A/N: Guess what I forgot to do last chapter?

DISCLAIMER: I do not own 'Invader Zim'. It belongs to the almights Jhonen Vasquez. So does 'Johnny the Homicidal Maniac'. (There are references to it in there, you just can't see them).

However, the plot is property of justmacy and myself. You can't have it! But we'll let you look at it. ...From a distance.

[Oh, yes, and the whole lovely fic is getting reposted because Nae (FINALLY!) came up with a page-break thingy that wouldn't make vanish. 3]

Okay, I'm done now. Here's the story!

"Have fun with the new doctor, Dib?" Gaz didn't bother looking up from her Game Slave III. I watched her punch away at its controls, her thumbs ten times as lively as her demeanor could ever be.

"No. The bastard is as smart as I am."

"That's not hard."

"Shut up, Gaz."

"If you tell me what to do again I'll kill you, Dib."

"I'll surgically remove your spleen then feed it to you raw, sis." I loved these little exchanges we had. It was our form of bonding.

"So, will you be going back?" It was like she was choking on her own words.

I wished Gaz would stop talking to me. I didn't like her concern. It was itchier than a wool sweater in a heat wave and nowhere near as comfortable. "I have to."

"Dad's working late tonight."

"When isn't he?" The question was more to myself than anything. I started for the stairs, dragging my feet.

"Dib!"

When I turned around she was staring straight at me, her hands completely still in her lap. "Are you okay?"

"That's a stupid question."

"Your voice is making my ears bleed. Leave so I can concentrate." Her attention snapped back to the Game Slave III.

That was better. As I climbed the stairs she hurled one last death threat. "If I hear one more sound out of you, little brother, I will personally disembowel you!"

I slammed my bedroom door and locked it behind me. The howl of rage from Gaz made me smile. She and I were still normal. As normal as our dysfunctional relationship got, anyway.

My room was the same disaster zone as it had been the night I shot myself. The walls were plastered with posters of obscure Bulgarian metal bands, Roswell and the odd pin up. The ceiling was an exact replica of the sky above the roof, the stars painted on in glow-in-the-dark paint. Of course this was only accurate on the anniversary of when it had been painted (because the planet turns, oh smart one) but I didn't mind the inaccuracy. My mom had painted it for me when I was still in a crib.

My earliest memory is of watching her with a paintbrush clenched in her teeth, clinging to the ladder with one hand and consulting the star chart she held in the other. Gaz told me that had been on my third birthday. (That would have made her about five). Every year on the fifth of September I'd make a point to leave my window open all day so the paint would be able to glow at night. Cheesy? Oh, hell, yeah, but it was tradition.

I peeled off the straight jacket and dropped it onto a pile of junk. The floor was already a mess of electronics cables, jewel cases and clothes- what would one more thing change? My shirt followed it. My lip curled in disgust as I looked in the mirror adjacent to my door. (Is it possible to have a self-loathing narcissist? Hello? You're reading the life story of one!) The square of gauze covered both my healing bullet wound and my left nipple. It made my body look off-balance. I looked down and poked at my ribcage and stomach. I prodded at what little weight I hadn't lost in the last year. The muscle had melted off into fat for lack of use. There wasn't much there to whine about but it still made me shudder. I wouldn't be eating tonight, or if I did it'd be something light, like crackers or lettuce. I had to get rid of this flab. It was revolting.

I turned to the window with a tired sigh. The neighbors were having a wedding in their back yard. There would be a mariachi band playing well into the night. A cursory glance at the clock told me it was just past seven.

Gaz should be screaming at me to come eat my dinner any time now. My stomach liked that idea and felt the need to tell me so.

"Shut the fuck up, you. You haven't earned your meal." I muttered to it, dropping onto my bed and curling against the wall.

I stared at the paint near the circular window. There was still blood smeared there. I'd pulled the trigger and dropped the gun, my hand flying to my chest because, stupid me, I hadn't expected it to hurt. When the adrenaline had kicked in I'd wiped the side of my hand along the wall, just for the hell of it. Dad had had my carpeting, mattress and bed frame replaced. My sheets had been incinerated. He'd forgotten to have the walls repainted.

