Note: I can't say how good this is. It's the first time I've written in what seems like forever. If it makes no sense, I apologize; obviously I have problems editing my own work at 1:29 AM. In any case, this story is dedicated to Amethyst Soul, Arm&Leg, Chaotica, Jaimelee Rocket, lyn, Scribe E, Xellina, and all the other authors of Zim fanfiction. You're very good, what can I say?
Disclaimer: I do not own Invader Zim, or any of its affiliates. Jhonen Vasquez is the one that gets all the money, and thankfully he hasn't started shooting down fanfiction (although some of it deserves to be shot). I also do not own To Kill a Mockingbird, nor do I want to - I don't even rightly know why it's in here.
My inspiration for this particular fic comes from the movie The Birdman of Alcatraz, which I thought was incredibly stupid. My motivation comes from the movie Left Luggage, which I don't think is playing in regular theaters. It has nothing to do with the story, it just made me cry. That said, enjoy!
Mocking Bird
The cell was cold, but Gaz was sweating. Brisk October air was blowing through the bars on the one window, twenty handlenghts up the whitewashed walls. Gaz had watched the leaves of the tree outside turn orange and gold, then increasingly brown. Soon then would wither and blow away completely; every day she saw fewer and fewer holding tenaciously onto the branches that bore them. Every day the shadows on the wall lengthened, and she would be waking and rising in the dark of 7 AM on a winter's morning. Then the days would grow longer and it would be spring again, and she could watch the tree giving bud to new life. Which would die the following winter, and so on and so on for all the years she would be here.
The cell was cold, but Gaz was not.
She had spent the last hour on the exercise grounds, looking at her tree from the one other angle allowed to her. Standing on the 50 ft square of pavement, she could gaze up at the expanse of bark as it rose higher than four stories, up past her one window to tower above the razor-wire of the wall. The tree had been here when the prison was not, the tree would be here when Gaz was not. She had never paid attention to such things before, not in her city life, but the tree gave her hope. It seemed to her that tree would be standing when the world ended.
There were a few other prisoners out on the grounds with her that day. Running the track, tossing around a football, enjoying the fresh air. The smog had been light this week, a double blessing. The air inside the prison had an unpleasant tang to it: the smell of unwashed bodies, unsavory activities, the scent of despair.
Gaz had known it for ten years already. She would know it for twenty more. Thus said the United States law.
Her father sat staring at her through the glass between them. To his ear he held a black telephone, identical to the one on Gaz's side of the glass. For once he was not wearing his heavy scientific goggles, and his eyes behind his glasses were tired, weary. The eyes of an old man. The hand holding the phone was thin and shaking.
Gaz could tell he didn't know what to say to her. She was surprised to see him at all.
"I've been...working on a new breakthrough at the lab," his voice said into her ear. A few months ago his face, or what she could see of it, would have been animated as he said this. Now it seemed strange that his mouth was moving, when the rest of him did not. "Everyone is very hopeful. Some people think we may have cracked the mystery of the missing link."
"That's great, dad," Gaz said into the mouthpiece. Ten minutes they had, and as always he hid behind his work.
"And...ah...your old schoolteacher, Mr. Elliot, from fourth grade? He was just made principal of Skool...I thought you might like to know."
Gaz raised her eyebrows. She had forgotten Mr. Elliot. She had not forgotten many things, but apparently her perpetually happy teacher had been one of them. "That's nice for him."
"Gaz." Her father shifted uncomfortably, running his free hand through his graying hair. "I told you that I'm getting married next spring. To..."
"Mira Hoffberger. I remember," Gaz said. She didn't frown. After all, she'd known since she was five that her father had no lasting regrets over her mother. She was only surprised he had allowed himself the leeway of marriage, after being consumed by work all those years.
"Well, she'd like meet you," he said, leaning closer to the glass. "Get to know you, maybe."
"Why?" Gaz was honestly confused. Why would anyone in the world, knowing who she was and what she had done, ever want to know her?
"You are my daughter, Gaz. And..."
"Professor Membrane, time's up." A guard in the drab blue uniform of the prison leaned into view. Membrane nodded and looked at Gaz.
"I love you," he told her, before hanging up the phone.
