Starfall
Summary:
Zim is different after the tragedy, suffering a depression that Dib can't seem to break. When he disappears one day out of the blue, Dib is left searching for answers.
Disclaimer:
I do not own the IZ characters, this story however is mine.
Warnings:
Zim angst: Depression. Anorexia. PTSD.
Dib07: Thank you for all your support, and for those who have reached out to me. You guys have been incredible.
guest: Thank you so much, I can't tell you enough how much your words have meant to me, and I really appreciate your support and kindness. Heh, you noticed I am updating it on A03 too! I am pleased I made that decision! Again I can't thank you enough for reviewing, and telling me what you think of the first chapter! I hope you continue to enjoy it! ^^
little side-note:
If you're new to my stories then I welcome you!
Please review, same as always, it might make new chapters appear faster!
Chapter 2: Dark Horizons
His attention was drawn to the sorrel and gold leaves dashing across the backyard. They shifted almost seamlessly, going wherever the wind chased them. Gir was trying to catch them as if they were butterflies, and whenever he was so close to snatching a few, they would whirl away again in different directions.
He felt suddenly sad watching him. The game looked fun at first, but when the leaves blew away, Gir couldn't decide which way to go and his efforts looked increasingly futile.
The robot had never come back the same, either. His confusion was more defined, his reactions a lagging, irrational mess. Dib was certain he was reading the signs completely wrong. Gir was a logically broken mess to begin with, but the subtlest changes were there, poking through the surface. When a situation was too demanding on the robot's brain, he tended to glitch and lock up and he was doing it a lot more lately, as if the sum of his parts was straining to keep up with basic function.
He was hesitant to try and tune Gir up, worried he'd mess up internal gyros and circuits, and the fact that Zim had left him in this state only angered him.
Stooping over the sink, hands mechanically cleaning a white china plate, he watched Gir's antics as a spreading gloom extended its cloak over the garden. The hunched, rectangular shape of the garage caught the evening light, the concrete walls looking like they had been soaked in blood.
His sister looked round at him as she lifted a fork trailing spaghetti to her mouth. "You look like a zombie, Dib."
I feel like one.
His legs woodenly steered him from the sink towards the table before feigning a smile her way. The dinner didn't taste like anything. He had managed two forkfuls before filling his stomach with cheap wine.
Gaz had come over on the pretence that he couldn't cook, offering to make a meal they could eat together, but he suspected she just wanted to talk.
"You're still thinking about him, aren't you?"
He weakly sunk into the chair, supposing he was that easy to read. "He just doesn't leave like that."
"He probably just got tired of Earth. Of you." She swallowed the last forkful and pushed her plate away as if the residues of her meal suddenly repulsed her. "You ever considered the possibility that he's just gone to get repaired?"
"And leave Gir?"
"Think about it. He's an interstellar alien who can go wherever he pleases."
"That's not quite true." He couldn't help but correct. "He goes only where his Empire sends him. If he steers off-course, he has to report any unauthorized excursions."
Gaz looked at him blankly. "And you would know that because...?"
He tried to keep wraps on the rage that suddenly wanted to erupt through the sutured calm. "He babbles a lot. Usually when he's drunk or high on whatever elixir he's taking. You'd be surprised what he gives away when he rambles in his sleep."
Gaz just shrugged. "You said the Voot was gone, so it's obvious he took a trip. Some kid might have thrown a stone at the house long after he'd skipped town."
He looked into the swirling ruby in his glass, unable to agree with her. "But a trip to where?"
She cocked her head at him, pencil-thin eyebrows narrowing as if he should know.
Gir had been about as useful as a broken hard drive. It didn't matter how many times he asked the same question in as many different ways when the one he was asking didn't have much of a brain.
Zim had betrayed them both. What kind of bastard did that without bothering to even leave a message?
She gestured at the violin resting against the wall. "Where'd you find that old thing?"
"In his hangar." Earlier he had rotated it around and around in his hands, hoping to find something telling on its burnished surface. There were a few faint and shallow scratches around the waist area where the bridge sat under the strings, but the scratches looked more accidental than deliberate.
