"Okay, so we've got electrocution, spike traps, and the wolverines you have in cryostasis." Dib tapped the marker against the whiteboard. "What else?"

"I could short out his eyeballs!" Zim nearly dumped his cup of hot cocoa on himself as he thrust the mug up into the air excitedly, and Dib scribbled it out with the squeaky marker.

"Oh, that's a good one."

"He won't be getting anywhere near any of us! Isn't that right?" Zim looked down at his stomach, giving a big grin at it at the shift. "That's right, you know what I'm talking about."

"You really talk to her a lot, don't you?" Dib let the magnet on the marker click it to the board as he knelt down in the few blankets taken from the nest.

Zim grabbed his arm, tugging him hard, and Dib fell on top of Zim's stomach. "Oof!"

"Why wouldn't I? She has to get used to my voice, doesn't she? Not that she won't-" Zim yawned twice in a span of a few seconds, eyes squeezed tightly shut before blinking them open again. "Won't know it's me."

"I think you're supposed to talk to kids. Dad's notes said he did sometimes, since we didn't have a heartbeat around us in the tubes." Dib pushed himself up before leaning forwards anyway. "Apparently he did it once a day for exactly a minute and a half at a time. I have no idea if that helped, to be honest-" Zim held up a finger to shut Dib up, before pointing it down at his belly.

"Say something to her," Zim urged. "She has to adjust to your horrible voice at some point."

"Hey, it's not horrible!" Dib protested, before clearing his throat. "Uh, hi. I'm- Dib. You don't know that yet. I'm sure Zim's been telling you his name every five minutes when he's talking to you, so I should probably repeat this a few times so you know mine. Do I want you to call me Dib? Would that be weird?" He looked up. "What do you want to be called, anyway? Not mom, I wouldn't think."

"Zim, obviously."

"Don't you want- I don't know, aren't there any old irken words for parent? Breeder or something? Not that specifically, though, that'd be kind of creepy to have your kid call you that."

Zim thought for a moment. "Irkens have come from tubes for thousands of generations. Zim is fine."

"Okay. That's kind of weird, but I guess no weirder than having two dads anyway. Makes it easier for me, I can just go with..." He trailed off, staring down at the curve pushing out the fabric of his old shirt. "...dad."

"That is the term for a male parental figure, no? What's the problem?"

Dib shook his head like he was clearing an etch-a-sketch. "No. I mean, yeah, yeah it is! It's just- weird to think about. I just graduated high school a few months ago, really, and now…" He set a hand on Zim's stomach. "Hi there. I'm going to be your dad."

There was movement under his palm, and Zim groaned.

"Great, you woke her up!"

"I wasn't trying to- she was moving around a lot earlier, I thought she'd be tired. Figures she'll never stop going, though, with you as one of her parents."

"You never quit either. With you, she'll be climbing out of my guts in no time to go exploring." Zim drummed his fingers on his stomach. "Do something to make her go back to sleep."

Dib cleared his throat. "Hello there, uh… man, we still need to look for more names. And no, we're not going with any variation on Zim jr!" Dib cut Zim off as soon as he opened his mouth. "I guess we have some time, it's not like you'll be able to really tell as soon as you're born, you'll be a meat lump. We can just call you baby or something. I'm Dib, like I just said, your… dad. I'm your dad. And your- Zim? He's my Zim, but he'll be yours too. He wants you to settle down." He pulled up the shirt to directly rub his palm on Zim's skin. "I know annoying him is a lot of fun, but you can… tone it down a little? It's starting to annoy me too, and you don't want to do that, right?"

"She's going to be perfect, she just doesn't know it yet," Zim said. "As soon as she comes out, you'll know that."

"I don't know about perfect. Nothing's perfect. We sure as hell aren't." Dib's fingers curled on top of the green skin. "But… yeah. She's going to be great, if she manages to make it to her first birthday."

"We aren't going to kill her!" Zim smacked at Dib's chest. "Even if we do, I'm sure we can resuscitate her!"

"Right, your alien healing tech is freaky, I know. And I can raise the dead- I wonder what a zombie baby would be like? Would she just be stuck in an infantile state of mind forever or could we figure out how to make her grow normally and just clone brains for her to eat? Although I met that one vegan zombie who ate cauliflower, boy was she strange-"

Zim flapped his hand at Dib. "You're death-thinking again. Stop that. Right now."

