a/n: I should have been asleep hours and hours ago. This just isn't funny, anymore. I even took a sleeping pill, which seemed to be working for about 10 mins and then disappeared. Ah well. Insomnia gives me an opportunity to be dorky and write stories like this one.

As a little warning: everyone who reads this should read the outline for the unaired ep. "The trial", (You can d/l it at http:www. roomwithamoose. Com / closet / ) because the control brains featured in it will have a key roll in the 'dramatic and exciting conclusion' ™ of this fic. You don't gotta, but it may help. I dunno. I'll prolly mention something about it in a later chapter, I just kinda remembered that I would be putting the control brains in here while I was cooking dinner. Mmmyup.

Oh, and this is an excited note: I have a review!! One whole review!!! Tee-hee! There is no sarcasm here, ladies and gentlemen, this is honest to god chipper ness over a review. They make me smile so much my face gets all stretchy-like. So Kit Kat the Great, you are my favorite person at the moment. I give you Cadbury Crème Egg. Yummy...

And now I leave you to your moosey fate.

disclaimer: legal stuff goes here.

PART TWO

I was nine years old when my mother's nightly crying finally stopped. Gaz was seven. She was sleeping in my room, which had become almost as much of a ritual as brushing my teeth before bed. Every night had been the same for the past two years: our mother would tuck us into our respective beds, reading us each a story—mine about outer space and Gaz's consisting of one fairy tale or another—before kissing our foreheads and pulling the covers up around our necks. Every night, then, we would ask for our father to come up from his lab and kiss us goodnight, and on some nights we would get lucky, but more often than not our mother would smile her sad smile and tell us that our father was very busy right now, but he told her to tell us that he loved us very much and to not let the bed bugs bite our toes off. She would then give us a little tickle over the covers to distract us from the fact that we knew that she was lying, and blow us a kiss from the door way before shutting off the lights and partially closing the door.

A few hours later she would lock herself in the bathroom that separated her and Dad's bedroom from Gaz's, and she would cry. And Gaz would come into my room to sleep for the rest of the night.

The ritual The Night The Crying Stopped was not too noticeably different, yet it still unnerved me so much that I couldn't sleep. Maybe it was the way she had hugged me extra tightly before tucking me in. Maybe it was the way that she had been singing—actually singing—when she handed Gaz and I our lunches that morning before school. Maybe it was the way she stared extra hard at our faces throughout the day, as if memorizing every freckle. Something was off. Something was different.

I moved slowly from the bed so as to not wake up Gaz.. As cute and adorable as she could be when she climbed into my bed each night, she turned into pure evil if she was woken up before she was ready. I was edgy enough—I didn't need to face her seven year old wrath.

I could tell something was wrong as I approached the bathroom and didn't hear any noise from the other side. None of the muffled sobs and sniffles that I had grown so used to in the past few years. My breath began to quicken as my tummy did flip-flops and I could feel my pajamas sticking to my back. I remember that they were my favorites—light blue with little grey UFOs. They were my favorites, but I never wore them again after that night. No matter how many times they were washed, they still...

I knocked softly on the door. "Mom?" I wanted to shout it, but I could barely bring my voice above a whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again, "Mom? Are you there? Are you ok?"

I heard a faint 'click' from the other side. The sound of something metal hitting tile.

"Mom?"

I took a deep breath and put my hand on the doorknob. It was disturbingly cold under my sweaty palm. I could hardly swallow around the lump that had grown in my throat, and I could feel my eyes stinging with hot tears.

I turned the handle and pushed open the door, not really registering the surprise I felt over the fact that it was unlocked.

The first thing I noticed was that the room was only lit by candles. They were everywhere—on the vanity, the toilet, the floor—their flames pinpointed into little stars in front of my fogging glasses. I remember thinking how pretty they were.

It was then that I noticed the blood. And my mother, sitting in the bathtub, her left arm dangling over the side. A few inches below her fingertips, on the floor, lay a razorblade.

I don't know how long I stood there, gaping, my mind not being able to fully comprehend what I was seeing. All I know is that I was brought out of my stupor by a small, delicate gasp behind me. I turned and saw Gaz, her fists clenched at her sides, her hair mussed and knotted from sleep. She pushed past me and latched onto our mother's arm, pulling at it, shaking her shoulder, trying to get her out of the tub. I rushed over to her, gently attempting to pry her small fingers from our mother's form.

She punched me in the face.

