. He crossed his legs at the same time as his PAK legs scuttled back and retracted, lowering him elegantly. The whole time, he didn’t take his eyes off of Dib. 

Dib took a few moments to process what had just happened. He put his head in his hands and dug his palms into his eyes, willing back the stabbing, throbbing headache. When he could hear himself think again, he slumped forward, readjusted his glasses, and looked back at Zim.  

“There was no reason for that,” he bit. 

Zim didn’t even shrug a shoulder. 

“Okay, fine,” he sighed, running his fingers through his hair. “Death. Earth-death. What do you want to know?” 

“What happens after?” Zim was quiet but intense.

“Um, okay. All of your organs and stuff shut down, and all your cells die. And then microbes eat the dead cells and you turn into rot until there’s just a skeleton left.” 

“Does it hurt?” Zim leaned in. “The rot transformation?” 

Dib blinked. “Uh, no. Because you’d be dead.” 

Zim made a small, inhuman clicking noise in the back of his throat. “The death sensation. What is it like?”

“Are you asking me how it feels to be dead?”

He stared wordlessly in answer.

“It’s not—that’s not really how it works. You don’t feel anything when you’re dead. That’s like, the whole thing. There is no sensation, or thoughts, or self, or anything. Because you’re dead.” 

Zim sat with this information for a very long time, his gaze falling away from Dib and into the middle distance.

Dib wondered if that fire escape reached all the way to the roof, or if he’d have to jump for it. 

Zim took a breath. “Irk has no such concept,” he said finally, still staring at nothing. 

“Oh.” Dib tried to remember what it had been like to learn about death for the first time.

Zim held his knees to his chest. “When an Irken falls, the PAK is retrieved and… and uploaded to the Collective.”  

The silence that followed was loaded. 

Dib scooted closer. What was it with him and moving toward his mortal enemy lately? “Y’know, um. Most humans have stories kind of like that.” 

Zim held himself tighter.

“Reincarnation, or heaven, souls, that kind of thing. I mean, nobody—nobody really knows what happens after you die. It could be, like, drinking soda and riding giant bunnies for eternity.” 

“That’s idiotic.” 

Dib chewed the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, it is.” 

“Do you believe in such stories?”

“I know ghosts are real. But even that’s rare, and not much of an afterlife… So, I don’t know, maybe. Probably not. You probably—I think most people just die.”

The boys sat in silence for some time. Then, sighing softly, Zim’s PAK legs deployed and lifted him away. 

“Wait.” Dib stood up and almost reached out. “Zim, wait.”

He did. His back was turned. 

“What are you going to do now? Without the mission?”

His hands went to his upper arms again. He hesitated only a moment longer before disappearing over the edge of the building, leaving Dib stranded.

Professor Membrane had the observatory built for Dib’s eighth birthday. It was a beautiful room, too small for a team of real astronomers, but just right for one or two budding scientists and their father. One portion of the circular wall was lined with bookshelves, boasting a tiny library of all things interstellar. Computers and other machines blinked and whirred on the opposite section of the wall. In the center of the room, of course, stood an enormous telescope, extended out to the slit roof. 

Dib used to spend all of his time here, back when cryptozoology was just a hobby and not Earth’s last defense. The room was disconnected from the rest of the house, so he couldn’t hear how quiet and lifeless his home was. Being in here felt like his own little world—a world made for him, a world made out of nothing but his father’s love. 

Dib used to find comfort in the infinite potential and beauty of space. Not so much anymore. But he still came in here to think, really think, away from the photos and corkboards and red string that littered his bedroom, away from the journals and sticky notes and scraps of Zim, Zim, Zim. 

Not that there was any getting away from him. Not really. Dib wondered if it would be like that forever, if even after the world woke up, after he won, after Zim was preserved in five different jars, if Dib would still always be thinking about him. Ghosts came to mind, then souls, then their conversations on the couch and the rooftop, and the look on Zim’s face when Dib explained that death was death was death. 

There was that feeling again, squirming in his gut like a parasite. He wanted Zim dead. There was that feeling again, sinking needle teeth into his heart. From the moment they met, Dib wanted to be the one holding the scalpel. How long had they known each other, now? How many months had his life been nothing but this stupid alien kid? 

“It doesn’t matter,” Dib muttered to the empty room and readjusted the telescope. 

The feeling was pity. The feeling was sympathy. 

Stars didn’t seem to twinkle anymore. He fiddled with the controls again. 

A quiet tapping noise tugged Dib out of his reverie. It sounded like the first drops of rain under a tin roof, but only for a moment. He looked up, saw nothing, and slowly returned to the eye of the telescope. 

The heavens had turned bright pink. 

Dib startled away and gaped up at the slit of exposed sky, only to find Zim standing there like it was a doorway. He was on top of the wall, leaning against one side of the opened roof, swaying on his feet. 

“Zim!” Dib cried, pointing an accusatory finger, his voice colored with outrage. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Zim spat back. He didn’t sound quite right. 

He swayed further, deeper, and then fell like a stone onto the observatory floor. 

Dib found himself with a hand over his mouth, staring. The room was silent as he tiptoed around the telescope to get a closer look. 

Zim had crumpled like a napkin, his face in the floor. For too long of a moment, he was completely still. Dib wondered if he’d died right at his feet, and the thought sent bolts of lightning through his body. 

Then, the alien groaned, and Dib was disgusted to find himself relieved.

Zim struggled up onto his elbows. A contact lens popped out in the process. His bruised face was painted in a bewildered grimace. 

“Nice move,” Dib commented, even more confused than Zim. 

“You humans,” Zim slurred, dragging the word out like it was poison. He tried to get a knee under his chest, failed, and tried again. “Wriggling, writhing, crawling around…”

Dib took a step back and watched. He was certain of it now—Zim’s PAK was dimmer.

Zim leaned heavily against the wall as he climbed to his feet, making little grunts and groans that well could have been Irken curses. “Why are you here?”

“This is my house,” Dib exclaimed with all the condescension he could muster.

“On Earth!” 

“I live here. Seriously, Zim, what—”

The alien stumbled as he pried himself away from the wall. “Who put you here? Why?” 

Some stupid instinct made Dib put his arms out as if to steady him, or catch him should he fall. “Are you—”

Zim swiped the back of his wrist over his chin, glaring, wobbling. He mumbled something more about stinking humans. 

“What is wrong with you?” Dib asked genuinely, the words kinder in his head. In his mind, it was the most compassionate thing he could have said.

Zim socked him for it.

Dib stumbled, knocked back but not down. So that’s how it was. 

His dad had built this room for him as his eighth birthday present, and since then, it had been the holiest place on Earth. He came here to hide as a child, tucking away under the computers when the world wanted to hurt him. He and Gaz had sleepovers here with the roof wide open. In this room, once, just once, Dad put a hand on Dib’s head and told him he was proud. 

Few places were safe for Dib. Certainly not school. Not public, where people whispered and pointed, where monsters could pop out of any corner. Not even the rest of his home—Zim had proven that much before. He had already taken that much away.

But the observatory—this was his. This belonged to him. This was the last place he had, and here Zim was in the middle of it. It felt like something being defiled.

Dib tasted blood in his mouth. That headache swelled up again. 

He forgot all about disconnections and death talks and the fact that Zim was swaying and slurring his words and looking sicker than ever, and he certainly forgot about that writhing animal called pity. He pushed his glasses back up onto his nose, braced his foot back, and tackled Zim into the wall. 

The thud echoed through the small, metal room. Zim made a sound Dib had never heard before, shrill and clicking and pained, and it thrilled him as much as it caught him off guard.

Dib leaned away the slightest amount in preparation to taunt, but quicker than he could open his mouth, Zim raked claws over his face. His glasses flew away, and the sting of shallow cuts swelled up alongside hot blood. Dib’s feet remained planted.

“Nothing is wrong with me,” the alien hissed desperately as he struggled. “Zim is perfect, Zim is not d—”

Dib pushed his shoulder further into Zim, keeping him pinned, and punched him in the gut. Another whining kind of sound spilled out of him, but he kept trying to talk. Dib punched him again, harder, and again. This place was his. This planet was his.

Zim’s talons found the boy’s throat. He pushed and squeezed, trying to leverage himself into a better position. The grip was dislodged with one thrust of Dib’s shoulder. Zim still wouldn’t shut up. The words were incoherent.

Dib kicked him in the shin as hard as he could. God, it felt good to be on this side of it. No wonder Torque did it. 

Zim snapped his teeth and tried to squirm away, attempting to melt out of his grip, his legs giving out. He had never sounded so pathetic as he prattled on. Dib kept him up with one arm and struck him with the other, the side of Zim’s face slamming against the wall with the force. That shut him up. Only then did Dib relent, stepping back all at once and watching as the alien kid crashed to the floor. 

For a long time, the only sounds were Dib catching his breath and the crickets singing outside. He stared at Zim, curled in on himself and motionless, as the adrenaline drained away, leaving him only with something dark and rotting in the pit of his stomach. 

The light in Zim’s PAK flickered, so quick Dib wasn’t sure if he had imagined it. 

Zim’s PAK—this wasn’t how this fight should have gone. Dib should have been clutching a laser burn right now, or tied up in robotic rope, or dodging sharp steel. At the very least, Zim should have been scuttling away, mechanical legs carrying him up the wall and out the roof. 

Dib kneeled and searched for his glasses, feeling gently at the ground until he found them. They were cracked but wearable. 

Zim still hadn’t moved. He hadn’t even made a sound. 

Dib stared at him from where he squatted a pace away, watching intently for the rising and falling of the boy’s chest—or lack thereof. He ran his tongue along the cheek Zim’s punch had torn, feeling the sting and swell of the wound, tasting the iron between his teeth. 

He knew this was his chance. Dad was inside, undoubtedly holed up in his lab or study and elbow deep in some project, but at home, within reach. Dib could drag him out here and make him see. Maybe. This could be it.

While he was working on the laser wand, Dib had done some reading on firearms. He had mostly skimmed over the safety sections of the books he’d checked out, but one piece of advice had echoed through them all: only point a gun at what you’re prepared to kill. 

A sliver above silence, Zim emitted that noise again, a whine not dissimilar to the crickets outside.

Dib thought about the situation for a long time. He shuffled to have his back against the wall and sit down fully, eyes still trained on Zim’s unmoving form. He thought about the scratches underneath Zim’s sleeves. He thought about fame, about recognition, about acceptance. He thought about life without his arch nemesis. 

“Zim,” he prodded, tapping his shoulder with an outstretched foot. 

His clicking groan was barely audible. He leaned away from the touch.

“Hey, Zim,” Dib goaded again, stretching further and nudging with more force.

Zim growled once more, louder, more out of anger than pain. He fought to roll himself out of reach, trying to get his forearms underneath him, glaring at the floor. 

A whisper of relief coiled around Dib’s heart. “If you came here to kill me, you’re doing a terrible job.”

He ground his zipper teeth. “Zim didn’t come here to kill you.”

“Then why are you here?”

Zim breathed out something like a facsimile of a laugh. Slowly, he gathered one knee under his body, then the other, then shifted to plant his foot on the ground. 

Dib was standing above him before he could get much further. “If you think I’m just going to let you go…”

Zim tossed his back against the wall, sitting and staring up at Dib, the ghost of a snarl on his face. He looked exhausted. A smear of magenta decorated the corner of his mouth.

Dib crossed his arms. “Seriously, Zim. What are you doing?”

His words were still slurred. “What are you doing?”

“I feel like I already explained this,” Dib spat, withering. “I live here. Quit deflecting.”

“You’re deflecting.” 

“I am not! I gave you a—” 

“Then why do you not answer my demands, Earth boy?” 

“Oh, my God.” Dib groaned and ran a hand through his hair, turning away from Zim like he couldn’t bear the sight of it any longer. Then he snapped back and jabbed a finger at him as he informed, “That is not how this works. You are at my mercy here.”

Zim took out the remaining contact lens with shaking fingers and blinked slowly.

“Now, answer me. What did you come here for?”

His eyes were almost gray. “Maybe Zim came here to talk.”

Dib paused. Something in his heart quivered at the thought of that, so he said, “And you expect me to believe that?” 

Zim wasn’t looking at him anymore. He wasn’t looking at anything. 

Dib shifted his weight from foot to foot. He thought about tying Zim up with an extension cord, then getting his camera and the kitchen scissors. But increasingly, he knew that for some goddamn reason, that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, he found himself mumbling, “What would you have wanted to talk about?” 

Zim squinted a little and rolled his tongue over his teeth. He started to say something, but backed away from the ledge before the first word could form. Then he sighed, and with that exhale, he murmured, “Homework. What Zim missed at school.”

Dib blinked, then scoffed. “Why did you think I would help you with that?”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t look up. If his antennae were free, they wouldn’t even twitch.

Dib looked away and chewed again at his sore cheek. When he next spoke, a low mumbling, it wasn’t a conscious choice. “We started talking more about algebra. Just like, the basics of the basics. Two plus what equals four, that kind of crap.” He paused for Zim to jab about how pathetically unintelligent humans were, but the comment never came. “Started a book about the Dust Bowl. It’s pretty stupid.”

A long silence stretched between them. Then, finally, Zim gave a monotone hum of acknowledgement. Something in Dib longed for the days where he’d be bleeding out on the floor right now.

Suddenly, a deafening clang shook the observatory walls. Both boys startled, Dib crying out sharply. They stared with wide eyes as the newly-dented door creaked open. 

