A/N: I realized that I didn't credit the idea- it originally came from Em, aka Fanart Anon! She sent a piece of art about the idea to me just a few weeks after AIP started, and I've been mulling over it since. I've been really excited to write this and it's coming out a lot of fun, so thank you. ;p

"You weren't kidding." Dib's eyes were wide as he stared over the shattered lavender windshield and the still-slightly-smoking parts scattered across the lawn. "Geez, you flew this?"

"I was practicing!" she defended herself. "When I was- it was going to be a whole thing when I turned thirteen, coming of "appropriate age to start driving it" and all that. All I have at home is the scooter, I didn't realize it was going to do a trick like this. I would have packed a camera if I'd known I was going back to the past. Or at least some better snacks." And a rope for her taser, for that matter.

Dib ran his fingers over the metal. "I've seen Zim in this a good few times… Tak's ship is fussy about letting me examine it, but even broken I could learn a lot about the tech." He crawled into the cockpit, experimentally spinning the wheel and wincing when it sent a shower of sparks his way. "How hard did you land?"

She started counting on her fingers. "I'm going to say… a hundred miles an hour? It's time travel, the whole 'speed of matter' thing is sort of a moot point when you're careening through the void."

"Until you ram an alien ship into my lawn fast enough to burn up the grass, that is." Dib tugged at an exposed piece of windshield material, yelping as it cut into his skin before sticking his fingers in his mouth. He made a very loud sucking noise that reminded her of Gir. It was, strangely enough, the most comforting thing she'd experienced so far. "It's a good thing stuff blows up in our yard a lot, or Dad might be mad."

"My landing was fine! It was the stopping that needed work, that's all." She folded her arms.

"I'll have to see what I can salvage. Are you much of a mechanic?" Dib picked up a tiny bobblehead irken, shaking it to watch the antennae flip around.

"Not much," she admitted. "I'm better with biology than tech, but I can help if I need to." She knew the Voot inside and out. Unfortunately, that didn't mean she knew how to put it back together.

"It looks like it's been modified some since I last saw it, so you probably will." He gave one last flick to the bobblehead before shoving it in his pocket and rummaging around in the backseat, legs kicking at the air like an upended beetle. "There's a bunch of scrap metal in opened boxes back here! It looks irken, this will definitely be useful. Geez, you're lucky it didn't impale you in the crash."

"It hit my head, I guess I just have a thick skull."

"Right, I've dealt with enough head injuries to know that probably runs in the family," he muttered, just before her stomach started to growl. Dib looked up at that, and she gnawed on her lower lip.

"Is the toaster still next to the fridge?"

"So." Dib's chin was in his hands as he watched Twix eat with rapt fascination. "They still have toast in the future? You used the toaster just fine."

She swallowed. What kind of question was that? "People were making toast out of bread since they started slicing it. Yeah, we still have toast."

"What about pizza?"

"We still have pizza too. I'm only from…" She started counting on her fingers but then realized that giving him a concrete timeline would be an absolutely terrible idea. "About twenty years in the future."

"Twenty years… and you said you're twelve. Wait, does that mean you come around when I'm eighteen or nineteen?" He winced. "Geez, that's going to suck. Am I at least out of high school?"

"I- think so? I was a baby. I don't remember much before the age of three, so don't ask."

"Aw man, no super-baby, then?" The table creaked as he leaned on it, and she realized that she could smell the leather of his coat even from a few feet away. Yikes. At least he had to go through decontamination at the lab and that helped keep him smelling nice enough at home. Mostly. He always had a musty dad-smell no matter what.

Then again, from what he'd told her, Grandpa wasn't home very often when he was little, and his house didn't have a voice that could tell him what to do if he needed help.

It was strange, seeing her reflection in his glasses from straight across instead of from looking up. Something different lit his eyes, and it wasn't just the flickering of the bulb above them. It was the same manic energy that possessed him on a hunt, or when they all managed to cram into the Voot to fly out into space as a family.

Oh, right.

She was the specimen right now, the wolf to track or the vampire to stake. The toast crumbled as her fingers curled into it, nails brushing the butter, and she licked at it the gooey mess on her fingertips before grabbing a wadded-up napkin to scrape away the crumbs, feeling suddenly gross.

"So!" He stood up, the chair creaking across the tile. "I'll show you my room. Unless you live here and know what it looks like? Although it would have changed, probably-"

"Let's go, I want to see how much changed." She dumped her plate in the sink, and he grinned.

"All right!"

It wasn't really a lie, either. They'd thoroughly disinfected his room from top to bottom by the time she first saw it as a kid, and she'd always been curious about what it was like when he'd been- well, not only her age, but unhindered by anything anyone thought of him. He was Dad now, and sure, she loved him, but how he acted when he was a Dib before a "Dad"… maybe this wouldn't be that bad. A chance to get to play with him before he settled down. Zim was capable of dealing with him for years, and as long as she didn't let too much slip, it would be fine, right? Right! She could do this! All she had to do was not let him kill Papa, and he hadn't managed that in the years before she was born anyway...

