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Sublime Awakenings	By : Kailean Category: Comics > Squee! Views: 1478 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Squee!, JTHM, or Invader Zim, nor any of the characters from these works. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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Sublime Awakenings: Chapter 8

The steady pounding of two pairs of boots hitting tile inside the hi skool hall was interrupted by a squeak of grinding leather soles against said floor as a scythe-lock-haired boy was struck with a devastating thought. “Wait! My trench coat!”

Zim only clung tighter to the teen's hand when he tried to turn back down the hall to the home-ec department, the holding place of his beloved trench coat. “No way, Dib-Stink! Has a Glorgarian space slug crawled in your head cavity to feast on your brain juices!? We are NOT going back there!” He then used his superior Irken strength to jerk the Dib back toward himself.

When Dib found himself once again facing the Irken at close proximity, he displayed his very best ‘kicked puppy look’. He had discovered over the years that while Zim claimed to lack “pitiful huuman emotions”, he exhibited quite a few of them, including pity and sympathy. He had seen GIR use this maneuver many a time to get his way, and had even, he was somewhat ashamed to admit, used it himself to get out of a few of Zim's traps.

At the Dib's pathetic look Zim's crimson eyes softened to a dark pink beneath his contacts, which caused their lavender hue to fade to a true blue. Curse that human for knowing him so well! “Look Dib, we can't go back there. But do not worry your humongous head. Zim will retrieve your primitive vestige of cow skin later, or he will get you another one. Maybe you would prefer a whole cow?”

“My head's not big! Okay, I guess. But no whole cows. …Or extra cow parts.” He received a relieved nod from the alien just before once again being jerked down the hallway in the general direction of the junior hall. After a moment, though, a question twisted its way to the front of his mind.

“Hey Zim, do aliens really mutilate cattle?”

Zim rolled his contact-covered eyes at the Dib-thing's question, a gesture he had picked up from the humans, and now relished doing whenever he had the chance. His mouth curved up in a mischievous grin. “Of COURSE we do! You see Dib, we aliens, every species mind you, NEED the cow parts for er...reproduction...because...eh...we lack…jelly sacks!”

Dib couldn't help letting out a small laugh at Zim's ridiculous claim, but his brows furrowed in confusion near the end. “Jelly sacks? What does jelly have to do with reproduction? Cows don't have jelly sacks...”

“Everything!” Zim came to an abrupt halt in front of Dib's locker, almost sending the confused boy slamming into him. He turned to give him a questioning look, one eye half closed and the other wide open. “Eh, no jelly sacks? Then how do they exchange genetic materials and form eggs?”

“Uh, they umm...” Dib found his face flushing once again, and that he was having trouble forming basic words. One thing he really did not want to do was explain Earth-based reproduction to the alien. Why was this so embarrassing? “Maybe you should just pay attention tomorrow during sex-ed.”

“Perhaps. But isn't sex-ed. about...OH. So huumans lack the jelly sacks as well? Is this common for Earth creatures?” He gave the Dib, who had lied to him about Earth matters in the past, a skeptical once over. “Is this like that time you told me that humans worship bears?”

Dib had to bite his tongue to stop the laugh that threatened to escape at the memory of Zim in a bear-suit, trying to convince the people of Earth that their beloved “bear god”, Yogi, had been reborn. “No Zim. It's nothing like that. Sooo... what's a jelly sack?” He suddenly wished for his trusty mini notepad, but alas: it was in his trench coat...in the home-ec department. He spared a longing look in the direction of his forsaken treasure.

“A jelly sack is a pouch located in the abdomen of Irken males and females that produces jelly: a sticky lubricating fluid that contains nutrients and genetic material vital to the formation of the egg and development of the embryos of Irken smeets, though now it is produced by the smeeteries...but you'll never know!”

“You just told me.” The teen stated this in an attempt at a flat tone, even through his face was consumed in an involuntary smile. The smile was half pure joy at learning more about Irkens and half a mixture of feelings wrapped in amusement. Didn't Zim say something about his proclamations of Tak being an Irken having nothing to do with “jelly” a long time ago?

“You LIE!” Zim gave the paranormal obsessed boy a conspiratorial grin. He loved tossing the kid little scraps of info every now and then. The look on his face was worth more than all the monies it costs to spend a twenty year foodening on Foodcourtia, not that the Irken had any interest in doing so, even as a customer. “Now, retrieve your inferior, human computer from its metal storage unit. We have much to do!”

Dib's happy face suddenly turned to mildly suspicious confusion, though the merry gleam never left his eyes. “Mind telling me exactly what it is we have to do?”

The invader released a deep sigh, as if to bemoan the Dib's questioning of his superior orders that he knew would be forthcoming as soon as he revealed them. “I have reason to believe that Miss Bitters is an extraterrestrial bent on dooming the Earth. If this is true, she is a threat to both our missions. We need to find the location of her base, and make an infiltration today while she is still at the Hi Skool.”

