Debacle (R)
Summary:
All his life Dib has wanted to capture Zim and gain the victory and fame he always wanted. When his wish comes true however, not everything falls so comfortably into place.
Disclaimer:
I do not own the IZ characters. However this story and this idea is mine.
Warnings:
Dark themes, psychological issues and angst throughout.
Dib07: Hi all. Thank you for your support, and for those still reading this, and those who spent time reviewing: I would not be updating if it wasn't for YOU! I love that it is being enjoyed, despite its dark and questionable content. ;)
Advisory warning. This chapter contains depictions of torture, and scenes of trauma that some readers may find distressing. Please feel free to skip parts if you don't feel comfortable at any point.
Chapter 12: The Inexorable
"Well, here it is." Said the retailer as he opened the door to an invitingly polished and tidy foyer. But it also breathed stale air, as if no one had been here in a long time. As Dib dismissively looked around, his ghostly amber eyes caught a musical box on a windowsill, and his chest tightened.
Gaz hadn't come, though the estate was hers too. He supposed it didn't matter. Neither of them would ever come to live here.
He followed the agent around without listening to his sales pitch, even though there was nothing here to buy.
Though the estate was familiar in some ways, like a dream half glimpsed, he couldn't remember all that much of it, which was probably for the best. He had always assumed his father had sold the old home, along with all the other relics. But he had not. How often had he come here, and why had he kept the house, when it was full of painful memories?
A great flat lake glimmered from the end of the garden, its borders feathered in trees. There, the little cabin still stood where his mother would make her musical boxes. He had watched her make them, fascinated, when little bits of metal and even tinier cogs could make music.
He drew over to a dusty window, where, once, he thought he had seen her white figure weave through the gardens late one night, convincing him of the impossible, that…
"This is the only door I couldn't open." The agent came to the magnetic-locked door, with a metal panel for a lock. He dismally looked over at it.
His father's innovations were all over the place, from the unit where all the cleaner bots came to self-charge, to the separate lab that was closed off from the rest of the house. Dib stood before the panel and slid his thumb over its smooth, cold metal plate. At once the door swished open. Inside, his father's main computer remained, surrounded by numerous screens. The painful reality of all his things, and no one to use them anymore plugged his senses as if he had just been submerged. He hadn't been able to shake the cold all morning either. Gingerly he touched the healing wound in his side.
"Sir, Mr. Membrane?" The retailer was looking anxiously at him.
He noticed a little musical box on the mahogany desk with a yellow note tacked on its lid. 'Open Me.' It read. He approached it, a hurting part not wanting to proceed, to be done with all the crumbs and riddles. Anger spurred him on anyway, and he yanked it open, only to find a plain old USB stick inside.
"It's all yours." And the agent handed him the keycard for the place.
"Thanks." He said.
He looked back at the foyer, when a younger version of him had tugged on his father's great big labcoat. "Dad, what happens when we die? Did mom go somewhere? There are ghosts… aren't there? Or is mom an angel now? Is she in heaven?"
"No, son. Science has shown there is no evidence of an afterlife, that there is no heaven, and that there are no angels. Therefore ghosts cannot exist. I'm sorry."
-x-
Wet and cold, he shambled in through the threshold, leaving muddy boot prints as he dumped the keys in a glass bowl by the door. He turned round, leaned against the wall and took a breath.
He was trapped inside a bubble that had no air.
Moving through room to room like a wraith, he turned on the switch lights, wincing when dark, quiet rooms were thrown into sharp exposure. There was no comfort here either. Comfort might be found in a bottle. In a pill. In obliteration.
Still wearing his wet coat and boots, he passed the silent metal dog in the hallway and took out a bottle of gin, unscrewed the cap and threw his head back, letting the acidic sharpness sting and burn his throat and belly. The alcohol worked quickly when he had nothing in his stomach: his head and heart all knots that kept twisting and hurting.
He sunk into the couch, fully dressed, hair so wet that water kept running into his eyes. The succour of the gin helped ease off the shakes and pensive cold, but the tears kept flooding his eyes. When Gir walked in, he hardly noticed him. He was too busy watching his sad, pathetic reflection in the TV screen.
"Whatcha doin'?" Came his little soft voice.
The hurt blew harder, rattling away anything that was left. Tears as cool as the rainwater dripped off his nose. "Go away, Gir..."
The robot drew closer, wearing the dog costume that was parted halfway down the middle. Little feet tinkered across the carpet. The soft whisper of rain was all there was for a moment as he looked up at the human with those big round ovals for eyes. "Yous sad." Was his childish deduction.
"And you're not?" He took another swallow. "I took away your life. Your stupid master. It's only fair that you should be angry with me." He pressed the side of the chilled bottle against his flushed forehead. The room had that gentle spinning quality to it, but he still wasn't drunk enough. He could still feel the pain. Gaz hadn't spoken to him since the funeral, and he was frightened she may never talk to him again. "I don't know what to do anymore, Gir… somehow I always keep failing… and everyone hates me for it."
