Éxtasis

by HedgehogSquadGoals

Summary:

Five years stranded in the ruined world of his own creation, five long years scraping by for food, for water, for anything he could find in the pursuit of continuing his meager existence. The PAK helped sustain him, maximizing nutrition input, minimizing energy exertion. Without it, he’d have been long dead. There was nothing there in that blighted land, just scraps of what had come before.

But he could work with scraps.

Notes:

*drops Za2r horror fic in your lap and runs away*

Chapter 1: The Good Stuff

Five years.

Five years stranded in the ruined world of his own creation, five long years scraping by for food, for water, for anything he could find in the pursuit of continuing his meager existence. The PAK helped sustain him, maximizing nutrition input, minimizing energy exertion. Without it, he’d have been long dead. There was nothing there in that blighted land, just scraps of what had come before.

But he could work with scraps.

Those five years weren’t wasted. Bit by bit, wire by wire, he built a way out.

He’d underestimated one of the Zims, the Zim he’d taken to calling Zero, because he was absolutely, unequivocally, just the worst. At first, he’d thought Zero the worst for the usual reasons; he was the smallest (aside from that annoying baby, good riddance), he was the stupidest, he was the weakest.

But it’d turned out he’d also been the most driven, the most stubborn, the most egotistic.

The most dangerous.

He’d been hellbent in a way Dib had never seen before. All Zims possessed that drive, that fiery passion to destroy, to dominate, but Zero...he had burned with it. Even Dib’s own Zim, the one whose PAK he was now in possession of, couldn’t have held a candle to such a fervor.

And that made Dib angry.

Zero had said he’d destroyed all alternate timelines, but well, that just wasn’t possible. The universe itself was built upon a lattice of different timelines, alternate realities, all stacked on top of each other, thin, ever-replicating sheets in the book of eternity. Rip out enough pages and the book bows, collapsing in on itself until nothing is left.

Dib was still there, the Zimvoid was still there, so he knew there were still places he could escape to.

And he did.

He crawled through the muck of the universe, the darkness between worlds, searching for a place that would suit him. A place where he could start over. There was nothing to guide him but his own intuition and the voice in his ear, there, always there. Something was pulling him in the right direction, that was all he knew. That was all he needed.

And at last, reality opened up and he clawed his way through, into something familiar.

And again, he set to work.

Dib didn’t remember much from his time squeezing through the cracks of reality. His mind wouldn’t let him. Saving him from himself, the terrible lines between the lines that humans weren’t meant to see. He didn’t have to remember.

It was better this way.

It took another year still to find the planet.

Not Earth. He had no interest in Earth, not at the moment. That would come later.

Whatever timeline this was, whatever reality, he didn’t know. What he did know was that there was Irk, lightless and lonely. And there was The Massive, drifting listless through the dead void of space.

A bloom of joy unfurled within his chest.

Yes. This would do. A reality with Irk in ruins, harmless and inert...this would do quite nicely.

The hallways of the ship were dark and endless, eerie with the sound of machinery struggling to perform. It groaned along, mournful mechanical death throes, begging for maintenance. Light flickered, casting strange shadows in the corridors, weird patterns on the walls. He sidestepped old bones, a skeleton crew, long-dead and rotted at their posts.

Killed at work. The best a drone could hope for.

A notion filled his mind as he navigated the maze of metal and dead, a wonderful and pervasive thing. The bodies were rotted, yes, but there were the PAKs, glowing and buzzing and blue. Could he salvage them, use them? The PAKs were obtrusive, sure, but he was ready and willing, and his body was prime real estate.

The knowledge he could gain! The power! One PAK had been enough to allow him to rip the world asunder and slip through its remains into something new. Two PAKs...or three, or four...what marvels would he be able to accomplish then? Rewriting the fabric of reality itself? And all it would take would be for him to give up more of his skin, more of his flesh.

Small price to pay.

What hope would there be for Zero, then? Zero and his Dib, a nervous, idealistic child. Pathetic. Oh, he planned on coming for them, it was only a matter of time. And Zero would die, of course, he would die painfully, and the burn of his eyes would fade out like the last embers of a doused campfire.

Dib would watch it all, show the Other Dib how to do it right.

And then he’d have to kill that Dib too, of course. Two Dibs on one world, that just wouldn’t be right. He’d have his dad and Gaz back, and he would make them see in a way he hadn’t been able with his old family.

But those were big thoughts, big dreams.

So he wanted the big fish.

He kicked aside a corpse as he went, its PAK ringing against the metal floor. Toward the bow of the ship.

The promenade, dim and dusty, opened up before him, the entirety of the cockpit stretching high above his head, a huge and lonely dome. His footsteps echoed in the emptiness, even with the soles of his boots as worn as they were.

Clothes to fit his growing body had been hard to come by over the years. He made do. He always made do.

Stars winked at him from the ship’s curved port, dark silhouettes of collapsed machinery breaking up the sweeping panorama. And there they were, once-mighty heaps on the floor. Dusky pink bones in old metal shells, their jaws hung open under vacant black holes. They were leaning against one another, and Dib wondered if that had occurred before or after death.

It didn’t matter.

He could hear the buzz of their PAKs, and marveled at what must have been in there. What information did they hold? How many new and exclusive functions? Access to how many other planets, how many other societies? What kind of equipment was reserved for the cream of the crop, the top of the ladder? There must have been things in there Zim could have only dreamed of.

Dib wanted those PAKs, wanted to crack them open and suck the marrow out, use it as fuel to power his own greatness.

The good stuff. The best of the best.

Something caught his eye. Behind the huddled skeletons, framed by the light of a thousand stars blinking against the Massive’s forward window, was a dark form. It glowed faintly, spectral with a soft cerulean light.

Dib abandoned the melancholy bones to approach the window.

The Irken was dangling by his PAK, cables still inserted into the machinery above him, around him. He hung there, listless, speechless, sightless.

Alive.

His chin rested against his chest, the dark hood obscuring his face. Dib pulled it back, already knowing what he would find. There was that familiar face, eyes shut, single-layer lashes resting against high cheekbones. It was a face Dib dreamed about in the rare moments where he slept.

“Two,” he whispered, the first word he’d spoken to another living being in six years.

Two’s eyes shot open and they were blue saucers, undulating with light like a busted television. It shouldn’t have been possible. But here it was; a reality where Dib had won, where he’d dispatched Two on an ultimately successful mission. They’d been the cause of the Massive’s disrepair, Irk’s downfall. Him and Two.

The implications were more than Dib could handle for the time being. Were there others like him, other Dibs with PAKs, limitless, just as there had been limitless Zims? He didn’t know.

And it didn’t matter.

Because if there were, they were stuck in their own worlds. Inept and undeserving. But he was here, on the mighty dead leviathan of a ship, him and Two and an entire universe choked and overflowing with possibilities.

“Two,” he repeated again, and the alien lifted his head.

“Oh Glorious Dib,” he croaked, a voice dry and dusty with time, but a voice that nearly brought Dib to his knees. He had been hearing it for years, whispers in the back of his mind, the urging, the snarls, the laughter and the cries. But that had all been internal.

To hear that voice vibrating through the air, the near-tangibility of it...tears pricked his eyes.

“Stop running Dib Virus,” he whispered.

The cables loosened with a terrible groan, retracting back into Two’s PAK and sending him falling face-first onto the floor. His PAK glowed pink, and a quick look behind Dib confirmed that the others in the room had reverted to their standard colors as well.

Two groaned. He moved sluggishly, limbs sliding against metal flooring. Dib was reminded of a nature documentary he had seen as a child, high-definition footage of a mudskipper desperately crawling its way to the next pond. He’d found it sad, back then, and had cheered when the little thing eventually made it into the water.

He didn’t feel the need to cheer when Two finally managed to push himself up, hadn’t felt that need in a while. Instead he watched, drinking in the sight of him.

Back in the Zimvoid, he’d enjoyed watching the Zims fight and spit and tear one another apart, but he’d enjoyed watching Two the best. Perhaps it had been the beginnings of a boyish crush, something Dib had considered before and struggled mightily to come to terms with. Now that he was older, he could admit to himself that there had been a definite attraction, a fascination. All that aside, Two had simply been a pleasure to watch.

He was slim, agile, quick as the crack of a whip and just as loud. Dangerous. Cunning, even...for a Zim, at least. He’d seemed tall back then, certainly taller than Dib’s old Zim, his slender body curving even over the fake body Dib had built for himself.

But those had been the observations of a child, a big mind in a small vessel. Now he stood heads above Two. Between the both of them, he’d always held the cards, something even his stature now reflected. And it was clear the years of hanging had done Two no favors. His legs were weak, unsteady, quivering under even the meager weight of his slight frame.

Two looked up at him, and the truth and horror of it all seemed to hit him in the gut. He recoiled, backed away, eyes bulging.

“You…” he said in that voice, that beautiful bleat of a voice, and Dib closed his eyes that he might hear it better. He smiled.

“You did so well.”

But Two’s attention was elsewhere now, beyond him, and he looked past Dib at the bones littering the cockpit floor. He flew past Dib, and that made Dib angry, but he allowed it. He allowed it because Two was huddling over the bones of his leaders, his head shaking, antennae low and wobbling with each turn. He allowed it because Two knelt, cradling the empty skulls, and his voice hitched in sad, soft little gasps, and Dib relished his pain, wanted to sink his teeth into the agony.

“My Tallest,” Two said, strangled.

“Did you love them?” Dib asked, smiling. Two just sat hunched over the bones, his forehead pressed against one of the elongated skulls.

He traipsed over to where Two sat, circling the tableau, memorizing each awful detail, burning the scene into his mind and storing it in his PAK. Something inside him was whimpering in anguish, and Dib quickly threw up a mental wall to keep the clatter out. This was no place for pity. This was a place where pity had never set foot, and Dib intended to keep it that way. An eye for an eye. One ruined world for another.

At last, Two lifted his head up and his eyes met Dib’s, and they were frenzied red globes, bright with madness.

“You...wretched...DIB!” he spat, launching at him like a shot, all crazed eyes and gnashing teeth and crooked claws. But he was weak, and Dib was strong. He caught Two by the throat, slamming him down onto the floor. He knelt above him, a hand on Two’s wrist, a knee on his arm, pinning him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dib laughed, amused.

But when Two’s knee flew back and bashed him in the side of the head, his good humor evaporated.

“Éxtasis."

Two immediately went limp, bent legs sliding flat onto the floor, hands uncurling and twitching, head lolling. His eyes found Dib’s and they blinked slowly, drunkenly.

“What’dyoudo…” he slurred.

“Just a little code within the Dib Virus,” he said, smiling pleasantly down at Two, “in case I ever needed you incapacitated but didn’t want to run the virus proper. I never had the chance to try it before. I’m glad it worked.”

He smoothed his hand over the curve of Two’s scalp, brushing back the limp antennae. He took one between his fingers, running them down the long stalk, the lightly textured surface. It would be so easy to rip out, and it was an idea he entertained.

But no. He wanted to keep Two intact. He didn’t have an endless amount of Zims any longer, and scarcity made him cautious. When you had three thousand Zims under your thumb, deforming a few of them wasn’t a big deal. An antennae here. An eye there. It was okay if they suffered, because they were monsters, and they were in endless supply. But now he was left with only one, at least until he found Zero. Only one Zim left.

His favorite Zim.

“Do you hate me?” he asked, gaze shifting from the pointed tip of Two’s antennae to his half-lidded eyes. He chuckled at the weak glare he received. “That’s fair. Honestly, I’d be offended if you didn't hate me. But you’ve been beaten, Two. You’ve been beaten...and it looks so good on you.”

“I trusted you,” Two hissed weakly. Dib burst into laughter.

“Of course you did! You thought I was you! That’s what made it such a brilliant plan! And...it worked. This universe is proof. It worked. And I can do it again. I’ll just have to start over. It’ll be easier this time. We won’t be trapped in the Void. This time it’ll be different. Better. And you’re going to help me.”

“I will not-”

“You have no choice,” Dib reminded him, “no choice. And think about it, Two...what else do you have besides me? Your leaders are dead. Your machines are down. Irk is a ruin...you’re the last of them, you know that? Until we get to a different reality, you are the last Irken. You’d be all alone if it weren’t for me. So you’re going to help me. You’ve got nothing else.”

Two shook his head weakly, obstinately. Dib leaned down and cupped his cheek, and god Two looked so bad he looked good, a stunning wreck, a lovely little waif. He had missed Two, something he was only just now realizing.

He had missed him so much.

“I chose you for a reason,” he whispered, “out of thousands of Zims, I chose you. You should be honored. You won’t let me down, Two. I know you won’t.”

He smoothed his thumb across the soft skin of Two’s forehead, smiling affectionately.

“Because you can’t.”

Chapter 2: Sacred Bones

Two pawed back and forth behind the barricade like a captive tiger, a too-dangerous animal kept in a too-small cage. His eyes were violent red jewels, burning blue in the force field’s light.

A simple task, putting up an energy field. Neutralizing Two’s PAK with code in the Virus. Easy stuff.

Dib could have thrown him in a cell, sure. He could have. But it was a big ship, and the brig was too far away for his liking. He wanted Two here. Wanted Two on the bridge beside him as he urged the mighty ship back to life. Wanted Two to see when he finally split apart the remains of his cherished leaders and took in everything they had. Everything they’d taken for granted.

One thing at a time.

And Dib knew he could keep Two placid, harmless, by running either the Dib Virus or the Éxtasis function, or...perhaps...even both! The thought thrilled him. Two, his PAK, his eyes, burning blue, overcome by loyalty to his master, overcome by Éxtasis, lolling and writhing and helpless on the floor.

What would his voice sound like then? What would it sound like when he said Dib’s name?

The thought was never far from Dib’s mind. He kept it tucked down deep inside, candle flame in dark crevices. He wanted Two lucid now. Awake. Himself. He had missed him, after all. Had missed him so much.

One thing at a time.

The PAKs were too heavy. Too heavy and too well integrated with the metal shells. Too large. Too cumbersome. Dib tried everything, and his finesse grew to force, his patience to rage. No good. All the while Two watched, watched and paced and snarled. Every time Dib’s hands touched those sacred bones, Two’s thin lips would slide back against his teeth, an aggressive and ultimately useless gesture.

Such love, Dib thought. Such love was so hard to come by.

He’d never met the Almighty Tallest, not really, but he imagined they’d known exactly how much they were worshiped. They’d known how much they were adored. And they’d been greedy with it, he was sure, greedy with the love, because there had been so much of it.

Greedy with love, greedy with conquest, greedy with the bounty that the universe had provided. It was endless, and they wanted more. Dib felt no shame desecrating their remains. And besides, wasn’t that nature? The breakdown of the once-living, new energy to fuel those who persisted. The strong. The survivors.

His efforts had loosened the old bones, scattered them about the floor. He scooped up a forearm, still stuck in its cylindrical gauntlet, and studied it. Long and thin. Slightly rubbery. A pleasant, creamy pink. It had belonged to the one named Red, he knew that. Something inside him cried out. Dib turned. He wanted to see Two’s expression. Wanted to see his face.

Two wasn’t in the cage. There was no cage. There was nothing.

So he’d disabled it somehow. Escaped, even with his PAK neutralized. Clever. So clever.

If there was one thing Dib could say for Zims, it’s that they excelled at wriggling their way out of situations they’d gotten themselves into in the first place.

But not this time.

Dib knew Two. Knew him well. His favorite Zim.

Two hadn’t escaped. Not really. He’d still be in the cockpit, watching, waiting. High above Dib, perched on some half-toppled machinery, a mere shade among thick twists of cable. He would creep along. Careful, silent, eyes flashing under his hood as Dib strode to the center of the enormous room. He’d be carrying a weapon, a makeshift blade of some sort. Crude, quickly fashioned, but lethal in the right hands.

He wouldn’t waste time. He’d strike swiftly. Now wasn’t the time to play with his food. Quick and dirty, anything to keep Dib’s hands off those beloved corpses.

Oh yes. Dib knew Two well.