A disguised Gir was plastered to the other side, still smoking. The door came to a stop inside the room and he fell from it, landing with a heavy thud. He leapt to his feet in the same breath.

“Master!” the little robot cried, flipping his hood down. He raced to his caretaker, and Dib stepped out of the way just in time. 

“Gir,” Zim started, something like an attempt at anger in his voice. 

“House saids you need to be charging,” Gir urged, tugging on Zim’s tunic. 

“Charging?” Dib echoed cluelessly.

“Zim is fine,” the alien muttered as he staggered to his feet. Gir held onto his hand.

Dib could only watch as the pair stumbled out the door, Gir scolding Zim the whole way, whining about looking all over for him. And then they were gone, leaving the boy alone, blinking, a hundred thousand questions festering in his chest.

Chapter Text

That morning, for the first time in almost three weeks, Zim showed up to school. He looked bad—pale, bags under his eyes, and now bruised to hell and back—but not as terrible as the last few times Dib had seen him. The light of his PAK was closer to what it normally was. When kids asked him why he’d been gone for so long, he waved them off with a snarl and vague comments about his “condition.” 

Dib tried to catch his gaze from across the classroom, but he never looked over. 

Things didn’t go back to normal. Dib wondered if they ever would. He watched Zim pick at his food from across the cafeteria, alone in the corner, hollow eyes unseeing.

“What do you think, Gaz?” Dib asked without looking away.

Gaz’s thumbs never faltered in their patterns, her gaze firmly on the GameSlave’s screen. “How should I know?”

“Well, that’s why I asked what you think.” Dib poked at the green beans on his tray, sliced and canned and served cold. 

Gaz’s tray sat untouched some distance away. “I think you’re being even weirder than usual.”

“How? This is—everything is different now. It’s a big deal!”

She didn’t dignify that with a response. 

Dib scowled. “He could do anything. I don’t know how to predict what’s going to happen next.

“He’ll probably just go back to space,” Gaz hissed, a rare moment of magnanimity. She typically would have been done by now. “Doesn’t he hate Earth?”

Suddenly, everything was heavier. Dib almost stopped breathing. He tried again to imagine life without Zim and came up empty. Had there even been life before Zim?

“I’d have to follow him,” Dib said, unaware of the words coming out of his mouth. “He’d go looking for some poor, defenseless planet, a place without someone like me to protect it. I’d have to stop him.” 

She didn’t respond to that, either. Dib wouldn’t have heard her if she did.

He tried to match the picture of Zim in his head—ruthless planet-killer, cackling over the corpses of innocents—with the kid he stared at now, sitting alone and refusing to eat. Something wasn’t adding up. 

For the first time, Dib wondered if Zim was lonely. He knew what it was like to be surrounded by people not worth talking to, to be alone in every crowd, to be isolated from his species. For the first time, Dib realized that Zim knew this, too. 

He debated using his plastic spork as a green bean catapult, judging the distance and obstacles between himself and Zim. But then people were getting up to throw their plates away, and the bell was ringing, and Dib only watched as Zim slipped away. 

Back in class, Zim’s seat was empty once again. 

Then, Ms. Bitters made an announcement, and it was the only uplifting thing Dib had heard in the past year: tomorrow, they would start working on the science fair.

He knew this day would come. It was school tradition for the 5th graders to finish their elementary careers with a science fair, filling the cafeteria with tri-fold poster boards and baking soda volcanoes for one glorious night. It would be stupid, because all of his classmates were stupid, but Dib already knew his project was going to be astounding. They would give him a trophy on stage, and everyone would have to clap for him, including Torque Smackey, and Dad would be there, and he would be proud. Not even Zim would be able to ruin it.

A few short words shattered the daydreaming. “You have one minute to get into groups.”

Panic spiked his heart. His hand shot into the air, eyes wide and begging.

Ms. Bitters glared down at him. “No, Dib, you cannot work alone on this assignment.” 

He lowered his hand slowly as that perfect future slipped away. Behind him, classmates smiled as they leaned towards their friends or moved across the room to be with them. They made eye contact that somehow beckoned or warded certain peers. He could only watch like a statue as they all settled, commotion giving way to quiet chatter as duos and trios locked in, forming a perfect social fence around him.

He looked to Ms. Bitters for help, praying she’d see reason. She didn’t glance at him as she went down the attendance sheet, calling names and marking who was with who. 

“Membrane.”  

Dib grit his teeth and scratched at his palms. “Are you really sure I can’t—”

“Since Zim is absent, you will be paired with him.” 

Earth halted on its axis. Dib blinked, not believing his ears. “What?” 

But Ms. Bitters had already moved on. 

He raised his hand as if it would help. “Ms. Bitters, you can’t—you know I can’t work with him!” 

Her glare was fatally icy. Dib withered under it. “You’re going to have to learn.” 

That night was one of the exceptional instances where Dad was home before bedtime. When Dib was a child, he would always come running to meet him at the entryway, smiling and grabbing at his lab coat and offering to carry his briefcase. But he was a preteen now, practically an adult, so these days he just stayed in his room when the front door opened.

So tonight, Membrane was surprised when his son came to greet him, a frown on his lips and a question in his eyes. He allowed the boy to take his briefcase to the table. 

“Have you already eaten?” Dib asked, even though he knew the answer.

“Yes, at work.” The professor stood beside a chair as he unlocked the briefcase and began sorting through it.

Dib sat next to him and waited to be talked to.

Against the odds, Dad actually did. “What did you learn today, son?”

“I got partnered with Zim for the science fair,” he spilled miserably. 

“That’s fantastic! You two are always hanging out together.” He didn’t look up from his papers.

“What? We don’t hang out, we fight! I hate him!”

“I suppose you boys will be getting started right away. If you need a ride over there tomorrow, call the number on the fridge, and one of my assistants will take care of it.” 

Dib wondered why he even bothered. “You don’t understand. There’s no way we’ll be able to work together.”

Professor Membrane hummed and tapped a stack of papers against the table to straighten it. 

“I’ll just do the project by myself and put his name on it,” Dib grumbled, pulling his knees to his chest.

That got Dad’s attention. He set down the papers and turned to face him. “Son,” he said seriously, “that is not how you were raised.” 

Dib looked away. 

“Lying about the division of work is a violation of academic integrity. You know that.” 

He started to whine out a rebuttal, but Dad put a hand up. 

“You will go over there tomorrow, and you will figure out how to do equal shares of this project.”

Dib knew when he was beat. He never won in conversation, especially not against his father.

The professor turned back to his work, paperclipping one of the stacks and returning it to his briefcase. “I’m far too busy to be phoning parents and setting up playdates. I trust you will be able to handle this by yourself.”

“Yeah,” Dib muttered as he slunk out of the chair, heading back upstairs to stew. 

The next day, Saturday, Dib found himself again outside his enemy’s doorstep. Dad had gone against his word and arranged for an intern to chauffeur Dib, which meant that there was no getting out of it. He watched sadly as the Membrane Labs company car left the cul-de-sac, leaving him with the promise to pick him up after dinner. 

Dib turned to look at the guard gnomes and wondered how he was supposed to knock on the door if he couldn’t even get close. He thought about breaking another window, but that seemed like the wrong choice considering he was here to ask for cooperation. Maybe he could disguise himself as a delivery boy?

Or he could walk home, or catch a bus. He had enough pocket change for it. None of the options were pleasant. 

As he shifted on his feet, debating and feeling miserable, the door opened. Gir stood in the frame and shouted, “Master told me to tell you that he’s not home!” 

Dib pinched the bridge of his nose. Then, he took a breath and shouted back, “Tell him I said he’s a poor liar!”

“Okay!” Gir chimed happily and disappeared back into the house. A moment later, he poked his head back out of the door. “He said to go away and that he hates you! And to come in and order pizza so we can have a dance party!”

Dib huffed. “Tell him I think he’s a—” he started, then cut himself off. He shook his head and tried again, urging the anger out of his tone. “Gir, could you deactivate the gnomes for me?” 

Gir scraped one foot on the ground. How the bulbous, plastic eyes of his disguise managed to look anxious was beyond Dib. “I don’t think I’m ‘sposed to…” 

“It’s okay,” he shouted, “I’m not here to hurt him.”

The robot still looked unsure.

“We can order pizza?” 

Immediately, Gir hopped into the air and cheered. He slammed a paw onto what was presumably a button on his side of the entryway, and the glow of the gnomes’ eyes died away. 

Dib walked up with a wary eye on the disabled sentries, cursing this situation with every step. Gir opened the door wider to let him in, and once again, Dib was inside Zim’s base. He adjusted his backpack, pulling at one of the straps uncomfortably. 

“Where is he?” Dib asked, giving the ceiling an automatic cursory glance. 

“Pizza first,” Gir asserted as he flipped down his hood.

Ugh. Dib was kind of hoping he’d already forgotten about that. “Fine, okay. Where’s your phone?”

Gir tilted his head with a blank stare.

“The thing you use to call people?” Dib mimed it, sticking out a pinky and thumb. 

“Ohh! Master has some,” Gir informed cheerfully.

“Okay, then I need to see him.” 

“Pizza first!”

Dib groaned a sigh, pushing up his glasses to rub at his eyes. He wondered if he could pass 5th grade if he failed the science fair.

Then, Zim climbed out of the toilet-shaped elevator, antennae pinned. “Gir,” he barked, “I have been—what on Irk is he doing here?”

“There you are,” Dib grumbled.

“I have told you a schmillion times to quit letting the humans inside! Especially him!” Zim yelled at Gir, gesturing to the invited intruder. 

This was a bit more how he should look, Dib thought. He had been half afraid to find the alien curled up on the couch again, staring at the TV and watching nothing, motionless sans for the listless caressing of fresh cuts. This was the most animated he’d seen him in weeks.

Gir walked off, unperturbed by his master’s rage. 

Zim snarled and rolled his eyes before turning his glare onto Dib. “What do you want?”

“Because you skipped class, we got partnered together for the science fair,” Dib explained hatefully. “I don’t want to be here, either.”

“What?”

“The science fair. Everyone has to make projects. Popsicle stick bridges, potato batteries. Dumb stuff. And we got stuck together for it.”

“What?” 

“She partnered us by force! I tried to explain that it wouldn’t work, but she didn’t listen.”

Zim looked at him with blank eyes. 

Dib growled. “We have to work on a project together for school.”

“Oh, school.” Zim’s face fell back into that tired blankness. He moved past Dib, towards the sofa. “I don’t think I’m going to go anymore.” 

Dib stepped aside so that Zim could sit down, not showing him his back. “What? Why?”

“Why stay?” he countered, wedging himself into the corner of the couch.

“You can’t just drop out of elementary school. They won’t let you.” 

Zim grunted. “I’d get the roboparents to tell them they’re homeschooling me.”

Dib glanced back to the kitchen wall, where the hole he’d made days earlier had been boarded over. “And then what?”

He shrugged one shoulder and said nothing.

A beat passed. Dib rolled his cheek between his molars. “You don’t have a plan, do you?” 

Zim narrowed his eyes, tension winding as the boy pressed.

Dib felt something like a cauterization in his heart, his face heating with growing anger. He didn’t know why he was upset with Zim about this, but then, when wasn’t he angry at him? “All this time to think, and you haven’t come up with anything. You don’t have any idea what you’re going to do now.”

“No, I don’t!” he snapped, throwing his hands into the air and glaring up at Dib. “I don’t know! Irkens aren’t like your pathetic race, wandering without purpose—everyone is deliberately crafted. We know our roles from day one. There is no… uselessness.” He got quieter as he ranted, sharp anger giving way to hopelessness, slowly curling back into himself.

Dib took a small step back at the sudden outburst. After a beat, he assessed, “That’s what you really wanted to talk about the other night, isn’t it?”

Zim glared.

Dib wondered if Ms. Bitters would let him work alone if his partner dropped out of school. She would probably just stick him in another group, though, a group where everyone was already friends, where they wouldn’t want him, where they would hate him in a way that was worse than how Zim hated him, and they would be infuriatingly stupid but refuse to listen to him, the clear genius, because they hated him. 

At least Zim had good reason to hate him, considering how Dib had been trying to expose and kill him since day zero. And he was something of a scientist, too, much like Dib. Suddenly, being partnered with him seemed tame compared to the alternative of any other classmate. That didn’t make Dib loathe it any less.

He shifted his weight on his feet. 

“Don’t act like you know what your life is for, Dib-stink,” Zim sneered. “What’s your purpose?”

“To stop you,” he answered automatically.

Zim settled deeper into the sofa. “We’re both useless, then.”

Dib blinked, taken aback. “Huh. I guess… I guess so.”

He took that as invitation enough to sit down. Both boys leaned against opposite armrests and stared ahead blankly.

“What do we do now?” Zim eventually asked, a strange insecurity in his voice.

Dib turned his head to look at him. “Science fair project?”

He contemplated the offer for some time, antennae hanging limp. “Okay,” he finally decided, and Dib breathed a little deeper.

They did end up ordering pizza. They got an extra one for Gir to roll around in, which enthralled the minion to no end. 

While that went on in the living room, Zim and Dib sat at the kitchen table and reviewed the plans they’d come up with. They had decided that if they were going to do this, they might as well win it. As such, there would be no soil erosion soda bottles, no crystallized pipe cleaners, and certainly no baking soda volcanoes. 

“I still like the transportation device best,” Dib argued.

“I’m telling you, it’s elementary! A smeet could do that.” Zim dissected his dinner as he spoke, scraping off as much cheese and grease as he could with a fork and butterknife. 