"I don't." His quick confession, soft and horribly childlike, hit him even harder. There was little point holding on to whatever formality he could keep. He felt Gir struggle onto the sofa only to then wrap his little arms around his much larger one. He helplessly buried his face in Gir's soft green doggie outfit when the world felt so lonely.
The dream came in a glimpse, of a dark purple ship emerging from the clouds, the wings of its pink plasma tails unfolding behind it. He gasped awake, disorientated, woozy, and turned to see Gir snoring lightly against a cushion. The sight of him there offered a strange but not unwelcome comfort when he didn't want to be alone.
He reached into his pocket, and felt the slippery plastic containing the USB device. He didn't want to pursue his father's interests anymore, it was too painful a reminder of his violent and abrupt passing.
His hatred was a rising storm that wanted to devour everything.
There were several missed calls and two voice messages, one from Williams, and one from Carlson. He didn't care for them, and wanted to drop the phone into the bottom of the ocean.
Carlson looked at the world and all those in it with cold dissolution. Trying to figure him out was like trying to chisel your way through a brick wall. And maybe once that wall had been chipped away, there would be nothing on the other side but a black granite slab.
He wondered less about why his wife had left him.
After looking at the little slim white USB on the table for nearly two hours, he finally picked it up and angrily slotted it into his laptop, only to find that it was password encrypted, with the encryption only available via his father's network, the estate, if he wanted to bypass the firewall.
"For fuck's sake!"
I don't want to go back to that place.
But the questions kept coming, hounding him, pounding him to bits. He could speculate all he liked, and draw up as many conclusions as he liked to better suit the pain trying to claw him apart, but the image relentlessly played on in his head as Membrane willingly placed himself between Carlson and Zim.
"No more! I'm done with your sick debauchery! I will not allow this to go on any further than it has already!"
"Very well. You two deserve each other."
He sat back, staring at the dark of the room as things inside started to break apart from the bottom up. Thoughts ran away with him, his heart pounding like a locomotive in his chest. His mind still crumbled at the question of why.
"Promise me you'll never profit from someone else's misfortune... that you'll do the right thing..."
You…! You selfish bastard! Don't tell me to do what's right when you failed ME!
He trembled uncontrollably despite the burning rage melting through the walls of his shock. He saw the scene replay in his head, of his father plummeting to his knees, of Zim rushing to meet Carlson's charge.
Perhaps Zim had been no more a part of his father's endangerment than he had readily jumped to believe….
But Carlson had had to protect Geneva, and the world from evil.
His father had planned Zim's release for whatever reason, a reason he had not discussed with anyone... not even...
The question burned almost as deeply as the rage that took root. He sat there, waiting for someone to slap him awake.
I've… I've got to go back… I have to know why…
He looked to the phone, before his tired and drunken eyes rested on the yellow sticky note: open me, and the USB.
Making up his mind, he drifted over to the phone. "Gir," his voice was croaky, and didn't sound at all like himself. The robot perked up, and sleepily rubbed an eye. "Can you leave the room for a second? You might not want to hear this."
Gir nodded, slipped down from the sofa and tinkered out of the room.
Dib stiffly picked up the receiver, and listened to Williams' message that had been recorded shortly after the funeral, three days ago.
-x-
Carlson sat before the various screens, clutching the raggedly alien doll in one knotted hand. The data revealed the same surface variables, of the enigmatic machine exhibiting heat, energy, to varying degrees. When A01 was resting, the energy levels and heat steadily dropped to lower percentages, but when A01 was more active, and more stressed given the situation, the levels went up like heat in an engine. The three pink ovals lights continually pulsed, making him think of pulsing waves on a cuttlefish. They would dim and brighten periodically, like the PAK was thinking, or reacting, but it was definitely doing something all the time.
Whatever it could do, mankind had to have it, at whatever cost. I've waited long enough.
As he watched the data, his thumb caught on something incredibly sharp and he cursed out loud, dropping the doll. Snarling, he looked at his thumb to see a lone sewing needle sticking out of it. Blood oozed from the puncture, as dark as winter berries. He pulled it out and limped over to grab some tissues, only to curse again from the pain in his leg. Williams had dressed it, telling him he should really get it checked out.
I don't have time for such nonsense. He thought, when all he could think about was the PAK's power, and what it could grant him.
He kicked the doll under the table, and made his way to the chamber.
-x-
Zim... I am... Zim...
Untouchable... elite...
Condition... severe...
Must rest... repair...
Memory... want to erase...
Zim... I am... Zim...
I... I want to die...
In the dark, existing between bouts of pain and nightmares, he wondered if he could go much further, that he could truly follow through.
He was prodded at sharp and rude intervals that kept him from truly escaping. He reached for his ship so that he did not have to stay in this existence. He bricked himself in, with walls holding him tight until another prod broke clean the illusion. He did not want to listen. Did not want to wake.