So when a shadow dropped from the high ceiling like a bat in a cathedral, the glint of death in one hard-clasped hand...Dib was ready.

PAK claws grabbed the Irken well before he could reach Dib, slamming him into the floor. Two gave a soundless scream, the silvery-pink curve of a dagger clattering from his grasp.

“Now Two…” Dib sighed, “why would you do that? You don’t want to fight me…”

“Wrong as usual, filthy beast,” Two hissed as Dib simpered down at him, “rotten mongrel. Disgusting urchin.”

Dib chuckled at the insults, little thorns, pointed but ultimately harmless. Sticks and stones.

“Wretched Zib.”

Dib felt the smile melt off his lips.

“...what did you just call me?” he breathed, a sibilant whisper.

He’d heard it well enough the first time. What he wanted to know now was if Two would be brave enough, stupid enough, to repeat it.

Two was a Zim. So of course, the answer was, would always be, yes.

“Zib,” Two growled, mouth curving into a hateful grin, “not fond of that name, are we? You think I wouldn’t recognize my own PAK? You’re as much me as you are you.”

Dib snatched up the abandoned dagger and plunged it deep below the curve of Two’s collarbone. Two shrieked and writhed, limbs scrabbling as he tried to push himself back, away, escape. But the dagger held him in place. The dagger and Dib’s hand on Two’s narrow throat.

“Think you’re smart just because you made it out of the force field, huh? But look at where all that effort got you. Right back where you were before. In my hands. Under my thumb. At my mercy.”

“You loathsome monster,” Two wheezed, tongue catching on the bitter words, “the PAK isn’t made to-”

“No, Two,” Dib crooned, tightening his grip around Two’s neck. The Irken choked a gasp, fingers tearing at Dib’s hand. “No. You try to take over other people’s planets? Steal, kill, destroy? I did what it took to protect my people. Does that make me a monster, Two? Do you really think so?”

Two’s breath rasped in his throat. Dib smiled.

“And sure. Things went a little...wrong the first time. But that was the first time. We can try again. Infinite realities. Infinite do-overs. Just look around you! We did this. Success. We’re saviors, Two. You and me. And once I get into the Tallests’ PAKs-”

Sharp claws raked across his face, sending his glasses flying. He stared, shocked, into the dark distance. Warmth flowed down his cheek. He dabbed at the cuts with the pads of his fingertips. They came back a beautiful carnation, glistening. Below him, Two’s mouth was twisted into an animal snarl, and he kicked against Dib, wriggled and arched and squirmed, tried to angle himself away, break free.

Two and his cherished bones. Those beloved corpses. A loyal soldier to the end.

Such love.

“Éxtasis.”

Two’s hand crashed back to the floor. He let out a tiny cry, a whimper, a sound that turned Dib’s blood to fire, his body to a furnace. He struggled to keep his composure.

“You’re not being very helpful, Two,” he pointed out, easing his hand off the Irken’s throat. His fingers wrapped around the dagger’s handle, yanking it out of Two’s body. He eyed the pink liquid along its jagged edge, thoughtful, and ran his tongue along the blade. Two’s blood gathered in a pool in his mouth, a tang of metal and syrup. Dib threw the weapon aside with a sharp clatter, gazing back down at his captive as he licked the sweetness from his lips. “We need to work together, after all. What happened to my right hand? My second-in-command? My Number Two?”

“I was never your...” Two groaned, his voice trailing into more of those soft whimpers that never failed to set Dib alight, “...you were...what...what is this…?”

“Éxtasis,” Dib repeated, and delighted in Two’s moan, “I made it for you, Two. All for you.”

He took the hem of Two’s cloak in both hands and ripped it, tearing off a wide strip, and brought it to his face to wipe the blood. The flow had thinned to trickles. Already the gashes were healing.

The wonders of the Irken PAK. His lifeline.

He stood, striding over to his glasses. The crack in the lens had grown. With a disappointed huff, he placed them back on his face. Two could barely lift his head to observe, consumed as he was by Dib’s design.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Dib asked, kneeling back down beside him.

Two gave his answer in the form of a helpless whine. Dib chuckled.

“Bliss, Two. Ecstasy. Turns out your PAK has everything it needs to synthesize the chemicals necessary to induce a euphoric state. You should really be thanking me. I could have designed a much less pleasant way to incapacitate you, but I’m not a monster. I’m not a monster, Two.”

Two tried to glare, but his eyes fluttered and slipped closed. His parched lips opened, releasing another little whimper.

He was fragile like this. A body as useless as it was beautiful, wracked as Dib knew it was with pleasure. Two’s mind would be just as gone. Drifting off on rapturous clouds. Enveloped on all sides by sweet twilight.

An enemy who couldn’t fight back was good. An enemy who didn’t want to fight back was even better.

Upon his initial exploration of the ship, Dib had found a room just off the cockpit, a resting area, filled with chairs and couches and cushions, entertainment, snacks. He left Two for a moment, returning to that room to cannibalize one of the couches. He dragged its plush cushions back to the center of the bridge just in front of its wide stretch of window.

A comfortable place for Two to rest, to writhe. After all, Dib wasn’t a monster.

Back to work. He couldn’t get into the Tallests’ PAKs with the ship dead, that had become apparent. He could fix it. He’d gotten himself here, hadn’t he? He could fix anything. A spark of life still remained in the power core, basic diagnostics confirmed that readily enough. And so he stoked its ember, fed its fire. The cockpit lights flickered. Dim, but there. A small sign that the ship was ready to return to its former glory.

It would take time. But that was okay. He had all the time in the universe.

Dib returned to Two, curled in a boneless heap in that soft nest of cushion. He flopped down on his back beside the Irken, headily absorbing the tempo of those quiet moans, those impotent gasps. Thin fingers laced over his chest and he smiled, pleased, gazing up at the window. Its vast blanket of stars. The dark sphere that was Irk, pink and spinning and full of the dead. Dib wanted to make it down there. Witness the ruin, experience it in a way imagination could not fulfill. He envisioned heaps of bones, toppled towers, broken machines.

Nothing but a hill of ants that had grown too prosperous, and had paid for it with eradication.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Dib murmured, turning his head toward Two, “what you and I have done together. It’s beautiful.”

Two could only provide a weak growl in response, a growl that quickly lost its heat, evaporating into an airy sigh. Dib rolled over on his side, head propped on his elbow, and reached forward to stroke Two’s antenna.

“You wanna know how it happened, Two?” he asked. Two’s head fell to face him, eyes scrunched in an anemic glare. Dib chuckled, rubbed the tip of the antenna between his thumb and forefinger. “How I defeated my Zim. How I got this PAK. I know you want to know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” was Two’s listless response, “you already have it.”

Dib smirked, and waited.

“...how?” came Two’s puff of a voice, so soft it was nearly silent. Dib laughed.

A Zim would always be a Zim. The cat and its curiosity.

“He did something stupid,” Dib recounted, “but that’s how most stories involving Zims start, isn’t it?”

Another languid glare. The same type of glare he’d seen on his own Zim. Just before the end.

“He opened a portal into another world. Brought through a whole bunch of...I don’t know what they were. Just that they were awful. Inconceivably hideous. And of course, they attacked him too. Tore apart his base…nearly ripped him to shreds.”

Dib sighed at the memory, because it was a good one, despite the fact that he too had nearly been ripped into shreds. He trailed his fingers down to the base of Two’s antenna, not missing his low exhale.

“It was one of those times. You know. One of those times we agreed to work together. Save the world, so he could try and destroy it again. And we did it, Two. Of course we did. We made a good team. Just like us.”

Two’s eyes scrunched in confusion, unease. Dib recognized that look too.

“We were both beat to hell. His base was wrecked. My house was wrecked. The whole city, up in flames.”

Dib remembered it well. The two of them laying spread-eagle in the middle of the street, resting against the rubble, flames and sirens in the distance and the sky red and hot above them. Broken bones and bruised bodies. Both exhausted, but both alive.

‘A truce,’ Zim had said, panting and pathetic, his weak glower directed at Dib, ‘until I can feel my legs again.’

‘Truce,’ Dib had agreed, because he’d felt in that moment that there was no more fight left in him.

And they had lain there in their own silence, in their own blood, breathing together, and Zim had seemed...comfortable. In pain, yes. Tired, yes. But comfortable to be laying alongside Dib. Comfortable in the knowledge that he was safe, that Dib had agreed to a ceasefire, and that Dib would keep his word, because why wouldn’t he?

Zim hadn’t taken him seriously. Had never taken him seriously. Just like his family, just like the skoolkids, just like every other person Dib had ever met. Fun and games. Push and pull. That was all Dib was to Zim, a meager annoyance. An enemy, but one he could trust. An enemy, but one he could rest beside. And an anger unfurled within Dib, primal and searing.

He didn’t remember what it was he had picked up. Something from the rubble around them, some sharp shear of metal. Maybe part of a car hood. It was wide, painted blue, he remembered that. Wide and blue and scorched on one side.

He did remember seeing Zim’s eyes as he held the heavy curve of metal over him. The flash of confusion. Surprise. Terror. His mouth wrenching open to choke out Dib’s name, one last time.

Dib brought the makeshift guillotine down with all the strength he could muster.

“After that,” Dib said with an easy shrug, fingertip circling the base of Two’s antenna, “removing the PAK was easy. Removing everything was easy.”

Two stared at him, a brief flash of clarity, of horror, surfacing underneath Éxtasis. Dib gave him an amenable smile.

“But you understand, Two,” he said, slipping an arm around the alien’s thin shoulders, “you understand. Whatever it takes to win, right?”

He stroked the curve of Two’s face with the back of his hand, felt the bump of cheekbone against his knuckles. The liquid red rose of Two’s eyes filled his sight.

“Whatever it takes,” Dib murmured again, and pulled Two against him.

Chapter 3: From Another Time

“You killed him.”

“Huh?”

He looked over his camera at his sister. She, in turn, looked over her magazine. Staring eyes and the crease of a frown.

“...you killed him. Zim. You just said you were going to go spy on him, see what he’s up to. But he’s dead. ...remember?”

“...oh,” he said. She was right. Zim was dead. Had been for a while now.

Gaz hadn’t believed him, not at first. Not until he’d shown her the body. The head. Not until he’d shown everyone.

And it still hadn’t mattered. They didn’t care. The entire planet saved and nothing had changed.

The only thing Dib’s victory over Zim had brought him was a family that tiptoed around him. Gave him odd looks. Spoke to him even less now than before.

Gaz hadn’t thought he could do it, obviously. Hadn’t thought her brother capable of...it wasn’t murder. It was success. Victory. And that had come at a cost, yes. Sleepless nights where he lay awake, mired in guilt, in the memory of those awful choking cries, the vivid splashes of pink. The look in Zim’s too-bright eyes just before they went dark. It had come at a cost, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle.

He had saved the world, after all.

“...I’m worried about you,” Gaz said, and Dib nearly did a double-take. He’d never heard those words out of her mouth, doubted she’d ever even said them before. They were strange in her voice, unfamiliar things that made him uncomfortable.

“I’m worried about you for being worried about me,” was Dib’s response once he’d finally regained composure. It was a half-hearted attempt at a joke, and Gaz didn’t smile. She hadn’t smiled in a long time. He sighed. “Gaz, I’m fine. More fine than ever! Zim is gone, and with his base unguarded, it’s only a matter of time before I figure out a way to stop the Irkens for good.”

“Or you could just...forget about it,” she looked at him, into his eyes, in her unblinking and unrelenting way, “let the rest of the universe deal with them while you go on live your life. Go back to hunting yetis and vampire bees or whatever. You know, do the stuff that used to make you happy instead of obsessing over-”

“My obsession is what saved this planet, Gaz!” Dib snapped, and Gaz’s surprised expression would have broken his heart if he weren’t so angry.

Enough of that. Enough of her.

He stormed up the stairs, back to his room, and tossed the camera onto his bed. After all this, after everything, she still didn’t understand. He supposed she simply couldn’t understand. No one could. And that hurt, of course it did, but it also made him angry. How much had he sacrificed for humanity? How many hours, how many days of his life, spent in a desperate clash against Zim? He’d given up his childhood for them. He’d given up his flesh, his blood.

He’d given up his innocence.

He looked at the PAK, sitting harmlessly on his desk, its ports glowing faintly in the darkness. He scooped it up, held it in his hands, ran his fingers over the cold metal. He’d been talking to it a lot these days. He didn’t know why. If there remained anything of Zim in there, surely it couldn’t hear him, but he took comfort in it nonetheless.

Sometimes it was mild conversation. How school was going. How he’d managed to disappoint his father again. Sometimes he’d complain. Sometimes he’d rant.

And sometimes he’d cry, something he had never dared do in front of Zim while the Irken was alive. But he’d killed Zim, and what harm was there in weeping before the remains of a vanquished enemy? Dib could sob before the bones of a foe. It was all right. Zim couldn’t respond. He couldn’t mock.

Dib, though, could mock all he liked.

He brushed his knuckles across the PAK’s smooth surface.

“I’m going to stop them, Zim. The Irkens. I’m going to stop them for good. And you...you’re going to help me.”

He could have sworn he saw the port lights pulse. 

---

 

He gasped, arching awake. The ship’s interior lights blazed above him. Another nightmare. Another nightmare from another time.

Unimportant. Beyond him.

And yet, there was this slight hurt, the small ache of seeing his little sister’s face in his mind. The memory of her voice. That Gaz was gone, long gone. He didn’t think about her much. No point in it. But sometimes she would crop up in his dreams, when he had them, and he’d wish that things had turned out differently.

Luckily, Two wasn’t there to see his weakness. He had the Irken on a leash, a graciously long one, in his opinion, but there was only so much a leash could do. If Two managed to worm his way out of it, as was so common with Zims, he would flee, and where would Dib be then?

Alone among ruins once again.

A Two awake and aware enough to see that Dib could still dream, could still hurt...that would be a setback. His desire was to be able to slip that leash off and have Two remain steadfast at his side. A good dog. A loyal second hand. Two had gazed up at Dib in admiration once, and it was a look he longed to see again; that lucid, slavish devotion, the sycophantic worship that had once filled him with so many peculiar emotions, rare happiness among them. Rare happiness and a strange fondness he hadn’t known what to do with.

He smoothed out the creases in his coat and strolled down the walkway, toward the bridge. The ship glowed around him, pinks and grays at every angle. He admired their work as he went, the fruits of their labor. The mighty vessel was alive again, blazing, burning with light, its command decks pulsing with neon readouts, bright-lit buttons.

And there at the center of it all, the enormous circular room that the Tallest once led from, lay his precious gems. Two, standing at blue-eyed attention before a console. Behind him, on either side, the PAKs, those large rounded domes, wired to a terminal and flashing.

Dib knew they could still think, on some level. Still feel. And well, there was no need for that. He’d fix it soon enough. For now, his attention was on Two.

He’d been watching the Irken, watching him closely, ever since he’d had Two help him with the PAKs. Because he thought he had seen brief flickers of red against Two’s blue, bleeding into purple. He thought he’d heard tiny whimpers, thought he’d seen hesitancy in Two’s hands. For a brief and panicked moment, he knew there must be an error in the code.

No. His Virus was too absolute, and Two had wrenched the metal shells apart upon his command, scattering bones, and the beauty of that moment was burned into Dib’s brain.

There had been no error, only Dib’s own paranoia.

He approached Two, the PAKs, ran his hands over the domes, marveled at them. The urge to dig in, to shovel out the innards and devour them, had been strong. But Dib had quickly realized that they would have been too much for him; Zim’s PAK he could handle, the PAK of what amounted to a worker bee. Elite, perhaps, but lesser than a Tallest. And besides that...there was a...familiarity. A bond. An understanding, something he hadn’t realized until the metal shell had wired itself to his skull.

He’d known Zim. Fusing with the PAK had been an immensely painful experience, but he’d been able to keep a handle on it, on himself, because he’d known Zim’s ins and outs and peculiarities, perhaps even better than he’d known his own.

