Saving Zim by Dib07

Summary:

When you had it all. When old age forces you to change. When life isn't what you'd imagined. When you aren't prepared to be so powerless.

When a soldier's undetermined future remains his greatest fear.

Disclaimer:

I do not own the IZ characters. However this story and this idea is mine. Cover art lovingly designed and drawn by TheCau.

Warnings: UPDATED

Zim Angst. Language and distressing scenes.

Normal italics where applicable are Zim's thoughts.

Italics with '...' apostrophes on them are Dark Zim's thoughts.

A/N:

This chapter and the next one is dedicated to Piratemonkies64. Also known as Slothfantasy on Tumblr! Please put your hands together for her! She has singlehandedly made an audio recording of Saving Zim's first 2 chapters! I thought one was brilliant enough; a dream come true! And I was not prepared for the second audio recording! I may die soon with love and excitement for this goddess of a person! And she really inspired me to get out these TWO chapters early! I'm still working on the 'thank you' sketches for the wonderful 500 review you've gifted me with! Plus a oneshot that I've nearly finished! (ha, sorta!)

Anyway, please, you MUST check out piratemonkies youtube channel! It's there to listen to! It's like a whole fresh take on the early chapters! She's done it with such tender dedication, adding in SOUND EFFECTS! I know RIGHT? And ambience! And...and MUSIC OMG! I am going to have a heart attack and I don't care! Because I am still so hyper about it! Have a listen to the chapters, you won't regret it!

-x-

I had to post two chapters at once. I wrote them together. Back to back. I cannot see one without the other. It's basically one chapter - Soldier's Apotheosis split into 2 parts.

RissyNicole - the submission for the deleted part you wanted has been added!

CHAPTER 38 (44): Soldier's Apotheosis

'I've been believing in something so distant as if I was human
And I've been denying this feeling of hopelessness
In me

All the promises I made just to let you down
You believed in me, but I'm broken
I have nothing left

And all I feel is this cruel wanting
We've been falling for all this time
And now I'm lost in paradise

As much as I'd like the past not to exist it still does
And as much as I'd like to feel like I belong here
I'm just as scared as you'

Lost in Paradise - Evanescence

-x-

'I can't change who I am.'

Lacrymosa - Evanescence

"Master! Master!"

Zim lean claws danced on the keys of his mainframe console; seeking out answers to certain life problems as if his predicament was just another one of his computer simulations. "What is it Gir?" Though the robot's shrill voice was hard to ignore, he did not turn around, or even salute Gir's presence with any antenna movement. "When I'm at my computer, it means that I'm working."

"But Master, you should come see this! It's reaaaal bad!"

Zim sighed heavily, and finally cast his eyes at his synthetic child. "What did you do this time? Let me guess, the fridge is empty? You've completely eaten everything haven't you, including my joint cream?"

"No, no nothing like that!" Gir looked worried. The colour of his cyan eyes seemed to grow brighter whenever he got upset.

Zim looked at the problems listed on screen, prickling with irritation at being interrupted. He didn't want to leave work half finished, didn't want to leave the mainframe at all in case some new equation to the problem would present itself if he stayed. But Gir's unnerving franticness helped Zim come to a decision as he idled with uncertainty. "Very well. Show me."

Gir took him by the hand, and led him out of the room.

-x-

Zim awoke most suddenly, his eyes flying wide open, surprised that he was not walking along sterile, warm corridors humming with activity, being led by Gir. It had been so real! He had just been there! He even remembered the clear-cut data on the computer screen, could still hear the whisper of Gir's feet as he padded along in front.

Then every sprung nerve and muscle sunk down into disappointed rest when he rediscovered the stagnancy of realization.

It had been a dream. Just a dream. And, as the dream faded, spiralling loose until he could barely remember what it was that he had dreamt, he felt the threatening approach of loneliness.

So he lay there, not reacting to anything.

Not wanting to react to anything.

Too often from the prison of invalidism he jumped awake from dreams, and Clara was always there to soothe his terror when he wasn't sure which reality he was in. A hand would reach out and dry the tracks of those long-shed tears that had dried on his cheekbones.

