Chapter Eight – Darkest

He'd been doing a lot of typing. GIR had worn his hands down to stubs scratching at the wall and had then replaced them from the box of spares. How he had done this without any hands was somewhat perplexing, or it would have been if Zim was in any right mind to be perplexed.

Typing, typing. That was the thing. The scratching and whimpering had been slightly distracting, and he'd been a long while without food, and at one point he'd heard someone sobbing obnoxiously, which threw off his rhythm, then he realized that it was him, so he stopped. It had been quiet since then. He'd typed quite a lot. Yes, it was good.

Magnificent. Zim had always known that he'd be the salvation of his Empire. Maybe the greatest Irken ever to live. Not greater than the Almighty Tallest, of course, they were really amazing, never that great. Except...

Maybe he was greater than the Almighty Tallest.

Another page finished. That was over two hundred so far. He was just getting started. So much planning to do, so, so many problems to fix... How had his glorious Empire ever survived this long? It was all going to take so much time and effort to fix. But he would fix it, yes. Whatever else they said about him (and, for the first time in his life, he was beginning to truly understand exactly what it was they did say about him) no one could accuse him of idleness in the face of his duty.

Truly he never ceased to amaze himself. Although those words were more than a little hollow now. The seemingly endless depths to his own stupidity and dependence on his foolhardy delusions. So very, very, sad. Strange that the Human larva had been the one to break through the thick armoured wall of his ego, clearing the fog and letting him see, let him see... everything. Oh, such things he could see.

But after all those years trying to destroy him, to defeat and undo him, perhaps it made perfect sense that Dib had, in fact, managed to do just that. He'd have to do something about him, eventually. Tak, too. He would not allow any risk to himself, any risk to his work.

Claws blurred until they ached and he ignored them. Words poured out from dark corners of his mind, synapses that had been forgotten and all but severed now crackled and hummed. After waiting and biding for a lifetime sleek shapes uncoiled from their hides and crept forward, already whispering to Zim and to each other. They had been watching. They had endured. And they had made plans.

Words on the screen.

*

The room was empty, with a layer of dust and a collection of long-since abandoned snack wrappers. An observer could easily assume that the old maintenance workers had vacated their office with a great deal of haste, pursued by the devil himself. It would be pretty accurate.

She wiped some of the grey sheen off the desk and delicately detached a large panel. Wires and boxes and glowing, buzzing metal innards. Smashing them would be rash and dangerous and oh so very satisfying.

The eternal conundrum of the invader; destroy in a razing fury, or tease apart beautifully from the inside out. After a moment of wonderful anticipation, she chose the former. There was a moment of red, sparking poetry, and then she sat back and waited. For Dib, and an ending.

*

The words vanished.

Thoughts screeched and flailed, cut off from their anchor, then regrouped. He was suspended in darkness, if not for the feel of the keys under his fingers the world could have ceased to exist.

"GIR! Make some light or something!"

"Yes, my master!"

A red glow pushed against the black. Zim turned around slowly, scanning the room. Finding no obvious cause for the blackout, he walked towards the saluting robot. Kneeling on the floor, he rested his head against the cold metal and closed his eyes.

A throbbing, a dull vibration.

"The engines are still operational, so the power cut must be localised to this section. I tried to explain to those drones just how poor their techniques were. Why must they all stay clothed in their ignorance?"

The light faded into a pale green. "They should be naked instead, master!"

"Indeed. Still, I am sure that eventually they will stumble upon their mistake and correct it, and I can get back to marching the Empire forward into a new dawn of world-exploding might!"

"And I can be the king of the angry turtle people! Fear my pointy shell!"

Sighing, "GIR, could you please go back to being an intelligent and helpful servant until the lights go back on?"

"Your servant is in another castle master!"

"Be quiet."

Zim leaned resignedly against the wall. GIR's light waxed and waned softly, and his breath started to flow in synch with it unconsciously. The furthest corners of the room remained dark, and where the glow ended and the shadows began small movements caught in the corner of his eyes. The lights would soon return and banish them.