The Tallest...he couldn’t say what would come along for the ride if he haphazardly hooked himself up to them. And so he decided to err on the side of caution. Use the ship as a great reservoir for whatever those precious PAKs held. A well he could dip his ladle into whenever he desired.

“Stop running Dib Virus,” he said casually, bending to inspect one of the ship’s readouts. Behind him, Two dropped to his knees with a ‘whumph’. “Looks like they’re ready for the transfer. You did good, Two.”

Two glowered weakly at Dib from his place on the floor. He looked sick; not from lack of food or rest or the weakness that came with those conditions, but with the terrible knowledge of the things he had done to his beloved leaders’ corpses. What he’d done to what remained.

And still Dib wanted more.

“You can do the honors,” he said, skirting aside and demonstrating the control panel with a flourish. Two glared up at him.

“What honors? What more do you want from me?”

“There used to be a time when you’d do anything I asked,” Dib noted, “no question.”

“You were me, then. Not...whatever you are now. If I had known-”

“But you didn’t, Two,” Dib said, kneeling down. He took hold of Two’s hand, placed his palm to the flat of his back, and helped him to his feet. Two stared warily all the while, wobbling on weak knees. “You didn’t. And unfortunately for both of us, I started to like having you sing my praises.”

“Why?” Two asked, swatting away Dib’s hand as he made to grasp the Irken’s antenna.

“Wouldn’t you?” Dib asked, and an astonishment briefly crossed Two’s face. It was obviously something he hadn’t considered, and that singular look told Dib that yes. Two would have. He smirked and took hold of the antenna he’d been reaching for, absorbing Two’s startled gasp. “You could say I got addicted. Addiction, Two...it’s a dangerous thing. It’ll make you into something you don’t want to be. Something you thought you never could be.”

Two’s eyes darkened. A threatening expression under different circumstances. An expression that knew what Dib was implying. Dib could see it, even now, the slight sheen of sweat on Two’s skin, the fevered fire in his eyes. He chuckled.

“Just be a good boy and we won’t have to resort to that command, or the Virus. Now…” he said, moving aside again, “the honors?”

“...I still don’t know what you expect me to do,” Two said, voice low.

“We want to load the Tallests’ PAK data into the ship so we can access the information inside, right? But we don’t need them rattling around in there making things complicated.”

A horror dawned on the Irken’s pale face, one Dib had not seen since Two had first glimpsed his leaders’ dusty bones.

“You want me to…”

“Delete them,” Dib confirmed.

“No,” Two looked up at Dib as if Dib had just commanded him to sprout wings and turn into a bird. Wholly unthinkable, deleting his Tallest, the idea alone something his brain could barely process.

But it was a necessary thing. They’d use the ship itself as a filter, a seive, separating personality from function. Skim off whatever consciousness remained. Dump it like the muck it was.

It was a necessary thing, and he wanted Two to do it.

“No?” Dib asked, brows raised.

“No,” Two repeated. He backed away, head shaking under the hood of his cloak, “vile worm! You don’t even know what you ask of me!”

“Oh, I think I do,” he stepped forward in time with Two’s steps back. It wasn’t long before the Irken was pressed against a control dash, Dib the ominous specter hovering over him. “You’ve already done half the work,” he gestured to the mound of bones piled in a precarious heap nearby, “now we just need to get rid of the rest.”

“My Dib wouldn’t have done this,” Two said, his eyes narrowed. The fight was beginning to creep back into him. Enraging. Exciting. Dib leaned in further, close enough to smell Two, to smell the stale blood staining his purple cloak.

“I’m not your Dib. And you’re not my Zim. And these might not have even been your Tallest. It’s just you and me now, Two. You don’t need them, and I certainly don’t, so why not dump them?”

“I wouldn’t have asked you to kill your family.”

Dib slammed his curled fist on the dash next to Two, delighting in the Irken’s startled jump.

“Wouldn’t you have? You’re a Zim. Evil. Hateful. You’re a fucking monster.”

“You’re asking too much!” Two asserted. A mix of plea and rage. Rage seemed to be winning out.

“I’m not asking you anything. I’m telling you.”

There was a sudden flash in Two’s eyes, the snarl on his lips, it reminded Dib of Two’s time in the Zimvoid arena, triumphing over every single opponent that came his way. Echoes of the fury, of the fire, the vicious way the Irken had fought in his prime, the vicious way the Irken had fought for him...and some little part inside of Dib, a childish part, felt the cold stab of fear.

And Two must have caught sight of this gap in the armor, because he lunged without warning, sinking his teeth into the flesh of Dib’s throat, his claws into Dib’s bony shoulders. Dib let out a strangled yell, stumbling backwards, trying to pry the snarling creature off. Irken teeth were too soft, too rounded, jaws too small to deal fatal damage, but Dib could feel his throat closing shut with the force. He struggled to breathe.

Two wrestled him to the ground, teeth a vice, moving his claws from Dib’s shoulders to the flanks of his neck. Needletip fingers dug tight into skin, piercing, choking, and Dib gasped for air under the sensation of blood, warm and trickling down his shirt.

PAK legs erupted out the back of Dib’s head, flashing forward to skewer Two through both shoulders. The Irken piped out a cry of pain, and that was all Dib needed to free himself; he wrenched his head to the side and hurled Two through the air. The Irken hit a console counter and fell, bleeding, to the floor.

Dib endeavored to regain his composure, regain his footing, lest Two find his second wind and resume the attack. He clambered to his feet, wiped at his neck, staring at the carnation color in his hand. He looked over his palm at the prone Two and felt his face twist.

Two looked up at him, and his hate dissolved into fear. He shook his head, mouthing ‘no’, but it was too late. The words took no time at all to say.

“Run Dib Virus.”

And he was rigid as a board on the floor, great blue eyes turned up in supplication, ready to receive. Ready to obey.

It was beautiful, so beautiful, and Dib felt his rage melt away, coalesce into something else, something perhaps even more dangerous.

Dib wanted more. As always, he wanted more.

“Éxtasis.”

Two’s limbs went slack and he moaned, and that moan crept its way through the length of Dib’s spine. Dib shuddered and Two writhed, arms and legs sliding uselessly across the floor.

“How do you feel, Two?” Dib approached, gazing down the cracked rim of his lenses toward the prone alien at his feet.

“Good…” Two breathed. Dib licked his lips.

“And who do you serve, Two?” he asked, voice a parched whisper.

“You…” Two moaned, staring at Dib in cloudy reverence.

Dib could stand it no longer. He dropped to his knees beside the Irken, hands roaming Two’s lithe body; his hips, his torso, his shoulders, trailing up to his neck, his face, smearing him with a rosy mix of their blood.

“Two,” Dib leaned in, whispering against limp antennae. Two mewled in response, lost to the submission, to the pleasure. He was everything Dib could have ever wanted in that moment, a beaten enemy whimpering on the floor below him. Worshiping him. Loving him.

His body burned. He cupped Two’s face, his thumb sliding past the Irken’s open lips, into his mouth. Two turned his eyes toward Dib, begging for guidance. For instruction.

Dib sighed in contentment, slipping his thumb out of Two’s mouth, wiping the wet digit across the plane of his cheek. Two was his, all his, splayed out on the floor for him. Gorgeous in blue. Gorgeous with the illnesses Dib had infected him with, the flood of sickness that had been among his finest work.

“Say my name,” he crooned, and brought the tip of an antenna to his lips, kissing it, “say my name.”

Two let out another little moan, Éxtasis-induced cloudiness clashing with the Virus. But at last, he opened his mouth, and Dib watched his face so he could see as well as hear, wanting to drink it all up, inhale Two’s adoration and ecstasy with Dib’s name on his lips.

“Zib.”

Dib sat back. He frowned. His fingers curled. And still Two floundered under him, lolling.

A problem in the code. Some kind of flaw.

Or maybe sheer Zim stubbornness, or maybe both. It didn’t matter. Dib clenched his teeth, clenched so hard his jaw cracked, and placed one hand flat on the floor beside Two’s head, leaning in to him, their faces an inch away.

“Stop running Dib Virus,” he growled, and Two’s eyes rolled over into their natural red. The Éxtasis function remained active. Two struggled to concentrate.

“Wha’happen…” he murmured, voice as sluggish as his movements.

“You made a mistake, Two,” Dib said, “you made a mistake.”

A brief flash of lucidity rippled across Two’s face. There spread the smallest of smirks, cocky and assertive even under the clouded veneer of inebriation.

“I...don’t make...mistakes.”

Dib stared at him.

And he returned Two’s smile, the points of his teeth glinting like knives under cracked lips.

“Let’s see what we’ve gotta do to fix you.”

---

 

He resumed operation of the twin viruses, flooding Two’s system once more with the heady cocktail of obedience and ecstasy. Two wouldn’t move. Couldn’t move.

Dib paced, circling the Irken, hands clasped behind his waist. Appraising at every angle. Every curve of skin. Every tattered piece of cloth. Every blossom of blood. He devoured the sight, his second-in-command, his captive. His greatest enemy and his greatest ally.

His Number Two. Blue-eyed and at his command and trembling as he struggled to stand amid rapture.

He came to a halt at Two’s back and lifted the torn cloak to expose the machine underneath. Delicately draping the folds of fabric over the arc of Two’s shoulders. Smoothing out the creases.

Cables snaked out from behind him. Slithering forward, they slid against Two’s PAK, caressing the dome. Delicately probing the sleek metal, the pink-lit crystal glass, for entrance. And when they found what they were looking for, those precious ports, they plunged themselves into all three, and Two gave a gasp, a whine, a groan. His knees wobbled dangerously, his body twitched. Dib took hold of his arms, lowering them both onto the floor. He sat, and Two rested against him, still and moaning while Dib penetrated his defenses in the eager search for information.

A bliss all its own, being so connected. Feeling for himself the power he held over Two. The power he could hold over any Irken. It was only a matter of finding them. But that would come later.

For now, everything he needed lay within Two.

...how many hours had passed? He didn’t know. But he couldn’t find the error. There must have been one, some crack in the code, some flaw in his perfect plan. Some germ in his spotless system. Something small. So small he couldn’t locate it.

There was, however, something...else. Something...big. Tucked in the back of Two’s mind like a letter in the pages of a book, creased with wear.

A memory.

The dark of night. A light at its middle, casting an orange glow on the ground, on the trees. A figure sits across from the fire.

So much like him. Dark, swooping hair. Circular lenses flashing red in the flames.

So much unlike him. Older. Taller. Stronger. A lean arm rests against folded knee. Pierced eyebrows and a scar across the face.

“You like fire too much,” the figure says, and it’s his voice. His own voice. The Dib of Two’s memory pulls a skewered marshmallow out of the fire and blows the flames away.

“How can someone like fire ‘too much’?” Two scoffs, “impossible.”

“You have a problem.”

“And its name is Dib.”

The other Dib struggles not to smile. There is a danger to him, a deadliness, just as there is to Two. But there’s also...comfort. Comfort despite sitting across from a sworn enemy. The comfort Dib had sensed from his own Zim before he’d put an end to it.

“You should be careful. You’ll end up catching your cloak. That’d be a shame.”

“It’s fireproof,” Two huffs, pointing with his own marshmallow-tipped stick, “as you well know. Zim hasn’t forgotten about the flamethrower incident.”

“I know, you remind me all the time. How is it that I’m footing the bill for this again?”

“Eh?”

“I brought the fire and the food. What’d you bring?”

“Myself,” Two answers haughtily. Dib snorts.

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

“Yes,” Two says, but his voice has dropped low. The other Dib’s expression shifts in the flicker of the flames. It is an expression Dib recognizes.

Hunger.

“We can’t keep doing this,” he says, but he’s moved now. No longer across from Two but beside him.

He’s tall and fit and handsome and Dib hates him.

“So you’ve said, human,” Two remarks airily, stuffing the marshmallow in his mouth. The other Dib watches him eat, and there is no disguising the look in his eyes.

“It’s not healthy.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m in perfect condition.”

“I don’t mean it like that.”

“I don’t care for human double-speak. Tell me what you mean or don’t bother saying anything at all.”

“You’re terrible. I don’t know why I do this.”

“Zim knows why,” Two says, poking at the memory Dib’s dark hair with the marshmallow-goo end of his stick. He smirks and grabs the stick, yanking Two forward. Against him. His lashes are low against his cheeks, lips still upturned in that slight smile.

“I oughta kill you right now.”

“But that’s not why we’re here, is it?”

“No,” he demurs, “but there’s always tomorrow.”

“Zim will be out of town tomorrow, so if you’re going to try and kill me-”

“Shut up, idiot,” he says, and-

The cables retracted like whips from Two’s PAK.

Dib stared at the Irken slouched against him, at the smooth curve of his skull, the thick black antennae, trying to reconcile.

He had seen much in his time in the void. Much in his desperate crawl through the universe, his journey through the frayed tears of reality. But this was something...new. Emotion roiled inside him. 

Shock. Disgust. Curiosity. Yearning.

But above all...anger. Anger, burning like a sun in his chest.

He didn’t want to see more.

He had to see more.

He sat on the bridge amongst the stars and the bones and, with Two in his arms, dove back in.

Chapter 4: The Outlier

Notes:

Sorry it took so long, but I'm finally back with another chapter! Please note the fic tags, and I hope you enjoy!

Thunder. Dark skies. The white silhouettes of screaming gulls are outlined against charcoal-black clouds. They are on a slick dock, and the ocean roils before them, all storm-blue water and crashing foam. Two has his hood up, but nothing much else in the way of protection from the elements. Perhaps he’s found a method better than child-safe glue to defend himself. Not surprising.

Two’s eyes shift toward the cloaked figure undoing the mooring on a boat, a small cabin cruiser. The figure straightens, looks back. Round lenses dotted with ocean spray.

Him. Another Dib. Another Dib to add to his list of enemies.

Something he hadn’t counted on.

An Outlier.

“This is foolish. Even for you,” Two remarks. His tone is airy, but there’s something underneath that betrays concern. The Outlier Dib shrugs and inspects a dent on the side of the boat.

“You could still come with me. We could use the Voot and be there in a fifth of the time.”

“Zim has more important things to do than chauffeur you around,” he scoffs. The Outlier’s white-scarred lips crease in a frown.

“And I’ve got more important things to worry about than whatever half-assed world domination scheme you’ve got planned.”

“Viva la revolución,” Two remarks sarcastically.

“Sí, exactamente. No hagas pucheros, querido.”

“I’m not pouting,” he snaps, but now there are hands on his shoulders. One is clad in a fingerless tactical glove. The other is metal. He grips Two’s slight shoulders gently and leans in to kiss his forehead, under the hood of the cloak.

“I won’t be gone long. A couple weeks.”

“I don’t care. My life doesn’t revolve around you.”

“Good, that would be pretty sad. I can’t even imagine.”

“Just get out of here so Zim doesn’t have to look at your smug face any longer.”

The Outlier smirks, leans down for one last kiss. Then he slips over the edge of the boat, untying the aft mooring.

“What if you never see me again?” he asks as he works, “you wouldn’t want those to be your last words to me, would you?”

“No. I would want to say something worse.”

“You’ve got time.”

But Two doesn’t speak again. He just watches the boat drifting away from the dock, the man positioning himself at its console. The vessel roars into life with press of a button, and he looks toward Two. His lips move, curving into words that Two can’t hear through the thunder and the engine.

And when the boat turns and speeds off, cutting through the choppy water, Two is left standing alone. He watches the wind howl through the Outlier’s hair, billow his heavy cloak, until the boat disappears over the edge of the dark horizon. 

---

 

And that was where Two’s memories of his Dib tapered off. There were no more. The only thing that came after were things Dib already knew; the distress signal, Pandora’s Quadrangle, the portal, the Zimvoid. Just as the Outlier had ventured off into the stormy seas, lost to memory, so had Two.

Dib hadn’t given it much thought before. Where the Zims came from, what their lives were like before the Zimvoid. He’d assumed they were more or less like his Zim, and that their versions of Dib would be more or less like him. He hadn’t considered that things could be so...different. And that Two, of all people, his Two…

He tried to keep his mind on track. He had his target. Zero. Zero and his pathetic excuse for a Dib. Finding them, destroying them, had been his driving force these past few terrible years, a comforting light at the end of a dark tunnel.

