Contrary to Zim's certainty that the human's bad mood would only last a couple of hours at most, it didn't seem to improve at all over the course of the day.
If anything, it only got progressively worse: after she got out of the shower, she sat back on the pilot seat, fetched a crossword magazine out of a drawer under the panel control, stuck in her auricles a pair of earphones attached to an outdated Earth music player, and proceeded to scribble furiously on the paper without ever raising her eyes or uttering a word for a good couple of hours.
Even lunchtime was different: usually, she liked to use it as an excuse to strike up a conversation and chat with him. This time though, she mechanically got up from her seat, went to the kitchen in the back, fixed herself a miserable sad sandwich and gobbled it up in a matter of seconds, without even consulting him. Then she sat back at her seat, with the magazine and the earphones and the music player, in the exact same pose as before, like she had never moved at all.
Zim had observed the whole scene with quiet (but absolutely disinterested, of course) disbelief.
The human looked so different: sluggish, sulky, taciturn, unresponsive. And most striking of all, she didn't seem interested in him at all. She evidently wanted to be left alone.
Which worked great for him, actually! It was so, so nice to have some time free from her constant need for attention, for once! Hurray!
At first, at least. But then, as he approached the seventh hour of non-stop playing the game she'd given to him, its addictive effect wore down, and Zim became very, very bored.
The ship was practical and simple, but it didn't offer much entertainment on its own.
As a result, his attention inevitably shifted back to the human.
Her perpetual pouting now looked childish and overblown. Seriously, how long was she going to sulk like that in front of him because of something someone else had done?
Left with literally no other option (because otherwise, there was no way he would've bothered), in a desperate attempt not to die of boredom, Zim tried to get a conversation going:
"You know, human, this old game isn't too bad!" he said, holding out the console in front of her nose.
"Yeah?" she asked. Her hand didn't stop scribbling, like her eyes could easily look past the game and onto the magazine.
"The pocke-monster-abominations are quite ugly, but the battles are kind of fun!" he nodded.
"Uh-uh" she answered again with that same flat, bored tone. Like a robot.
"I chose the fire-pig as the leader of my team"
"I prefer grass types"
"Hah! You wouldn't stand a chance against my team then!" he gloated, and then, as he tapped his finger on the screen, he added: "I also equipped five pigeons on all the other slots!"
"I wouldn't stand a chance at all, then" she agreed. Maybe she didn't hear the sound of his finger tapping the screen through her earphones, because even that didn't make her raise her head.
"Well, don't feel too bad about it. I'm pretty good at this game, it seems. Look, I just finished utterly humiliating the sixth gym master on the map!"
He was sure that that Look! would have made her at least look up, but instead, she remained focused on her own game.
"It happens when you play eight hours straight" she pointed out.
"It was only seven, actually!"
"Good for you, Zim".
Zim lowered the console, disappointed by the human's lackluster reaction. He stared at her for a bit, but she seemed to have already forgotten that they were talking. He doubted she'd even paid any attention to him at all.
In the end, he turned off the console, and put it back in the drawer she'd got it from.
Zim had been sure she would have gladly talked about something she herself had shown him: she was always so eager to expose him to the old, useless junk she'd brought from Earth. Maybe she just wasn't in the mood for talking about video games? Maybe he would get a better result with a different subject:
"So, where are we going exactly this time?" he asked
"It's a place called Tiyo" she replied.
He assumed she would expand on that, but she remained silent way longer than expected: she was not going to talk more than necessary, unless he pushed for it.
"Well, how far are we?" he insisted.
"It's about two days from where we are now"
"Do you have a map to show me?"
"Yeah, sure" she said, finally taking her head out of the magazine: she pressed a series of buttons on the control panel, and on the windshield-screen appeared a very rough, blue-colored map: a white moving dot represented their current position, while their destination was marked by a red, still one; the route they were on was represented by a segmented line. But wait, something was wrong about it...
"Hey, wait a minute!" Zim exclaimed, pointing at the screen, "We could save one whole day at least if we just steered in a straight line!"
"I know that. But I'm not taking any main routes. I'm trying to maintain a low profile"
"Why?"