"What a weird thing for him to have." His sister admitted after some thought.
"Yeah..."
He was still convinced that Zim had stolen the thing or had inadvertently inherited it without knowing what it was for. The very idea of him actually placing the bow to the strings and playing music was just too ridiculous to imagine.
Gaz settled frowning eyes on it too as if she was also trying to imagine the dual function of instrument and Irken as well. "Has he still been getting headaches? Maybe he left because it had something to do with that?"
Dib blew out a sigh, feeling a telltale sadness tease its way through. He had never been brave when it came to approaching the subject or to even breathe a question that closely brushed the corners of Zim's papery thin forbearance. It had tainted everything about the soldier. Just when he was about to skirt into that territory rather than tiptoe around it, Zim sensed it as if the human had just tossed a grenade by his feet.
His hesitation clearly frustrated her. "Don't you talk to him?"
"I... I tried!" The next mouthful of wine tasted worse somehow as if the dredges at the bottom had tainted it. "He... wouldn't let me help..."
His hands had been less than steady when he had tried to get Zim to turn around so he could inspect the damage on the PAK's left side. Something hard had impacted the mantle, causing a deep crevice of fissures to spread outwards like strands on a spider web. Pressing a finger on the dent, he felt ragged, sharp splinters of metal move around: he wasn't sure if it was part of the PAK or shrapnel from something else. Zim had then darted clear of his probing, bodily turning to face him as if the briefest of examinations had hurt. The fear on his face was as clear-cut as moonlight distilled on the water's surface.
He knew Zim had been in a war, but he didn't know any more than that. The one thing he was certain of was how it had affected them all. Even he felt numb some days, and wondered if that was normal. The food tasted incredibly bland, and even the wine had this flavourless and acidic taste. The more he drank, the lighter he felt, but his emotions were spiralling faster and faster together, the anger harder to control, cracks harder to plaster away.
He had chosen his sympathy as carefully as one would try to disarm their way round a ticking bomb when it came to Zim. He thought that applying less pressure on what was hurting the Irken would help...
"It's just an arm, space jerk."
Zim had stood stone still, eyes dark pensive pools of red.
"It's nothing to be ashamed of, you know. You can do a lot more things with it than you could before."
He leaned back, feeling pissed off.
You can't pin an emotion on betrayal. That's an anger you can't describe.
It's kind of like grief. You fall down this hole, and it doesn't matter how hard you try to get back up, you just keep sinking back down.
I wanna kick your head in, Zim.
"You should take a look at Gir." Gaz's eyes were levelled at his. "He sounds... broken."
"You mean more broken than normal?" He didn't mean his voice to come out so harsh.
"I found this on the floor." She picked up a bolt not much larger than a regular sized screw. He reached over and took it, recognizing the delicate Irken forgery. It gave the slightest mauve sheen when spun towards the light, revealing tiny hieroglyphs of interconnecting circuits, like veins to carry the blood around. "Do you think it's from him?"
He didn't even bother to ask who she was referring to.
He slotted it away in a pocket like some memento he had no intention of looking at again.
"His base..." She suddenly blurted, rising to stand.
"What about it?"
She walked over to the violin, smiling ironically before lifting it up to feel its gentle weight. "It became his prison."
-x-
When the pale blue curtain of sky blew away, the constellations spun across the heavens like tiny frosted sequins shimmering on velvet.
The memories were torture, his mind repetitively replaying scenes to tease out any signs he might have overlooked, or cared not to have seen.
He approached the burgundy ship in the soft pink of evening, surveying the long stern and smooth turbines that housed the engines before leaning tiredly against the chassis, feeling the cold of her metal work its way through his jacket as he emptied a sigh from his lungs.
Some days he just couldn't breathe.
It was like feeling a closing panic that had no source, no reason, and no outlet.
Time stretched endlessly, the hours a cruel weight on the day when they used to fly away from him.
He tossed the bolt in his hand, throwing it up into the air, watching the purple tail flash after it before catching it again. The weight of it was substantial, the sides smooth, angular, and warm somehow.
