RKB, you raise some interesting questions. I'm resisting the temptation to give anything away, but hopefully this story will address at least some of them to your satisfaction. As I said in my AN for Chapter 21 (you know what frustrates me? The fact that FF has no "prologue" option, so including one throws off my chapter numbering), I'm really just getting started here, so the possibilities are endless.

Also, how can Gaz kiss Tak on the cheek while they're wearing Irken invisi-helmets? Well, how can Zim eat a sandwich while he's wearing one in Battle of the Planets? That's the great thing about writing for this fandom: you can handwave all kinds of little logical inconsistencies with IT'S FUCKING ZIM.

24. Invincible

Tak speaking

I came to confused, unsure of when it was and where I was and what I was doing there. I realized that I had somehow ended up horizontal, surrounded by something soft—my bed? My room? But that didn't make sense.

My eyes blinked open and I knew it was my room—from where I lay, all I could see was the ceiling, but I recognized it well enough—but I wasn't supposed to be here. Last I remembered, I'd been in one of the hollow interface rooms, logging my notes on the projected conquests report Commander Shlorb had—

The child. Suddenly, it all rushed back to me—or, more descriptive of the sensation, slapped me across the face. As though propelled by a catapult, I shot up in bed. That rotten, presumptuous child!

Sure enough, she was lounging on a sofa in the sitting-area across the room, her feet and a box of doughnuts resting on the low table in front of it. "Morning, Sticky," she said through a mouthful of the doughnut in her hand. "Want a doughnut?"

"YOU LOATHSOME LITTLE BEAST!" I got to my feet and stalked over to where she sat, hands fisted, seething. "Do you have any idea what you could've done?! Of all the stupid things—you're lucky I'm still alive! You could have damaged my pak, I could have fallen from the hoverdisc—not to mention you've cost me an entire night's work, so now I'll have to—"

"Tak. Please." She gave me this look that somehow sent all of my anger tumbling back down my throat. I think it had something to do with the sincerity of it – when so much she said and did was casual and cavalier, one solemn glance could shake my surest stance. "Sit down."

So I sat on the sofa beside her, and she picked up a cup from the table and handed it to me. It was warm, giving off steam from a little hole punched in the lid, and from the smell I knew it was feeya – a creamy, sweet drink that was always on tap next to the soda, vaguely similar to what humans called hot chocolate. I'd used to drink it all the time at the Academy, while I was studying for some exam or other, but I couldn't remember when I'd last had it since.

I could feel Gaz's eyes on me as I brought the cup to my mouth, taking a long sip and then nursing the rim. For a moment, the taste took me back to the Academy, so many years ago – when everything seemed so simple, and my fingers didn't overlap when I held the cup in both hands.

"You can't live like this," she finally said. "Locking yourself up for days on end. Sucking reserve fuel when your pak gives out. I'm not going to stand by and watch you burn yourself out."

"You don't have a choice," I mumbled into the lip of the cup, without looking up at her. "And neither do I."

She sighed and the sofa cushions shifted as she scooted over to me, snuggling up to my side. Still staring across the cup's lid, I felt her slide an arm around my shoulders, squeeze me close, and kiss the sliver of skin that showed between my glove and my sleeve.

"I've told you this before," she said, laying her head on my shoulder, "and I'm going to keep on telling you til it sticks: everything Nine said to you was a steaming pile of crap. She wasn't revealing some deep truth; she was trying everything she could think of to make you feel worthless, so you'd think you needed her. You're not going to fail the Empire. You're not going to lead anybody into ruin."

"I know you believe that. I tried to believe it, too." I closed my eyes. "Do you understand how comprehensive the network was? The control brains were responsible for everything, everything, and when I took stock of the situation I realized I'd never be able to do what they did. Our society is going to fall apart because of me. Our military, our education system, our reproduction labs—they're all descending into chaos, because I couldn't suck it up and suffer for my people."

"Well, why do you have to do it all yourself? Everybody delegates, Sticky; there's never been a king or a chief or a president man who's been able to be the entire government. Maybe you can't do everything the network did, but you can appoint other people to help you."

"As if I didn't think of that!"

Insulted by the implication, I shoved Gaz off the couch and stood up, plunking my cup down on the table. As she scrambled to her feet, I began to pace the sitting area, fuming. Did she understand how close to madness I'd driven myself over the past month, trying to figure out what to do? Did she think that after thirty days and thirty nights spent obsessing relentlessly, there'd have been anything that just hadn't occurred to me?

"How can I possibly feel secure delegating," I raged, "when I've just realized how two-faced my entire society is? My whole life, I've been so blind, so stupid—I believed that the Tallest were Almighty and the network served the Empire, and look where that got me!

"Everything we tell ourselves is a pack of lies, and I can't tell the truth from the fiction any better than anybody else. If I couldn't trust the Almighty Tallest to be what their title said they were, how can I possibly trust Commander Whoever to take over the education system?"

