This is pretty much irrelevant to the following chapter, but you know what irks (ha!) me? The fact that a large majority of this fandom (at least that represented on TVtropes and the Zim wikia) seems incapable of taking Word of God with a heaping helping of salt.

Jhonen Vasquez making a joke in an interview or the DVD commentary DOES NOT qualify the contents of that joke as instant, incontrovertible canon. A good 75% of what actually occurs in the show proper isn't meant to be taken seriously; why on Irk would anyone assume that things the production staff have said offhand are SRS BUSINESS?

Also, hooray for timeskips! Who doesn't love a good timeskip?

25. Clean Cuts

Ten years later

"What was your decision, then?"

Minister Splink's wavering green eyes blinked out at me from the transmission screen, darting to my left and my right before returning hesitantly to me. "I…didn't make one."

"What do you mean, you didn't make one?" I slammed my hands down on either side of the console, glaring at him. "You're the Minister of Territory Distribution, your job is to distribute territory! What part of that don't you understand?"

"No part, my Tallest. I mean—I'm sorry." He hung his head and sighed. "As I'm sure you already know, the Lith nebula boasts a number of very desirable qualities, and is thus in very high demand. I met with the leaders of the Councils, and they all made an extremely convincing case for why their department should be allotted the space. What was I to do?"

"Well, you could've started by showing some backbone. But I suppose that's a moot point now."

We'd occupied the Lith nebula because it was ripe for colonization: its location was strategically valuable and its planets were largely uninhabited, with uncommonly accommodating topography. I had thought we'd been lucky, securing our grip on the territory before we had to challenge someone else for the right, but now it seemed we'd bitten off more than we – or rather, Minister Splink – could chew.

"Okay, moving on. Who exactly did you speak with? What was it they said?"

He straightened up, better-versed in delivering reports than accounting for failures. "I spoke first with the head of the Justice Council. They're lobbying for control of the new territory on the grounds that the prison colonies are overcrowded, and they want to expand their facilities."

"Do they really need an entire nebula to do that?"

"According to Councillor Prai, they do."

"Well, maybe if Councillor Prai weren't trying to toss everyone who was mean to her at the Academy into a prison colony, she wouldn't have to worry so much about overcrowding." I rolled my eyes, making a mental note to move her upcoming performance review to the top of my list. "Who else?"

"The Reproductive Sciences Council believes that the environments on several of the planets in the nebula would be especially hospitable for developing smeets. The Military Council thinks it would be best used as a base of operations for when we launch our conquest of the Plogg system later this year.

"The Education Council, like the Justice Council, wants to use it to expand their facilities – but no sooner did Councillor Mal leave my quarters than Councillor Skree barged back in, demanding that the Education Council not be awarded the territory, on the grounds that military training should fall under the Military Council's jurisdiction."

"What? That's ridiculous. Military training has been incorporated into general education for as long as anyone can remember. He's just trying to bully you into preferencing his department."

Minister Splink's shoulders slumped, his gaze gravitating towards the floor on his side of the transmission. "Then I spoke with the head of the Recreation Council. And she said that if I gave her the territory, she would tell the people at Shloogorgh's to bump me to the front of the line whenever I come in." He looked at me mournfully. "Have you seen the lines at Shloogorgh's, my Tallest?"

"Have I seen the lines at—" I was suddenly overcome with the powerful urge to chuck something heavy at the screen, preferably hard enough that he'd feel it on the other side. "Minister Splink," I growled, "are you at all aware that you're supposed to be making a serious decision here?!"

"Of course I am! But it's hard!"

"You know what's going to be hard? Getting the smell out of your clothes when I send you off to shovel snoorbeast dung on planet Stink for the next fifty years!"

He shrank back from the screen, wincing. "Well, I—this is why I was hoping to turn this matter over to you, my Tallest. When I informed the Councils that no decision had been reached, they said they should be allowed to plead their cases in front of you, and perhaps you would be—more decisive."

"Fine. I'll do it, if only to keep you from giving the nebula to whoever offers you the best bribe. You can tell the Councils I'll be in touch." I drummed my fingers against the console, casting him a less-than-pleasant glance. "Was there anything else?"

"No, my Tallest. Thank you, my Tallest. I—"

Feeling no need to be groveled at for another quarter-hour, I cut the transmission, plunging the room into refreshing silence. For a moment, I stood with my hands on the console, blinking down at my reflection in the darkened control panel—then, I lifted my head, and screamed, "REL!"

I'd never once needed to page Rel. She always came scurrying the second I called her name, because she was never far from where I was. She'd sort of glommed onto me after I promoted her, and at first I'd been slightly horrified (go irritate the child, why don't you? She's the one who forced my hand),but she'd proven useful enough over the years. Now, she was effectively my personal assistant, though still encoded as general crew.

The doors to the videoconference room slid open and Rel dashed inside, clutching a tablet to her chest. "Yes, my Tallest?"

"I'm taking over the allotment of the Lith nebula. Add a meeting with the council heads to my schedule."

I heard the tablet blip as she did as I said. "Anything else?"

"Mark off videoconferencing with Minister Splink. What's next after that?"

