Here we go with Chapter 10! I'm glad you all made it through the last section – hopefully this one will be a tad more interesting. Also, if you left a review and I didn't personally respond to it, I'm sorry for my negligence – time's a little tight around here and I'm a bit scatterbrained. Just know that I love every single review I've gotten like my own wormbaby.
Chapter 10: The Void
There are a few ways to regain consciousness. You can be thrust, snapped, shaken awake with a sudden and violent fury. This sort of waking jars the mind as if had been struck with a battering ram and throws thoughts into a meaningless jumble, difficult to sort out again.
Failing that, there are slower ways of coming to. For example, the kind that begins far back in the medulla. You are breathing, it says. Your heart beats, it says. A conveyer belt of memories from the first sentient thought are brought to the forefront with agonizing slowness, and the waker must wait patiently to be brought to speed.
Dib's awakening fell somewhere between these.
For a long time he forgot that he had a body. His thoughts were the only thing that existed, floating in and out of his mind like garbage in the surf. Slowly, he found his fingers. He felt them twitch at the end of his arms which ached softly as if he'd been holding up a pair of binoculars for too long. His toes curled against his feet and it bothered him how small and fused the bones were.
Dib tried to kick. He touched nothing. Instead he felt a bubbly sliminess against his skin as he moved. Before long the dampness became background noise and he found he couldn't feel that, either.
He opened and closed his eyes several times before realizing there was nothing to see. A void of black stretched out in all directions (or it could have only been a few feet - there was no light or color to help him reference).
Nice going, genius. Looks like you're dead.
Somehow this didn't seem quite right. He couldn't be dead. Dib felt around with half-numb fingers until he touched his face, found the metallic hinge on the side of his glasses. He rubbed at the zipper on the top of his collar. Probably any sort of afterlife wouldn't let him keep his clothes.
Besides, he could still hear his heart beating. The rhythmic thump was the only sound that penetrated his total darkness. Did it count as a sound if he heard it reverberating inside his head? Either way, your heart didn't beat when you were dead. Didn't have to be a rocket surgeon to know that.
Fine. You've gone insane, then. Because this place doesn't make any freaking sense.
Dib wrapped around this explanation a little more readily. He realized it was a point of absolute rock-bottom when he felt comfortable with his own unraveling mind. Maybe this place was just a holding pen for his consciousness until his higher senses could sort things out. Maybe Gaz's kidnapping and Zim's revenge had made him go catatonic...
Gaz! How could he have forgotten about her! Zim could be torturing his sister right now and all he could do was ponder his sanity? He thrashed about in the vacuum, mostly in an attempt to find some physical outlet for his burning guilt at letting Gaz slip from his mind. After all, there didn't seem to be any escaping from this place. When his flailing amounted to nothing Dib curled in on himself, brooding over his failed rescue and current uselessness.
He rolled ideas around idly like a bored child with a ball. There were times when he would have fought the Shadowhog again just for a moment of quiet calmness in which to think, but he soon found that his thoughts screamed overbearingly without any stimuli to distract him.
The nothingness began to creep in, barely noticeable. His fingers went numb with nothing to touch. His ears rung and then buzzed and then felt clogged with cotton in the silence. It became pointless to move his eyes at all because there was only blackness, and after a while he had to concentrate to figure out if they were open or not. Dib lost track of his body, until he was just a mind in the void.
The void was a frightening place.
At first it was just memories. Things Dib hadn't thought about in years came bubbling to the surface and he relived every second with vibrant detail.
He remembered being six years old and staying home sick with Gaz. They were curled up under a blanket together while Mysterious Mysteries blared on the T.V. Holding a tissue up to his little sister's nose, he told her sternly to "blow!" and was rewarded with a damp handful of snot. He threw the tissue onto the coffee table where it bolstered the already considerable pile.