The human finally decided to look at him directly, for the first time in the whole day: she plucked one of the earphones out of her hear and explained, with a pinch more verbosity than before:
"After the... bar incident, there are probably still many people looking out for us in this area. Plus, an Irken-human couple doesn't exactly pass unobserved"
"But this is the longest way! It will take triple the time!"
"Don't you have patience on Irk?" she cooked an eyebrow up, "Or did you ditch it along with quietness and caution?"
"Umpf! It's you who are incautious, human! Everyone knows it's the secondary routes that are more dangerous! Who knows what lurks out there, in the uncharted depths of space?" he admonished her, with a tone that he hoped would sound ominous.
"Look, relax. I know what I'm doing" she dismissed him, laid-back as ever. "I've been doing this for years. I have a map and a radar. Trust me, it's way safer this way. Do you think they call me 'Driver' for nothing?"
Zim's eyes widened.
"Is... is that your name? 'Driver'?" he askeds.
"...uh?" the human looked extremely surprised at his question.
"I never told you that? All this time? Really?!" she asked back.
"Ah! So you do have a name! There I thought you had no name, like your 'Cat'!" Zim snickered.
"But that's not my real name eith-"
"Well, Driver-human, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation if you hadn't made that bar explode in the first place!"
"That vile dog of a blob had it coming" she stated with a growl. "And besides, setting stuff on fire is fun".
As she added that last part, her voice softened, a small grin appearing on her lips, as if she was looking back to a pleasant memory.
Shortly after though, that smile faded too, she stuck the earphone back into her ear and continued with her crossword game.
To her credit, the precise, confident way in which she had shot that horrible blob-creature and made his bar explode had been rather... cool.
Very cool, even.
Under normal circumstances, it would've been ridiculous to compare shooting a gun to handling a mere pen, but the Driver-human's expression as she was focused on the crosswords was pretty similar to the one she'd displayed that day: her eyes were attentive, and concentrated, and serious and cold. If he didn't know alteqdg what she did for a living, he would have probably mistaken her for a soldier.
As he stared at her, his gaze slowly moved up to the top of her head, and he noticed how the lights on the ship's ceiling reflected on her hair, making it look shiny and way lighter than it was; he was never too fond of fur, but admittedly, hers looked soft, and well-groomed, and silk-like, in the way that it fell down on her shoulders.
From there, his eyes trailed down over the rest of her body: she looked relaxed, back rested on the seat's back, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding the magazine, the other writing on it. If there was one good thing humans had going on for them, it was their height, and the proportions between their limbs and their torsos often accentuated it, contrary to most Irkens. And hers were no exception. Especially her legs. Just now, he noticed how long they really were: stretched out, they were almost as long as he was tall. They probably contributed greatly to the general aura of elegance that she gave off.
Zim imagined passing a hand over the entire lenght of one of her legs, and his body immediately heated up.
Zim fiddled uncomfortably with his hands (to keep them busy and not reach for the human's leg) and swung his legs back and forth in the air to work that tension off.
He tried thinking of something else, anything else, but he found nothing that could keep his attention away from her.
Looking away probably would have helped, but he was completely transfixed by her sight: he just couldn't stop staring at her.
Why, oh, just why wasn't she looking at him?! Whenever he felt that way, she would immediately notice, and her touch would usually calm that awfully hot, itchy state of his!
This couldn't be just about what had happened that morning, right? What did he have to do with it anyway? He'd done nothing wrong to her! They'd barely even talked to each other that day! And she had never withheld her effusions this long!
Maybe then, she was doing this on purpose. Maybe this was one of her weird mind-games, where she did something out of the ordinary in order to provoke a reaction from him. Like when she picked up an object and placed it in his sight, waiting for him to ask her what it was. Or when she sometimes placed a hand close to one of his own, expecting him to reach and grab it.
So by ignoring him and giving him the cold shoulder, maybe she was actually trying to get him to try and reach for her instead.
Zim clenched his fists; he really, really didn't want to give in and bend to her ridiculous demands, but at that moment he felt as though his desire to touch her was going to kill him if unsatisfied. Any humiliation he might have felt from doing it felt like an acceptable collateral damage.
Gathering all his courage, Zim cleared his throat and asked her, as casually as possible:
"Can I look at the crosswords you're doing?"
"Hmm? I thought you were enjoying Pokémon" she pointed out without lifting her head.