I stroked the bloodstain. It was brown because it had been there for a couple of weeks. I'd only been out of the hospital for a few days. It wasn't my fault I hadn't noticed it yet. Still, it must be lonely. Poor blood smear.

There was a shout from the neighbors' place. It was enough good cheer to make me wish I could give them a gift. Perhaps a Molotov cocktail would be fitting.

I knew the groom, if only from parents' nights in greyd and midel skool. He was a single father of four girls. His life must be a living hell for 25% of every month. I remembered watching the house's morning routine one day when I'd had the flu. (Yes, I used my telescope to spy on them. That doesn't make me a stalker, just a concerned neighbor.) He was a good single-father. He'd woken them, fed them, dressed the ones young enough to need it and French-braided each of the girls' hair and still had time to let them bicker over what CD to listen to in the car on the way to the school. He took good care of them. I should be happy for him.

Instead I wanted to see the wedding party go up in flames. They shouldn't be happy. Those girls should not get to wear pretty little pink dresses and giggle and be thrilled with their new mom. Even the teenaged daughter was happy about it. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair.

Dad couldn't French braid to save his life. My hair was short- besides that I'm a guy- and Gaz would chew his hands off if he got them anywhere near her preciously dyed and cared-for hair. That wasn't the point, though. You don't get it.

I spent the rest of the night listening to my stomach scream at me and cringing as the mariachi band played out of tune. I stared at my blood on the wall. After a long time it started to get light again. I realized I still had my boots on and took them off carefully, lacing and buckling them back up after they were off. Then I threw them as across the room as hard as I could, one at a time. I heard something break but it was still too dim to see what it was.

Gaz pounded on her wall in response. I think it was Morse Code for "Shut Up, Dib".

xXx

I think I slept for about six or seven hours before the sun pouring through my window started to get too hot. Summer was most definitely not my favorite season. I kicked off the blankets and crawled to the shade at the foot of my bed. Damn sunlight. Evil, burning, painful sunlight.

There was a knock at my door. I grunted in its direction and Dad stepped halfway into my room. The sun was up and he was standing in my personal cave. I just about had a heart attack.

"Good afternoon son."

Say "Hi" Dib! Go on, say it! Be friendly- this might be your only chance. He's never ever-ever-ever-ever-ever home! What if he's home just to see you? Be nice. I continued staring at him. My mouth had gone dry. I kept seeing the Dad I'd grown up with, which is to say Professor Membrane. The man was famous. His life's work and his television show had a cult following. How the hell was I supposed to have a normal conversation with that?

"How are you feeling today?"

Cut the concerned-parent crap. We both know you're only protecting your image. Wow. Where'd the anger come from? From you, you dolt. I kept my mouth shut around that one and blinked at him. His high-collared lab coat was luminous in the early afternoon light. I told myself that it was starting to make my eyes water.

"We cooked up a new batch of mutants last night. Would you like to go feed them?" He was messing with biology and DNA again. He'd done it a lot when I was still a kid and I'd loved playing with his creations, however short and painful their lives were.

I used to feel intimidated when he looked at me. His freakish glasses always gave the impression that his eyes were behind them, burrowing straight through your soul. His glasses irked me. They'd look better broken on the floor. He had no right to keep his eyes hidden from the world- no one could tell whether he was lying or not.

After a few more minutes of silence he conceded defeat. "Look, my assistant is out sick and I couldn't leave the alone mutants in the lab. They could escape in kill someone. They're in our basement-lab instead. I don't have time to feed them."

"Why can't you do it?" There was my voice! Finally. Ooh, I sounded pissed.

"I'm needed in Cambodia at the moment." That was his version of goodbye. "Oh, Son, you might want to put your glasses on when you go to feed the mutants. They bite so you'll need to have all your faculties functioning to full capacity. Their food is in the refrigerator next to the ammonium nitrate."

Then he was gone. I'd spoken five words to the man and one of them was a contraction. Nice goin', Dib. I'm sure you made a great post-mental-ward impression.