He remembered being nine, and falling off the roof while trying to follow a UFO with his binoculars. Professor Membrane had found him crumpled on the lawn. Being carried gently back into the house, Dib had been surprised at how fast and thunderous his father's heartbeat sounded as he leaned his head against his chest. The doctors shaved his head to work on the concussion, and for weeks afterward he'd panicked whenever he looked in a mirror and didn't see the scythe of black hair waving above his forehead.
He remembered being twelve, two weeks after receiving his medal for exposing Zim's world domination plot and two days after Gretchen got her braces off. Kicking around on the playground, still sore and ill and distracted by the whole saving-the-world business, Dib hadn't seen her approach him on the swings.
"Dib, I really like you a lot," she'd said.
"...thanks?" He'd tried, not entirely sure what to make of it. Maybe Gretchen had anticipated his confusion, because she leaned over and kissed him on the temple. He still thought she looked pretty cute when she put her hair down.
Eventually Dib ran out of memories. Either that, or re-watching Zim be cut to pieces and re-discovering the fileted body in the woods was too much for his fragile mind. With no more raw material to work with, his brain had to start making things up.
He flew Tak's ship through the Andromeda galaxy. He lived in a cottage by Loch Ness. He battled his way across a post-apocalyptic desert, fighting dinosaurs all the way. Dib lived a thousand lifetimes while curled up in the fetal position in a cell devoid of stimuli.
It became harder and hard to separate one idea from another. Thoughts came and went too fast for his mind to follow, hours upon hours (or so it seemed). Not a single one stayed for more than a second or two before spiraling into nothingness and being replaced. Each thought became everything, defining the entirety of his existence, but they slipped through his clawing mental fingers and left him abandoned and alone and nothing.
His brain would have gone to sewage if it had lasted much longer. Neurons firing like gunshot until too much heat and too little ammo rattled them into atrophy. Dib was fortunate to be interrupted.
Well, not that fortunate.
Light entered into his prison. It scorched his eyes; the first sunrise across a primordial sea. The fabric of space and time began to stretch around him, faster and faster into a great cascade as if he were running through a waterfall. The void slid away with a scraping agony. It was what he imagined birth must be like. And then he was coughing and sputtering in a puddle of fluid on the floor.
Dib tried to pull himself up, but his body was too heavy. Gravity felt like stones pressing on each of his joints. The world was nothing but sounds too deafening to make out and lights that he was sure would blind him. He wanted to go back to the darkness, back to the nothing that was at least safe and quiet. It might have been insanity, but it wasn't pain.
"Wake up, filthbeast! I have spent quite enough time waiting."
The voice crunched against his eardrums. A voice Dib hadn't heard so close in over five years - barring his nightmares, of course. The Hunter screamed at him and he managed to roll himself over onto his back, opening his eyes to face the enemy that had been crafted by the universe especially for him.
Zim was crouched over him. His four biomechanical legs crinkled stiffly beneath, holding the tiny alien right at Dib's eye level. The Irken wasn't unchanged - there was a jagged scar where his left eye had been shoddily excised, and the one that remained glowed with a dusty, muted pink. His pale green skin bore pockmarks from countless needle-jabs and biopsies. Instead of the pink tunic he used to wear, Zim had wrapped himself in the ragged remains of a thin brown coat, likely stolen off of one of his victims. One of his antenna had been torn clean off, while the other seemed to have been stripped halfway like a wire.
To an untrained eye Zim looked damaged. Dib knew better. He saw how the smug grimace on Zim's craggy mouth clashed with the seething hatred in the Irken's intense magenta eye. It was an expression that foreshadowed destruction and ruin, all focused on Dib as he inched himself millimeter by millimeter away on the damp floor. The alien followed his every motion, always above him, legs shifting ever so slightly so that his quarry was never more than a few inches away.
Dib could have reached up and struck Zim across the face if he'd had the strength for it. Instead he coughed up a mouthful of liquid and finally sputtered out:
"Where's Gaz?" his words sounded anemic.