But now...this new revelation had his head turning with thoughts, and the crosshairs that had once been focused on Zero threatened to shift toward a new mark. He had seen where Two’s love lie. What loyalty could he expect to wring out of him now? Earning Two’s allegiance as a Zim had been easy.

But as a Dib, and especially when there had been another...

The memories were a bewildering mess. Two and his Dib, they were enemies. Two and his Dib, they were lovers. They hated each other. They loved each other. Something had brought them together, some great tether, bigger than the both of them, he could sense that. And he had seen it for himself, seen all the times the Outlier had kissed Two when he could have killed him, and the other way around.

How had this happened? Dib had to know. There sat PAKs full of knowledge, of secrets, mere feet away, but what he sought now was something so much smaller, something within Two. It hadn’t occurred to him that Two had...well, an actual life before this. Before him.

The way Dib saw it, Two was his, had been his ever since he’d ascended the ranks of the Zimvoid and took his place at the side of the false Number One. But now, here was this threat from the past, a ghost in the hallowed halls of Two’s memory. Dib had never had so much of an inkling.

And that made him angry.

Dib remembered the excitement on Two’s face, the wild gleam in his eyes when he’d discussed sending him back to his own dimension with an updated PAK, state-of-the-art weapons. The thrill of that knowledge, the pride of his accomplishment, all plain to see in the fiery reds of Two’s eyes...what had he planned on doing with it, if not killing a Dib?

He longed for more answers.

He doubted that Two would be willing to provide them.

So he dug his way back in, back through the tangle of memory and emotion. He didn’t know what he was looking for. All he knew is that he needed more. Always more. 

---

 

Darkness again.

The night before the Outlier leaves on that boat, clipping through the wild seas for parts unknown. He and Two sit on the rooftop of some shed out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere the city lights can’t fog up the night sky. That black canopy soars above them, endless and sparkling with its trillion galaxies. Dib, this other Dib, this memory, this Outlier...he pulls away from a telescope, gazing upwards with vision unmagnified, taking in the splendor of it all.

His eyes shine with childlike wonder, at odds with an otherwise hardened visage. And there is Two, watching him. The Outlier turns to him, a strange expression on his face. What is this expression that Dib can’t discern?

He worries that it’s love.

He laments that it’s not something he can recognize.

“What’re you thinking about?”

“How many fragile human bones in your squishy body would break if I kicked you off this roof right now.”

“We’re only one story up, so probably none. Cute that you think about my bones, though…”

His voice has dropped. Dib knows where this is going. His heart beats faster. He can almost feel Two’s lips spread into a reluctant smile.

“Are you still planning on leaving tomorrow?”

A nod of the head, black hair waving in the breeze. He’s abandoned the telescope, instead turning to Two, the cool metal of his right hand against Two’s cheek. He leans in, peppering the alien’s face with small kisses.

“Got something to see to,” he murmurs, “come with me.”

“You don’t think I have a life outside you, clearly,” Two scoffs, but he’s leaned in to the affection. “Zim has something to see to as well. You come with me.”

“Your thing can wait,” the Outlier pulls Two’s hood off, mumbling against his neck, leaning them both back against the rooftop.

“My thing is urgent,” Two argues breathlessly. Slender arms wrap around broad shoulders. “your thing can wait.”

“My thing is more urgent.”

Teeth nip at Two’s skin, and he shudders at the sharp pleasure.

“Then I suppose Zim will only be forced to tolerate your company for one more night.”

“One more night,” comes a liquid whisper.

And then they clash, lips together, tongues together, interlocked, interweaving. Clothes are pulled off, article by article, surrendered somewhere to the night. Leaving them both bare, both vulnerable. Limbs and skin and flesh, hot, and the stars are forgotten above them.

“Zim,” the Outlier sighs.

“Dib,” Two returns. His claws are all over the Outlier’s body, sliding across muscle, across scars, across tattoo-inked skin. And now they are grunting and panting, moving together, against each other, within each other. Ragged breaths and sultry moans. Somewhere outside of the memory, Dib feels his hips arch, hears a faint and keening whine.

“More,” Two demands.

“Yes,” the Outlier breathes, and the feeling is all-encompassing, overwhelming. The roll of their hips, undulating, the crescendo of heat, of pleasure, rising higher and higher, stretching, burning, until-

Dib cried out as he came to, jolting out of the memory. The cables connecting he and Two snapped back behind his head, into the PAK, and he sat dazed, shaking. Two still rested half-against him, eyes cracked blue and blank, a thin stream of drool running down the side of his chin.

Dib dropped his gaze. His thighs were spread. A hand was down his pants.

The quick, burning flares of pleasure, of release, morphed into twin flares of shame, of anger. He pulled his hand out of his waistband, leaving a smear across his belly, and kicked Two off of him. Tottering to his feet, he managed to find a rag, the remains of an old uniform he had torn off a corpse days ago.

This was...not something he did. New territory. And even as his body buzzed pleasantly with the aftershocks, he hated the way it had gotten there. Two was to blame. Once again, Two was to blame.

He approached Two once more as he wiped his hand, looking down the cracked lens of his glasses at the prone Irken. He could flatten him with his boot. Snap his ribs. Mangle an antenna. Cut him open, somewhere it would hurt, somewhere it would last. He had that power. He mulled it over, considering.

As for Two, he lay on his back, arms stretched to the sides, and he was...smiling. Smiling up into the air, smiling at nothing, wavering blue eyes glazed with bliss against a slack and pale face.

A slow blink, and...Two was looking up at him with that same smile. And the euphoria! The devotion in his eyes! It reached out to Dib, spearing him through the chest, and the bright burn of excitement took hold. His Virus and Éxtasis, Éxtasis and his Virus, working together in absolute harmony to achieve something beautiful. 

This was what he wanted. What he’d been looking for. A sign that it wasn’t all in vain, that Two could adore Dib just as wholly as he’d adored his false Number One.

A smile. That was all he needed. This blissed-out, beloved smile.

Maybe the Outlier wouldn’t be as much of a problem as Dib had thought. He could salvage this. He could make this work.

After all. Every relationship had its issues. 

---

 

When he woke Two, he did it gently. Eased him out of the grip of the Virus. Out of the clouds of Éxtasis. He would be tender. He would be calm. The violence between them, the blood, it had solved nothing so far. Gotten Dib no closer to his goal. He could be friendly. He could build an understanding with Two.

And Two might end up coming out on the bottom of that understanding, but he was not in control here, and would have to take whatever small graciousness he was given. Dib would go easy on him. Two didn’t deserve it, but Dib could be diplomatic.

He wasn’t a monster.

Two blinked out of the haze, wobbling precariously on his feet as he stood at the center of the cockpit’s great dais. Dib loomed before him, hands behind his back, standing in between the Tallests’ detached PAKs. The wires connecting them to the Massive’s console pulsed with light.

“You’ve been keeping things from me, Two,” Dib said, smiling amiably.

“Things…?” Two asked, still groggy from so long spent in twilight, “what…?”

“Big things!” Dib continued, turning to pace between the purple and black-backed domes, “tattoo-covered, glasses-wearing, metal-armed things.”

He stopped inches away from Two, swiveling to look down at him.

“You never told me about your Dib.”

“Why would I?” Two asked, eyes narrowed. The mention of this Dib, this Outlier, seemed to bring him back to his senses. Dib didn’t care for that.

“I’m your Number One. You should have told me everything.”

“You’re not my anything,” Two growled, and Dib felt the blood boil in his veins.

No. No, it would be okay. Calm. Gentle. He smiled again, tilting his head at Two, hands still behind his back. Leaving himself open. Vulnerable. Showing Two that he didn’t have to be a threat.

He didn’t have to be.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Two?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Two argued, gazing back with tired and suspicious eyes, “he’s a Dib.”

“Were you scared?”

“No!” Two snapped as if on instinct, brows furrowed, “scared of what?”

“Scared to tell Number One that you were fucking a human. Fucking a Dib.”

Two’s demeanor shifted entirely. His antennae lay flat. The color drained from his face, leaving his eyes dark and huge against pale skin.

“That’s what I thought,” Dib continued, still offering the friendliest countenance he could manage, “can you imagine? Everything you accomplished in the Zimvoid...all that hard work to get to the top. All the Zims you slaughtered. The sweeps you led against the rebels...so much of your blood and your sweat. All for nothing, if Number One had found out. After all...fucking a Dib! A real Zim would have never let you get away with that!”

“Then am I not a real Zim for doing it?” he snapped, obstinate.

A confirmation.

Two seemed to realize his mistake. The anger melted off his face, leaving surprise. Worry. Dib couldn’t help but laugh. Zims and their big mouths.

“So!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together, “how did it happen, Two? You and him? Which one of you is the race traitor?”

Two didn’t move, and he didn’t speak. He seemed to have learned his lesson, leery as the sweat gleamed in a thin sheen on his face.

“It’s okay, Two, it’s okay,” Dib cooed, "I’m not angry.”

“I don’t care if you’re angry or not,” Two muttered, but Dib could see the slight dip of his shoulders underneath the cloak, the almost imperceptible slack in the antennae. Relief. A lowering of the guard, however slight.

“You should care. I’m your Number One.”

“You’re not-”

“It’s just a shame,” Dib interrupted loudly, turning to pace once more. His footfalls echoed throughout the grand, empty cockpit. “You know my plan by now. The Irkens are my enemy, Two. Not Dibs. The other Dib, Zero’s Dib, he’ll have to be an unfortunate casualty. That’s just the way it is. But all the other Dibs? I want them to be able to keep living their lives in peace. Including your Outlier.”

Two’s spine straightened, the terse stillness of distrust creeping back into his bones. He remained unnaturally silent, waiting in pained apprehension for what words were to come next.

“I wonder how long he’s been looking for you.”

Dib watched as Two’s eyes grew, as large and as round as plates. Dib’s eyebrows arched.

“Must have been a while now. The dedication! Crossing over into alternate dimensions isn’t easy, Two! But, the universe is as much chaos as it is order, so these things happen. You and I are proof. And how was he able to find you? Not even I know which dimension we’re in. Smart, your Outlier. But, he is a Dib.”

“He’s not here,” Two rasped, but his voice wavered with hope, with anticipation, with fear, “he’s not here-”

“Not yet,” Dib allowed, dipping his head in a reluctant nod, “but soon.”

He turned, tapping a few keys on one of the cockpit’s consoles, and a hologram flared into life. Space. The Massive. Irk. And a small blue beacon on the outer edges of the display, flashing as it moved steadily toward them.

“You recognize that, don’t you? These readouts. That energy signature. Membrane tech. And who else would be out here in this dead void?”

Two gawked at the screen. The reflection of that flashing blue light pulsed in the red mirrors of his eyes.

“The way I see it, Two…” Dib said, leaning back against the console and tapping claw-sharp fingertips together, “we’ve got two options. This ship is capable of blowing up planets, isn’t it? I wonder what it would do to whatever sad little vessel he’s traveling in. I sure would hate to see another Dib scattered into atoms. Real shame. Don’t you think?”

Two stood, staring at Dib, his entire body terse and trembling with anger. There was that snarl again, that animal snarl, but with it was...caution. Two was calculating, for a Zim. And right now his mind would be turning, weighing his options. He knew he couldn’t attack Dib and win. He was too weak. And he knew if he tried, that might spell the death of his…

What were they? Dib didn’t know. Didn’t want to think about it.

“...what’s the second option?” Two finally hissed through interlocked teeth, his voice the lowest and most strained Dib had ever heard from a Zim.

“Second option...you help me upload whatever these things’ve got inside them to the Massive’s network,” he rapped his knuckles against one of the large PAKs, “and delete the leftovers. You know. Consciousness, personality. All the shit that doesn’t matter.”

“Why do you need me for that!?” Two cried out, voice tinged with desperation, “you could do it yourself! You keep insisting on this ridiculous-”

“Because!” Dib kicked off from the console, placing his hands on Two’s shoulders. The Irken flinched. Dib squeezed lightly, smiling. “Because. I’m your Tallest now. That’s something you need to accept. And this?” he asked, gesturing toward the PAKs, “this is the first step toward acceptance. I’m doing you a favor, Two. Putting it all out on the table. Letting you learn for yourself. I’m doing you a favor.”

Two goggled, shocked, up at him. It wasn’t the look of total devotion Dib had wanted. Not yet. He didn’t expect that yet. But it was a look of total fear, one that teetered on the edge of defeat, and that was almost as good.

He leaned in close, pressing the side of his cheek against the curve of Two’s skull, breathing in the alien’s scent.

“It’s up to you...time to make your choice,” he whispered, and kissed the base of Two’s antennae. Then he stood aside, sweeping his arm forward to guide the way. Waiting for what he knew would come next.

Two wobbled. His lip trembled. His eyes shifted, looking from Dib, to the PAKs, to the console, to the hologram.

Slowly...painfully...he stepped forward. Up to the console. Dib stood back, hands in the pockets of his coat, watching as Two worked.

Eyes down. Focused. Claws tapping at the screen. Avoiding looking at the PAKs, now that he had made his decision. Biting his lip. Hands shaking as they moved across the controls. The console flashed.

 

Information Upload in Progress

 

And again.

Designation Red

Designation Purple

Coding, Almighty Tallest

Confirm Deletion

 

A hesitation. The final tap of a button. The lowering of his eyes, his antennae. And it was done. Two stepped away, head bowed.

“Good Two,” Dib purred, taking Two by the wrist and pulling the Irken against him, “good...you see? All that fighting, all that posturing, for what? Isn’t this better? And now that that's taken care of, we can start the real work.”

“What real work?” Two murmured against Dib’s chest. He didn’t make an effort to move. He was too exhausted. To worn down. Beaten. Dib could feel this in the body he held against him, and he cherished it. 

“Finding Zero. We find Zero and end him, and then start it all over again.”

He felt the small shake of Two’s head against his chest.

“He’s unmatched. He tore through our ranks in a day. He’ll kill you.”

“I won’t give him the chance, querido.”

Two’s head snapped up, eyes narrowed and teeth bared. A flash of life, of rebellion.

“You don’t get to call me that.”

“Who’s going to stop me?” Dib laughed, “you? No. Your Outlier? Definitely not.”

“You said you wouldn’t attack him-”

“And I won’t, Two!” Dib said jovially, kissing him on the forehead before turning to monitor the upload, “I won’t. How could I? I don’t even know where he is.”

Two stood slack-jawed. Stunned. And then white-hot rage boiled up from inside him and he howled, all curled talons and gnashing teeth and burning red eyes.

“You deranged WORM!! Filthy degenerate, wretched beast!”

“Mm-hmm,” Dib hummed, rocking on his heels as he watched the information upload. He heard the skitter behind him, the telltale sound of light feet, lunging forward for the attack. Heedless of the danger, heedless of his own weakness. Dib sighed.

“Éxtasis.”

Two arched forward, his attack charge fizzling into a ponderous lurch. He sank to his knees, fingers still curled in impotent rage, the highlights of his eyes wavering as the function took hold. Dib smiled. Watched as Two was dragged back into that sweet twilight, the warm bliss. The alien blinked slowly, up toward Dib.

Dib bent down and rested on his knees in front of Two, stroking back his antennae.

“Here’s the thing, Two...here’s the sad truth. Back in the Zimvoid? The distress signals I sent out to all the Zims wasn’t the only signal. I had one for the Dibs, too. Coded. Any Dib with half a brain could figure it out. It told them everything, Two. Who I was. What I was doing. That their worlds would be safe now, because their Zims were gone, and soon the entire Irken race across all of existence would be gone too.”

He caressed Two’s cheek, the green skin smooth and clammy against the back of his hand. Two’s eyes didn’t leave him.

“The only other Dib I’ve seen is Zero’s. Your Outlier never even tried to show up. And after all this time! You, hanging here for years...and not a single peep. He isn’t looking for you, Two. He was never going to look for you. Maybe he’s dead. Those seas looked pretty rough. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. His Zim is gone. His world is safe. What more could a Dib ask for? But it’s okay, Two, isn’t it? It’s okay.”