"Wakey wakey little bug." The human's predatory voice was softer, though he knew not to trust in it.
He thought he knew pain. He carried the scars of battle, having seen and outlived what had killed most of his kin. The bulk of his existence had been a trial with everything trying to snuff him out.
It's not about pain! He tried to tell himself. Failure is worse! Failure is obliteration!
I just… I don't want to be... anymore...
Another poke, this time in his soiled stump where a leg used to be. He flinched, the brief movement sending bolts of pain sparking and flying through the flayed, rent remains. He smelt the reeking stink of his own body. Old bile and sweat stains soaked his sodden gown, with urine and leaf mulch filling the room like decay.
I am Zim, Elite, I am...
"There you are!" Came the scathing ridicule. "I thought you bugs didn't need your beauty sleep?"
Zim... I am... Zim...
Untouchable... elite...
Condition... severe...
Opening his eyes revealed the abnormality, of a dark and sodden stump that soiled all conjurations and beliefs. It was incredible to rediscover that missing part, and he would stare emptily at it, blinking stupidly at the apparition, or lack thereof. He needed to retreat, to forget, after all, it was just too impossible. But he wasn't able to disengage from it when he had never mastered the complete apathy all soldiers needed to master, and that he had never regarded his own emotions as weaknesses until now.
He was starting to hope that when Carlson eventually came to remove the PAK, it wouldn't be put back in.
"Guess you can't regenerate limbs after all. That's a real shame." The sergeant's cool and indifferent voice floated from above him. The hatred squeezed him tighter, he wanted to get his claws into him, and never let go. He wanted to kill Carlson in a thousand different ways.
"Williams gave you a dose of good stuff, I see. It's done the trick."
He turned, trying to open his eyes wider, to see intravenous tubes clamped to his bandaged wrist. Fluids travelled down these translucent lines, into him. He warily followed the lines to the nearby saline bag hanging from a pole.
As his vision cleared somewhat, despite the blots and dark stars that kept popping into existence, he noticed that the grey and solemn 'doctor' was present. He stood silently by the monitors like a statue.
He turned away, wanting nothing more than to wrap his arms around himself so that he could curl up and disappear.
As the numbness began to envelop him, the next poke was sudden and excruciating. Carlson deliberately targeted his stump where his knee once existed. It brought him back, the shock of the present and pain too intimate. He tried to cling to the bastion of fickle courage, masking pain with indignation, but he found that he could no longer hold the man's gaze.
Satisfied, the sergeant moved back, hands at his hips. Then Carlson produced an apple from his pocket and starting biting into it. The crunching, squelching noises were more than he could bear. Mockingly, he offered the apple riddled with bite marks towards him. "Want some?"
Zim went to spit at him, only to produce a dry-heaving cough that ripped his chest apart. It made the remnants of his leg burn something awful too.
Carlson took another bite of the apple, letting its juices run down his unshaven chin. "That PAK o' yours. Tell me." He said through mouthfuls of apple. "How does it heal you? Do you tell it? Or is it more... automatic? Maybe a new leg will pop out of you some day at random when we ain't looking?"
"I've to-told you everything..."
"No you haven't, silly imp! You've loosened up some o' those secrets o' yours. Told me that you – and I mean you yourself powers the PAK, as if your itty bitty body can power something so insanely sophisticated, but you haven't told me how. Hell, you still haven't told me how you and Membrane became best buddies!" Another squelching bite as he chewed with his mouth open. "How many devices do you have stuffed away in there? How does it all fit?"
Even rage did not give him the energy, and the PAK was a burning oven in his spine. His cybernetic half was a dry husk of its former munitions, and as such, sleep was beginning to beckon. He had gone past all forms of hunger. His spooch was boiling down its own lining, and his atrophying muscles kept kicking into sickly spasms. His heart was going into sickly spasms too, filling his chest with sharp, rapid palpitations that made his veins and arteries jump.
He sensed concern from Williams through his medical ministrations. Between episodic periods of rest between tortures, he would be aware of the cardiologist wrapping his good arm in Velcro, and feeling it inflate. The cold, invasive disk of the stethoscope roughly landing on his sternum inevitably followed, and there was nowhere to go, no way to get Williams to stop. He did not want to be something of a fascination, for his organs to be curiously monitored and examined as he rapidly deteriorated.
"The only thing I can give you is an end without pain. It doesn't matter what godforsaken monstrosity you are. You'll still suffer like any other. Cooperate, and I'll make things easier."
'Stubbornness... stubbornness is...'
"Wanna know what I think?" Carlson swallowed the last chunk of apple and threw the core at Zim's face. "I believe you can turn the PAK on and off. Like the engine of a car." He wiped his greasy lips with a handkerchief, noting Zim's silence, and eyes that no longer mirrored strength or vibrancy. "You're a soldier, and you follow your orders. But withholding information won't help you, or slow down our progress. You're merely making your life more miserable than it needs to be."
