Disclaimer: On Christmas morning I found the rights to Invader Zim in my stocking. And Santa Claus is really Jhonen Vasquez.
I got the idea for this while reading the "Breakfast" chapter of Senri's ever shifting and always amazing Starcluster. So Senri, this one's for you. Thanks for being a Dib fan. He needs as many as he can get.
Cereal - The Real Story
Dib licked his lips on seeing the cereal box lying on the counter. Even after the weirdo he'd gotten stuck with for Career Day, the one who kept insisting Count Coco Fang was a real vampire, this was still his favorite cereal.
Hm, it sure feels light...? Dib opened the box and peered in, only to see nothing more than a couple of flakes and some dust in the bottom of the box. He clearly remembered that when he had put the box back in the cupboard the previous morning nearly half the cereal had remained, enough that Gaz could have had a bowl of it, perhaps two, for breakfast while still leaving plenty for him, easily.
Carrying the empty box, Dib walked out to the living room, where Gaz sat watching a show about a green demon standing in a fireball. On the coffee table before her a bowl was heaped with cereal, soggy and obviously forgotten. The table was covered with drops and streams of milk; this was far from the first bowl of cereal she'd poured that morning.
Dib didn't bother to keep the disgust out of his voice. "Hey, Gaz, did you eat all the cereal again?" He held the empty box upside down, shaking it to emphasize his point. "I was going to have this for breakfast, you know!"
Gaz whirled around on the couch and stared at him for a second, maybe two. "You think you own all the cereal. Well you know what Dib you don't you just don't!" Viciously she spat out the final few words in a boiling fit of self-righeous indignation.
Uh huh, Shrill and Defensive mode. Well, this wasn't anything he'd never seen before; simple assertiveness was Dib's weapon of choice when confronted with such hysterical outbursts as these. "Gaz, we talked about this already," he said calmly. "All I'm saying is if you're going to have some cereal... and half a box of it's left... just leave some for me, okay? Not all of it, just some. This cereal is here for both of us, so we both have to share."
"You don't own all the cereal Dib... !"
Dib rolled his eyes. Wherever she came up with THAT one, she was sure in love with the sound it made. "Yes, Gaz, I know I don't... and that also means YOU don't either." Not that this sensible approach ever helped much when dealing with someone THIS pathetically out of touch with reality.
Bristling at the outrageous idea that sharing was expected of her too, Gaz now flung herself into yet another semi-coherent rant about nightmares, souls, hells and assorted other things Dib didn't even bother listening to. By now he could instantly tell from the tone of her voice whether she was about to lash out in one of those tantrums anybody else grew out of at age three, and this wasn't one of those times. Gaz's wildly exaggerated idle threats were no longer even amusing, only trite; in fact, by now they were downright annoying.
Dib hadn't seriously hoped for much of an intelligent conversation anyway; constant staring into that idiotic blinking beep box called a GameSlave was enough to erode anybody's sanity. He went back to the kitchen where he stuffed the flattened box into the garbage before looking around for something else to eat.
Leaving Gaz to whatever empty threats she considered still necessary, Dib went back to his room with a glass of orange juice and a couple of poptarts she had somehow overlooked. He set his breakfast down on his desk before shutting the door,then sat down and started his computer to check up on the Swollen Eyeball Net's latest activity. At least HIS computer actually DID have a connection to somebody in the real world...
Waiting for his computer to boot up, Dib shook his head over how worked up Gaz could get over a simple request for a little consideration... she who herself acted like it was the End of the World whenever he reached for the last slice of pizza...
"Hypocrite... BITCH..." Dib muttered through a mouthful of pop-tart, and then his wallpaper came into view once again and he forgot about the whole thing.
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(A/N) I wanted to see something like that here even if only once.
That one tiny mention of cereal (it doesn't even merit the word "incident") sure gets dragged through these fics a lot but with disappointingly little variety in how it's handled. Gaz may talk a good game, but for the most part all she does in canon IS talk.
Warping Gaz into a swaggering bully who sinks to fisticuffs over idiotic trifles will not in itself make "a better story..." or indeed, any story at all. "The more the conflict, the better the story"? Only partly true. A story is actually about how the conflict finds its resolution, and (here's something those network execs never did get) underdogs make the best heroes.
Regardless of age, gender, or following, a bully is still nothing more than that... a BULLY.