Chapter One: The Second Invasion

They looked human, even moreso than Zim with his improved disguise, but Dib knew who – or, at least, what - the two strangers were. They didn’t say anything, just barged in and proceeded to trash his small apartment, scanning over it with all sorts of devices, not leaving anything untouched.

“What do you want? Who are you?” Dib asked them over and over, until his voice was hoarse. A few times he tried to force them to pay attention to him, by standing in front of one of them or trying to stop them, but they just shoved him roughly out of the way and tossed something heavy on top of him to keep him in place. He watched from beneath his microwave as they searched his closet thoroughly, but they seemed to pick up nothing from the low-tech escape hatch. Suddenly Dib was very glad that he hadn’t given into temptation and used his father’s technology to build it… such a glaring discrepancy would surely have shown up on whatever it was they were searching for it with.

Dib hadn’t quite managed to free himself from underneath his filing cabinet when they left peremptorily, simply sweeping out of the room without another word. He yelled after them, but his lungs were too compressed by the heavy metal cabinet for him to do more than breathe in a rasping wheeze. It took a few more minutes to free himself, and after he did he just lay there for a few long minutes, waiting for his breath to come back and pain to subside. When he finally stood it was with a limp, but he didn’t do any more than lock the door before diving down the secret passage, being careful to close it behind him.

***

Dib reached the secret room quickly, long familiarity with the route making the journey quick. It took him three tries to enter the password correctly – a good thing, since it was wired to blow up everything if the third try was wrong – and entered, slumping against the wall and trying to calm shaking, adrenaline-high nerves. The door slid shut behind him.

Zim spared him a glance. “They did not find this place?”

“No,” Dib managed to say between breaths. “They’re gone, but not… not before they tried their best to crush me under my own furniture.”

Zim’s second glance was sharp. “They attacked you?”

“No… no,” Dib breathed. It was still hard to talk. He hoped that he didn’t have any internal injuries. “They just threw my furniture at me. I… I think it was just to keep me from bothering them… ouch…” he slumped down to the ground, pretty sure now that he was injured. If the pain in his chest was anything to go by, at least one of his ribs had been cracked. “You… you owe me, alien…” was all he could think of to say before crumpling to the ground.

Sometime before it got better, he blacked out.

***

He woke up to see the ceiling of his secret room. It was a rather ugly ceiling, he considered, all craggy concrete. It was strange, he thought, how he’d never noticed it before. And it was so empty… he couldn’t believe that he hadn’t realized how much space there was up there.

Space.

Hm.

Why did it seem like he was supposed to remember something…

Hmmm…

Memory returned with the equivalent force of nine hundred kilograms of bricks. Or a ton, as he would have referred to it in his youth. 

“Zim!”

“*What*?” came the irritated Irken’s voice back to him.

Then the memory continued to hit, as the remaining 7.18 kilos of bricks that had been left out of the ton fell on him.

“Ouch,” he commented, but that was the memory. “I… I don’t hurt anymore.” He at least didn’t bother to say it intelligently, since it was a rather obvious observation.

“Really. How I wish I hadn’t bothered to save your miserable life, then, if you’re so upset about it.”

“…” Dib looked at his chest. What seemed to be several rolls of bandaging covered it tightly, restraining his ability to breathe but at least it didn’t hurt anymore. Something about that struck him (the remaining 0.00474 kilos… okay I’ll stop this joke already…) as odd… shouldn’t there be at least some pain if he had broken ribs, like the bandages seemed to indicate?
His next thought was more of a realization than a memory (and not just because the author had run out of brick fragments either, god this joke needs to die…).

“You still have your technology.” Irken technology, he reminded himself, but it was too late to correct the sentence.

“Of course I do.” Zim’s voice was mocking and unremorseful – it made Dib nostalgic – but at least he had confirmed Dib’s guess.

“How much?”

Zim finally grew annoyed enough to actually establish eye contact with the human, or at least make himself visible. His head poked out from behind a large – and broken, Dib remembered – piece of machinery. His eyes were free of their contacts now, and the look was unnerving. Dib didn’t know whether to feel nostalgic or resentful. Those years had been some of the best and some of the worst of his life at the same time, and although they had nearly ruined the rest of it once he had decided that it wasn’t worth it, and that he couldn’t prove anything to anyone with Zim gone anyway, it was exciting to go back to that old routine, even if it was considerably different.

“More than you, less than them,” was Zim’s useless answer to the half-forgotten question.

Dib ignored him and sat up. Still no pain. “Enough to heal me, at least,” he observed. “Because I know that I’d be in pain if you had only used my first-aid kit.”

Zim just disappeared again behind the machinery. “I had expected you to have more advanced technologies here,” he said in a disappointed tone, or at least one that Dib assumed was meant to sound disappointed.

“Sorry, but that sort of thing costs money, and I don’t exactly have much of that.” He paused. “How did you…”

Don’t you have *anything* here?” he was interrupted.

“What did you expect me to have?”

“Something… I dunno, *useful*?” Strangely enough, he managed to make the colloquialism sound nearly natural. 

“Sorry if I disappointed you.” Dib retorted sarcastically.

Zim stood again and sighed, rubbing his eyes. Dib noticed with a flash of surprise that he looked tired. “Fine. Whatever. I really wasn’t expecting to find anything.”

“Then what in the hell do you /want/?”

“A hiding place, for now.”

“Hiding place?” Dib repeated dumbly.

“From the Empire, of course.”

“No kidding! But… how could I hide you?”

“You wouldn’t need to. They’d never even consider that I would be living with a human, and I’d be safe. Meanwhile, we could put together something as a more long-range solution.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know!” Zim almost shouted it. “I don’t know, okay? This isn’t how they worked when I was with them. This… mass infiltration thing is new, I don’t understand it. They should just bring the fleet here if they’re so desperate, but all I detected was two small cruisers. Carrying enough hatchery equipment to populate a planet and four soldiers, that’s it. They contacted me when they arrived, or else I wouldn’t have known about the second cruiser, and told me their plans, or else they’d have me by now. They expected me to just surrender and I should have, I don’t know why I’m trying to save this pathetic planet…” he broke off and turned away, obviously pained. “I should just give myself up. The Invader’s ultimate duty is to serve the Empire…”

“But they want to kill you!” Dib protested. Why this mattered to him he didn’t know, but it seemed important. “If they want to kill you, torture you, for no reason, then you have /no/ duty to them.”

“You’re just trying to save your planet, pathetic mudball that it is.”

“Maybe,” Dib admitted. “But it’s in your own self-interest as well.”

“I have no self-interest. I never have.”

“Well then, maybe you should.”

Zim just looked at him for a while, his huge purple-red eyes giving away nothing of his thoughts. “Maybe,” he finally repeated.

***

~Mordain

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