"Come on, just take one sip" she chirped.

The suspicious Irken looked at the foreign fizzy drink in the glass. He slowly turned his head back up at her:

"How do I know you and that bar-drone didn't poison this liquid?" he insinuated, "You two know each other from before, don't you?"

She frowned at him in annoyed frustration: she had never met another alien as distrustful as he was, and that was saying a lot.

"C'mon. Look at him. Not to be mean, but. Do you really think Mister Sunshine over there has any friends?"

"Psh!" the Irken suffocated the giggle that was about to erupt from his mouth. "I-I mean. Yeah, but. That doesn't mean you're not conspiring together" he continued with more composure.

Driver rolled her eyes; she grabbed the bottle, his drink and her own glass, and took a gulp out of each of them, the Irken's eyes attentively following each and every one of her moves.

"See?" she huffed, putting that last glass down, "No one here is conspiring to assassinate you. I'm just offering you a drink. It's a human gesture of courtesy. Relax, will ya?"

Once again, he looked suspiciously between her and the glass. Just when she thought he would not drink it after all, he dipped the straw in the wine and sucked on it.

This time, as he swallowed, his antennae straightened up on his head, his eyes twitched and his body shivered: the alcohol content in the wine was much higher than the one in the beer, and the sensation of hot alcohol pouring down his throat must have been entirely new to him.

Driver observed him with a mixture of fun and apprehension.

God, I hope that doesn't make him sick.

As he parted his mouth from the straw however, his face wore an expression of pleasant surprise.

"This is actually not bad at all..." he said, more to himself than to her.

She smiled wider at him:

"See? I knew you would like it. Why would your superiors forbid you from drinking alcohol?"

"I guess... getting intoxicated would be very much inappropriate for an Irken elite such as myself" he explained, for once speaking to her in a relaxed voice.

Then, he sharply turned his head at her:

" Say , how much of this would it take for me to get… drunk?" he spoke quietly, as if to hide his transgression.

"I don't know exactly, but judging from your body proportions, and considering this is your first drink ever… no more than two full glasses. Just to be safe" she replied. The glass was so big, he needed both of his tiny hands to hold it, after all.

He turned to his glass and started sipping at his straw. She had never seen anyone drinking wine with a straw; still, she was happy to see that he was actually enjoying it. That meant he had trusted her, if only one small bit, right?

Maybe he'll be more open to talk to me now.

After taking a sip from her own glass, she asked him:

"So, you are an Irken, right? What is your home planet? What is it like? And how does your society work?"

The Irken stopped drinking and turned to her with a somewhat baffled look on his face:

"What? You've never heard of the mighty Irken race from the planet Irk? I thought you said you have been around space for eight years"

"I've probably just never been to the part of it that you guys inhabit"

"The Irken Empire is huge though" he retorted. "It spreads over multiple galaxies, and has even set itself on the way to a total universal conquest!

"Oh, wow. So I guess your job as an Invader is very respected in your society"; he did just mention being part of the elite of his race.

The Irken grinned and puffed his chest pridefully. That was the first time some form of smile had appeared on his face, she noted.

"Very much so! The role of us Invaders is crucial for the successful outcome of Operation Impending Doom II. And I am the finest Invader there is!" he stated in a confident, pompous manner, and he took another sip of his wine.

"That is rather impressive" she said with sincere admiration. "But wait, why II?"

The Irken Invader let go of the straw in the now empty glass; he turned to her with a smile and said:

"Well, you know. Two is better than one, right?"

"Haha!" she chuckled.

Just like she had imagined, his smile was very pretty. Maybe even more than just pretty: handsome. Charming.

It really made her want to kiss his lips.

And she was the one who had brought him out of his gloomy mood and drawn it out!

Not to mention, considering what he had said, he seemed to be a very important person in his society. That was also pretty enticing. But if his status was of such height, why had he come to such a small, anonymous and decadent space bar? There was something he was not telling her, she felt. Maybe he had had some kind of accident that had left him stranded in that part of the universe with no better options at hand? Or may be the status he was speaking of only existed in the past? And how did Earth fit in the picture?

Whether he was lying or omitting something to her didn't really matter: either way, he seemed to be a very interesting guy. And besides, it's not like she of all people would or could judge him for lies or omissions about his background: it was something she did literally all the time.

Nevertheless, while before she had had a feeling that approaching that small angry alien could potentially end very badly (if not disastrously ), she now felt like the night could actually turn out very, very… good , for the both of them.

"What planets have you conquered?" she asked him.

"Uh?"