"I've been playing it all day. I'm tired of it" he explained, "Why, I can't watch?"
"… no, sure. Just don't spoil the answers for me" she finally allowed with a somewhat uncertain voice.
Pressing a button on one of the armrests, Zim detached his chair from its place and slid closer to her; he looked at what she was writing, and noticed that the alphabet she was using wasn't the Earth one he knew.
"What language is this?"
"It's Thwartian" she shrugged. "It's the most common one in this galaxy".
"Oh, I see" he nodded, "Isn't it weird that everybody writes in their own language but then we all speak the same one?" he tried asking as a diversion while he slowly leaned on her arm.
"I try not to think about it. It's pretty weird, though" she agreed; she didn't react at all when his head touched her shoulder.
So far so good.
From so up close, he could smell a flowery, fresh fragrance. Probably the soap she'd just used in the shower. He took in a deep sniff of it with his eyes closed (oh she always smelled so good!), careful not to make a sound with his breathing.
Then, he slowly raised his hand, and placed it on the arm she was holding the magazine with; he wasn't quite used to touching others gently, so the motion came out awkward, hesitant, and a bit rough, but in the end, he managed to stroke it, twice.
This time, the human did halt her writing and looked at him. Their faces were pretty close, and for a while they stared into each other's eyes, without saying anything.
Now that was the familiar situation that Zim had sought to trigger! And the human had played right into his scheme!
He couldn't help but feel a hint of satisfied pride at that: the human might have thought she was so smooth, that she knew him oh so well, but at the end of the day she was the one who'd fallen madly in love with him! And totally not the other way around, like she thought! And as such, she could be easily induced to dance in the palm of his hand! Dance like a meat-puppet!
But enough with the internal bragging. He had that thing he viscerally hated doing to concentrate on.
Zim stretched up towards her, slowly closed his eyes, and positioned his lips into the optimal kissing stance, until they were touched by her... fingers. Pushing his face away.
"What are you trying to do, Zim?" the human asked.
Zim immediately opened his eyes.
For a moment, he just stared at her, flabbergasted by her reaction.
The human drew back her hand; she looked just as confused as he was.
What… Had her disadvantaged little ape brain just... straight up removed the last or so month with him?! Could that happen?!It did sound like something that could happen to a human!
But then, after that first moment of complete and utter panic, he realized that she had to still be playing her 'hard to catch' game, as the humans called it, and he broke in a nervous giggle.
"Haha, come on, human, stop playing dumb. You've had your fun and all, but your silly act can't possibly fool ZiM's amazing mind for too long!"
Zim got up on his knees on his chair, and gestured at her to come forward.
"Now come here and do your usual gross thing. And remember" he added lifting his index finger and shaking it in a 'no-no' gesture, "no hands. Or this time I will shoot them with my lasers".
"Oh, uhm, yeah Zim. About that..." the Driver-human pulled the earphones out of her ears by their wires. She looked rather... sorry.
"… no".
Her tone, too, sounded apologetic.
... No?!
"… no... what?" he asked.
"Well, I mean, uh..."
She paused for a moment to put the music player and the magazine back into their drawer.
When she turned to him, she talked with a very serious voice:
"I've been thinking recently, Zim, about this… thing going on between us, this, uhhh… this mess. Yeah, 'mess', I think, it's the most apt word for it. This whole mess going on between us, and I've concluded that..."
She scratched the back of her head and averted her eyes from his, as though she couldn't handle his sight.
"… we've rushed into this really fast, don't you think? It is pretty crazy, how many bases we've burnt without even knowing each other! So, uhm… considering that we're colleagues now… maybe it's best if we… if we stop… doing… stuff… for… now".
Zim felt as though the whole ship had been pulled from under his feet, leaving him to weightlessly float in the middle of space.
"… you mean you don't want to kiss me anymore?!" he asked, completely astounded and horrified.
"It's not that I don't w-, I mean, uh" the human still dared not to look him in the eye. She started tapping her right foot on the floor, apparently nervous.
"Yes" she concluded, "I suppose I… do mean that".
Zim was at a complete loss of words.
He caught a glimpse of the prospect of having the human in front of him for the days to come and not being able to kiss her, and it already made his guts ache.