He looked at this elaborate room filled with human equipment and technology. He had no liking for any of it, and hated the revalidation of it every time he opened his eyes to be bombarded with it anew.

From the margins of this inner solitude he realized he was wearing a frock-thing. Clara changed him regularly into these alien clothes. Not a uniform or something that upheld dignity. No. Today it was a brightly coloured thing: soft, cuddly nightwear for invalids. That she had dressed him in. He thought about it and still didn't know what to make of it.

He hated the dry, plastic stink of the mask he had to breathe with. Several times upon waking, he peeled off the nasty smelling, rubbery oxygen mask, (which wasn't so easy to do when you had great fat mittens for hands), only to find it back on him again after he had woken.

So he pried it off as much as limited energy would allow, and left the ugly thing to lie by his head like it was the shredded translucent skin of some beast.

Zim grew tired of languidly staring from slits at one area of the white ceiling past the branching forest of plastic tubing, and he looked to his right, at the bank of computer screens by his bed. He was compelled to hear the procession of his synced heartbeats pinging on the ECG, bound as he was to wires and tubes that only anchored him down to the personal summary of defeat.

Even though his darkly rimmed eyes were almost closed, his breaths sluggish, his brain was busily working away. Neurons were firing; seeking out the receptive parts of his PAK, and discovering dead links; dead pathways that had been working before, he was certain. He let his cognitive neural sweep do the leg work, intrusively searching his PAK's core drives and basic functions to greet new damage down there, and to be greeted with the gaping absence of his PAK legs, his tools, and all the other benefits that came with being an Irken soldier.

He felt the alien intrusion of human equipment down there, as a survivor might feel the cold, numb infringement of metal stints in their broken arms or legs. They did not answer to him, these foreign parts. They were silent, dead, cold components, having no telepathic or psionic qualities that linked back to his brain.

He was scared of these new parts.

Scared too, of living without the defences he had been born with.

But, from this terrible freedom, he floated in a void where his former agonies could no longer touch him.

The burden of being a soldier had been taken – removed.

Lifted.

They... they fixed my PAK... He thought, clenching on the idea: the possibilities of what that might mean.

Another voice, lurid with insanity only laughed at him and at his insensible conceptions. 'They didn't fix it! They butchered it! It doesn't do anything now, other than keep your pitiful remains alive for awhile!'

Zim shut his eyes tight, but there was no escaping his own mind. I don't hurt anymore.

'So what? Look at what you've become! What they've done to you! They went into your brain, and took stuff out! Humans did this! HUMANS! You're not Irken anymore! You're a thing! A useless, ugly maimed THING!'

He tried to shift his body so that he could flop over and lay on his other side, as if, in doing so, he could move himself away from these screaming thoughts. Then the strangled, high-pitched coughing started. His chest was boggy with fluids; fluids he unable cough out. He couldn't even sit up to allay them. He tried by pushing a shivery elbow against the cotton of the mattress, but the nasty, hacking coughs drove him back down again. Someone was there – always there – and strong, trusting hands lifted him up and patted his back.

Zim swallowed. It encouraged the fiery coughs to worsen like he'd just breathed down food.

"It's okay!" Said a voice through the discordant racket of his coughs, "It's good that you're coughing! Helps get the fluids out! Here, you can drink this once you've got your breath back. It's simple orange juice."

Zim managed to swallow without igniting another long series of hacking coughs as he looked up at the human from conspicuously narrowed eyes. It was the human creature called Clara. Her voice had guided him through his dreams many a time, as a lighthouse guided a ship lost in the dark.

As his limited focus sharpened now and then, he saw that she was holding out a Styrofoam cup with a straw as if he was a perfectly willing, perfectly obeying subject. Then she lifted away his breathing mask. Strong scents hit him, few of them pleasant.

Without his mechanical defences, he did not know how to hide, and could not move away or use any other tactic he had always fallen upon when he was in a situation he didn't like. His movements too, usually so graceful and synchronized, despite the rusting of his joints, had acquired an uncoordinated and inelegant aspect, and he felt like a marionette without the aid of strings.