“Yeah, but not a regular Earth kid! We don’t have that technology yet. It could change the world!”

“I do not care. I have decided upon the remote control heart attack generator.” 

“We are not doing the remote control heart attack generator. What would we demonstrate it on?”

Zim just looked at him.

“Don’t—don’t answer that. We’re not making it.” 

Zim huffed. “The school’s tallers really should have let us work alone.”

“Yeah, agreed,” Dib growled. 

A few moments passed in silent animosity, Gir’s laughter filling the background.

Then, Zim offered another thought, fork in the air. “What about combat robots?” 

Dib took a moment to digest the idea, surprised by how much he didn’t hate it. “We could each make our own.”

“Exactly.”

He thought this must be the first moment they’d ever been on the same page. It was a weird feeling. “They’d have to be small enough to demonstrate in the cafeteria.”

“Approximately 400 Earth units in mass?”

He felt a smile creep up onto his lips. “Less, probably. One or two feet across.” 

Zim nodded slowly, leaning forward.

“Yeah. This could—this could work.”

Outside, a car honked twice, slicing through the moment. Dib remembered where he was and who he was with.

He stood up in a hurry. “Uh, that’s probably my ride.”

Zim blinked, the spark of enthusiasm gone again, and watched as Dib gathered his things.

“I’ll start drafting blueprints, and uh, we can talk again on Monday? Ms. Bitters said she would give us time in class to work on it.”

“Okay.”

He slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked away, but hesitated at the door, looking back.

“Zim?”

“What?”

“I still hate you,” he assured, finality in his voice. “Even if you’re not a threat to Earth anymore. That doesn’t change it.”

“Okay.”

He lingered a moment longer, hoping the alien would launch into a tirade about how much he hated him, too, more than his pathetic human mind could comprehend, or whatever. But he didn’t, he just stared at him with those unreadable eyes. Dib slammed the door shut on his way out.

Chapter Text

Piggie Slaughter V: Return of the Vampire Zombies was a joke of a game. It was stupid, and also for dumb babies who didn’t play real video games. That made it perfect for moments like these, occupying her hands and attention while the commercials and long introductions played.

Today was Wednesday, which, for Gaz, meant Wrestlemania reruns until 6:30. (They actually went on past then, but that was when Mysterious Mysteries started.) Dib knew not to bother her until then, so she enjoyed the peace of the living room by herself, exactly how she liked it.

Then, the doorbell rang. She grumbled under her breath and tore herself away from the cushions. The monitor beside the door showed Zim, looking pained and out of place, waiting on the doorstep. 

She let him in. She almost asked him what he was doing here before she remembered that she didn’t really care, so long as he left her alone. (Something inside her imagined weakly what it might be like to have a friend come to the door, but she thoroughly ignored it.)

The couch welcomed her return. Gaz unpaused her game and waited for commercials to be over. 

Still hanging around the entryway, Zim shifted on his feet and adjusted the duffle bag on his shoulder. “Appropriate greetings, Dib-sister.”

She glared at the screen in her hands. “Hi.” 

“Where is the Dib?”

“His room.” 

A beat passed. “And, eh, where would Zim find that?”

A door opened on the upper level, and Dib rushed to the balcony above the living room. “Zim.”

The alien looked up at him. “There you are.” 

Gaz tensed in preparation for her brother to leap down and attack, or for Zim to pull out some cartoonish weapon, but nothing happened. They both just stood around awkwardly. 

“My things are in the garage,” Dib called down. His voice was the same as it was when he tried to talk to Dad about ghosts—guarded, thorny, prepared for a fight but aiming to please.

He came down the stairs, and then they walked off. 

… Okay, that was different. Gaz prepared herself to be pissed later if they blew up that chunk of the house, but until then, apathy prevailed.

“Here’s what I have so far,” Dib presented, gesturing towards the piles of metal and electronics on the beat-up table. He picked up one of the objects, a dense black cylinder with its wire guts spilling out. “I’ve mostly been working on the motors.”

Zim put his bag down on the free space of the table and unzipped it. “They look pathetic.”

Dib’s nose scrunched. His mouth prepared a retort before his brain could remind him that they were supposed to be working together, but the words died when he saw what Zim pulled out. 

It was the most magnificent looking motor he’d ever seen. It was the strangest, too, with deep grooves and a star-shaped shaft and extra nodules sticking out, and of course it was purple. 

Zim set it down like he was discarding it, like he was just getting it out of the way to look for something else. Dib snatched it up without thinking. 

“Did you really make this?”

“Eh?” Zim’s eyes flicked over to the boy briefly. “Of course.”

He turned it over in his hands. “You didn’t salvage it from something else you had lying around?”

“Zim threw it together before coming over.”

Dib ran his fingers against the near-invisible seams, searching for something to unscrew, or pop open, or pry at. Meanwhile, the Irken produced pink rolls of paper and set the bag on the floor, making room on the table. He moved Dib’s handiwork out of the way without much care, rolling out the prints, using the human’s half-made motors and actuators as paperweights. 

“This is only the third draft, approximately,” he grumbled.

Dib blinked at blueprints (pinkprints?) in front of him. They were incredibly detailed, every line clear and clean. Notes were printed neatly in every corner, and as Dib looked closer, he could see the places in which Irken script had been erased and written over in English. 

He’d never really seen Zim’s handwriting before. It was immaculate, almost robotic, angular and sharp and perfect.

“You write like a kindergartener,” Dib told him.

“Zim does not.”

“Yeah, you do. Nobody writes in all caps like this. Ever heard of something called lowercase?”

He growled in the back of his throat. “Why would Zim write anything in the inferior class of letters? Only the uppermost of the cases is suitable.”

Dib side-eyed him. Zim glared back. 

“You’re lucky I stoop down to your pathetic language at all,” the alien continued. 

“Yeah, whatever.” 

With that out of his system, at least for now, Dib moved on to the actual contents of the pinkprint. Zim had outlined something out of a bad horror flick. It would walk on six independent legs, each one sharpened to a razor-fine tippy-toe. Blasters would be mounted on the back of the metal beast, each one able to swivel and aim irrespective of the machine’s orientation. And Dib could see it now: it’d be freaking purple.

He could feel Zim’s eyes on him, watching him watch his work, and it felt a little strange. Dib had expected him to not care what he would think, but the alien was looking at him like something bad would happen if Dib was unimpressed by the plans.

So, he supposed he had to say something. “You’ll have to write in an algorithm to get those legs to work. It’d be a lot easier to just do wheels.”

Zim squinted. “Of course you would make your plans based only on what is easy.”

Dib dug his nails into his palms. “Man, I was just trying to help.”

“Zim does not require your assistance,” he muttered. He tugged the pinkprints a little closer to him, as if protective, as if taking back something that was offered. “Let’s see what drivel you spat up.”

Dib rolled his eyes until they hurt as he turned away, fetching his own magnificent plans. He laid them out on top of Zim’s.

They were perfect in every way. Dib’s robot would be on wheels, like any sensible thing, low to the ground and fast. Its weapon would be a horizontal spinning bar—made of what, he didn’t quite know yet, but something heavy, something that packed a lethal punch. And it would be painted sophisticated shades of blue and black. Maybe a logo, if he thought of one cool enough.

“This is ridiculous,” Zim clicked. “That much gyroscopic force will tear it apart before it even gets a chance at my creation.” 

The words were probably intended to sting, but Dib had an unbelievable amount of practice at not caring what other people thought. If he were to organize everything that had ever lived by how much he cared about their opinions, Zim would place below the ants he burned at recess. 

So, as such, the harsh words only bolstered Dib’s confidence. “Okay, spaceboy. We’ll see.”

Zim seemed to miss the challenge in Dib’s voice, because he didn’t look over. He was still studying the blueprints, and it was harder to read him with his antennae hidden, but Dib thought he looked… genuinely contemplative.  

“Experiment with adding counterweights when the time comes,” the alien suggested, tapping a claw against the diagram. “That would mitigate the effect of the force generated at the front.”

Dib blinked. He hadn’t thought of that. “Well, obviously,” he bit. 

“How heavy do you plan on this bar being, exactly?” Zim asked, still studying the pictures. 

Dib was pretty bad at reading tone, which had gotten him in trouble on countless occasions, but he swore now that Zim sounded sincere. He wasn’t making fun, he was seriously interested in this design. “About 60 pounds?”

Sliding out from Zim’s PAK, an articulated metal arm handed the alien a remarkably regular pen and pad of paper. He took them and started scribbling. “You humans already have Xokt’s four laws of motion, yes?”

Dib was embarrassed by how high his voice jumped. “What? What’s the fourth one?”

“Equal and opposite reactions?” Zim hardly paused in his writing. “Smeets are uploaded with that as soon as they’re out of the tube.”

“Okay, wait, we already have—what are the other three? All of them?”

Zim either wasn’t listening to Dib’s desperate plea, or he didn’t care. He paused and looked over what he’d written, then shoved the notepad in Dib’s face. “This is how much force you would generate at the tip. Assuming we use my superior Irken motors, of course.”

Dib took the notepad and stared, triple checking the calculations. “Oh.”

Zim hummed affirmatively. “So by Xokt’s fourth law, your vessel must be capable of receiving that much energy. What does this planet do for shock absorption?”

His mind spun in fifty directions, ideas generated and disregarded in microseconds. The ghost of a smile pulled at his heart in anticipation. Dib wasn’t talking to his mortal enemy now, his would-be killer, his future vivisection victim. For the first time in his life, he was talking to an equal.

“We’ve got some here,” he started, running over to a shelf on the other wall and pulling out boxes. “But I’ve always thought they could be improved.”

“Yes!”

“Zim told you!”

The world became fuzzy on the edges as Dib stared at the ridiculously, ludicrously, impossibly low number on the display of the detector they’d hooked up. He was grinning, mouth agape in shock, his hand balled into a fist in the air. They’d done it—their changes to the shock absorbers, no longer so recognizable as such, were a complete success. This time. Finally. 

Beside him, Zim was smiling, too, baring all his interlocking teeth. Dib looked over at him to confirm that yes, he was seeing the same thing, and Zim looked at him, and for a brief moment, they were just looking at each other and beaming in shared victory. 

Dib broke the moment as quickly as he could, faltering. He wrote down the number displayed, the pencil scratching deeper than it needed to. “That better not have been a fluke.”

Zim hurried to reset the simple machine they’d put together to run these tests. He made a clicking sound that must have meant brisk agreement. 

Then, the door that connected the garage to the house swung open, and the yellow glow of the kitchen cut through the dimly lit room. When had it gotten dark in here? When had the sun gone down?

Gaz stood in the doorway, silhouetted. “Dinner’s ready,” she snarled.

Dib blinked. “Oh.” He glanced at the tangled mass of metal and wires on the table. “I’ll be there soon. We just have to run this test a few more times.”

“‘Kay.” And then the door was closed, leaving the boys suspended in the revelation of how dark it had gotten outside.

Once, in second grade, Dib had been invited to a classmate’s house for a playdate. It had been awkward, uncomfortable, like the other kid didn’t really want to be doing this, and Dib quickly learned that he didn’t want to be there, either. (He later found out that the meeting had been arranged by Membrane in an attempt to socialize him. Every subsequent act of kindness from a peer was then met with hostility, because Dib knew that the only reason anyone would ever be nice to him was if his dad had paid their parents off. But that’s neither here nor there.) He remembered the kid’s mom telling them that dinner was ready, and he was invited to eat with them. 

So now, Dib knew that this was the part where he was supposed to invite Zim to the table. They always had more than they could eat—not that Zim would take much, anyway. And it wasn’t like Dad would disapprove if he were home, and Gaz wouldn’t care. He was, no matter how Dib felt about it, their guest. This was a ritual he was supposed to fulfill. 

They ran the test four more times, not talking much. Each measurement was within range of the first, as precise as the little detector would get. 

“We really did it,” Dib self-congratulated, surprised. He started scribbling down more math, comparing this with the unmodified version. “Like, this alone could be a winning project.”

“Thanks only to my superior Irken mind,” Zim responded automatically, tone lacking any real heat. That lifelessness had seeped back in when Gaz opened that door, and now he sounded kind of hollow. He started packing his things, returning the pinkprints and alien tools to the duffel bag. The motor he’d made remained on the table.

He probably wasn’t aware that the family was socially obligated to feed him, Dib thought. Which was good, because the notion of him sitting at their table and picking at their food fanned a fire in Dib’s chest, resparking all the hatred that had been set aside and somehow almost forgotten in the past few hours. Zim wasn’t a person, he was a monster, and Dib was going to treat him accordingly as much as this situation would allow. He was not human, he was not a friend, and he would not eat at their table.

(Nevermind the fact that this afternoon had been the most fun he’d had since God-knows-when, once they got started. Nevermind the way Zim would say things and Dib would know exactly where he was going before he could finish the sentence. And forget the fact that Dib was finally being listened to for once in his life, forget the way Zim actually took in and appreciated Dib’s ideas, forget the way he looked at him like his opinion meant something.)

(Nevermind that together, they’d made something that outperformed anything on the market by a landslide. Zim was still his enemy, still a monster, and he always would be.)

Zim’s bag now hung over his shoulder. He looked around as if waiting for something.

Dib was already sick of these awkward goodbyes. “See you tomorrow?”

“Indeed,” the alien said shortly, and left. He paused at the threshold, but didn’t look back.

Dib watched him go, thinking. 

