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: I really want to thank you all for your continual support, without you this story simply would remain something of an afterthought. Meadowfox and so many others has been exceptional - the feedback, support and passion is something I can not get over! I just hope this doesn't upset you all too much, it is a tough chapter, and I struggled to write this.
Anon
Dear Anon, thank you again and again for simply being here, reading and leaving your thoughts. I cannot thank you enough, I really can't, and like the other reviewers, you made my week! You've stuck by this story, and it thrills me no end! I hope karma catches up with Carlson too, he's a monster. And ah I have the movie to thank for your investment in this crazy fandom! Hellz yeah! So please enjoy. You have no idea how grateful I am for you being here.
Chapter 11: Adrift
Carlson leaned against the doorway, looking in with that catlike smile. Williams paused, looking up from the weasel on the surgical table, wondering how to weather another day in Geneva. "I have a little surprise for you, doctor." The sergeant said. "It's high time you had something to work on that harnesses your… abilities." He paused to rub at one of his decoration medals on his uniform with a thumb.
"What do you mean?" He was waiting for any news on his old friend and colleague, anxiously counting the minutes and the hours.
"It's just this way. It's a lot more inspiring than that thing you're looking at." He grunted disapprovingly at the specimen lying on the cotton-layered table.
Williams frowned, hesitated, and followed the sergeant who happily led him down the expansive and cold atrium to the biology section. Williams felt a sense of foreboding when he looked at Carlson now. Everyone was getting the jitters when they were around him. No one was even speaking to each other, what with all the cameras keeping tabs on every little thing they said, and did.
"In here." Carlson opened a heavy lab door. Within was a spotlessly clean table, and on that table was a glass container. Inside was a very small and dainty green twig-like thing.
He stared at it, trying to figure out what Carlson was trying to show him. When it dawned on him, seeing that it was A01's wiry leg, from thigh to foot, he spun round on the man. "What have you done? I didn't authorise this!"
"Whooh! Easy there, old timer! I thought you'd be pleased! Sure, it's not what you want, yet, and trust me when I know exactly what you're after! But you have this to play around with in the meantime!"
"Please tell me A01 is alive!"
"Of course it is! The creature is in perfectly good health! In another few hours I'm sure another leg will pop right out of it! Think of it! If this alien can regenerate itself, like organs for instance, you can have as many as you need for all your jars and Petri dishes!"
Williams stood, staring at the leg lying there in its glass container. It didn't look very pristine, and already he could see the bruising mapped all over it, of the stump they had cut through. "A01 must be stable, sergeant! We have too much to document! We are barely scrapping the surface as it is!"
Carlson toothily smiled as he showed the doctor video surveillance on his wrist device, a wrist device that looked suspiciously like the professor's. On the small screen, the alien was sitting in its usual position in the cradle, but Carlson toggled it off before he could get a good look. "Happy now?" He grunted. He took one last dismissive look at the cardiologist and made his way out of the room, whistling to himself.
Eventually Williams roused himself enough to pull on his thin, surgical gloves and acquire his gurney tray loaded with the usual sterile operation tools and implements. He then dropped a surgical mask over his nose and mouth and slid open the lid of the box to acquire the specimen.
He put down the scalpel after having exposed the dense, intricate muscular layer, revealing tubular veins and arteries on an almost microscopic level. The flesh however was very dark and dense with lactic acid. Lactic acid was the result of stress and adrenaline hormones often found in the meat of animals after slaughter.
He turned away from the appendage and pulled his mask down.
-x-
The world was splintered pieces of things half glimpsed, and even less remembered. The fabric of dreams anchored him down to his bones, but beyond it was diabolical pain that gave voice to the indelible agony inside.
He tasted the chalky residue from the pills Williams had given him as he tumbled freely into oblivion. Reason. Purpose. What had any of it meant, when it had all crumbled without a path forward?
As the drugs worked through him, the dreams fetched and grew around him like thorns. He found himself stepping out of the car and into a sunny patch of late winter sunshine. Late snowdrops ducked their heads as a soft breath of wind ruffled his coattails. Stones burned gold beneath the glowering sun, with distant birds chirping distantly to one another.
