DISCLAIMER: 'Invader Zim' and its characters, places, and situations are owned by Jhonen Vasquez and Viacom. (More the latter than the former, sigh.) They are reproduced here for non-commercial entertainment. All other material is mine, and I will have my vicious attack dog kill you if you steal. Have a nice day.
Story of Dib / Story of Gir
an Invader Zim fanfiction
by Kassi
Dib Membrane's door opened silently, so he couldn't say what it was that woke him. The hall light wasn't on. Only some cool moonlight from somewhere framed the silhouette that was Dib's waking sight. The boy's hand snatched for his glasses in the shadows enshrouding his bedside table, pulled them onto his face. Even as he recognized the distinctive hairstyle of the approaching tall shadow, it spoke.
"I have an idea; and you know I'm brilliant and inspired. I must try this out at once. Come, my son."
Dib scrambled out of bed, shivering in the cold air. His father had already turned away. Dib scrambled after the flash of his father's white coat into the hallway. Dib wasn't sure what to say—he felt still half trapped in a dream he couldn't remember or even feel anymore. He worked his fingers to try to anchor himself in reality as he followed his father downstairs.
Professor Membrane said nothing. As he rounded the bend in the stairs Dib caught a glimpse of eyes. Dib was surprised to see his father sans goggles—he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen his father's real eyes, but he knew that last time they hadn't been so full of cold darkness. They shone like granite in the moonlight.
"GIR!"
The robot slave booted with a jolt. His master was shaking him. Gir blinked up at the green alien above him. Zim's red eyes shone in the lurid pink light of the empty closet.
"I have a plan! Follow me!" Zim announced.
The firmness in his tone, the sense of urgency in his words, initiated a protocol deep in Gir's cavernous lack of workings. He felt a powerful surge of duty and desire to serve overcome him. Red light haloed him, taking the place of the turquoise that normally poured from his eyes and fittings.
"Yes, my master!" said Gir. He shot to his feet, saluting, and marched after Zim. His body thrummed with an unconscious drumroll, a powerful link to his master's every command and need that drew him along like a supercharged magnet.
As always, the feelings and single-mindedness ebbed, and light became blue-green again. He still followed Zim down the stairs, but now thoughts washed through in the wake of Gir's duty mode.
Why is Master shaking so? Why does he clutch those gold scissors so tight? What… ooh, an eagle! The distractible robot had caught a glimpse of the television as they passed into the kitchen. No, a vulture! No, an eagle!
"Come, Gir!" Zim said as the robot lagged. Gir stumbled after his master, casting a last longing look at one of his favorite appliances as Zim dragged them both into the elevation device disguised as an Earth toilet. The alien touched the handle. Gir watched the darkened walls of the kitchen get sucked away as they rapidly descended into the tunnel network underground.
Dib took a sip of soda, watching his father across the table. They sat in the lonely Membrane kitchen, used primarily for the storage of soda and leftover delivery pizza. Cereal was fleeting here, all else an illusion or dream. Even his father didn't seem real in this place—probably because the professor was rarely home.
Like a dream, his father looked to nowhere and left his open soda untouched and flattening in the dark air. Moonlight got in here too, through the windows, enough so that neither Membrane felt moved to put on a light—but it made things look soft and pliable, or else hard as stone like Dib's father's eyes.
Dib's soda had been gone for several minutes before the silence reached his impassive father. Professor Membrane rose.
"All finished, son? Let's go." In turning, his labcoat knocked over his bottle. Dib's eyes followed its soda-tailed progress down to the floor. The shattering of glass did not disturb his father. No sound followed except Dib's own small footsteps as he trailed his father down the dark winding stairs that led under their house.
The moonlight faded from view. Professor Membrane had not turned on the stairwell light, so for a while Dib was stuck in the dark, feeling for walls and stairs with his body and listening to his breathing and his father's. A deep glow appeared below them. Its golden touch lighted Dib's way around the last bend and into his father's lab.
The light was provided by the sole lit lamp in the room. It pooled around a gleaming bare metal stretcher and a small rolling table nearby set with medical instruments. Beyond the shining table, all else seemed insignificant in the darkness.
"Come on, hop up here, boy," said Professor Membrane, walking over to the table. Dib pulled himself up on the stretcher and instinctively lay back, turning his head slightly to look at his father's back. The man looked over his shoulder briefly, his eyes almost meeting Dib's… then they were gone again, turned and bent to look down at the rolling table. Metal clinked.
Professor Membrane turned around, breathing softly but deliberately. In the light, the scalpel in his hand looked golden to Dib; despite its tiny blade, it mysteriously blinded him so he had to squint to see his father's face and its eyes that would not focus.
The scalpel lifted smoothly, like a conductor's baton. Dib closed his eyes.
I love him so much… he thought, he's my father… I love him no matter what. No matter what…
Gir felt oddly detached from the sound of Zim rifling through the robot's little head. Gir's turquoise eyes watched the snacks he'd stashed under his own hinged head-lid being discarded with abandon on the computer lab's pale green floor.
