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Despite them being on good terms for a while now, Zim still kept a careful distance from Dib: never trusting him too much, never letting him in too close. He had a sort of measured frigidity to him that Dib would give anything to melt; though, Dib knew it wasn't out of animosity. Being vulnerable and allowing yourself to depend on others wasn't exactly in an invader's job description. No; he knew Zim wanted to trust him, but just how much he was able to get himself to open up after years of being on the defensive tended to vary.
He was trying, though. And every time he let Dib touch him, or asked Dib for advice, or even complained about something he'd been stressing over recently, Dib's heart soared. It was like seeing glimpses through to the other side of a wall, and every time it happened, he loved what he found. He wanted to know Zim for who he truly was, and bit by bit, they were getting there. Getting closer.
Needless to say, Dib was just about struck speechless when Zim asked him to come help look after his base.
“I'm going to run maintenance on my PAK,” Zim explained. “It's mostly automated, but it will cause me to be unresponsive for a while. Like your…” he waved his hand around, searching for the right word, “…human comas.”
“And you want me to stay with you while this is happening?”
“Yes. Because I….” Zim visibly cringed, as though this conversation was causing him physical pain. “I trust you.”
He'd spat the words out with palpable disgust, melodramatic as ever, but Dib still smiled at the sentiment. “You're sure you don't just want GIR and Minimoose around?” he decided to ask, to be certain. “Surely they—”
“Leaving those two alone,” Zim interrupted, “always puts the base at risk of being destroyed. Or filled with cheese.” He shook his head. “No. It will be beneficial to have you there.”
“…OK.”
Zim nodded, curt for just a moment before his theatrical tone returned. “Then we are in agreement! I will see youuu… tomorrow!”
It was only after Zim had marched away that the gravity of what Dib had just agreed to really struck him. Zim rarely let Dib into the actual base part of his base, even this far into their friendship, and anything pertaining to his PAK was a whole can of worms on its own that Zim almost never dared to open. This was a huge step forward, for sure.
Was Dib going to be at the base for days? It sort of sounded like it. Would he need to be prepared for something to go wrong? How was he going to keep GIR and Minimoose out of trouble? Question after question occurred to Dib as he walked home, and he really hoped it would all go smoothly.
He really… really wanted Zim to be able to trust him.
Dib felt awkward standing idle in Zim's living room while the alien rattled off a list of things for GIR and Minimoose to not do during his maintenance. It didn't seem like they were listening to him, so Dib did his best to remember in case he needed to stop them later.
He couldn't help but feel like this was a big deal; some huge and risky operation that he was helping Zim with, even though Zim stressed to him over and over again that it was normal for him to have to debug his PAK. It kind of reminded Dib of troubleshooting issues with a computer, but he struggled to wrap his head around the concept of having to do that to yourself.
Maybe someday he'd be able to convince Zim to explain to him how all his cybernetics worked….
“…don't open the door, don't open the windows, don't invite anyone over—that includes pizza-delivery humans—don't let the robot gophers out, don't take the ship anywhere, don't touch anything, and don't interrupt me while I'm in the lab.” Zim leveled a grave stare directly at Minimoose, then at GIR. “Do you understand?”
“Yes!” GIR exclaimed with a cheery salute.
“Repeat it back to me, then.”
GIR's resounding silence was conspicuous, and Zim buried his face in his hands before turning to face Minimoose instead. “Minimoose?”
“Nyeh!”
“Excellent!” He clapped his hands together, spinning around again to face Dib this time. “Now. Dib. Come with me.”
Dib tried not to seem nervous during the elevator trip down to the lab. Zim was pressing buttons on a panel below the palm of his glove while they waited, an impatient look on his face. “As I said yesterday,” he began, without looking up, “I will be temporarily unresponsive. But you shouldn't need to do anything. Just keep those fools upstairs under control until I'm fully activated again.”
Dib nodded. He still couldn't shake the feeling that this was some kind of high-stakes operation. “What if something goes wrong?”
“My PAK will reboot and resuscitate me,” Zim answered, matter-of-fact, like he hadn't just suggested the possibility of death.