The old Zim had been brash and hasty, but the new Zim could be patient.

He glanced down. "So, GIR... What are you doing these days?"

The machine returned a crooked grin. "Have you seen ma ketchup?"

"Uh-huh." He drummed his claws against the wall.

GIR began to murmur a familiar melody, and soon enough had launched into a reprise of that great lyrical triumph; The Doom Song.

Zim straitened up, "I have been sufficiently patient! If these morons are incapable of fixing the power, Zim is forced to do it himself!"

He stormed out of the office and into the hallway, dragging his musical sidekick with him.

Through the dark hallways, and only the faint emergency lights to show the way. He misplaced himself a few times, but soon enough the doors to the maintenance room appeared out of the black. Without power, jammed shut.

"GIR! Open the doors!"

"Yes sir!" Robotic claws tried and failed to find purchase in the seam between the two doors. The scrabbling and grunting dissolved into a tapping dance and a gloomy, melancholic cover of his favourite song. Red light to green.

Zim pushed passed him with a hiss and extended PAK legs to scratch at the sliver between the metal sheets. Gritting his teeth, he stabbed into the gap, caught it with one spike, then another. Using the other two to brace himself in the cramped hall he strained and heaved.

The metal crumpled, squealed, then parted with a screeching of tortured mechanisms. Panting, Zim slumped to the floor and gazed blankly into the room beyond.

"Pah, empty?! Lazy creatures, abandoning their post! Such treachery to their Empire! I shall report them to the Tallest in my next... oh. I shall commit this transgression to memory for later reporting!"

It wasn't dark. A small portable lamp was lying on the floor, knocked askew. A few eviscerated cables hung from an opened panel set into a raised desk. A vent fixed into the wall exhaled softly. The room felt untouched, everything neglected and dusty, but there were footprints set in the grime. Zim got to his feet and followed them in. Righting the light, he held it up and surveyed the room.

Nothing was moving but GIR, drawing smiley faces in the dust.

Above him, a soft metallic clicking

He walked towards the gutted panel and examined it, toying with the shredded cables. Beyond repair, he disconnected them and carried them, limp and lifeless, to a hatch in the wall. Hauling it open, he deposited the ruined innards into the void beyond, to fall and be sucked out through the airlock, into space. Whatever irrelevant had broken it, they hadn't bothered to unplug the main feed. Zim unplugged it himself, having no real desire to be electrified in the midst of his charitable endeavour. Opening one of the abandoned boxes he gathered replacements and went to thread them into the gaping wound.

GIR pulled a piece of candy out of his skull and popped it, wrapper and all, into his mouth. He looked towards his master, who was being orbited by several yodelling toasters, as usual. Although the toasters were looking a little more nervous than usual just recently.

Master hissed and cursed under his breath, walking around the room, aggressively pulling apart, locking together and occasionally kicking various devices around the room. GIR followed his progress, floating in the blank apathy before some random circuitry would fire and hurtle his mind down a new avenue of excitement and chaos and brightly coloured meat. He heard a quiet, silver sound, like a tuning fork in a squirrel's eye. He looked up, towards the pretty sound.

"Hiiiiiiii Tak! Wotchu doin' up there? Did you bring waffles? I like waffles!"

"GIR! I'm trying to work here and you and your noisy-" He blinked. Things were sinking in a little better now, through the cracks. "What did you say?"

No answer. He turned. The room was distinctly free of GIR. His antenna bristled on his head. He backed slowly into the nearest corner and cast his eyes wildly around the room.

"Tak?"

He took a step forward, black boot sounding too loud on the ground.

"Tak?"

GIR's plummeting form hit him hard on the back of the head. Zim fell forward, catching himself on his palms and spinning to glare at the robot. Through his churning vision he tried to focus on GIR, readying some harsh words which evaporated before they could leave his mouth. A scrap of dark fabric gagged the metal mouth shut, and in normal circumstances this would be a rather pleasant turn of events. Light stuttered red and green. He reached down to pull at the material, grasping at air through the double vision.