“Okkkay. Bitters is definitely not a normal human, but if she is an alien out to doom us all why hasn't she made any attempts in the last five years that we've known her?”

“Do not question ZIM! I am unsure of her motivation and method for dooming your pitiful planet. That is why we need to search her residence for evidence. Besides, worm-baby, you said it yourself. She is not normal. That means she is para-normal, which means you have to stalk her like you do me, right?”

Dib's eyes narrowed slightly behind his glasses in mock frustration. Over the years he had gotten used to the Irken's kooky logic. He had to admit, it would be interesting to find out the probable creepy truth about their doomy teacher. The main reason he had yet to do so was that the prospect of researching Bitters by himself was daunting. “Alright, but you have to agree to a temporary truce. And I prefer to describe my profession as that of a 'Contemporary Anthropological Interactive Observer' because it has just the right amount of flair. Besides, ‘stalker’ is such an ugly word.”

“Yes, yes. Contemptible Antlerology Interfering Oppressor. That sounds magical. Zim will agree to this truce until the Bitters matter is resolved and that scum Chunk has been eradicated. We shall have the usual terms: no killing or causing serious injury to each other, no attempts to expose me for the 'horrible alien menace' that I am, no experimenting on you...AND you have to continue to be my love-pig until Chunk is nothing more that a hissing vapor of hydrogen and carbon evaporating into nothing on the surface of the sun!”

The human was slightly irritated at Zim's misconstruing of his joke. He wondered momentarily if the Irken was really that ADD and self-absorbed, if all Irkens were like that, or if he just did to get under the paranormalist's skin. This thought was quickly forgotten as the alien laid out the terms of their truce, and went into a short maniacal rant about hurling Chunk into the sun. The teen raised a brow, and addressed Zim with an unimpressed tone. “You’re going to chuck...Chunk…into space? Why do you always have to solve things by launching the problem into space? It's kinda predictable.”

“Zim is not predictable!” The Irken stopped mid-rant, his playful, argumentative scowl evaporating, much as he imagined Chunk doing, to be replaced by stark confusion. “Wait! Predictable?! Not evil, or cruel or criminally insane?! Just...predictable? Are you okay?” The Irken pulled the boy even closer with the hand he was still gripping, so that they were a mere inch and a half apart. He tilted his head to the side to examine the Dib-thing, as if he could find some obvious flaw that could make him forget about all those “morals” he was always going on about. “Are your head meats functioning properly...no...make that normally? I thought you were dedicated to defending the whole biosphere of the Earth, even our horrible classmates.”

As the Irken raised a fist to tap Dib's head, as if checking if a melon was ripe, he pulled back as much as the invader's grip would allow. “I am! To an extent. People like Chunk are...exceptions. They hurt other people, and generally make the world a bad place.” He sighed dejectedly before giving voice to one of the more depressing aspects of his reality. “Sometimes the world needs defending from its own people. But anyway, I guess those terms are fine.” He gripped Zim's hand, which was already clutching his own, and gave it a solid shake for emphasis before attempting to break free from the other. “Uh, Zim. Could ya let go of my hand? I kind of need it to get the lap top.”

“Eh?” The Irken looked down to see his hand still intertwined with the Dib's, and realized that they had been standing close together like this, holding hands, for some time. If his blood was not a light pink in contrast to his green skin he might have displayed a visible blush. Instead, he swiftly released the Earth-monkey, and proceeded to make a big show of wiping the germs on his red shirt. It was strange, but for some reason the Dib didn't disgust him as much as the other human filth.

Once Dib had acquired his lap top, the two set off to the high school parking lot and his shiny new hydrogen powered land rover (a real army standard model, unlike the popular SUVs put out under the name of land rovers in the early twenty-first century) that his father had bought him for his sixteenth birthday. It was metallic blue, but capable of changing color on command via the central computer. It was capable of extensive off road travel on extreme terrain, but it was still no space ship. The space ship was at home in the garage.

“Is this why you started working at that video store?” Zim gave the vehicle a skeptical look. Such pitiful huuman technologies couldn't even fly, much less make it out of the atmosphere! On the other hand, he had never heard of one succumbing to a death-bee.

Dib looked up from his hacking, from inside of the rover. “You can get in, you know. Unless you want to walk to Miss Bitters' house.” He continued, somewhat bitterly, as the Irken took the passenger set, and the doors automatically closed. “No, my dad paid in full, and I'm on his insurance. I work there because my dad decided that he doesn't want to pay for my paranormal studies anymore. He gave me and my sister prepaid credit cards so he can keep track of what we buy. I guess he knows why I'm working there, but he doesn't seem to mind since it cuts into the time I can spend on it anyway.”

“Is that ...normal...for Earthenoid parental units?”