Ivy bloomed along the broken fencing of what used to be a meadow, with hanging foxglove and myrtle invading the ruins of a shed or outhouse. Burnished hawthorn, so shiny they looked like they had been waxed and polished, hung like Christmas baubles from the undergrowth.
He took a moment to look around with his Polaroid camera clutched to his chest. It was a clunky old thing that had gone with him pretty much everywhere. Though it was not exactly the best piece of equipment to go hiking with, it had never failed him. He had taken it through a snowstorm when he had been trying to follow the foot prints of a reputed Sasquatch, and had accidently dropped it down a narrow gulley, adding a few more dents to its brick-fashioned armature.
When it was close to his tenth birthday, he had looked at that camera behind an antique shop window. It sat there like a big ugly black brick beside an elegant violin and a mahogany chest of drawers. His father had paused, waiting for him as he peered through the glass, marvelling at something from another era.
'Come along son. It's just a toy.'
His father would try to get him to look at microscopes, analytical analysis balance machines, chemistry sets, specimen slides and highly detailed anatomical models. He'd view them all with the same dismal impassivity, not quite understanding why his father was so attracted to things cold and uninspiring.
Late one October evening when the sky was low and red, he would stop by the window on the way home. He remembered the professor wagging his finger, saying 'you're growing up, son. Toys and baubles are for children. Soon you will have your own equipment, your own laboratory.'
When his birthday came, there was no cake. No celebration banners. And no music. There was just a selection of brown cardboard boxes on the table, each one individually sealed with brown tape. As he opened them, each one contained exactly what his father had promised. He got his set of pristine glass beakers, his very own chemistry set (complete with license) and a rather unexciting analytical analysis balance machine.
His father must have read the disappointment on his face. Before the end of the night, he came over holding a black box tied with a red ribbon. Opening it, he peered inside to see the Polaroid camera. He knew it was the one in the window because of that same dent on the left side below the red shutter button.
From that moment on he had gone off exploring with it wherever he could. It was the forest close to home that attracted him. It was a feeling, an old instinct he couldn't explain. He would stand in a particular spot, feeling a strong sense of déjà vu, as if someone had taken him here, long before.
He paused, looking gloomily towards the wintry forest, eyes searching for the telltale glints of crimson and green.
I know you're out here, Zim. I don't know what attracts you to this place, away from the city, but I'll prove to you that nowhere is safe.
He moved off into the undergrowth, eyes and ears trained on every twitter of noise. Heading through the wiry weeds and snow, he made his way towards the brooding tree line where hunched crows and jackdaws watched from their thorny canopies. Snowflakes started to fall as he paused by the old wishing well. He ran his gloved hands over the moss and crumbling brickwork, feeling the hatred rise to linger in his chest.
This is my world. Zim has no right to be here. If this is how he wants to play, I can show him a thing or two.
He hadn't even thought of what he would do once Zim was in his sights. Revenge and duty was all he cared for. The rest would fall into place.
Eyes flickering to the downy moss-soft floor for tracks, he heard something crunch on russet leaves and twigs. He sharply looked up, spying a speckled buck in the distance. It was gone before he could blink, its passage as silent as a leaf falling.
The huntsman in the shop had promised that a mantrap was one of the strongest things around, with manageable resetting, (easy to install, easy to plant,' he had said, 'but be careful, these things can take your arm off if you're not careful.'
Dib had been looking it over in the same way a child might look at a dead bird he had found on the side of the road. The price tag attached to one of its teeth did not lessen the severity of its ugliness or its dangerous promises.
'What do you need it for, son?' The huntsman had asked.
The rasping sound of the wind played musically through the leaves, with the trickling sounds of a remote river running secretly through the woods. But even this far from traffic and humans, litter and plastic rubbish still managed to wash up along hillocks and animal burrows like flotsam in the sea. Old remnants of human industry could still be found, with twisted and half buried lengths of wire occasionally poking out along the valley floor, some of which still clung to trees like barbaric necklaces.
He came across a mantrap he had planted many weeks before. It had gone brown with sediment and rust, lying ominously in place where he had left it, looking just as grotesque and as monstrous after the fall and rise of so many days.