Dib dipped down, kissed again the edge of one antenna.

“After all…” he said, murmuring against the appendage, “you don’t need rescuing, do you, Two?”

“...don’t...need rescue…” was Two’s slurred response, dazed eyes turned toward him. Dib drew back, smiled down at him, held his face in his hands.

“That’s right. You don’t need rescuing. Because you’re where you belong, Two.”

He pulled the alien against him, feeling the flutter of his antennae against his skin. He held Two close and gazed past him, out into the wondrous wilderness of black space beyond.

“With me.”

Chapter 5: Head and Hand

Notes:

After a million years, here's another chapter! Please note the tags before you read, I am not responsible for your eyeballs.

Also, I have created a Discord server for IZ, art, and general nonsense - if you're interested in joining, the link is in my profile page!

Two was trying not to think about the Outlier. Dib could see it in the quiet reflection of his eyes, in the rigidness of his movements. His words had taken their hold. Two didn’t believe them yet, not fully, but they were there, just under the surface, poisoning the alien’s hope, weakening his resolve.

It was for the best.

Two had a new life now. A new life with him. Gone were the days gallivanting around with that other Dib, long nights on rooftops staring up at the stars, claws tracing tattoos and a metal hand against green skin. He and Two were together, and that’s where they both belonged. The master and his servant, the head and the hand, the one and the two. Numbers as old and as important as the universe. Two would always follow one, and that was just the way things were. The mathematics of life. The structure of reality.

The simplicity of it, the inevitability of it, these things brought Dib comfort, calming the constant cacophony of his mind. He was trying not to think about the Outlier either. The situation had been handled. Those words that had dragged Two into bitter despair hadn’t been lies, after all, couldn’t have been.

The Outlier was gone, dead.

The Outlier didn’t care about Two, didn’t care that he’d vanished.

The Outlier was happier without him. Safe and free to do whatever a Zimless Dib would want to do.

And even if none of these things were true, at the very least, the Outlier was dimension upon dimension away, and even if he had wanted to find Two, that opportunity had long since passed. The Zimvoid was, at this point, barren nothingness, and something Dib had long left behind.

Dib thought of the Outlier finding his forsaken dimension, finally reaching it in the search for lost love. He thought of the emptiness, emptiness that he’d been painfully familiar with. He thought of the Outlier, trapped as he had been, spending his last fruitless days searching the void, growing thinner by the day, weaker by the moment, until at last there was no energy left to look, to move. A cloaked corpse laying on the cold ground of a ruined world.

Dib could survive where the Outlier could not, and that brought him peace.

And besides, everything was falling into place, just as everything always had. Two had obeyed him, reluctantly, but that solemn acquiescence left jagged cracks in the thick shell of stubbornness Zims were so well known for. The deletion of his Tallest, the knowledge that he would never see his Dib again...they were things that wore on Two, things that made him soft, made him pliable.

Dib could remold him. Build him back up. Better. Stronger.

They were together.

Just as importantly, the PAK information now stored in the Massive’s databanks would get them to Earth, get them to Zero. Get Dib to a new family. He expected they might fight him, but he was more than prepared to deal with that. He’d dealt with a lot of things. He was a veteran of terrible circumstances, had been since before his thirteenth birthday, but he knew now how to force things his way. A twist here, a nudge there. It had worked with the Zim hordes. It had worked with Two. It would work with Membrane, with Gaz.

He took his time sorting through this new information, sifting through it all, dredging up the endless lines of code for their glimmers of gold, their pockets of knowledge. The culmination of all the accomplishments of an intergalactic species, and of the species they had conquered, sat ready and waiting at his fingertips.

And at last, with this endless font of knowledge, with this rich marrow pulled from the bones of his enemies, he ripped the world asunder and started again into a new one. He at the helm of the mighty vessel, Two at his side. The universe opened up for him, for them, and they were somewhere else, a whole new reality to fix. An entire universe for him to shape.

They would travel through realities until they reached the one he wanted – he knew what he was looking for. The ship would tell him what he needed to know, when he needed to know it.

A god in a new world. The temptation to explore was great. He had wanted to make it down to Irk, see the broken piles of mournful dead. He wanted to visit each planet, each lonely comet, wanted to bask in the wonders of space, its infinite reach beckoning him after so long in his small and ruined reality. But he had his target, and he would see this new mission through.

And then, afterwards...who could say? All of existence was at his fingertips.

But for now, there was Zero, and the promise of death. Dib hadn’t decided yet if it would be swift or sustained. He had tried talking it over with Two, but the alien didn’t share the same concerns.

“You’re flying to your doom,” Two warned, in a rare moment where Dib had him lucid and awake, “he’s dangerous.”

“And you aren’t?” Dib laughed, amused, “with the way you ripped through the Zimvoid ranks?”

Two glowered at him from his place at the fore of the bridge. He liked to stand where the Tallest used to. Out of pride or out of guilt, Dib didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.

“That Zim not only sliced through the others like a Gir through butter,” Two argued, “he collapsed thousands of alternate realities. In less than one day. It’s presumptive to think you can destroy him so easily.”

“Zero doesn’t scare me, querido,” Dib smiled. Two stiffened. He’d been using that pet name every now and then, a pointed little barb to poke Two back into place. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But he couldn’t deny the strange thrill that ran through him to see Two’s shoulders stiffen, his claws clench.

“I told you not to call me that,” he hissed under his breath, eyes flashing beneath the hood of his cloak. Dib lounged back in his chair, lacing his hands over his chest.

“Or what? You don’t have any power here, Two. Whatever you have is whatever I choose to give you, so if I were you, I’d be a little more gracious.”

“Gracious!” Two barked, teeth bared in a threatening but ultimately useless display, “after everything you’ve done to me?”

“I’ve made you happy,” Dib said, watching the way Two’s eyes went wild with disbelief, “I’ve given you purpose. Pleasure. What else could you possibly want?”

“I want to go home!”

“Back to Irk?” Dib lifted an eyebrow, “or back to the Outlier?”

Two stewed, seething at him, before turning away. His PAK burned angrily underneath his cloak. Dib sighed, patted his thigh.

“Come here.”

“Absolutely not,” Two looked over his shoulder, baffled Dib would even suggest such a thing.

“I can make you, Two. Did you forget that?”

“You’re delusional if you think I’d willingly sit on your lap like some neutered pet,” Two spat.

“Oh no, Two...I don’t want you neutered,” Dib said lowly through his smile, enjoying the slight shiver that rocked Two’s frame, “and I’d rather not rely on the Virus or its various...functions. Unless...is that something you want, Two? Don’t tell me you’re acting up on purpose.”

Two turned, opening his mouth, when Dib stood; a sudden motion that had Two shutting up before he even got a word out. Dib walked toward him, but Two didn’t back off, holding his ground and gazing back, defiant, even though he couldn’t hide the small quake in his knees.

“Why wouldn’t you,” Dib said, pressing his thumb to Two’s chin, “when the punishment feels so good? If you want me to run that function again, all you need to do is ask, Two. I want you to enjoy this.”

“You’re deranged,” Two breathed, but Dib could see the heavy rise and fall of his chest, the hunger in the darkened depths of his eyes.

Two wanted it as much as he didn’t want it, that was plain to see. He danced on the edge of the chasm, gazing down in the endlessness of that blissful void, both longing and terrified. Dib would push him over the edge if he had to. As always, he would do what needed to be done. What no one else would do.

There had been many of these moments lately, things Dib noticed as they traveled soft and silent toward their destination. Two, in his lucid moments, free of the Virus, free of Éxtasis, wild eyes against clammy skin, roving toward Dib. Free of Éxtasis, but nigh-desperate to be back in its clutches. Two wouldn’t say so, though.

Not yet. 

---

 

The innards of the ship seemed as endless as the cosmos it traveled through. Strange passageways leading to stranger rooms, incredible machines whose functions Dib couldn’t have even discerned without the knowledge ripped from those PAKs, all that was left of the Tallest besides their bones. Thanks to Two’s sleepless, Virus-induced work getting the ship back online, they’d been able to activate the cleaning systems, sweeping unsightly skeletons out of the way, piling them into storage for study.

Dib accessed this storage room often, finding himself sitting among the mountains of pleasant pink bones, old uniforms and buzzing PAKs. Shifting through each, inspecting, analyzing. He loved the soft clacks when he’d pull one from a pile and it shifted, bone upon bone, loved the feeling of the smooth, slightly rubbery surfaces against his skin.

Zim’s bones had been the same, just...fresher. Wetter.

Oh, Dib had waffled for days after the decapitation. Staring at the little body in its preservation tank, pacing in front of it, watching for life, for movement. There had been none, of course. Dib had snuffed out that flame with nothing more than muscle and metal and rage, and all that was left of who Zim had been was locked inside that PAK. But Dib had gotten over his initial hesitation. Of course. Hadn’t it always been his dream to cut Zim open, see what made the Irken tick? Hadn’t he delighted in the thought of alien guts spilling out onto the table, of rooting through the viscera, the thrill of discovery, the thrill of victory?

The reality of it had been a lot more disappointing than his fantasies.

Still, he remembered the feel of bone, the color of it all, strange shapes and smells and emotions. That had been before he’d attached the PAK. Before he set out on a new mission.

He usually left Two alone as he went to explore the ship. Sometimes under the control of the Virus, sometimes Éxtasis, sometimes both. There would be no escape. Soon, Two wouldn’t want to escape. He’d learn, and they could rule over their realities together.

He almost missed the skeletons scattered about the ship. This felt...lonelier, somehow. But as he came across a large bank, floor to ceiling tubes, each marked with their own little symbols, he was reminded that he was never alone, not truly.

‘Smeets,’ part of him said.

“Hm,” Dib hummed.

‘Don’t touch them,’ part of him said. The stupid part. The captive part. Dib laughed. Irkens were hive animals, dedicated to the expansion and proliferation of their kind, and couldn’t help but be maternal.

He considered, staring up at the bank and its rows of glass tubes, its soft purple-blue glow. He could smash them all. That was certainly doable. Smash them all and eliminate this new generation before it even had so much of a chance to exist.

Or he could pluck each out of its little tube for examination, for study. He pulled one of the containers out of the wall and gazed inside at its tiny occupant. Harmless, helpless. Floating in thick goo, dead and alive at the same time. It didn’t have a PAK, none of them did, but he was sure he could rig some up. Implant them with the Virus, with Éxtasis . Raise them to obey him without question. An enemy turned army. He could do that. He had the power.

An interesting thought.

He slid the tube back into its recess, bouncing the idea around in his head. He’d save that for the future, after Zero was dealt with.

It was a future he looked forward to. 

---

 

Naturally, his trips into the dark recesses of Two’s mind hadn’t ceased. But with time, they had grown more...difficult. Gloomier. Not because Two was putting up a fight, he’d ceased to be much of a hassle in that regard. Tired, weak, worn, it was as easy as it had ever been to push past his meager defenses and delve deep inside. But hour by hour, day by day, Two’s mind became muddier, his thoughts darker. The code inside his PAK seemed to grow thorny with pain, and each foray in left Dib with scratches and snarls, feeling the anguish in himself that Two couldn’t help but feel.

It turned his stomach. It made him sick.

But the rewards were greater than the trials. The knowledge, the memories, the glimpses into the deepest parts of Two’s life, the life he’d lived before. And underneath it all, Éxtasis , coursing through Two’s PAK, through his body, into Dib, and he felt warm and whole and content in a way he never had before.

He hated Two’s memories of the Outlier, but these were where he spent most of his time. Hot nights and cold drinks and ocean breezes, claws on skin and moans on mouths, the look in the Outlier’s eyes, the swell of emotion in those locked gazes. These memories were like movies, unreal as they were vivid, incredulous and perfectly believable all the same.

There were some memories he couldn’t get to. Not yet. But with time, with patience, Dib could find them. After all, digging around in Two’s precious memories couldn’t be more difficult than finding his way out of the Zimvoid.

And on each viewing, each new piece he uncovered, he found something growing within himself. A hunger. A desire. Something that hadn’t been a large part of his life until recently. Two had awoken it within him, this burning, and Dib didn’t quite know what to do with it. What he did know was that it felt good, having Two against him, sinking into the alien’s past, where he was warm and loved and driven by a pleasure that wasn’t Éxtasis, but just as addictive.

He mapped out these memories, saving them, storing them. He could give Two such pleasure, he knew he could, if Two would take it. And the alien had stopped flinching at his touch, had stopped drawing away when Dib approached – it was taking time, but Dib had that in spades. Two was resigning himself to the truth, that he belonged here, that he was better here, and Dib soaked in the heat of his victory.

But there was more to be had, and he wanted it.

---

 

As much as Dib wanted to forget about the Outlier, as much as he wanted Two to forget about the Outlier...he found he couldn’t help it. His desire, his curiosity, it had gotten the better of him, as it usually did.

“What are you doing to me?”

Two’s voice was a croaking whisper. He lay helpless on the cool floor of the bridge, light-lined wires running from his PAK to Dib’s. Dib smiled, making the adjustments in his head, lining it all up. And still Two lay, prone in his pleasure, struggling to push himself up and slipping back down each time. The colors of his eyes rolled with bliss, with panic.

“Nothing that’ll hurt you, Two. Relax. I’m just...altering your perception a little. Just for a bit. I’m doing you a favor. You’ll like this.”

“My...perception…” Two managed to lift his head, blinking slowly, wearily. He was tired and beaten and in that moment Dib loved him.

“I’m taking you back, Two,” he said fondly, crouching to brush back a black antenna, “into a memory. Back to see your Dib again. You want that, don’t you?”

Two stared up at Dib with bleary and narrowed eyes, rolling the possibilities around. His expression spoke of distrust and alarm, and that made Dib angry, but he shoved the feeling down. He’d told himself to be gentle with Two, and he would be.

“My Dib…” Two said, and the words soured in Dib’s stomach because he knew they weren’t for him. 

“You’ll like it, Two,” he said, standing, “you’re going to have fun.”

“I don’t-” Two began to argue, but immediately, he froze. Dib had finished his work. The cables unhooked, retracting, slithering past his shoulders and behind his head. Sitting in a comfortable pilot’s chair he had claimed for himself, he leaned back, one leg crossed over the other.

And watched.

Two lay still on the floor for a few more moments. Then he lifted up and stood, wobbly on thin legs. He glanced around the room before his eyes finally settled on Dib.

“Dib,” he said softly. Dib smiled.

“Hey, Pumpkin.”

“I thought you were out on recon?” Two asked, walking forward. His footsteps were cautious, confused. But he was reliving the memory Dib had chosen, that much was clear. Caught in the past. He wasn’t seeing the great bridge of the ship, with its kaleidoscope view of passing realities. He was on Earth, in a cottage, with the sound and salt of ocean waves on the air and black night in its windows.

“Went sideways,” Dib said. He’d stored the memory in his own PAK, effortlessly mimicking the Outlier’s old words. Their voices weren't exact – his higher than the Outlier’s, and lacking its slight accent. Another way they differed. But it didn’t matter. As long as the memory was active, Two would see his Dib, would hear his Dib.

“Sideways?” Two’s face scrunched in confusion.

“Went badly. I chose to retreat instead of getting blown up.”

Two paused for a moment, then gave a small and cocky smile. Dib felt his worry lessen. Two was entrenched now, the look on his face said as much. A look he hadn’t seen on Two in person since their time in the Zimvoid.

“Good. Zim doesn’t want to have to pick up your pieces. Are you injured?”

“My leg. It’ll be fine. I just need to stay off it a while. I missed you, querido.”

“Naturally,” Two answered, sweeping forward. Dib uncrossed his legs and Two bent, running his hands down his left calf, feeling for wounds that did not exist.

“If you lose another limb, I’m not making you a new one,” Two said, placing a gentle kiss to Dib’s kneecap. Dib smoothed his palm over the curve of Two’s head.

