I believe that a disclaimer is in order here. I do not own Invader Zim, nor do I own Ben Moody and Anastasia. I have changed a few words in the song here and there to better suit the fanfic.
"Suppose you were to die tonight. What would you say?" –Quote from Walking Dead by Z-Trip featuring Chester Bennington
Experimental Being 13: Code Name DIB
By -I will bleed for you-
He sits in his corner,
Singing himself to sleep.
It was dark. No, that wasn't a proper way to describe the swirling torrent of blackness that had settled itself amongst the quiet street. Someone who was not familiar with the area would expect the sidewalks to be lined with streetlamps, but as to anyone who was native to the dark and ominous world that they lived in, a street without any streetlamps or lights whatsoever was normal. The only light that shone throughout the whole neighborhood, besides the moonlight, was that coming from a technologically advanced looking house with a bright electric fence. Electricity sizzled and popped as it surged between the metallic posts.
Up in a window in the second story of the dwelling, a pair of brilliant tawny orbs stared off into space as if waiting for something to happen. The owner of the eyes yawned silently and then propped his head up with one hand, suddenly grateful for the light emanating from the electrical restriction around the yard. He glanced at his alarm clock, which read 2:38 PM, andthen back out of the window. He crossed his arms and laid his head down on its side, no longer able to evade sleep. On the ground below his window, hidden behind the branches of a few bushes, sat another creature.
It heard a loud clanging sound a few feet away from it in the driveway of the house and, startled, jumped out from behind its hiding place to take a defensive stance. The noise shook the boy awake too, and he leaned out his window to get a better look. Upon noticing the green-skinned creature, he let out a gasp before quickly covering his mouth with his hands and ducking out of view. He shoved his laptop, a flashlight, a pair of headphones, a notepad, and a pen into his backpack, slipped his long, black trench coat on, and snuck a glimpse out the window before quietly sneaking down to the kitchen and out the back door. Once he ran around the side of the house stealthily to catch the alien doing…whatever it was he was doing, he found that the front yard was empty except for a few red and yellow leaves still blowing in the wind.
Wrapped in all of the promises,
That no one seems to keep.
Not wanting to go back into his house to go back to sleep and not knowing what else to do, he headed in the direction of a secluded and peaceful hill the overlooked the city, where he usually went when he wanted to think or be calm.
Back in the bushes of the boy's house, the alien sat in a silent anger; the silence unusual for him but since the situation called for it, he had no choice. Next to him was a green dog with wide eyes and a zipper running along its chest. They sat in censorship for quite a while, the poorly disguised dog staring at the alien and the alien staring at the ground, until the alien shot the dog a look of annoyance.
"Aww, what's wrong master?" The dog, surprisingly, said.
A few random grunts of frustration escaped the alien before he spoke. "GIR! You were supposed to be keeping an eye on the Dib-monkey, not digging around in the trash can!"
The dog seemed as if it was thinking really hard, then replied happily, "I found me a taco!"
The alien shook his head in disbelief. "You almost gave us away! This is the perfect plan to try and destroy the Dib. I mean, of course it's the perfect plan, it was made by me! I AM ZIIIIIIIIIIM!" The dog jumped on Zim's head and slapped both its paws over his mouth.
"Shh…you can never tell anyone…" It whispered.
He no longer cries to himself,
No tears left to wash away.
"Eh? Tell anyone what?"
The dog looked as though it was considering this for a moment. "I really don't know." He plopped back down on the ground and began to eat the taco that it had rummaged out of the garbage.
The Irken pulled a strange device out of his pak and pressed a button, releasing a flame from the tip of it. He smiled sinisterly as he watched the flame dance in the wind, casting shadows on his face.
"Dib…you will stand in the way of my mission no longer…" Zim walked slowly towards the front door of the house and, as if in a trance-like state, hesitated to let the flame make contact.