A hand snatched his and moved it firmly down. Through the clearing fuzz he looked up into Tak's eyes. She stared at him, cold and still and empty.

"You are not supposed to be here."

Zim narrowed his eyes at her, and snatched his hand away. Bracing his hands on the floor he pushed himself to his feet.

Tak pushed him hard. Falling back to the ground, he skidded across the floor and thudded against the wall.

"You are not supposed to be here."

He stood, leaning hard against the wall, growling fiercely.

"Has Zim upset your carefully laid plans, Tak? It seems to be a persistent flaw in your character."

Tak's eyes stabbed at him. She kicked his muted sidekick away, and stalked across the floor towards Zim. The edge of her shirt was torn; it's colour matched the gag GIR was wrestling with.

She stopped just out of his immediate reach. Tilting her head, she stared down at him as haughtily as her slight height advantage would allow.

"You should be dead by now. Or mortally wounded. How disappointing."

Zim twitched his claws and resisted the urge to break eye contact and re-appraise the room for threat. Instead he met her smug look with one of his own.

"Disappointing indeed, Tak. Cutting the power? I expected so much more."

She tilted her head at him, "I wouldn't relax if I were you, Zim. This is one mission you will not ruin for me." Her voice was calm, steady.

Zim chuckled.

Tak gave him a quizzical look, "something about all this amuses you?"

He opened his eyes and grinned up at her, "it is most interesting to see such foolishness from the other side." He started to laugh again, shoulders shaking with the effort.

"I see," Tak said, and Zim knew she really didn't. She seemed to shake herself and straightened up, softening her gaze with visible effort.

"Well I guess you get to live another day, Zim. Truly my plans are foiled. Now I suppose you'll take your SIR unit and go back to your quarters, leaving me to my mourning."

The lamplight glanced off GIR as he struggled with the tightly knotted cloth. It cast Tak's shadow against the wall, where Zim's caught and swallowed it.

"No, Tak, I don't think I will. I think that your plan isn't quite ruined yet, and you believe that if you can get me back to my office, and quickly, then you might yet succeed." He watched her eyes go wide, "you are, naturally, wrong. I guess I've beaten you yet again. It must be getting boring."

Zim felt the attack before his eyes had time to register. His left side jolted and he felt himself tumbling through the air, and his back protested loudly as he crashed down.

He slammed into the lamp and felt something crack, and the room snapped rudely into darkness.

Two mouths panted weakly in the dark. There was the sound of small shards of debris shifting as the smaller Irken silhouette moved. The room was dimly lit by an angry red glow as a metal hand found purchase on a splintered shard and sliced into the gag, but Tak's gaze never left Zim. She watched him turn to look at her, bleeding just a little as he picked the pieces of glass from his flesh.

"I understand, Tak. I know why you despise me. Because I am, or I was a broken and pathetic creature, with no more right to be called an Irken than the Dib-monkey. Defective. But no longer. Now, oh, now I am something so much greater. Something the Empire needs. Now I can see."

Tak didn't seem able to looks away. Eventually she blinked and shivered violently, and Zim smiled.

"You, Zim... the Empire has no need for you. And it never will. Defective. Always defective. And you can't change that, Zim, no matter how you've deluded yourself. And this... whatever this," she gestured towards the eerie figure, "is, it's just another defect."

"Hah, oh Tak. You can't possibly begin to understand what I can accomplish. I have been wasted long enough. Don't you see? The defect is with the Empire. It needs to be corrected. That is my true mission. It always has been."

Still that smile in the red light, and Tak not sure whether to be horrified or in hysterics.

"You can't be serious. Even you can't truly be so monumentally foolish. Even if you had the skills, the intellect, the resources and the support to do anything of the sort, the Tallest would never allow it. Never."

He looked at her head tilted in contemplation.

"Well then, regrettably, the Tallest would have to go."

She looked at him, sure, sure, that she must have imagined it, and understood.

He meant it.

And the risk of being exiled, or executed, and living and dying with the shame of actually being punished for ridding the universe of Zim didn't matter. He meant it.