His father had told him he needed time away. From the city. From Zim. He had argued, saying: 'but that's what he's waiting for! For me to drop my guard!' But he could tell from the way his father had looked at him that he was only making himself look more hysterical.
He touched the mantrap's rusty teeth with timid fingertips, feeling its hard lines and cold reciprocations. When he recovered the narrow and oiled trigger plate with a fresh pile of leaves, he felt dirty.
There was a rustle, something moving to his left.
He turned, pointing the camera like a gun, only to relax and draw breath when he saw the tiny head of a weasel watching him from a thick tussle of grass. He hit the red button, snapping its photograph in one huge flash. The weasel flew into the air and disappeared into the undergrowth.
The photo was loudly ejected out of the machine. He slipped it into his fingers and waited for the image to appear until hazy shapes and colours began to emerge like a mirage about to take shape. When he saw the tiny critter he had captured, Dib stared in horror when he realized he had caught something else. Standing off to one side, near the edge of the photograph, was the big, happy and unmistakable cyan eyes of the alien's evil robot: Gir.
Dib looked wildly around, a hand gripping the Polaroid, the other in range of his holster, but there was no sign of him. He cautiously turned full circle, hoping to catch that sparkle of cyan. Eyes skirting around, he saw Gir's conical tracks in the mud, and he made his way deeper into the tangled forest where shafts of snow fell in clusters through the spindly canopy of the trees.
It grew colder. The sun winked behind darker clouds and the trees fell under a cloak of sudden dark snow.
He caught a glimpse of something small and goldenly brown from his periphery. The weasel he had noted earlier scampered into a thicket of needle-thin brambles. The tracks, harder to see through the dark, tussled grass, disappeared. He stumbled round in a wide circle, trying to back track and pick up where he had last seen them, only to come across a rather different set of tracks. When your prey wore boots, it made tracking a whole lot easier.
Think you can play games with me?
He knelt down, feeling the sharp sting of resentment when any interstellar creature should dare haunt one of his most treasured places.
Straightening, he looked around, growing wary. The wind picked up, and leaves and snow spun and scattered through the air. As he slowly surveyed the tree line, he saw the flash of silver and cyan.
He ducked and weaved under stretching tree branches, their twigs trying to snag his jacket like jealous fingers. He almost fell into a rabbit hole, with leaves clubbing his face and glasses. He could just see the bob of cyan in the distance and hear the robot's shrill cries. He couldn't tell if it was laughter or tears when they sounded one and the same.
Dib ran into an empty clearing where the ground was white with fresh coatings of snow, and there, low and behold, was the damn ship, looking completely out of place in a world full of soft greens and browns. Its loud purple and pink undertones looked comical and childish somehow, as if it belonged in a theme park where people dropped coins into a slot to make it rock back and forth. He was about to put his hand on its smooth chassis when a cry split the air clean in half.
He snapped round, diving for the gun at his hip, and when Gir ducked into the trees, he ran after him.
He heard the sounds before he saw him.
Golden blooms of cream and copper swirled down with the snow. Amongst the burdocks and dandelions, a pair of watchful crimson eyes stared at him across an expanse of white. Clenching the gun in shaky, sweaty hands, sights aimed at the monster, Dib slowly approached. As he drew closer, he realized why Zim wasn't openly attacking him.
He stood slightly slouched with his weight on one leg, the other stuck in a mantrap. Iron wedges for teeth had snapped home just below his knee. Zim looked tired and grey around the eyes as if he had been here for some time.
Lord knows the little space monster deserved it. An invader, cart-wheeling into earth with such incredible tech only to succumb to a 20th century trap was beautifully ironic.
Zim evenly looked back, those large reflective eyes glittery and star filled, even now.
He held the gun higher, aiming to shoot his brains out. "Say something." He said. "Say something, you… you monster!"
"Nooo!" Incredibly Gir came to stand between them, tears starting to gather under those bright, cyan eyes, and something in Dib clenched.
Zim then lifted his chin and looked directly at him, those thin lips parting to emit bloodied, pinkish teeth.
The silence was deafening, as if the whole forest was listening.