She was standing looking at me as if I were hopeless, slowly shaking her head. I shot her a glare. "What? You think it's better to be known for having appointed the people who lead the Empire into ruin, than to be known for having done it singlehandedly?"

"I think you're more paranoid than my brother, and that's saying something." She held up her hands, displaying palms like creased white flags warding off another outburst. "Look, I get it. You're a control freak. You want to micromanage everything because you're not sure anyone else can do it. But you don't have the luxury of micromanagement anymore.

"If the Irken people want to move past being a nation of children, they've got to start somewhere. You have to trust your twenty billion sixteen-year-olds to take the car keys and be home by curfew, because if you don't, they'll be living in your basement for the rest of their lives. Is that what you want, Tak? An Empire of basement-dwellers?"

I stared at her. "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

She pressed her lips together. "DELEGATE, Sticky! It's not a choice! You can have councils or cabinets or fucking feudal lords—you can grab a stick and a handful of these little green assmunchers and knight them if you want to—but you are not going to live your life like you've been living this past month, because I'm not going to fuck you in the hollow interface room!"

She always seemed so confident, I remembered thinking before we left Nraya. So certain everything would turn out right. Surely it was because she was a child, and blind.

"You make it sound so easy."

I hated the way the words deflated my voice. I hated how weak I felt, how pathetic—I hated how hard it was to believe Gaz when she said Nine was wrong. I hated that I wasn't young enough to be as surefooted as she was, or dumb enough to be as gratingly confident as Zim. I hated doubting myself, but I'd have been stupid not to, wouldn't I? It couldn't possibly be as simple as she made it sound.

Gaz looked at me a moment, almost smiling and yet not smiling at all. "Come on," she said, turning towards the bedroom doors. "There's something you should see."

Wondering why she always felt the need to punctuate my personal crises (not the good kind) with something she had to show me, I sighed and followed her into the corridor, where Rel sat pretending she hadn't been eavesdropping and Mimi, as ever straightforward, took no such pains.

We breezed past them and down the hall onto the main deck, where Gaz herded me onto a hoverdisc. To my surprise, we didn't dock at the next floor up, or the next; she took us up and up through every layer of the Massive, until the hoverdisc let out a ping to announce the end of its line.

"Where are you taking me, child?" I asked somewhat crossly, surveying the room with narrowed eyes. We must have been just under the hull of the ship by then. It occurred to me that we were standing in an airlock chamber – a small, spherical room stocked with space gear, a circular hatch staring down at us from the center of the ceiling. "Why would I want to see anything up here?"

Gaz ignored me, shoving her feet into a pair of boots and her head into a helmet. As its cloaker flickered on, she vaulted up onto the ladder that hung from the hatch, and clambered up to the ceiling. Before I could step into my boots, she had opened the airlock and slipped out of sight, into the inky disc of space where the hatch had been.

I climbed out of the airlock a moment later to find her standing on the hull, a few feet shy of its slope. Looking awfully satisfied, I noted, for someone who had just dragged me all the way up here for no discernable reason.

"What on Irk are you trying to prove, child?" I snapped, finally fed up. "Did you just bring me up here to—"

"Look down."

I did. Between my feet, at first, and then further along the hull—down that slope like a cliff over a black sea, to the great red face of the ship. To the part of the hull where the Irken insignia, looming larger than most of the vessels that would face it, proclaimed the glory of the Empire more eloquently than any speech.

But it wasn't the same insignia I'd seen two months ago, approaching the Armada ignorant and terrified. It was my insignia, the one with the curled antennae, the one on the wings of my ship—the one I'd doodled in the margins of my assignments at the Academy, pondering the injustice of an emblem unrepresentative of an entire sector of our population. As much a part of me as my name. As good as coming home.

It took me a minute to push my thoughts into articulate molds. "You—you did this?" I asked the child without looking at her, unable to lift my eyes from the hull.

"Well, I didn't do it. I had a couple of crew guys do it for me. This morning, before you woke up." I could hear the smile in her voice. "But yeah, it was my idea."

"Why?"

"Because I like defacing other people's property." She slung an arm around my shoulders, leaned in, and planted a kiss on my cheek. "And because you're gonna be the best Tallest ever."

We didn't go back in right away. For awhile, we sat together on the hull of the Massive, drifting through space. Through an endless canal of planets, hanging huge and bright like paper lanterns in the light of their sun, and far-off forests of stars—a vacuum that felt a little bit fuller, for the weight of her arm on my shoulders, and the warmth of her side pressed against mine.

I knew it was only her humanity and her youth speaking, when she made these bold, senseless generalizations. I knew that her saying it didn't make it true. Still, it made me feel like I'd felt on the platform, Presenting myself to a roaring crowd: invincible, if only for a moment. Like if so many people – or just one important person – thought I knew what I was doing, there had to be a little truth in it, somewhere.