His eye clung to her, as if she was the rope for which he could cling to.

"Zim? Hey. It's going to be okay." She soothed the frowns away on his forehead. Zim's focus dawdled on her for a few moments out of eyes that were glazed with that all encompassing look of abject misery and confusion.

His claws flexed within the tough fabric of the material they were encased in. He narrowly looked down at his hands swathed in mittens, wondering why he was wearing them. It was like wearing great big oven mitts.

His PAK had been butchered. They had ensnared him with wires.

To say that all this was highly degrading didn't even cut it. No words had yet to be invented that purely described his embarrassment.

Clara's honey-hued eyes watched him warmly, trying to instil reassurance into him. But when she tried to get him to drink, tried to force that straw into his mouth like the last time and the time before that, he tilted his chin away from her. All he had to do was bunch away, and harden his jaws.

He heard her speak to him, but her words had no meaning. And he didn't speak back. He hadn't the energy or the spirit to enunciate a thing. He was caught between waves of rage, and floods of tears from the despair he tried to contain.

She put the antagonistic drink down and shifted him back into raised pillows so that he could view the little room from an upright position. This way he could see the door opposite. It was closed. Then Clara meticulously made sure he was all wrapped up, and that he was warm.

"Hey, hey look at this!" Now she was showing him something else. He opened his eyes wider, tried to will his focus to work. Clara wrapped an arm around his littleness so that he could melt where he sat; shivering despite the thick, fleecy warmth of the clothing he was wearing. Behind his right antenna, he could hear that new, scary burble of liquid sloshing at his PAK as if someone had left a faucet running. He wasn't sure what it was. But he could always hear it.

Clara was showing him one of those Samsung iphones or ipads. He wondered why she was showing him it, and why it was so important that he look. He wanted to slip behind doors of heavy sleep again, and allow a veil to shroud his consciousness rather than deal with whatever the hell she expected of him.

She was showing him a photo of a house. On its second storey was a balcony. On its roof, a telescope.

"See? You recognise it, don't you? It's Dib's house."

So? His right antenna twitched as he questioned her.

Clara was now showing him photos of inside the house, such as the hallway and lounge and the garden, and then she showed him a set of pictures of one particular room. This room's walls were soft, comely lavender. There was a desk loaded with raw computer equipment as if someone had raided a laboratory of its best paraphernalia, and then, in one of the photos, there was an open suitcase full of his stuff. He recognized the homely icon of his Empire labelled on some of it. In another photo was a bed quilted in dark purples and pinks, and on it sat a floppy plush doll: of Gir.

"This is going to be your room!" She was saying. "You can tinker about. And Dib says he keeps an old ship in his garage. Something about it being called a Tak ship? I wasn't sure what he meant, but he said it's an alien vessel. I want to see it for myself! It's all yours!"

The smallest of frowns creased Zim's pale forehead. Tak's old ship? Dib still has that heap of junk?

Then: they want me to live... with them?

'You'll be a prisoner, fool!' Came that bitter retort from the far reaches of his crumbling sanity. 'You'll be their little, LITTLE pet! How cute! You may as well wear a dog collar. It'll suit you.'

He turned away from the phone and nuzzled his face into her arm. He didn't want to see anymore.

"Zim, honey, you've got to drink. It's just a little juice. We need to get your spooch working."

Zim groaned spitefully when he felt her tip him away from her arm, and felt that invasive straw slip between his lips. He clamped his teeth down, forbidding it from going any further. She tried to work her way around this wall, trying to poke the straw through a breach in his defences. There was a slight gap at the back of his mouth, where his molars were, but when she found this opening, he angled his head away as best he was able.

So again, she surrendered, and put the cup down again beyond his foggy field of sight.

He was strangely shivery with hot flushes, and sometimes he was shivery with icy cold chills.

Clara. Clara's kind. Dib. Dib's my comrade in arms. Membrane. Membrane is...

Enemies. They're all ENEMIES!

Nothing can break me.

Nothing.

I exist only to kill.

I exist only to kill.

The Empire made me.

But they've...they've removed all my universal aches. Haven't they?

