A/N- Chapter 2. Nothing much to say other than that, though. Please take the little amount of time it takes to review, even if you want to say it sucks monkey balls. That is all.

Oh yeah, I'm finding my Beta clientele has dropped off a little, so If anyone that's reading this feels that they might need just that little bit of extra help in their stories to make them even better and more enjoyable for the readers to... well... read, feel free to contact me at unravelled_stitching@hotmail.com. I've had plenty of experience in Betaing, and I can range from just Spell and grammar checking your work, to going through it, with your help and permission, and finding plot mistakes, fixing up problem sentences etc. I do as much or as little work as you want me to do, and I'm always very careful with other peoples work.... Much more careful than with my own.

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BREAKING POINT 06

Chapter 2- Moment of Truth in your lies.

Gaz had always found that the hospital her father resided in smelled of three potent, distinct things; disinfectant, pine-scented bandages, and the overbearing smell of pain. Depending as to which place in the building you were was the potency and strength of the smells, though she'd found over the long years that the third on her unconscious list, the smell of pain, never left. It forever tainted the foreboding air, filling her lungs with it's rancid breath; forever choking her...

That day, Gaz noted immediately as she pushed the hermedically sealed doors apart with a heavy and dry heave, was no different to any of the others she'd spent locked away in the white-masked hell-hole. She sucked the hospital air deeply; coughing as the disgustingly strong odor of Eucalyptus made itself known in the very pits of her screaming lungs. She'd had to give up what could have indefinitely been the most relaxed and at-ease sleep she'd felt for what seemed like years in place of showing up to that awful hell-hole. Dib, when she saw him, had better have had a legitimate and rather convincing excuse for her not to hurt him severely.

The blonde secretary, whom of which was solely manning the front counter managed to flash her a wide, pearly smile between the obnoxious tapping of her keyboard. Gaz had become so accustomed to the smiles; the wide, flashy kind that it seemed all nurses were trained to execute, that she knew very well they weren't genuine smiles at all. No, they were merely a dollish façade they were paid to keep up at every moment of their schedules to keep grieving visitors at ease with their surroundings. Gaz managed a dull, mechanical nod as she abandoned the bare front lobby in place of a small, rather claustrophobic corridor at its opposite side.

It only took her a matter of minutes and brisk walking before she reached her destination. She'd become so accustomed to the place, despite the nauseous twisting it caused to bubble in her stomach, that she could have reached the Intensive Care wing blindfolded. A tiny, inaudible sigh escaped from between her lips and she lowered her head, entering the said wing by forcing the immensely sealed door apart with cold, stiff fingers, then listened with ears sharp for detail as it hissed softly behind her, finally coming to rest with a miniscule click.

It was always very foreboding in the IC wing, she'd found to no particular surprise after all the long and lonely years she had spent inside. She hated it more that anything else about the damned hospital; the IC wing was the very root, the very epicentre of her fears, of her doubts. She hated the neverending river of tears that the wing seemed to produce from countless amounts of people. She hated the nurses, donned with their clipboards full of graphs and numbers that made no logical sense or relevancy to anyones mind. She hated the doors, huge and white, too confronting to bare for more than a few seconds. But more than anything else, she hated the beeping. The insane, insistant beeping of every heart perdometer in the damned place, keeping track of lives so preciously hanging in the balance, the sole thing insisting that the dead vessels pumped with oxygen and Morphine really were, to her remorse, physically alive.

She found the designated room easily, having become so accustomed to the route taken to arrive there and the dull, slightly chipped numbers sprawled across the door. She stared patronisingly at that door at every visit she took. The white, slightly chipping frame always seemed to be looming above and around her like a colour-inverted shadow. It taunted her constantly. Her own lambent shadow on that day streaked across it's length as if it were a dirty, black smudge on its otherwise milky disposition. Her shadow seemed so small, though... so desperate and covered from head to toe in a white, a purity, that it could not match.

"Ugh," she muttered dismissively, shaking her head briefly to rid herself of such menial proses. Today she had no time to wait, no time to stare patronisingly into the depths of the door she had come to despise so deeply over the years. No, she was too busy thinking of what she were to do to Dib if his reason were not a legitimate enough one.