"What planets have you conquered as an Invader?" she repeated.

As proud as he seemed to be an Invader, that question seemed to leave him disoriented: for a few seconds, he said nothing, pondering something to himself, his smile gone from his face.

Did I say something wrong?, she wondered worriedly.

But then, a devious grin crept on his face.

"Oh, are you sure you want to know?" he said, voice loaded with maliciousness.

Driver blinked in confusion. Before she could respond in any way, he continued:

"You see, Earth-filth, it just so happens that during your eight-year-long absence your home planet, Earth, was paid an unforeseen visit by an unspeakable, unforgiving, unstoppable foe come from the farthest depths of outer space... that would be me. Invader ZiM " his grin deepened as he once again slowly stood up, his movements almost animal-like.

She tilted her eyebrows: so that's how he knew about Earth: he'd been sent to conquer it.

Also, apparently his name was 'Zim'.

"Your puny brain could never fathom the pure horrors I inflicted upon your fellow dirty human beasts!", 'Invader Zim' carried on his speech in a dramatically theatrical tone, as he got closer and closer to her; his arched fingers were touching the tip of the corresponding one on the other hand, like a comic book villain sitting on a chair in their secret lair.

"Tearing down their infrastructure, destructing their cities, setting fire to their homes, contaminating their MEAT supplies!, before I turned the disgusting, putrid ball of dirt they had the gall to call their 'home planet' into a handful of tiny, minuscule specks of DUST!" he described sadistically, his right index finger and thumb gradually closing in until they clenched into a fist that he shook in front of her face.

Driver gave him an unimpressed look.

"Oh. Well, good for you" she told him.

His arrogant, menacing bravado was instantly replaced by deep and utter confusion.

His dramatic pose loosened, his right arm lowered. In complete disbelief, he inquired:

"W… why aren't you horrified?! I just told you I am the destroyer of your home planet! Is your brain broken?!"

"Why do you think I left there in the first place?" she raised an eyebrow, "I couldn't stand that ball of venom and corruption and I'm happy it and its inhabitants are gone."

"You... you hate your own people and planet?" he asked.

The notion of being defiant, if not down-right hostile to your own species and planet were pretty foreign to most aliens. She was used to the weird looks she conjured every time the subject surfaced. Nonchalantly, she explained, in a practical manner:

"You don't have to like your people, nor your planet if they aren't good for you. Or to you".

Truth to be told, she had exaggerated her feelings towards Earth and humanity by a lot: why it's true that she felt much better far, far away from them, she didn't want them to actually be destroyed. Point is, she was fairly certain that he was lying about the destruction of Earth: when he had first spoken to her, he had talked as though Earth was very much still existent -and probably humanity too-, but that for some strange reason he couldn't… get to it? He had asked her for the planet's coordinates and how to get there. Maybe he didn't know where it was? But then, how did he know about humans?

Despite that, though, she had to give him credit for his act: if his lie hadn't been obvious, it might have actually turned out quite scary.

Zim collected again to his place on the couch, looking disappointed and confused at once at her reaction. It almost made her wish she'd faked fear and made him happy.

"So, your name is Zim, uh?" she tried to change the subject. "I like it. It has a nice ring to it. It rather suits you" she commented as she poured more wine in both of the glasses.

"Ha! Of course it suits me and it sounds nice!" he scoffed, voice full of conceit, "It was made for me".

He took his glass, and drank a bit more of his wine.

"Doesn't it bother you that I massacred an entire planet of your kind?" he then asked her.

Had she managed to make him curious about her? Good. That'd been exactly her goal.

"I mean, I've killed people because of my job too. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to judge you for it" she explained.

Zim cocked his hairless brow at her.

"You? Killing people?"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"With your happy smile and sappy act? You look like you couldn't lay a finger on the tiniest lexx-fly! "

"To be fair, your big sweet eyes and adorable little antennae don't look very intimidating, either" she smirked.

"What-!" he scrambled for words, looking both insulted and surprised, "I AM NOT ADORABLE!" he yelled at her a little too loudly.

"Sure you aren't. Cutey" she winked down at her.

"I am not cute either!" he narrowed his eyes on her, but his anger was only superficial. He seemed to have finally gotten comfortable with her. A little.

She didn't reply; instead she smiled, and finished her glass of wine.

"'Cute'" Zim spat, as if he was saying a dirty word. "I know for a fact that I'm creepy and frightening. Blind human… eyes" and he finished his glass too with a series of angry sucks, until his straw could only draw up the air bubbles on its bottom.

As she was pouring her third glass, he handed his own empty one and shook it.

