Disclaimer: I don't own Invader Zim. Jhonen does. It would be pretentious and false of me to claim any ownership.
Circling the Drain
He crawled in the window, flopped down in bed and laid there, his entire body screaming at him in pain and exhaustion. Maybe it was all the blood he had lost, all the holes that had been bored into his skin and through muscle and bone. His broken body rested there, crimson spilling and leaking to tint the sheets the same color. A color that startlingly reminded him of a certain pair of eyes.
He swallowed, staring up in the darkness at the still open window. He pulled himself up by an injured arm and slid it shut, streaks of scarlet left smeared across the glass and window sill. He flopped down again. So tired; the darkness seemed to be closing in. And he had dealt with this sort of thing enough to know that if he didn't do something, it might never let him go.
He sat up, painfully grabbing at the sheets to help himself upright. The trench coat shrugged off and fell in a heap on the floor, the fabric stiff and damp with a liquid that didn't show color but left a dark stain that seemed to stare out at him in the dim light.
His shoulder ached. It was almost a sickening intensity, and the throbs it sent down his arm made if feel as if his fingers were swelling and his wrist exploding. He pushed it away, turned his mind to think about the other side of his body instead. Dib pushed himself to a standing position, knees and ankle screaming, and walked slowly over to his desk, over the floor strewn with piles of shadow and lumps of darkness. His fingers fumbled blindly in a drawer, colliding dully with numerous random objects before they wrapped around what he was looking for. He pulled the long knife out and watched as it glinted in the moonlight that flowed in from the unshaded window. A glimpse of his face in the reflective metal before he lifted it to his shoulder and slid the blade carefully beneath the cloth there. He stared at the desk, looking with his mind's eye as he carefully drew the sharp knife against the fabric, the hiss and rip of dividing cloth.
Eventually he managed to cut the shirt off of himself, the fabric sticky and damp with his blood as it fell to the floor. He stood there staring at it for a second, down the length of his leg as his hands rested heavily on the edge of the desk. His eyes fogged over in a dreamlike state, mind stuffed with cotton. Dib blinked and shook his head, biting back against the screamingly painful tempest that motion produced. The dream state passed, and he looked down at his shoulder, really only able to see it with one eye, and then only half in the area of his glasses. He couldn't make it out. He swore under his breath and glanced up at the closed door.
He made his way to the bathroom, painful footsteps sucking at the floor. His boots were slicked over in blood and slime. Dead fingers met the cold metal of the handle and he turned it to step inside the room, shutting the door behind himself before hitting the light.
In the stark reality of the fluorescent bulbs overhead, he stared at himself in the mirror. Blood streaked across his chest and face. In so many places, the skin was punctured or ripped or bruised to a shade that almost looked as if it were bleeding. He ran a hand down his arm, feeling the wounds with careful but bloodlessly cold fingers. And then they met the shoulder, the one that was torn open and bleeding around ugly black clots and tattered flesh. Cartilage was almost visible, and he felt his stomach lurch at the thought.
Memory seemed to seep into his brain, and scarlet fingers fumbled at the medicine cabinet as he pulled it open to grab some gauze. There, in his hand, the whiteness of the bandages already being tinted by the blood on his fingers. He stared. Yeah, that would help. Frozen, he couldn't pull his eyes from the staining gauze, so many images flooding through his mind of the fight and all the things that had been said. That had gone wrong in a way that seemed as it if was the culmination of years of pent up fate. He couldn't move. The dream was pulling him in around the edges of his vision, the past hour on replay. Scenes shifted in a circle, more blurry in the middle but still there. Now wasn't now. That could all wait.
"Do you want to kill yourself? You're gonna die if you just stand there." The voice was quiet but irritated, and he snapped out of that strange reality to glance over to see the door open an inch, one golden iris framed in its space against the blackness beyond.
He just stared at her, angry for some reason he couldn't exactly place. But he always felt that these days.
Gaz stepped inside and shut the door behind herself. She stood there, glaring up at him for a moment before pushing him down on the side of the bathtub. The haze was fading, and he watched her with clear eyes as she dug through the cabinet, pulling out a needle and thread. She perched on the edge of the sink, body held taut and crow-like in her black pajamas She threaded it and knotted off the end, watching him for a moment, eyes hard, before she grabbed a cup of water and came over to dump it's contents over his shoulder.
He flinched a little as the icy water traced down his skin, stinging at wounds not healed. Not even closed. Gaz sat down next to him, her stature concrete that she didn't like being here, doing this. She glanced up at him once, making sure that he knew what was going to happen before she grabbed his arm and held him steady.
The needle bit into tattered flesh. He watched her in the mirror, watched the grotesque scene of his younger sister sewing up an almost fatal wound in this shoulder. He looked away, disgusted. He was supposed to be stronger than this, strong enough to be able to deal with something like this. This was pitiful.
The needle jabbed into a more tender part of his shoulder, and he felt a jolt go through himself, the sick feeling rising in his stomach.
"Don't flinch, stupid." Gaz hissed, her eyes shooting up again to glare into his own. He just returned it, cold and steady.
He watched her in the mirror, mind drifting in and out of the haze that was fighting to take him. It kept replaying the fight, what had led up to it and all the changes that had suddenly revealed themselves. The open door, the upper levels of the base empty and unguarded. The flash of crimson and a steely gray, Zim shooting out of the shadows with fire in his eyes. His face stained and that deep, deep anger ever so apparent on his face. The flashes and blurs of the battle that had come after, filled with the sound to metal sinking into flesh and howls of frustration in a voice that wasn't human.
