1. Chapter 1 (1/2)

zim isn't sure what this feeling is. he's certain it's fatal. it must be. he paces his labs, tight as a bowstring, and mutters to himself. he's angry. granted, he's always angry, but this feels somehow worse. it's gotten under his skin. he kicks a neglected toy, something greasy and matted of gir's that should've been put away hours ago. his fists ball up and he shouts, "gir!"

the robot appears from a vent in the wall. zim's too occupied to wonder how or why he's in there, why he appeared so suddenly, is he watching him again from hiding spots? sometimes he thinks gir is trying to kill him.

"clean all of this up, immediately!" he gestures around himself wildly. all of this is one toy and nothing else but gir's eyes flash red as he salutes, and hops out of the vent, procuring a mop from nowhere. he sets to work. zim doesn't hear the reckless slosh of water as he paces. he's been on a mean streak with gir all week. he's already demanded he scrub the entirety of their living room, clean all his drawings from the kitchen walls, and wipe down all of the wiring in the ceiling. gir's agreed to all of it; zim's certain none of it will actually get done. he mutters something that gir is useless, it's a travesty an irken as superior as himself has been graced with such a fool of a robot. gir asks if he prefers rocky road ice cream or lint flavor. zim doesn't answer.

it's likely that perhaps all this meanness has less to do with gir and more to do with the footage on the screen. three screens. no, eight. eight screens play footage of the stupid dib-human, footage from skool, from home, from a portion of his bedroom. it's creepy. it's invasive, but he is not called elite irken invader zim for nothing, no? he glimpses a particular moment in one of the screens, and it makes his antennae perk up in recognition. zim wonders if this infatuation is some unknown alien illness. maybe he's picked it up from a human? he shudders; just the idea is enough to make his head swim.

they're in hi-skool now and the dib is wretchedly taller than zim, and so zim decides that that is why he is so fascinated. that's why he follows him ceaselessly, and that is why the organs within his tiny body shore up his throat when he speaks to him.

"what are you staring at me for this time, space boy?" four days earlier; the dib has marched over to him from his table in the skool cafeteria. dib still sits with his sister. zim still sits alone.

"i've no idea what nonsense you're going on about, dib-human." but zim can feel the heat in his cheeks. he thinks it's a fever. maybe dib poisoned him? but how could he have slipped anything into zim's food? he doesn't eat at skool. and zim's far too observant not to notice anyway.

"you've been acting so weird zim, don't think i haven't noticed. i'll figure out whatever the hell it is you're concocting this time. don't think you'll get away with it-"

"insolent fool child, zim is concocting nothing. and if i was, you would be the last to know about it, you pathetic, squirming pile of flesh."

zim loves adjectives. dib is glaring at him the rest of lunchtime, and zim begins to find that glare a little too searing. he skulks off to the lockers, feigning annoyance. really his spooch is beating a million times a minute. really he just can't hold eye contact with dib for too long anymore.

he isn't entirely sure when this began.

zim turns away from the screen, to another.

this one was at a party, a month earlier.

zim hadn't been invited. neither had dib. but dib had heard that zim was going and so he'd come, too. and they ended up arguing all the way to the roof of the party-holders house, dib cradling a vile earth-substance called beer while zim had found several juice boxes in the fridge. together, they'd sat on the roof and talked. lately, their arguments had become this. they'd faded into actual, semi-civil conversations. it was startling to know how much they had in common; dib did not like any of his classmates, for the most part. neither did zim. dib was desperate for his father's approval, though he claimed he really he didn't care what he thought. zim didn't understand what had made dib's defenses fall so well; he knew it had something to do with alcohol. why was the human so stupid to allow something like that to happen? he should always be on the defense; zim was always wedging for an opportunity to topple him.

and yet zim hadn't tried doing that yet.

but nonetheless; there they were. the sky was black and vast, just how zim liked it; like an open doorway in a tight room. an escape. if he wanted, he could hop into his cruiser and fly off. never come back. the human was leaning back on his hands and talking about his sister. his father.

"he's just such a dick and he doesn't even notice half the time. you know he leaves for work for days on end-sometimes weeks. once he didn't come home for almost a month. when he finally fucking came back, he acted like i was the weirdo for being pissed about it. something about independence being a valuable mem

ane trait. whatever the hell that means..."

"why don't you just kill him?" zim had muttered it halfheartedly if only because that seemed totally reasonable to him. dib had laughed. a sudden, warm laugh that seemed to begin from the middle of his chest.

"i can't kill my dad, zim, are you insane?"