“Mentiroso. With the way you fawn over my prosthetic? You’d be happy if all my limbs were metal.”

“Not all of them,” the Irken teased, shoving Dib’s knees aside.

“Most people wouldn’t consider that a limb,” Dib breathed, watching hungrily as Two’s fingers brushed against the crotch of his pants. His heart beat quick in his chest, flooding his body with fire.

“You have missed me,” Two smirked.

Dib’s entire body burned, from his feet to his PAK. He felt it, hot metal against skin, and the desire to dominate, to push Two onto the floor, to own him physically as he did mentally.

But he could be patient. He could play his part in this memory. Right now, he was another Dib Membrane, older and stronger and loved by Two, and he reveled in it.

“More than words can say,” Dib whispered, and cupped Two’s cheek. He kept his hand there, gently guiding Two up, toward him. Two climbed into his lap, knees on either side, and Zib could feel the pressure against him, the not-so-subtle press of alien hips.

Two leaned in to where an ear should have been but wasn’t, and whispered back.

“My throne...a throne worthy of Zim.”

“High praise,” Dib murmured, slipping his hands up Two’s tunic, feeling the thin ribs, the hollow of his stomach. In Two’s current world, he would be fit and strong and unmarred, at the peak of power. The currently reality was very different. Two was thin and weak and dotted with injuries that struggled to heal against the Virus in his PAK. Punishments. The consequences of trying to fight. But Dib loved it all the same, loved to see imperfections, loved to feel the damage he caused underneath his fingertips.

“You want me,” Two smirked, and Dib had to struggle to control his breathing. He thought he’d mastered long ago the art of his new anatomy, the art of breathing with no nose, with altered lungs, but now with Two on top of him, eyelids lowered, sultry and longing, he found himself losing air, panting with nothing to pant for.

Two’s eyes flickered for a moment, and Dib worried he was coming out of the memory. He tried to compose himself, to drag Two back into the farce.

“I don’t think I’ve ever kept that a secret, Pumpkin…” Dib cooed, airless. Two hesitated, and smiled, and for a moment, Dib saw himself from Two’s eyes, confident and suave and charming and ready to get what he wanted.

“How many times can you have me before you’re satisfied?” Two teased, dipping his head to Dib’s neck, biting the skin there, dragging his claws down the sleeves of Dib’s coat. Dib gasped, just as the Dib in the memory had done, aching and desperate. His hips hitched of their own accord, and he felt the thrum of a laugh snap through Two’s chest like a plucked guitar string.

“I don’t know, what’s my record?” he asked, slipping his hands down the back of Two’s leggings, marveling over the soft skin.

“Zim isn’t your personal scorekeeper,” he huffed, but there was a grin on his face as he pulled away.

“Then what are you?” Dib asked, accentuating the question with a pinch. Two yelped, and moaned, and pushed forward again, his antennae tangling in Dib’s hair. Dib licked his lips, he felt only seconds away from losing his composure, of collapsing the experience. Two and the Outlier and their damn banter.

It had been something he’d missed, and he hadn’t realized it until now.

“Sick of you wasting my time. If you want me…” Two placed his palms to Dib’s cheeks, brushing his thumbs against purple-veined skin as he leaned in and purred, “then take me.”

Heat flared through Dib like a sun, igniting every nerve, and with a growl pulled from deep in his throat, he dug his fingernails into Two’s skin, pulling him close, sinking teeth into neck. Two gasped, and groaned, and Dib could feel the warmth against him, could feel the alien trying to wiggle out of his clothing, he would have what he wanted, what his body had been screaming for--

A droning alarm blared into life, echoing throughout the bridge. Dib barely realized it at first, so wrapped up in the alien who was wrapped up in him, each lost to the memory in their own ways. But the alarm persisted, throbbing through the stale air like a headache, and slowly, almost unwillingly, Dib came around to what that alarm meant. He lifted his head from Two’s neck to view the console nearby, lit up with flashing symbols and readouts. 

"We’re close,” he murmured, a sibilant breath, “we’re close.”

He stood suddenly, sending Two tumbling off of him and onto the floor. He didn’t even look as the Irken lay, shocked, and strode past to investigate the console. Behind him, Two sat as if in a clearing fog, the lie he’d been mired in fading away. Blinking out of the memory and into reality. All good things.

Dib didn’t care, not with this new turn of events. The thrill of approaching victory had smothered the dark heat within him, something greater than Two, greater than the both of them. He studied the console and its information shrewdly, even as Two sputtered and gasped behind him.

The alien was trying to come to terms with what had just happened. In his lover’s arms one minute, with the salt smell of the ocean and words of love to soothe him. The next, back in the nightmare, the ghost ship that reeked of sweet decay and old machinery. Dib heard the alien let out a strangled howl, a wrenching sound of frustration, despair.

“What did you do?! You filthy-” Two’s voice trembled with either rage or anguish, Dib didn’t know, and he didn’t care. “How dare you!? Loathsome beast!!”

Dib was so engrossed that he barely noticed Two jolting forward like a hellion, all speed and claws, barely noticed until the back of his coat was shredded, and there were claws clamped around his PAK, yanking him back, digging into the veins, bringing forth gushes of carnation blood.

Dib screamed, and they wrestled against the console, struggling, scrabbling. But Dib had the upper hand, had always had the upper hand, and within seconds the alien was pinned by PAK legs that ran pink-red with both their blood. He pressed Two against the console with his hands, with PAK legs, pushing Two against the metal until the alien winced, milky pink teeth gritted in pain, fury.

“Why do you have to act up like this, Two?” Dib growled, digging his fingernails into Two’s shoulders. Two snarled, and Dib realized with a jolt that he had missed this fire. He missed it in his own Zim. He missed it in Two.

But this ferocity couldn’t exist as long as it worked against him. And he’d have to snuff it out, just as he had done before.

“How dare you use my own memories against me?!” Two shrieked, and Dib narrowly missed a sharp-tipped boot to the crotch, “vile worm!”

“Enough, Two,” Dib put his hand to Two’s face, shoving it to the side, forcing him to look at the readouts, “do you see this? Do you know what this is? We’re close. You have one enemy to focus on, Two, and it’s not me. I want to see you fight Zero. I want to see you triumph, like you did over every other pathetic Zim in that disgusting cesspool of a void.”

Two’s eyes shifted from the scrolling information to look up at Dib, uncertainty creeping into the searing red depths. Dib leaned in further, his lips an inch from Two’s skin.

The alien smelled good. Like lost lust and fire, adrenaline. Without even knowing he was doing it, Dib’s forgotten second tongue, long and normally curled beneath his more human tongue, slipped out to lick the length of Two’s cheek, tasting the sweet sweat, the rage, the fear.

“We’re close,” he purred, and now he was pressed against Two completely, the heat within him smothered, but not dissipated. He felt it growing again with Two against him, with this good news, with his victory on the horizon, “we’re close. You and me against Zero, Two, against his Dib, and then again against Zero’s Empire. Triumph. Victory. I want that. You want that. I know you do. It’s in your nature to want to win, Two. And when we do win…”

He leaned forward, not able to help himself, nipping at Two’s neck, trailing his tongues down the pulse he felt there, and whispered.

“When we win, it’ll be an ecstasy all its own.”

“I don’t want any pleasure you have to offer,” Two hissed. Dib smiled, took the tip of one antenna in between his fingers.

“You’re lying to yourself, querido…”

“Like you?” Two’s eyes narrowed, and a wicked smile crept across his face, malicious, a tongue ready to sting. “’Querido’. His word. Not yours. You are not him. You will never be him.”

Dib’s smile dropped into a frown. He felt his blood boil. And Two saw this, saw the wound he had caused, and dug deeper, spreading it apart with his words, digging into the meat of it.

“A disgusting creature. That’s all you are. A failure. A failure of a Dib whose only real success was defeating his failure of a Zim. You will never be my Outlier.”

Dib stared hard at Two, still, silent. The lights of the console flashed, illuminating them in pulses of pink.

And he felt his rage evaporate. Felt the wound close, begin to heal. Two hadn’t caught himself. Hadn’t even noticed. But Dib had.

In that moment, Two’s Dib had ceased to be Dib, and was now the Outlier. Separate. Intangible. Unreachable. Something no longer part of Two’s life. And that slip of the tongue poured more pleasure into Dib than any provocative memory ever could.

“That’s true,” he allowed, and backed off, releasing his grip on the alien. Two, weak, stay leaning against the console, staring up at Dib in wary confusion. Dib reached out, stroked his face, and Two didn’t shy away. His skin felt cool and soft under Dib’s knuckles. “But why would I want to be? After all...I can give you something that the Outlier never could.”

Two saw where this was going. He saw where it was going and he opened his mouth to object, to squeak out some kind of protest. But he could make no sound, and Dib saw in his eyes the fear, but also the anticipation, the excitement. That hunger, yearning, reaching toward him, begging for a bliss the Outlier could never give.

“Éxtasis,” Dib said, and Two gave a delicious moan and sank off the console and onto the ground, clutching onto Dib’s legs as he went, dragging claws down his pants. He stay sitting at Dib’s feet, latched onto his legs, resting his head against his knee, swept once again in the pleasure. Dib lay the palm of his hand against Two’s head, smoothing his thumb against the alien’s skull.

He wasn’t the Outlier. That was true. But he didn’t have to be.

He was something better.

And he was on his way to victory.

Chapter 6: There Is No Line

Notes:

Sorry it took so long for a new chapter! I've been dealing with uhhhhhalot of stuff. Also, small reminder that my Discord server is open, link is in my profile. I post extra depraved content there, so come on in if you're interested and also not an asshole. It's a small and friendly environment!

Anyway! Remember to note the tags, and enjoy.

It had been a mistake to fuse with the PAK. He’d thought that at the time.

The changes had come on quickly. The twist of fire in protruding veins, the melding of flesh, the stiffening of hair, keratin thickening, hardening to form rudimentary antennae. Fingers growing sharp at the tips, solid like knives, edges blackened as if dipped in flame. And that was to say nothing of the new senses, the new sensations. Everything, every smell and taste and sound and touch, overwhelming.

And then there was the voice at his ear, bodiless, screaming. The code of consciousness. Zim was still alive. Dib refused to acknowledge it.

He had killed Zim himself, had suffered through the nightmares, and so Zim couldn't still live. Frame upon frame, replaying in Dib’s mind every night like a horror movie. Blue metal and red eyes and pink blood. He saw the scene from his eyes. He saw the scene from Zim’s eyes. And both collided into a tableau of brutality, a type of violent rage Dib hadn’t known himself capable of.

But now he knew. And he could either push past it, forget it, and move on, or...embrace it. This newfound strength, something that had been burning in him, something he both feared and exalted.

The loss of his universe, of his family, had been a blow. But he was strong now. He could handle it. Besides, he was on his way to a new family, wasn’t he? His father and sister would be his father and sister no matter the time or the place. Things would go right this time. And that’s why he pushed, pushed his way through the universe, through the very makeup of reality. Weaving his way in and out of different dimensions, new places, that he, once upon a time, might have been keen to explore.

But now, there was only the scent of blood in the water, the call of destruction, and it lead him past these errant worlds and toward his prey. Death waited at the end, he knew that. Death for Zero and his Dib and the entire Irken race, across all possibilities.

He’d be a hero.

And this time, he’d make sure everyone knew it.

---

 

He’d found the right dimension. Zero’s PAK signature might as well have been a beacon. He’d stored away the signatures of every Zim who had crossed into the Zimvoid - none of them mattered, now, none except for Zero and for Two.

Zero’s signature and the ship’s guidance system, the knowledge wrenched from the shells of the Tallest and uploaded into new machinery, the endless starmap with all its territories and spaced out, lonely worlds...with all this, there was no problem setting course to the right Earth.

He ruminated on what he would do once there. Use the Virus, command Zero in lieu of killing him? A second Zim. He could rebuild his army. Two Zims and a genetic bank brimming with smeets, all waiting for his orders. It was a tempting thought, but one he brushed aside almost immediately. Zero was too volatile, and he couldn’t risk the Irken upending his plans for a second time.

Besides, he had Two. And for now, that was all he needed.

He looked over at his second hand, sorting through piles of machinery on the floor, weapons they had sourced from throughout the ship. Zero wouldn’t go down easy. Dib-Zero might not either, when the time came, because although he was a particularly pathetic excuse for one, he was still, after all, a Dib.

But he would be prepared, this time. Prepared for Zero’s combination of chaos and dumb luck, whatever anarchy that had allowed him to collapse dimensions and escape unscathed, all while Dib had to spend years in the backalley refuse of the universe. Dim corridors, lonely and unknown. Years he would never get back. The last fickle years of his childhood, erased.

He’d been easier on Two since their emergence into Zero’s dimension. Partly because he was in a good mood, his objective close at hand. Partly because the alien needed to build his strength back up, steel himself for the inevitable clash. Partly still because that last trip into Two’s memories, seeing his Outlier, having a metal hand against his cheek only for it to disappear, for the illusion to be shattered...it had broken something within him, some mechanism inside the watch that kept its time. He was just fine with that.

Longing for ghosts was something Dib had given up years ago. Two would do the same. The wheels were already in motion.

“Make sure you set aside something to take care of the robot,” Dib said as he approached from behind, placing a hand on Two’s shoulder, “and the moose, if he has one. Just in case.”

“You seem to think this will be easy,” Two responded, voice low and tone dour as he worked.

“After all our triumphs? I’m not worried.”

“You should be,” Two turned to look at him, eyes narrowed. Glazed cherry red orbs that searched Dib’s face a moment before continuing on. “He dismantled your entire operation once before. It’d be foolish to think he couldn’t do it again.”

“We’ll have the element of surprise on our side, Two,” Dib said fondly, patting the alien’s cheek before he turned to pace, one hand behind his back and tattered coat flowing behind him, “we’ll leave the Massive outside sensor range. Take a smaller vessel down to Earth. Remotely infect his base with the Dib Virus. The base will in turn infect him. He’ll be just lucid enough to know who we are, why we’re there.”

He stopped and turned on his heels back toward the Irken, smiling.

“Aware enough to be afraid. To regret interfering. And once he’s dealt with, we’ll find his Dib and get rid of him too. Dad and Gaz might be a little troublesome-”

“Why the Dib? He’s not a threat,” Two gestured contemptuously toward an invisible enemy, “you saw him.”

“There can’t be two Dibs in the same dimension, Two,” he chided, “much less the same world. Don’t tell me you’re sympathetic? Just because your Dib wasn’t an enemy-”

“He was an enemy,” Two spat, but stepped back almost on instinct, the now-learned fear of retaliation, “and I don’t care about Zero or his Dib, except that they’re both insane enough to get us killed.”

Dib smiled, tilting his head to the side.

‘Us’.

The word sang through his head like a lovely chime.

He was part of Two’s equation now, whether the Irken realized it or not. Whether he liked it or not. And that simple fact filled Dib with a thrill that would be second only to his victory over Zero, because – well, this was its own little victory, wasn’t it?

Two was his, and he didn’t even know it. He would, someday. And Dib could be patient. He could wait.

“We have each other, Two,” Dib cooed, stepping forward once again to rub an antenna tip between long-blackened fingers, “we’re a team. Partners. Didn’t you and your former...partner...always triumph?”

“Mostly thanks to Zim, yes,” Two grumbled sourly, trying to flick his antenna out of Dib’s grasp, but attempting nothing else to try and escape.

“Then this won’t be any different. It can’t be worse than whatever you two were fighting against.”

The alien didn’t answer to either confirm or deny, and only went back to his work, wrenching a broken component off a machine and tossing it aside. Dib pulled back and watched him for a moment, took in the perfect curve of his PAK, the fluttering antennae, the tattered and bloodied purple of his cloak. An old and ragged thing, torn to pieces by time and by Two’s own struggle against the new life Dib had laid out for him.

But it would be a good life, for them both.

“Take a break and eat,” Dib said, picking up a bag of chips from a store of snacks he’d scrounged up and tossing it toward Two. The Irken twisted to catch, looking at him in confusion.

