Whooo! Sorry I'm late, my lovely readers. I wish to hug you all. Goopy Goo gave me a 8pm deadline, but I missed it because I was watching tv.. but it's not 8pm in California yet! AHAHAHAHA!!!

Ummm.. other than that.. this Chapter is a little short, but hopefully good.. and yes, I will eventually be explaining how the horrible cure for Zim-poisoning works... yess... just give me some time to think about that. ::giggles:: sorry... I have also decided, as some of you have told me, (hugs for you) that I will be following my heart with this one and writing it the way that I originally intended. This story is not going to be a ZADR, however, my next stroy will be.. and I already have an idea. I did write a slashy fic about Red and Purple, for those of you who wish to read that. :)

Chapter 9 - GIR's cooking isn't so good, and something horrible happens... something just horrible!

About 40 minutes and a plate of muffins later, Dib was full, but didn't feel so well. GIR had baked the muffins himself, which smelled really good.. and also tasted really good.. but they still made Dib sick. He gave Zim a suspicious look, which Zim ignored. He had no reason to poison the Dib more than he already was.. perhaps GIR was just a bad cook, or put something in the muffins that wasn't supposed to be. Either way, Dib's stomach was hopping around and making him turn a slight shade of sickly green.

He groaned and clutched at his stomach. GIR was busy eating the muffin wrappers that he had discarded, and Zim was busy thoroughly reading the instructions that Purple had sent to him. He normally probably wouldn't have taken the time to do this, but he couldn't ignore a direct order from his Tallests... unless they told him to go off and explode or something, or banished him again, but even then he would have felt horrible about it. His reading was interrupted by another groan from Dib, and then a sickening splattering sound on the floor, followed by some loud coughing.

Zim grimaced and dared to look up. GIR was laughing insanely.

"My muffins don't agree with Dib's organs!" He shouted, which hurt poor Dib's ears yet again. The color had drained from Zim's green skin once more as he looked at the disgusting pool of vomit on the floor.. his own insides were now lurching dangerously.

"Ohhh.. gross!" He looked away, he needed to look at anything but the remains of the regurgitated muffins.. gross gross gross.. Zim sighed and looked at GIR, who was still giggling like a maniac drunk on soda. "GIR!"

"Yes sir!" GIR stopped and stood there, saluting him yet again.

"Fetch me the mop," Zim said weakly. He looked at the sick Dib, who was now passed out on the table. At least he hadn't been strapped down.. that would have been even more disgusting. He wondered if it really was GIR's cooking (seeing as he couldn't stomach human food most of the time either) or if Dib's body just wouldn't let him keep anything down. He shook his head as GIR sprinted from the room, back up to the storage level to grab the mop that Zim had used to clean up Dib's mess from his earlier mishap.

He went over to the unconscious boy, shuddering as he stepped around the revolting puddle. He stared at him for a while, as if he was half expecting him to wake up and say something stupid about Bigfoot or something. He looked curiously at Dib's glasses, then pulled them off of the boy's face. He held them up to the light, then put them over his eyes. Everything went blurry.

"Why do you wear these horrible things?" He asked aloud. They gave him a headache, almost as big of a headache as Dib gave him normally. Dib showed no sign of hearing him at all, so he placed them back where they had been on the boy's face. He glared down at the silent boy, then went back over to the monitor so that he could check the status of the Dib. His body temperature had changed.. it was going up... a fever, he remembered hearing the nurse at the skool call it. "Interesting.." He said, looking at Dib once more. He was interrupted when GIR reappeared.

"Git along, horsey!" He yelled. The bucket covered his entire body and he was riding on the mop as if it was a horse. "I got a ten-gallon hat!"

"GIR, give me the mop!" Zim said with a sort of waver in his voice as he clenched his fists.

"Okay, okay.. sheesh.." GIR took the bucket off of his head and handed his master the mop. Zim summoned a hose from the ceiling with the touch of a button and filled the bucket so that he could clean up after the wretched Dib-human. It was so disgusting.. and it was a good thing he didn't have those germ goggles on or else he would have screamed loud enough to wake the dead, or wake the unconscious Dib, at least.