"you are insane for allowing him to live this long, dib-stupid,"

that had just made dib laugh more. his eyes had been closed and he hadn't caught zim staring. staring. humans were filthy when they emoted. maybe that's what that feeling had been. disgust.

"why don't you ever go back home?" dib had asked next. the question had caught zim off guard.

"i go home every day, is that earth-poison ruining your pathetic

ain?"

"no, not your base," dib tilted his head. "home. wherever it is the hell you came from…" he trailed off, watching zim… then he looked away, out toward the sky. zim followed his gaze. "what's it called again? irk? i dunno. i'd be homesick, is all. or maybe not. space has gotta be better than anywhere on earth."

"anywhere is better than this dirtball," zim muttered, but now, he isn't sure how true that is. he misses speaking his own tongue. he misses purple skies and pink-ish dust covered dunes. the towering cities in irk, the constant air travel. but if he thinks too much on it, zim begins to realize irk, earth, vort, mars, and any other number of planets are all the same. on every one of them he is always zim.

he was wondering what exactly a thought like that meant when dib sighed, added, "i'd get lonely,"

"stupid fool. irkens don't bother with such useless emotions."

but really zim had no grand plan for this party. he'd heard students talking about it all week. had threatened the address from a fellow student the day before. sitting next to dib he realized all the kids were growing up, he'd learned nothing about earth that would ensure his victory, and the tallest's didn't call anymore. dib didn't know this. in a way, zim didn't know this either; he was still waiting for them to congratulate him on having sacrificed so much time away from irk, all for the empire. time passed on earth the way it never had on irk. on irk he was a soldier, a scientist, whatever the empire needed him to be, and he didn't worry about years or days or months, just assignments and missions. he would graduate from one station to the next and could expect long survival via his pak as he succeeded and was upgraded. he could expect a glorious and

iliant death via battle, as any good irken would wish to go. there wasn't aging, there wasn't much growth. there were undervalued paks on failed irkens or violent death. or deactivation. but he didn't think about that...

zim pauses before the screen, realizes he's standing too close, realizes he's at home, deep within his base and not on that cold roof a month ago. this is a memory; etched into his pak, uploaded for him to rewatch, forever.

zim shakes his head; where was he?

oh yes. this horrible new feeling towards the dib human.

he's afraid this feeling might be called "a crush".

he tries to distract himself, moves on to various projects, chases gir around the house insisting he must be cleaned. he pushes away the monitors and spends the evening meticulously checking his pak for poor wiring. he finds a lot of it. in alge

a just the other day, zim had received a note meant for the dib from another student, confessing feelings called love. zim sat right behind dib; usually he was throwing things at his massively sized head. zim had torn it to shreds and sneered at the girl behind him who'd passed it in the first place. it wasn't as if zim, almighty irken invader who despised every human, felt similarly to her. of course not. irkens didn't feel such putrid, filthy, useless things. but it bothered him, another human looking at dib the way she did. it made him feel gross. and violent. especially violent.

the night drags on painfully.

at skool the next day, zim is distracted. his head hurts from all his intense berating and concentrating the night before. at lunchtime, he sits. he stares. completely lost in his own head. then he is blinking as a figure stops just before him.

zim looks up.

"are you- god i can't believe i'm asking this but- are you alright?" dib squints as if it hurts to ask. zim blinks, realizes he's been leaning his cheek into his gloved hand, staring. staring at the dib. and dib's approached him about it. he's leaning down so zim can really face him eye to eye. "your eyes are like, glazed over, zim, it's-

"what do you want?" his mind flounders and it's the first thing he can think to snap.

"nothing?" dib raises a

ow, "you just- sorta weren't answering. and usually, you love to answer. you looked spaced out-"

"zim was no such thing. i was simply, ehh, ignoring you, horrible earthling." pointing, accusing. dib starting, surprised, rolling his eyes.

oh, he was so bad at this. zim thinks he has a headache; he's dwelling on this when dib leans an inch closer.

"are you sick?"

zim starts, "why would i be sick? did you poison m-"

dib reaches out, touches his forehead. three seconds later, he pulls the hand away, "you're sorta warm-"

"why did you put your putrid hand against zim's head-" zim leaps onto the cafeteria table, shrieking, "what are you plann-"

"jesus zim, chill out for once," the look of confusion and concern fades to annoyance. "sorry for being remotely concerned,"

"zim doesn't need your concern,"

"yeah, i can tell," dib stomps off. zim reaches, touches the space on his forehead.

maybe it is a fever. if it isn't, maybe it's… a hot flash?

it can't be blushing. because if it's blushing…

zim flees the cafeteria and wanders the halls until class begins again.

at the end of their final period, zim lingers as the students leave to speak to the teacher. miss bitters, to be precise. no matter how much older they got, she has always been their homeroom teacher. even though this was a different skool. even though this was a different district. nonetheless.