Gir had given up chasing leaves and was kneeling in the flowerbeds, digging holes until he had enough soil to build... tall things. Dib watched as his mind suppurated, the bolt cutting into his palm when he squeezed his fist tightly around it.
Gir either couldn't talk about it, or wouldn't.
His long periods of silence were more unnerving than any laconic shout or giggle. Zim had shifted into the same kind of listless tune as if they had both begun to turn to stone.
What had they survived?
Conventional war movies were just that – limited, Hollywood style dramas or 're-enactments,' and as he sat and watched them he wondered how closely they resembled the real terror and pain. How pale was the representation, and what kind of horrors were really seen in a war on another planet?
He squeezed his eyes tight, trying to visualize a memory before everything had become so pixelated and grey. During a particularly hot and sweltering day, he had walked home, hands heavy with groceries when he heard the clanging and banging coming from his driveway.
Stepping lightly across the gravel to see where the noise was coming from, he saw the Irken kneeling beside his sister's motorcycle, wearing his tactless disguise of wig and contacts. He was in the middle of changing the exhaust pipe and cylinder when he heard the familiar clacking of boot heels. Amber eyes caught his, and Zim simply smiled in that crooked and slanted way, pausing only briefly to wipe gloves greasy with oil on a stained dishcloth.
"Do you like making a mess of things, Dib?"
"What do you mean? I already fixed it!"
"Well, if you want the thing to rattle apart..."
He shook his head, the memory falling apart as Gir continued to build mud sculptures in the flowerbed. Nothing grew much anyway, only the hardiest of plants and flowers that were probably weeds for all he knew.
Turning to face the ship he eased himself into the padded but painfully small pilot seat and considered the risks and overall stupidity of simply looking for the old bastard. But where to start when the universe was so infinite and so vast that it might simply devour him? Even if he narrowed his search down to Irken controlled planets, stations and galaxies, they may still number a gazillion and one places.
As he sat there, fingernails working into the smooth sides of the warm metal bolt, his hopes, worries and frustrations collided until his eyes and heart stung.
I have to know what happened to you.
It's killing me.
"Ship? Show me the data on every Irken in the Empire."
Tak's voice servicing the ship's computer was cold. "No. Morons don't have access to prohibited information."
"Then, uh, just give me a list of all the Irken invaders!"
"No. That information is prohibited too."
He was growing tired of the BS and the turn-arounds, and the A.I's irony wasn't helping.
What else can I ask that won't result in the same answer being thrown back in my face?
His amber eyes glared at the screen as the computer quietly awaited his next request. When he took a breath, it wasn't as steady. "Ship... show me a list of Irkens who... who died within the last month..."
The answer wasn't as sharp. "You don't have access to that either."
Hot coals of anger started to stir up again, leaves of flame blowing through his chest.
Easing the blue nodule into the hub beside the switchboard, he delicately removed the original apparatus with a hard tug.
He had hacked into his sister's computer when he was nine. Getting to know the backend of software and hardware had its charms, and was certainly indispensable to have as a skill. When he had hacked into Zim's base all those years ago, he would watch him work over a console, his pale jade skin bathed in pinks or whites from the overhead screens he tended to obsessively stare at. The 'spying' had allowed Dib to see a more tired and less noble side that contrasted with what Zim chose to show.
"Now let's see... Locate Irken Zim, Elite Class."
"Locating..."
He held his breath, heart beating hard, sweat tickling his armpits.
"There's that 'prohibited Information' again."
"What the fuck?" His amber eyes flashed behind the lenses, the cold rush of disappointment filling his mouth.
Think, think you moron! What you're asking is too specific! Broaden your scope! Think of the most likely places he'll go, or would have at least been to!
"Okay... uh... What planets have the most goings and outgoings with Irken trade and military?"
"Processing... You ready? Need a fucking pen handy so you can write this down? Planets Superia, Conamara, Anxanum, Nevogobac, Easyeats, Aches 66, Grazyup..."
"Wait, there's a planet called Grazyup, Easyeats... and... and Aches?"