"Is th-that so?" A01's bitter sarcasm was still holding, even if the creature was not. His breaths were coming up shorter, heart racing all the time now, even when he was resting with no other stimulus. His skin was burning to the touch as he shivered with cold.
"You can stop this. You know what I want." He calmly stood there, watching the Irken shiver.
Carlson was digging deeper, and deeper. Zim did not know how to endure it. They were approaching a final standoff. Each of them knew it.
"You r-really think you're gonn unlock all the doors fer me? Let me go if I happily give away my PAK's design and m-methods?" His crooked smile was edged in lunacy. Great dark crescents had appeared under his bulbous eyes, giving them a sunken, wild look that perfectly suited his degenerating appearance. Whenever he spoke, his shoulders heaved that little bit more as he gasped for air. "I can turn it off, yo-ou kno'. If you touch me again, i'm shutting it down. Then it'll be useless. To you, and to anyone of you... you pigs..." His smile began to weather at the edges, wrinkled eyelids drooping as he temporarily lost focus. The fluids steadily dripped down the IV line. Williams had tried to tempt him to eat by offering little portable trays of different edibles throughout the day, but Zim would merely look and blink and stare without any interest.
Maybe shoving a feeding tube down its throat wouldn't be so bad, Carlson thought. After all, it would be nice not to have to listen to its banal running commentary for a while.
The subject's head drooped as he lost focus, eyelids closing. Carlson had to poke A01 again to rouse him, watching the subject come-to in a senseless, wild panic.
"As I was saying," Carlson patiently explained, aware that A01's memory could be patchy – whether from lack of sleep – food deprivation or simply because it was too old and stupid to know any better, "if that were true, why didn't you do it earlier?"
"D-Do what any -any earlier?"
"Shut your PAK down."
"Oh... yes... that. I will, yo-you know..." Tiredly drawled their subject. One eyelid slanted down as he battled to stay conscious.
The human once again turned to the table, gracing his fingers over the items and objects pristinely laid out until he came to the see-through jar. He picked it up with both hands as liquid sloshed around inside, causing the floating things within to writhe and squirm, and he took his time unscrewing the silver lid.
The Elite stared from glassy, pained eyes to the leeches floating in the jar. He tried to count them – but their wriggling, squirmy shapes intertwining and twisting in the water magnified by the glass made it harder to estimate their numbers. There might be ten, or fifteen.
Once he had unscrewed it, he fished a hand around inside, and the black things within twisted and roiled around his rasping, searching fingers.
He snared one by the tips of his forefinger and thumb and lifted it out. The oily black tendril seemed to aimlessly stretch itself out before contracting again, each tip from either end seemingly licking the air for places wet and warm. It reminded Zim of a writhing, senseless worm that Gir had once plucked out from the soil, and the sight of it panicked him. He started battering himself in the metal cusps to try and get away.
"Have you ever seen one of these before?" Carlson said wryly. "We call it a leech. I assume they are a common part of any ecosystem, be it alien or otherwise. They are bottom feeders. Sucking on whatever scurries into their path."
"I d-don't care! Jus' get it away from me!" A01's fear was palpable; its eyes were bright with it.
"And why's that? Don't tell me you're afraid of such a little thing?" As he held the writhing thing, he weaved it up and down in the air. Zim's eyes were magnetized to it, mouth gaping as this tiny monstrosity drew closer, the slimy sheen of its skin wetly reflected in his huge magenta orbs.
When the leech fully protracted, it easily stretched to the length of Carlson's hand. Zim mindlessly fell to screaming. Carlson parted his gown and placed it under the shelf of his collarbone. The leech clung there even as the man let go, and for a moment in the delirium and panic, Zim felt the smallest sting as its teeth sunk in, its bottom half wriggling and contracting like a grotesque tentacle as it anchored itself in place.
"Get it off! Get it OFF!" He felt sick, his spooch roiling and heaving. He could feel it coldly pulsing there. The intimate weight of it was perverse, violating…
"You don't want me to repeat that, do you?" Carlson folded his arms, but his voice suggested that he was losing patience. Zim slowly shook his head, his look of horror palpable. "Now be a good little imp and answer my questions."
Zim looked to the whitewashed ceiling, wishing it would part open, that rescue couldn't be far off as the temptation to reveal all continued to grow.
They're not coming! They left you here!
Condition severe…
Static filled his head and eyes.
Hurts… I don't know where, something's going wrong…
Carlson stood over him, a second leech dangling like a retracting velvet ribbon between his fingertips, but closing his eyes could not remove him from the sensation of the leech's vile weight either, or its constant throbbing. Every time it sucked, the entirety of its body nauseatingly pulsed. Its once flat and tapered body was filling up, fattening into something more slug shaped. He wanted to whack it off, fight, escape…
Williams stood, trembling with anger by the monitors.