"miss bitters," zim tries to look indifferent, uninterested, "what is a human, ehh- a crush, exactly?"

"a crush?" she repeats, deadpan, scowling. zim nods. he's overheard the word in skool. sometimes when he's bothering the other students, they tell him to bug off and go bother his "boyfriend", dib. zim is still unsure of this word but he doesn't like the way they say it. he doesn't like how vehemently he denies understanding their meaning. "are you really asking me this, zim?"

"of course i am," zim hisses back, "i demand to know the meaning of this horrible word,"

"horrible indeed," miss bitters somehow squints harder at him, "that word is used when one of you foolish children develop insipid feelings for one another. as if it isn't useless to feel something like that in a dying world such as our own. now go away, i can't stand the sight of you outside of class time."

he avoids dib the rest of the skool day. dodges him in the halls. he even leaves early if only to avoid having to sit near him on the bus. none of the other kids sit with either of them and the bus is too full for either to have his own seat. so they're always side by side, bickering, arguing or… comparing technology. zim thinks human computers and laptops are inferior, but dib gets his father's tech before it's released to the public, and it's always a little more similar to irken technology than zim would like. and it does, admittedly, have some interesting and unique uses. sometimes they just mutter about class. once, when zim lamented that he didn't understand an english prompt (poetry, creative writing he struggled with the most; there were no sonnets in invader training) dib had claimed it was far simpler than zim had thought. he'd made an offhand comment he'd help zim if he bothered to show up at his house. zim had accepted. they'd sat together in dib's bedroom on his bed, doing homework. zim had managed to forget, for far longer than he liked to think on, that they were supposed to be enemies.

those feelings, then, had resembled something like friendship. he wasn't sure when they'd developed into something far more constricting.

"computer!" zim stands in his base again, hands on his hips. "scan my pak for these, romance-y feelings," he makes dramatic air quotes, feels his skin prickle in disgust. waits for the light to beam down and holdover him. it does, and the computer thinks while he taps his foot, impatient and anxious. no, not anxious, because he doesn't have a crush, he just really really really wants to eliminate these distractions from mankind's inevitable destruction. ah ees. it's exactly-

"it would appear you are experiencing what is called a crush, in earth terms-"

"argh then what are the cures for this ailment?!" zim grabs at his antennae, feeling frantic. the computer hums in thought. is that sarcasm he picks up in its tone? how does a cold, unfeeling irken-machine even have a tone?

"a cure for a crush might include asking the subject of affection-"

"affection?!"

"-out on a date."zim's claws grip his face in terror. "a date?!" he cries- then squints. "what is a "date"?

"a date is an edible, sweet fruit of the palm family on earth. or, it is a social activity between two humans who like each other,"

zim feels sick, horrified, as the computer lists off things that might take place on a date.

holding hands. sitting together. talking together. perhaps even- just maybe- kissing-

zim scowls, kicks something across the lab, and fumes to himself, fists clenched at his sides. how pathetic! an invader likes no one! he can hardly stand his fellow irkens! and to feel this way towards an enemy, it's, it's...!

… unavoidable, now. zim crosses his arms tightly in defeat. what can he do? an idea springing to mind, he whirls and demands the computer to scan him again. to zero in on the feeling, find where they dwell within his pak. once done, he'll have them removed, torn out like a splinter. gir keeps him company as he works, amongst televisions and candy wrappers. his computer warns that feelings aren't like physical injuries. they spread, they're vague, they're difficult to center in on. zim tells it he knows what he's doing. the computer tells him he doesn't. zim threatens to tear out its wiring. the computer isn't so intimidated by that, but compiles, finally.

later, his pak is open and in an organized mess on a table. he works most of the feelings out of his system himself; he can feel the twinge of them remaining even after his computer ordered purge.

"computer!"

"whaat?"

he wears wide goggles and wields a screwdriver-looking tool. "show me the dib's bedroom!"

a monitor crackles to life. the dib is on his stomahc reading a book. his phone buzzes. strange, because zim didn't just text him. who else might he keep contact with?

zim watches dib smile, respond quickly. he imagines a girl some miles away, in her own room. grinning and giggling and telling the human stupid romantic lies.

he looks away and works at some wiring in his pak. they look like a million miles of worms looped over and over and over again. intricate, delicate, and complex. "computer!"

"what now."

"erase all current footage of the dib human!"

"all of it?"

"yes, all of it."