"Uhmm…reviewing preliminary reports on the Plogg system. Shall I bring them up in a hollow interface room?"

"Nah. She can take a break." Gaz sauntered in through the open doors, Mimi beside her. She snaked her arm around my waist and kissed me for as long as I'd let her kiss me outside our bedroom (which wasn't long), then reared back and cocked her head at me. "What's up?"

I groaned. "I hate everyone."

"Why?"

"People are stupid. What else is new?" I waved a hand to dismiss Rel. She slunk obediently back into the hall, the doors clicking shut behind her. "How've you been?"

Gaz let me go and began to wander around the room, running her fingertips along any surface she encountered along the way. Mimi, never one for restlessness, climbed up onto the console, that being perhaps the best seat from which to observe the conversation. "Bored."

"Convene the fleet, then. Start planning your next operation."

"There's no more operations no plan. We haven't heard so much as a whisper from the resistance in two months." She glanced over her shoulder at me. "You know that."

I did, and I was still having a hard time believing it. I had been mocking her, when I asked if she'd thought her toy made her a good strategist; I hadn't actually expected her to be the best fleet commander in the military. "Well, maybe if you weren't such a good commander, you'd have more to occupy your time."

"I know, right? I'm half-considering mounting a resistance to myself, just so I can crush me." She strolled over to the console and turned to lean against it beside Mimi, resting the heels of her hands on its edge. Then, as casually as if she were proposing a round of sodas, said, "Let's have a baby."

At first, I thought it was the setup for some stupid joke. "What?"

"Or a smeet, or whatever you call them." She shrugged. "I want a little nugget to play with."

I blinked at her, slowly registering the nauseating possibility that she might actually be serious. "Are you out of your mind, child? Where on Irk is this coming from?"

"I don't know. How old am I now—twenty-seven, twenty-eight?" With her pak supplying her with the bio-booster I'd prepared, it had taken her a remarkably short time to begin thinking of age the way Irkens did: as a marginally interesting tidbit of personal trivia, rather than the all-important axis around which one's life spun. Like ours, her physical age was ambiguous and her mental age was immaterial (though she'd always be the child to me).

"I figure everybody back on Earth must be popping out spawn right about now," she added. "My biological clock is ticking."

"Is that anything like a lifeclock?"

"Don't be stupid. I would think that you, of all people, would understand this, if only from a scientific point of view—weren't you the one spouting all that crap about propagating the species in my bedroom that day?"

"Child, that was more than ten years ago. I haven't the faintest idea what I said." I crossed my arms across my chest, frowning. "But rest assured that if you're suffering from reproductive urges, I shall make it a priority to find a cure."

"I don't want a cure," she said matter-of-factly. "I want a baby."

I glanced at Mimi, who was either reserving judgment on the issue or felt nothing she cared to share with me. Her eyes were impassive, focused on neither of us in particular. I wondered if she'd known about this nonsense before I had. "And how exactly do you envision that happening?" I asked, deciding to humor the child a moment. "Just because you can mate with me doesn't mean I can impregnate you, you know. I'm not one of those aliens from your horror films. I'm not going to lay eggs in your stomach."

"Fuck. And that sounded so appealing, too." She rolled her eyes and pushed herself up on the console, scooting back to sit with her feet swinging above the floor. "I don't want to get pregnant, anyway. Why don't you just build us a baby? You built Mimi, you built your ship, you built my pak—you can build us a baby."

"So what you mean to say is, you want me to go down in history as the person who unleashed the abomination of a human-Irken hybrid on the unsuspecting universe."

"Sure. It'd be cute, right?" She flashed me a grin. "She could have your eyes, and my internal organs."

"Oh, you've already chosen a gender. Lovely."

"Yeah, well, I always figured that if I ever had kids, they'd have to be girls. Otherwise they might turn out like Dib."

I shook my head slowly, drifting to the other side of the room to find something – anything – to distract me. The child was delusional. I couldn't reason with her any more than I could slap some sense into Minister Splink. "We're not discussing this. I'm not even considering this. Go dunk your head in the chemical shower, and we'll talk when your mind is clear."

Horrid videoconference room. With Gaz monopolizing the console, I couldn't even pretend to be busy. "Shouldn't you be suffering from the same urges as me?" she plowed on, failing to understand the not before discussing this. "I mean, if I broke the seal on your horny-juice, shouldn't there be some mommy-juice in there, too? You know, passing on your genetic material? I thought it was pretty much a package deal."

"By that logic, you want me to go find a male Irken to sire my offspring." I shuddered at the thought. "You're making me physically ill, child. What do I have to do to get you to leave me be?"

"Say yes."

Sighing, I pressed my lips together and my hands to my temples, in a futile attempt to contain the frustration brewing under my skin. "Child," I said, as evenly as I could under the circumstances, "I will give you…anything you ask for. I'll give you a planet, I'll give you a galaxy, I'll give you an entire race to wait on you hand and foot—but I will not, not now nor ever, reproduce with you. Is that clear, or must I say it again?"