The central operation theater was one of the most magnificent rooms in the warren. A significant portion of Zim’s work took place here, under the looming floodlights, flanked by everything he could need. Without a subject on the table, the countless machines stood quietly in wait, monitors black, arms curled up into the ceiling. This made the room perfectly quiet, aside from the inescapable low thrum of blood running through the walls. 

It was also one of the only rooms with a flat surface large enough to lie down on. That was why Zim lay here now, curled up on the same cold steel where so many other creatures had met their fate. Three long, thick cables were attached to his PAK, the ends disappearing into the dark ceiling.

Irkens didn’t sleep. In fact, they were physiologically incapable of it, and had been for some centuries. That was just one of the weaknesses they’d engineered themselves out of. 

Connection to the Collective supplied them with all the energy they needed.

Zim, of course, had found that out the hard way. There was no manual on how one’s life would change after disconnection. Why would there be? Disconnection was death in a way that the destruction of the body could never compare to. And besides, the only ones this happened to were d—

Only de—

Defec—

…

And besides, it wasn’t like anyone cared what happened to whatever was left of someone after disconnection. 

So now, Zim needed to charge for a few hours each day. It wasn’t the worst adjustment in the world, as it didn’t interrupt his work by much. (Not that he had work to do anymore, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t do it. These days, he didn’t do much of anything. Weeks were wasted in fugue, hours blurring into nothing, time falling from his fingers like sand as he watched in complete apathy. Perhaps that was a symptom of disconnection, too.) It only meant that he was confined to the base. 

Yet it still hurt. It was irrefutable proof that he had been changed, that this had really happened—it wasn’t a prank, or a trick, or some false memory. These cords were the damning evidence of it all. He’d failed the Empire. His Tallest hated him. He was a d—

Zim curled his claws and filled his mind with static. He wasn’t thinking about it. He was not going to think about it. 

He thought about the Dib instead. 

The days where they were always trying to kill each other seemed so far away now. All of it did. The plots, the destruction, the blood, the gore, the victories, the failures—had it really only been less than an Earth-month since it all? It felt like lifetimes ago. 

He thought of Dib chasing him, hunting him down through the streets with those accursed handcuffs. How long had it been since Zim felt fear? He thought of how the Dib looked when he was afraid, the pinpricks his strange amber eyes became, the cracking in his voice, the tremble in his body. How long had it been since Zim felt victorious? 

Oh, well—just a few hours ago, he supposed, when they’d finally gotten that shock absorber to work. Something in his chest stirred weakly at the recall. He’d felt happy then, hadn’t he? 

Had he?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything anymore. 

(Apparently, he never did to begin with.)

Chapter Text

Humans were obsessed with water. It was one of the first things Zim had learned about this place. They loved it so much that they carved massive pits into the earth and filled them with it, in backyards, in parks, in buildings, everywhere. And they would splash and wade and swim in these lake mockeries for no reason at all, even and especially when they were completely disgusting. 

Humans did a lot of perplexing and repulsive things. Really, there were few aspects of the species that Zim did understand, and fewer that he found respectable. This “pool” tradition had always been firmly in the “inane and revolting” category, but the longer Zim stood on this perch, watching the artificial light reflect in the idle motion of the water, the more he began to understand it.

The moon hung low in the sky tonight, full and shining. That was another thing Zim hated about Earth. This singular pathetic excuse of a satellite mocked him—Irk had 37 moons, each one brilliant and unique and perfect. (Smeets weren’t allowed above ground much, and he was far too short for the facilities with frequent skylights, but still. He’d seen them through the eyes of the Collective billions of times, and they were magnificent.) 

All the night sky was disgusting here. There was only ever a smattering of stars visible, maybe a dozen faint, lonely pinpricks. On Irk, the night sky was pink and purple, painted with nebulae, stars clustered so tightly together that it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began. On Earth, the night sky was a blanket of cold, empty black.

The plank Zim stood on creaked under his weight. It bounced and swayed when he leaned forward. 

A few blocks away, a pack of motorcycles tore through the spring night, ripping the quietude into pieces. He hated it. The acrid stench of the city stung the back of his throat day in, day out. He hated it so much he could spit blood. He hated it so much he could kill someone. He could kill…

But the screaming racket soon faded, leaving only the crickets and frogs and the gentle wind in the juniper trees. 

Zim wasn’t exactly sure how he got here, standing over a public pool, and he certainly didn’t know why. He knew he wasn’t having a good night. He knew he’d trashed some laboratory or storage room, but the details were fuzzy. He knew there was blood crusting on his arms. He remembered leaving the base in a flurry, watching his body move without his input, but he had no idea why his feet led him here.

Water danced below him in a perfect pattern. A repeating cycle. A cycle of falling and rising, weaving in and out and back into eternal imperialistic glory and servitude, which he wanted nothing more than. The perfect pattern, broken. An impurity cleanly removed and discarded.

He swayed. The board creaked and curved like it wanted him to jump off. 

Zim knew he couldn’t die here, not unless his PAK was disabled. The legs would fly out and catch him before he touched the surface. And even if they didn’t, he would probably claw his way out of the acid before it killed him. It took more than a few mouthfuls of poison to kill an Irken. 

Not that he wanted to die. He didn’t. That was the only thing he really knew. It thrummed through his veins, pumping through his PAK incessantly—I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. The very thought made him quake from the inside out, dizzying in its intensity, sickening. I don’t want to die.

Sirens howled in the distance. A dog started barking and did not stop, high and gnashing and head-splitting.

Zim realized that he didn’t want to live, either. Not here. Not like this.

A lot of the little things stayed the same. Zim didn’t see it at first—at first, truly everything was different. But the more he left the base, the more he went to school and took Gir on his walks and did science, all begrudgingly, all while more dead than alive, the more he saw that most things went on irregardless of his sentencing. 

Leaves still strained against their stems in the wind. Most food still hurt to touch. Ms. Bitters’ lectures hadn’t changed. And—

“Watch it, freak.” The vile Earth creature shoved Zim against the wall of the hallway hard enough to bruise. 

Anger sparked in his chest like a flashbang. “You ran into Zim,” he spat, but the kid was already gone, lost in the sea of departing schoolchildren.

… and the student body still treated him the same. 

The anger left him just as quickly as it had come, which was maddening in itself. A month ago, it would have stayed, burning, enveloping, and he would have used it. He would have forged it into a weapon with which to exact his excruciating revenge. Now it just taunted him, filling him only long enough to remind him how impossibly empty he was. 

He walked back to his base alone, thinking about the Dib. The boy would be over later to work on their project. Zim wished he could manifest a sense of hatred for this, some semblance of anguish and turmoil over being forced to take this earthworm dirt-child into his base, but he just couldn’t. 

He did still hate Dib, didn’t he? 

Zim collapsed on the couch once inside, ignoring the roboparents’ greeting. His eyes stung, his antennae were sore, and all he wanted to do was lie motionless for the next lunar cycle. School always left him feeling this way. (Why was he going, again?)

He wanted to take off his disguise, but there was the possibility that whatever human charged with Dib’s transport would want to see him. Maybe he could take it off when it was just them. After all, the Dib wasn’t really trying to expose him these days.

He thought about that for a while, curling deeper into the couch. It would have been easy for Dib to kill him. Zim should have been Earth-dead by now. Dib should have slit his throat in the corner of lab F-17. But he hadn’t, and Zim didn’t know why. The world slipped away.

Why was he alive? Why was he here? And why—why was he like this? The Control Brains were without flaw. The smeetery robots were without flaw. The Empire was without flaw. So why? Why would they build him like this? Why would they make—

Pain, sharp and stinging and sweet, drowned it all out. Nope. He wasn’t thinking about it.

Time passed like that, outside of Zim’s awareness, until a knock on the door gently tugged him back to the world of the living.

“I’ll get it!” Gir caterwauled, launching himself out of the kitchen toilet and into the door, a green blur with a trail of smoke.

This, of course, startled Zim to life with a scream, leaping from his seat, PAK legs shooting out to pin him to the wall. 

“Oh. Hi, Mary.” Gir almost sounded disappointed, all of the previous enthusiasm evaporated.

“Hi, Gir,” Dib greeted flatly as he came inside.

Zim took a deep breath and huffed, lowering himself to the floor and smoothing out his uniform. 

“Zim.”

“Dib-thing.”

“What have you brought?”

The Dib had wheeled in a dolly, the mechanism taller than he was, a few boxes stacked on it. The boy smirked. “My weapon. Or, well, it will be. Right now it’s just a bar, but…”

That all-consuming static from earlier began to drip away. Zim hummed in approval. “I have a room specific to metalworking. We will begin there.”

It was a bit of a hassle fitting the dolly into the fridge-shaped elevator, but they made it work. Zim guided him through the twisting halls, and he wished he felt gross about it, but again, he just couldn’t. It was almost like there was something wrong with him. (Ha, ha.)

They soon arrived at room C-32. The furnishings of machinery and supplies made it feel cramped, but they fit. 

“It’s this alloy that my dad invented years ago,” Dib bragged as opened the first box and put the contents onto the table, haphazardly piling mechanisms and metal frames. “It’s super strong, but really expensive to make and like, stupidly heavy, so no one really had any use for it. But we still have a few bars lying around.”

When the first box was empty enough to lift, he moved it out of the way and dug into the bottom package. Without thinking, two robotic tendrils deployed from Zim’s PAK and grabbed the bar of metal, helping Dib lift it onto the table. He never would have gotten it off the ground by himself.

Dib then pulled out a pinkprint (colored blue, of course—the Dib-thing was ridiculous in that way) from his backpack, detailing the schematics of the soon-to-be weapon. The two went to work.

It was an easy pattern to fall into. Dib had used most of these machines before, or a satisfactory human analogue, and he quickly picked up whatever he didn’t already know. Zim supposed he admired that in him. Born of mud and flesh, Dib was far from anything Irken. But in another world, Zim thought idly, he might have made a good one.

Within a few hours, Dib had shaped the bar into a serious weapon, carving holes for machinery, sharpening it, making it perfectly balanced. Meanwhile, Zim had worked with the motors and actuators that would make it spin. 

As they fit the pieces together, Dib asked, “Do you think we should test this outside? In case something goes wrong?”

Zim tightened the last bolts. “Eh.”

Eventually, everything would be controlled remotely. For now, the basic controller was hooked up by wires. Zim handed the box to Dib and stepped away, his back against a tall shelf.

The human stepped back, too, as far as the tethered remote would let him. “Okay,” he warned, pinching the dial gingerly. 

A low thrumming filled the room as it started up. It was slow at first, but quickly gained speed, turning into a black and silver blur as the humming got louder. 

Zim glanced at the human. His tongue poked out just a bit, his eyes narrowed. For a moment, the beginnings of a tentative smirk pulled at his lips.

And then, everything happened at once. 

Dib wasn’t Irken. He wasn’t crafted, not like Zim was, not with terabytes of extra neurons plugged in for the best processing speed in the galaxy, not with the finest ocular implants, not with eons of training coded into his core.

As such, Dib never would have seen it coming, but Zim did. Not from far enough away to think about it, not enough to make a decision, just enough for his body to make the decision for him.

His PAK legs launched him into Dib, tackling him, knocking him to the floor and smothering him with his own body at the very same moment that their machine tore itself apart. The world was nothing but crashing, the sounds penetrating and all-consuming. Zim screwed his eyes shut and clung until it was over.

“Zim. Zim,” Dib breathed against the side of his head. 

That was the first thing he registered when the world came back into focus. The second thing was how the boy pushed and kicked against him weakly, trying to squirm away. Zim let go and tried to stand, only to be met with resistance. 

He looked up and behind him to find that his PAK legs were supporting the entire weight of the floor-to-ceiling shelf they’d been in front of. The thin metal trembled.

Zim blinked, then looked back to Dib. He’d seen that expression on him once or twice before, when Zim’s plans were working, when he had the upper hand, the moments Dib saw what he was truly dealing with, the moments the stakes became real. It was pure terror.

Why, then, was he wearing it now? He was safe.

“Zim,” Dib urged, hands flailing.

Zim brought one foot underneath him in a sharp, silent movement. He paused as the shelf settled deeper, the PAK legs straining. Then he adjusted again, bringing his other foot under his chest in the same manner as the first, and glanced up at Dib.

“Step back,” he warned, the words tumbling out thoughtlessly.

Dib shuffled backward even further.

He made one microadjustment, then another. Then, he sprung. 

Zim skidded against the tile floor as the shelf crashed into splinters on the spot his body had been a moment prior. Both boys scrambled away, breath rattling, squeezing themselves into the corner until the dust settled and everything was still.

Dib’s blade stuck out of the wall, halfway impaled, right where the boy’s head had been before Zim tackled him. They stared at this fact in tandem.

Dib opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “That was. Uh.”

“A minor setback?”

The human turned to gape at him. Zim stared back, and there must have been something in the air, or some error in his PAK, because he couldn’t breathe quite right and his vision was fuzzy on the edges and he couldn’t stop shaking. He didn’t remember danger feeling quite like this before.

And then the Dib was laughing. The sound was garish, too loud, the humor of it warped until it was unrecognizable as joy. But Zim found himself smiling alongside him, and the laughter that then spilled out of him was much the same, trembling and closer to a cough. 

Dib collapsed onto his back and pushed up his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Jesus Christ,” he breathed, rattling.

Zim stood up on trembling legs and brushed debris off his uniform. “I doubt the blade is still usable. You’ll have to do all of that again.”

But Dib was still laughing under his breath, digging his palms into his eyes. Zim stared down at him until the affliction passed. (And maybe, in the meantime, he waited for his own body to come back down.)