"I see they like your blood just as much as ours. Dib wrote in his files that you can repel head lice, but they are a much more sensitive parasite, and their life cycles are very short, making it harder for them to adapt. These on the other hand…" Carlson stooped over, pressing the second leech on his shoulder. The Irken hissed and strained, yowling feverishly. "They are quite something, you know. Even though they're parasites, they're survivors, and their needs are simple. They gorge themselves until they are sated. That's it. They do not care for the bigger world, only on what they can get."
Zim gagged, spooch heaving up next to nothing but its own acid. It burned the lining of his throat as he choked up bile, splattering his chin in brackish yellow. The platform's unforgiving cradle kept him from shaking them off, and the uselessness of his situation was wrinkling loose his iron cladding.
The warm slime of their writhing bodies had him heave up more spooch acid. Carlson made a pleased sound as he plucked out another slithering leech. Its jet black coat was as moist as jelly. "Hmm. Where next to put it?"
"You w-wanna know wha' it's really like?" Half the time I turn round, it's there isn't it, what did you expect, all this filth, all this these obstacles… it's hard… impossible…
It's not turning… please, why isn't it turning? I can't move – can't, get it off!
Carlson was looking smug. "Do you even know what you're saying half the time, A01? Is your translator struggling to keep up, or is it your brain that's overheating?" Like putting a magnet to metal the leech intrinsically fastened itself onto the hollow of his emaciating belly. The arch of its black body writhed, its teeth anchoring itself in place. When the Irken wheezed in terror or pain, Carlson tried to keep his burning arousal to a minimum. "How many more would you like, A01? Can your body keep up with the demand?"
It was easier to disengage from external occurrences, but there was no ignoring something that was pressed against his flesh. Violation was a fear he couldn't contend with, when he didn't know how to fight it.
"I wonder how many leeches it will take to bleed you dry."
"No more…! Please! I'll tell you ev-everything…"
"That's better. Good little bugs get their just desserts." He reached over, plucked off the leeches, (that left three little holes streaming rivulets of blood) and stepped back to carelessly plop them back in the jar. There they floated, looking twice the size beside their thin, tapered counterparts. "What material is your PAK made from? Was it made from a natural metal on your planet, or did you have to combine certain elements and materials?" He stood back, looking relaxed and in control. "Hell, maybe your ship is made out of the same thing?"
"PAK's shell is m-made ou-out of cronisis… hard to acquire… we used what was l-left… perfect to weather most elements… naturally robust and water proof… *doesn't rust… protects the hardware…" He tried to repress the incoming spasm; he could sense it somehow before it came, like smelling a storm on the rise. But resisting it only seemed to strengthen it as his teeth and bones rattled.
Carlson didn't look anymore impressed with his answer. "And what powers the PAK? Where's the power source? Do you have a fucking battery in there?"
Zim's eyes, dipping to half crescents, remained lucid and impossibly bright. "It's powered by cupcakes! Fucking cupcakes! What… are you surprised?"
Carlson huffed out a sigh. "Torrent, get your butt in here now!"
Torrent looked about as autonomous as a machine when he strode in without question. Williams however looked even more resigned.
"I'm giving you one last chance, A01." Carlson didn't sound nearly so calm or composed. "What powers it? I will take it off right here and now if I must."
"Yu' still can't even ge' past my Voot's security, can you?" A01 crookedly smiled. "FFor all your s-smarts, all your talk... you're just another ffool."
The platform hummed as it moved, tipping him back until he was lying face up. He didn't mind the change of view. It had been a long time since he had last seen the ceiling.
Carlson's voice, uglier somehow, barked at Torrent to 'get a move on.' When the dry cloth went over Zim's entire face, snuffing out his vision, he could hear the blood thrumming in his antennae, and their words, broken and not so well translated, were spoken beyond the suffocating material. He wasn't sure what they were blabbering when much of it was indecipherable, with the bottom of the cloth trickling across his throat.
When it hit him, he thought he was being pummelled by falling ice that was somehow colder than the void, and there was no air. Water rushed down his throat through the cloth. Choking and gagging, trying to bring it back up, it came again, a streaming torrent that became pure screaming agony. It paralyzed him, and stone-walled his senses.
He tried holding his breath when the water continued, when there seemed to be no end, but he had to breathe, and there came a point where he couldn't hold it in any longer, that he had to try when asphyxiation drove him to every unbearable corner.
His lungs helplessly heaved, choking in water instead of air. Lashing up his claws and trying to arch his back to turn himself to one side had no effect, trying to breathe had no effect...
Drowning, he was drowning...
"That's enough." The voice sounded strangely distant, floating on the horizon of a faraway land where other things existed beyond pain and asphyxiation.
Inhaling madly, never knowing such desperation to breathe, his antennae, also wet and dripping, caught the heavy motions of the sergeant and his body heat as the man bent closer to him. "I suspect you didn't like that, did you?"