She silently, though possessing an impetuous streak through her movements, jerked down the cold, silver handle. It easily parted in her firm grip, revealing the room at the other side. A room that brought nothing but sadness, and the occasional streak of unabiding anger, to the girl. Over the long years it had become a room where she checked out her emotion at the door, as if she were wearing it like a suit. When she entered, the suit of emotion would slide on, allowing her to express herself in a way she had never thought it possible for her to, but at the end of the time spend, it was slid off once more, hung on the invisible coat rack, not to be seen or consciously felt until her next visit.

Her father, inside the room, lay silently beneath a mass of coloured tubes attached to numerous incisions made to his body. An IV needle was buried deeply into the inside of his pale elbow, feeding him the nutrients and painkillers to see it through, as the doctors said, just one more day. A breathing mask to his face was administering him the lifegiving oxygen he was unable to draw in alone with seared, damaged lungs. The visible skin of his face was tight and unsure after the numerous, and most failed, skin graft surgeries to the damaged, smouldering skin. And the steady Beep, Beep, Beep of the heart perdometer, the noise that had driven Gaz mad if kept alone too long with, hung in her ears insistantly. The sole sign that he really was alive...

But where was Dib? She turned her head briefly in every which direction, expecting him to be settled in the shadow, in the cold and uncomfortable plastic stool set up in the far corner; the stool she usually inhabited. Though as she inspected closely, she found he wasn't present at all. Had he set her up? Was he late? Her heart sunk a notch in her chest. She'd been waiting intently, though she would never admit, for the materialistic comfort she derived from seeing his face, a comfort it seemed only he could bring her. Though she'd long taunted him, long stated that he was the very bane of her existance, he'd been the closest to a father figure she had ever recieved over the years they hadn't been allowed a real one by a higher authority. A higher authority that had decided they deserved this kind of torture; the torture of observing their father dying, yet dragging it out for so long that false hopes of his recovery had been allowed to surface, like tiny bubbles on an otherwise black and hopeless sea. They'd been in it together for the years, both suffering from the deprivation and loss, and he'd brought her comfort to know this fact. But he wasn't there...

"Not here, Dad," she muttered softly, referring to her brother as she took a small, almost reluctant step toward the bed her father lay in. Though a hard, green plastic stool sat obediantly by the white-linened furniture, Gaz chose, as she routinely did, to stand. "Should I wait, do you think?"

"I don't think there's a point in that, Gaz," a voice that she recognised immediately sounded from behind her back, a voice that she'd never have thought to hear in her father's hospital room, the tone of knowledge and slight bemusement oozing from every syllable. She turned slowly, taking in the familiar face, taking in the familiar emotion, before turning back to her father.

What could he have possibly been doing there? She hadn't seen Zim in what seemed like a lifetime... himself and Dib had hardly dared come within a mile of eachother for what seemed like an eternity to the girl. If it hadn't been for Dib's constant ramblings of incoherant speech about him, she would have assumed that he was dead... or left for his own planet, or whatever else it was aliens seemed to do these days. But it seemed that this thought was futile, for there he was, in the exact room as she, talking as though his presence was the most normal thing on the planet.

"What are you doing here, Zim." Her voice was small and reserved, yet withheld every thread of disdain and forebodement she could muster to weave through her words at the spur of the moment. There was slight shifting from behind her as he moved his position.

"Don't start the tone with me, I'm only a messenger, " he took another confident step toward her. "Dib sent me."

"Do you think I'm stupid? Why would my brother send you in confidence to do anything for him?" she muttered, crossing her hands firmly across her chest with a steel and inverted grip. She lowered her gaze to her father, to his temple, where a small vein pulsated with the blood pumped around his unmoving body. Zim let out a small, low chuckle, though it held no humour in its depths.

"Did he-" he paused for a millisecond, "does he have anyone else?" Gaz considered this for a second, and her head lowered in unspoken reply. Zim took a step foward. He was level with her now, she could see him slightly in her peripheral vision. His gaze, like hers, was downcast to the body before him. He clung tightly to the lip of the bed, his mouth forming a tight, grim line.

"Oh how the mighty have fallen," he muttered simply, before ceasing to speak a word more for the quarter of an hour that proceeded. Gaz, finally, tired of the inane act of silence, spoke up, mustering the best sense of disdain she could manage at the spur of the moment.

"What did you mean by that?" Her voice was dark and low in defense to Zim's words, the way she had trained it to become in the many years of her existance on the horrible spinning ball known as Earth.

Zim smiled vaguelly at her. Silly girl. She really was attached to this man, this hollow, dead man more than anything else she'd ever before. His impartial studies on her had inferred this and now he could simply confirm it as a solid fact. He'd have to drill more to get that wall inside of her to fall....it wouldn't be easy, but....