They headed up the stairs. It was lined with portraits, some of Grandpa, some of Dib, some of Aunt Gaz, and a few that were a mix of the three. She muffled a snicker at one with Dib and Gaz of them making faces at the camera, and he looked back at her. "What?"

She pointed, and he perked up. "Oh, that one- Dad wanted us to take a photo for some press thing, but we were hopped up because we found the stash of Halloween candy Dad was going to give us to hand out. They had to reshoot it later and I got sick from all the sugar, but it was totally worth it. Gaz has a stomach of steel, I don't think it even phased her."

"You look happy." There weren't many pictures of him she'd seen at this age where he had a genuine smile. It was a nice change of pace from being grumpy, blurry, or with a straightjacket on.

"I was. Gaz was smiling in a few of them from something other than destroying people, and Dad must have liked the first shoot to get the pictures processed anyway. That, or it was non-refundable, but he never took the picture down either way." He shrugged.

"I guess I never noticed it. Maybe it got moved to storage." She tilted her head, hair falling over her eyes, and she grumbled, trying to pull it back with her hand. "Do you have any hair ties?"

Dib shook his head. "I've never seen Gaz use any, her hair's probably too short for it."

"Rubber bands, then? You've got to have rubber bands. They're a terrible substitute, but I hate having my hair down."

"Oh, sure, I've got rubber bands!" Dib waved her into his room.

Or, to be more frank, the pile of clothes, loose papers, and miscellaneous junk that was masquerading as a room. There wasn't even a- oh, the bed was just buried under the miscellaneous junk. It also smelled like sweat, body spray, and various forms of uncategorizable grease. She could only compare it to the ball pit at Bloaty's that had a sign next to it with a cycling number of days since they last lost a child.

"This is your room?"

"There's no need to clean it if it's just going to get dirty again." He knocked a pizza box off of his computer chair, bouncing a little as he dropped down on the cushion before rummaging around in the drawers. "Rubber bands, rubber- ah!" He tossed a box at her. "That should work, right?"

She opened it- they were bright green, the shade that said they would glow in the dark. She chose a thick one, careful not to tie her long antenna up with the hair. She'd made that mistake too many times to do it casually anymore. It stung with the rubber, hair tugged from her scalp, but it was better than having it hanging loose and getting everywhere. After a moment's thought, she loosened it so it puffed out on the sides of her head and concealed her lack of ears.

He wheeled around on the chair. "So, I need some details about how you got here before we can send you back."

"I borrowed the Voot, and fiddled with the engines, mixing in some old junk. It was a time machine, considering it sent me back here." She ran her fingers around the buttons on her overalls. "I probably should have known from what it was labeled, but I didn't think it would work. Most of the old stuff doesn't."

"Borrowed. So in the future, you have access to it." Dib had produced a pen and pencil from somewhere and was starting to scribble down notes. "Either I defeat Zim, or I manage to steal his ship."

Twix shoved a pile of blankets off the bed, climbing up to sit- better it than the floor, which she was pretty sure hadn't seen a vacuum in years. She kind of wished she'd just landed at-

Home. Which should still be in the same place, with everything she needed. "What time is it?"

Dib spun around to check the computer. "It's five-thirty, why?"

She just had to stay until he fell asleep, then- but he'd mentioned the security, and getting disintevaporated would put a big fat wrench in getting to return home. Besides, the house wouldn't know her. Pooh. "Nothing."

"What time was it when you left?"

"Four, maybe? I wasn't looking at the clock."

"So you probably landed at the same time here, just twenty years in the past." He chewed on the end of his pen. "What month and day is it?"

"It's March- I know the sixth was Wednesday, uh…"

"It's March here too." He wrote that down, before doing a double-take as she tugged at the band of her goggles. "Hey, you said they were prescription. Is that a thing in the future? Do I wear goggles too?"

She shook her head. "Only when you need them for something you're working on, usually you have glasses."

"That's good, I don't like goggles," he said, and she stared at him. It took him about ten seconds to realize why, and he waved his hands, eyes wide. "They look good on you, though! I'm not- it's fine, you're fine. We're fine."

Twix couldn't help a grin as he adjusted his own glasses, which had slipped when he had gestured around. At least he was still familiar, talking before he thought anything through and then rushing out an apology, often with something to placate her to convince her to not repeat it. She'd learned to swear younger than she could remember, and had gotten more pieces of candy than she could count because of it.

"So, you need to get back to your own time, preferably before too much time as passed."

"Right."

"Do you still go to the public skool? Would they notice you're missing?"

"May-" She snapped her mouth shut. "That's future information. I don't want to cause a time paradox." It would be terrible if she got home and everything was different. What if Tulip suddenly wasn't there in her class, or the grocery store was moved an extra block away? Or they lived on the moon or something!

He groaned, leaning back in the chair. "You're not going to tell me anything? "

"Nothing you don't strictly need."

"Why did you even tell me that you're my daughter, then? That just piqued my curiosity! It's at maximum pique right now! I've never seen time travel work with a person before."

"I panicked when you shoved a gun at my face!" She kicked at the arm of the chair, sending it spinning until he managed to grab his desk and steady himself. He shook his head like a dog shaking off water, brushing a hand over his scythe lock.