Did he really want to do this? Did he really want to destroy the only being on this pitiful ball of dirt that even came close to having the intelligence that he himself possessed? Did he really want to annihilate the only human that could ever appreciate his ingenious work and efforts? Yes. Dib was a threat to the mission, his mission. He had to be destroyed. Yet Zim still felt a small pang of some emotion in his chest, and he quickly chased it away. Emotion was a weakness.
"Goodbye Dib," He stated monotonously and pushed the tip of the lighter to the wooden doorway.
As if covered in gasoline, the fire engulfed the house quickly, or at least quick enough for Zim to hear a scream emanate from deep within the fiery depths before the would-be invader stared running.
Just diaries of empty pages,
Feelings gone astray.
An owl hooted in a tree next to the cemetery gates and startled Dib, whom had seemingly forgotten about the previous danger. He weaved his way through head stones, searching for one particular name engraved on a plain, unornamented stone. His eyes came to rest on it and he gulped in his breath. All the thoughts in his mind went blank as he recalled the one image that was almost lost to him. Her face…it was so pretty. He could barely remember her, and that made him furious at himself.
Calculating his current age of fifteen and the latter date on his mother's marker, Dib concluded that it had been eight years since she had died. No one had known exactly why, or at least they hadn't let on that they did whenever Dib questioned an adult about it at her funeral. They would tell him to run along or that they'd tell him later. He was so young then, but not stupid. Oh, so young…and so innocent, as was Gaz. Nothing clouding their childish minds besides the occasional fight over who got the last soda in the fridge, or who got to control the remote.
His mother had told Dib to believe in whatever he felt was right, and not to let anyone tell him different. It was her who had given him his trench coat. It was her who had emphasized onto his sister that she be nicer to her brother. It was her who has kept their family together. And it was her death that had torn them apart.
Gaz had felt that it was her father's fault, since she had always looked up to him and had thought that he could do anything. That pretense fell away about a month afterwards, and though she was still close to him, she had never forgiven him for not trying to do something about it.
But he will sing,
A tear slid down Dib's cheek before he could realize it and wipe it away. He lay down next to the grave and stared into the nighttime sky. The stars twinkled their usual greeting as he smiled and felt at peace for a moment. That feeling vanished when memories surfaced, memories of things that had came from that sky, beings that had come to destroy his home. Protests about the beings that had gotten him laughed at and humiliated time and time again. And a realization hit him hard like a blow to the groin, and perhaps just as painful. No one cared about him. And no one ever would.
The tears began to flood down his cheeks rapidly. He suddenly wished that some alien spacecraft would come down and abduct him right then. He wouldn't care if they conducted horribly painful experiments on him, or anally probed him. Anything would be better than the daily Hell he was put through at home and at school.
He was never really a religious person, but the night before his fifteenth birthday, he had prayed to God. He had told him that he was ready to go. All the grievances and sins, all the conflicts that plagued the world: he had told God that he wanted to leave all of that behind him and go to someplace beyond all of that. But God didn't hear him and left him here.
A blood curdling scream pierced through the cool air and Dib sat straight up, a chill shivering itself down his spine. Somewhere in the distance to his left was where the scream was concentrated, and it was held out for a few moments. Almost as if the person releasing it was being tortured painfully slow.
Everything burns, everyone screams.
Burning their lies, burning my dreams.
In one fluid movement, he jumped off of the ground and slung his backpack against his shoulder, bolting past head stones as he made his way out of the necropolis. Smoke was wafting slowly up towards the heavens as his boots skidded to a halt on the sidewalk. He didn't admire the direction that the smoke was in. He started sprinting down the sidewalk in a desperate attempt to go as fast as he could.
He was approaching the fire, coming within four blocks of it, when he heard footsteps pounding against the concrete ahead of him. They didn't appear to be slowing down any, and then something crashed into him, knocking him backwards.