He tried to muffle a 'no' but air was too precious. He was a slave to it - a slave to his own respiration. Breathing was all that mattered, it was silk, it was a drug. He had once believed he could weather any storm, brave any battle... but the integrity of who he was and the triumphs of his efforts were washing away. Nothing mattered, not ships, not his Empire, not even his Tallest. They were all empty, insignificant mirages in a dream.
"Have you seen what water does to granite over time?" Carlson muttered over the sounds of A01's sickly gasping, "Water eventually cracks the toughest of rocks to the core."
Skin was blistering beneath the cloth and wherever else the water had touched as it trickled and ran down shivery cold skin, but he was only faintly aware of the burning sting when he just wanted to fill his lungs.
"Does every hellish Irken come attached with one of these PAKs, and if they do, why?" Carlson continued in a musing kind of way.
"Y-Yes…?" It came out garbled as shivers tore savagely through him. He tried to stay afloat, when pain snapped out more of his memory and sense of self - when he suddenly couldn't remember how he had even ended up here, and why.
"Kind of expensive if you ask me. So how then are you devils born? What comes first? The Irken or the PAK?"
He couldn't cough it all out; his lungs were useless gasping sacs as they heaved, eternally ravenous for air. His tech was becoming increasingly obsolete by the second – just being able to satisfy his own biological needs was more valuable. He tried to hang on to Dib's image, of blue skies hanging overhead, of how things used to be when there was a robot to greet him home.
"Who are you protecting?" Carlson cooed, running his finger through the rut in Zim's throat until he hit the bleeding welt left by the leech. "You're all alone. What's stopping you from telling me what the PAK's all about?" His soothingly mocking voice had his antennae ringing.
"Please..." He choked, the squeak muffled by the sodden cloth, "...Stop..."
"Still thirsty, are we? Hmm. Maybe some rain really will wash the Armada away?"
He panicked, he felt his existence crumbling – he began to rapidly take in breaths, trying to prepare himself, when his face and mouth was hit by another cold, ceaseless torrent. His head wanted to split open, PAK a useless stanchion that clicked endlessly through its services, unable to help, left only read the host's surmounting distress and pain.
Nausea was another hand in the madness. Water was getting into his shrivelled thing of a spooch, making him vomit. It was saturating his trachea; there was no way through or around it. His hand beat and beat against the cuff until something in his wrist fractured. His lungs were smouldering inside a chest on fire. There was no enduring it. The agony belonged to its own echelon where ordinary pain couldn't touch it, couldn't compete against it.
He was alone in the forest... there was nothing but cold seeping in as quickly as the blood rushing out...
"Master! ...Master!"
Carlson became a shadow, near and far. Sometimes he felt him placing a hand on his sodden chest, but he couldn't be sure of anything – anymore.
More of it came down, drenching him, filling his throat and eyes. He was blinded, left only to endure a ceaseless, agonizing hell. Thoughts held no concept, no meaning. He was reduced to nothing save the pain, living to exist only to take the next breath. His throat was its own master, a reflexively gagging agony as his lungs begged for oxygen he couldn't get. His heart accelerated, throbbing faster against a cage of ribs as it expanded to bursting.
The name...
Zim...
So distant now.
Was that really who he was?
There was only the cold dragging him away, no sounds could reach him, he could see only the swaying trees lancing the dark like swords...
Membrane came through the black, "There are always solutions! Granted, they may not always be obvious, or attainable. But you must try!"
Zephyr: "Master! WAKE UP!"
The deluge finally stopped, but he went on gagging, coughing out water and blood-speckled phlegm, chest a tightening band of corrosive pressure pressing on his starving lungs and heart. Air came in painful splinters, chest dragging in as much air as he could when it only seemed to fuel the fire.
The pain was a claw ripping its way in, shredding him open.
"Not so boastful now, are we?" The voice made him tremble. "Got anything clever to say to me? Any tall tales you'd like to share?"
He went on gagging, bringing up fluids that burned as they went up. The need to breathe took unprecedented attention.
Gottabreathe... gottabreathe pleaseletmebreathe...
The cloth was a cloying ceiling that made the starvation worse even as air came in small, maddening amounts. As much as his chest expanded, ribs straining, he couldn't get the air, and what he did get was hacked and coughed back out again. Stars, black and repulsive swarmed his eyes in firelight.
The cloth was suddenly torn away; the lights were like daggers stabbing his eyes shut. The cool air worsened the blisters and bleeding sores on his cheeks, forehead and swelling throat. When he coughed, unable to reflexively purge the fluids he was drowning in, the platform's backrest tilted him into a sitting position (his empty spooch churning with the motion), so that it was easier for him to bring water back up.
The effort was costly. His head fell forwards, chest and throat burning, body helplessly spasming.
Carlson lifted his drooping head up, pressing the heel of his palm against his wet and dripping forehead. Zim didn't resist. Fighting to breathe was the greater battle. The sergeant listened to the crackly, gurgling wheezes sobbing in and out of a very noisy chest. "Look at you. Reduced to a shivering, spluttering little thing. I hope there is still some fight left in you. We have a lot more to share."
