From the beginning of time, humans have pondered essential questions about their lives. What's the meaning of the universe?, they've wondered, and What is love? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If I fall down the stairs and no one is around to see it, should I still be embarrassed? Why does my cat always wake me up at three in the morning for no reason at all and keep meowing until I pay attention to it?

It's all about verification.

…

You get up morning after morning and hope something has changed. But it doesn't; your life's a stuck record, playing the same notes over and over again. How is it even possible to be feign hopefulness at this point, when this is all there is?

The lower base is sealed off and dead. GIR forgets what he is more and more each day. He hasn't taken the dog suit off in a week; he eats kibbles and garbage (though that isn't really new) and pretends to piss on fire hydrants.

Zim sits in his kitchen and tries not to look at the ruins around him. He eats some chocolate-chip cookies instead.

A man named Schroedinger put a cat in a box and poison ready to trip at the decay of an atom outside, and postulated that since death or life was random under these conditions, until you opened the box the cat could be either. Looking at it made it real.

Looking at each other makes it real too.

Dib woke up when he felt the mattress shift. Noise never jolted him out of sleep, but movement did- pressure on his skin, being shaken, jolted, the legacy of surviving several midnight ambushes. He rolled slowly and carefully out of the warm indentation his body had made, and looked into Zim's disguised eyes. The contacts didn't hide the red very well, and pepto-bismol pink showed at the corners of them.

"Get up," Zim muttered to him. Dib rolled over to his belly, slid his hand under and into his pillowcase, caressing the cold smooth metal of the folded blade he'd hidden in there. He took it carefully in his hand and drew it out, hiding the blade with his palm. Then he stood up, looked out his window, out into the night. The sky was salted with stars.

Years upon years with pressure on both of them, forging them into beings as hard as diamonds. Days without anyone else talking to you except him, the only person who acknowledges your existence or looks at you in any meaningful way. Even if it hurts all the time. Even if it isn't ever anything good. Under conditions like that, what do you do? Do you stand up to it until you break, until you can't do it anymore? Or do you warp and bend and go with it because it's all you fucking have?

It was all about being seen.

They never talked to each other when they had sex, and they were very quiet, because neither of them wanted to wake Gaz up and face her wrath. They never looked each other in the eye- it would have been to intimate, too close for what they were doing, and both of them knew (somewhere, on SOME level) that they were too knotted up in each other already. They breathed into each other, put fingerprints on skin - left a trace of passage. I want you wasn't right, because both of them desperately wished that they DIDN'T want the other. I love you was out of the question.

I need you might fit. They rolled together on Dib's bed and the human tucked the alien too close to him, closer then he liked, under his guard because the bloodrush and terror with having Zim right there next to his heart gave him some kind of delirious high, and thought about the knife in the pillowcase under his head.

What both of them dreaded the most was the thought of going back to the beginning, where there was solitude, and echoes when they shouted but no response.

Look at me. Touch me. Make sure I'm alive.

If somebody dies alone in the middle of the night and never notices he's gone or has someone else notice he's gone, has he really existed?

Please please please don't make me go alone.

END

Written 9/30/05.

Edited 10/1/05.

And then again 9/22/07.

Thanks for reading!