"Why?" she whispered, as another guard came to lead her away.
Gaz lifted her hot face to the breeze. If she sat on the top bunk, she would feel it directly but she lacked the energy to climb all that way. She had worn herself out today, as she did every day. When one worked oneself sufficiently, one slept easier. And Gaz needed to sleep hard, for she had no desire to dream.
Yolanda and Joe had challenged her to a race today, three miles around the track and losers had to take on the winner's KP duties. Gaz had won, much to the chagrin of some inmates betting. Yolanda, who had the cell next to her, was almost six feet tall with legs like a giraffe, and by rights she should have run circles around the smaller girl. But Gaz was not used to loosing.
Now Yolanda was in the cafeteria, serving up whatever slop was for lunch that day. And Gaz got the reward of sitting in her cell, staring at the walls.
When she first got here she'd asked for a crayon, which was duly commissioned. A section of the whitewash was covered in blue drawings, little sketches and doodles that filled the time and kept her inexperienced mind from going stir-crazy. But Gaz didn't draw much anymore. It had gotten too personal, reminded her too much.
There were some things that she wanted so much to forget.
The trial was a blur, scenes and images that sometimes fit together logically, sometimes didn't. Red mahogany wood of the defense table, the prosecutor's brown hair, anxious murmurs from the audience. The hard stares of the jury.
"How does the defendant plead?" the judge asked.
The lawyer straightened his suit. He had not been happy with her, not happy with the case in general. Gaz had told him nothing; all he had to work with was her distraught father. Against the mountain of evidence in possession of the prosecutor, he had no hope of winning. "The defense pleads guilty, your Honor."
Then a woman, on the stand. "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"
"I do."
"Please be seated."
Then a man. "I found the body lying in a dumpster, the one in the back of my store."
"And in what condition was the body?"
"It had been...brutally...I'm sorry, it's just...it was horrible."
Then, "What is your relation to the defendant?"
"I'm her father."
"Please tell us what you saw on the night of April 25, at 5:00 PM."
Then, "And what does the jury find?"
It was a fat black man, mid forties. He was wearing a gray suit with a red silk tie, a well-off businessman who looked mildly annoyed at having to waste his time with jury duty. And to Gaz's eye, he appeared mildly sick. "We find the defendant, Gaz Membrane, to be guilty of two accounts of murder in the first degree. As she is under the age of sixteen and cannot, by state law, be given the death sentence, we condemn her to thirty years in prison and twenty years pension.
Her lawyer had snapped shut his briefcase. The prosecutor had looked pleased. Her father would not meet her eyes. And then the police had come with their handcuffs, and she began the ride to her new home.
"I am lonely here," the blue crayon read. "I have never in my life been lonely before, but now behind the locked doors and cement walls I find myself longing for the push and shove of people my own age."
Gaz smiled. It had been quite a while since she wrote that. How anti-social she had been in Hi Skule, causing her classmates to clear a path for heblock. One of the first things Gaz had been taught upon arrival was the importance of the system of tapping on the pipes. Without knowledge, the prisoners were at the complete mercy of the guards on duty, and some of them had a tendency to take advantage of their power. Like old Leslie the Lesbo, for example. Always be prepared and never mouth off on her watch, or she'd be glad to restrain and reprimand you. Physically.
But it wasn't the 'watch out for Les' signal; Gaz had no trouble with that one. She recognized the word 'guard', and 'some big stir', but then there was a series of taps so long that she became completely lost.
'Repeat that', she tapped onto the side of the pipe. This time as the message came back, she began to write.
"Gaz, I'm going out," Dib said from the door.
Gaz paid him no mind, she rarely did. Dib was a fine brother: he did her homework and left her alone when she told him to. But sometimes he had this idea that she was wildly amazed with whatever he spent his time doing. Gaz had learned long ago to tune him out.
"I...guess I'll see you," he called. His trenchcoat was on. There was an umbrella in one hand and a watergun in the other. His pockets were bulging. He looked ready to go.
"Then get out of here already," Gaz said, beginning to feel a bit irritated. She was in the middle of a very tricky part of War Of The Worlds III, and she'd already died twice. She only had one life left and she was in no mood to lose it to her brother's interruptions.