"You know, you should be careful not to drink too much" she advised him, "You-"

"Oh, shush it. ZiM feels perfectly fine. I'll know when to stop" he cut her short.

She obediently filled his glass. Maybe deep down he did want to get drunk. And who was her to stop him? It was fine as long as she got drunk too, right?

After he took a sip of the wine, he asked her:

"So what kind of job do you do?"

"Wellll" she hesitated, "I can't exactly tell you..."

"But I told you mine!" he retorted.

"My position, I'm afraid, is much trickier than yours. Hmm… Let's just, say it's a very manual job"

Zim cocked an eyebrow up.

"Are you a repair-drone?"

"Well, no, not really. I meant that it involves a lot of… handwork. Lots of-" she moved her glass in circular motions, trying to think of terms that would make her job pass as legal, if just remotely.

"… moving stuff from one place to the other and then selling it. Lots of… papers involved. There's a lot of competition, so sometimes you have to get your hands dirty, but… you know what? I end up helping a lot of people too, so I think it balances itself out".

"Aaah. I. Uhm… get it. I think" Zim scratched his temple, visibly confused. "But, uh. Just to be sure. Can you give me an example?"

Driver pondered on that. Now that she thought about it, if she had never heard of this huge Irken Empire, he, too, probably had never heard of the planets she had been to. So maybe there would be no harm in sharing a few details about her most fun missions. Besides, he didn't seem like the talkative type, unless the subject of the conversation was himself.

"Well, alright. But don't tell anyone, okay?"

Zim nodded in agreement.

And so, she told him of the time she and her work partner sneaked three big boxes of the much illegal hempbiz leaves past the authorities in a space juncture; of the time they retrieved a rare lugolite for a rich client; and of that one time she had managed to fly a ship through a bunch of asteroids in order to lose an entire platoon of enemy ships.

As she spoke, Zim listened to her with an unexpectedly great deal of interest. She suspected the alcohol was playing a role in that: as he drank his wine, he eventually ditched the straw and started drinking directly from the glass to take bigger gulps of the beverage. His mood was noticeably changing: his occasional snorts turned to chuckles, and the chuckles turned to flat out laughter, even when whatever he was laughing about wasn't objectively that funny at all.

She wasn't complaining in the slightest, though: his laughter sounded like sweet music to her ears. Each time it resounded she could feel her heart skip a beat and her cheeks flaring up; eager to hear more of that laughter, she overplayed, or added wacky details to her stories, and tried to regulate her voice and tone to accentuate the comedic effect. That seemed to work greatly on Zim, who was laughing himself out more and more: he looked like he hadn't laughed in quite a long time, and that that was a much needed fun break from his problems.

In the end, with a count of five glasses each, they finally drank up the whole bottle. By that point, she was feeling fairly air-headed; Zim too was holding his liquor surprisingly well despite his small size.

He stood up, waving the empty bottle high above himself, and shouted:

"Hey, bar-drone! Fetch us another bubbly-fizzy… wine-thingy bottle!"

"Hey, hey, watch out, dude! It's my monies we are talking about" she playfully protested, but she honestly couldn't care less about the money right now: she would pay anything to see him smile and laugh even more.

"Oh come on, I'm sure sneaking hempbiz-es through customs pays you a lot of money. Doesn't it?" he sneered at her.

Well, that mission had paid quite a lot. Nothing to retort there.

As they drank the second bottle, Driver's stories became more and more incoherent: she would mix up the elements of two or more different stories, and pronouncing foreign, alien words or even just longer words in general got harder and harder.

Zim laughed at her stories even louder than before, as if what she was saying was some kind of high comedy. Or made any sense at all.

There was no denying at this point that they were both helplessly drunk. Their laughter filled the usually quiet air of the small space bar and, unnoticed by them, the heads of the other clients and of the barman turned over to look at them with a mix of curiosity and confusion: it looked like a bright, warm, lively light had suddenly lighted up in a dark, cold empty alley for the first time in its history.

Despite her intoxication, Driver had not forgotten her purpose of getting closer to the small alien: while she was telling her adventures, her left arm had slowly crept behind Zim's back, and her body had slowly leaned towards him. Zim's back, too, was slightly resting on the arm behind him, although he probably just did that instinctively to keep himself from losing balance and falling lying on the couch.

She was now telling an episode that had happened during her latest mission: their cover had been blown, and an enemy had managed to climb on their ship minutes before they could take off.

"So like, this huge dude tackles me from behind, right?" she described, her right hand erratically waving as to draw the scene in the air.

