(A/N: I gotta say, I am THRILLED with all these reviews. Thanks to all of you! I'm afraid I've never been one for lengthy author's notes, so, read on and have fun!
Disclaimer: I OWN NOTHING! QUICKLY, TO THE LIFEBOAT! Jhonen Vasquez owns Invader Zim and then some. Oh yeah, and so does Viacom.)
Chapter Four
Professor Membrane flopped on the couch as soon as he got home, exhausted after a day of being hounded by reporters. They'd be hounding him still, but the cyborg kittens guarding the house had chased off/incinerated any reporters foolish enough to follow the Professor home. Mostly absorbed in her Gameslave 2, Gaz was subconsciously aware of her Father's presence on the couch next to her, and this brightened her mood a little.
Membrane turned on the TV; seeing all channels relayed a replay of Dib being taken away by an alien spacecraft, he turned it back off. "Daughter... what has your brother done now?" he said wearily.
"What? Oh... you mean the alien thing?" Gaz replied, shooting virtual enemies. "I guess he finally got on Zim's really bad side..."
"What about the foreign child?" Membrane wondered, looking down at his small daughter questioningly. This was sounding like an all-too-rare father-daughter conversation. Gaz decided this seldom occasion called for turning off her game and giving her father her full attention.
"You're not really that oblivious, are you?" Gaz asked, giving Membrane an amber-eyed stare. The following oblivious silence answered her question. "Zim's an alien. Doyy." Professor Membrane leapt to his feet in a sudden "EUREKA!" movement.
"That's it! Your brother's insanity must have finally CONSUMED him, transforming him into a physical amalgamation of his irrational obsessions! This calls for SCIENCE!" Scientific vigor renewed, Membrane sprinted to his lab and immediately began work on something sciencey. Gaz sighed and switched the Gameslave back on; looked like the father-daughter moment was over.
---
"UGH!" Dib grunted as the ship slammed to a stop on the landing port in Zim's attic, which the house's roof was quick to close over, shrouding it in darkness. The force of the landing caused Dib to slam into the floor, wound-first. Dib groaned and got to his knees as the ship's windshield slid back and Zim and GIR jumped out. Climbing out after them cautiously, Dib shot Zim a suspicious glare.
"Why did you take me here?" he demanded. "Are you going to torture me yourself?"
"NONSENSE!" Zim dismissed. "You're still weak. I'll give you a chance to heal... maybe THEN I'll DESTROY you. Now come - the base awaits!"
"Yeah right, ZIM. As if I'd follow you."
Zim was caught off guard by the sight of Dib's red eyes flashing brilliantly out of the dark to meet his own. Catching himself, Zim smiled. "Oh, you'll follow me, Dib. The humans are after your blood, and you're injured - you don't have anywhere else to go." Again, Zim was held by the sight of those eyes glimmering at him vehemently.
"I'm not going," Dib hissed, still unmoving.
"You don't have a CHOICE!" Zim growled, stamping a foot irritably. "Now COME! ZIM COMMANDS YOU!" No response; just more of that unsettling glaring. "Grrrr - COME ON!"
"Come on big-head boy!" GIR offered, pulling a rubber pig out of his head and squeaking it invitingly. "If you come you can play with PIGGY! PIIIIIIGGYYYYYYYY!" More glaring.
"Nevermind, GIR," Zim muttered, meeting Dib's gaze with equal ferocity as he backed toward the elevator. "The Dib is being STUPID right now. We'll give him some time to come to his senses."
"Okiedokie!" GIR hopped onto the elevator alongside Zim, squeaking the rubber piggy happily. The elevator lowered down to the next floor. Dib's glinting red eyes watched Zim and GIR descend until they vanished from sight.
---
Zim was in foul sorts as he marched on the elevator into the living room of the base, and so internally preoccupied he didn't even flinch when GIR made a break for the couch and switched on "The Scary Monkey Show" in record time.
"YAAYYY MONKEYYY!" GIR screeched, waving his little metal pincers in the air excitedly. Interpreting this as GIR's way of saying "please launch into an aimless rant", Zim obliged.
"RrrrAGH! The DIB is even STUPIDER than I thought!" Zim complained. "I give him the honor of being an Irken, go out of my way to rescue him from the ffffFILTHY humans, and offer to let him stay here until he's healed! He dares refuse the hospitality of ZIIIIIIIIM?"
"Aw, you like big-head boy!" GIR chirruped, eyes still glued to the screen... also, at some point, he'd put on the dog suit.