"All that power he once possessed. The sheer brilliance that could have competed even to mine. He was a wonderworker and a menace at the same time. Finding the surefire cure for Meningacoccal, then killing more than three hundred due to a carelessly unsealed test tube. The man created artificial life in that lab of his, yet refused to share his secret with the rest of the world, which to this day still remains a secret." Zim turned his eyes downward, taking in the lifeless lump of flesh. "Now look at him, Gaz. What do you see? He was once controlled by his mind, now he is little more than flesh, bone and blood. He has no mind anymore. Reduced to nothing by one of his own ailments. What little electrical impulses that do pass over his brain now will never be put to good use again. He is fallen, and we both know it." Zim didn't look to Gaz as he spoke, rather felt her eyes follow him with every step he took. She remained silent for what seemed like an utter lifetime, arms crossed tightly over her chest, head bowed low....watching everything without watching anything at all. Zim once again broke the silence, like shattering a mirror.

"Gaz, he's left."

"I know, he was gone a long time ago," she replied sharply, smoothing a wrinkle in the white linen about her fathers hands to pass the awkward silence. He shook his head, tutting lightly at the back of his throat.

"I don't mean your father. I mean Dib." She immediately stopped the preoccupied preening as she slowly absorbed the sentence Zim had spoken. She failed to answer for a long, long proceeding, as if she were escaping the admittance through arrogance. "Gaz, it's true, Dib left. He sent me here to tell you-"

"I don't believe you," she spat vehemiously, turning to him with the poise and accuracy of a snake.

"Believe what you want, human, I know the truth and that's all that matters." He looked her in the eye, eyes that, though sheltered mostly from his heavy gaze, reminded him so firmly, so securely of her brothers that it brought a tiny, unconscious scowl to his face. "Believe it or not, in the long spaces that have passed between your brother and I, bonds of confidence have been woven,like it or not. I owe him, he owes me, the game went on forever, though always knowing we'd turn eachother in the second the chance arose." He stopped and took a deep breath. "I suppose it was his turn. And that is why I am here."

Gaz did not reply immediately, she had no reason to, and nothing worthwhile to say. A small sigh passed between her slightly parted lips and she turned, almost shied away from the Irken. She finally gathered her words. "Why... would he just leave? You tell me, Zim." Her eyes, the eyes he knew deep down he would eventually come to despise when he could ignore them no longer, flickered toward him, taking him in, as if sizing him up. Attempting to unnerve him.

"I don't know, human," he replied firmly, matching the flickering notion she'd applied to her gaze with a steady force. "I never did understand him and his insane eccentricities in the slightest." He sniffed, studying a gloved hand with a complacent smirk glued to his facial features. "There must have been something, though. I never really did see him as a person that would pursue something like this..."

"He's sick of this. I don't blame him." Her voice, though faint and barely audible, cut through his words with the force of a butchers knife. Immediately, he knew he'd hit a nerve somewhere deep inside of her intangible mind, he could tell by the intent stare she administered harshly at her fathers hand, taking in the tubing and the scabbed skin and the steady Blip Blip Blip in the very back of her ears. Far away from the internal struggle with herself deep inside.

A small sigh escaped her lips; so small in fact it was almost inaudible to the green skinned boy beside her. He, in turn, watched her face thoughtfully. This girl had always fascinated him.... Something about her reactions that weren't quite the same as every other human he'd had the severe misfortune to come across.... something he couldn't quite explain, though rolled with ease on the back of his tongue like a sour grape. Something he could never quite Reach....

She busied her hands straightening the white sheets over the body of the former scientist, smoothing over any creases with hands almost as pale as the sheet itself; the nails deep, midnight black in striking comparison. He knew that, though she seemed to be severely fussing over the body of her father, her mind was still stuck, still restrained on what he had told her.

"You're too young to live alone legally, am I right?," he muttered in a low, smooth voice, shifting slightly in his spot to gain full view of the girl. She ceased to move and an intense shot of hatred glared at him from beneath that thick mass of violet fringe... the sole item restraining him from her unimpared glare. He shuddered, a twisted attempt to hide a scowl of contempt distorted his facial features

"He'll be back. If he's even gone, that is." Her voice remained fully composed, but he immediately, if not even sooner, picked up on the slight, shaking nerve that rung through like a vein of gold with ears sensitive for detail. "He needs me to look after him," she laughed tonelessly, though it held no humor in its depths. "Who else is going to cook his meals and tape Mysterious Mysteries for him while he's.... well... spying on you?"