I fell back onto my bottom, my hand to my cheek, smearing my mother's blood there. Gaz looked at me, her eyes filled with more pain and anger than I had ever thought possible. "Don't touch me, Dib." She warned between clenched teeth, "Not unless you can make her wake up." Her eyes softened a little, "Make her wake up, Dib. Please? Make her wake up? I promise I'll be good from now on." She turned back to our mother, burying her small head into her shoulder. "I promise, Mommy, I'll be good from now on. You'll never have to yell at me or nuttin'. Dib, too. We'll both be good." She turned back to me, her eyes filled with tears, pleading. "Right, Dib? You'll be good, too, right? Promise you'll be good with me?"

"Gaz..." I moved towards her, putting my arms around her shaking frame, gently pulling her from our mother's body. She turned towards me, crushing her face into my chest, and she sobbed as we sat there on the floor of the bathroom, our pajamas soaking up our mother's blood.

Six hours after Gir had arrived at the base, I received word that Gretchen had finished downloading the information that we needed. I sent a message to all key operatives to meet in the conference room an hr after that to receive the report.

There were 6 of us at the meeting, not including Gir. I had assigned each of us, including myself, a team of 10 other people. The leaders I had chosen consisted of me, Kala, Gretchen, whom I knew from skool and had always secretly been nice to me, even when the other kids thought I was insane. Though I didn't always notice, which made me sad to think about, now. She and her team were in charge of intelligence and reconnaissance along with Elizabeth, a 15 year old computer wiz who had been orphaned in one of the first battles. Her parents had worked with my father. Torque, whom I also knew from skool, who had always made a better point with his fists than his brain. His team was our brute force. Alex, our 25 year old resident gun enthusiast, whose father once headed our local chapter of the NRA. Her team worked on repairing weapons and creating a few new ones in the process. Kala and I's teams consisted of those who had spent time closest to the Irkens. The majority of our teams were once slaves and torture victims. We knew how our enemy thought. We knew how to get inside out their heads. We were all, as it were, very dangerous individuals, and all of us held more of a grudge than the others combined. The rest of our masses were generic soldiers, trained, and, as much as I hated to admit it, expendable.

"As you can see," Gretchen began, pointing to a spot on the 3-D holographic projection that was coming from Gir's head. The robot was sitting in the middle of the table, licking at a cherry blow pop. I don't even think he noticed what was going on. And if he did, he hid it well enough. "This level of the Irken forces have taken over what once was Membrane Laboratories." Everyone in the room glanced at me, pointedly, although they tried to hide it. We all knew that using my father's labs as a base of command was a personal insult from Zim. He liked to add those homey touches to rub in the fact that he had won. For the moment.

"There do, however, seem to be areas here, here, and here, where security is lax. We may be able to sneak in at these points and infiltrate the base. However, we would have to make sure to disable the security system. Gir's report shows that there have been lasers and motion detectors added to these key spots. We would have to get past those before making our way to the main areas."

Elizabeth piped in, as we all knew she would, "No prob. I'll have my team working on that, immediately." She pushed her wire framed glasses further up on her freckled nose, "I suggest we create a virus that Gir can upload into the system before we attack. We should be then able to activate it by remote."

"Excellent." I replied. Elizabeth grinned and blushed. It was no secret that she had a little crush on me—had ever since she was a kid when Gaz and I used to baby-sit her. Well, I did. Gaz just sat and played her Gameslave as usual. She had been one of the first people that I ended up "liberating", and had seen it as a personal favor. In reality, she had just been at the right place at the right time. I turned to the others at the table. "Torque, Alex, any luck on reassembling those ray-guns that we acquired on our last raid?"

"No, Sir." Alex replied softly, frowning, "We thought that we had it figured out, but the damned thing self destructed. Seems to be a safety mechanism."

"Well, keep trying. It would save us a lot of time on the field if we didn't have to rely on bullets all the time."

"Yes, Sir, We will, Sir."

"Alright, then. Gretchen, work more with Gir and come up with a plan of ascent. Kala, you and you're team work with them. My team and I will help Elizabeth out on that virus. Torque, Alex, keep it up with those weapons. Any other points of business?" There was silence. "Alright. Dismissed."

It all seemed so simple, then, in theory.

So. Damned. Simple.

Little did we know it would end up getting a hell of a lot more complicated very, very soon.

All right, that's it for now...I know the flashback was longer than what was going on in the present, but there wont be much of the present until the battle, and afterwards, so the flashbacks will prolly stay long...the next few chapters may even consist of only flashback material, I haven't really decided, yet...I have a lot I want to cover, there.

Ah well.

It's 8am. My eyes burn.

R&R people. It's what makes the burning worthwhile.

Ps: if anyone would like to tell me how to make italics show up, I would love you forever—it would make things a hell of a lot easier in later chapters. Yup.