“W-What if that goes wrong?” Dib shot Zim a mildly panicked look. “What should I do?”
Zim sighed, closing the panel on his glove and looking up to make eye contact with Dib. “It won't. But if you must be reassured that I'm not dead at any given moment,” Dib flinched at the idea, “you can ask the computer about the maintenance status. It will tell you whether my PAK has experienced a fatal error.”
“That doesn't really answer my question,” Dib muttered, “but whatever.”
“Then…” Zim frowned, a thoughtful look on his face, “perhaps it will reassure you to know that not doing this maintenance would put me at an even greater risk of death…?”
“No!” Dib couldn't hide the disbelief in his tone. “Why on Earth are Irkens dependent on a machine that's so error-prone in order to live?”
Zim's expression faltered, anxiety clear in his eyes for a split second before he averted his gaze. “PAKs aren't error-prone,” he said, after a beat. “Mine appears to be an exception.”
“…Oh.”
The elevator fell silent after that. Mercifully, Dib didn't get the chance to dwell on the awkwardness and how much he probably just screwed up and how he should have just kept his mouth shut and and and… because the door slid open with a whoosh just a moment later.
They stepped out into the lab. It was a room Dib hadn't seen before, though that didn't surprise him—it seemed like Zim's base never had the same layout for long. This version of the lab had the same dark, industrial appearance as the rest of the rooms Dib had seen down there, with various screens and gadgets and a worktable covered with junk. Zim approached one of the screens by the table and grabbed a large cable, turning and pressing it into Dib's hand. “Connect this to my PAK.”
“Oh, uh….” Dib's nerves amplified to an exponential degree. He could not mess this up. He stepped behind Zim and looked over the PAK, not seeing anything that he recognized as a port. “Um….”
“The pink panel at the top.”
Dib gently pressed the cable around the middle of the panel until it snapped into place, and Zim stiffened with a sharp inhale. “Sorry, did I hurt you?”
“No,” murmured Zim. “It's just strange, is all.”
“I thought you did this all the time.”
“Yes. Alone. It's strange to have someone else handling my PAK.”
Dib came back around to stand in front of Zim again, tilting his head as he shot him a puzzled look. “Why'd you ask me to do it if you didn't need the help?”
“Because I trust you.”
He hadn't flung the words at Dib like they sickened him, this time. Instead, there was an earnestness to Zim's voice that Dib didn't think he'd ever heard before, and the air between them suddenly felt very emotionally charged. What should he even say? That he appreciated Zim letting him help like this? That he trusted Zim, too? Reassure him that his trust wasn't misplaced? In reality, all Dib managed to say, as he stared back at Zim and the weight of the sentiment settled over him, was a quiet “thanks”.
Zim eyed him for a moment longer, saying nothing, before he turned his attention toward the screen. He fumbled around the table and pulled a keyboard out from the pile of junk. “You may go now, Dib-creature.” He waved at Dib like he was shooing him away, and the strange emotional tension that had built between them was instantly dissipated. “I need to go through the logs before I start, and you cannot help with that.”
“Well—” Dib was about to disagree—they both used the same operating system, after all!—when he saw lines and lines of Irken text appear on the screen. “Oh… yeah, I guess not. Sorry.”
Part of him wanted to stay anyway, even if he'd just be sitting in silence while Zim worked, but he didn't want to push Zim's boundaries more than they'd already been pushed in just the past few minutes alone. He had his own task at hand, regardless: he needed to make sure the minions upstairs hadn't blown up the house yet.
“OK, well,” Dib called, as he headed back toward the elevator, “I'll see you later, then…?”
“Yes, yes! Begone with you!”
Dib rolled his eyes, stepping into the elevator and bracing himself for whatever chaos might be waiting for him back in the house.
“A little to the left… a little to the left….”
Dib nearly collided with GIR when he reemerged from beneath the end table in the living room. Before he could even register what was going on, a camera was shoved into his hands.
“We're taking a group photo!” GIR exclaimed.