"Aha! The Dib can speak! I had some concern that the isolation chamber would have rotted his INFERIOR brain," the alien shrieked, throwing spittle in Dib's face and predictably ignoring his question. Insults Dib could deal with - even his father thought he was insane - but Zim's green insectoid body so close to him proved maddening.
"Get out of my face. I can hear you fine, you lunatic. Now where is Gaz?" Dib repeated, his voice a little stronger now. The warmth seemed to be slowly returning to his muscles, but he tried to stay low and still so that Zim wouldn't realize it.
"Your sibling is being detained. Do not worry - I wouldn't dream of letting her expire without you here to witness it, pigdog." Zim quivered almost gleefully from atop his steel stilts, wallowing in the slack-jawed expression of disgust Dib felt creeping across his face.
Nice going, Membrane. You couldn't keep her safe and now Zim's going to torture both of you to death. Dad should have made your middle name "Screwup."
"Shut it! This is your fault just as much as mine," Dib hissed softly. He was in enough trouble without his inner monologue reminding him. Gaz was in enough trouble.
"My fault? NONE OF THIS IS ZIM'S FAULT." With a blurring lurch of motion, Zim leaned forward on his Pak legs and slapped Dib full-on across the face. Three tiny claws raked furrows on his cheek. "This is all because of YOUR VILE SCHEMING. It was you who sabotaged the mission, Dib! It was you who had me gutted like a Gungan on Feasting Day! Any misery that may befall you on my behalf is simply a result of your own treachery!"
Dib probably should have listened to Zim's screaming. He probably should have been bothered by the blood dribbling down his face. Instead he only noticed that the force of the strike was so great that it dislodged something from Zim's sleeve which fell clattering to the ground.
One magenta and two amber eyes locked simultaneously on the little object, in the first motion of unity that Dib could remember. He was closer to the ground and managed to snatch it before Zim - though the Irken's effort seemed admittedly half-hearted. Opening his fist, Dib stared down at a computer chip about the size of a postage stamp. The chip was coated in something sticky and grey that left chunks of itself on his fingers.
"What is this?" Dib demanded.
Zim threw his head back and laughed coldly at the question, fists clenched, jagged teeth shaking in the malformed skull. His laugh came so loud and sudden that Dib spasmed childishly at the sound, only summoning more mirthless giggles from the alien.
"You are in no place to ask questions. Whatever knowledge you have gained of my plan is purely by Zim's own-"
"We took it outta your brain!" the high-pitched drawl snapped Zim's rant cleanly in two. Dib twisted to see where GIR's voice was coming from, for the first time breaking his focused from the alien crouched over him.
The room looked to have been created - it was much larger than any of the individual cells, and broken-off floors jutted from the walls as if Zim had vaporized four small rooms to create a new, larger one. They were still in the Crazy House, at least. Great coiling wires and robotic hoses were draped over three-quarters of the decayed surfaces, running in and out of the room through holes in the walls and half-open doors.
GIR had propped himself up against a radiator a few feet away from them. With mechanical efficiency, Zim pivoted on a Pak leg and backhanded the little android across his metallic face. Dib wasn't sure if robots could feel pain, but something about GIR's shuddered writhing on the ground indicated that he hadn't liked it.
"What the hell is he talking about? Where did this come from?" Dib tightened his grip around the chip, feeling the sharp corners dig into his palms and enjoying the soft crackle of the plastic. Something to cling to in this place where there seemed to be only danger and destruction.
Zim turned his attention back to the teenager curled beneath him, stalks clicking against the floor, his real arms crossed smugly across his chest. Dib realized that the alien was proud of something.
"I installed that tracking device in your cortex. I knew you would try to come after me and I wanted to make sure I could keep tabs on you, Dib-filth. It is no wonder that your species survives so poorly away from the coddling of civilization - that state of 'sleep' leaves humans extremely vulnerable." Zim said, lips curled back in some toothy mockery of a grin.