“I missed this,” Dib coughed, hands falling to the ground beside his head as he looked up at Zim. 

Zim curled his lip. “What, almost dying?”

“I guess so. It’s just, like…” he trailed off and made a noise Zim didn’t know how to interpret, his hands flapping and waving. “Like, oh, I’m alive.”

Zim held himself a little tighter. “You’re always alive.”

Dib hummed like he disagreed. 

Zim turned his glare onto the wreckage around them. “Are you going to apologize for destroying my lab? Or thank me for saving your miserable life?”

“How is this my fault?” Dib accused, sitting up with great effort. That facsimile of joy still haunted his face, and the waving of his hands faded into fidgeting fingers. “You were the one who made the—the spinny thing.”

Zim scoffed. “And it would have worked perfectly, had your blade not been built wrong.”

The Dib climbed to his feet. Zim saw that he was still shaking, too. “Whatever, you jerk. It was definitely your fault.”

The alien hissed at this, and Dib narrowed his eyes in victory. Zim put his hands on his hips, digging his claws in a little to hide how they still trembled, and looked away sharply. Dib shoved his hands in his pockets and surveyed the destruction.

A moment passed like that, the pair taking in the mess they’d made with a mix of awe, defeat, and breathtaking relief. Dib tiptoed around the wreckage to approach the bar of metal impaling the wall, eyes wide and unreadable. There was something about it that Zim didn’t like, something in his face that made his gut curl. The human reached out to touch it, his fingers pale against the black, and his expression looked more like hunger than fear, and Zim hissed.

Dib turned away from his narrowly avoided guillotine, stuffing his hand back into his coat pocket. “What now?”

“Zim does not wish to work on this any more today.” His PAK was still circulating hemolymph ten times faster than it needed to, and just the thought of cleaning this up made him want to self-destruct.

“Okay, well, my ride won’t be over until later. What time is it?”

Zim checked in with his internal clock, which must have just looked like a brief zoning out to Dib. “Eighteen twenty-three.” 

Dib took a calculating pause, then offered, “Mysterious Mysteries will be on soon.”

Zim scrunched his face. “What is that?”

“Oh, man.” Dib made his way back over to Zim slowly, carefully piecing together a path through the ruins. He smiled, different from before. “Only the best programming on Earth.”

Zim hugged his knees tighter to his chest as he leaned forward, equal measures absorbed and horrified.

The TV’s blue glow was the only light in the room, flickering and casting warped shadows. Dib didn’t even spare him a glance, eyes trained to the screen. 

The narrator continued ruthlessly as blurry pictures flashed on screen, detailing the rural man’s encounter with the terrifying creature Zim had never heard of before now. How could he have been so foolish? This animal-thing was clearly one of Earth’s greatest threats, and he’d been bumbling around completely unaware the whole time.

By his side, Dib reached into the bowl of sour candies for another handful. His fingernails scraped against the plastic, making Zim’s antenna twitch.

He wasn’t sure when he’d taken off his disguise. Or when they got out the dinner snacks. Or how one episode had turned into two, then three. And he certainly didn’t know the whys of any aspect of this situation. 

He didn’t even know for sure if he was glad that Dib was still alive. His mind kept pulling him back down to the thought of it, of the boy decapitated in C-32, of a bookshelf soaking in blood, of a classroom with an empty seat. What would he do? Without the project, without school, without Dib—forget whatever he was doing now, what would he do then?

The tentative hypothesis was that Zim was glad that Dib was alive, if only because that meant that they had a project to work on, and that meant that Zim didn’t have to think about whatever he was going to do with the rest of his life, he just had to think about hydraulics and physics and metal alloys.

The other hypothesis of the hour was that Zim was enjoying these present moments. He liked this brand of candy, and he was learning all kinds of useful information about Earth, and the narrator’s voice wasn’t totally unpleasant, and… and Dib’s company was kind of nice, maybe. Almost. At least when he was being quiet.

The narrator made his final comments as the episode drew to a close, leaving Dib smiling and Zim terrified, wondering what else was out there. Then, the commercials played, far brighter and louder than the show, bursting through the strange bubble of intimacy.

Dib shifted suddenly. “How long have we been watching this?”

Zim clicked noncommittally and selected another piece of candy.

“My ride must have forgotten about me.” Drops of anger colored his voice alongside another emotion, something darker, something Zim couldn’t quite put a claw on.

“You can borrow Zim’s phone.”

Dib crossed his arms and picked at the seams of his coat. “I could be dead right now. I could be dead right now, and… and no one would even know. Except you.”

Zim turned to look at him as that dark emotion grew. 

Dib stared into the middle distance. “Dad probably wouldn’t even find out until morning. Unless he went into work early, and then… then what?”

“The school would call,” Zim supplied. He’d been absent enough to know that much.

“Yeah. And he—he’d just think I was ditching. Wouldn’t leave work for that. By the time he got home to chew me out, I’d be… Hey, what would you do with the corpse, anyway?”

His chest felt tight. Was it cold in here? He looked away, glancing from the TV to the wall to the floor to his feet. “I don’t know. Zim doesn’t wish to talk about this anymore.”

Dib hummed. Then, after a long pause, quieter, “Gaz would notice.”

Commercials played out, inane and overbright, and Zim’s antennae began to sting.

The human’s next words came as a murmur. “I don’t know if she would care.”

What was Zim supposed to say to that? He pulled into himself a little tighter. This was another thing he despised about Earth life—for Irkens, communication was a simple exchange of information. Data sheets. Instructions. Here is what will happen if you do not comply. Here is what you need to know in order to complete your mission. Status reports.

Humans were different. Everything was “here’s how I feel” and “this is what I think” and empathy and personality and silent requests for comfort and a hundred thousand invisible enigmas hidden between syllables. The more time he spent on this ball of stink, the more he realized that every conversation was a puzzle, every tone and expression a cypher to unravel, and even when he did figure out what was being expected of him, he almost never knew how to fulfill it. 

(All of this was clearly a problem reflective of these slimy, writhing primates, not Zim. It wasn’t his fault that they decided to make their customs useless and byzantine, and if he didn’t play along, that was for them to deal with. He was clearly the superior lifeform here, and he wouldn’t stoop to their nonsense even if he could.)

Then, the Dib was on his feet, brushing citric acid from his shirt and shoving his hads in his coat pockets. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll just walk home.”

Wait. Didn’t humans have a rule about children and nighttime?

“Because who cares if I get kidnapped, right?” 

Ah, yes. That. “You’ve survived plenty of encounters with Zim and Zim’s glorious Irken might, and no human is more dangerous than I. You would be fine.”

The Dib huffed through his nose. Zim was pretty sure that sound meant something, but he couldn’t say for certain what. Happiness? Grim acceptance of a situation? Whatever. It’s not like he cared about how Dib felt.

(Did he?)

“Yeah, I suppose that’s true.” With one hand on the doorknob, Dib stared hard into the wall beside him and hesitated, grimacing. When he next spoke, it was like he was extracting the words painfully, the pliers bloody and jammed with the cartilage of his trachea. “And thanks for saving my life, I guess.” 

“I didn’t do it for your sake.” (At least, he was pretty sure he didn’t, because why would he?) “But you’re welcome.”

Dib’s mouth was a thin line. He stared at the wall a second longer, then left, and the slam of the door was sharp and painful against Zim’s antennae, and suddenly the room felt very, very dark.

Zim wasn’t looking forward to today’s work session. He’d gotten pretty far with the hydraulic legs on his own, but he’d run into a problem with the gait algorithm. Perhaps several problems. Code was never his strong suit, but he knew Dib could do it. The human had hacked Zim’s tech enough times to prove that. 

But that meant asking for help. 

That would have been fine if the circumstances were different. Irkens were good at helping each other; that was how the Empire ran, each soldier a perfect cog in a perfect machine, the teeth of every gear interlocking in servitude. And Irkens were good at assimilating the technology and labor of lesser species—that, too, was key to their all-consuming success. 

Invaders were a special case, though. Invaders worked alone. They didn’t need the help of anyone once they set foot on their planet. 

But Zim wasn’t an invader to begin with, was he?

He bit his cheek, grinding the nubs of his teeth into the flesh until he tasted silicon. He wasn’t thinking about it. He was thinking about pistons and remote controllers and the approaching deadline. 

Adjusting the bag on his shoulder, Zim steeled himself and rang the doorbell. 

The Gaz opened the door. She peered at him before coldly informing, “Dib’s not home.”

Zim blinked. “He isn’t? But we—what is wrong with your nails!” He shrieked and jumped back, pointing one claw accusingly at the offending digits. They were purple, so purple they were almost black, and it was all too easy to imagine them rotting and falling right off and what kind of disease did she have and was it contagious and how much of this air had Zim already breathed and he needed to leave right now. Also they were kind of sparkly in the light, and he was 75% sure human nails didn’t normally do that, either.

Gaz’s glare sharpened. “They’re painted,” she glowered, dry and withering.

“Oh.” Zim returned his feet to the ground and pretended to brush dust off of his tunic. 

A moment passed in tense silence, Zim opting to study the doorframe and the dead moths in the porchlight and the cracks in the concrete. 

Then, Gaz spoke slowly, hesitantly, the words crawling out of her throat like gravel. “I can do yours, too, if you want.”

Zim’s attention snapped back to her. “What?”

“I was in the middle of it. Haven’t put the stuff away yet.”

He gripped the strap of his bag a little tighter, narrowing his eyes, and thought. His next question felt like a decision. “Does it hurt?”

The smallest flash of a smile flickered across Gaz’s face, so brief and small Zim wasn’t sure he didn’t imagine it. She opened the door a little wider and stepped to the side. “No.”

Zim next found himself sitting politely at the Membrane family’s dinner table, staring with wide eyes at Gaz’s collection of little bottles. They were shaped strangely, the caps thin and longer than the stout basins. Most of the liquids inside shimmered, catching the light like miniature galaxies when Zim picked them up.

It smelled strange in here. Like acetone. Like home. It covered the stink of flesh quite nicely, he thought.

He selected another bottle from the box, turning it in his fingers to watch the liquid swirl. This one was purple, brighter than the one Gaz wore now. It was purple like the Voot, like his combat robot would eventually be, like the Eta Vok nebula in sector 10-31-3, like the floors in his base. 

“Zim likes this one,” he decided.

Gaz took it from him. While she shook it, holding the cap and flicking it around, Zim realized that this meant he would have to take his gloves off. He hesitated, cringing, but did it anyway.

“Put your hand on the paper towel,” Gaz instructed. 

He did so, wary but willing. It was speckled with tiny streaks and smudges of purple.

Gaz twisted the lid off and revealed that the absurdly long caps were actually tiny handles for tiny brushes. Zim gasped quietly. That was admittedly rather ingenious. 

The human scooted her chair closer, leaning a little bit more into Zim’s space. The strangely comforting smell of the paint was stronger. Zim watched the miniature brush with wide eyes, the glob of paint on the end round and shining, hovering right above his claw until it slowly, slowly made contact, brilliant purple against the pale green. Gaz brushed upward, following the curve of his claw with careful precision. 

She had been right—it didn’t hurt. It was kind of cold, but that was fine.

Then, the Gaz placed her other hand over his, lightly taking his finger between her pointer and thumb. And maybe the contact should have stung, maybe it should have shocked him, maybe it should have hurt. But it didn’t. She made tiny adjustments, angling his claw this way and that as she went, and then it was done. Zim had one radiantly purple nail.

She pinched the paper towel and dabbed it against the crevices between his claw and flesh where excess paint pooled and smudged. He observed her work and decided he approved.

“Where is the Dib-thing, anyway?” Zim asked once Gaz had moved onto the next claw.

She made a low sound in the back of her throat. “He had… an appointment.”

“With who? Who could possibly be more important than Zim?”

A drop of purple trickled down the side of Zim’s finger. Gaz wiped it away firmly. 

She’d moved onto Zim’s thumb by the time she responded, “If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

“A secret appointment?” His mind went to high councils and oligarchs and courts. What was the Dib up to? Who was he seeing? What were they discussing? 

Could it be about Zim? Had the flesh-pig revoked their unspoken truce? Had all of this project nonsense been a ruse to gather damning evidence? 

“When will he be back?” Zim demanded.

Gaz rested the brush in the bottle as she looked over her work, then motioned for Zim’s other hand. “In an hour. But I’m warning you, he won’t feel like talking when he gets here.”

Zim put his unpainted hand on the paper towel, letting Gaz take it. “Why not?”

“He just won’t. Seriously.” Here, she looked up at him, and the glare pierced his very soul. 

“Oh. Okay,” he surrendered quietly, hyper aware of his hand in hers.

He tried not to fidget as she continued painting, just like how he tried not to think. But he couldn’t help it. His foot shook, and his mind spilled a thousand possibilities of where the Gaz-brother could be, and each thread sang when he plucked it, and the whispered, layered song in the back of the back of his mind was nothing but dead defect, dead defect.

But this shade of purple was very nice against his skin. And it smelled good. And Gaz—this was the first time that he’d been in the same room with her for so long, he was pretty sure, and he was certain that they’d never been so close before. It was nice, he thought. Maybe.

Gaz twisted the hidden brush back into the bottle and returned it to the box, scooting out of Zim’s space. Zim moved back, too, and held out his hands, spreading his fingers, scrutinizing every angle. 

It was perfect. 

“Don’t touch anything until they’re dry,” Gaz hissed, snapping shut the latches of the box’s lid.

There was probably something about the compounds in the paint that would become volatile if disturbed before fully setting. That made sense, and Zim didn’t want his fingertips to explode, so he accepted the instruction without question. 