"Okay. Right. Okay. I'm going," Dib said. He opened the front door and a torrent of rain blew in, compliments of a tropical storm off the west coast. He stepped halfway outside, dripping onto the rug. "I love you, Gaz."
She died from the shock. "What?!" She turned, utterly bewildered; why would he say that? He never said that. But her brother was gone, the door firmly shut behind him, and the carpet a sopping mess. Gaz turned off her game and sat back.
She and Dib had been raised in a household where love was scarce. They simply grew up in its absence, not needing it, not needing each other. For Dib to become suddenly, seriously, emotional...there was something wrong.
He'd been off to Zim's, that much was clear. He was missing the suitcase that would dictate a meeting of his dorky paranormal society, and besides, there was something grim and set in his expression. Six years rivalry between Zim and Dib had taught Gaz the warning signs.
War was afoot.
Dib was making his good-byes.
Grabbing an umbrella, Gaz ran out of the house.
Two tries later, Gaz was still confused. There was a lot of water in the pipes, garbling the message, and Linda was getting pissed. The last time she'd given up repeating whatever it was she was trying to say, and had been giving Gaz a taste of her extensive vocabulary.
Not that it was that big of a deal. Gaz was used to keeping on her toes if there was going to be trouble, but she doubted the message was anything serious. All the same, she was a little miffed at her ignorance; she'd have to brush up on the code at dinner tonight.
For the present, all her neighbors were either absent or napping, so Gaz had no one to ask. She backed away from the toilet and lay down on the bed, resting her muscles. She picked up a worn copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and began to read, enjoying the play of leaves on the wall beside her.
Zim's house was an intimidating place, and Gaz had never been certain if that were intentional or no. Certainly the gargantuan gnomes and flamingoes didn't help much, but the house had a sinister and out-of-place look in the quiet cull-de-sack where Zim resided. Just feeds right into Dib's overactive imagination, she thought.
Walking through the gate and across the lawn, Gaz shivered. The lawn gnomes stared at her with blank eyes though sheets of rain, and she was having second thoughts. So Dib was feeling sentimental, that wasn't much of a reason for her to be out trespassing at 9:00 on a school night. By rights she should be home having another go at War Of The Worlds III. She...
The front door was standing open. Not just open; it was hanging strangely, as though maybe the hinges were broken. Yellow light was spilling out onto the lawn. Without knocking, Gaz stepped inside.
She had been at Zim's house before, and she knew what things looked like normally, if the green boy could ever be called normal. Taking one look around, Gaz knew something was wrong. It was a giant wave of wrongness that hit her in the gut and made her stop where she stood.
On opposite sides of the door were two machines; one dressed in a tutu and the other wearing a shirt and tie. Both had limbs missing and were glowing with an blue nimbus of electricity. She could see blue flames dancing in the male machine's teeth. The female's head was hanging as though her spine had been snapped.
Stuffing from the couch was strewn across the carpet, mingled with springs and pieces of fabric. Chairs were broken, pictures smashed, a small fire burning in the trashcan. And splashed over the shattered television set, across the large picture of a monkey, was what looked horribly like blood.
It was only now Gaz could smell its coppery scent.
There were four sets of footprints on the floor. The dripping ones were hers, and she could see the wet imprints of Dib's boots. The other set of boots had to belong to Zim's smaller feet, which left a blackish stain. Halfway across the room those dark marks turned a shade of red.
The final footprints weren't feet at all, but rather round circles that ran crazily across the floor in no discernible pattern. They ended at a pile of metal, covered in places with green cloth. Apparently a machine like the two at the door, it looked as though it would never run again.
Gaz heard a groan from the kitchen, and finally broken from her paralysis, she ran.
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird," Miss Maudie informed Scout and Gaz. Gaz knew the words by heart and could have repeated them verbatim.
That didn't mean she understood it.
Letting the book fall, Gaz closed her eyes and drifted to sleep, paying no mind to the commotion at the end of the cell block.
The sickly-sweet tang of blood assailed Gaz's nostrils as she entered the kitchen and she gagged, holding onto the doorway for support. What she saw gave her insomnia for the rest of her life; the image was burned into her eyelids.
