HOUR: SEVENTEEN
Zim pulls me closer on his one damn fingertip to that rotten zipper-tooth smile as if I were weightless, were NOTHING. He regards me with insectile amusement, red eyes blood-bright. I can smell his breath, cool and sterile.
Closer.
I have to kill him. I'll never have another chance like this, this close...
Closer.
My face is getting hot, my world shrinking. Tunnel vision to the extreme; I can't see anything except his mouth, the triumphant smile. His teeth parting slowly, hint of tongue behind.
Just DO IT already! Kill me, kiss me, SOMETHING!
Power builds inside me, fueled by the tension, builds up in me until even my TOES are full, my skin just barely holding it in. Hold on, hold on, hold on...
...and at the last second, just before it's too late, he jerks his head back and snickers.
"...You'd enjoy it too much."
If my hands weren't strapped down behind solid metal I'd strangle him. I won't be able to hold the charge much longer and I HAVE to touch him, have to be touching his skin... I need it. I need to FEEL him burn. After ten years, and all the shit he's put me through... !
I struggle to form words over the angry buzzing glow in my head but I can't get anything coherent out, just a whimper.
I can see the sarcasm in his eyes: oh very WELL, with bile... but something breaks in him too. Having me, having his triumph, he can't wait any more. He never WAS any good at being PATIENT...
... so he yanks me back to him and shoves his big grinning mouth on mine and kisses me so hard it HURTS.
He tastes impersonal, latex and sterility, but there's nothing impersonal about this. It's bruising. Sadistic and aggressive and cruel; everything I ever imagined it would be like if the walls broke down and he HAD me, helpless like this, at his mercy.
No, it's -better- than I imagined. Worth dying for. I give him his victory; I let him hear me breaking. He makes a low amused sound and just pulls me closer, slips a heavy gauntlet around the base of my back so that my chest is crushed tight against his armored carapace.
My heart slowly turns itself inside out.
I can't even -pretend- to deny it any more. God help me, I -love- Zim.
But the power's there, pent up and too painful to hold now...
I let him have it. ALL of it: the silent scream I've been carrying around for a decade FINALLY taking voice in waves of raw blue force. I love him. But I want him to BURN.
It's almost suicide. I hit him with everything I have, more than I have, so much that I start to feel the edges of my world going black. Black and blue... there are blue sparks. I hear them popping, smell him burning, taste smoke on my lips. His mouth goes all funny and he tries to scream but I hold it, hold HIM with my mouth and drive electric needles deep down hard into his flesh.
A sudden painful shock accompanies the detonation of the metal bands around my arms and chest. My clothes smoulder. I hear a few shrapnel bits clink against his red round chest armor.
He grunts and flings me hard into one of the nearby chairs then brushes his claws over his mouth. The lower half of his face is blackened, smoking. Blood drips out of the corner of his left eye, pink and viscous. He's furious as he whirls on me, long tall body jerking with random, spastic muscle twitches.
The guards rush toward him and me but he howls something- sounds like it hurts a LOT just to SAY it- and swipes a claw savagely in the air. He faces me, gasping.
I feel sick and shaky; completely drained, with my vision going in and out of focus. I won't be able to put another charge like that together again for... some time.
I'll probably be dead long before that.
"My armor..." Zim wheezes, spitting blood, "... is insulated. I EXPECTED as much from you. Can't do it again though, CAN you, Dib?"
Guards grapple me again, yank me into the middle of a knot of tiny angry bodies. I swear they SWARM like bees. I could try to throw them off, my arms are free, but I'm too woozy for it. A few leftover sparks snap here and there when they touch my skin. It just makes them dig in harder, and their claws are sharp as cats.
Zim collects himself, drifting back too close again. I watch the burned parts of his skin slowly crack and bleed... but he doesn't even seem to notice, or doesn't care. His long fingers scissor open and close around either side of my chin, jerking my head up again.
"Do you know how the Tallest are initiated into their glory, Dib?" His voice is conversational, almost whimsical- all the more hideous coming out of his ruined face.
I can't shake my head, but he doesn't care what I might say anyway, because he carries on a moment later. "It's said... when the candidate for Tallest is selected..." He pauses, grinning blood. "That the candidate's thumbs are removed. A Tallest should be able to rule the Empire with only two fingers. A strong Tallest never cries out."
One of his fingers strokes along my cheekbone.
There is a horrible, dangerous pause; the kind that means immense pain is coming.
"Of course, I wouldn't know. I never had to go through that..." He links his gauntletted hands behind his back and drifts away from me. Instinctively, I start struggling now. The guards start locking down on me and someone, two of them go for my hands, gripping my wrists hard, grasping my THUMBS...
His voice breathes in my ear from a tiny body pressing up hard against my back all at once: "Does it hurt?"
SNAP.
Clearly, I would not have been a good Tallest.
I can barely hear the Irken being barked around me over the pain. I can only just make out Zim's voice, Zim's voice shouting from twenty directions at once, shouting words I can't make out, grabbing at me, little hands yanking my hair and ragged clothes and arms and pulling me, pushing, half dragging me through colored-light hallways that all blur together in my mind until I reach the end, the sterile too-bright white room with the long table and the 'doctors'...
More talk, more orders I can't understand from voices that all sound like Zim.
At the end of it all, bound and naked, I'm put on cold scanners, probed and injected and tagged with alien devices fused to my skin and I can't do anything, ANYTHING to stop it.
And all that goes through my head is that old, old cliche:
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
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jrandomlurker(at)yahoo-dot-com.