He grumbled and felt sick the whole time, but he couldn't trust GIR with it, half afraid that GIR would do something completely gross like start dancing in the vomit, or throwing it or.. eww.. he shuddered at the thought. "So nasty," he muttered when the floor was finally clean again and he had gotten rid of the filthy water that had been in the bucket. He looked at the Dib again.

"I hope you know that the workings of your digestive anatomy are disgusting!" He ranted at the boy, snarling. "I also hope that there is no more food left in your.. stomach." Dib let out a small, pained moan as his eyebrows knitted and his eyes opened slowly, but he was just as blind as he had previously been. Too bad it hadn't just been a bad dream. "It's horrible to see that you're not dead yet, Dib-monkey, but welcome back."

"Why are you trying to save me and say that you care if you want me dead?" Dib asked softly, trying to remember what had just happened.

"Because I can't let you die of your own stupidity," Zim said as he marched back over to the table where the serum was to be made. "I want to kill you later with some ingenious plan, then I can be proud and laugh and throw a party for the filthy skool children and blow them up with a radioactive weenie! As soon as I have the satisfaction of destroying you with my own hands, no one will stand in my way!" After that was said he giggled evilly, sneering at the Dib.

"Why would you do that, though?" Dib questioned, thinking out loud, his blind eyes looking in the direction of Zim's insane laughter. "I mean.. you hate me, and I hate you.. it's sort of weird, Zim, that you would save me now just to kill me later. I mean, why not get it over with?"

"I did think of that, Earth-stink.. but it would be..." Zim struggled to think of the correct word.. Dib hadn't realized he had actually asked the question aloud, what if Zim changed his mind? "hmmm.. that would be..."

"Monkey?" GIR asked, smiling at his master.

"No GIR.. not monkey," Zim said, crossing his arms and thinking. "Attacking and killing you in your weakened state would be... dishonorable, dastardly and.. devious! The 3 D's of DOOM!" One of Dib's eyes twitched. It truly seemed like something that Zim would do.

"The three D's of doom? That's stupid!"

"SILENCE! I shall decide who is stupid here, slug-worm!" With that, Zim picked up a muffin wrapper from the floor (one that GIR hadn't attempted to eat yet), crumpled it and threw it at Dib's large head as the boy flinched from his loudness again.

"Hey!" Dib felt around on the table and found the wrapper after it bounced off of his glasses. With a growl he threw it back at Zim, but missed horribly due to his newfound blindness.

"HA! Dib-stink!" Zim smirked. "I should just sit here and throw things at you until you go crazy!" Such a mighty Irken threat it was.... not. "You are so inferior to me, I could laugh and... eat candy! Eat candy! yesss! Bwahahahahaha!" He pulled a candy bar out of his PAK.

Dib wanted to shut Zim up so much.. damn he was loud.. he felt another muffin wrapper on the table near him.. if only he could see. But wait..... he could see. What the hell? He smirked, his blindness having subsided for just a few moments, and threw the wrapper right at Zim while he was laughing his psychotic, evil laughter. The paper ball went right into Zim's mouth, which stopped his laughing abruptly seeing as the Irken had started choking. He made coughing and hacking noises, all the while punching himself below his ribcage, trying to dislodge the evil hell-wrapper from his throat. He couldn't breathe.

Zim turned the most horrible looking shade of blueish green, and now it was Dib's turn to laugh. Soon, though, the Irken collapsed on the floor, and his eyes slipped closed.

"Master?" GIR stared down at the fallen Invader. "Are you sleeping?"

"Zim?" Dib peered over the edge of the table to look at the Irken, he couldn't be.. dead? "Zim???" He called again.. not even a twitch of Zim's antennae.. "Zim, are you okay?" He cursed silently as his vision started to blur again.

"........"

"Zim? Hello?" Normally, the thought of Zim being dead would have made him hop up and down and run through the streets shouting it joyfully at the top of his lungs, but not today. Why did his aim have to be so decent? Why?!