“I can’t have my Number Two half-starved, can I?”

Two, once again, didn’t have a response. Unusual for a Zim, but Dib didn’t mind. The alien was learning his place, his subservience, his duty. And besides, didn’t Dib already have Zim’s voice in his head?

This was something he thought on as he left Two and roamed the halls of the great ship, searching. Zim had been in his mind for years now, closer than ever, louder than ever, but more distant, quieter at the same time. The murmurs, the whispers, in the beginning they felt as if they were driving him to madness, but all the same, they’d been...subdued. Beaten. There was no wit or tenacity left, just the low tinny interruptions that Dib knew, somehow, would never disappear.

What was left of Zim...whatever that was, he was helping him now. Had been for a while. Helping him survive. Out of the innate desire for the PAK to survive itself, to preserve whatever body it was attached to, or maybe even out of some kind of strange and twisted bond. After all, Dib and Zim had known each other inside and out, had pushed and pulled for the entire time Zim had been on Earth, up until the very end. Tangled with one another like rats in a too-small space, miring themselves deeper and deeper until ultimately, two became one.

No, Dib didn’t regret it.

Now he had a new Zim, one that would be more manageable, one he had learned to manage. He could keep Two in line and keep him happy at the same time. He had the means…

And he had the memories.

Another recollection, one Dib had hauled out slowly, painfully, from the hidden depths of Two’s psyche. Two’s mind, Two’s PAK, a memory stored in both, a memory precious in both. He had told himself he’d stop delving, because these trips ultimately only soured him. But they also brought knowledge, and that was an addiction, knowledge and this warmth, this love, a body against his in the cold night, a hand to hold -

Some burnt out building, long abandoned and lost to the jungle around it. Two has set up a rudimentary workstation there. Irken tech, wires and screens, loadouts and holograms. He studies one, the interior of some estate, and glances down at himself, the reddish pink of his uniform. His usual cloak is missing, and instead of its warm comfort there is a stab of bitter regret. He’d lost it in some skirmish, some recent battle. A battle they’d barely made it out of.

A pointed boot taps against the concrete floor, antsy. He turns from the projections with a huff and paces, arms crossed and hissing to himself, words he doesn’t remember and words Dib cannot make out.

Six heavy knocks to the side of the building. Two looks up, and there is a flood of relief. This is some code, some unusually primitive thing to establish that a friend is about to enter, that movement should not be met with instant eradication. And of course, there he is, tall and dark and broad-shouldered against the sunlight-framed doorway, this specter Dib hates and has never met.

A friend. An enemy. A lover. A rival. Something beyond the capacity to say.

They never came up with the right word for what exactly they were. Now they never will.

“Took you long enough!” Two gripes, pointing, “you were supposed to be back two hours ago!”

“You shouldn’t worry about me,” the Outlier responds, but there’s a smile on his face, the almost childlike expression of someone keeping a good secret.

“Zim wasn’t worried about YOU. I was worried about the mission.”

Two’s response is stiff and completely unbelievable. It serves only to amuse the Outlier further.

“Sorry to trouble you so much. I made a pit stop.”

“A pit-?” Two starts, questioning. But then the Outlier is upon him, all muscle and shadow, and something is being laid across Two’s slight shoulders. The Outlier gazes at him as he sets the clasp on the medallion into place, and there again is that softness in his eyes, replacing what is usually a hard glint. He smooths his palms down Two’s shoulders, down his arms, over the fabric of the purple cloak.

Two gawks down at it, marveling. He bunches the ends in his hands, caressing, and looks back up at the Outlier.

“I went back for it,” he shrugs, and reaches for Two’s antenna, kissing the tip, “pried it out of a dead Centinela’s hand.”

“It better have been dead,” Two says, but his voice is unable to carry much anger.

“It means something to you,” the Outlier gestures as he pulls away to root through their store of provisions, finding a water bottle and twisting it open with a metal hand, “that thing.”

“It’s not ‘a thing’,” Two insists, near aghast, “this is part of an Adept’s uniform! The Elite of the Elite, given only to those at the very top of their fields! This ‘thing’ marks me as a master warrior.”

“You looked naked without it anyway,” is all the Outlier has to say in response, half the contents of the bottle already consumed.

“Then I’m surprised you bothered getting it back,” Two quips, but there’s gratitude bleeding through the attempt at carelessness. He’s sidling up to the Outlier now, feeling his warmth, feeling the comfort of something he’d thought long lost, the happiness that comes with its return.

“Anything for you, querido,” the Outlier teases, the mocking tone camouflauging something more, something real.

“Anything for me,” Two scoffs, but one hand is in the Outlier’s hair, the other tracing the jagged white scar at his lips, “I wonder where that line is drawn.”

“No hay una linea,” comes the Outlier’s low voice at the base of Two’s antennae, and the feeling of hands at his waist, before he is lifted onto the workstation table.

“We’ll see about that,” Two says, and kisses him. 

---

 

Dib found what he was looking for, tucked away in a grand storage room on the upper decks of the ship. Even with power restored and most of its functions back online, the vessel took ages to navigate, and ages still if you weren’t sure where something was. Part of him wondered if it was wise to leave Two to his own devices for so long. The other part of him wasn’t worried. Dib had temporarily disabled all secondary and escape craft, established numerous failsafes. Command of the mighty ship was his and his alone.

Even if Two tried to hide, Dib would find him. The Armada flagship would betray him, beholden to its new master. Dib knew every step Two took.

It turned out, he didn’t need to wonder. Dib saw Two, upon reentry to the bridge. Standing next to the consoles where the Tallests’ PAKs had once been leeched of all their precious information, one palm against the cool metal. He muttered softly to himself, lips moving, words Dib couldn’t pick up. Dib gave him that moment, a brief respite. A moment alone with himself. After all, he was a kind Master.

“You’ve been so good lately, Two.”

The words jolted Two out of his reverie and he turned to face Dib. His eyes were tired, but they were also suspicious, wary of what was to come next.

“And so…” Dib stepped forward. He unclasped Two’s medallion, pulled the tattered remains of Two's cloak off his body, letting it fall to the floor in a heap around his ankles. Delicate, Dib draped the new garment over Two’s shoulders. Just like the first, the same size exactly. The same pleasant purple, the same slight sheen to the fabric. New and unmarred and beautiful.

His fingers strayed as he arranged the cloak. Brushing knuckles up against his neck, down his arms. All the while, the alien stood, and stared, watching him. Only the quivering pink highlights of his eyes moved, subtle shifts in color. Dib finished by clipping the medallion on once more. He pulled back to admire his work.

“I thought I would bring you a gift.”

Two finally looked down. But he didn’t caress the fabric as he had in the memory, didn’t bunch it up in his palms, marveling at it. Didn’t look at Dib with the same gratitude, the same love.

That was okay. The path to adoration wasn’t a quick one.

But when the Irken finally looked up, finally faced Dib properly, his expression was one twisted in rage, teeth bared in an outright snarl.

“What is this,” he growled, voice low and calm, despite the absolute animosity he wore.

“Your cloak,” Dib answered patronizingly, brows raised, “since you-”

“Not my cloak,” Two hissed, starting forward, an abrupt and aggressive enough movement to make Dib take half a step back, “this is NOT my cloak, it is a cloak.”

Each word was enunciated clearly, short and shot like bullets. Dib frowned.

“It’s exactly like your old one, Two. Just newer. Better!”

“Pulled from some dusty old storage unit by YOU!” Two shot back, his rage catching up to his voice, quavering, “not given to me on ceremony by the Tallest! This?” he picked at the hem and let it flop back down, “this means nothing!”

“So you’d rather wear those rags?” he gestured at the floor where the old cloak rested, darkened with grit and grime and Two’s own blood.

“Those ‘rags’ are in that state because of YOU!” Two howled, one gloved claw pointing at him as he advanced.

Dib was careful not to take another step back. Not to let Two think he had the upper hand. Surely the alien knew better by now, didn’t he? Surely he knew that Dib held all the cards, all the power over him, physical, mental, emotional. The power to twist his very reality, to let him live in a memory, a piece of the past, be it pleasant or - but still Two crept forward, all spitting fire and burning eyes, and it filled Dib with equal amounts anger and excitement.

“It’s what you’ve got now, Two. You can either take it or leave it.”

“I’d rather leave it,” Two spat, and his eyes were wild, crazed. His hands curled into claws and he peered up at Dib, goading, almost daring him to make the next move. Dib had thought Two nearly broken, finally softening enough to mold, but now...now, this anger, this irritation-

The realization hit him, slower than it should have. He knew why Two was overstepping his bounds, reverting back to the combative, near-feral nature he’d found him in.

“Two…” Dib crooned, and now he was the one who stepped forward, pressing a hand against Two’s cheek. Two snarled, but didn’t move, just as he hadn’t moved to take off this new cloak – he stared instead, waiting for Dib’s next words, waiting for his Master’s decree. “Two, if you wanted pleasure again, you should have just asked.”

At that, Two faltered. The burn left his eyes, his lips parted, an almost-immediate plea. But he stopped short. Stopped short and stared, silent, some misplaced pride keeping him from what he wanted. Foolish. Pointless! But Dib couldn’t help but chuckle, amused. No wonder his gift hadn’t gone over well. Two desired something else, and how could he be angry at that? He was the one who’d engineered it, after all. Another gift. From him to Two.

“I don’t…” Two muttered, but still he stayed, frozen in place. Still and close to Dib and staring up at him. Still with that new cloak around his shoulders, and the old one laying dark and abandoned on the floor.

“All you have to do is say it,” he murmured, smoothing his thumb over the soft skin of Two’s cheek. And there was that fire again, the new sensation he’d found with Two, this burning deep in his body, “I want to make you happy.”

“You want me to suffer,” was the mumble he got in response.

“Only when you’re being bad,” Dib laughed, and cupped Two’s face in both hands, leaning in to him, “but you can be good, I’ve seen it. My Number Two...tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you.”

He watched as Two visibly swallowed, throat moving with the effort. His chest, with the pristine new cloak laying against it, rose and fell in anticipation, in longing. Fevered eyes and a shudder to wrack his frame and thin lips opening to whisper

"Éxtasis."

“There we go,” Dib praised, pulling Two against him. His body was stiff, but he didn’t wrench away. His head turned, avoiding Dib’s gaze, antennae low. But Dib curled his fingers around Two’s chin, bringing the Irken’s eyes back to him as he repeated, “I want to make you happy.”

Two opened his mouth to say something, to retort, but his chance was cut short.

“Éxtasis.”

The body in Dib’s arms immediately went limp. He held Two, dutifully, gingerly, and watched Two’s face as it rolled over from painful awareness to sudden bliss. The relaxing of the muscles, the loll of the head, the way Two’s mouth opened and closed in helpless little moans, the most beautiful sound Dib had ever heard. And his eyes! Exquisite depths under fluttering eyelids, fixed on nothing but whatever pleasure Two had found.

And then he smiled. Smiled and closed his eyes and let himself be held by Dib, who traced the upturned lips with his thumb.

“What would you do to keep this feeling, Two?” he whispered against an antenna, watching him sink further into the depths of ecstasy, feeling his own at the very sight. Two’s eyes flickered open, and he blinked slowly up at Dib, lovingly up at Dib, lost to euphoria. 

"Anything," he croaked. 

“No hay una linea,” Dib smiled, and lay him down.

Chapter 7: Boiling Point

The night was hot. Summer with all the windows shut and the AC on blast. And inside, a ritual.

Friday evenings spent on the floor of the living room, takeout half-consumed in the kitchen. Gaz on the couch behind him, her eyes fixed on a game. Dib in front of the television, as close as he could get. The world outside was dark, but their home bright, every light in the house switched on, another half-measure against danger.

Dib used to think they were safe. When Zim showed up, all that changed.

But the Mysterious Mysteries opening always managed to soothe his anxiety, replacing the simmering dread with excitement, wondering what new truths, what new lies, would be discussed. Stories of magic and creatures and legends in flesh, things he knew were real, others he knew were fake. A distraction. A hope for the future, that one day he might be the explorer intrepid enough to uncover the unseen.

He would be. He knew now. A childhood spent fighting Zim, an adolescence trapped in the Void. Setbacks he tried not to let consume him. Things he mourned, when he could.

But there was time yet. And Two would be there, and his new family, Gaz with her games and their father with his science, and the destruction of the Irkens laid out before them. And beyond that...infinity. Countless worlds to explore. Things he could experience on his own terms. Not just surviving, but living, thriving.

Here, in some new reality, what seemed like only inches from his current goal, he felt himself performing the ritual again. The expanse outside the Massive, black as night, its innards lit up like some great pyre, chasing the demons away. And music, haunting and tinny, echoing through the huge dome of the ship’s bridge.

Dib stood before the monitors, transfixed, bathed in their blue lights. The buttery voice of the host, bassy through the ship’s sound system, reverberated in this bones. They were close enough now to pick up television signals – a rerun, maybe?

But as the episode began in earnest, Dib let out an enraptured sound, half sigh, half laugh. He knew all the episodes by heart, had watched and memorized them all, something near scripture to him, and...this was one he did not know. New, to him. Yet another thing lost, after his own forsaken dimension had been plunged into disaster. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes, hot and painful, the blue glare of the screens reflected in the cracked lenses of his glasses.

Home. He was coming home.

“Two,” he whispered, barely able to choke out a word above the speaker’s volume, “look.”

He’d heard Two shuffling up behind him. He hadn’t been worried about an attack. Two seemed to have finally accepted his situation. Bested, beaten. Abandoned. Tied to Dib for the pleasure he could offer, and for so much else; the Tallest were dead, and would soon be dead across dimensions, and so who would Two serve now?

Dib. And it was as simple as that.

The alien kept his distance though, careful not to join Dib at his side. Instead he strayed away, eyes narrowed warily up at the monitors.

“It’s a TV show,” Two said listlessly, unimpressed. His hands clutched at the unspoiled hems of his new cloak, black leather gloves against the deep purple fabric.

“You didn’t have Mysterious Mysteries on your Earth?” Dib asked, surprised.

“Things like that were illegal,” Two muttered, staring at the floor. Dib gawked.

“Illegal? Why?”

Two just shrugged, giving a small and disaffected shake of the head. Dib scoffed.

“Then you should be on your knees thanking me for leading you away from that dimension. What kind of asshole FCC makes Mysterious Mysteries illegal?”

If Two had any insight, he didn’t remark on it. But that was fine. He’d come around eventually. Soon, there would be no need to dig around in the PAK’s stored memories to find what he wanted. Two would offer it freely and generously, and Dib’s heart soared with that knowledge, something he believed wholly was fact.

“Come watch it with me,” Dib said, gesturing toward the bundle of blankets and cushions he’d set up, what seemed so long ago. A place for Two to exalt in Éxtasis. Comfortable. More than Two deserved, probably. “You’ll like it.”

“We need to prepare for Zero,” Two said stiffly, gaze averted. Dib laughed.

“We have a plan. You’re back in fighting shape. All that’s left is to ready the vessel we’ll take down to Earth. That, and actually getting there. Shouldn’t take long.”

Grinning, he gestured toward the monitors, waveform proof of their approach, playing bright across the screens. Two gazed back, the reflection of the screens flickering blue against red eyes, and Dib could recognize that calculating look. Trying to think of a way out of it, surely. Dib was familiar with the expression; Two wasn’t the first reluctant party he’d asked to watch his favorite show with.

Of course, this time, there was no choice. Two seemed to come to that same realization, and he hesitantly lowered himself onto the cushions, huddled against a mound of blankets, arms wrapped around his legs and face fixed forward.

“Good,” Dib cooed, taking a place beside him, “I’m proud of you, Two. You always did learn a lot faster than the others. You’re the smartest one of them, you know?”

The praise did seem to perk Two up, if only slightly – his antennae twitched, his spine straightened. They just couldn’t help it, these Zims, this useful and obvious weakness. Now that Two had been beaten down enough, Dib could begin to build him back up.

Something he’d been looking forward to. The creation would be better than the destruction, because with it would come adoration, obedience, love, he was sure. A new life, built in Dib’s own image, and all he would ask is for worship. A small price to pay.

