From the outside, it was over.

Erasure was a final and definative death. Most Irkens took it with grace. Soldiers slated for deletion, seeing or knowing too much, bowed to the verdict of the control brains without a whimper. For the Empire. Stoic and calm. Cows to the slaughter.

No one had ever expected something like Zim.

He went down kicking, screaming, writing miles and miles of code in seconds, all of it making one sum: protect yourself. Live. LIVE. He was the greatest and most uniquely twisted defective ever to live, and in death this served him well – for once. It made him slippery. Hard to catch. His meatbrain was where his wild brilliance came from, and it had been liquified a few minutes ago, but he was still left with a lunatic mechanical genius and right now, right now impending doom had honed his mind to razor-sharp focus.

For all the fight in him he was losing. The Control Brains had a processing power many times greater than his. They had numbers on their side. Zim was being stripped and grated away in little shreds, in tiny memories. GIR stuffing himself with hotdogs – the picture was snatched, ripped away, gone to pieces. Zim leeched on to it frantically, grabbing for the shards that were left of it. His minion – green dog suit – the overwhelming smell of cold meat–

Dib. Another memory. Falling down to his knees when someone shoved him. Yelping. Glasses fell off, and Zim picked them up, twisted frail metal frames in his claws – but who? Where? When? Dib, who was Dib, what did he mean anyway –

No! Zim roared to the world in general. He grabbed it back. He clung with iron resistance. No, no, NO! The Dib is MINE, no one takes or TOUCHES HIM, he belongs to ME, I MADE HIM! He's mine!

Dib, the memory, he fell down and – and that's where the glasses came from, the glasses you brought home, remember, Zim? That's where they came from. You took them from him because you could and – that's where they came from. Dib is your enemy. Dib is your enemy. He was the strongest cleverest enemy ever. He was yours. He had a gravity well that came from that stupid huge head of his. And it kind of pulled people in. He was worth it, all the time given to him, all the hate – none of them could take that. None of them were allowed.

He lashed back at them with viruses, coded on the fly. The Control Brains' coordinated their attacks, delegating tasks with cold-mercury speed, but the viruses made them glitch and stumble on each other. Zim screamed raw victory and bungled up the Brains' code further. He yowled again when one of them caught him unawares, snipped off vital information from his mind and scattered it into binary confetti.

Zim was fighting the good fight. He couldn't fight it forever. He was outnumbered and outgunned. Somewhere he knew this.

So when he saw the opening, he took it.

A reprieve seemed too good to be true. It probably was.

Firewalls scorched him. Zim lashed around them like a plague, searching for weaknesses and then rushing them, enraged. He had noticed the barest chink in the defenses of one Control Brain, defenses that were usually impenetrable. In desperation he'd taken that bare offering of a chance, and now, now, the world defied him again….

I am ZIM! he screamed at the indifferent walls, but it was a lie, now. Without the identity code and his name written into the data packet that made up his personality, he wasn't Zim. He wasn't anyone. He had no identity. In the eyes of the Irken Empire he was a virus to be eradicated at the first chance.

It was very quiet.

…………

Dib woke stretched out on his belly with the acrid tang of chemicals in his mouth and his eyes gummed. His body felt twisted-up and strange, stiff, not entirely natural. Uncomfortable. He was uncomfortable.

Some inner trigger stopped him from rolling onto his back. He flopped onto his side instead, curling up slightly, his mind still caught in what seemed a delirious, horrible dream. The metal under him was hard and offered no comfort; it hadn't even warmed with his body heat, he could feel that when he touched it with an open palm. Maybe it was because of the suit he still wore: it was reflecting all his heat back into his body, so only his hands and face were clammy-cold. Dib swiped at his bleary, gummy eyes and hair.

He got up slowly and carefully, looking around. He was basically in a cube, five paces in each direction, opaque walls, no discernable light source. No visible horrible torture devices. The ceiling was only a few inches above his head and Dib flinched a little when he felt his spiky hair brush it.

When he stretched, his lower back didn't seem to flex very well. Dib felt a raw shiver of nausea run up from his belly and he leaned against a nearby wall, shaking. After a few minutes he got a grip on himself and stood straight again. He walked in a circle.

He felt, very horribly, that there was something just beyond his reach that in a few minutes he would comprehend, and in a childlike way he didn't want too. It was like the feeling he got in nightmares, where a realization was looming on the horizon with inevitable, terrifying force and all he bowed his head and did his best to ignore it hoping desperately that not acknowledging the finishing blow would divert it. Very much, this was something he wanted to put off; he didn't want to see it, he didn't want to know, he didn't want to think about it, he wanted to curl up and sleep again, maybe for forever...

He felt intensely dizzy. Spots swelled up and burst in front of his eyes. Dib shook and shivered and slowly, slowly, he twisted his arm around to feel his lower back...

His fingers brushed over a gently curving plastic-metal dome that was flush with his skin at its edge.

END 13

Oodles and oodles of thanks plus megaloves go to J. Random Lurker and lael adair, who made so many suggestions on this chapter and sat with me for positively hours correcting things, respectively. You guys rock my socks.

Sorry for the long wait. I was stuck for the longest time on this chapter. And now it's updated, and even if it's a short one at least it's here, right?

Also, I keep forgetting to mention that the awesome Red Crow has done fanart for this fic. Look after you read this and I'll link her pieces in my profile. They're SO good, seriously.