"Don't- don't take it badly though!" the human pleaded with him as she noticed his expression, "I'm just saying that we need to take some time and think about it! Let's wait at least until after the mission, ok? After all, we are working together right now. It's probably best if we leave emotions out of our job, don't you think?"
"No- no, human, hahaha!" Zim shook his head, shaken by a series of hysterical giggles. "You don't understand. Have you forgotten my current PAK condition? Until I can properly analyze and cure it, we can't risk disrupting this already precarious equilibrium! I might actually die! No, I feel I will actually die! Or at the very least, end up with a serious spooch failure!"
"Pffft!" the human snorted, "Zim, no one has ever died from not kissing. I think you'll survive that just fine".
"ZiM is not like you humans! Kissing is not natural for Irkens! It has disrupted my PAK's chemical workings, I can feel it!" he protested.
"Zim, you..." the human massaged her forehead with her hand, and replied with a tired voice: "you don't want to kiss me because of a chemical problem in your PAK. Okay? It's time you faced it. Ergo, you are not going to die if we stop"
"You presumptuous little monkey!" Zim screeched, pointing his finger at her, "You think you know ZiM's PAK better than ZiM does?!"
"Yeah, well, Zim..." she sighed as she crossed her legs and her arms. She looked straight into his eyes, and assumed a very serious, firm, and defiant expression.
"… you can't force me to do it. So learn to deal with it"
"YOU- youuuunnnnngh-!" Zim growled in frustration.
Didn't the human care at all about his well-being? He was suffering in front of her very eyes from the excruciating pains of withdrawal! Though, come to think of that, this lack of care towards him was uncharacteristic too. Could there, perhaps, be more behind her refusal? Was it somehow connected to her bad mood?
"I know you are lying to me, human!" Zim hissed at her, "You must be. You've never cared about proper work protocols until now! You have never cared for propriety of any kind!"
Zim stood up, he spoke up with a dramatic tone, emphasized by a series of theatrical hand gestures:
"I don't know why you are doing this, and frankly? I don't even care! Because I KNOW very well how COMPLETELY OBSESSED you are with me!" he accused her. "I KNOW you can't resist these lips!" and saying so, he pointed at his irresistible mouth with both his hands.
Zim breathed in as much air as he could fit inside his body to yell the final, decisive line:
"OBEY THE LIPS, WOMAN! OBEY THE LEEEEEPS!", he shouted, so loud he had to flex his spine backwards to get it all out.
Very, very smooth. Now, that surely ought to convince her!
The human kept looking at him with her calm expression, unphased by his stunning seductive abilities.
"Zim. Are you my boyfriend?" she asked him.
"Uh- WHAT? What?!" he exclaimed, completely thrown off by that question.
"Just answer. Are you my boyfriend or not?" she calmly insisted.
"O… of course not! Hahaha!" Zim scoffed, "Me, your boyfriend! HA! Now that's a good one, human!"
"Do you like me, at least?" she asked again.
"Hahaha!" he laughed, "Of course not! ZiM likes no one! And there's certainly nothing I would ever like about YOU!"
"Do you even care for me at all?"
"Oh, human! Of course I don't care about you! Are you serious?!" he shook his head, talking as if he was stating a very obvious fact.
All of a sudden, the human's calm expression inexplicably turned into a scowling, angry one.
That was no regular angry face either: it was the angriest expression he'd ever seen on her face.
Zim's condescending smile died on his lips. It'd happened so quickly, that his conscious mind had barely processed that change by the time the human started talking, and so when he heard that her voice, too, was seething with pure rage, he was so taken aback he almost felt scared:
"Well, ZIM, since the only person you worry about is yourself, since I'm so- so gross as you say, why don't you just use a mirror and french-kiss your reflection, uh? How about that?!"
Zim took a step back from her on his seat, antennae lowered, intimidated by her unexpected, angry reaction.
He had no idea why, but he could already tell he'd just gotten himself in giant trouble. Like he'd just stepped on a buried mine.
Zim opened his mouth to try and calm her down, but the human continued before he could emit a sound:
"And MAYBE if you ask nicely, your reflection might even come out of the mirror, and cook your food for you, and offer you a bed to sleep on, and put you out if you ever catch on fire! Ohhh, you'd make such a PERFECT couple, you two!" she joined her and put up the most upsetting fake smile.