His throat and face festered as if he had been thrown into a vat of acid. He coughed in the stink of his own boiling flesh; the oxygen to his system a terrible elixir he couldn't get enough of.
"Is A01 supposed to be that pale?" Torrent asked. "Its skin is... what do you call it? Suppurating?"
"How very observant of you. Has the good doctor been giving you lessons?" Carlson replied without batting an eyelid. That caused Torrent to shut his mouth. Carlson smiled at him before looking affably at the wheezy, coughing Irken. "You're not going to expire on us, are you, my little imp?" He bent close, listening to Zim bodily heave and gasp. His asthmatic retching was high-pitched, the gargled respiration often met with convulsive, barking coughs that produced bright green froth.
He knew then that he had damaged its lungs.
Carlson took his time gazing at the wheezing creature the universe had spawned, deciding that there was little to fear from such monsters that were so terribly and biologically fragile.
Throughout the session, the PAK had brightened significantly, its three oval lights burning a vivid and shiny pink that exhibited great amounts of heat. Energy was in there, and he wanted to know where it was going and what it was doing. When he glanced over at it, he noted that with each fluctuation of the ECG, the PAK lights convulsively fluttered, like a flickering light bulb about to blow.
"What if A01 can't admit anymore than it has already?" Williams looked like he was trying to restrain himself. His hands had become clamped fists, his eyes grey with shadow. "This is barbaric and against every code! If you kill this alien, this one miracle we have on Earth, we won't know anything else...! The PAK may be less of a weapon, and more of a shield against any enemy it faces!"
"Shut up and do what I tell you! Get that nuclear thermal scan up and running! The PAK is synchronizing with something inside its body!"
"Huh." Was all Torrent said on the matter as he wheeled the thermal nuclear scanner over. His eyes would habitually stare at the reflective pool of bloody water beneath the platform, and Ao1's straining efforts to inhale as it coughed or hacked froth.
"Now, my little soldier." Carlson lifted Zim's head up a little higher, with wrinkled eyelids trying to open. "Will you be a good, or are you still thirsty?"
The reaction was immediate, the apology so profuse that Carlson could hardly catch it. "Anything... please... noworry... justdon't... don'tplease...!" Tears welled up in the creature's eyes to splash down its blood soaked face and gown. Every facade and wall was ripped bare, revealing a terrified creature that shrunk beneath his voice and hand.
"Only good little soldiers get rewarded, don't they? I'll be easier on you from now on if you comply."
Zim weakly nodded, floppy lines of antennae hanging off the back of his head. "Y-yes..." He couldn't manage very many words. His breathing hitched, throat convulsing, coughs hacking up waterlogged squeaks that reflected chest-deep agonies.
"Why don't we let you rest first? You've done so well." His voice was honeyed velvet, soft and sweet.
More tears dribbled down Zim's glazed and blotched cheeks. Though he was coughing, unable to fully draw in breath, he started to sob. They were broken sounds, a childish mewling that almost made Carlson want to hit him again just to shut him up.
They positioned a white and grey machine over his chest – the main hub arching into a giant tunnel of wall that was smooth and polished. Hundreds of dials pulsed and blinked like jewels. Together Torrent and Williams lowered it until it was hovering over Zim's labouring upper half.
Spasms of cold would bully his tiny frame, and spasms of fiery heat would follow as tears of silver ran down the alien's paling, scabby cheekbones. Tortured by convulsive, coughing fits, the soft lining of his throat burned as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper, and his gagging reflexes seemed to come and go endlessly.
"Now lie still and don't move." Carlson ordered him.
While it scanned, clicking and purring away, Williams stood there and watched, trying to remain detached and analytical when he was used to seeing patients in one form of pain or another. This is no human being. He reminded himself. This is an alien soldier, an advanced being made to destroy all other life. Let Carlson do his work. Maybe he was right all along, and he's just trying to do the right thing. Membrane made the wrong choice.
After glancing at the wavering data on the monitoring screen, Williams made the signal. The metal of the platform groaned, with the giant scanning machine receding. Carlson rubbed his bristly chin. "What is that?" He asked, nodding at the obvious signs of a pink electrical field practically radiating off the PAK and creature's chest. "Could that be radiation?"
"No." Williams stared, wondering why nothing seemed to be able to read this kind of energy. It's the glow inside him, it has to be. Finally he dipped his gaze back to the subject, torn between warring emotions that he usually left at the door to every operation and duty. The monitors rendered an overall depiction of the subject's worsening health. A01's temperature steadily climbed, its weight having dropped to 11 lbs. Having its left leg removed would have counted for much of that. It was uncertain at this point if their subject would 'grow' a new limb, and that all A01 needed was just more time to 'accumulate' the necessary energy to do so.