Wincing, Dib shut his eyes then opened them, staring straight into the magenta eyes of his enemy. For a moment, confusion plainly swept the alien's features, and then he continued to run along in his way, even faster than before. The grounded boy stood back up and dusted himself off, muttering something to himself.
When he reached the source of the billowing smoke, his heart fell. He had never wanted anything more in his life than to be wanted and loved, and he hated how he was mistreated by his family. But nothing they would've done to him would've made him wish for this. No matter how much he had been beaten or ignored and labeled insane. His backpack fell to the ground with a dull thud.
Before his eyes, everything that he had known was lying on the charred grass in ashes. The place that he had called home, where he had spent nights upon nights sitting up and crying about his horrible and depressing life. Gone. Something between a cough and a gag forced itself up his throat as he pictured a dark, fourteen-year-old girl with purple hair. Scenes played out in his head like an old movie. She had beaten him down, she had tortured him to the point of insanity, and he had still loved her. He always stood up for her, yet she had torn his self esteem down until it was no longer existent.
All of this faith, and all of my pain.
Burn it all down, cause my anger reigns.
Then a tall man in a long, white lab coat appeared in his mind, with eyes that were hidden behind a pair of goggles. The relationship between him and his father was different somehow. Professor Membrane had never treated his son as a human, but more like some hideously altered experiment that had gone wrong. He had humiliated him in front of world leaders, labeled him as mentally insane, and ignored his attempts at trying to impress him, and Dib hated him. He hated him more than he could fathom.
He took a few steps forward and slumped down in front of the ashes, the electrical fence disabled. Sirens sounded off in the distance and a light was on in the house next door to the pile of ashes and debris. An elderly woman poked her head out of the door of the house, squinting in the dark at the black-haired boy who was kneeling in the soot. A fire truck drove rapidly down the street towards the remains of the fire, followed closely by a police car. Both stopped in the road. Realizing that they were too late, a fireman walked slowly out towards the boy.
"Did you live here, boy?" The man asked, gazing down at him with a fake concern that everyone in this world seemed to have.
His head moved slightly up and down, not even bothering to look at who had inquired the question.
A group of firemen and a few police officers wandered around the rubble, searching for the cause of the fire.
"Were there people inside?" The man questioned again.
Walking through life unnoticed,
Knowing that no one cares.
Dib wished that the man would just shut up and leave him to his misery. As if in a trance, Dib turned his head to the man and let the tears speak for themselves.
Not knowing when to stop, the man insisted, "We need to get you an ambulance. You might be injured."
"I'm not hurt." His voice was strangely stable even though he was crying.
"You might be, so we need to call an ambulance."
"I'm NOT hurt!" Dib yelled.
The man eyed him from over his shoulder as he walked back over to the fire truck, and a police officer approached him.
"Do you have any ideas as to what the cause of the fire might have been, young man?" He asked as he held a pencil poised over a pad of paper.
"It was Zim," The words put a bitter taste in his mouth, pulling back numerous remembrances about times he had tried to prove that there was more to life than just living.
"Who is Zim?"
"Zim is…" He paused, not wanting to continue. "Zim is…an alien."
"I-I'm sorry, who is he?" The officer asked again.
Dib looked in his eyes. They were moist and not in the least bit threatening and enforcing.
To consume and then masquerade,
But no one sees him there.
"Sir," A nervous, younger, lower ranking officer ran up to the one interrogating Dib and handed him a paper.
"Hmm…Well, it looks like this fire was started by a short circuit in the electrical fence that was running along the perimeter of the area." He motioned to the tall, metal posts.
"NO! That's NOT what happened! It had to have been Zi-…This kid from my class must've lit a match and-"
"Look kid, that's what the analysis says. You can't argue with the data!" He smacked the papers in his hand, turned, and walked away swiftly, with the younger officer in tow.
"It's not fair…"
"What's not fair"
"This! Everything! Nothing!"
"That doesn't make sense. How can everything and nothing be unfair at the same time?"