"B-but- but that's-"
"My name!" she snapped. Somehow, she became bigger, she swelled, and she shivered all over, like a boiling pot overflowing with hot steam, "You couldn't even BOTHER to ASK what my NAME is, and you STILL have the gall to-to-to-"
Her hands darted left and right as she struggled to pick the right word to finish with. Zim tried to interject through her stuttering, in vain:
"But human, I-"
"Just shut up, Zim! SHUT! UP!" she shouted at him in the loudest, angriest voice he'd ever heard coming from her.
That scream cut through him like a dagger, jabbing and twisting right in the middle of his chest. He even felt his blood draining from his face and his knees becoming weak.
They stared at each other for what felt like infinity. She looked absolutely livid: her enraged eyes were too much to handle. He almost expected them to shoot literal fire at him any second now.
The human turned away from him with a sharp sway, directing her frowning face towards the ship's windshield, her body still trembling with rage. That didn't make him feel much better, though.
Zim sat back on his seat and repositioned it back in its place, very slowly, afraid that a sudden movement would invoke her anger again.
He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, unable to think of a good way to speak and not get blasted again.
Why had she had such a violent reaction?! Usually, whenever he used such words on her, she would simply laugh them off, and move on like it was nothing! And usually at that point, she leaned towards him to kiss him, hug him, or otherwise tease him. What happened to the sweet, sappy, touchy human he knew? She was completely fine and ordinary just that very morning! What happened to her to make her do such a sudden one-eighty?!
And then, it clicked.
He found the reason why the human had suddenly turned on him.
"The Krass-monster pitted you against me, didn't he?" he growled.
"… what?" she turned her angry face back to him.
"The Krass-man, human! You two talked about me this morning, didn't you?! And then he said something that made you act like this!"
"Uh-" the Driver-human was clearly thrown off by his accusation; for a moment, her eyes shot wide open, as if she'd just been caught red-handed.
"Zim, leave the Boss out of this! We didn't talk about you at all this morning! Get over yourself!" she denied.
"Yes you did! I know for a fact that you did! You're a liar, human! A liar!" he accused her.
That accusation seemed to be founded after all, because it made the human appear even more nervous: she rubbed her arm with a hand uncomfortably, and her eyes once again darted left and right to avoid his.
"I know he said something about me that made you change your mind! You were fine with the whole kissing thing just this morning! And now, all of a sudden, you're all gloomy and angry at me and don't wanna do it anymore!"
"Oh, wow, that sounds awful, Zim" she murmured, "I hope nothing like that ever happens to me..."
"The great ZiM is NOT as dumb and clueless as you two think!" Zim continued, "I was okay with letting this slide, but now I demand an explanation: what did you two talk about this morning?!"
"Zim, no one thinks you're dumb, and we are not at all against you! We- we've done nothing but help you until now!" she stated, trying to make her insecure voice sound firmer, "A-and, you know, Zim, being straight with you would be so much easier if you just could act coherent for five seconds!"
"ZiM is coherent! He is always coherent! When have I ever not been coherent?!" he yelled.
"Well then, answer me this, Zim: do you hate me or not?!" she yelled back.
"Of course I HATE you! You're so smart and pretty and cool!"
"See?! This is exactly what I'm talking about!" she exclaimed, throwing her arms in the air in exasperation, "By GOD Zim, did your mom SMOKE while you were- smoke"
As she spoke that one last word, her face suddenly shot to the side, like something unbelievably interesting had just caught her attention. Like they weren't arguing just now.
"What? What's that about smoke now?"
"There's smoke in space!" the human pointed at something out of the windshield.
"There's what in what now?" Zim followed her finger to look out on the open space in front of the ship; or at least, that's what he would have done, hadn't there been a layer of thick, white smoke covering it all up.
"Ah, I see. You're trying to change the subject now"
"Zim, there is a literal cloud of smoke right in front of us!" she said as she pressed a series of buttons on the panel.
On the ship's screen appeared the videos from the external cameras: they all showed the same white smoke surrounding the ship from all angles, thus completely impairing the view.
"What the hell is that?" the human whispered, "It doesn't come from the ship, and there's nothing close to us...", she said, and she started checking every possible parameter with increasing worry.