For the first time since she'd come in, a frown creased her brow. "What exactly is your problem, Tak?" she said, her sudden seriousness implied not only by her tone, but by her having used my name, unembellished by any form of her nickname for me. "Why are you being such a jerk about this?"

"You mean why am I refusing to saddle us both with the lifelong burden of parenthood? Why do I refuse to waste my time and resources engineering a prototype for a completely unique species, just so that you can dangle a rattle in front of its face?"

"What I mean is," she said, almost snarling, "why don't you give a fuck about whether or not I'm happy?"

"Child, if it would make you happy, then by all means, tour the colonized galaxies and pick out an alien larva to raise. Go to a gestation lab and adopt a smeet. Swab your cheek and clone yourself, I don't care. If you're really that desperate to hold something warm and drooling, you're more than welcome to find one—but don't drag me into it!"

I glared at her, tightening my hands into fists, foregoing any effort to keep from raising my voice. "How hard can this possibly be for you to understand? I don't want my genes in some half-breed freak of nature, toddling around the Massive calling me Mummy! I don't need yet another person expecting me to look after them, and I don't want to sacrifice my life to your biological compulsions!

'I don't know the first thing about children or parenting, because I've never wanted to, because I've never needed to, because my culture doesn't expect me to. The Irken language doesn't even have words like 'mother' and 'father.' You can't just demand that I assume this role that's entirely foreign to me. It would be like me asking you to—to—"

"To what?" she cut in, sneering, before I could finish the thought. "What would it be like asking me to do? Command an Irken fleet? Fight for an Irken cause? Leave my home planet and everything I've ever known, forever, to come here and eat your food and speak your language and live on your ships? You're full of shit, Tak. I've played a foreign role for ten years for you, and you can't do this one thing for me?"

I was burning to counter her point almost before she made it. "I didn't ask you to do any of those things! You said I'm coming with you, you said you've got to give me something to do—you practically auditioned for this role! I never did or said a single thing to make you think you had to do any of this. There's never been anything to stop you from taking your ship and going back to your home planet and everything you've ever known, whatever that amounts to."

"You know what stops me? You stop me. I'm here because of you, because I l—" She stopped short, swallowed whatever she'd been about to stay. Face twisted in a scowl, she dropped with a thunk to the floor, the clack of her boots sharper than usual as she headed for the doors. "Whatever. You've obviously made up your mind."

For a second, my voice stuck in my throat. "You can't walk out on me," I snapped at her shadow in the doorway.

"Fuck you, Tak."

I startled when the doors shut, though I'd watched them closing. Suddenly, I was exhausted. Harsh words with the child always left me feeling drained, especially when (as was often the case) they were vicious; when we fought, it was brief but bitter, like a clean cut. Painful, but quick to heal.

Not that knowing the seas would soon settle made them any less choppy. Standing there blinking at the seam between the doors, I was reeling, fuming, shocked, infuriated—still trying to process what had just happened, while nursing the throbbing knot of injustice in my gut.

"You don't think I'm being unreasonable, do you?" I said, looking at Mimi.

She shook her head – not as if to say no, but as if she were wiser than both of us, the look in her eyes implying a sigh. I think that that's a question you'll have to answer for yourself.

I didn't see the child for the rest of the day – ostensibly because I was avoiding her, really because she'd made herself too scarce to be avoided. Of course, there was plenty of space on the Massive in which to play these petty games, so it was easy for each of us to ice the other out. I went about the schedule Rel kept for me, pushing Gaz and her baby nonsense as far from my mind as I could, and it wasn't long before night (such as it was) rolled around.

One might say I stuck to a humanoid sleep schedule because it was a hard habit to break. Because I'd arranged my time that way for seven years - six to conserve my fuel stranded on Earth, one because Gaz would drag me under the dome of my projector before I could slip away – and had become accustomed to it.

One might say that (and one did say that, if one did not wish to offend her Tallest), but one would be wrong. For which one could be forgiven, because one wouldn't necessarily know that the special appeal of the time we called "night" was that it was so often christened by her hands sliding under my nightdress.

Thus, aware that to do otherwise would be to grind salt into the wound – that it would break our unspoken rule of slights forgotten by nightfall, clean cuts knit without scars – I went to bed. Dimming the lights in our room, I lay beneath the blanket with my back to the door, one eyelid cracked, watching the wall.

And eventually, light broke over the paneling, for the moment between when the doors opened and shut. I heard her footsteps padding across the room, and the soft rustle of fabric as she undressed and slipped into that awful, ratty T-shirt she slept in – the one relic of her life on Earth she still clung to, even eleven years out. She said it didn't bother her, because it was big enough to wear over her pak. I had grown used to the smell.

I felt the bed shift as she scooted up behind me, fitting the front of her body into the back of mine, and looped her arms around my waist (she called it spooning; if that was so, I wondered what forking would be). She pressed her nose to the nape of my neck and breathed in. Neither of us apologized. Neither of us so much as spoke.

We lay there in silence awhile, reconciling as best we knew how. Then, her hands wandered from my waist down my thighs, and hiked up my nightdress, and slid under it, and her lips crooked in a smile against my neck, and I let her in.