'Haha! You're still OLD! What use are you now? As soon as you die, they'll autopsy your remains!' Said the cruel part of him above all other voices. 'There's no gracious noble ending for you! No soldier's apotheosis! You're but scrap! Nothing but scrap!'

Zim shut his eyes fast, trying to run from the screaming realisms he'd rather not face, not yet, not so soon.

I don't know how to live without being a soldier.

I don't know what role I am to play.

Who to be.

Got to adapt! Got to stay in control!

And I CAN'T!

He was being unmasked from all his previous pretences.

He wanted to hide, and couldn't hide. Wanted to run, and couldn't even gather the strength to crawl. He could not censor the memory of the moment when Gir had come undone: when all his intricate parts that had made him come apart at the seams. And Zim had stood over them, the boundless sadness forcing him to kneel at Gir's grave, as he felt his own life come to ruin.

Fathers did not kill their children.

He felt unbalanced. Lurching through a spaceless void with no control. No dashboard to anchor his plots. No steering to see him through the debris of his ruination. He gazed down at his mitten hands through heavily slanted eyes, and felt homesick. Wallowing in futility was never his thing. Yet here he lay, wallowing in it all the same.

'You should have killed them. Killed them all when you first arrived at this speck of DUST!'

To ascend beyond the threat of madness he opened his eyes and looked wildly for comfort. Clara was there, hushing him tenderly, one hand stroking his face. The voices, like bats, scattered beneath her kindness.

He was going mad.

They had cauterized him by removing his gear, thus plucking apart any sanity worth saving.

Then Clara was speaking softly to him, and her words, gentle and caring, washed away the bad voices warring in his head.

"I remember being left out in the rain." She said, her eyes taking on a paler tint, and her gaze was mainly unfocused, as if her real attention was within. "I remember standing there, waiting for my parents to come back and take me home. I must have stood and waited there until the sun went down, and still, I stood, not knowing where to go, and afraid they'd never find me if I moved from that spot. All I had was my ragdoll, and a school bag full of books. They said we were going on a trip."

Zim, having no experience on parents, knew enough to know that they were role models, or 'leaders' for human children. And that being abandoned by such must have been a low strike indeed. He swallowed, feeling a sudden swelling of remorse. He knew what it felt like, to be left when all others had turned their backs on him. So he had turned round, and turned his back on all of them. He had never since looked back.

"By the time the police came and found me, I had pneumonia. I was stuck in the hospital for two weeks surrounded by passing strangers. Every day that went by, I was sure my parents would come running to see me, so worried, with love in their eyes. They never came back for me, Zim. The police never found them. The only clue they had was when my parents used their passports to get on a plane bound for Sicily. That was twenty five years ago. I was six years old."

Zim wondered where she was going with this; wondered what on Irk it had to do with him. Even so, her tale of woe rang true with him on that subterranean level he daren't ever look at: the one so deep, he often forgot it was there, and yet it had shaped him: defined him from day one of his existence. He was mostly targeted due to his absurd height and solitude, and was penalised for it daily. During his Elite training, and for every Irken that he passed, he caught circuitous whispers.

'Look, it's that runt training again!'

'He'll never amount to anything short of cannon fodder! That Zim's such a waste of resources the academy could do better without.'

'Hey, isn't he defective?'

'He's accident prone, that Zim. He'll never become an Elite. Should have been a table drone.'

They'd pushed him around, and he'd pushed them right back, getting steadily angrier and angrier as he grew older and his peers grew taller. He could never understand why he had been ostracized from the beginning, and though it was a constant fact of his existence within his own kind, he had always chosen to ignore it. Instead he had focused on conquering his enemies, and Irkens were not to be spared from his cold vengeance. Now, abandoned on planet Earth by no less than his own hand, he had given up. And Dib had reached in, and pulled him up out of his chosen grave.

"What... w-what happened?" He found himself asking in a croaky, feathery-light whisper. He had taken the bull by the horns all his life, and taken the violent path. But innocent humans did no such thing. They seemed to accept defeat, and live with it willingly. He wanted justice on Clara's behalf, that much he knew.