"I don't know. So what? It's just smoke. Let the autopilot guide the ship" Zim dismissed her concern waving his hand, "Now, about me having a 'mom'-"
"It's not working" she interrupted him.
"What's not working?" he asked.
"The autopilot isn't working. Look, the GPS is out!"
He leaned to look at the GPS' display: it showed the map of the tract of space they were traversing just before they started arguing, but the dot that was supposed to indicate their position was gone.
"I think we've been thrown off course" she added, even more worried than before.
Now he was starting to get anxious too. Was something interfering with their connections to the GPS satellites? Was that correlated with the smoke? And why did it have to happen at such a critical moment?!
"Can't you use the radar?" he asked.
"There's nothing near us that we can use as a reference. Maybe-"
All of a sudden, something struck the ship's right side, making it shake.
Both of them instantly went quiet, and looked to their right where the sound had come from.
They slowly turned their heads to face each other, and shared a confused, startled look.
Then, there was another strike, much stronger than the first one, so much so that it made the ship steer to the left, and both he and the human let out a surprised yelp; the lights in the ship flickered off and on.
The human held onto the steering wheel, trying to stabilize the ship, but it didn't stop shaking: it was like something out there, or multiple some things indeed, were bumping into it from all sides.
"What's happening? Is someone attacking us?!" Zim asked, now genuinely scared.
"No, I think- it is more like wind blowing on a plane!"
The human tried to steer the ship back to the right, but it was hit by an even stronger force that put it back in the previous course. Zim could tell she was seriously struggling to keep the steering wheel still: whatever was hitting the ship was pretty strong.
The analogy she'd made was pretty accurate: it very much felt like they were on an aircraft flying through a terrible storm.
The human secured her seat belt, and he did the same; this didn't look good at all...
"Human, do something!" he shouted.
"I don't know what to do! How can there be wind in space?! I've never seen anything like this!" she replied in an equally panicked voice, trying her hardest to keep the wheel straight.
"Just shoot some missiles or something!"
"How would that be of any help?"
"Missiles always help!"
"I mean, you're not wrong, but- hey look! Look there! Is that a light?"
Zim had noticed it too: there was a small dot of light shining intermittently in front of them, buried deep miles away in the white fog.
They both looked over at the radar's display: a dot correspondent to the mysterious object had appeared on it.
"What is that?!" Zim asked.
"I don't know…" the human answered with uncertainty.
She tried steering to the right, but again the 'wind' violently pushed them back towards the light. She tried turning to the left, but again the ship was pushed on that route that led to the light.
"There seems to be an air canal here where the wind is less strong..." the human murmured.
"I-it's luring us in!" Zim panicked, "Shoot it down, human! Shoot those missiles!" he urged her.
"I can't just shoot something without even knowing what it is!" she retorted, "And it seems we will know soon, anyway..." the human readied the missiles: she pressed a sequence of buttons, and Zim heard the mechanical sounds of the missile-shooting turrets arranging on both sides of the ship. However, she also pushed the ship towards the light even faster than before, and Zim could have sworn that the wind started pulling the ship forward along with its propellers.
"What are you doing?! Are you crazy?! We're falling right into their trap!"
"Whose trap?! You can't just… 'make wind', Zim!"
"Yes you can! I can! Turn the ship away!"
"You saw it, I can't!"
"Not with your weak fragile monkey hands you can't!" Zim tried to reach for the wheel, but the human slapped his hand away.
"Keep your hands away, Zim!" she snapped, "I'm the pilot here!"
"You're also the pilot that got us into this foggy nightmare in the first place! You-"
"Zim, I feel the sudden urge to maul your vocal cords" she growled, baring her teeth threateningly, "So unless you have anything helpful to add, you better shut up".
Zim immediately went quiet, remembering the damage that those ape teeth of hers could do; he sunk in his chair and crossed his arms, staring anxiously at the light in the fog, feeling as impotent as ever.
The sheer nerve of this human! Telling him, ZIM, to shut up! Leading them towards danger because she couldn't fly her own ship through a tiny bit of wind! Calling herself 'Driver'! She should have herself... Not... Not-So-Good-Driver!