The ship continued processing his request as each planet came up in the database. "Zoth 19, Talleron, Zaruvis, Xelvillon, Zulara, Vilurus, Searth, Aloth..."
So many... Where do I start?
"And Zim's history? Which planets did he go to in his life?"
"Processing..." A mug shot of Zim was displayed on the right of the screen, code running up in reams. His heart began to lift like a helium balloon. "Zim trained on planet Devastis. He was banished to Foodcourtia for destroying Operation Impending Doom 1, and then briefly and illegally attended Conventia. He was taken to Judgementia for his Existence and Evaluation Trial where he made his escape. He was later deployed to the warfront of Elysium." The ship suddenly went silent.
"And after that...?" He leaned back in the painfully narrow cockpit chair, eyes gaping wondrously at the winking moon that drifted in and out of cloud cover. No answer was forthcoming, so he asked, "What about his mission on Earth?"
"No Records Found."
His eyebrows pinched together. "He was...banished? And taken to an 'Existence and Evaluation' Trial?"
The ship's computer had no answer.
What did the Empire do to those who were found guilty? And what could Zim be guilty of?
Isn't it obvious? Being an idiot is crime enough. For all I know, the Empire punishes those who order too many bolts and screws without 'proper authorization.'
The specifics were barely there, and served only as contemptible highlights to Zim's long and arduous life, highlights that sounded more like annotations of failure.
"Elysium..."
So that's where you and Gir went... But you never really came back, did you?
He stared at the results flashing back at him, filling his face in ghostly pale whites and pinks.
Why do the records stop there?
"Computer... what happened on Elysium?"
Again, there was no answer.
From the cockpit he watched Gir shape the soil into a pillar of sorts or a long thorn, taking pains to get the narrow tip just right, and after it was seemingly 'complete' he'd start again by making another one, and another one, all of similar sizes but always with the same 'spike-like' shape. The robot was soon surrounded by these tall, narrow spikes made of mud. The soil splattered his metal knee caps, hands and face, and then the memory seeped in before he could shut his eyes and mind against it. Gir had been completely rigid in the Voot Runner's cabin, and maybe something had happened to his processor. He'd been the colour of coal, and his eyes weren't shining.
When Dib had smeared a finger across his chassis thinking it was oil, the filth felt crusty, almost soft like pulp when it came away. He had started to wash it off him... realizing what it was...
Breathing past the pressure in his chest was a struggle.
So. Are you gonna just sit there, or are you going to find him?
Am I actually considering this?
I don't know how long this will take me, if I have the fuel, the supplies...
His mind raced from one scenario to the next, problems considered before being quickly overturned. He looked at risks and procedures analytically as if the nature of the problem was just another mechanical malfunction. The best way of overcoming the problem was to look at it in parts, to meticulously follow the threads until the damage was revealed.
But life, he found, was far more complicated than simple wires and components.
As he watched Gir, he felt sudden sympathy for the little robot. Slipping out from the cockpit and sauntering across wet grass saturated in twilight, he paused a little ways behind him as Gir happily made another tall mud spire. "Hey there. What are you making?"
Gir turned round, the smile soft and genuine. "The tall spiky thing!"
"I can see that. But what is it, exactly?"
"Urm..." He sat back as if viewing his creations for the first time. After a moment he visibly looked pained as if he had no idea what he had been doing, or why. "It calls, sometimes." He said finally. "It hurts."
"What do you mean... hurts?" He knelt down, the wet grass soaking his pants. He wasn't sure which was the greater enigma, that Gir had pain receptors or what he was trying to say had any validity.
As if in answer, Gir began to build another pillar, wedging soil together with his hands before shaping it into a growing spike.
Dib glumly watched, having no other conclusion to draw from. "Come on." He sighed at length, tiredly coming to terms with his new role as 'babysitter.' "Let's get you cleaned up."
-x-
Gir stepped out of the bath looking shivery as if robots had perfectly accurate thermal readings. Dib opened up a towel anyway and Gir stepped into it, standing eerily still as he dried him. The robot had sat in the bath, squeezing some old rubber ducky Dib had managed to salvage from somewhere in the basement to keep him happy.