My interest is research, and furthering mankind's knowledge through advancements using A01's biology and biomechanics. I must not forget that. Williams bent closer to the subject and heard the distinct rattle coming from his chest without even using the stethoscope. The creature's skin wasn't nearly as green, with signs of vein distension in its throat. "There's fluid in the left lung."
Carlson sounded about as casual as a man could be on a Sunday morning. "The imp will heal, good as new."
He knew he couldn't push the argument any further when Carlson and the team had been more than willing to cut into A01's leg, as if they could cut out the glow inside, and that Carlson would happily eliminate anyone who got in his way.
He tried to stay focused on the job at hand and lifted up a medical torch. It was the nature of the job that kept him occupied, not the patient. "A01, open your eyes and follow the light."
Membrane had noticed his techniques and the genius of his methods when he was just a general heart surgeon, and the renowned professor had approached him with a proposal.
Why me? He had once asked himself, when there were others who were just as good at the job, when they were younger, more ambitious…
Flinching eyelids opened to reveal watery nebulas of crimson. Any instruction, be it benign or otherwise, prompted an immediate and terrified reaction from the alien. Holding up the tiny medical torch, he looked into those half opened and cloudy eyes, eyes that stared back without focus. The tiny capillaries inside had blown. "Follow the light."
Eyelids opened wider, the soft pastel pink of its pupils darting almost blindly to trace the light. There was noticeable bleeding in the left eye, and both retinas were cloudy, giving them a muted, dark coating.
"Look to the left, A01."
"Z-Zim..." The subject choked breathlessly. "Not... A01..."
Williams looked down, suddenly ashamed to hold the alien's gaze.
"We've wasted enough time." Carlson approached. "You'll get your spinal tap, and your vivisection so you can play with the thing's heart, viscera, and all. But the PAK comes first. I need to sample it, and detaching it may finally reveal all we need, without having to go through this fucking bullshit."
Williams pulled away, feeling cold sweat soak his armpits. "We still don't know the function of it! We can learn everything in time, if we work with the alien!"
"This is the answer!" He insisted, gesturing sharply at the blinking, pulsing PAK. "We figure this out, and we figure it all out! Torrent, get another camera in here! And bring Edwards! I want this fully documented! After we remove a segment, we'll replace the damn thing!"
He did not believe that he would. "What if A01 dies when we pull it off?" Williams said. "He's becoming unstable! There are factors we're not fully aware of!"
"Like what?" Carlson's reply was a grunted one. "If it was designed to come off, then it was designed to come off!" He started exploring the PAK's hot shell with his hands, tracing incredibly tiny rivulets with his fingers. When he tersely knocked his knuckles on it, he was satisfied to feel how solid it was.
Zim squirmed, vertigo and terror twisting him in twenty different ways, black panic a force he couldn't breathe past. Dying tendrils of energy, barely worth consideration snapped and flayed through the PAK for one final attempt to restore functionality, and there was nothing left to channel them.
"Seems affixed to the alien somehow." Rough hands explored the surface area of the mantle, with Carlson paying particular attention to the three rounded, egg-shaped circles pulsing there. He began to experimentally tug on it, like a surgeon trying to work out a loose tooth.
Zim contorted and yelped, feeling painful, unsolicited pressures bolt and flash through his spine.
"I thought the files said that it can just be pulled off?" Torrent asked.
"Maybe A01 is resisting and keeping it locked in place. We'll have to use the clamp."
Zim slumped forwards against his restraints, gasping for breath, sweat trickling down his chest. He didn't have the strength to shudder as Carlson ran deceptive fingers down the PAK's shell as if he was looking for a simple 'lock and release' button.
His vision was a patchy reel of film blotched in static. Forcibly blinking did not alleviate it. He tried to picture the musical box, its dainty music drifting out soft notes while the winter storm raged across the window.
"It's in you, Zim." Membrane had said. "Everything that I have been looking for."
The 'clamp' was brought in on wheels. It looked more like giant pliers hanging from a crane, something that would hoist up his PAK with ease.
Zim closed his eyes, wishing to be in the cabin of his Voot, when the giant mechanical pincers clamped onto the PAK. The contact was sudden, invasively intimate. The pincers went to reverse, tubes hoisting back into the pulley. The pressure was immense – with a sudden icy cold sweeping in. Sweat dripped to the floor as the PAK began to work itself out of his spine from his spinal ports – the connectors stretching as he fought to keep them in. There was a moment when he thought he might just be able to hold on, when the whole thing snapped out.
Quickie author note: Thank you for getting to the end! Also! Please don't kill me!
*naturally robust and water proof… doesn't rust… protects the hardware…" - Zim
I see you thinking there, Meadowfox! XD in Saving Zim, inside the PAK, it was pretty fithly with corrosion, and the outside mantle might be super tough, (Zim just loves knocking it about) but the delicate insides that make his cybernetic brain aren't nearly so robust. I just thought I'd drop this in, I don't always know what I'm doing o' course, but eh, who can tell? XDXD