"Well, the little stink-worm has obviously found a way to fend for himself." He coughed lightly as his matter-of-fact tone sunk deep into Gaz's skull. "If he really has gone for good... what are you going to do?"

"And you're trying to say what?" she immediately cut him off, peering at him with a face destitute of tolerance and acceptance of his words. His forebearance with the girl was wearing well thin, yet he still managed to force out a blank smile.

"What I'm trying to say," he replied hyperbolically, "is that you're in a bit of a jam... and I want to help you."

"If you want to help me, Zim, you can leave me alone. I still don't believe a word you're saying," she denounced dismissively, turning her gaze away from the green-skinned menace beside her. "Now, if you don't mind, this conversation is very... perspicatious and all, but I'm going home." And with that she turned to the much despised door, making to leave.

"That's understandable," he called as she gingerly fingered the door handle. She paused. "It doesn't worry me what happens to you." He let out a small, low chuckle, turning away as he felt her suspicion-plagued gaze settle upon his figure once more. "Though I rather did need the help I could have recieved from you. It's very hard to find intelligent beings on this planet."

Gaz hadn't been born yesterday, and despite attempting to block them out at every waking moment of her young life, she did in fact listen to Dib's mindless rantings about his most loved enemy. She severely doubted the 'help' Zim had previously mentioned was for anything else but his so called 'invasion', however pathetic his attempts over the long years had been, according to Dib, that was.

"And I wasn't," he added, "going to leave good work going unrewarded." He raked a critisizing gaze over her, from head to toe. "I'm sure there's something you'd want from me, Gaz, some form of... unfullfilled wish."

What had he meant by that? Was he attempting to claim that he could grant her the most deepest of her wishes and superficial longings? She let go of the door handle, turning to her father desperately, lying motionless beneath the mass of white sheeting and coloured tubes forcing essential nutrients along his tired, useless veins.

"Unfullfilled wishes, huh?" Gaz muttered, her hands snaking over her chest in a sharp, defensive pose. The Irken eyed her face carefully. She was deep in thought, though a hollow smile destitute of any warmth was smeared thinly over her face. "You know, there is one thing I've wanted for a really long time now, but it's never been given back to me."

Zim matched her hollow grin. "And that would be?" The words she formed caught in the back of her throat and she stuttered lightly, turning away to perhaps mask the light snag of emotion that caught at her voice as it protruded from her mouth.

"You're leaning on his bed," her voice wavered uncertainly. Zim looked down to his gloved hand. Indeed, it was latched tightly to the Professor's whitewashed bedframe. He let go. In a moment of haste, she masked the thready tones of her voice with a deep, foreboding darkness. "Though I suppose that wish is... unfullfillable, isn't it?" Zim looked doubtfully to the man lying helplessly beneath the primitive human equipment. No, this man didn't have a chance, he was too far gone even for the most advanced of his Irken Revival equipment. Though Gaz used it as a descriptive verb, the man really was dead inside, Zim could see that oozing from every pore in his body. He was just a shell now.

But he couldn't risk losing her! Not Gaz Membrane. He had to show this planet what he was really capable of, show those no-good Tallest's that he really was invasion material despite their constant and partially hidden taunts he'd only recently become fully aware of. And he needed this girl to achieve it. A human who knew all the secrets, a human willing, if not consciously, to betray her own planet. If keeping a promise that could never be traded in was the sole sacrifice he had to make to retain the girl in his grouped side, then so be it. Promises were only ever made to be broken anyway.

"On the Contarary, Gaz, not everything is as hopeless as it seems." Over the long years he'd inhabited the planet, Zim had become an expert liar. There wasn't a flinch, a pause, a faulter in his words that could have been used against him in an accusation of lying. He watched as Gaz turned her gaze to him, eyes a little wider, yet twice as suspicious and full of internal and underlying emotion than she'd ever allowed them to become. His lip curled at the full, unimpared blow of her stare. That stare.... it would drive him crazy.

"Don't lie to me," she muttered, maintaining eye contact as she searched his face for anything, anything that could tell her he was lying; he didn't mean what he said, he couldn't do what he was saying. Though she couldn't find a solitary thing in her deep searching. Not a faulter or a snag.

