(A/N: Finally back to working on this crap. Wow, I'm so proud of myself...
Prepare for a lot of explanations & sadness)
The next day...
Fudge jolted into consciousness. He'd had a nightmare about Zim, but mere seconds after waking up, he forgot all about it. Dreams were strange like that.
Then he remembered what happened to his sister and cried. Not to mention he'd already missed a day of school. Oh, boy...
He made his way downstairs at a slow pace. Every part of his body felt like it was on fire, and despite how slowly he was going, Fudge fell forward about halfway down the stairs.
He painfully tumbled to the bottom of the stairs and started crying again. It seemed like nobody heard him, but he could've sworn he saw someone or something pass by him on the floor.
He called out for help one last time before passing out once more.
...
Later, Fudge woke up in that same position. Despite his aches, he sprang to his feet and opened the front door.
It was dark outside, but Fudge was unable to determine whether it was early morning or late night.
Something was urging him to be anywhere by where he was, almost causing Fudge to panic, but he just shut the door and retreated back inside to the silence.
However, even peace and quiet can be unsettling. And in this case, it was.
To Fudge, it felt like nobody had ever lived his home. What had once been such a lively and joyful home had become barren and twisted. He hardly recognized the place after all that had happened. All that had been happening since Zim had shown up out if the blue. So many painful emotions surrounded Zim, Fudge refused to deal with it anymore. This all needed to end.
His muscles burning, he made his way to the basement and began calling for Zim, a bit surprised by how unhinged he sounded at the moment. When he heard no reply at the top of the stairs, Fudge turned on the light, held his shoulders, and began his descent.
Stumbling a bit, Fudge finally reached the cold basement floor, and looked at his surroundings for the green boy.
"Where are you, Zim?" he asked, turning around. "Where are my parents...? And Sprinkles...what did you do to him? What did you do to my sister?" Fudge could feel tears forming just from asking these questions. "What did you do to my life...?! How...who are you? WHAT are you?! Where did you come from?! Why are you doing this, WHY this?! WHY ME?! ANSWER ME, ZIM!"
And Fudge fell to his knees in hysterics. He just didn't understand anything. This didn't feel like life anymore, or at least, it feel like what Fudge's life had been. This felt like...some series of lapses between consciousness and unconscious, dreams an nightmares, or something like that!
Zim finally emerged from the shadows. Wait. Was that Zim? He looked pretty much the same, except...he had big, bug-like magenta eyes, and two antennae on his head instead of hair.
"Mission accomplished," he declared with a smirk on his green face.
"Wh...mission, what...?" Fudge babbled, trembling. "What are you?"
"Hmm," The Zim-looking creature put a finger to his chin. "I suppose it's safe for me to let you in on the whole story now..."
Fudge tensed up and tried to back away, but he felt numb all of a sudden.
"Hey!" the creature called out. "Do you want to know or don't you?"
Though hesitantly, Fudge stayed put there on the basement floor with the ceiling lamp shining down on him. It really felt like he was being put on the spot.
"Just as I thought. Now, this is a fairly lengthy explanation, so keep the interruptions to a minimum!" He paused to clear his throat. "To answer your foolish question, I AM ZIM! A member of the Irken military, an invader, sent to your planet, Earth, to scout out its weaknesses, making it vulnerable to the Irken armada's attack..."
Upon hearing this news, Fudge began to frantically look around the room, hyperventilating. Everything started to hurt again.
"Silence!" commanded Zim. "Quiet your breathing, and be still your beating heart!"
He waited for Fudge to calm down a bit before continuing.
"AS I WAS SAYING, I was chosen for this special mission because the leaders of my race, the Almighty Tallest, know of my greatness, and have the utmost confidence in me! They even trusted me with GIR, the most advanced SIR unit ever constructed!"
"That's ME!" GIR popped out of a random box, startling Fudge, as GIR appeared to be a robot rather than a green dog. Catching the glare his master sent him, GIR dived back into the box of foam peanuts and packing tape.
Zim cleared his throat again. "So after disguising ourselves as human creatures, GIR and I seamlessly blended into your society, while you all remained unaware that you were actually being invaded!"
The sentence Zim had just said made Fudge think of how Zim had suddenly become part of the Hopkins family overnight. He shuddered. Zim must have been a truly formidable invader to pull that off.
"After some time it occurred to me. Everyone at my awful school seemed to have a 'family unit'. Well, besides my teacher, but I'm unsure that she's human...SO! These 'family units' were basically groups of humans all living together. Oh, but you probably know all about that, right, Fudge-human?"
Fudge was unable to reply.
"Long story short," Zim went on. "I continued doing research and conducting experiments on the family units of this planet. How easy it would be for them all to be destroyed systemically, as all humans are connected in one way or another...SO! I took it upon my AMAZING SELF to find the perfect family to test, and some say it is easiest to destroy something from the inside!"
Fudge could tell that Zim was about to get to the really horrifying part.
"It was YOUR family, human, that was chosen as the perfect family! You were all so happy and middle class that you would make the most suitable control group for me to ANNIHILATE! With some prodding, and...pleading, I convinced the Tallest to lend me a memory altering device, which I used to change the memory of your family in the middle of night as they slept!" Zim suddenly frowned. "But perfect as I am, I still make mistakes every now and then. I got the address wrong on my first try, and a...confrontation ensued at your neighbors', the Johnsons, house. So they had to go."
Fudge was about to ask how Zim had gotten rid of them, but decided against it.
"I wasted so much time in the wrong home, I ran out of time to alter the memories of everyone here! I got your mother, your father, your sister, your cat...but not YOU. At first, I saw it as a hindrance to my plan, but it turned out it only made my victory even sweeter! For I watched as I slowly tore your your family unit apart, and watched you crumble along with it!" cackled Zim. "And while humans CAN be pretty easily conquered by their emotions, there were a few other precautions I had to take. One of them involved little, um...Spoonkles, I believe he was called."
"Sprinkles..." Fudge breathed with tears spilling gently from his eyes.
"Yes...since I couldn't get close enough to you, or trust GIR to do the job for me, so I injected 'Sprinkles' with a substance, that caused the beast to become near-feral, and I knew that if it infected you, it would render you WEAK, and unable to interfere further with my plans! What I didn't plan on was the venom to actually KILL the animal, so I had to have it hastily buried in the backyard. Then I moved on to tearing down the rest of your family, and you know how that went."
"The rest of my family...?" wheezed Fudge. "...what about my parents?"
"Oh, them. Not important," Zim replied simply. He began heading for the stairs. "Right now, I've got to get out of here. Come along, GIR, Minimoose has the Voot waiting!"
GIR popped out of a different box this time, his arms full of bubble wrap, and started following Zim out of the house.
Fudge was unable to keep his head up any longer and collapsed, succumbing to the poison in his knee.
(A/N: FWOOOO! One epilogue-like chapter to go! Thanks for reading all this so far! Kinda disjointed, isn't it? Or it feels that way to me. Like some parts of this story I REALLY like, but other parts, I...don't. What did you think?
I feel like some people are gonna go all psychoanalysis on this and deconstruct why Zim wanted to tear a perf family apart, and that's cool, but I really just wanted to write a disturbing story about Zim, sooo, IT'S NOT THAT DEEP, HONESTLY...MERP
But yeah, please review, fave, and follow, and I shall see you in the next and final chapter! More will be explained there, I promise! Au revoir!)