"Happy Ducky." Murmured the robot, squeezing it just to hear the tired-sounding squeak it made.
"Yeah..." He always felt awkward around him, not knowing what to say and what got through to the robot.
It wasn't easy allocating a place for him when he had been forced to do so without any prior plan. Gir did not seem overly obliged to 'go home' and he couldn't blame him when there was nothing to go back to other than echoing chambers and a lofty hangar.
He 'dressed up' the storeroom, turning an old chair into a bed and tidying away the crap that had started to breed all over the shelves and floor. It still looked a little cluttered, the situation bringing back the melancholy he had never been quite able to conquer. Some things he could provide, and he had given the little robot sketch pads, pencils and coloring pens.
"You're good to go, Gir."
Gir aimlessly stepped away from the towel, squeezing on the duckie. His left conical eye would flicker occasionally like a finicky old light bulb. The crack running down the optic lens had been fixed but the same problem kept coming back. Zim had unscrewed and removed the optic eye twice to look inside to see if there was any lasting damage.
The robot suddenly did a complete one-eighty and hugged Dib around the leg. "Don't go."
He petted the robot's head, not sure how else to comfort a thing made of metal. "Hey, everything will be okay." He said, the promise sounding like a lie. "You should... urm... sleep now."
Gir hugged him tighter, holding the rubber duck to his chassis.
Dib tried to walk towards the doorway to show him his new room. Gir was pretty heavy for something that was supposedly 'empty.' "You can draw some pretty pictures, okay? When Zim gets back you can show him what you've done."
It was the lamest incentive, but Gir quietly detached himself and walked into the room, slowly looking at the pensive grey walls and shelves. The chair-bed thing had been moved to sit under the windowsill so that Gir could look outside if he wanted. Dib had found some of his old glow-in-the-dark stars and glued them to the ceiling with adhesive to 'brighten up the place.'
Gir wandered about, metal feet tip-tapping along the carpet. When he came across the stacked sketch books and colourful array of pens he paused to look at them. The smile was mild, almost puzzled when his left eye started to flicker again.
"Just come and find me if you need anything, Gir." He stood back, not wishing to stay. When he turned, heading across the landing, he could have sworn he heard the robot whimper. He tensed, wondering if he should go back when his feet were already taking him away, down the stairs and into the kitchen.
The emptiness came back. Even dreary music from the radio station couldn't soften it.
When he tried to ram the dishes back into the cupboard two of them fell out and smashed across the floor into ceramic shrapnel. He wheeled away, back hitting the countertop, his hands went to his head, and the scream that came out could not release him from the prison inside.
The flailing bits of plate settled, the ringing in his ears took longer to fade, and when he could finally start to breathe again it only increased the pressure in his chest.
The world began to return, the walls taking form and shape from the grey haze.
Lost, shattered eyes roamed over the kitchen, body too paralyzed to move. When he finally focused on the violin that had been left on the table he shakily lifted it and placed it in a cupboard to save the temptation of snapping it in half.
He dropped by one last time before retiring for the night to see how Gir was 'adjusting,' only to be dismayed to see the spire-shapes make their return on paper. Gir had painstakingly drawn and colored the needle-pointed spikes in black crayon or pen until the floor was littered with pages and pages of them.
Amongst them, almost hidden away beneath layers of the spire were stick figures of Zim holding hands with a little stick figure of Gir. It looked as though they were drowning in a sea of red. Again the spire made its return, standing behind them like some nightmarish, beckoning monolith.
"It's calling, it's calling!" Zim had thrown himself out of bed, screaming those words with blankets trailing around his wobbling sticks for legs. His wild, haunted eyes were washed-out pupils that couldn't focus, one hand feverishly clawing for the way ahead like he was trying to find the way out.
"Easy, easy," Heart in his throat, scared of what to do, Dib went to reach for him...
He turned his palm over, staring at the silvery scars that almost connected into a V shape at the heel of his hand. He wasn't sure if Zim's claws carried a type of venom or because hands just bled like a bitch because nothing seemed able stem the flow. Now he was left with an ugly scar.