Zim took a sneaky look at her: she was keeping her eyes firm on the light, her hands ready to shoot the missiles at any sign of danger, but under that calm he could still sense an aura of rage emitting from her.
For a moment there, he'd been so scared of whatever was attacking them, that he'd forgotten that she was still angry at him.
He wanted to say something, anything, as talking usually helped him ease his anxiety, but he was pretty sure that she would have just given him another angry answer. And then she would have probably mauled him.
So he simply settled down and waited anxiously, staring at that approaching light. And although he still feared whatever potential threat it might have been, on the forefront of his thoughts were now those cruel words that the human had used against him.
She had never been so… so mean to him! Even the other times she'd been angry at him, she'd never told him to 'shut up'! She'd never ignored him! She'd never ignored his discomfort like she was doing now! Why had she taken such an offense at his words? It's not like he'd said anything that she didn't already know! He totally hadn't been rude and unfair to her!… had he?
Zim fiddled with his hands: deep in his chest, he felt the unusual, unpleasant feeling of regret.
He wished he hadn't said those words to her, he wished their fight had never happened and that things between them had stayed exactly how they were just a few hours before, even not being kissed would've been better than knowing the human was angry at him. But his pride refrained him from apologizing.
And besides, he was afraid that she would say another mean thing to him if he tried to speak.
Something else, however, caught his attention: as they got closer to the unidentified object, it became apparent that it wasn't an intermittent light at all. Rather, it was a long ray of light whose source was spinning on itself.
Slowly, the surroundings of the ray of light became more defined too: there was a sort of tower upholding the spinning light. And under that, there seemed to be a sort of building: he could make out the faint lights of its windows through the mist.
"Hey, that's a lighthouse!" the human exclaimed.
"What's a lighthouse-" Zim asked, but at that moment the ship was hit by another wave of strong shakes: they were entering the atmosphere of whatever land the tower was built on.
"There seems to be an atmosphere here!" the human confirmed his deduction, "It might be a small planet, or maybe an artificial platform. I'll try to land here now".
But the ship seemed not to agree with her: even though she had initiated the landing procedure, the strong wind kept her from stabilizing the ship; plus, they were now hovering at the same height as the light, and much closer to it too, so every few seconds it would spin and shine brightly right into their eyes: the continuous shakes and the intermittent blinding light combined together to form a true and authentic assault on their senses.
"Just land already!" Zim pleaded as that horrible light forced him to close his eyes a third time in a row.
"I'm trying! Just give me a second, okay? I'm trying not to crash!" the human said as she fumbled around with the commands.
"Well, just... just press the gravitational button and the system-override command at the same time!"
"What? Why?"
"Just do it!" he insisted.
The human, probably out of frustration for her own fruitless attempts, actually followed his command, and as soon as she pressed both buttons, all the lights of the ship went out, its engine turned off, and they fell with a loud, violent crash on the surface the light-house was on.
The impact was so strong, Zim felt his teeth grit inside his mouth, and if he and the human weren't wearing their seatbelts, they would have been without a doubt thrown out of their seats. From the back of the ship, came the sound of multiple objects falling, as well as that of something made of glass breaking.
Zim looked at the human: he could barely see her, as the only light powerful enough to illuminate the ship was now the one of the light-house-tower, which shone irregularly above them, but he could tell that she'd been rather startled by that emergency landing: she had a short breath, and her eyes were wide open.
Slowly, she turned around to look at him.
"Eh... see? We landed!" he gave her an awkward smile, but she didn't return it. In fact, she looked quite un-amused by his unorthodox landing technique.
The human unfastened her belt, then reached in a drawer under the control panel and drew her ray gun out of it.
For a split second, Zim was sure that she would use it on him, so he felt a big rush of relief when she instead placed it in the holster under her jacket.
"Come on, let's board off" she grumbled, "Don't say or do anything before I do".
She turned on her chair and headed out of the ship; Zim quickly followed her through the corridor and onto the outer stairs.
Once they were out of the ship, they took a good look around them: close to that surface, the mist was nothing but a light haze; the wind, too, was much weaker than it was just a couple of feet above them.
Apparently, they had landed on an artificial space-platform with a flat, barren surface of brown dirt. In front of them, stood a small one-floor house, of a light gray color, squared, bare, it pretty much looked like a bunker, or a block of cement; a green metal door was perfectly in the middle, with two windows on either side, out of which shone a warm, yellow light.