He lowered the gun as sprawls of snow whipped between them. "What will happen if I leave you here, Zim?"
The dream, the memories began to fade, and he droopily came to, struggling out of sleep. His boggled mind frantically tried to grasp where he was as he woozily looked around a room he had no memory of; with dreams near and far hugging the edges of his mind. Then it all came back to him, the gunfire, his father falling, and he tore out the room and down the corridor.
-x-
He stood in the doorway looking in. Williams stood quietly by an operating table, overlooking something so tiny that he almost believed it to be just a bundle of blankets hooked up with tubes and IV lines. When Williams turned to see him, he jumped, startled by Dib's quiet intrusion.
"I… I didn't see you there. How did you sleep?"
"How long was I out?"
"Five hours, more or less…"
"M-My dad?" He snapped, staring at him accusingly.
"He's at the hospital, Dib. They managed to get him there in time, it's okay." He added, watching Dib hold his head with one hand. "You haven't missed much. I think everyone's in shock. You should really go back and rest. You look…"
"Which hospital?" Then in the same breath: "Take me to him!"
"Dib, listen to me. We can't see him just yet. He is under investigation…"
"That's ridiculous and you know it!" His voice cracked. "It's Zim's fault! This wouldn't have happened if you were all paying attention!"
Williams looked at him. "We don't know that for sure…"
"Someone got to those controls and released my alien!" Dib snapped. "And I'm going to find out who!"
"We will get to the bottom of this. But whatever your father's intentions," Williams said gently, "he could never stand to see anyone in pain. Your father designed that glass cage, and was in charge of the surveillance…" Dib passed him a look so black that the words quickly died on his tongue.
"You don't know my father." He growled.
"I'm sorry, Dib. You're right." He said.
Dib approached, looking about as diaphanous as a paper cut-out. He looked sparingly down at the blanket to see a perfectly golden little weasel. Slowly the gloom in his eyes lifted.
Zephyr…?
He stared blankly at the creature, not sure if he was hallucinating or still dreaming. He took in a thin breath, let his shoulders drop and felt another part of himself give way. "What h-happened?" He traced a finger through Zeph's shockingly soft and shiny fur. Gold radiated off the critter.
"It's alive. Don't ask me how. I think it will pull through, though I do believe the concussion won't be much fun." Williams was saying, watching him. "I don't recognise it, not with jaws like that. We've kept weasels before, but they had a knack for escaping. I'm certain that Carlson shot it… but I can't find any mark or wound, when a bullet would have reduced the creature's skull to splinters. He must have missed, there's not a scratch on it." Williams shrugged.
"What's this?" He noticed a tiny metal curve running along the weasel's hip. He touched it, and suddenly armour plating wreathed the creature from head to tail. He jerked back, recognising his father's design. No. No it can't be… Awe quickly eroded the anger. "Zim did this." He choked, voice guttural and hoarse. "He planned it somehow, and tricked my father into helping him!"
"Easy, Dib. Will we find out in time." But Williams didn't look that surprised at the technology. "I've seen this before. Membrane has played around with this kind of prototype armour when he tried to protect animals from poachers in Africa… But why this weasel?"
"Zephyr's okay, then?" The name just tumbled out before he realized his mistake in time.
Williams was looking at him with more intensity than he liked.
Dib's phone started to ring, its shrill tone as sudden and as alarming as a scream. Dib snatched it to his ear. "Gaz?" Grabbing his bag, he took off, leaving Williams in the issuing quiet. The tired doctor stood by the operating table, knowing that before long, the boy would be an orphan. He took a heavy breath, gazing demurely at the little weasel.
-x-
The long, snaking hospital corridor mirrored Geneva's cold and apathetic design into startling parallels - of hospital and laboratory coming together so seamlessly that he was sometimes confused as to which building he was really in. Every member of staff wearing white had him pause and stare, unable to define where he was and the intentions of whom he saw.
He asked himself how things had ended up this way, how everything had gone so horribly wrong.
He wasn't even sure if he was able to see her.
His feet grew heavy as he approached the long and lonely corridor to the ICU ward. Slowly he looked up, brushing back his drooping scythe of hair to see those hard, accusing eyes of amber pin him from the other end of the corridor.