Gir sat, hunched over a new leaf of page, scribbling another spire as he quietly hummed something completely tuneless.
The question was in his throat, he needed to say it, but he wasn't so sure how Gir would take it.
"Is this Elysium?" He gently asked, pointing to one of the hundreds of black towers.
Gir made an unhappy noise and quickly scrunched it up before swallowing the crumpled ball of paper whole. Maybe it was just because he hadn't fed him.
"Sometimes." Gir said at last.
"What do you mean?"
Gir's memory was probably so scrambled that he could only ever remember events in jumbled bits and pieces, like bad coding that came intermittently.
Dib reached over, picked up the old rubber duck and placed it on the floor by Gir's side. "Why don't you draw Mr. Duckie instead?"
The robot cheered up instantly as if Dib had simply flicked a switch, but the human's smile didn't last long.
-x-
When he climbed into bed a little later, barely having the energy to kick off his boots, he kept thinking about what the ship had told him, wondering if Judgementia's trial was something like a courtroom where Irkens were put up on the stand to prove their innocence, or their guilt.
The rain beat against the window, sounding like stones or hail smashing the roof in their thousands.
He listened out for Gir, knowing he may be restless, bored, or homesick.
When emptiness returned, eyes achingly softening, the ennui that it provided left him with the memory as he lay in bed, listening to the gentle ticking of the bedside clock and the slashing of the rain outside. He wanted to revisit the memory as few times as possible, and during the day it worked, more or less, like putting gauze over a wound to hide the bleeding, but the night brought it back to the surface.
The pink of the Voot had flown erratically across the sky, trailing fumes, burning debris and smoke. He had thrown on his coat and run out into the rain, following the burning stink of plasma as he listened to the rattling sounds of a ship coming apart.
When he got there, shafts of purple evening light infiltrating the darkened trees, it made the stains iridescently shine. The fumes were thick and porous, a repulsive odour mixed with the stink of purulent decay. Pockets of fire, burning this amazing purple, flashed in and out from the smattered foliage.
He still remembered the way the blood had painted the rock, made worse somehow by the moonlight shining on it as it dripped. The Voot had come to rest sleepily on her side, barrels of smoke leeching into the dark, her windshield partly open, the cabin a glittering mosaic from the pink glass of the windshield. Gir had drooped forwards in the cabin still strapped in, unmoving, eyes dark and lifeless.
Where the moonlight gathered, he found him floundering without direction in the rain with muted eyes staring out of hollow pits. What remained of an arm hung brokenly from his shoulder.
When he approached, Zim finally buckled and broke, falling, pain-torn against a tree. The smear he left he could still see behind closed eyelids.
Dib turned over, looking at the second hand on his bedside clock. Little decorative stars shone neon blue in the dark of its round clock face.
Fury is how I know you. Fury is the thing that holds you.
The rain hammered down on the house. The restless grumbles in the sky in turn made him restless, and he'd religiously struggle upright to peer through a break in the curtains, wondering if he could hear the Voot Runner flying through the storm like it had on that awful night.
I could hack into Gir's memory... I could see through his eyes what happened on Elysium... but do I really want to?
When he closed his eyes, he saw the spires, thorns growing and rising against a reddened sky. He turned from side to side, the horror reopening behind closed eyelids. The storm kept waking him up. Heart leaping up his throat, body frozen in the midst of a waking dream, he would listen to the wind and rain lash insensibly at the walls.
Sleep remained an uneasy hole he didn't fall into easily. When he did dream, he dreamt of Zim kneeling in chains before a council of Irkens with a white circle drawn around him. As each Irken passed by they would cut him down with their claws. Zim would land on his elbows or knees, and he would get back up again, but again they would slash and tear into him until he simply stopped trying to get back up.
His eyes opened with the sunrise as light crawled along a damp pillow. He stiffly sat up, scythe of hair limply falling in front of his eyes. It took him longer to unearth his legs from the bed sheets to stand up.
...I... I have to know what happened. I am going to find you, no matter what it takes.
Dib07: Thank you for your support! It really means a lot! If you want more, just say and I'll work hard to get it done! Have a great day ^^