He sobbed and got back down on his knees
"I'm going crazy…Maybe I am insane. Maybe I always have been. Maybe everyone was right. Maybe dad was…"
" No, you're not insane. You're just in a state of panic right now. It's understandable".
And still he sings…
"I'm talking to myself. How is that not insanity?"
He began to rock back and forth, cradling his head in his arms as he watched the firemen and police officers rummage through the soot. The wind began to blow again and some ashes blew up in his eyes. He rubbed them out and felt something brush up against his cheek. A picture, torn and faded, fell into the boy's lap, and he picked it up with both hands gripping the edges tightly.
A beautiful face smiled out at him, with long, purple hair cascading down around her shoulders. Next to the woman stood a man in a long, white lab coat and goggles, with his arm wrapped around the skinny woman's waist. A young girl whose hair reflected a shorter version of the older woman's stood at the man's feet with a scowl on her face. And there he was, just tall enough to be eye-level to his mother's thighs. He was the only one besides his mother who was smiling.
He flipped the picture over. Sloppy cursive writing was in the upper left-hand corner. He recognized his mother's, sister's, and father's names scrawled in one group, but no where near it did he see his. His eyes searched frantically for his name until finally coming to rest on; not his name; but a title that was shocking.
Experimental Being 13, Code name DIB.
Experimental Being 13? Just what exactly did that mean? It couldn't possibly be...
A while back, he had run across some data while accidentally hacked into his father's database that had said something about an experimental being with the code label DIB, but he had thought nothing of it.
Now he knew. Now he realized. He wasn't human at all, or at least he wasn't related to anyone in Membrane family. It felt as if a ton of bricks had landed on his stomach as red lights flashed around in his vision.
Everything burns, everyone screams,
Burning their lies, burning my dreams.
After being examined in the back of the ambulance, the being was lifted back to the ground and left in the dust, all alone because he didn't have any other relatives. And the people that were supposed to help him didn't. They had just left him here after making sure that any burning embers were put out. They left him here! Of course, he wasn't really homeless. How could an experiment be homeless? An experiment was an object, not a human being. Only human beings had homes, and feelings, and regrets, and sorrows.
Digging through the ashes for one last reminiscent moment, he found the one thing that he had treasured over the years since he had discovered it. The object that had given him his scars. It glared in the darkness and the moonlight reflected off of his glasses in an almost angelic way. He would end it. He would end it all. And his end would seek out to destroy the one who had ruined him in just an hour's time. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, and ever so slowly.
He raised the object, which overpowered the beauty of the night with its gleam, and brought it straight down on his chest. Pain shot through his body as the blood began to pour out of his wound. No one can save me now.
He fell with a thud, almost like a corpse falling into a coffin. That's what he was. A corpse. And this world was a coffin; his soul just hadn't been freed yet. No, He told himself as he cried away the pain. You're an experiment, you don't have a soul.
Blood gushed out of his chest, and he rolled over on his side to cough up some more blood. His breathing became more rapid, and he could barely lift his head to take one last glimpse of the moonlight. And yet he was still crying, pouring out the tears and the vital crimson fluid, a regret that had so delicately connected him to the subsisting world. But isn't that how everything is? Everything just ends in regret, no matter how great the story or the person.
He gasped, a breath that would gladly be his last, and his eyes closed hesitantly.
All of this faith and all of my pain.
Burn it all down, cause my anger reigns.
Now you will begin you life anew, you shall live eternally either in Heaven or in Hell at peace with yourself and the world.
"Didn't I die though?" His voice resounded through the vast space of emptiness.
Don't you believe in life after death? There is no such thing as death, there is only physical change.
"So what's next for me?"
A choice. Why did you die?
Dib's mind pondered this for a moment. "I stabbed myself because I was tired of life."
Then your choice has already been made. Your path leads to suffering and cruelties.
"…I'm going to Hell?"
You chose this fate. Now you must face the consequences. And Dib, people do care.
Let me know what you think. Read and review.