"Shut it."

I slid from my bed and ran my hands through my hair, tugging the knots out of it. Once or twice I even came away with a good hunk of hair ripped out in my fingers. In the hospital they hadn't allowed me to cut my own hair and I'd refused to let anyone else near it. It was getting a bit shaggy. At the moment it was too greasy to defy gravity. That's what happens when you don't feel like doing jack shit for hygiene. I was still sporting yesterday's morning breath.

Gaz shrieked when I walked through the living room. "Oh god I'm going blind! It burns! Crawl back into the hole you came from!"

Beside her on the couch, attached to a matching Game Slave III, Tak giggled. I looked down and realized I was still half dressed.

"You just wish you weren't a lard ass, Gaz. You're jealous because I wear a smaller pants-size than you." I pulled my socks off one at a time, eliciting a groan of disgust from the alien on the couch. Success. I'd freaked out my sister and her girlfriend and managed to balance on one leg all at the same time.

"They're called hips, Dib. Get your freakishly twiggy skeleton out of my living room."

I smirked as I walked away. Gaz got territorial when Tak was over. She didn't like their "gaming" to be interrupted. "I may be skinny but at least the only person willing to sleep with me isn't an alien freak."

Tak hissed and Gaz snarled. Yup, those two were made for each other. "At least I can get laid Dib! At least I'm not a closeted loser like you!"

She threw something but it was just for dramatic effect. I was already headed down to our basement where her projectiles couldn't reach me. I think I'd accidentally touched a nerve with that one. Oh, well, shit happens.

The home lab was white washed and pristine. The linoleum on the floor reflected the florescent lighting above. My bare feet squeaked on its surface. It was a little too clean. A coffee pot stood against the wall on one of the counters along with a mug. I sniffed the coffee, just to make sure I wasn't going to drink one of Dad's experiments, and poured myself some. It was strong enough to be considered tar and just about as black. It was cold. It was nasty. I drank it anyway. If it were good enough for Dad it'd do me just fine. What was more, I needed to stay awake. My nearly-all-nighter was dragging me down.

The newly hatched mutants were in a cage in the back corner of the lab. It reminded me of a child's playpen but with wire mesh siding and an industrial sized hamster water bottle. The mutants themselves didn't look like they were capable of biting or scratching or doing much of anything. They were little puffs of fur about the size of my fist. They sat bunched up together in the far corner. The fur pile was quivering. I wondered if that was a reaction to fear or something more sinister.

"Look," I said to them, "I'm just here to feed you. I promise I'm not going to do anything unholy like try to put you back into your component parts or dissect you. I only do that to alien mutants. As far as I can tell you're made up of things from Earth so we should be on good terms."

The giant puffball remained in its corner but stopped quivering. I chose to take that as a good sign and not a mark of a potential attack. Dad had left the top off of their pen, which must have meant they couldn't jump high enough to rip my face off, right?

The puffballs' food consisted of a pile of raw steaks that I pulled out of the fridge. I looked from the meat to the mutants and back to the meat. Each steak was the size of all of them put together. There was no way they could eat them all. I shrugged and settled on dropping them into the metal pen one at a time. If the little monsters appeared to want more I'd give them more.

A shrill chorus of pure puffball joy arose when I dropped the first steak in. They worked their way to the middle of the cage with a scuttling sound. It was their claws clicking on the metal. I could see them like centipede legs- only longer and sharper- when they moved. Okay, so maybe these little guys really could do some damage. Within seconds the steak was gone and the puffballs were pushed up against the side of the cage where I stood, towering over them. Some of their strange, long yellowish fur was poking through the holes in the mesh. They made slurping sounds.

I cracked a bit of a smile then. These guys were actually kind of cute. I fed them another steak, letting it drop into the middle of their cage with a meaty plop. They scuttled back to it, all of them finding space to stand on the large hunk of cow flesh and work their way down. I didn't think they had heads. Perhaps their mouths were on the bottom of their bodies like an octopus'?

Gaz had appeared beside me.