Slowly she crouched to the ground and tensed, still looking into the fires in those eyes.

"For the good of the Empire."

She lunged, red and indigo and sparking silver. Zim leapt on metal legs and felt the crest of his skull brush the ceiling. Tak recovered and threw herself upwards in barely a second, and he pushed hard against the wall and propelled himself clumsily to the floor, crashing in a tangle of limbs mechanical and flesh.

Not a moment to breathe, she would not allow him the slightest chance to mount a defence. Dashing forward, she stabbed down brutally again and again at him as he scrambled and crawled away. He backed into the wall and threw his body to one side, but she caught a pair of his spidery PAK legs in hers and heaved him up, grasping his head in her hands and squeezing, squeezing until it seemed that his thoughts themselves became compressed and warped.

With a small animal noise he spat at her, blood blossoming against her cheek as she flinched and recoiled. He twisted and retracted the PAK legs, dropping from her grip and landing unsteadily on the floor, but not falling. Not falling.

He expected a scream of rage or some barked insult, but she manoeuvred away from the wall and regrouped a little away from him with great economy of movement and controlled, careful breathing. True military training honed to near-perfection in her every move. He couldn't match it.

He feinted forward, leaping backwards at the last moment to strike, silver darting. She ducked under the strands and tackled him, trying to get a grip on his neck. Wriggling, he clawed at her eyes and caught her a deep scratch just above the right, blood pooling in and around the her vision, and in the second she took to wipe it away he twisted her other arm and stumbled out of her grip.

But she had only superficial wounds; Zim's head was beginning to throb again and somewhere his exoskeleton was cracked, and being tossed about like a rag doll hadn't helped. Sensing movement behind him he jumped forward, wincing, and climbed onto the console. He reached down for the discarded panel cover and pulled it up in time to batter away Tak's latest assault, then rolled over onto his back and extended his PAK legs to lash back at her.

With blurring speed she dodged, ripped the panel from his unready hands and impaled it on the metal claws, driving it down to the base and the twisting sharply, and they tore and fell limp. With only the right set left he struck, desperately trying to run her through, and she picked up a hefty wrench from the toolbox and swatted them aside before pinning them in her own and battering them over and over, until they gave with a sickening high crunching sound. Panting, she dropped the remains and leaned over him, grabbing his face again, but not crushing this time. The cables and circuitry of the console jabbed into his back. Through the blood her eyes looked dull.

"For the... good... of... the em... pire..."

In the corner of his eye, Zim saw her raising those terrible blades to delivery the final, killing blow. He saw them descending, so fast, so fast.

And, for the last time, he smiled.

"GIR! Reconnect the primary power feed!"

Red light.

"Yes sir!"

Her eyes lit up then, wide and comprehending, and as Zim writhed from her suddenly lax grip she tried to stop the killing blow, but it was going too fast, too fast.

Talons plunged down and for the second time that night the naked wires were sliced and rent, bleeding electricity out into the cold, slender, and above all metalic legs of their aggressor.

Light flooded the room and flew in spirals from the shaking figure, and the legs tore loose as it thrashed and wailed. Charred, it fell against the wall, whimpering, and looked up at him.

Grasping it by the heated metal, he heaved it roughly from where it lay, and dragged it across to a hatch set into the wall. Spying the destination, the thing let out some rasping, stuttered protest, which faded away as it tumbled down the shaft and into the dark. The last thing it heard was the high pitched voice of the little robot, singing merrily.

And in the room there was a moment of quiet.

Zim stepped back and sealed the hatch. Turning away, he felt something brush against his boot, and bent down to retrieve the small disc. He turned it over and over in his grasp, eyes went wide for a moment, then placed it in the storage section of his PAK. It would be useful.

Deep in the much-maligned console some important sparking thing sputtered and frazzled before exploding, quietly, and the room fell once more into cloying darkness.

"GIR! You broke it!"

Author's Note: we're almost done, just a wee bit further.

(edit: tidied up a bit, so with any luck everything is a bit clearer now. Thanks to Tazer42 for pointing out a problem with the who-did-what-where.)