“I suppose Zim will stay until the Dib-worm returns,” he informed idly, still studying the new galaxies on his claws.

“He won’t want to play with you when he does.”

“We do not have play. We have work.” That, and Zim needed to interrogate him and find out if his mission was compro—there was no mission. Blood seeped between the seams of his interlocking teeth. Rewind. That, and Zim needed to interrogate him and find out if his identity had been revealed. 

Gaz growled under her breath. “Whatever.”

Once this paint dried, Zim would go to the garage and set things up. And then Dib would arrive, and Gaz would be wrong about him because of course he would want to talk to Zim, and the meat boy would tell him where he was but it would just be something stupid, perhaps something with his external ocular enhancements, and this feeling in his gut would go away.

The Gaz murmured, “You can watch me play video games. If you’re quiet.”

The gel on his claws looked less shiny, stiffer, but not entirely set. Zim squinted. “What kind of video games?”

“Bloody ones. I got the new Slash and Destroy.” 

He didn’t know what that meant, but he had to admit, it sounded cool. “Okay. But only until my cl—my normal human nails are dry.”

“There, there! Behind you!”  Zim’s finger shook as he pointed, jabbing the air wildly. At some point, he’d stood up to give better directions, perched on the couch while Gaz sat on the floor. He could see the pretend enemies from farther away like this.

“I see him,” Gaz smiled cooly, unruffled. The character on screen turned and blasted the adversary into impressively detailed smithereens. 

Zim’s chest swelled. He was great at this game.

Gaz fought her way through the horde viciously, reloading and switching weapons with practiced efficiency. Zim watched and tried not to tell her what to do as she was doing it, but he couldn’t help it if he pointed out monsters coming up on the horizon or gave the occasional suggestion. (Her response was usually “be quiet” or “I know what I’m doing,” but still. Once, she’d said “good eye,” so obviously Zim’s help was appreciated.)

Then, just as this wave came to a lull, the front door opened. Zim snapped to see who it was, and—had it really been an hour already?

The Dib yanked his key out of the door and slammed it shut, leaning his weight against it, holding onto the knob like it was supporting him. His back was to them. If he’d noticed Zim, he gave no indication. 

Immediately, Gaz reached for the TV remote and turned the volume down. 

Zim watched, squinting, as Dib slowly pried himself off of the door, bringing his sleeve to his face as he turned away from the wall. And then, he saw him. Their eyes locked, thick electricity in the air between them.

His eyeballs were red and swollen and disgusting. Snot crusted the corners of his nose. The pallor of his skin, the slump of his shoulders, the glassy emptiness of his stare… There was defeat—kicking, screaming, swearing revenge—and defeat. Never before had Dib looked defeated. 

The human opened his mouth, once, twice, and made an almost imperceivable noise. He sighed a breath that wanted to be letters, poked his tongue over his lips, and tried again. Nothing. He shook his head a little bit and walked away. 

Zim hopped onto the floor, sharp words behind his teeth, but Gaz put out her hand. He caught her venomous glare and resigned to watching Dib disappear into his room upstairs. 

“What is wrong with him? Where was he?” Zim demanded, crossing his arms.

Gaz looked back at the TV and muttered, “You should just go home.” 

Home. What a ridiculous notion. Zim could never, ever, ever, ever, ever go home. But he could go back to his base, he supposed, and that was probably what she meant.

He growled, “Fine,” gathered up his things, and marched away.

Chapter Text

Once they started 6th grade, they wouldn’t have recess anymore. Most of his peers were upset about this, some nigh inconsolable, but Dib almost looked forward to the change.

Late May sun beat down on the children playing, racing around, inventing games on the blacktop. They didn’t seem to mind it, Dib thought from where he sat and watched at the base of an old oak, but they weren’t wearing leather trench coats. (He’d laugh at the suggestion that he could simply take it off.)

He added a few more details to the sketch he was working on. It was of the highly elusive urban bigfeet he’d caught a glimpse of on his way home from Zim’s the night he almost died. He had, of course, tried to tell his father all about these events. His father, of course, had laughed and said something along the lines of “I would suggest you become an actor if it were a respectable career” and “go to bed now; I’m very busy.”

Gaz might have believed him, at least about the near-death experience, but he didn’t want to imagine her reaction. He didn’t know if he would be able to take it if she didn’t care. Some suspicions were better left unconfirmed, allowing them room to breathe, room to be untrue. 

Suddenly, a shadow fell over Dib’s sketchbook. He tensed automatically, looking up and expecting to find someone about to hurt him.

It was just Zim. (When did Zim become someone who didn’t hurt him?) His arms were crossed, and there was some kind of expression on his face, brows half-knitted and half-furrowed, a frown tugging at his lips.

“Where were you yesterday?” the alien challenged. Was that hurt in his voice? Anger? Worry?

Dib scowled. “None of your business. Why were you at my house?”

Zim huffed sharply, indignant. “We—I—you invited me!”

“I did not!”

“You lie!” He stamped his foot on the ground and dug his heel into the dirt. “You said—you said to come over.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did! Filthy, lying…” He trailed off into near-inaudible grumbling before snapping, “Why did you leave Zim?”

Dib had to blink at that. There was something wet in Zim’s voice, pitched too high. It was hurt; he knew it now. “I didn’t. I didn’t even know you were there.”

He held himself a little tighter. “Why won’t you tell Zim where you were?”

Dib grit his teeth. “Why do you want to know so bad?”

“Because you’re hiding it! You’re hiding something!”

He glanced around sharply, praying that Zim’s raucous volume hadn’t attracted the attention of their classmates. Those kids were vultures. “Quit yelling, you stupid space roach,” he whispered sharply.

Zim hissed.

“I’m not going to tell you, because…” The paper in his hand crinkled and creased. “Because you’d make fun of me.”

The alien boy blinked, and a singular ounce of tension left his shoulders. He continued at a more reasonable volume. “There is nothing fun about you. Not even Zim could create fun out of you.”

Dib glared. The effect was lost on his rival. “You would tell other people.”

“I will not tell other people. There. Now confess your guilt!”

He pulled into himself a little more. “Why should I believe you?”

Zim’s eyes narrowed. Then, he kicked the dirt again, marched forward, and squatted down beside Dib, glaring ahead. “Because. It would not benefit me.”

Dib shifted away the tiniest amount, creating space for him. “I thought you liked seeing me humiliated.”

Zim hummed, clicking. “Perhaps. But until this science fare is over, we are allies. What does not serve you, then, does not serve me.”

He rolled this concept around in his mind, observing the way it stung and stuck and made him feel something akin to nausea. 

The alien ripped blades of grass from their roots at his side. “And if you don’t tell me, I’ll replace your pillows with beehives while you sleep.”

Maybe it shouldn’t have, but that startled a laugh out of Dib. This was more comfortable territory. “How does that fit with us being allies?”

Zim shrugged one shoulder and tore apart more grass. 

Dib huffed under his breath, closing his beat-up sketchbook and pulling it to his chest. “Fine. You really won’t tell anyone?”

“Yes, no, whatever! Tell Zim!” He whipped to face him, eyes intense even through the contacts.

Dib shot him a glare (again, to no effect) before looking away, turning to the children on the blacktop. No one was watching. No one was nearby. He took a steadying breath, hating himself for how tight his chest felt, hating himself for the decision he was about to make, hating himself for getting into this situation at all. 

The confession came quietly. “It was therapy.” 

“Therapy?” Zim asked, testing how the word felt in his mouth. “What is that?”

His stomach felt like a rock, sinking painfully. “Uh… It’s like a doctor, but for your brain.”

Zim immediately flinched away. “You’re sick?”

“No! I’m not sick, and I don’t need therapy!” 

The alien thoroughly scrutinized him before slowly returning to a normal posture. “Then why do you go? Can they not see that you’re fine?”

Dib hugged his knees tighter to his chest. “No. They think… man, everyone thinks that I’m crazy.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t count.”

A few moments passed in tense silence, Dib sweating through his coat in the shade, watching everyone else play freely. 

Then, Zim asked, his voice so quiet it was almost something like gentleness, “Do they hurt you?”

Dib looked sideward at his enemy(?), surprised. But Zim was looking at him, too, so Dib snapped his gaze away before the moment could permeate. “No. It just sucks.” He shifted a little bit, talking into his knees, letting his glasses fog. “You don’t know what it’s like for everyone to be against you.”

Why was he telling him any of this? Why was he letting the freak even sit next to him?

“Yes, Zim does,” the alien answered with what sounded like sincerity, the wound still lingering in his voice.

“Maybe you would understand if people knew the truth about you. If they knew what you were and they treated you like how they should.” 

Next to him, Zim made a thin sound and twisted his claws in the earth. His words became a trembling line, and Dib had to strain to hear. “Zim thinks they knew all along.”

He rested his cheek against his knees, watching Zim as a black and pink and green smudge behind the fog.

“I don’t know why they…” 

The whistle blew sharp as a knife and just as painful, ripping all schoolchildren away from their games. 

“Why they what?” Dib prodded as he moved to stand, but his voice was quiet and almost, perhaps, gentle. 

Zim shook his head and stood up firmly, swiping dirt away. But he didn’t march off, he hovered and waited for Dib to stand, and they walked back to class together in tense, meaningful silence. 

Once everyone was settled in their desks, Ms. Bitters snapped her pointer against the chalkboard sharply, shutting them up. Their teachings continued as normal, boring Dib out of his skull. He watched the clock and doodled in the margins of worksheets and every now and then, he glanced over to Zim, but not on purpose. He used to do that to glare or grin menacingly or make threatening gestures or show drawings of him on the autopsy table, but not anymore. Now, it was like he just kind of wanted to look at him. 

Every now and then, Zim would look at him, too. But not to grin or glare or steeple his weird fingers. Just to look.

Right before the sweet salvation of the bell, Ms. Bitters made her concluding comments, something about the state of the education system, which Dib didn’t really care about. Then, she growled, “Don’t forget that the science fair is next Thursday. You will have thirty minutes of in-class time to finish your projects.”

Immediately, Dib snapped to look at Zim, shocked and horrified. Next Thursday? As in, a week from now? As in, they only had a week to finish? 

Then, the bell sounded, enveloping the scene in chaos. They moved to find each other in the sea of shoving schoolchildren. 

“There’s no way we’ll be done by then,” Dib hissed as the crowd pushed them to the exit.

Zim had that far-away look in his eyes again, this time laced with concern. He was quiet.

“Maybe if we cut some corners,” he rambled. “I wasn’t that attached to painting them, anyway. And the armor, I think we could use some of my Dad’s lighter alloys instead of that plastic-y stuff, that way we could just weld it instead of dealing with the interlocking attachments?”

“Okay,” Zim said. 

“Most of my stuff is still at your base. We should go straight there.” 

They were already headed in that direction, Zim’s feet taking him there automatically, Dib following. “Okay.” 

“I have to let Gaz know first, though. You go on ahead, and I’ll catch up with you.” He was picking at the lining of his jacket pockets. 

Zim didn’t pause or look back. 

Thank God the gnomes had gotten used to him by now. (Was it Zim who put his biometrics in the “not a threat” database, Dib wondered, or Gir?) As he walked up and knocked on the door, he was glad it didn’t have to be a federal issue. 

Gir, as usual, welcomed him in. He was already chattering, all high pitched and emotional about something that Dib really didn’t have time for right now. He gave some automatic, placating responses until the little minion went away. 

With the blinds all drawn and the lights off, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of Zim’s mock living room. It was almost like stepping into another world, something private and secluded in an unsafe way. 

He turned to see Zim curled up on the sofa, holding himself, out of his disguise. 

Dib sighed from deep in his chest, recognizing that posture at a glance. “Man, come on, we don’t have time for this.” 

Zim narrowed his eyes. 

“We have work to do. I can’t do all of it by myself.” 

Again, the alien showed no indication of getting up. He did groan, though, buzzing and closer to a whine. 

Dib tried to soften his glare. “I wasn’t being completely serious earlier when I said we wouldn’t be able to finish. We can still make this work.”

“What’s the point?” Zim finally bit, brow furrowed. “What’s the point in any of this?”

He growled under his breath. “Man, you were fine an hour ago! What’s gotten into you?”

Zim just glared.

“Seriously, do we have to do this right now? Can’t you keep it together for a little longer?”

He shoved himself up from his side all at once, baring teeth and scowling. “No! Zim is sick of this!”

Dib couldn’t help but flinch.

“Sick of—of filling time with nonsense, nothing-tasks! It doesn’t matter! None of this matters!”

His hands balled into fists at his side. “It matters to me! I need us to get a good grade on this so that—”

The alien launched up to his feet, claws twitching. “Well, you do not matter to Zim!”

Dib almost expected that, but he wasn’t expecting it to hurt. The words were a baseball bat to his ribs, knocking the breath out of him, and the whole crooked house fell into deafening silence. 

His fingernails dug crescents into his palms, almost breaking skin. He sucked in a breath and yelled decidedly, “You don’t matter to me, either!” 

“Nothing matters,” Zim cried, grabbing his antennae and pulling, but he wasn’t really looking at Dib anymore, and—

“Are you—are you crying?” The words tumbled out thoughtlessly, surprised into quietude.

Zim fell back onto the couch all at once, letting go of his abused antennae to bury his palms into his eyes. Dib’s anger rushed away at the sight, the pain going numb, something new and stupid twisting his heart.

“Zim matters to no one,” he muttered into his hands, the words traitorously thick. “I know. I know this.”