For a moment Dib convinced himself that Zim was lying. He ran one hand through his hair, feeling his temples, trying to find an incision or scab marking where something might have been implanted. Of course, Zim hadn't made an incision on anybody six years ago, when he'd spent a day stealing and replacing the organs of their schoolmates. No reason to think he'd leave a mark now.
For an instant his mind flew to the video saved at home at his computer, a thousand miles away, showing the figure standing over him as he slept. The flash of purple light. That must have been when Zim had done it.
Dib looked down at the chip, gummed up with pieces of brown-grey goo that could have only been bits brain and blood. His brain and blood. The chip in his hand was ground to powder as he clenched his fist around it, blood leaking from his ragged fingernails.
There had been a piece of alien technology inside of him. In his brain. The thought of it flailed sickly in his stomach - a damp, writhing coldness - Dib half wanted to throw up in the vague hope that it would eliminate this sense of contamination. He'd carried a piece of Zim's machinery around with him like a parasite.
A piece of machinery that tracked him. This violation seemed almost as demented as the chip itself. It suddenly made perfect sense how the stalking figure seemed to always find him, but this knowledge brought him only a sick unease. Zim had been watching him with the voyeurism of a spider picking the next insect to disembowel and devour.
Dib gaped up at Zim, feeling the pain in his head slowly subside into a half-soothing clearness. His eyes narrowed in realization.
"This thing," Dib said softly, glaring down at his fist "it made me hallucinate. I thought I was going crazy. You were behind all of those visions, weren't you?"
"I cannot be held responsible for any mental aberrations from which you may have already been suffering. But if the chip caused some disturbances...then that is a side-effect I would not have interfered with." Zim hissed smugly, evidently enjoying Dib's traumatized shaking on the ground.
Whether he imagined it or not, his thoughts seemed to be coming a little smoother now - like getting a new prescription for his glasses. He never realized how bad off he was before until he saw things a little sharper.
The snap of understanding had passed. In its place was a hot-white mass of anger.
All that horror that he was losing himself again, that surreal detachment that he'd fought so hard against - it had been fabricated. The result of a tiny computer sending electrical signals in his frontal lobe. On some level he knew he should be more relieved. More satisfied that he wasn't schizophrenic and that none of his fears of medications or lobotomies would become reality.
Instead he hated Zim for making him doubt himself. He hated that fear and disorientation had been distracting his focus from the most dangerous and significant case of his life. If he'd been a little clearer of mind, maybe Gaz wouldn't be missing right now. And that, maybe more than anything else, mixed rage and adrenaline in his veins with all the carelessness of a child making a volcano in science class.
"You psychopath!"
Neither of them expected his speed. Muscles snapping like springs, Dib leapt to his feet, shoving aside the vague lightheadedness as blood shifted in his body. His fingers clawed at the air, desperate for something to grab and strangle. Zim - kidnapper of sisters, murderer of children, bringer of insanity - was standing here before him, and only now he thought to fight? The Hunter laughed condescendingly at Dib's tardiness, and then urged him on.
With a rasping snarl Dib threw himself at the alien, boots squeaking against the floor as he launched himself forward. He didn't care anymore about talking, about explanations or justifications - the part of his mind usually reserved for philosophizing had been high jacked by a righteous focus on Zim's scraggy, dodging body.
Dib hadn't waited for an opening - the beginner's error was on him. He stumbled at first, made half-assed punches and swipes that grazed Zim's uniform or were knocked cruelly away by a snapping tentacle. It wasn't until his third or fourth missed blow that he realized Zim was grinning at him.
"You think this is funny?" Dib panted. "Are you making fun of me? Fight me like a man, Zim!" Blood was trickling down his busted knuckles and he sucked at one of the stinging cuts, the metallic taste only spurring on his aggression.
"There is no notion which disgusts me more than imitating a filthy man-animal such as yourself! I will not be commanded by any beast too cowardly to finish off his own enemies," Zim roared in return.