"There." Gaz muttered, popping the dream around him as she bit through the rest of the thread and tied it off, wrapping the wound in gauze. She finished and stood up, eyes biting into his own as she went back to the sink and washed the blood off her hands. Dib's blood, spiraling down the sink, in the same way his life was circling the drain as he continued to chase everything that got him nowhere. He looked away, disgusted with himself and everything in general.
Gaz grabbed his wrist, pulled him roughly to a standing position and killed the light before stepping out into the hall. She had socks on and he couldn't hear her footsteps as she led him through the darkness, down into the depths of the house and into one of Membrane's many labs. His mind was drifting into the fog again as she pushed him into a seat again, one of his dad's swiveling chairs he noticed as the thing slid a little from his weight. He slumped back in the seat, letting the haze cloud his vision, seeing through the fuzzy gray and picking out sequences. Zim, that horrible evil grin, and the tears running down his alien face that only added to the sense of insanity in his tiny body. Danger lurked in the fog, he could see it moving around like some colossal black hell hound, searching.
Gaz's hand wrapped around his arm, bent it straight. He blinked, the fog clearing, the glimpse of the death-beast fading away. She glared at him, golden eyes harsh in the darkness of the room. He saw what she was doing. Another needle, this one hollow and attached to a long tube. She clamped her hand around his upper arm, twacked the inside of his elbow and took her pick of the half empty veins. Dib watched the needle go in, watched as she turned the valve on the bag of blood that hung from a scaffold she had pulled up next to him. The little streak of red arched along the thin clear tubing, flowing slowly into his arm, into his body.
A sound escaped him, something that could have been a laugh but that was too cold and real. Gaz glared at him for it, rolled her eyes and turned to go back upstairs.
"Let the blood run out before you go back upstairs. Next time you come home half dead, don't wake me up."
She was gone. It was as if she had vanished, and he wasn't sure if it was a trick of the light or if he had passed out for a second. He cleared his throat, dry and scratchy and slick with blood. Eyes slid closed again, his mind clear in the stark silence of the room. Cold, stiff fingers tightened around the arms of the chair, and he slid down a little, trying to not rest so much weight on that gash across his lower back.
He felt clearer, less foggy and ghostlike. The haze was disappearing, both along the edges of his vision and in the depths of his mind. The clarity was strong, like the silence of the room, firm and reassuring.
But it made it harder to think back. And all he could think of was how cold he was shirtless and still lacking in blood. A glance up. Still half the bag left. He could wait. The memories would come.
-
The base was a wreck. Zim glowered at it from where he hung, perched on spindly spider legs in the middle of the living room. The walls had been knocked down, and he could see the house next door through the gaping hole right through the center of where the couch should have been. A flurry of Irken curses skittered through is mind, but he did not mouth them. There were better ways to vent, and that was evident by the mess he now stood in the middle of.
His fists clenched at his sides, arms taut and lightly flexed. He could feel the tears tracing their way down his face again, and he was annoyed that he could find no way to make that go away. The stark pain of betrayal. The thought that all of this had been for no reason at all.
The Tallest were wrong. He would never believe them. They were liars in every aspect of the word. He wasn't a failure of an Invader. He wasn't lacking in all the things they had said. He was the greatest being that had ever lived, and they still seemed to ignore that fact. He could feel his own impending greatness, smoldering deep in his chest.
Zim would show them. How dare they send him on a mission that was a joke! How dare they hide that behind his back throughout all these horribly filthy years he had spent mired on this worthless dirt-clod of a world. How dare they laugh at him for all those years. Had he not proven his deadliness, his ruthless desire for destruction in the success of Operation Impending Doom 1? So, with that as proof, they had sent him on a fake mission? Oh, they would pay dearly.
He would make them see, he would rub their faces in it until they were as humiliated and hated as he was.
The left side of the spider legs twitched, spasmed in a terrible array of blue sparks. The contraption collapsed, throwing Zim to the rubble littered floor. And then he did utter the curses that had come to mind a moment before. Even that was denied him, the feeling of height that he did not yet have. Oh, but they would still pay. He would become the Tallest when he overthrew this impossibly filthy world, threw that fact in their faces and finally grew in stature, as was always the case with a successful Invader.
Zim glared out through the broken wall, eyes piercing into the brick of the house next door. He seemed to sense something next to him, and his gaze ripped away.
"Gir."
The little robot peeked out from beneath the half of the couch that was thrown up against the television. "Yes, Master?"
Zim whirled, reached out and grabbed his minion by the body, grip so tight that it would have hurt a creature made of flesh. He spoke with stark, slow clarity. "You will put this room back in working order before the horrible doom-sun comes up. Understand?"
Oddly the robot remained placid, his expression bland as he nodded. Disgusted by that and everything else, Zim hurled the metal thing through the hole in the wall and stalked off to the kitchen. His eyes were downcast, angry and red in the lightless room. Fists clenched at his sides as he stepped onto the bare elevator beneath the far wall, it's disguise now a mess of broken porcelain.
It was the observation room that he let himself step out on. The saddle shape of a traditional Irken seat slid under him, and he stared listlessly at the blank screens for a moment before activating them manually. It had been long ago when the computer had rebelled and stopped listening to him.
The sullen look in his eyes melted away, molded itself smoothly and seamlessly into something bordering between hatred and insanity. He would find a way. Even if all of it had gone wrong before, he could do it. And he would. But, as for now, he would rest, think and plan and ignore everything else.
Gloved fingers flew over holographic keys and the text that showed up was reflected almost perfectly in his crimson eyes. And slowly, as the minutes ticked past and he thought and planned, a terrible smile picked at his lips. Soon. Soon it would all be set into motion.
neoKOS-MOS: First chapter dedicated to Goat. Reviews are nice. Thanks for reading.