Her face was a twisting grimace of pain as if she had just shoved her hand into a hornet's nest. Dark bags hung under her eyes, and her purple hair, usually combed to the eighth degree, was fuzzy and unkempt, leaving it to stick out in places.
When he was in her shadow, she stomped forwards, as sudden and as heavy as a stone statue moving to intercept him. Maybe her punishment would offer some atonement. He couldn't feel any worse, and he was unable to meet her gaze.
He was so broken that another hit, another crack wouldn't matter.
"What happened?" She stood there, voice cold and empty.
"Please… just…" He almost didn't want to ask, almost didn't want to know. "Tell me how… h-how he is?" He squeezed it out. "Have you seen him?"
"They won't let me into his room! All I'm left with is a fucking window to see through! The doctor's in there right now. Dad's barely conscious. That's all I know. Your turn."
"There was a f-fire! We were being evacuated...! Zim almost got out…! Dad was s-shot!"
She pulled back, confused, perfect rage boiling just beneath the surface. "Who shot him? Why? What the hell did you and dad get mixed up in?"
"It was… It was Carlson…!"
"Carlson?"
"He's military… he's kinda taken over the whole operation…" He went quiet, eyes darting senselessly to her and back to the floor again. His cheeks were flushed and wet, hair messy tatters of black. "It just happened so fast! I couldn't… I couldn't do anything!" She looked blankly back at him, her eyes wide, indecipherable black pools. "Dad got in the way… he was trying to defend Zim, have him escape… Carlson had no choice…" He braced himself, fists knotted and trembling when she forcibly pushed him, the back of his head dully connecting with the wall. He started to mumble frantically as she held him there with a cold, consuming glare. "I didn't know he would do something like this…! He nearly released Zim!" The words sounded flat and useless, with her eyes glaring accusingly at him.
"Are you happy now?"
"What… what do you mean?"
"You have what you wanted. Zim is captured. Fame and riches. That's what you were really going for right? Or was it to prove us wrong? Is that it?" She released him, looking pale and washed up.
"What? No!" He watched her, knowing it wouldn't be long until another storm whipped him to the floor.
She turned away as if she couldn't stand the sight of him. "He's just this way."
They went down the corridor and looked through the thick pane of glass where their father lay in a hospital bed. It was hard to catch a glimpse through the plastic curtains and the bodies of the nurses as they tended to a pale man that almost looked like their father. The bed sheets had been roughly placed up to his chin, his face hooked to apparatuses, tubes...
Dib turned away, staring at a floating floor. Gaz pulled him over to one of the ugly plain plastic chairs in the corridor where he dropped sullenly into it.
He asked in a trembling, shaky voice: "I... I just wanted to… to make him proud..." He squeezed his eyes shut.
Her voice was sharp with anger. "Do you ever listen to yourself? Stop thinking you're some hero out to stop evil!"
He trembled where he sat, the tormenting guilt twisting him apart.
She looked up, sighing as she twisted her fingers on her lap. "When the world finally burns, what will be left? What will it all be for?"
He ran a sleeve under his eyes. Gaz being philosophical was about as strange as a dolphin walking on land. But then, how well did he really know her when they lived separate lives? His sole mission of saving the Earth had always come first, not family. Even as a kid, he had always chosen to sit in his room alone to research ghouls and ghosts.
'What kind of mad man releases a dangerous organism into the world?! The consequences could have been disastrous! No one would be safe!'
-x-
Thin daylight trickled through the curtains as they dozed uncomfortably on the plastic chairs hours later. He ran a shaky hand through his limp and tattered hair, having only managed to sleep for an hour or so.
The waiting room was always cold. They wrapped their fingers around their little cups of Styrofoam coffee from the nearby vending machine until the warmth of the tepid beverage faded, while his eyes tracked the clock's every minute.
Both of them were growing ever more anxious for word on their father's condition.
"Did he say anything to you about Zim?" He asked her. Questions had been weighing on him like concrete slabs, questions he couldn't obliterate until he could make more sense of them.
Membrane had always enjoyed discussing certain relevancies and topics at the forefront of his research, even when his children didn't much care, but Gaz had always been the better listener.
