Chapter 24

Twinned With Insanity

Dib walked up the stairs, his breath catching as he realised that he had let the spare room door drift open. He couldn't let that happen. He wasn't as worried about the smell now that Gaz was gone, but he was worried about something else getting out. It had been three days since Zim had appeared at his door and slapped him. During this time, Dib had been having bad dreams about his father's twisted form appearing at his door; ones that he did not want to come true. He slammed it shut with a resounding crash and rushed to his room. He sat on his bed and closed his eyes, listening to the various creaks as the house settled. He had taken to listening extremely hard to the house before he went to sleep; he didn't trust it.

Creak, and the floorboards in the kitchen slowly fall into place. Ratatatatat, and the washing machine builds up its cycle, though its load was a lot smaller in the absence of the Professor's soiled lab clothes and Gaz's various jeans and skirts. It was empty tonight but Dib set it regardless, wanting to hear its comfortingly familiar rattling. Scritchascratchascritch, and the branches of the bushes outside rustle against the window. All normal sounds, all safe. Then, THUD.

Dib sat up. There shouldn't have been a thudding noise; there was never a thud. What could it have been? The idea that the noise had come from the spare room slowly meandered into his mind, and Dib lay back down queasily, pulling the covers up to his chin and pinning the blankets down under his feet to add to the safety of his bed. He snuggled down into this cocoon, squeezing his eyes shut and swallowing deeply in order to try and rid himself of the thought, but the damage was done. The more he tried to deny it, the more certain he became that the thudding noise had come from the spare room. He strained to listen now, praying that he would hear it again and prove himself wrong, but now the house remained mockingly silent. He turned over, about to tell himself that it had all been in his mind when the voice spoke.

"Son," it called throatily from the spare room, dragging out into an eerie echo. Dib froze, and it called again. "Son! Come here."

Dib clamped his hands over his ears, moaning low in his throat, and a new voice joined his father's.

"Dib," Gaz's voice crooned in an unfamiliarly welcoming tone, "Come here, Dib, I want to talk to you."

Dib stood up and slammed his door, wishing for all the world that it had a lock on it. After a while the voices ceased, though not before they had tried everything in their inventory to coax him out of the safety of his bed. Sleep did not come easily, and when it did, Dib woke up feeling just as tired as when he had gone to bed. He knew that he needed to talk to someone about what he had heard. But who was there left to talk to? He had no friends at school, he had killed his family and he had just kicked out his invisible friend. He remembered his hate-filled words to Emma, promising her that he could easily make new friends, even if they were imaginary. He considered that he was quite good at making friends. After all, he had written Emma's story from start to finish, giving her a history and a family, christening her with a meaningful name. But he wasn't feeling all too creative at the moment. He didn't think he would ever feel that creative again.

--

Location: The Massive

Somewhere Near Our Solar System

The technicians were getting restless. The Massive was on a set course to take over the universe, and they had been still for too long, waiting for the return of the Tallest so that they could set off once more. None of them were sure where their leaders were; they had been told little except that the Tallest had important business to attend and that the Massive must wait for them to return. They had taken the teleporter, though whether it was to a planet or a ship they did not know. Either way, they had not turned up, and if they were to take over Planety Rhond by the end of the week, they needed to set off. A door slid open, and the head technician walked in, looking slightly agitated.

"Has there been any word from the Tallest yet?" he asked, and the room was suddenly alive with shaking heads. He sighed; that was what he had been afraid of. Now he would have to take matters into his own hands, something that he wasn't very good at doing. He had only just been promoted to his higher rank, his predecessor having exploded in a freak nacho accident.

"Sir," a drone piped up, blinking her green eyes nervously, "We need to locate the Tallest soon, or we'll fall behind schedule."

"I know that!" he snapped, "I'm on it, okay? Computer, tell me the last recorded destination of the main teleporter."

"Planet Earth," the computer replied.

"Locate the receiving teleporter and contact the computer there. Inform them that the Tallest are required back here because..."

"Receiving teleporter cannot be located. Data bank shows that the only licensed teleporter on Earth belongs to exiled Invader Zim," the computer interrupted, and the technician narrowed his eyes slightly.

"Fine, fine, send the message to Zim's base then," he said impatiently.

"Base is protected by a blocking field. Cannot contact Invader Zim," the computer stated blandly.

