The trip back to earth was just as silent as their outward trip had been. Yet, it was a different sort of quiet than before. Dib still was exhausted, quickly slipping into a light doze, soothed by the steady hum of the voot's machines. Zim let him.
There was no use in rushing anything now.
The human had agreed to return with him to the underground base, where they would – for now – work on their cure. Magenta orbs flickered back to rest on the dozing boy's form. There were no outward signs of what was going on with both their DNA. There were no really obvious symptoms anymore. But it still affected them, Zim knew.
That cursed DNA weakened them, made them vulnerable to too many factors and influences and, in the end, it was a matter of principle. Zim would not idle when he knew there was such filth in his body, his very cells. He visibly shuddered at the thought and let his smooth face twist into a disgusted frown.
Another look at the Dib and the alien allowed himself to grudgingly admit that he did, indeed, need the other to find a cure. And now... now that the Dib had nothing to keep him away from their experiments anymore and now that he at least seemed to be recovering, they would...
The alien stopped himself at that thought.
Would "they" do anything? The Dib had seemed very calm when they left the station. But was he, really? The boy's mind was still fragile, prone to bouts of panic and catatonic phases, confusion and anger. Plus, he had just been left by the pitiful rest of what he had once called family.
Zim still didn't fully understand the human way of life and the way they attached themselves to others, but he understood enough to know that this was not easy on the boy. It would affect him and the alien found himself hoping that it hadn't caused enough damage to break the Dib beyond repair.
He shook his head. Silly thoughts. There was no use speculating now. Things would develop like they would and for now, getting safely back down to earth and into the base was more important. There would be plenty of time to muse about the whens and ifs and hows once they were there.
By the time Zim landed the voot in the lower hangar, Dib was fast asleep, breathing deeply and not so much as twitching when the large, spherical top cover opened and the alien jumped off the little ship. For a moment, he considered to just leave the human in the voot, curled up as he was. But he couldn't. The lanky body already looked uncomfortable, wedged behind the driver's seat, thin limbs curled up to fit into the tight space meant for a single Irken pilot and maybe one tiny robot. Not another, almost fully grown human passenger.
Shaking his head with a sigh and trampling down the burning question of just why he even bothered - mostly since the answer he was giving himself held implications he didn't dare investigate – Zim opened the panels on his PAK to free the PAK-legs, somehow managing to lift the Dib out of the cockpit without waking and without both of them crashing to the floor. Despite the boy's height, he was still way too light and Zim carried him off to the boy's makeshift bedroom without much trouble.
After some good rest, Dib would be coherent enough to be able to work out some sort of plan with him. Until then, Zim decided, there was his other piece of company to check up on. Rolling his magenta eyes at the thought alone, the alien went to find his robot minion, praying that whatever chaos he had caused had spared the vital parts of the base.
A weary wave of relief flooded Zim when he found only a giant pile of rather strong-smelling goo in one of the storage rooms. It was a disaster, but one that could be cleaned. It seemed the deranged little thing had attempted cooking again, with the usual, sloppy and disgusting results.
By the time the storage room was clean and Gir was somewhere else after the massive, if of course completely useless, screaming lecture from Zim, Dib was awake and trying to muster the will to pull himself up and out of his bed.
It was hard to even bring himself to start thinking. A part of him wanted to just crawl back into bed, bury himself under as many pillows and blankets as possible and simply forget he even existed until he stopped breathing. But his instincts at least were still intact. No matter how awful and hopeless he felt right now; Dib knew he'd not go down that path.
Things were just complicated.
His situation was horribly complicated.
The boy blinked. Or... was it, really? Willing or not, The recent events replayed in Dib's head, And the more they did, the more he found that with each crippling impact to his life, his situation had become simpler.
Broken down, his life had entered a stage of perfect simplicity.
Dib had no family to go back to. No home, no duties and no friends anymore. No human friends, anyway. It was that easy. He had nothing to care about outside of this very base. It wasn't easy to accept, not at all, but it was a simple process of adapting his thoughts to this new situation.