She looked at him questionably. "He was working in Geneva, Dib. Of course he would be discussing Zim. It was all he talked about."
This surprised him, especially when Zim's situation and the experiments going on were strictly confidential. "Like what?"
The phone started buzzing in his pocket. He numbly slipped it out to peer greyly at the name on the screen. Williams.
"Dib and Gaz Membrane?" The doctor walked out of the ICU door to see them. The siblings felt a certain kind of fragile hope, but when Dib recognized the sombre look in the doctor's eyes, his heart dropped like a boulder. "Your father's awake, and he'd like to see you both."
Gaz spoke first, and was somehow able to form words. "He's gonna be okay, right?"
"We can't stop the bleeding." The doctor said regretfully.
"Didn't you remove the bullet?"
"We did, but his right lung has been perforated. I'm sorry. He doesn't have a lot of time."
Gaz sprung to her feet and pushed past the doctor.
Dib felt more like a hapless spectator trapped in his own skin, forced to discern a grim reality where the pain didn't stop.
The ICU room was warm, but he could not stand the sounds of apparatuses working, of his father taking artificial breaths from the assistance of machines.
There was no pit too deep to fall into. Dizziness swarmed his head while his bowels loosened below.
Miraculously, Membrane was awake, straining to see out of cracked goggles that even now hadn't been removed as if the light hurt his eyes. The sheets had been drawn over his chin and shoulders, but he was still able to extract a great long arm and wrap it around his daughter's shoulders as she knelt by his bedside. "Now, now," he was saying as if his situation was just another little hiccup, "everything will be alright." But his voice wasn't the same. It was weak, tremulous, as if he had suddenly aged a thousand years.
"It won't be..! Not without you!" Gaz gasped.
Dib collapsed on the spare chair opposite, barely able to look at the intrusive wires and tubes. It was too personal, too painful. When his father grabbed his hand, and squeezed it, the tears came, thick and fast.
"I want to apologize..." Their father croaked in that rasp they weren't familiar with.
"There's nothing to apologize for!" Gaz insisted, her eyes wide and glassy. "I just want you home...!"
"You m-must listen to me, both of you!" He rasped more urgently, "I... I wanted you to live in a safer world... I worked so hard to make that a reality, and m-my only regret was not spending more time with you both..."
Gaz squeezed on his enormous hand, bringing it up to her wet cheek and holding it there.
His father then turned towards his son. "Dib, my dearest boy. Promise m-me you'll never profit from another's misfortune... that you'll do the right thing..."
He nodded, throat clasped tight, tears rapidly spilling down cheeks and chin to the coverlets below. All this time I thought you never listened to me, but it's me who never listened to you. Dib held onto his hand, willing with every power that he could turn back time, that he had chosen differently.
When his father closed his eyes, they didn't know if it was sleep overcoming him, or something more final.
There was nothing more any of them could do.
-x-
"We've got an emergency on our hands… it's A01…!" Cackled Torrent's voice from the intercom.
"What about A01?" Williams paused to look at Torrent's haggard, sweaty face in the little screen perched above his wrist.
"I dunno… it's not responding… I think it's having a seizure…"
It was all Williams needed to hear as he hastened to the next level, using his keycard and then hurrying through the next door to the ward. Torrent looked completely out of his depth as he stood, wide eyed and staring at a tiny alien in the throes of a convulsion within the embrace of the metal cradle. He could hear its bones sharply ringing and clattering against the metal of its restraints, with the ECG and other monitors screaming discordant alarms.
"Help me get him out! Quickly!" Williams said when Torrent just stood there as if he hadn't heard him correctly.
"But the thing's dangerous! It'll attack us!" Torrent argued.
Williams was already unclipping the first manacle around its wrist. There were fewer restraints to keep the alien in place, what with one less leg, and an arm still secured in plaster. He gently lowered it to the floor, feeling its tiny, arched body flex and unnaturally contort. "Take off your coat and lay it on the floor!"
Torrent did so, and laid it out like a blanket. Williams gently lay A01's tiny body on it. The remaining stump where its leg had been cleanly severed was wrapped tightly in a padded tourniquet. "When did the convulsion start?"