The head technician groaned, sinking into a chair and massaging his temples. Why, why on Irk did everything have to be so complicated for him? Instructing the computer to hack the field, he sank back and watched the progress on the screen, feeling more and more infuriated as the bar jerked along slowly. If there was a blocking field then there was something that the exiled Invader was hiding. He didn't really care what Zim was doing; he was the laughing stock of the Irken Empire, but it was preventing him from contacting his Tallest, so it was his duty to look into it. If Zim thought he could stop the entire Irken Armada with a simple blocking shield then he was sadly mistaken.

--

The knock at the door echoed loudly, giving the impression that it had been inflicted with a sledgehammer rather than a fist. There was a slow, deliberate series of thumps, joined in harmony a few seconds later by a rapid succession of taps. Wondering who the hell was hailing him in such an annoying manner, Dib sat up and braved walking out of his room for the first time that day. The fact that the doors to the forbidden rooms were still shut fast only added to the already elevated adrenalin levels in Dib's blood. If they were shut, he couldn't see if they had moved or not.

The amount of knocking increased, and Dib could see two shadows through the small window of his front door. They were exactly the same height. He opened the door and was knocked backwards as a girl and a boy, both blindingly pale, burst in, laughing fit to burst. He stared at them, trying to place them in his jumbled memory. The girl had long black curls that flowed past her shoulders, and the boy had short, curly black hair. They were quite obviously twins; that much was obvious by the way they were completely in tune with each other, as well as their creepily similar appearances. They both had the same piercing grey eyes. Dib had seen those eyes before.

Now Dib knew who they were, and this recognition set off alarm bells in his mind, which he ignored. By recognising Emma's brother and sister, he was also recognising the fact that he wasn't quite as stable as he had hoped. Though, he thought with an ironic smile, he had figured that out last night. Yet he had been wishing for someone to confide in, and here were two, friendly and smiling faces, looking ready and eager to listen.

"Hey there, Dib," Damian said, grinning broadly, "We were just in the neighbourhood, and we thought we'd drop by, right Dee-Dee?"

"That's right," Desdemona said, flashing a smile that was just as broad as her brother's and flushing a violent shade of pink when Dib returned it.

"Did Emma send you?" Dib asked shrewdly, smiling even as he said it; their bouncy happiness was so alien to him at the moment that it was instantly infectious.

"'Course not," Damian said, waving his hand to emphasise the fact that his older sister was the least of his worries at the moment, "But she talks about you so much that she might as well have."

Dee-Dee seemed to find this extremely amusing and giggled shrilly, blushing further as Dib stared at her. Eventually, Dib invited them in properly, fixing coffee for three and sitting down with them. They had turned on Mysterious Mysteries, acting as though they had lived here all their lives. They reminded Dib of Emma, and this was the only thing that was keeping him from completely trusting them. He knew they were imaginary; even now that he had kicked Emma out that wasn't really an issue, but he was remembering what Emma had said before she had left; that anyone he made up would eventually become like her. After they had finished their coffee (the twins did not touch theirs), Damian asked if he could see Gaz, because Emma had told him that Dib's sister was his age.

The twins didn't wait for an answer, however, and made their way up the stairs towards Dib's room. Even as he cried out for them to stop, Dib sprinted after them, but they didn't listen. He heard the door creaking open above him, and felt dangerously close to tears. He skittered into the room to see the twins looking apprehensively at the form under the crimson covers. He stood in the doorway in silence, willing one of the twins to speak so that he could explain that he was insane and turf them out as he had already done to Emma. When they eventually turned to him, their reaction was very different to anything he could have anticipated.

"Emma told me her hair was gorgeous," Dee-Dee sighed in an envious voice.

"She's really pretty when she's sleeping," Damian said pensively, and the last two words were all that Dib heard, the only two that mattered.

"You don't exist," Dib said quietly, and Damian shook his head.

"We may not exist in the... physical sense of the word," he said, "But we do in the sense that really matters."

Dib nodded slowly. Emma had told him that she did not exist in the sane sense of the word, but her siblings existed in the sense that mattered. There had been many stages of Dib's mental degradation, but it would later be unanimously agreed that this newfound belief in his creations was the first step into the fission point. And so Dib sank back into the bliss of having friends once more, unaware that it would throw him even closer to breaking, like a Christian battling with the lions of his mind. Neither did he know what was happening to Zim at his own base or that it would be of extreme importance in the not-so-distant future. And yet Dib's journey to fission still needed something to start him on his way, which was handily provided by yet another knock at the door.

"Hello?" called Gretchen through the letter box, and the twins looked up. They scowled.

AN

Please review and I shall update soon.

Invader Zim is the property of Jhonen Vasquez. I own Emma, Damian and Desdemona Dribben.