“When they think you’re crazy, and that your career choice is self-destructive? Yeah. Normally they're not dead set on their children going into their own field like my dad is, though. Sometimes I think he might actually disown me if I don't end up in some field of 'real science'.”

For a long moment there was nothing, but the sound of the clicking keys of the lap top as the neglected son of the famous Professor Membrane continued his search for the password to Miss Bitters’ skool account. He had already discovered that her phone number and address were not listed in the public directory. Now all he had to do was use a remote exploit to set up a modified server that would collect and relay Miss Bitters' password to the skool's system. Then he would simply log in and find her address.

Zim drew one leg up to rest against his chest as he propped his right elbow on his knee. This allowed him to rest his head in his hand as he gave the Dib an unnoticed sympathetic frown. While he didn't know what it was like to have parents, he did understand being denied one's chosen role in life. He knew what it was like to be different. He knew what it was like to be deemed defective and unworthy, which the Dib-thing definitely wasn't. “Dib-human?”

“Hmm?”

“I...I'm sorry.” He started off slow, but then the words left his mouth as quickly as possible. He couldn't remember the last time he had talked to someone seriously about something this sensitive. Maybe there wasn't a last time. Irkens tended to keep any insecurity they might feel to themselves as revealing them, or having them for that matter, was considered weak. On Irk this conversation would be almost taboo. Zim was very much out of his comfort zone, but it wasn't as if he had never broken Irken taboos before. Aspiring to personally rule the Irken Empire and then the Universe weren't exactly Empire approved goals, especially for someone of Zim's, barely improved, 5'3”, stature.

At those words, words he NEVER thought he'd hear the Invader speak in any situation, Dib's head shot up. His fingers stopped typing. The neurons in his brain nearly stopped firing. He slowly blinked twice. “What? What did you just say?”

Great. The Earth-boy just had to question it. He could never take anything at face value. “I said I'm sorry Dib. I...know it probably doesn't mean much coming from me, but I don't really think your crazy.” He shifted uncomfortably in his set, hoping the conversation would take some less...pitiful…direction soon.

Dib had to focus to keep his jaw from dropping in shock. His egotistical, invading, alien nemesis, whose identity rested largely on the fact that other humans thought Dib insane, had just expressed sympathetic condolences for this very thing. WOW. There were no words. None. But, being Dib, he tried to supply some anyway. “Zim. I. Uh. Er. That is. Well. I mean...thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Dib-thing. Don't think this means I'm not going to conquer this stinking ball of filth, though.” He sent the Dib a familiar challenging smirk in hopes of lightening the mood.

“But Zim, I never thought you were going to conquer it to begin with. Don't worry, though, I don't think you’re going to stop TRYING to conquer it.”

“SILENCE! Planet owning victory shall belong to ZIM! Do not despair, though, Dib-stink. If you’re a good little huuman Zim might let you be the overlord of all the other slaves.”

“Keep dreaming, Space-boy! You’re never going to win because I-- oh, I've got her password.”

“Is it 'doom'?”

“No, it's 'Shmee'. Humm. I would've never guessed that, though it does sound vaguely familiar. Well, just give me a second and-- there! Her address is 616 Elm Street.”

“Excellent!” Zim was forced to sit in a variation of the standard fashion as the Dib-creature started his automobile, and the safety belts automatically wrapped around them both. He stared determinedly out the window shield to cover his surprise. He brought his hands together just below his face in a natural non-imitation of a scheming villain, which he was. His three steepled fingers rhythmically taped each other as his green lips formed a cunning smirk. “The infiltration begins now.”

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Notes:

Notes:

-Dib's joke (And I prefer to describe my profession as that of a 'Contemporary Anthropological Interactive Observer' because it has just the right amount of flair. Besides, "stalker" is such an ugly word.”) is a quote, but I don't have a source.
-Zim's blood color- I read that Jhonon says that Irken blood is translucent pink, but in Planet Jackers Zim's blood appears to be bright green (a brighter and paler green than his skin). So I did some research on the biology of blood color in Earth organisms and speculative astrobiology. The color of blood differs according to the presence or absence of respiratory pigments and the type of pigment used by an organism. Coboglobin blood would be colorless or slightly pink when oxygen-enriched, but dark yellow or deep amber in the veins. This would resolve the greenish blood verses lite pink quite well. This is an interesting site on this type of blood and other alien possibilities. [link
-Dib's working at Rob's- I think I forgot to mention that he told Squee about Rob's to begin with.
-Zim's height-Character appearance in this fic is realistic, meaning no balloon sized heads or toddler sized 5th graders. Most 5th graders are around 5 feet. Zim and Dib were the same height in 5th grade, so even if Zim does not grow anymore, he is a lest 5 feet. I only gave Zim about 3”, but it doesn't seem that strange that Irken adults grow more because Invader Larb had grown since last he stood before the Tallest at the Great Assigning.
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Sublime Awakenings