Dib looked down at the camera, then up at the enormous pile of plushies that engulfed the living room, then down at GIR, then up at Minimoose. “I've been gone for, like, ten minutes!” he exclaimed, gesturing wildly toward the devastation. “Where did all this stuff come from?!”
GIR only shrugged, and all Minimoose had to offer was a noncommittal squeak.
Dib was starting to understand why Zim was so adamant that these two never be left alone.
“Do you wanna be in the picture too?” GIR asked, excitement clear on his face.
“With you… and the plushies…?”
“And Minimoose!”
“Nyeh!”
“Uh… sure.” Dib glanced back down at the camera. “I guess I'll just prop the camera up on—”
A purple haze enveloped the camera as Dib was speaking, and it rose up out of his hands to float in the air next to him. Right. Of course. Minimoose's telekinesis.
Dib tried not to dwell on the weirdness of the situation as he made his way over to stand near Minimoose in the middle of the pile. It was like wading through a swamp, there were so many of them accumulated on the floor. The little robot drifted closer to him when he came to a stop, squeaking quietly.
“Yeah, everything's fine, Minimoose.” Dib sent him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I'm more worried about you two getting into trouble than I am about Zim. He seems like he's got everything handled.”
It wasn't really true, but if Minimoose saw through the lie, he decided not to say anything about it.
“Okaaay! I'm ready!” GIR called out. He'd climbed about halfway up the mountain of plushies, sitting not too far above Dib's head. It looked like a pretty precarious position to be in, and Dib motioned quickly for Minimoose to take the picture.
“Nya!” came Minimoose's cue. And as the flash went off, Dib hoped he didn't look as panicked in the photo as he felt.
“Hey, Computer?” Dib whispered. “How is Zim doing?”
It had gotten dark. Dib had done his best to contain all the plushies in one area of the living room, which had taken most of the afternoon, and GIR and Minimoose had both strewn nachos all over the couch the moment it had been unearthed. So, Dib was lying on the floor next to the couch instead, the dim glow of the TV the only thing lighting up the room as he stared at the ceiling.
“You just asked me five minutes ago,” the computer groaned.
“I know, but….”
The computer sighed, annoyed, but responded anyway. “He's fine.”
“Thanks.”
Dib continued to stare at the ceiling. There were countless wires and ducts up there, and various objects that Dib suspected GIR had tossed up there at some point. He could hear the two minions up on the couch discussing the TV show they were watching, but other than that it felt so calm in the room it was almost eerie. He was so used to being there with Zim that it felt like a different house entirely without him.
Dib's anxiety had waned somewhat as the day went on and the computer continued to report that Zim was OK. He was still a bit worried that something might go wrong, but more than anything, he just missed Zim. Like he'd thought earlier in the lab, it'd be nice to even just sit in silence in the same room together.
Well… maybe that was still an option.
“I'm gonna go down to the lab,” he announced, springing up from the floor. “I'll be right back.”
“Ooh!” GIR waved. “Tell Master I said hi!”
Dib smiled to himself as he headed over to the end table and disappeared into the elevator. He'd just go down there for a minute and then come back, he assured himself. GIR and Minimoose would probably keep watching TV the whole time. And it'd be fine.
It felt comparatively silent in the lab when Dib entered this time, Zim's talking and typing replaced by nothing but the steady hum of machinery. A wall of Irken text still populated the interface on the monitor, except this time it was rapidly scrolling by—probably verbose output from whatever process was running on Zim's PAK.
Speaking of Zim.
“Computer!” Dib whisper-shouted, hurrying over to the worktable. “Are you sure Zim's OK?”
“Yes,” the computer whisper-shouted back, sounding thoroughly disinterested.
The Irken in question was lying face down on the floor, a red light blinking slowly on his PAK. He looked like he'd collapsed there, and if Dib didn't know any better, he would've thought something had gone horribly wrong.
Well. The terribly anxious part of him still thought something had gone horribly wrong. But Zim had told him this would happen—that he'd be unresponsive—and Dib was going to take his word for it as best he could.