"Yes"

"He tackles me from behind, okay?"

"Yes"

"This huge… dude tackles me from behind, you are following me, right?"

"… I think I am, yes"

"So I just… go absolutely balls-listic , right, dude? I go, like…" she was really struggling to get that last word out, and when she finally managed to, it ended up sounding like something between a puff and a sob: "N-Hoh".

"HAHAHA! Yeah, you tell him, ape-monkey… pig!" Zim excitedly exclaimed.

"Little does he know however" she continued in a lower, more serious voice," that I'm hiding a secret weapon under my jacket".

Zim gasped in stupor.

"What secret weapon?" he asked her.

"A… triple electric ray-gun type 6Y6."

Zim looked at her in complete awe.

"I've only ever heard of such a weapon! What… what does it look like?"

"... alright, I'll show you. But you have to promise not to shout or yell or do anything like that, ok?"

Zim nodded obediently. She placed her left hand on his shoulder and slowly, gently pulled him towards her; her right hand drew the gun from its holster hidden under her jacket, but without moving it too much away from her body.

"Oooh" Zim sighed, eyes full of wonder. "How neat! It's even cooler than I imagined!" he said as he poked at the weapon as if it was a fragile object he was being careful not to break.

She nodded in agreement. As she concealed her ray-gun again, she continued:

"So anyway. I fire the gun up, right? So, so like… a plate from the ceiling falls onto his head with the loudest thud"

"Serves him right! How dare he… uhm… uh…"

"Tackle me from behind"

"Yes, that"

"So I take the chance to sneak out of his greasy arms, but. The guy now knows I have a ray-gun in my hands. So naturally he is freaking out, right? And he tries to run out of the control room, but… but… hehehe" a sudden giggling wouldn't let her complete the sentence.

Zim leaned towards her, his expression urging her to continue. After she collected her breath and pulled herself together as much as possible, she finally concluded:

"I shot him in the butt. Two times. And the blast made him fall ahead and he… he rolled away like an armadillo in its shell, hahaha!" she broke into laughter.

"HAHAHA! Like an herma-drill ! Stupid rat! Herma-drills don't roll! " Zim's laughter joined hers and they both laughed their guts out until tears started streaming from their eyes, their laughters encouraging each other. Zim hit the table with his fist to work off his laughing fit, and the empty bottles and glasses on it tinkled.

"Hahaha... hey... hey, we should get another bottle" he proposed.

"I'm sorry, but I'm running short on cash here. Besides, I don't think that would be a very good idea health-wise, you know?" she retorted..

"Hehe, yeah" he nodded in agreement, but she wasn't sure he quite understood what she had just meant.

"You also know what, human? " Zim went on in a playful, falsely serious tone.

He poked at the gun through her clothes, and said:

"I'm pretty sure carrying a gun of that model around is a grave violation of security norms in most establishments… actually, I'm pretty sure no one in their right mind would ever think of granting a puny hyuuuman a ray-gun license. Aren't you afraid you might get in trouble?"

She just now noticed her hand was still resting on his shoulder. Before, he had seemed so reluctant to let her touch him, but now he didn't seem to mind the grip of her hand at all. Well...

"Well, you know" she replied, matching his serious/playful tone, "I don't see why they shouldn't. I'm more handy with this gun than most alien people anyway"

"Hah, I don't doubt it, butt-shooter " he agreed. " Still, I am the actual best there is when it comes to weapons. I bet I could beat you with my eyes closed and my antennae tied behind my head!"

"Ohhh. I would really like to see you try" she smirked.

"Hehehe, I'm pretty sure you would not want. To see that. You know, I could" his hand scratched-tickled at her belly, and she let out a giggle, "-splat out all of your organs all over the floor with no effort. If only I ever wanted to. At any time" he shot her a devious smile, but there was no real threat to be heard in his voice.

She giggled again, and she lovingly smiled, looking at his eyes. They were so big and red and pretty...

"I don't think I could ever do that. Splatting your organs all over the floor, I mean" as she said that, she slowly lifted her right arm to caress his cheek. He giggled, her touch tickling him, but didn't pull away from it this time.

"Has anyone ever told you that you're really... handsome?", she tried really hard not to say the more apt 'cute' and possibly tick him off.

He did seem to appreciate that compliment much more: he made a half smile and his cheeks actually flared up a little bit.

"Ha... no... I don't think so" he answered.

Driver slowly leaned towards him; Zim simply blinked at her, relaxed and smiling still; her lips slightly parted as she closed in, but he really didn't seem to understand what she was trying to do until her lips actually touched his.