Clara looked at him. Startled by his voice. At the suddenness of the sound he had willingly chosen to make.

His muteness was breaking, and she seemed to forget what it was she was saying, such was her surprise. But, instead of scaring him back into silence by accident, she hurriedly continued.

"I...I was placed in an orphanage."

Reflecting back on her younger years seemed to lessen her softness, Zim noticed, as if, by remembering these hard times, a grain of spite remained for all the wrongs her parents had ever done to her.

"I didn't even get to go home to pick up my things. During my stay in St. John's hospital, the police had seized the house as evidence for clues. And the sisters who took me in didn't think it right that I should go back anyway."

It hurt her, deep inside, Zim could tell. Exposing this story to him was very hard. It was more than possible that she hadn't even told Dib this. She, like him, had kept things close to her chest, revealing very little about herself, in case of ridicule or shame.

Normally, he would not care for her at all, or her background. She was just another common human, in a sea of people he had intended to conquer. Broken and entangled in disease, he had been soothed by her strange maternity, and felt a frugal sense of attachment that was steadily growing. There was a very small, fleeting moment when he was a smeet that he had wanted to be loved, and held by his Irken Matriarch: his natural mother.

But his ancestral expectations had been affronted by the mechanical forges of Irken military progression, and such a family unit no longer, and could ever, exist. He had had to learn early on that being raised by a parent was impossible, and he had had to sever his ties to such feelings long since. Now an attachment had been forming ever since she'd come to visit him at his base, alone.

She continued with difficulty, as if the telling of her past placed a great weight upon her. "I remember being visited by many aspiring new parents looking to pick out children as if they were looking into the bars of a zoo, picking a pet. It was degrading. Every time we had visits, all the children had to dress in their best clothes, and be on their best behaviour. We had to 'be busy' and make it look like we had talent. So one of us would be painting, or reading, or playing piano, frightened of being deemed 'worthless' if we practised nothing of the sort. I was in the orphanage for six years, Zim. By then I had learned to rely on myself. To prepare for everything. I started stealing, fretful I'd find myself out on the streets again with nothing. So, when I lived with my new stepparents, who only took me in because they had recently lost a daughter of their own, I stole from them too. I hated people for a long time. I struggled to put my trust in anybody. I don't know what you're going through, but I know it hurts. And I know what it feels like when you lose your home. You lose faith in yourself. I've learnt that it's too easy to hold onto anger and regret. And regret is little more than a cold, dark cage. And it's a very lonely cage."

Zim looked away for a moment, suddenly feeling probed. She seemed to know him to an unnerving degree. If she was expecting a trade-off of his own secrets, his own background, then she would be disappointed. He did not work like that. He did not reward those who pried, and he did not want her to assume anything of him. But, he also could not hate her. Not anymore. Irkens did not forgive. Nor did they forget. However, in the face of things, and after having learnt many strange and bewildering human behaviours and emotions, he would allow her this one reprieve. He would forgive her.

"Did you...like... your... step-parents?" He asked softly, evading her indirectness towards his own troubles and hoping in recompense that he had asked her a valid question. He still felt foully out of his own depth when socially conversing with humans.

"No." Clara replied. "I tolerated them. I used them, kind of like a resource. They wanted me to be their little daughter. They expected me to be someone else. Someone I could never be. When I was fourteen I broke a classmate's nose – she was complaining about her pretty little life, and her pretty little family, and I just lost it."

Zim watched her readily, the wrinkles deep under his eyes. He curled the mittens at his chest, herding the blankets tighter around his thin bones. He couldn't repress the feverish chills that made him rattle.

He tried to listen out for the voices in his head, but for now they were silent.

"How are you still so cold?" She rested a hand on his sweaty forehead, and then looked to something beyond his littleness. Maybe she was looking at his ECG heart patterns, or at something else, something just as vital. But really he just wanted her to continue.

I lost it too. But I didn't punch a little foolish girl child. I killed dozens - no – hundreds of Irkens. And I issued commands in that battle mech before laughing. Laughing at them all. To see them running made me so...