Dib rubbed the back of his neck. "I mean, a zombie baby would be cool."

"Not if it's our zombie baby!" Zim shot back.

"I'm just saying, having a backup plan isn't a bad idea," Dib argued. "I want her to survive as much as you do."

"It doesn't feel like it," Zim grumbled, crossing his arms, and Dib blinked.

"What?"

"You're so soaked in bad-mood juice, all the time!" Zim waved his hands forward. "Oh, she's going to come out with a mutant arm, oh, what if she dies, oh, the Santa is going to destroy all of us!"

"He managed to flatten four buildings last year, that's a legitimate- come on, I'm being realistic! Zim, do you even understand how different we are?"

"Of course I do! What's your point?"

Dib grabbed Zim's arms, fingers tightening around the patch of skin between the bottom of the t-shirt sleeve and the top of his gloves. "The x-ray showed that her organs are all mixed up. You're an alien. On earth, if two different species crossbreed, if the fetus even makes it out of utero it's usually sterile or messed up in some way. And that's close relations, like tigers and lions, irkens developed in a completely different ecosystem from humans!" His nails dug in, and Zim snarled, pushing him off.

"Nonsense, my superior body will build her up so it's not that!"

"Even getting this attached to it is probably a bad idea, I shouldn't have told Dad and Gaz, who knows-"

"She'll be fine! If she isn't we'll fix her." Zim pulled his knees up and hunched forward. "We'll fix her. It'll be fine! Fine, fine, yes."

"...You're worried too, aren't you?" Dib's volume dipped, and he shifted to sit next to Zim.

"Zim worries over nothing!"

"Maybe I'm being too gloomy, but I'm right. Your body can handle it, but… can you get your Pak to check if she's still growing at a healthy rate?"

"If you insist," Zim said, but Dib noticed the way his fingers tightened on his shirt, and how the quiet dragged for a count of three before he spoke again. "Pak, analyze smeet for mutations."

The soft whirring was becoming familiar. "Multiple mutations detected."

"Are any of them fatal?" Dib asked, which Zim repeated to the Pak.

"None are fatal."

"She won't be paralyzed or anything, will she?" Dib worried at the thread of a blanket. Again, Zim echoed him for the Pak to spit out a new answer.

"Uncertain. Fzzt data is required."

"Right, she's the only human and irken hybrid so there's not going to be any information on her baseline." Dib groaned. "That's not nothing, at least- she'll live, and we can deal with the rest when we get there."

"How far along is she?" Zim asked. "Percentage-wise."

"Smeet is 77.645% complete."

"I thought you said she was at sixty-nine percent the other day!" Dib's eyes widened.

"When I last checked!" Zim defended. "Which was, uh…."

"A while ago. Right." Dib slumped back on the blankets, staring up at the ceiling. "I'm going to be a dad in less than a month, at this rate."

"Isn't that what we were planning all along?" Zim shuffled down the blanket pile before turning over and plopping his head on Dib's stomach, curling up a bit. Dib could feel his left antennae as it brushed his shirt, watching as Zim's eyes reflected under the lights.

"Yeah, but saying 'dad' makes it feel more real. I... wasn't sure we'd get this far, honestly." Zim moved his arm, jabbing Dib with a pointy elbow. "Hey!"

"You're a legal adult by the standards of Earth, yes?"

"Yeah, I am, but that doesn't mean jack."

"And didn't we have a classmate who was having children?"

"Yeah, she brought her kid to graduation because she slept with half the football team and our sex ed class was terrible. That was her problem, not ours. So?"

"So if she, an average specimen of earth human, could do this, then you, one of the least stupid of the bunch, can, no?"

The corner of Dib's mouth quirked up. "You're right. Maybe you're smarter than you look, space boy."

"Of course I am!" Zim beamed, and it was at that moment the smeet decided to turn over, distracting Zim while Dib fumbled for his phone camera.

He missed the picture, but the way that Zim grinned while bragging about how 'powerful she was despite any errant mutation' was worth it.

They ended up falling asleep curled into each other, Dib's long body brushing the cool floor, but Zim's body heat and the soft blankets were more than enough.