Just as this was easy, it would be easy to find a way to continue. There was only one next logical course of action. Dib had nowhere else to go. So staying in the base was the only option. Not that this made much difference to his living arrangements. He had been spending most of his time here for years before, and all of his time after his stay at the asylum.
It wouldn't make much difference at all. The only change was, that there were no more reasons to leave the safety and solitude of the base. Until Zim and he completed their search for a cure, Dib didn't need to bother with anything else.
The boy smiled, feeling a strange but relieving calm settle over him, soothing the residual sadness and hurt. It was really simple as long as he stayed focused on the things that still mattered.
Slowly, he rose and stretched, taking a few, calming breaths before he went to find Zim.
Things would continue, even if his sense of time started to blur from there on. After all, it didn't matter whether it was day or night or if there were hours or days passing by. In this neverchanging environment he had no use for regular time units.
Zim didn't ask the human about his resolve, nor did he mention the entire incident. Instead, they decided on a few arrangements.
Dib would try to recover better, having to promise Zim to "stop being an idiot" and several other things the little alien demanded of him. In return, the alien agreed to stock up on "filthy human foodstuff" so the boy wouldn't have to live off of sugar and soda. It was... frighteningly comfortable to settle their new living agreements.
Zim repeated again and again, that it was only until their cure was found, so that he, the mighty Irken invader could return to his mission, but Dib already had his suspicions that it would not be as easy and fast as Zim claimed.
It didn't matter.
For the time being, things were settled. It was a very, very simple situation, after all, once you looked at it. Maybe it was just that simplicity that he needed for a while. No other duties, no commitments to anyone or anything outside, just Zim and him.
Over the first few weeks, Dib did become better.
And he became worse.
Physically, he recovered quickly, better food and some mild, self-developed workout, mostly resolving around chasing after the little robot around the labs and the rest of the base whenever he decided to wreak havoc somewhere. Sometimes, Zim and he would get into mock-fights, like they had before things went bad. All in all, his body was slowly returning to its original level of strength and agility.
His mind and psyche, however, were a completely different matter. Dib himself knew, that he was far from fine. Even with the calmer mood around the base, he still had the same attacks of losing his orientation and lapses of memory, getting lost or simply pausing in whatever he was doing at the moment to slip right down into a catatonic episode, not reacting to anything in those moments. At times, it were just mere seconds, sometimes the fits were as bad as lasting a couple of hours, forcing Zim to move him to his room and stay with him to make sure the boy wouldn't end up hurting himself. Or having a panic attack when he... 'woke' from these episodes.
Waking up in general was a problem in and of its own. Dib woke up screaming more often than not, jerking awake from nightmares and whatever horror visions his mind tortured him with, even in his sleep. Zim knew the boy was trying to hide most of his broken emotions, but he was doing a poor job at it. Especially when the alien found him convulsing with sobs in the middle of the night, while hearing him claim everything was fine.
It was taxing.
And creepy.
At one point, Dib gave in to Gir's demands to watch TV with him. Usually, the boy would wisely refuse or even hide from the maniac robot when he felt unable to deal with his very presence. But maybe, Dib thought, maybe some TV, some images from outside, a movie, the news or a show would provide some light entertainment and take his mind off of things for a little while.
Zim quicky concluded that it had been a bad idea.
The moment Dib saw a short report on the news about his father, he was hooked. As bad as wrestling the remote from Gir's hands when he tried to change the channel, even hauling the little robot against a wall in the end. Not, that it would cause any damage to him, but seeing the human react so uncommonly violent over such a trivial matter was worrying.
From there on, Dib took every given moment to make use of the one connection to the outside world he had left. And even worse, he did stumble upon reports about his father regularly.
Zim watched the human watch TV sometimes.
It was disturbing.
The boy would stare at the TV...