I jumped and it took me a minute to speak. "Where's Tak?"

"I sent her home."

"Oh."

"Enjoying yourself?"

Though the influx of hormones had doomed her to an emotional existence six years ago she still had her moments of being freakishly quiet and ominous. I didn't trust her because of that. We could hurl insults at each other all day long but I knew that, somewhere deep inside my sister, there laid a monster waiting for the chance to kill. It was times like this that reminded me of that fact. We could have a completely mellow conversation but her vicious squint and silent walk would betray her.

"Sort of, I guess."

"You'd better. Dad made them for you."

"No he didn't." I dropped the puffs another steak and they cried up at me in sheer gratitude. Apparently they ate a lot.

"He made them for you when you were a kid, Dib. He did it to show you that the paranormal things you studied were, at best, lab-created. You were just too young and stupid to realize it so he stopped." She watched the mutants through her hair. I wondered if she thought they were as cute as I did.

"Gee, that's a cheering thought, Gaz. Keep in mind, aliens do exist. In case you forgot, you're dating one."

She turned to me and glared, her hair out of her eyes for one of the few times on record. I shrank away. She may have been a head shorter but she was still one scary chick. "When you're done moping down here meet me in the kitchen."

"Why?"

"Because I told you to, Dib! Don't even think of disobeying. Since they raised the age of legal adulthood to twenty I can do whatever I want to you and not go to prison!" As she stalked away I fought the urge to correct her. Some crimes were heinous enough that children could be tried as adults.

"Never trust something that survives bleeding for a week straight."

I chuckled. Zim had told me that back in midel skool. We'd had a few weeks of peace back then. He'd hit a growth spurt over the summer and was a head taller than me. (The being, obviously, before I hit six feet. Pay attention you idiot.) After he'd had his fun bragging and being a general nuisance we'd spent about fifteen minutes waiting at the bus stop together. I'd been complaining about my sister's habit of trapping me in conversations that made me look like fool and that had been his reply.

He'd been out of school the next day and for a week after that. When I went to see what was going on- the freak must have been planning some new method of conquest, I was sure of it- his base was nowhere to be found. The demonic lawn gnomes were even gone. It took me about a month to realize that his height had been the reason he left. He was now able to gain some semblance of power in Irken society. He didn't have to be trapped on this obnoxious rock anymore so he'd packed up his life and left.

I started babbling to the mutants. They squeaked on occasion as if they really understood what I was talking about. "Needless to say (though I'll tell you anyway) I felt that I'd gotten the short end of the stick. The only way I could get proof of a pending alien invasion after that was to stalk Tak and there was no way that was happening. She was friends with my sister and I did not need to get my ass kicked by either of them. I ended up dropping out of the Swollen Eyeball Network. I got bored so I hacked into Dad's research fund and blew gobs of money on shit I didn't need (e.g. clothes, electronics, a gun). He had mega-gobs of research funding, though, so it didn't matter if the books were a few thousand dollars off here and there. It was just an accounting error.

"I started having auditory hallucinations when I was fourteen, which is the official way of saying that I started hearing voices. It was nice to have someone to talk to. When they told me to go saw a cheerleader's legs off I told Dad about it. …It sounded like a funny idea to me. I didn't get why it freaked him out so much, but it was nice to see him panic at something. Refreshing…" I fed the puffs their final steak. They were starting to slow down. They must have been getting full.

"After that I saw my first psychologist and had a psychiatrist prescribe some anti-psychotics. The drugs worked for a while but, as anyone on meds knows, puberty fucks with brain chemistry and the drugs started fucking with my head. There were no more voices, no, but I got depressed. Simple apathy turned into all sorts of degrees of self-loathing, projection and repressed rage. Fun psychological shit, I'll tell you what. Then one day I decided to shoot myself because I was pissed at Dad for never being around and now we're here."

My new mutants had bunched up in the corner closest to my legs. They weren't moving but, judging from the occasional twitch, they were still alive. I hoped they stayed that way for a while.

A/N: Like what you saw? Then let us know!

Macy and Nae will give snacks to reviewers. 3