"Okay, fine, maybe you have a point. But!" He used his foot to roll the chair closer to her, leaning over her with such a big grin that she could practically see the bits of cereal he had for breakfast between the enamel. "But you're proof that I survive past my eighteenth birthday, and that Zim either doesn't win or I escape from him in some way. You have the Voot, so I beat him and take his ship, or we manage to steal it from him. It's probably better than Tak's anyway since hers hates me. I don't think Zim's has a personality, which means we can make it do whatever we want."

The bed creaked as Twix leaned back, Dib so close she could see the pores in his face. "Uh-huh, it doesn't really talk. It's just a matter of knowing how to steer it. I need to get it back into the sky to head home."

He pulled back. "Right! So, we need to get to the storage level of Zim's base. I've been down to the main lab, and the computer knows me well enough by now that we'll need to short it out and revert it to the more base AI that just obeys whoever talks to it. If I ditch skool on Monday morning, we'll have until lunch when Zim notices that I'm gone and comes back to the base to check if I'm there. I've still got one more pass before they call Dad." He tapped his pen against his notepad for emphasis. "He usually leaves the base at around 7:25, so we'll have four and a half to five hours depending on if he gets caught by the lunch monitor. The electroshock for trying to leave school premises early will slow him down."

"Oh, I hate those." It wasn't like the skool got enough funding anyway, why funnel it into making her brain jig around in its skull? And all because she wanted to catch the squirrel with two heads that was outside the window, or get a sample of the flower that was trying to eat said squirrel's tail... a complete waste of resources, in her opinion.

"I know, right?" He scribbled something else down. "Anyway, they really mess with his Pak, so that gives us time if he gets caught. I think he's started using the vents again, though, so we can't count on that." He spun around, digging around in the drawer again, this time to pull out a piece of paper. Twix slid off the bed to walk over and examine it, leaning over Dib's shoulder. It was a map of the base, clearly handmade with pencil and pen running all over each other. Several marks were made with a highlighter, and others were smudged with presumably the oil from Dib's fingertips. Even as he smoothed it out now, bits of ink and graphite soaked into his skin. "I've made a map of the inside. Is there anything you can contribute? You've been inside it, right?"

He'd missed two entrances and had swapped the snack level with the one that had extra metal for tech. Although things may have changed... Scratch that, they definitely would have.

"A few times." Also not a lie. She was good at this! This was why she was in the skool play, acting was just advanced lying. "That looks good- we'll want to go in the back, if we go through the neighbor's yard we can avoid the gnomes. Do you have a stealth suit of some sort?"

He nodded. "I do, but I don't have two of them. One of us will have to go without."

"Can't you make another one?"

"I had to rip apart one of Dad's old experiments for it, so probably not." He rubbed the back of his neck. "It only fits me. You can be quiet, though, right?"

She gnawed on her lower lip. It still tasted like toast. "Yeah, I can be quiet." He didn't seem reassured, one eyebrow raised. "I can be quieter than you can imagine." She poured determination into the last word, and that seemed to appease him.

"Great!" He made an 'X' on the entrance around the back. "We can go around the back, then- you're right, that'll be easier if we want to get to the base proper. Sometimes Zim's little robot thing just lets me in, but he's a wild card, so it's better to be sneaky."

"If- you made the stealth suit yourself, right?"

"Right."

"If you know how it works, can't we just get the parts and make a second one? I'd rather not go in all exposed to the laser guns and stuff, they kind of sting. A lot." A few incidents where the house's security system hadn't recognized her had been more than enough, thank you very much. She still had burns on her back from the most recent one.

"Well, Monday is going to be our best bet, so we have time before then." He clicked his tongue. "I've still got plenty of money from my last allowance, and I've been meaning to get some more supplies anyway. We still need groceries too, and making another suit is a good plan. I don't want to lose you before I even had you, I'd hate myself for that."

"You probably would," she agreed, poking at a pile of fabric that she was pretty sure had moved. Did he have any pets he'd never mentioned or was his stinky underwear cursed?

"So, until then…I'll give you a rundown of the tech I've gotten from Zim over the last year or so. Once we get those parts, we can take care of him. You said you're a good shot, right?" He grinned at her again. She nodded, lips tightly pursed. His coat swished in the air as he jumped off the chair to head over for the closet, practically slamming his palm into the scanner and watching with his hands planted on his hips as a cloud of what could have been steam poured out.

The first thing she noticed as a giant poster of Zim- normal Zim, not in his disguise- that took up a third of the wall. She wrinkled her nose, squinting her eyes slightly- eyes that she knew were a perfect match to his. There was a smaller picture of Gir, and then an assortment of tech she recognized mixed with some that she didn't. He grabbed something seemingly at random and held it up to her, a lilac tube connected to a cube that had rounded edges on the end. "This is all stuff I've either stolen from Zim's base or found while rummaging through his trash. This one's my favorite. I don't know what it does yet, but it sure looks cool, doesn't it?"

Twix bit her lip and gave him a thumbs-up as he started showing off the others, seemingly oblivious to the growing giggles she was forcing back.

She doubted he'd want to know his prized piece of alien tech was part of the downstairs vacuum cleaner anyway.