The jab rattled Dib to the core. Zim had a point - he'd been quite a coward five years ago. But he'd not needed to protect his sister then. Or his life, really, for that matter.
GIR squealed excitedly from the sidelines at the sight of their grappling. Whether the robot realized the stakes in this fight, Dib had no idea. But he was thankful for the high-pitch screech, which robbed Zim's attention for an instant. Dib took it. He swung at Zim again - unwilling to be satisfied with another miss.
Zim tried to scuttle out of the way, but Dib's long reach served him well as he managed to sink his fingers into Zim's shoulder. What he lacked in nails he made up for in sheer force. The Irken was light - still as small as he'd been in sixth grade - and Dib twisted him to the side trying to knock Zim off balance.
Beneath his grip Zim's arm crunched like plastic, but there was no grimace on the green face. Instead Zim's robot legs scuttled madly against the floor, single eye slit in concentration as he righted himself against Dib's attempt to upend him. Despite Zim's haggard appearance, there was nothing weak or unprepared about him - Dib realized this when Zim suddenly folded his legs beneath him, crouched close to the ground. Dib's weight shifted forward. He felt his stomach shoot to his feet as all the force he'd been putting on Zim's shoulder had nowhere to go but down.
He caught his balance, barely, staggering awkwardly a few inches away from a faceplant. Zim was there when he pulled himself back up, more prepared this time and so close that Dib could make out the pointed tips of the scar across his eye socket. It looked tight and badly-healed; it was a wonder to him that Irken's couldn't regrow eyes, as insect-like as they were. Maybe he could and the scientists just kept removing one eye after another - the thought settled with a sick, unexpected brutality in his mind.
The instant passed, and Dib paid dearly for his idle thinking. Zim's three-fingered hand closed tightly around a handful of Dib's hair, claws scraping his skull, wrenching his head to one side as the failed invader screamed in his face.
"You dare not attack an Irken in his own base! It is I, Zim, who decides who lives and dies in this place, Dib. It is I who decides how many days your death will be drawn out over. I may not have conquered your world, but I am master over all who enter here!"
Zim's hot breath fogged Dib's glasses, made him dizzy with anger and excitement that rocketed through his veins.
"I'm not scared of your stupid threats! I brought you down once, and I'll do it again," Dib snapped, feeling a slight sense of accomplishment when his saliva burned tiny craters on Zim's pale green face. With the force of a hydraulic piston and the fervor of a tortured teenager, Dib pulled back his fist and rammed it into Zim's fleshy midsection. He half-expected sticky viscera to come tumbling out like a piñata.
Zim curled around his fist at the strike, clawing at Dib's sleeve. In a smooth, cat-like motion, Zim sank his sharp fingers into Dib's arm, burrowing through jacket and tee-shirt to latch into the skin below. Six needles locked into his flesh. Backwards. A screaming bolt of pain shot to Dib's shoulder and he was so desperate to get Zim off that he braced his feet against the floor and pulled away.
Even with Dib's eighty or so pounds on the alien, Zim still proved stronger. Dib's attempt to wrench himself away just sank Zim's claws deeper, peeling away a chunk or two of skin.
With a twisting snap, Pak legs whirring into overdrive, Zim hurled Dib to the ground by his arm. Dib realized about halfway through his fall that if he'd locked his knees he might have stayed up - but this was little comfort as his head banged sharply against the ground and Zim finally released him.
The blow to his skull jarred a few things loose - having a computer chip inserted and then removed probably did him no favors - and Dib lay in a stunned stupor on the ground. Flashing lights made most of his vision. By the time he reoriented himself, Zim was looming over him once again.
With four thundering smashes, four blows that pierced the linoleum beneath, Zim's biomechanical legs pinned Dib to the ground. One beneath each of his arms and one in the crook of each knee, holding him spread-eagle and perfectly still.