"...cold. Here. This should help." She shored up another blanket on top of his many other layers. He was sweating through the soft, velvety new nightwear she had made especially for him, and was too embarrassed to say anything.

She went on with her story, and this made him relax again.

"I learnt about animals and how to treat and care for them on my stepparent's farm, and I had a roof over my head, but nothing was really ever my own. I could not love them. Nor did I try. They were nice people in their own way, but we were never close. When they found out I was stealing from them, they reported my unseemly conduct to the police, who detained me in a youth detention centre known as Juvenile Hall for a few days. I had stolen hundreds of dollars from them. Things that I could sell, like wristwatches, phones and jewellery. It lumped me with a criminal record. As soon as I was out, I used what money I had and moved into an apartment, and got a job as a vet trainee, but all I ever did there was muck out and dispense medication. With my criminal record I couldn't move up in the profession. So I decided to be a paranormal investigator to get a degree in Zoology and Mythology. They hired me straight away, and didn't care about my muddy records. I could finally be what I had set out to be; I could be a biologist, or apply my skills to natural conservation. And that's when I met Dib. And then I met you."

Zim found it very difficult to believe that a sensitive, polite human girl could ever be pushed to commit any kind of crime.

She seemed to be happier, now that she had confessed to him. "I did it for survival. I did it because I could still see myself as the little girl, standing out in the rain with nothing but a few books and a doll, left all alone in a city I didn't know. And I never wanted to be that girl again. Alone. With nothing. And I never want you to be like that. I want you to have everything, Zim. A home. Love. A family."

Zim cocked his head at her, not quite sure what she was offering. He was still too new to such human affinity. And he was still too unfamiliar with what he actually wanted.

"Just think about what I've said." Clara added gently. "I haven't even told Dib yet that I have a criminal record, though I knew I should have done ages ago. But, like you, I'm frightened of abandonment; and I've struggled to find the right moment to tell him."

He was silent. Losing Gir, and losing his home had burnt out all of his fuses, and, without them, he felt infirm, and old, having no stepladder to shore him up to his next level of anger, or ardent passion, or his usual zealous spades of energy. He just half sat, half lay there, feeling crestfallen. Perhaps hearing of Clara's story reminded him too much of his own, and was aggrieved by it all the more sharply.

To accept their love, and their kinship was a little too hard for him to realize right now. He did not understand it.

Clara spooned his shivery body into a hug when she saw the rising conflict on his face.

"The professor's coming to see you very soon." She whispered into his right antenna. "He's going to let you be the judge and jury of your own future. You get to decide. And... and if you choose to leave us... I'm... I'm really, really going to... to miss you."

He felt her hold his old bones close, felt her arms grip him tight, and then he heard her crying. His confusion spiked. He did not know what to think. What to say to her.

Human tears he understood least of all, but it unearthed a change in him, and it allowed the spades of his wrath to crumble and fall like weathered old stones tumbling from an old castle made of ill mortar.

The flashes of the old life he had wanted to lead... had they been so ill-conceived? What had he really wanted? What had he really desired?

He wanted to win. Even if the victory was always an empty one. It had never brought him happiness. It had never stopped him from trying again, of course, hoping this new victory would make him feel like he was worth something. But he had ended up chasing his own shadow, howling for a victory that would never be.

Gir on the other hand, little, insignificant Gir, had taught him a great many things of far greater importance than missions or his leaders or his numerous objectives would never teach: that life was precious. That things mattered. Not everything was a contest. Not everything was a simulation built for conquest. He was a creature that lived and breathed.

And he could be free, if he wanted to be.

His throat constricted.

He was made to follow orders. Irkens did not choose to live life freely. They had no idea on where even to start. Because living without a cage around him was far scarier than the cage itself. He could not cope. Every little crumb on his path had been a directive: an order. Without that little next crumb to follow, he'd only get lost.

'Not everything can be fixed after all, you little shit.' Whispered the things inside. The voices were like a foul wind - always blowing - screaming - against him.

He snuggled into her chest, allowing himself this measure of comfort, wondering what his last directive – this choice- would be. He wanted anything now, to be rid of his own voices.