Stare at the screen almost unblinking, waiting for more news about himself, his father, anything concerning the incident in the mental hospital, and he did so for hours, frozen on the spot on the couch. Sometimes, it seemed that if one didn't look close enough, it wasn't even sure he was even still breathing.
Sometimes Dib just leaned back his head onto the backrest when he was tired enough and fell asleep like that, not even bothering to lie down on the couch or find the short way back to his room and his bed.
He was like a ghost at times, unresponsive, deathly silent, there and yet not, and Zim was growing more and more disturbed.
Thankfully, when he wasn't staring at the TV too hard, or vanished off into his own mind, Dib showed almost normal reactions, returning to his normal speech patterns and behavior, cracking a joke here and there and even starting little, harmless fights with the alien over the silliest matters.
Those were the things that calmed the alien.
It showed that the boy was making progress, that he WAS recovering, howsoever slow as the progress went.
Dib stared at the screen again, having found an interview with his father about his newest invention. As soon as the professor's little speech was done, the reporters were all head over heels, bombarding the man with questions. Half of them still concerned the whereabouts and situation of his escapee son.
Dib twitched as he heard the laugh that bubbled from his father's lips. He laughed.
His father was LAUGHING.
The questions were dismissed with a good-humored comment that it was no trouble or danger and that he'd soon be found.
No danger.
No need to worry.
His father was not worried at all.
He did not care... at all.
It did not matter to him that Dib was gone.
He laughed at it and Dib ground his teeth with an audible grating sound.
Never...
Never had the boy felt as forsaken and unwanted.
Never had he felt so betrayed.
Not even when he had been left in the asylum had he felt like this... because there had been hope, still. A hope, that maybe it would all turn out well in the end, that his family would welcome him home at some point and everything could return to normal.
That hope had been popped like the telltale, fragile bubble the moment he had called Gaz. He knew... Dib knew there was no going back. It had left him with a burning, sore emptiness that he couldn't seem to fill.
And yet... maybe it was the insane part of himself, but he still had held some twisted sense of hope. Beneath all of his resolutions, beneath all his decisions and all those plans he had created for himself...
He had hoped. Just the barest bit, he had hoped that his father maybe missed him. Or that he had any regrets about what he had done to his only son.
Of course, Dib had had his suspicions about why he had been sent to the hospital. But to see them confirmed somehow made all of them so much worse.
He had been right after all.
It had been a plan to get rid of him.
He had been sent to the asylum to be forgotten.
Dib had long since stopped actually seeing what he was staring at on the screen, too lost in his dark thoughts.
In between all those conflicting emotions, one rose to make its presence known the most.
Rage.
A terrifying rage washed over him, coursing through his very veins like blood and he went blind with it.
Zim jumped when he heard screaming and crashing, the horrible, screeching sound of glass shattering and grating over metal. Only one second later, he was up on his feet, rushing to find the source. He knew it couldn't have been Gir, the deranged little thing watching him run off from his place next to the alien's chair.
When he arrived in what Dib had started to call their living room, he was greeted by a bizarre sight.
The remains of the large TV-screen were scattered all over the floor, along with droplets of crimson. And in the middle of it all stood Dib, arms and front covered in splatters of his own blood, hands still buried in the sparking corpse of the TV, breaths harsh and with a too-wide grin on his pale face.
Zim could just stand there for a moment, feeling his insides lurch violently at the sight, almost to the point of nausea when Dib started to laugh.
It was a hollow sound, echoing off the metal walls and showing just how distraught the boy really was.
Dib laughed so hard his whole body was shaken by the force of it.
He had been forsaken, he had been cast away, he wasn't wanted and everything he was to the people he thought considered him family was... a nuisance.
A lunatic.
Locked away to be forgotten.
Like he didn't even exist.
Pain... Pain registered with him several moments later and he calmed, looking down at his arms with a new, spreading grin.
Blood and pain... he was still alive.
They hadn't managed to wipe him from existence... not yet.
He was still here.
Dib would not let himself vanish.
And he would not be forgotten.