Dib found himself taking one tiny step forward, then another. “Man, I didn’t mean it. You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me; of course you matter.”

Zim made a gross, wet, muted sound.

“You’re being a baby about this,” Dib added uncomfortably, but the words didn’t rouse or console their target.

After a long stretch of charged silence, Zim made another quiet sound. It was something like a whimper and something like clearing his throat. Still hiding his face, the alien murmured, “No, I’m not. Zim is no worm child.”

“Yeah, you are.” As he spoke, the words kinder than he intended, Dib’s feet carried him closer and closer, the movements so slight that he didn’t even notice. Then, the next time he blinked, he was sitting on the cushion next to Zim, near enough to touch.

Zim ground his wrists into his eyes and sniffed. Dib sat very still while his heart raced ahead. Then, Zim shifted—not dramatically, not by a lot, but just enough. Their knees touched, the gentlest pressure. 

Dib stopped breathing and tried, seriously tried, to recall the last time someone had touched him like this. He couldn’t remember. Maybe no one ever had. His leg was on fire, embers spreading down the neurons radiating from the contact, but it was a gentle kind of burning, living just on the right side of the border between discomfort and pain. It was like the first meal after starving for days—he wanted more, but also, his stomach was tight and he was sweating like he might throw up.

He let out the breath he was holding, slow, hoping the sound didn’t tremble. Then, Dib shifted his weight to lean against Zim. Not by a lot. Just enough. 

The two boys leaned against each other in the dark of the mismatched house, quiet and still. Dib wondered if Zim had ever been touched like this, either. He wondered constantly about the alien—what his cells were made of, how he breathed with no nose, what color his twisted organs were, the strength of his technology, the extent of his power. But rarely did he wonder what the boy had lived through, who he once knew, what he’d seen, what he felt, what he loved, if he loved. That would be too personal, too humanizing. It was easier to think of Zim as an object that materialized out of nothing: no history, no consciousness, no desires outside of the instinct to destroy.

(Dib used to wonder if he’d be able to cut Zim up if he ever learned anything truly personal, so he avoided the ideas entirely, afraid of his hand faltering once it finally held the knife. How stupid that had been. He couldn’t even hold the gun.)

Dib was hyper aware of his tongue in his mouth and the air in his lungs. The words were quiet and still, barely disturbing the dark silence of the scene. “Did you mean it? What you said?”

Zim’s arms, too heavy to keep at his eyes forever, slowly fell to rest around his waist. His voice was like wet gravel. “Which part?”

“That I don’t mean anything to you.”

Zim was warm where he pressed against Dib. Dib tucked that knowledge away, hoarding it like he did with every other scrap of information about the alien, but this fact felt different. For some reason, he wanted to keep this one to himself. 

“No,” Zim finally muttered. 

Dib exhaled, thin and slow, ashamed at the relief flooding his veins.

Neither boy spoke for a while. Dib thought about the first time they sat on this couch together, when Zim handed him a knife and Dib twisted it in his back, when Zim tried to strangle him and Dib just laughed, when things were different, when he thought there might still be a chance that they could go back to normal. 

Slowly, experimentally, Dib extended his pinky finger and brushed it against Zim’s leg. In return, Zim pushed his leg against Dib’s the tiniest bit more. 

“I don’t know what there is to be done,” Zim admitted in a murmur. 

“About what?” Dib asked, the tip of his finger still poking Zim’s knee.

Zim gestured vaguely, a scowl tugging at his face.

They were quiet again for some time. “Maybe…” the boy trailed off, not sure what he was trying to say in the first place. Then, he let the words just happen. “Maybe you get to decide what matters now.”

Zim turned to look at him. Dib studied his hands.

“Like, if your leaders… If your people…”

Magenta eyes narrowed. Dib swallowed and kept trying. “They can’t make any more decisions for you. Y’know? You’re the only one who can do that now.” He could feel his heart shaking his ribcage. Why was this scary? Was he afraid of hurting Zim? Or worse, afraid he wouldn’t be able to help? 

“So, maybe,” he pressed on, “maybe you can give meaning to things they don’t care about. Or decide you don’t care about things they told you are super important.” 

Zim ground his teeth. Dib cringed at the sound and risked a glance at the alien’s face. He was staring hard (where, exactly, Dib couldn’t tell), tears drying on his cheeks, brow set in an expression that Dib couldn’t place. 

“Zim doesn’t wish to work on our project right now,” the alien boy rasped with a poorly-masked waver.

Dib tried not to let his frustration show. “That’s okay,” he said, as if Zim needed his reassurance for anything. 

Zim’s expression softened. (Maybe he did.)

The rational thing to do would have been to go down into the basements and complete all that he could. Instead, Dib found himself asking, “Do you want to watch TV?” in a tone that reminded him a little bit of his therapist, which he briefly hated himself for.

Zim blinked, then nodded slowly.

They ended up finding a program about NASA on one of the public channels. The narration was gentle and the visuals were twinged with fuzz, almost dreamlike. The slow pace of the show wasn’t enough to satisfy Dib’s anxious mind, so it chewed and chewed on all the problems it could—motors, bolts, blades (almost dying) (Zim saving his life), the physics of it all, the rapidly dwindling possibility of a paint job. He mulled over all of that and, of course, the biggest problem he’d ever had in his life, who was sitting right next to him and still leaning against his side.

Dib couldn’t read him as well without the faux pupils, so he wasn’t sure if Zim was even watching the TV. Maybe he was thinking about his own problems.

On the screen, a space station orbited Earth, the shot interspersed with an interview of a woman explaining how the planet’s gravity interacted with the satellite. On the couch, Zim’s head came to rest on Dib’s shoulder. Dib tried not to let his breathing hitch and leaned into the touch by mere atoms. 

He wouldn’t call it nice. It was still a burning discomfort, almost like that half of his body was asleep, needles pricking him from the inside out. Perhaps it hurt for coals to be extinguished, and that’s why they hissed—it was like that. But Dib didn’t make a sound; he just drank it in and tried to force his muscles to relax.

The TV played candid footage of astronauts floating inside the space station, smiling and waving for the camera or working without noticing. 

“This is probably really stupid to you,” the human murmured.

Zim made a small sound of acknowledgement. “My people accomplished all of this before your planet had grown bacteria.”

The artificial glow reflected in Zim’s eyes, glossier than normal, and Dib lost himself in thought again.

Eventually, the credits rolled, gently transitioning the pair back to reality. Zim pulled away slowly and popped his neck, looking away. Dib rubbed his shoulder while his electrons all reconfigured themselves, flesh buzzing and tingling and suddenly frigid. 

Then, Zim stood slowly, expression both contemplative and blank. Dib watched and waited for him to either kick him out or invite him further in. 

“There’s work to be done,” Zim observed with no enthusiasm.

Dib got to his feet. “Lots.”

When the Irken marched to the fridge-shaped elevator, it was really more like walking, and that twisted something small in Dib’s heart. He followed, and the ride down was long, his mind running wild over the deafening silence.

Dib worked well under pressure. The fate of the world bearing down on his shoulders the past however many months had given him plenty of practice. As such, and considering Zim’s sorry state, he took up the lead, writing out the plan and delegating tasks. Zim obeyed, which was a pair of words Dib never would have conceptualized in a million years. He almost wished the alien would throw in some quips or insults, or try to bait him into a fight, or at least argue about the best way to go about this. But he didn’t, he just worked quietly, sometimes muttering to himself in Irken when hiccups arose.

Time dwindled away in this fashion. Before he knew it, Dib’s vision was swimming with exhaustion. His eyelids weighed a hundred pounds each. He leaned against the workbench and sighed, looking over everything they’d accomplished and everything they still needed to do. 

“Zim?” he asked without thinking, feeling gravity tug at him harder with each passing second.

Behind him, the faint buzz of the soldering iron went quiet. “Eh?”

“I think I need to go home.” His voice was rough and groggy, almost painful to use, and he wondered how many hours had passed in silence.

Zim set his tools down. Dib could feel his eyes on him, and he knew he should maybe detach himself from the table and look back, but he couldn’t bring himself to. Standing like this had become quite comfortable. Maybe he was about to be one of those people who slept standing up.

“Zim will escort you,” he said, suddenly standing by his side.

Dib blinked slowly and gave the smallest nod, not really hearing or understanding what Zim had said and not caring, either.

The next thing he knew, they were outside, the sidewalk under their boots a sickly yellow in the streetlamps' glow. The night air was cool and crisp, a welcome change from the daytime heat of late spring, and the gentle breeze whisked away some of Dib’s exhaustion with each step. 

He realized it about three blocks from his house—Zim was walking him home. In the morning, he would lay this fact out on the autopsy table and dissect it, but for now, he just noticed it with a neutral kind of curiosity. Zim was walking him home. Odd. Okay. 

As they passed the house of Dib’s next-door neighbor, Zim drew in a breath and spoke. He, too, sounded drained, but the words felt sincere in a way that Dib wasn’t used to hearing from him. “Zim’s future involves you.”

Dib tripped, feet skidding over nothing. He stopped in his tracks while Zim marched on. “What?”

The exile paused and turned back, not enough to really look at Dib, but enough to be looked at. “This mudball is months away from any planet with half-way intelligent life,” he explained, a forced kind of snarl coloring his tone. The hints of hatred dropped when he added, a quiet confession, “And I don’t want to be alone again.” 

“Uh, okay,” Dib responded, at a loss. He felt like all his thoughts had been painted with tar. Zim resumed walking and he stumbled to catch up. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

Zim shrugged one shoulder. “Why should you?”

And then they were on the porch, Dib standing at his door, watching Zim watch him. Mind too toilworn to produce a retort, he just looked at him, long and thorough. “Does this mean you’re staying on Earth?”

“I guess. For now.”

Dib nodded, now halfway convinced he was dreaming, the kind of dreaming that happened right before waking, the kind of dream that stuck, muddling the real and the surreal until nothing meant anything anymore. “After we win the science fair, um. Will you go to middle school?”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Then yeah, sure.” Zim blinked, plastic pupils boring into Dib’s soul. “Unless I decide to take over the world again. I could do both.”

“Okay,” Dib murmured, strangely content and comforted with this plan. He began fishing for his house key and produced it after some struggle. He supposed he should thank Zim for walking him home, though the thought of it set his teeth on edge. But by the time he drew in a breath and looked up, the alien was gone.

Chapter Text

Dib awoke, as always, to the harsh alarm clock shattering the blue dawn into piece. He then, as always, took a few selfish, half-asleep moments to wonder what it would be like for Dad to wake him up instead, whether that be through rousing him gently or dragging him out of bed. But it was a useless thing to think, so he got up and started the motions of everyday routine on his own.

It was only halfway through brushing teeth that he remembered last night. Zim had walked him through the dark all the way home (why?), lingered at his porch (why?), and maybe sort of told him that he didn’t want to be without him (what? How? When? Why?).

He paused a while longer after brushing, staring into the mirror. He grazed his fingers over his throat, stretching the skin into the light. The scratches Zim once gave him were scars by now, almost nothing, and it was hard to imagine his neck splattered and smeared with blood.

Since Ms. Bitters reminded them of the deadline, Dib had spent more time at Zim’s base than his own home. He briefly wondered if this was how Dad felt, and he found himself missing fights with Gaz over the TV and the last soda. He was sure she didn’t feel the same, though, which maybe made him a little bit sad, but who cared.

Sometimes they worked in silence. Sometimes they couldn’t shut up, and Dib had to admit that those sessions were way more fun, even if they didn’t get as much done. Apparently, whenever Zim was neither trying to wipe out all life on the planet nor too depressed to move, he was pretty funny. He was never trying to be, but still, Dib found himself laughing—not exactly with Zim, but not at him, either. But Zim laughed at/with him just as much, even though Dib also wasn’t trying to be funny, so it was fair. (Not that Dib cared a whole lot about what was and wasn’t fair to Zim, he reminded himself.)

It was a good time. The more this went on, the less Dib could find it in himself to be horrified and disgusted with it all. He just gave into the laughter, not feeling so bad about feeling good. 

Human and Irken technologies wove together under their hands. Zim wrote the code and Dib made it work. Zim built the motors and Dib hooked them up with the actuators. Dib borrowed Zim’s face shield when they started welding, and it didn’t really fit, but it got the job done. Slowly, piles of mismatched parts became solid things, gleaming and wicked in the shadows of the warren’s underbelly. They would even have time to paint them, Dib realized with a jolt of glee. 

Presently, he turned around to share this news with Zim. It was Monday after school and they were down in his basement again, quiet and hard at work. But before Dib could make a sound, something stopped him. Zim had a troubled look on his face, staring into the guts of the gun he was constructing, and he was absentmindedly rubbing his arm. 

Dib narrowed his eyes, the smile dropping from his face as suspicion arose.

Without looking up from his work, the alien announced, “Zim will be right back,” and left.

Dib went back to wiring, saying nothing, removing chip crumbs out of the old console controller he was trying to repurpose. It wasn’t too long before Zim returned and went back to work. Dib glanced over. His eyes seemed clearer, antennae held a bit straighter, and—and his gloves looked freshly cleaned.

“What?” Zim snarled, meeting his gaze with a glare.

The human blinked. “What?”

“You’re staring at me.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You were.”

Dib groaned under his breath and turned away sharply. “Not everything is about you. Your ego’s massive.”

“Not as massive as your head,” Zim retorted, and Dib could hear the grin in his voice.

“Quit making fun of my head!”