All of the adrenaline which had been serving Dib so well when he was fighting suddenly became a crippling vice. His breath came in panicked chokes, heart thrashing in his thin chest like a caged bird as Zim bore down on him.
"You've had your last victory, Dib. Things will only get more difficult the more you resist," he hissed.
"I'm different than you, Zim. I've got more to fight for than you ever had," Dib snarled, thinking about his sister, trapped and scared, somewhere in the compound. If he could just –
But Zim must have seen some shift in his face. Some facial tic had given him away. Twisting his head suddenly, Zim turned to GIR in the corner.
"GIR! I've had quite enough of this squabbling. The Dib must be taught that his fate is inevitable. Bring Gaz to me!"
"Yes, sir!" GIR saluted with a clang, evidently in a mood to be obedient today. Dib twisted on the floor, trying to see where GIR was going and coming from, but Zim held him down and growled unpleasantly at his wriggling. At length GIR's metallic stomping got quieter as he left them alone.
The pounding of Dib's heart was not getting any quieter - he was quite sure Zim must hear it. Every beat rattled his entire body against the floor like a seizure. Above him Zim had begun rubbing his grimy gloved fingers together, knuckles popping softly. Perverse excitement radiated off the alien in slimy globs that made Dib feel filthy by proximity.
"You're not gaining anything by doing this, you know. Even if you kill both of us, they'll still catch you. I don't know how the hell you got out of that tank, but they'll put you back in it and let you rot in the dark," Dib spat, his voice quavering embarrassingly around his panting.
Zim did not even look down at him. "There is no damage your earth officials can do to me that would be worse than failing an invasion. Your torturous destruction is my last request of this planet," he said, with a cold and even finality that Dib realized it was futile to argue against.
Any further debate was cut short as GIR's clanging footsteps grew incrementally louder. Every few stomps was accompanied by some loud feminine complaint - the robot had Gaz with him.
Please, let her be in one piece. Don't let her be blind. Or unconscious. Or dismembered. If she's okay, we can work something out. Please please please.
For once Dib's thoughts and feelings moved in sync with one another. His eyes roved madly around the decrepit room, across machinery and blood stains and pizza boxes, looking anywhere for a blur of purple hair.
"Okie dokie, master. I gots one girl-monster, right here!" GIR said happily as he rejoined them. One claw-like hand gripped a strap of fabric like a leash, with Gaz strait-jacketed at the other end. Her feet were braced against the ground, no hint of fear or cowering in her posture, only a gentle, all-over quivering of anger.
"Stop touching me!" Gaz's familiar snarl echoed around them, and Dib allowed himself a brief moment of relief at the sound of her voice. She was alright, at least for now.
Dib craned his neck trying to look her in the eye. "Don't worry, Gaz. Stay calm. I'm going to figure something -"
Without warning one of Zim's legs struck him into silence, the pointed tip raking across his chest. All the air in his body shot out with a painful gasp, leaving Dib coughing on the floor. It was just as well - he had no more ideas for saving them than he had ideas for an Elizabethan sonnet.
"Get to your feet, Dib. Given your predilection for observing the grotesque, I'd hate for you to miss this."
I feel like this chapter is mostly about physical confrontations – fighting, that is – the next one is going to be a little more verbal/emotional, I'm thinking. So, I dunno, if you were bummed by the lack of screaming, then Chapter 11 ought to fulfill that need a little more. Also I'll be the first to admit that the sensory deprivation chamber bit didn't serve a lot of plot purpose beyond being fun to write, but I hope it was at least an interesting little piece of Dib's psychology.
Next week is exams for me, so I'm probably going to have to take off my fanfiction pants for a while. And by "a while" I mean like a week and a half, most likely, so don't worry too much if you're waiting for an update ^ ^
Unrelated: the other day I accidentally called one of my guy friends "Dib" without even realizing it. There was this awkward "let's just get past the moment" pause and everything. I think maybe I've been writing too much (I've got a couple other stories besides this one floating around on my computer that I'll post whenever I finish them.)