He trusted him.
He hadn't expected Zim to just let himself pass out on the floor, though.
Did Irkens get sore? Would he be sore from this later? It couldn't be comfortable, regardless, and Dib found himself wandering around the lab looking for something he could lie Zim down on. He wasn't surprised when he didn't find anything; he was pretty sure Zim had told him once that Irkens didn't sleep. So, instead, he took his coat off and knelt on the floor next to Zim, folding it neatly. He reached around to lift Zim up off the floor just enough to slide the coat underneath him, being extremely careful not to dislodge the cable connected to his PAK as he laid him back down.
That was better than nothing, right?
Dib sighed as he sat there watching the light blink on Zim's PAK. It was the only sign that he was alive—as far as Dib could tell, anyway—as he lied motionless on the floor. He didn't even seem like he was breathing, though Dib supposed that maybe Irkens didn't need to breathe…. It was unsettling, regardless, and the anxiety that Dib had spent all day wrangling was beginning to resurface with a vengeance.
“Computer,” he called, voice low, “do you know the status of the process that's running right now? I can't read the terminal output.”
“Nineteen percent complete.”
“OK,” Dib sighed again. “Thanks.”
He couldn't just sit there on the floor all night. And he needed to check on GIR and Minimoose before too long.
Dib forced himself to get up after a few more minutes, looking down at Zim for an extra beat before he headed back to the elevator.
“Computer? You'll tell me when he wakes up, right?” Dib asked during the ride back up to the house.
“Yes.”
“All right. Thanks.”
Dib woke with a start sometime later in the middle of the night. The nachos had vanished from the couch at some point while he'd been down in the lab, and he'd fallen asleep there after making it through most of a movie marathon with GIR and Minimoose.
He definitely hadn't been buried in plushies when he fell asleep, but. Well. These things happen. …Apparently.
It was pitch black in the house, save for a few faint lights coming from appliances in the kitchen and the clock on top of the TV. Even GIR appeared to be in some kind of standby mode, seemingly asleep on the other end of the couch from Dib, and the yard outside the windows was dark as well.
It almost felt normal. Almost. The odd stillness was reminiscent of every other time Dib had spent the night at someone else's place and been up late: there was that bizarre, liminal feeling you got when you were still awake in a house that wasn't yours after everyone else had gone to bed. As though Zim were just asleep somewhere else in the house, and Dib would see him again once it was an actually normal time in the morning.
That wasn't the case, though. He had no clue when he would see Zim again. And Dib's anxious mind would not shut up about it.
“Computer…” he whispered, into the darkness, “is Zim still doing OK?”
“Yeah,” came the computer's matter-of-fact reply.
“What about the current process?”
“Uhhhhh….” There was a weirdly long delay this time, almost like the computer had to physically go down to the lab to check. Dib wondered distantly whether all Irken artificial intelligences had unusual personalities, or if it was just Zim's. “Forty percent complete.”
“OK… thank you.”
Dib sighed to himself, closing his eyes again and trying his best to get settled under all the plushies. He hoped he'd be able to fall back asleep soon, if only for the sake of killing more time while he waited for the maintenance to be done.
The sun was high in the sky when Dib woke up again. He decided not to try to sit up just yet. Lying under the weight of the plushies, he listened to… whatever GIR and Minimoose were doing. It sounded like they were playing a board game on the floor, though he couldn't tell which one; either way, there was a lot of clattering and shuffling that he guessed were dice and board pieces.
It was sunnier in Zim's house than he had realized. Not that he could see much around the plushies, but a lot of light came in through the windows by the front door. More than Dib was used to at his own house, anyway. It was nice. And the couch was deceptively comfortable. Maybe lying there under the plushies forever wouldn't be so bad.
He was starting to nod off again when a loud ding! from the kitchen, followed by GIR shouting and a lot of commotion startled him into sitting up, a good number of the plushies tumbling off of him in the process. He squinted toward the kitchen as he fumbled around for his glasses without success.