Bye-bye, tortilla chips, Gir thought sadly. I'll miss you… ooh look! That's where the chewy chocolate chunks went! I've been looking for them for… hot dogs! Aww, I was saving those… g'bye artificial creamer… circus peanuts… hey, what's that? I didn't know I had those! Aw, man!
Gir felt a sudden strange calm overtake him, and his eyes unfocused. He felt an odd and very personal tingling as Zim reached into the depths of his upended bell-shaped head. The alien's black-gloved questing fingers had found the small, red power cord at the top of Gir's neck. The rubbery smooth sensation of Zim's hand was replaced with a tickly metal blade. The blade was trembling, as was the alien's breath.
Another blade came up on the underside of the cord, the same thickness and chill as the first. An echoing snick was the last thing Gir heard.
Dib's eyes were open. He could feel, hear, and smell the metal of the circuitry freshly implanted in his head. It was nestled alongside the nerveless tissue of his brain. The hypersensitive membrane around it was cushioned from the sharp edges somehow—but he could still feel it there. It was firing electrical impulses into the remaining organic parts inside him.
He could detect everything that was going on as his father soldered a few last wires and then closed the hinged metal plate that replaced the top of Dib's skull. Artificial skin slithered across it, making Dib's real skin shudder and crawl as if trying to get off his head. The replaced 'skin' disgorged fine black hair that tickled for a moment, then grew like crazy until it molded with his organic hair.
Dib felt his father's hands trembling as their work was completed. Dib crackled inside with inexpressible discomfort and pain he couldn't pinpoint.
The sky crackled, ripe, and with an air of finality and a cymbal's crash of sound it flung a lightning bolt at the rod towering up from a small strange pink house. Satisfied, the clouds shuffled away and looked for something else tall to bully.
Electricity flared down a special network of metal and refining devices that channeled the energy underground. A tiny robot's body was lifted off a worktable with the force of the jolt being funneled into it. Its dark eyes flared with tiny veins of electricity, then faded.
Dib pushed himself up on one arm, his other hand reaching up to his chest. His fingers slid over his ribs; his brain registered the carbon dioxide and oxygen he expended as he sighed.
Gir's eyes slammed to life with a huge flare of golden white light, which slowly faded to turquoise. He lurched to a vertical position, trembling in a way that didn't show at all.
"It's alive! It's aliiiiiiiiiive! Mwahahahahaha!" screeched Zim.
Gir fell to his lower leg-joints and threw up.
"My greatest creation," Professor Membrane breathed as he took in the sight of his cyborg son, the boy's enormous head filled with silently ticking and whirring electronics.
Dib found himself desperate to cry, but unable to produce the right emotion. It felt worse than an unsneezed sneeze, worse than the moment before a hiccup when one fancies they might be gone, worse than stunted grief for a forgotten mother.
He heard his father's voice, high above him: "Don't worry, son, it's all right. It's all in the name of science."
A thump woke Gaz with a start. She looked up at the flickering static on the TV which was, not that long ago, Edward Scissorhands. She swallowed the old-sock feeling of inadvertent napping. She blinked strained eyes down at the book lying facedown on the mauve living room couch beside her, some of its pages wrinkled from the way had lain after slipping from sleep-limp fingers.
She lifted it, the old testament of the Christian Bible, and snapped it shut. She shoved it off the couch with a satisfying thud… but left the snow on. As she maneuvered around to uncrease her clothes from her skin and bring life back to sleepy limbs, she unconsciously fished her GameSlave 2 out of her pocket and begin playing. She yawned through her nose, her eyes narrowing at the small screen between her fingers.
"Gaz, Gaz!" Dib cried, thundering into the room. "I've got a plan to defeat Zim! This time it's sure to work! Really! No more exploding pizzas!"
"Shut up, Isaac," she snapped, punching an upcoming yawn in its throat and stuffing it down into her chest. One, she felt, was enough.
"No, really!" Her brother's voice stabbed between her temples as her thumbs stabbed at buttons. "I think I can use his own technology to… huh?" Dib stumbled in his ranting, thrown out of his reverie.
A mechanical thunk made Gaz look up. The tape in the VCR had reached its end, and due to the marvels of modern technology was stopping and rewinding itself. The post-feature snow was replaced with cable channel four.
A retro NBC commercial filled the screen without sound. Against a warm blue background, an animated rainbow peacock spread its fan.
Gaz watched in strange fascination as her GS2 idled in her hands. The sight hypnotized and chilled her. Her senses were flooded with dream memories—the taste of metal, the feeling of a pair of scissors around a power cord, the sight of gold, the smell of electricity, and the sound of a boy's horribly broken sigh. She winced through an unbidden shiver, uncomfortable with her fear.
"Never mind," Gaz murmured, but Dib had already gone. A tear slipped away, a sister's pain for a tearless dream.