"I don't LIKE him, GIR!" Zim snapped, glaring at his robot. "I turned him into an Irken BECAUSE I didn't like him!" Zim pondered. "But I couldn't watch those despicable hhhhuumans disassemble a fellow Irken before my eyes! But - Dib's not an Irken - I mean he is - but he isn't - he - I - well - ZIM - ARGH! Irken or not, Dib's humongous head STILL give me a humongous headache!"
Internally feuding, Zim headed for the toilet entrance to the base's lower level and flushed himself down... maybe some cruel and unusual alien experimentation on the bionic chickens would help him think better.
---
Alone in the dark now, Dib slid down into a sitting position and crunched his knees up against his head, enduring the burst of pain in his middle as he wrapped his arms around his knees and began to sob. The day had happened so quickly, and so much had happened IN it, that was it only now beginning to sink in. In one day, he'd lost everything. The Swollen Eyeball, Dad, Gaz, skool, his humanity... Images of everything was gone to him in this form flashed through his mind. Giving up, Dib let his arms slide off his knees and fell on his back, looking up at the dark ceiling. Only a dim, broken circle of light was let in by the sole window.
Everything about this body felt strange; his antannae brushing the floor, his eyes adjusting in the dark and seeing details in things he could never have seen with human eyes. His skin, smooth, fine and cool, without the grease and heat of human flesh. His Pak, digging into his back and arching his strangely flexible spine upward. His organs, beating in him, unknown to him - he shuddered at the thought that they would have been cut out while he was still alive. And yet, that was the same fate he'd had in store for Zim - that gave him pause.
His pause was put on pause when something came up from the elevator. Again, gleaming red eyes met.
"What do you want?" Dib inquired coldly, propping himself up on his elbows (even those felt strange) in a semi-sitting position. Zim, who had been unable to concentrate on his work, stared back impertinently.
"I don't have to answer to you, Dib," Zim responded coolly, marching over to where Dib sat and sitting beside him. Dib looked at him in disgust and scooted an inch away. Zim grinned slightly at his discomfort.
"I don't want you here," Dib muttered.
"I know you don't."
Silence.
"Well?" Dib prompted.
"Hm?" Zim raised a brow questioningly.
"Aren't you going to start laughing and saying 'PITIFUL HUMAN, ZIM HAS WON'?" Dib asked, doing a dead-on imitation of Zim.
"ZIM SOUNDS NOTHING LIKE THAT! And you're not human anymore."
"Just had to rub it in, didn't you?" Dib sighed.
"You say that as if it's a bad thing," Zim accused.
"It is. I'm trying to save humanity from the aliens, which is a little hard to do when I am an alien, Zim," Dib said bitterly, then brought a hand to his forehead. "Ugh - why am I even talking to you? You're the reason I'm like this, you stupid alien!"
"Hehe... yeah, I am, aren't I?" Zim smiled absentmindedly. Dib frowned deeply at him.
"You're not paying attention to me." Dib studied Zim's face with the careful precision he'd honed all that time watching Zim in skool. "What are you thinking about?"
"None of your business," muttered Zim, his upper teeth sticking out thoughtfully. Dib couldn't help but smile himself at the ridiculous expression; did Zim even realize he did that? Something occurred to him suddenly.
"Hey... you haven't called me 'Dib-stink' or 'Dib-beast' or 'stink-beast' once during this entire conversation!" Dib cried. "You usually insult me at least once, sometimes three times in the same sentence."
"Eh?" Zim pretended he hadn't heard, but Dib knew he had.
"You're hiding something from me, Zim. What is it?" Dib interrogated.
"I'm not hiding anything... Dib-beast," Zim forced. Dib glowered at him, then looked ahead. This entire time, both had been avoiding each other's gazes as a rule by looking out the window out at the stars.
"The laser weasels beckon!" Zim announced suddenly, hopping to his feet and breaking for the elevator, which swiftly descended with him on it. Dib watched him go, confused, intrigued and irritated at once. Stupid alien scum...
---
Zim was panting heavily, eyes bugging as he got off the elevator.
"What is WRONG with me!" Zim asked no one.
"Shhh! This is the good part," GIR whispered, watching the ever-growling monkey head on the TV screen contently. The cockroach from a while back popped out of his head, squirmed past the dog suit's zipper and fed from the slushyed-over straw of GIR's SuckMonkey. Neither noticed as Zim ran past them and zipped down the garbage chute, headed for the base lab to run some self-analysis tests.
"I love this show," GIR told the cockroach, who agreed heartily. And somewhere, the abandoned rubber piggy wept.