“The muffins are ready!” GIR screamed, hurtling back into the living room holding a plate stacked hazardously high with muffins. He came skidding to a stop when he saw that Dib was awake. “Good morning! You want a muffin?!”
“Um—” Dib squinted at the tower of muffins, then at GIR. He frowned. “Are those my glasses?”
“Nooo….”
“Gimme those!” Dib snatched his glasses off of GIR's head, where they'd been dangling off of his antenna. “And, yeah. Gimme a muffin too.”
He barely had time to take one off the plate before GIR started cackling and eating the rest of them with great speed.
Dib scooted a bit further away on the couch to avoid the fallout of crumbs, eating his own muffin carefully. He didn't know what he expected, but it hadn't been a normal and perfectly edible muffin. The thought that GIR might actually be a decent cook almost made him laugh; he'd have to ask him about it sometime.
Minimoose came floating over just as Dib finished the muffin, getting his attention with a gentle nudge on his arm. “Nya?”
“Oh, you guys put these on me?” Dib gave the plushies that had been piled atop him a once-over. He should have figured as much. “Yeah, it was pretty comfortable. Weird! But comfortable. Thanks.” A sheepish smile crossed his face. “I hadn't even considered that I should've brought my own blankets….”
“Nya!”
Dib felt a blush threaten to creep onto his cheeks at the mention of his jacket. “I left it downstairs,” he explained, trying to stay nonchalant. “Zim was just… lying there on the floor, so….”
“Nyeh,” Minimoose reassured him, punctuating the statement with another soft nudge. “Nya.”
“You think?” Dib smiled to himself at the thought of Zim appreciating the gesture, even if he'd probably never say it to Dib's face. “I'm just… I'm glad he let me in, you know? I'm glad he trusts me. …With this. And I hope he'll be OK.” A beat. Dib glanced up toward the ceiling. “Speaking of that… Compu—”
“He's fine. Sixty-five percent complete.”
“Nyah.” Another nudge.
Dib nodded, letting out a breath. He sure hoped Minimoose was right.
“It's weird to think that I've known Zim for longer than you.”
Dib was lying on the floor again, the late afternoon sun shining through the windows and casting long shadows all over the house. Even in the different light, those wires and ducts on the ceiling were beginning to look more familiar to him than they deserved. Minimoose had come down to idle much closer to the floor than usual while he and Dib talked, hovering just within Dib's peripheral vision, and Dib found that his slow, up-and-down bobbing was quite calming.
“Nyeeeh.”
“Mm. Yeah.” Dib closed his eyes. “We don't hate each other anymore, though.” A beat. “Sometimes I wonder whether I ever really hated him at all.”
“Nya?”
“He was cool,” confessed Dib, earnest. “I always thought he was so cool. Even when he was being an idiot… I wondered: what's he seen, out there in the stars? What kind of stories could he tell me? What kind of far-off worlds could he show me, if we…. If things were different between us?”
Minimoose drifted closer to Dib, brushing against his arm until Dib shifted to hold him. “One of my dreams has always been to go out there and explore space. And Zim made that dream feel a bit more within reach, as much as I wanted to kill him. And as much as I knew I couldn't trust him. And I….”
He hugged Minimoose a little tighter, voice trailing off as he lost his words. The silence was only broken by a tiny squeak, and Dib opened his eyes again to give Minimoose a small smile.
“Yeah. I'm glad things changed, too.”
The rest of the day passed quicker than Dib had expected it to.
GIR was in and out of the kitchen making endless batches of muffins for hours, which left Dib alone with Minimoose in the living room for a good portion of the day. Minimoose was surprisingly talkative once he got going on a subject he was passionate about—Dib was admittedly enraptured by the lengthy tangent Minimoose had gone on to him about Irken linguistics, even if he didn't understand a lot of it. He wondered, briefly, if it'd be a difficult language to learn; if he could ever get good enough at it to use it with Zim.
He was watching GIR's chaotic muffin-making process in the kitchen late in the evening when the computer got his attention.
“What is it?” Dib asked. He definitely was not succeeding at masking his dread. “Did something happen?”