"Would I lie to you?" he grinned lightly, humorously. Her gaze fell away and he found himself breathe in a small sigh of relief. "If it makes you happy, if you help me for a little while, I'll bring this man back to you."

"Zim..." her voice faultered. She held to the bedpost for support, pushing a stray strand of violet from her eyes. "Zim, if you're lying, I can't let you live."

He chuckled. "There's no way of you knowing for sure, I suppose. You can either accept... or you can... refuse."

Decisions were never something Gaz had been outstandingly good at. It seemed that every fork in the pathway of her life, every turn, every crossway that could have led to a thousand different happy endings were void to her. She only seemed to pick the bad ones; the decisions leading her down the wrong road. She didn't believe Zim in any of the words that her brother was gone. No, she was sure this was nothing but an enticement for her mind, a psychological implant in which may have switched Zim and Dib's internal places in her mind from good to bad, or bad to good. This hadn't worked in the slightest on her mind planted firmly into the ground, yet she was still intending to accept?

"How long?" she muttered, not daring to look away from her father.

"As long as I need." was his swift reply. She pondered thoughtfully for a mere few seconds before the much despised door located behind her swung tentatively inward. She turned more with curiosity than surprise; a nurse entered, her unkempt, curly hair pulled into a loose excuse for a bun and her pale, watery eyes shooting them both quick, apprehensive looks behind her hollow smile.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't think there was anyone in here," her voice was thin and scratchy, and she crossed the room with tentative steps, clutching to her clipboard as if it were a safety blanket. Gaz eyed Zim in a bemused way; he continued to study the nurse with a content interest. The Nurse turned to both figures in turn. "I'm afraid you'll have to leave now, the doctor will be performing a routine health check on your father," she shot a pointed look at Gaz with her dismissing, apprehensive gaze, "and you can't be here for that. We'll keep you and your brother up to date with the results, though"

"Okay... It's a deal then," Gaz muttered. When Zim finally rose his eyeline to the girl from the visibly smaller woman, he took in that she was, in fact, not looking to the nurse when she spoke at all, but to him. He grinned. He had her in the net.... all that was left was to reel her in...

"How is he going, then?" He said, the nurse turned her head skittishly to face him, though his eyeline did not move from Gaz's. She consulted her clipboard hurriedly.

"Well... There's really been no improvement...."

"No improvement. How wonderful." A lopsided, hollow grin filled the lines of his moss-green face. "I'd say it calls for a celebration, wouldn't you Gaz?" he relished in her confounded stare. "How about we celebrate at, say, 42 Weschler Way, East City Limits, then?" recognition lit her face and she nodded knowingly. The nurse merely stood between them, afraid to move for fear of startling the staring duo.

"42 Weschler Way, East City Limits? Okay," she nodded. Zim turned to the nurse, grinning, clearly humored with his cryptic speech.

"That dress sure is lovely. Surely you got it at Table of Eight," he refered to a modern fashion store, yet the last word of his sentence was spoken so forcefully that Gaz immediately understood its hidden meaning with little difficulty at all, nodding slightly as she clutched the bed's thick whitewashed post. The Nurse stuttered, looking down to her plain white uniform with doubt.

"Well actually, its just standard issue-"

"Standard issue? Marvellous," he muttered, stroking his mossy chin. "I suppose you have a lot of clothes.... packed up then?" The nurse shot him a look of utter desperation, a thin blush forming in her cheeks. Gaz supressed a small laugh forcing at her cheek muscles, yet nodded to Zim that she fully understood.

"Well I suppose, but-"

"Is everything alright in here?" a tall, greying man Gaz immediately recognised as her fathers regular doctor entered the room, pulling along a large wheeling table filled with countless amounts of primitive instruments in one hand, and clutching a thick clipboard in the other. The nurse shot him a look of sheer relief, shifting her weight onto one foot.

"Oh yes, everythings perfect," Zim added, flashing a wide, hollow grin. "But I must be going. I suggest you had too, Gaz." He shot her a sizing glance before leaving the room, leaving behind him a severely confounded face, an anxiously embarrassed face continually peering down to her clothes as if she expected them to disappear from her wiry frame, and a last face, though slightly impared by a thick violet fringe, that was full to the brim with sheer glee.

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A/N- So? What do you think? Reviews are sticks to the fire. Add your stick, make it burn faster, get more chapters out of me. Please take the one minute from your life to review this story if you'd like it to continue. Chapter 3 up when Inspiration hits me.