Dib was slouched against the table, one hand clutching his arm, the other his head. His face was puffy and misshapen, black and blue and red. It almost looked as though someone had taken claws to him. He looked up at Gaz through two black eyes and rolled his gaze to the floor.
There lay Zim, but it wasn't the Zim Gaz knew. She involuntarily stepped back. Gone was the black hair, the zealous blue eyes, the backpack. Sprawled awkwardly on the floor amidst eight twisted pieces of metal was a monster. Antennae sprouted from his head. Narrowed, pupil-less eyes glittered redly. And his breath whistled harshly in his lungs, chest barely moving.
As Gaz watched, the rise and fall stopped. The eyes went dull. Gaz knew he was dead.
She turned to Dib, mouth open, but he beat her to it.
"You've got to destroy the body," he said, pushing himself painfully to his feet. "We can't leave any evidence. He won't burn, so you'll have to hack him apart and put him in a dumpster someplace. I can't do it, I don't have the strength." He said it with no emotion.
Gaz felt as though she were drowning and couldn't come up for air. She felt as though her world, the fabric of her reality, was tearing a bit at the seams. Her head was ringing.
He was her brother. She did what Dib said.
Gaz's book slipped to the floor as she slept. A key clicked into the lock on her cell.
Dib was seated, very calm, very collected, on the chair in front of his computer. His gaze at Gaz through broken spectacles was direct, and he didn't seem to be overly concerned about the blood seeping through his trenchcoat. "Gaz, I'll never be able to thank you for what you've done tonight. I know I've never been the perfect brother. I haven't been there for you when I should. And that's something I'll never forgive myself for. But I have to ask one last favor."
Gaz's heart, stomach, lungs...it felt as though all her organs had taken up permanent residence in her throat. She couldn't have spoken if she tried.
"A long time ago Zim implanted a chip in my brain. I've neutralized it, but I still can't risk that it ever be found. Once again, I ask that you destroy the evidence." And he handed her, handle first, a loaded gun.
"I don't understand," she choked out.
Through his broken jaw and distorted face, Dib smiled. "And that's the way it should be."
"Dib? I love you too." She fired.
The gunshot had brought her father, who wasn't supposed to be home, running. Dib was rushed to the hospital, but years of video gaming had given Gaz a knack for the real thing. Her brother had died a merciful death, dead before he hit the floor.
The authorities had found her covered with the blood of two people, one an extremely rare blood type. They found Zim's body, what was left of it, the following day. She was tried within the month, and said nothing in her own defense. After all, there could be no evidence.
Gaz was only fifteen.
"Gaz Membrane!" A rough hand shook her and she jerked into consciousness, momentarily disoriented. The face she peered up into was that of the warden.
There was a man in military uniform standing in her cell.
"What's wrong, what's going on?" Inwardly Gaz was cursing herself for not making more of an effort to understand Linda's message. She'd never seen a military presence in the jail before, and doubted it was a good thing.
"You've been drafted for a top secret mission by the United States Military," the warden said gruffly. He wasn't meeting her eyes. "If you survive and return, you'll be set free."
Free. October turning to December turning to April, leaves falling and growing again, birds singing. Wind in her hair, shadows on the walls. Gaz was silent. If you survive and return, so he doubted he would.
Gaz did not act on instinct. She thought things through, weighed all possible outcomes before taking the best route. She acted on survival.
"Are you allowed to tell me what this is about?" she yelled over the sound of the helicopter.
Lieutenant Doolittle leaned over to shout back, "What do you know about aliens?"
~ finite ~
Note: Well, I'm sorry that was so bloody, but that happens to be the direction my mind runs this early in the morning. Please do not take offence at Leslie; I was merely trying to play up the state of federal prison systems. As I said above, I'm not completely confident with this fic, so any suggestions as to improvements would be, in all seriousness, incredibly welcome. Or you could just flame me for killing off both Zim and Dib brutally on my first try. Don't understand the Mockingbird quote? Review. Want to know what the hell happened between Zim and Dib? Review. Why did Dib want to destroy evidence he'd waited so long to exploit? Review. What does Uncle Sam want with Gaz? Review. Just don't get it? Neither do I, but review anyway. Anything goes.