“The maintenance is finished,” relayed the computer. “So—”
Dib was in the elevator and back down in the lab in what felt like an instant. Zim was still lying on the floor—lying on Dib's coat on the floor when Dib got there, and Dib looked up at the screen to see if he could tell what was happening. It looked like checks were being performed; based on the colors, everything seemed to be passing except for a few errors here and there. He tried not to let his nerves get the better of him while he waited.
He ended up kneeling on the floor near Zim like he'd done the previous night, watching the light on his PAK continue to blink. The output on the terminal eventually came to a stop, with what Dib guessed was a Press any key to exit… prompt at the bottom.
After another minute or so, a loud beep came from Zim's PAK, and he jolted, pushing himself up onto his knees.
“Computer,” Zim called, glancing up at the screen, then over to Dib, “notify the— Augh!”
The theatrical double take Zim did would have made Dib laugh in any other situation. “You had one job!” the Irken exclaimed. “Did you stay down here the whole time?!”
“What? N-No!” Dib raised his hands up in surrender. “The computer let me know that the maintenance was over! I just got here! I swear!”
Zim visibly relaxed at the clarification, letting out an exasperated sigh. “The house is still intact?”
“Yeah. Although, the living room is full of—”
“And my minions are unharmed?”
“Yes.”
“And you are unharmed?”
“I— Yeah.” Dib shot him a sheepish smile. “I was worried sick about you, though.”
The light in Zim's eyes shifted in a way that Dib had learned meant he was rolling them at him. “I'm not going to explain it to you again.”
“I know.” Dib shrugged. “It wouldn't stop me from worrying, anyway. It was creepy seeing you wiped out on the floor like that.”
Zim finally seemed to notice the coat beneath him then, tearing his gaze from Dib to stare down at it instead. He ran one of his hands across the fabric, slowly, like he was lost in thought. “It's normal for humans to be unconscious, yes?”
“Yeah, but….” Dib considered how best to explain. “Not comas—not when you're totally unresponsive. That's terrifying.”
“I see.” Zim turned to make eye contact with Dib again. “I will try not to worry you so much next time, then.”
The implicit promise of a next time was weighty, and that emotionally-charged feeling from before built up steadily between them once again. Dib wished he could take Zim's hand, or hug him, or something. “OK. …I trust you.”
Their conversation lulled there, though not in a bad way. Zim shuffled around to save the logs from his PAK, reaching awkwardly up to type on the keyboard from where he apparently refused to get off of Dib's coat on the floor. Skimming through the output from the last checks that had been done, he muttered something to himself that Dib couldn't understand, then shut the terminal down and disconnected the cable from his PAK.
“Do you feel… better? Or whatever?” Dib broke their silence to ask.
“In some ways.” Zim shuffled back around to face Dib again; still on his knees, still on the coat. “I don't feel worse.”
“OK. That's good.” The movement of Zim's hand brushing over the fabric of his jacket again caught Dib's eye, and he couldn't help but smirk. “You can borrow my coat if you really want to, you know.”
Zim's eyes widened in shock as though he hadn't realized what he'd been doing. Quick like he'd been burned, he scooted off of the coat and tossed it at Dib with a huff. “No, thank you.” A pause. “…But I appreciate the offer.”
Zim didn't wait for Dib to respond, instead brushing off his uniform and standing up to stretch. Maybe Irkens do get sore, Dib thought, getting up off the floor as well and pulling his jacket back on. Hopefully it had helped.
The ride back up in the elevator was much less tense than it had been coming down the first time. They rode in silence, Zim leaning against the wall opposite Dib with his eyes closed. There was no strange sense of impending disaster weighing on Dib; no anxiety creeping up his spine as he looked at Zim. He wondered if Zim felt as relieved as he did, or if doing this so often had made it mundane.
Either way, he was glad to be there for him, on the other side of the wall.
“Oh! I almost forgot!”
Zim hummed an inquisitive hmm? at the sound of Dib's voice, but otherwise didn't react, eyes still closed. Dib smiled at him anyway.
“GIR says hi.”