Torrent shrugged. "I dunno!"
Williams swore under his breath. "Stay with him, and count the seconds while the seizure lasts."
"Where are you going? You… you can't leave me with it! What are you, crazy?" But Williams was already hurrying out the security doors. "Shit!" He looked down as the thing curled and jerked, with its pink eyes rolling around beneath droopy lids.
Now that it was restraint-free, he expected it to stop the act, and tear into him like it had done to that girl. Williams was back in minutes holding a hypo.
"What's what for?" Torrent asked.
"An anti-convulsant drug. It's mild, and used on small animals…"
"What are you saying? Wils, if you give this creature something untested, Carlson is gonna have you for breakfast!"
He knelt down, looking for a suitable place to insert the needle as Zim shook and spasmed on the lab coat. Small, fluttering moans occasionally spilled out of his throat. Williams couldn't understand what he was saying. "G-Giir… Giir…"
There was a moment before the next convulsion when the muscles stiffened, and Williams sunk the needle into the creature's arm above the elbow. The alien's skin was cool to the touch, and clammy. After the dose was given, he gently pulled it out, took off his own coat and bundled it carefully over A01 like a shroud. The creature rattled and moaned, its breathing enervated sips and hitches.
"Jesus…" Torrent stood there, staring. "Is it fucking dying?"
Williams sharply glanced at the monitors. The signs were not exactly reassuring, and the heart's diastole and systole cycles weren't coordinating. He reached for the respirator, and plugged the clear-through mask over Zim's wax and shallow face. A01's snatching breaths were rapid, desperate.
As the seconds ticked by, A01 started to quieten. His remaining leg and arm would twitch and spasm for many hours afterwards, but in the meantime he was settling, the tics and shakes not nearly so violent.
"How long have you counted for, Torrent?" His voice was sharp and authoritative.
"S-Seven minutes…"
A01 started to regain consciousness. Heavy eyelids slipped open to reveal drained, darkened ribbons of ruby, and it wasn't long before he fell into a kind of mindless, guttural moaning. Its rasping, breathless noises were about as loud as a whisper underwater.
It could be that A01 didn't understand the mask fitted over his mouth, or why it was there, and started to anxiously claw at the plastic rim.
"It's okay, A01. It's helping you breathe. It's oxygen, nothing else."
A01 continued to try and get it off, when gloved hands settled over his shiny temples to keep him still.
-x-
They stood dressed in crisp, rigid black, but felt more like statues stopped in place. Gaz had been holding onto a bouquet of flowers she had brought to lay on the freshly disturbed soil, but she had not yet managed to complete the act of placing them there.
Time passed. She stood there shaking, a fist digging around the stems of the carefully picked roses and tulips. Dib stood sullenly beside her, never knowing what to do, when he knew he ought to say something.
Every time he looked at the letters carved there, he still couldn't believe what they spelled out.
'Here Lies Albert Membrane
Inventor and Healer
Father of Two Beloved Children'
Friends of the professor, co-workers and founders turned up, but each one was the face of a sombre stranger. They passed their condolences, shaking hands with Dib, and awkwardly patting Gaz's shoulder. Their comfort, though they tried to be supportive, still felt cold and superficial. Dib didn't really believe what was happening, or that his father was really gone. It felt like he had gone on holiday, and might turn up as soon as tomorrow.
People came and went, until finally they got in their cars and turned for home.
Dib and Gaz remained where home was, where home now lay beneath the ground.
Gaz's eyes were pinched. She had been trying so hard not to cry. Every now and then a tear would glisten on her cheek, and she'd quietly rub it away.
There was nothing he could find to say. All he could do was clench his teeth, eyes focusing on the gravestone in disbelief.
Everything came to him in lapses as if he was watching a movie he wasn't really paying much attention to.
Finally she threw the flowers at the grave and hurried away.
His heart broke as he heard her cries join the whine of wind as it rent through the trees. He let it beat at him, and refused to move even as the rain came down. As the roses began to wilt beneath the downpour, he crumbled to his knees, feeling the wet soil soak through the fabric of his pants.
All I ever wanted was to make you proud, dad.