Above the house towered the 'light-house', as the human had called it: it was as gray and as bare as the house below, with small little dark windows, and on top of it laid that horrible yellow light. It turned on itself tirelessly, its ray plowing so strong through the fog, for what looked like miles and miles into the space around it.
The human stepped on the platform's surface and checked the ship's landing gear: luckily, it appeared to have sustained the crash without any major damage.
"There seems to be people in the house" she told him, "Let's go meet them"
"What?!" he exclaimed, "Are you going to trust some random strangers like that?"
"Lighthouses are made to help people, Zim. They are used to guide ships when the visibility is impaired. This one must have been built because this area is subject to storms… somehow".
Zim looked up at the light-house. That thing was supposed to help people? It didn't look well-intentioned at all to him. If anything, it looked extremely creepy. It looked more like the giant, yellow eye of a nocturnal beast. Or a spinning death ray. Or a giant, spinning eye that also shot death rays.
"But you said it yourself, there are no storms in space! I've been alive for way more than you have and I've never heard of such a thing! Don't you think that's suspicious? That the wind led us right here to this light-tower-thing?"
"Why would anyone even do that?"
"Maybe they want to steal our ship! Harvest our organs… dissect us… maybe they want to eat us too! People-eating monsters in the fog..." Zim shuddered at the thought of the endless possible living nightmares that could be lurking inside that horrible building.
"Zim, we are in the middle of nowhere. If they really want to trap people for a living, then they chose a horrible location. I think you watched way too many slasher movies on Earth" and as she turned around headed for the house, she snickered: "I didn't take you for such a scaredy-chicken".
"ZiM is no chicken! Human, you can't go in like that!" he warned her "At least kick the door down and threaten them with your gun! Catch them by surprise1"
"You're just being paranoid. As usual." she briefly looked at him over her shoulders. "Don't make a scene when we meet the people inside, okay?"
Zim anxiously ran behind her, who was now dangerously close to the door.
"Stop being so careless, human! You're really going to get us both killed! Or worse!"
"What?" she scoffed as she turned back around to face him, "If you are so afraid then, take your Voot Cruiser and fly away!"
"I-" Zim looked up at the sky: the white fog moved fast under the wind's blows. If the human's ship couldn't fly through that, there was no way that his little cruiser could. Getting stuck up there with no one that could help him was a terrifying prospect.
Additionally, for some reason, leaving the human to deal all alone with the probable cause of that whole incident didn't sit well with him in the slightest.
"Look, human, if you just stopped being so emotional then you'd see-"
"Oh, WOW! I'm the emotional one now?!" she cut him off, "If you hadn't freaked out about me not wanting to kiss you I would have been more focused on driving and THEN we would have never ended up stuck in this mist!"
"Well, if we'd JUST taken the main route like I suggested, we would have never even come close to this place!" he hissed back.
"You- you know, this is enough, I'm tired of this" the human murmured, sliding a hand across her face, "If I wanted to deal with this level of entitlement and emotional unavailability, I would have stuck to dating human men"
"You insolent little monkey! How am I 'entitled'?! Don't you see I'm trying to help you?!" Zim angrily shouted.
"I don't WANT nor NEED the help of someone who doesn't care for me!" the human shouted back.
Zim was ready to shoot right back at her, but then he heard a series of clacks coming from behind the human.
Someone was coming out of the light-house's door..
The sound startled him enough to make his heart jump in his throat. He immediately assumed a defensive stance and drew out two of his laser-legs out of his PAK.
The human, too, seemed to be startled by the sudden noise; she quickly turned around, took a few steps back, and, despite her stubborn resolve to absolutely trust the unknown residents of the building, she shoved a hand under her jacket, ready to grab her gun if necessity called for it.
Zim felt a very, very bad feeling about what was coming, possibly even worse than when he'd seen the ray of light. All in all, maybe trying to face the space-storm wouldn't have been so bad compared to this: anywhere would've been better than that place.
He was just considering the idea of simply grabbing the human with his PAK legs and forcefully dragging her back to the ship, but his body became paralyzed as the metal door creaked open to reveal the inhabitants of the space light-house.