A thread of laughter, only half-malicious, spilled from Zim’s teeth. “I can’t help it. It’s almost like it has a gravitational field of its own.”

Dib grabbed the discarded joystick from the controller, a light, small thing, and hit Zim right between the eyes. And then, the fight was on.

Before Dib knew it, both of them were tussling on the floor, rolling around in the cramped space, trying to get on top of the other or put the other in a headlock, grabbing and pushing and pulling. But they didn’t hit or kick or bite or claw or choke, and they were smiling, and none of it felt like it would leave a bruise. It was a collision of a well-tread path and foreign territory, something old mirrored into something new. Dib’s heart raced just the same.

He laughed as he pinned Zim to the ground, but it wasn’t a sound of victory or ill-will. It was happy. Zim narrowed his eyes and hiked his grin, and Dib braced himself for whatever move he was about to pull, but suddenly—something caught Dib’s eye, stopping him in his tracks.

His face fell as he looked down to where Zim’s tunic had ridden up, exposing a pale green belly littered with fresh, pink cuts. The blood was still wet, smeared in the places their wrestling aggravated.

Dib climbed off of him just as quickly as Zim drew away, jumping to his feet and yanking his tunic back down, antennae pinned to his skull. Dib looked away and picked at a button on his coat, shuffling backwards another step. Zim huffed and turned to his workbench. 

Dib did the same, and their backs were to each other once more. He picked up the tweezers again, but his fingers weren’t as deft as they were a few minutes ago, and all the wires waved in his vision.

He found himself, as usual, talking before he could think. “You’re still hurting yourself?”

A small, scraping sound came from where Zim stood, like metal carving aimlessly into wood. The human didn’t dare look over. Just when he thought he wouldn’t get a response, Zim answered, “Does it matter?”

“It’s…” Dib rolled his lip between his teeth. “It’s not good for you.”

The scraping stopped. Dib could almost hear Zim breathing. “Why do you care?”

“Because—well.” He fidgeted with the tweezers, slowly spinning them on their point against the table. “I don’t know.”

After a long, weighted moment, the soldering iron Zim was using came to life again with a quiet buzz. The smell of it seeped through the air. Dib tried to return his own focus to the task at hand, pushing wires this way and that, accomplishing nothing.

An hour could have passed like that, or maybe it was only a minute. Zim’s voice was small, its usual gravel quality exaggerated in the quietude. “Are we friends?” 

Dib glared into the innards of the controller. He weighed every interaction they’d had, right up to the dust still settling from their playfight. He considered all the information he had about friendship, none of it from personal experience. He looked to the twisted ball of emotions in his core, but couldn’t decipher a single thread of it. “I don’t know. Are we?”

“How should I know?”

“Is there no friendship on Irk?”

“No. Irkens don’t do friendship.” The words sounded automatic. 

Dib felt the air in his nose, felt his heartbeat shake his throat. “Are you included in that?”

“I don’t know.” 

He nodded a little, knowing Zim couldn’t see him.

“No one has ever cared what is and isn’t good for Zim. I don’t—I don’t think.” 

Something twisted in Dib’s chest, not dissimilar to a blade. “No one?” 

The alien didn’t need to respond.

“Sometimes, I don’t think that anyone cares about me, either. My dad says he does, but. I don’t know.”

He was quiet at that, too.

Dib thought again of Zim on his porch step, of Zim sitting under the old oak with him at recess and asking him if he was being hurt, of Zim saving his life on instinct alone (and the look in those huge eyes raking over him, as if checking that he was okay, as if Zim was scared).

It was almost as if Zim cared about him. The realization was slow but not tentative, steady and inescapable like a steamroller. Zim cared about him. Maybe it was only because Dib served some kind of purpose to him, but he couldn’t imagine what that might be. 

Dib never could figure out why nobody liked him—he was genius and brave and looked awesomely cool, and he’d saved everyone’s lives more times than he could count. But now, holding this fire of a revelation in his hands and watching his flesh drip away, he could only think: why?

As that question tore into him and he tore into it, a thousand unconvincing explanations fluttering around him like insects, another moment of terrible clarity struck him: he cared about Zim. That was what had driven him to sympathy a few moments ago, that was the charged feeling in his chest when he saw those cuts, the muddled relief he felt when Zim said he was staying on Earth. It was what made Zim’s enraged words truly hurtful, what made them sit on the couch and lean against each other and watch nothing at all. That was what kept Dib from pulling the trigger those weeks ago and every day thereafter. 

What exactly, then, did that make them?

Dib pried his tongue off of the roof of his mouth. “Would you want that? To be friends?”

“How should I know?” Try as he might, Dib couldn’t detect any sarcasm in the words. He just sounded small.

He shrugged a little, feeling the alien glance back at him. Both boys had long given up on their tinkering, so the room was oppressively silent.

“We should finish the project before worrying about anything else,” Zim decided with an unidentifiable emotion in his tone.

“Okay,” Dib agreed. Before he could stop himself, he added, “But next time you feel like, uh, hurting yourself, or whatever… Maybe don’t?”

Zim didn’t respond. The sounds of his work resumed.

Dib swished the can in his fingers, listening and judging how much was left. One last dredge of soda swirled around, so he brought it to his lips again and finished it. A small pile of the cans had amassed in the corner; he tossed this one in with its fallen brethren and got back to work.

It was Tuesday night, meaning the team (an odd word, but there was no time to think about that) only had one more night to work before their robots would make their debut on the gymnasium floor Thursday. This kind of stress recalled Dib’s many near-death experiences, the adrenaline and the thrill and the top-of-the-world feeling, but now with more dread. 

He glanced beside him to take stock of Zim’s robot. It was silly on paper, but now that Zim was finishing up the blaster mount and the knife-point legs shined in the sparks of his welding, Dib had to admit that it looked dangerous.

Beneath him, his own creation was in a sorry state. Things had been going well, but all kinds of issues cropped up when he’d tried to test drive it, so he had to pry off the armor that he’d spent so long attaching and work through the guts until he found the problem. If they’d had the foresight to create a proper schedule, they’d be far behind it.

Another empty can landed into the rattling pile. Zim’s PAK produced a funny-looking device that had become familiar to Dib during the past week. Into the communicator, the alien commanded, “Gir! Bring more soda to B-12!”

It seemed more often than not, these days, that Dib and Zim were on the same wavelength. A wisp of something like happiness breathed over his mind.

Being so engrossed in the work, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed since Zim had beckoned Gir, but it was long enough for Dib to have mostly forgotten about it by the time the little robot came clanging down the elevator. Gir stormed in, beaming widely, carrying several trays of something in one hand and a pitcher in the other.

“I made yous muffins!” he sang, lifting the trays high in the air. “Sleepover muffins!” 

“For the last time, Gir,” Zim chastised, “we are not having a slee-pover.” 

Unperturbed, Gir set the trays down on the workbench in the mostly-clear space between Zim and Dib’s robots. The stack wobbled perilously. 

“And the soda?” Zim questioned, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Gir thrust the open pitcher towards Zim, causing the liquid inside to splosh over the rim. His hand sparked where the liquid hit it. Dib threw himself in between his robot and Gir, trying to shield the vulnerable insides with his coat. Not facing him, Gir was completely oblivious to this motion.

“IIIII made it my-self!” 

Zim took the wet pitcher away from his minion. “We don’t have any cups, Gir.”

“Okay!” he replied cheerfully, then stuck out his tongue. 

“We need some if we are going to drink this.”

Gir stared blankly.

“Bring us some cups, Gir.”

His eyes blazed red and his hand clanged against his head in salute as he barked out “Yes, my master!” in a voice wholly unlike himself. Then he was gone, leaving only a trail of smoke for Dib to gape at.

Zim shook his head and set the pitcher off to the side, a safe distance away from their work.

“What was that all about?” Dib asked.

“Eeeh.” Zim squinted as if tasting something unpleasant. “When the Tallest made him for me, they… they didn’t do it right.” 

Dib had always wondered where Gir had come from. Until now, his leading theory had been that the servant was Zim’s creation.

“They did it…” His claws scraped against the workbench. “They did it on purpose. They made him wrong on purpose and told me he was an advanced model. Any idiot could see that wasn’t true, but I…” He quieted and shook his head slowly, absentmindedly rubbing at his side, the same place Dib knew there to be cuts. “Sometimes he experiences flashes of the way he should be. That’s what that was.”

“I see,” Dib responded quietly, watching Zim’s gloves, black on pink (and in his mind’s eye, pink on green). After a pause, he allowed himself to ask, “Have you told him about the mission yet?”

Zim continued gazing into his work, expression schooled. “No. But I think he’s already forgotten all about it.” He shook his head and picked up the screwdriver again, going back to tightening the mount. Dib followed suit, trying to recall what he was doing before Gir burst in.

A while later, Zim murmured into the communicator, “Cups, Gir.”

They kept working. It took another reminder from Zim, but Gir eventually did return with a stack of paper cups. Zim thanked him, and he left with a cheer of “Merry Christmas!”

Not for the first time, Dib wondered why Zim ever asked Gir to do anything. He wondered why Zim didn’t try to fix or deactivate him, but quickly felt bad for the thought.

Zim and Dib eyed the contents of the pitcher in tandem, equally wary. It was red and carbonated, looking for all the world like an innocent cherry-flavored refreshment.

“I’ll try it first,” Zim sacrificed, and poured a cup.

Dib watched as he put it to his lips and took a small sip. His face scrunched, but he took another sip before setting it on the table. 

“Is it edible?” Dib asked.

In response, Zim deployed the communicator and growled, “Antifreeze, Gir. We’ve talked about this.”

“It buuuuurns!” Gir cheered on the other end.

Zim huffed, the device snapping into his PAK. 

Dib stared inside the pitcher, horrified. “He carbonated antifreeze?”

Zim nodded grimly and took another swig. 

Dib barely restrained the impulse to knock it out of his hand. “That won’t kill you?”

He watched in horror as Zim downed the rest of the poison, then swiped the back of his wrist against his mouth, grimacing. “No. Why would it?”

Okay. Beans and bologna equaled anaphylactic shock; antifreeze was just gross. Good to know. “It would kill me!”

“Yeah, well, that’s human inferiority for you.”

Dib sputtered. “Also, like, every other creature on planet Earth.”

“Earthling inferiority,” he corrected. Then he sighed and poured another cup. “He’ll be upset if we don’t drink it.”

“Well, I’m not going to have any.”

“Fine, then; Zim doesn’t need your help,” he growled, and Dib couldn't tell if there was humor in it or not.

Dib turned his attention to the leaning tower of muffin pans. He had to stand on his toes and crane his neck to see the top of the stack. Inside, the pastries didn’t actually look that bad—but then, neither did the “soda.”

Zim shook his head as he slammed the emptied cup onto the table. “I keep taking it away from him, but he just buys more.”

Dib laughed a little. “Why do you put up with it?”

At this, Zim turned to regard him like he’d said something insane. “What are you talking about?”

Dib picked at his sleeve. “Aren’t you supposed to be his master, or something? Why don’t you ever do anything to… I don’t know, keep him in line?”

“Oh.” Zim scoffed. “I’d like to see you try to take away his TV time.”

It sounded like he spoke from experience. Dib could only imagine the screaming. He shook his head.

“Besides,” Zim mused as he popped up onto his PAK legs and began dismantling the muffin tower, “it’s not like he’s… doing anything on purpose.”

Dib took the trays Zim handed him, setting them off to the side.

“It’s not his fault that he was built the way he was.”

He hummed, head tilted as he looked up at the alien. “I wasn’t expecting that.” 

Zim glared down at him. “What?” 

Dib tried not to look away. “That’s just. Better morality than you usually show, I guess.” When Zim didn’t respond, the human dared to add, “You must care about him.”

“Irkens don’t have those feelings,” he defended, retracting his PAK legs. His boots clacked where they reconnected with the floor.

Dib wanted to argue—he knew when he was right, and more importantly, he knew when other people were wrong. He held his tongue. They could have this argument later, he told himself, when there was more time.

He turned his attention to the muffins instead. A sudden pain in his stomach alerted him to his long-unnoticed hunger. “Do you think these are poisoned, too?”

A slender, jointed mechanical arm with a clawed hand slipped from Zim’s PAK and extracted a muffin from the tin. They watched as it unwrapped it, then tore it in half. It held the pastry this way and that in the light while Zim peered into it, searching for something, and Dib wondered just how many times the extraterrestrial had submitted himself to Gir’s culinary whims. 

“No signs of sharp objects,” he assessed. He took one half into his hand and smelled it. “And it doesn’t smell too chemical-y.”

“High bar,” Dib noted.

Zim nibbled with some hesitation, waited a moment, and then took another small bite.

“Is it safe?”

He smirked as the robot hand tossed Dib the other half. “Find out for yourself.”

Dib huffed. A month ago, he wouldn’t have trusted anything Zim gave him, not for the whole world. Now, he barely paused before taking a bite.

It wasn’t half-bad. It was gummy, perhaps, a little chewy and deflated, but still better than the ones they served at school. He ate it, and when it was gone, he unwrapped another one. 

He added this moment to the subconscious list of things he and Zim had shared. It was longer than he would admit to anyone.

“Alright,” he announced after finishing his second muffin, “snack time is over. We have work to do.”

“You have work to do,” Zim corrected as he poured himself another cup of antifreeze. “I am practically finished.”

Dib made a short sound of contempt and wiped his hands on his pants. “Care to help me, then?”

Zim regarded him with narrowed eyes from behind his cup, then hummed and set it down.

The work went quicker spread between the both of them.