“The function,” he heard Two said softly. He tore his face away from the screen to look at the alien. It was all right. The ship was recording everything – there’d be plenty of time to rewatch.

“The function,” Dib repeated.

“The…” Two swallowed, and whispered, “the...Éxtasis.”

“Yes?” Dib asked, feigning ignorance. Two stared back at him in a helpless way that Dib particularly enjoyed. He knew either doom or salvation lay before him. Pain or pleasure. And Dib couldn’t say Two was sane, but he was sane enough to know which one to choose.

“I want it.”

Dib nodded slightly, reaching out to cup Two’s face. Soft, clammy skin under his claws, a strange smooth texture. He rubbed his thumb against Two’s cheek, and the alien’s eyes fluttered shut as he pressed back, ready to recieve. There was guilt on his face, and anticipation, near-desperation, and Dib loved it so.

“No,” he said, smiling. Two’s head jerked up, antennae flat, incredulous.

“But-”

“No, Two. We’re watching this. It’ll be fun. You don’t need it.”

A scowl crossed the Irken’s face, but just as quickly, it seemed to pass. The knowledge was there, the hard-earned reckoning. Fighting wouldn’t get him anything. Obedience, everything.

It struck him, as he settled in to watch, the monitors beaming down on them, how different things were now. He felt like he’d lived so many lives already, each setting in at their own slow burn. The eroding of his dimension. The building of the Zimvoid. The struggle to get out, to find his way into something resembling reality. All of it, and he, the frog in the pot, sitting there as the water began cool and slowly started to boil.

He’d made it out each time, before the boiling point had set in. And now, in this calm, this eye of the storm that had been his life, he could sit and...reflect. A lot had happened. A lot that he tried not to think about, couldn’t afford to think about. He had to move forward, and he was, but this strange bit of peace, with Two curled up and staring next to him…

He’d thought Zim had been the worst thing to happen to him. The worst and the best, a constant source of anxiety and terror, but within him had lain so much possibility. The truth, and a way to make everyone see it. And then he had killed Zim, and again, he’d been caught up in the best and the worst. Only the bests never seemed to come to fruition, and the worsts certainly had.

But the worsts had to end at some point, didn’t they?

He looked back up at the screens. This was a sign. Had to be. Something reaching out from the black to guide him, to tell him that he was heading in the right direction. And that soon, the worst would turn into the best, with all the struggles and pain and terrors of the past behind him.

But it would have been nice to hear it from someone else.

He turned to the Irken, brows furrowed. Two looked back, wary. Dib took a while to study him, and Two didn’t dare question it. It seemed a while before Dib spoke.

“I want to find a memory.”

“Find your own memories,” Two countered, retreating slightly, as if he could protect his PAK from Dib’s intentions, “haven’t you rooted around in there enough?”

“I’m not going to force it, Two,” Dib said casually, leaning back against the cushion. Two stared at him, instantly understanding. He knew what Dib could give. And that it was worth what he would take. Dib could see it in Two’s eyes. The promise of another hit. Swallowing audibly, the Irken acquiesced, hunched shoulders sagging in defeat.

The cables reached forward, snaking past Dib’s head, almost caressing Two as they moved around him, toward his PAK. And still he sat, like a statue, head bowed. Ashamed, maybe. But Dib didn’t think he had anything to be ashamed of. He was being good. He was fulfilling his purpose. And Dib was proud of him.

He hoped Two could feel that as the prongs of his cables settled into the alien’s ports, plugging perfectly into place. He hoped Two could feel what he felt.

It didn’t take long to find. Dib had experienced it dozens of times, this memory. It had comforted him often, in a way that he didn’t like to think about.

A dark night. A small fire. And a telescope nearby. Their ritual. No bright lights to keep the monsters away. Just the two of them, alone in an uncertain world. Laying amidst in a copse of trees, on some old blankets. Arms twining around Two’s waist. One of them is warm. The other, cool. The fire crackles and spits. There’s some kind of metallic wreck in the distance. Too dark and too far away to make out, but it’s ominous. Unsettling. And maybe the sight of it is enough to unnerve the Outlier, because he asks -

“Do you ever worry?”

His voice is soft, barely audible. A question that doesn’t want an answer. Two huffs.

“About you? Constantly.”

“Not what I meant. About all this.”

“This?”

“Failure,” the Outlier says, and Dib can see that his expression is somber. But it is nice to see him unsure, for once. And the closeness here – the scars become more apparent. A small one on his cheekbone, another across his neck. And the large, white one streaking across his face like a shooting star. Worse up close. It digs grooves into full lips. It obviously never healed properly, and this deformation was the price he paid.

Nice to see the imperfections. And even nicer to see the doubt. But at the same time, that’s not what Dib is here for.

“Failure,” Two repeats, scoffing.

“Is that word even in your vocabulary?”

“I just said it, didn’t I?”

“You’re a pain in the ass,” the Outlier says, but he can’t hide his smile, “seriously. Do you ever worry? That this whole...thing, won’t turn out the way we want it to?”

“No,” Two says, an obvious lie. Dib knows it. The Outlier knows it too. He makes to pull away, but then Two’s claws are on him, dragging him back. It doesn’t take much convincing. The arms wrap around him again, even tighter now. “Are you worried?”

“How could I not be?”

“So you don’t think everything will turn out…” Two pauses, searching for the right word. He settles on – “okay?”

The Outlier looks at him for a long moment. His eyes are tired, but bright in the firelight, flicking from Two to the sky above, and then back.

“...I think it will. Be okay, I mean. After everything...all this...it’s all got to amount to something.”

“But you don’t know for sure,” Two points out. The Outlier shakes his head, messy black hair falling into his face. It’s longer than Dib’s ever had his, longer than the crude cuts he’d been giving himself since the Zimvoid.

“I have faith,” he says. And he pulls Two close, and Dib can feel the warmth, the heartbeat against his chest. He rests his head against Two’s, and murmurs.

“And I have you.” 

---

 

Confirmation from a ghost. A man who might as well not exist, a man who was simultaneously Dib himself and not. Dib found it odd, how much of a guiding hand the Outlier had turned out to be. How he'd been able to use this specter against the alien. How would the Outlier have reacted to this knowledge? His very existence, a weapon. It didn’t matter. But Dib did wonder.

He let Two’s memories be, after that. Gave him his reward. Let him wallow in it, slack and moaning, gasping each time Dib trailed his fingers along the alien’s skin. Bliss on top of bliss. Dib loved that for him. Wanted it for himself. But he had a goal in mind, and couldn’t afford the distraction, the danger.

He couldn’t let it last long, either, and when Two came out of it spitting and howling and demanding more, Dib reminded him of their mission. He had faith, he said, and Two should too.

And Two’s shoulders had slumped, and he’d stared downward, and it took several seconds, but he nodded. Agreement. Or acquiescence. Another thing that didn’t matter, because they both served the same purpose for Dib.

But he saw the gears turning behind Two’s eyes. He knew what was coming.

One week out from Earth. Two days before they ditched the Massive and took a Cruiser toward the planet, hopefully bypassing any of Zero’s sensors.

Dib waited in the bay, amongst the the hulking forms of spaceships, all long out of commission. He’d disabled most of them himself. A precaution. Only one still worked, the one he’d been loading weapons into, updating with his Virus. Their chariot, ready to swing low, to carry them home. It sat pink and gleaming amongst the dusty wrecks of its brethren. One single light flickered in a halo above, the rest of the bay shrouded in shadow. An anglerfish casting her lure.

Dib heard Two before he saw him, the sharp tap of his boots against the floor. He skulked in between ships, skittering. Anxious. Dib saw all this from his darkness, leaning against an unused engine block. The alien approached the Cruiser, paused in front of it. His new cloak, pristine against his shoulders. His old cloak, not much more than tatters now, clutched weakly in one hand.

Two was halfway inside the vessel before Dib stepped into the ring of light.

“Going somewhere?”

The Irken froze completely, one leg up in the cockpit, the other perched on the thruster frame. He stared back at Dib, eyes wide, shoulders squared. Dib could see it on his face – the thoughts roiling around in his head. The instinct to lash out, to attack. The fear. And the shame, like a child that had been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

“I’m leaving,” Two announced, but his voice was strangled, and even as he said it, he was backing down. He stared at Dib, eyes wide and unblinking, unsure and anticipating what would come next.

Dib nodded a little. He swept his hand out in front of him.

“Okay. Go, then.”

The liquid highlights of Two’s eyes darted to the ship, and then back to Dib. A thin, segmented tongue crept out to lick his lips. Nervous. Confused. Two had never carried such anxiety about him before, and Dib knew this was his doing. He didn’t feel bad about it. Two should have obeyed from the beginning.

With achingly slow movements, Two began again his ascent back into the cockpit. He dared not turn his back to Dib, half-facing him. Dib watched him go, and when Two was well and settled, he cleared his throat.

“But before you leave-” he started, and Two’s head jerked up at him, reacting as if he’d been shot, “you should know that without me, you’ll never have access.”

He didn’t need to spell it out. Two knew, and he knew that Two knew. The alien swallowed thickly.

“I don’t need access.”

“Sure,” Dib responded pleasantly. Because it was a lie, a bald-faced lie, another thing they both knew. Already, sweat was beading on Two’s skin. Already he was missing the ecstasy, the one thing above all others that melted away the pain. Just a cloud core of bliss, and who could leave that behind?

“I’ll find my-”

“He’s either dead, or he doesn’t care. You know that, Two. I know it hurts, but that’s just how it is.”

Two’s eyes bored back at him. One last flicker of hope inside them, and Dib could see it. The hope that his lost love was still alive, would still want him. Somewhere, somewhen.

And Dib, suddenly, realized that this rekindling had been his fault. That memory he’d revisited so often, and the Outlier’s stupid, comforting words, and all the ways he’d said ‘I love you’ without actually saying it.

“And he wouldn’t let you have it, Two,” Dib asserted, feeling angry at himself now, angry at the alien, and angry at this phantom man who he’d never met, “he wouldn’t let you. Even if he did, do you think I’m a moron?”

He gestured to himself, then to some invisible person beside him.

“Tone, pitch, vibration, even the most miniscule variations in voice patterns – I’ve accounted for all of it. The functions will only work when I use them. Your precious fucking Outlier couldn’t come close. He’s got a deeper voice. He’s got an accent. You think he could hope to give you what I can give you?”

The notion seemed to not have occurred to the Irken, because he was stuck gawking at Dib, flabbergasted.

“That can’t…” he started, but trailed off, his voice evaporating hopelessly into the ship bay’s stale air.

“Do you really doubt it?” Dib asked.

“I’m leaving,” Two repeated, but his voice was high and distressed, wavering, and he made no move to start up the vehicle, “I’m leaving."

Dib said nothing, this time. He simply held out his hand.

Hesitation. But then Two’s fingers slipped into his, and Dib helped the Irken down, out of the ship, pulling him against his chest.

“It'll be okay, Two,” he said, and he felt Two curl inward, felt the shivers that wracked his frame. Withdrawal, or something else? He supposed it didn’t matter. Just another thing among a pile of things that didn't matter, as long as he got what he wanted. He placed his hands to Two’s face, sharp thumbs framing his cheekbones, and lifted it up.

“Éxtasis.”

The alien melted against him, let out the most beautiful sigh, eyes rolling back into his head. He pressed against Dib more fully, and Dib secured the limp body against his. That smile, again, caught up in the rapture only Dib could give.

“Aren’t you glad you decided to stay?” he asked, whispering against the antennae as he brushed them back.

“Yes,” Two moaned, voice breathy and trembling, some fragile little thing in the wind.

His old tattered cloak lay resting on the seat of the Cruiser, forgotten.

“I know,” Dib said, and kissed him.

Chapter 8: Having Faith

Notes:

I'm back! It won't take me so long to post the next chapter, that's a promise. Remember to mind the tags, and enjoy!

Dib wanted to put away the memories.

There were no more that he cared to discover, none than he wanted to dredge up from the silty banks of Two’s mind, anyway. As far as he was concerned, that chapter of his life, of their lives, was over. Close the book and put it back on the shelf. It was well read, had given him all he needed to know. The past was just that, and soon they would leave their mighty vessel with its forlorn heaps of bones and blinking PAKs, toward a better future. The death of Zero, and his Dib, and his race, so that Dib’s new family might be safe.

A family that included Two, now.

But the memories persisted, little ghosts flickering through his mind. Not from Two. He hadn’t touched the Irken’s PAK since the bridge of the Massive, with the Mysterious Mysteries theme warbling in the background and his own metallic tendrils slipping over Two’s slim shoulders. Not since he’d searched for the stolen comfort of a memory that wasn’t his.

But when he rested, there came strange dreams. Seen through a haze, sound and static. Blurry and ethereal, like scenes from an old movie. He saw a laboratory, and red blood on a white floor. He saw a single gravestone in the pouring rain, the etched name impossible to make out. He saw thick jungles and the ocean, salt-eroded boats, and telescopes pointing toward the winking heavens.

And most strikingly, he saw Two.

The memories fished out of Two’s head had been seen by alien's own eyes, before. But now here he was, his number two, his second hand. Witnessed by someone else entirely.

Two’s hood is up, and his eyes cut red through the darkness. He hisses, and grabs Dib by his wrist – there is only one. He protests, but Two tugs harder and he stumbles. He is terrified and elated all the same, and doesn’t know why.

A different day, a different time; sunset on the beach. He’s drawing with a stick in the sand, staring down at his black combat boots. They look hilariously out of place here, among the white sand and soothing crash of the waves. The wind rustles the palms. There is machinery strewn about, busted and smoking. Some giant wreck in the distance – Dib can’t focus on it. He focuses instead on Two, and how the Irken’s cloak sways about his body.

Deafening explosions, a mad dash through some sort of storage facility. Two races ahead of him, quick on his PAK legs, beginning to ascend to the escape with little effort. He pauses however, and there is barely a moment of stillness before he dips back down. Dib’s hand reaches for him, and though it is made of metal, he can almost feel the alien’s strong grip, hefting him up to safety.

The Outlier was haunting him, of course. Just as any ghost would.

As fascinating as it was worrisome. He lay awake during the night cycle, hands clasped to his chest and staring up at the dome of the bridge, with nothing but fretful questions on his mind. Two shifted beside him, breath little hitching sighs, lost to his pleasure. And Dib found himself uneasy, in a way he rarely was. In a way he hadn’t been since he’d attached that PAK, flooded himself with Zim’s thoughts, Zim’s knowledge, Zim’s vicious hold on life.

They were just dreams, weren’t they?

Dreams. Nightmares. Fanciful things. Dib didn’t want to dwell on it, and he tried not to. He had more important things to worry about. And even worse, part of him was mourning - some sick part that knew he would miss the Outlier’s face, those comforting words spoken in a voice that was both his own and not. He had scratched the surface of the deep well of emotion Two had held for the man, and there could be no other word for it but love.

Dib knew what love was, despite the world’s attempts to keep him from it. He’d sought it out, craved it – love in the form of acceptance, then of admiration, then of obedience. Love in any of its forms, all of its forms. He’d been denied for so long, and felt no issue now taking. Taking love from Two. Taking Two from love.

If it was what he wanted, it was what he deserved.

He found himself looking over at the slack Irken in an effort to find some sort of comfort. In the Zimvoid, Two had been...not irreplaceable. There had been plenty of elite Zims to choose from, and they likely would have done the job just as well. But Two was the best of them, and Dib had told him so, and that had filled the alien with glee so immense it practically dripped off of him. He’d become smug, even for a Zim, so intensely self-assured.

Dib had liked that. A Zim to the core, but at his beck and call. At his mercy.

Two had been stripped of it all now. It was a regrettable thing. Regrettable, but necessary. They had a job to do. And Dib could pull him back up when that job was done, give him all the praise and fulfillment he’d apparently not gotten back home.

Two had been happy in the Zimvoid, happy to be away, happy to be recognized. The Outlier didn’t deserve him, anyway. That’s what he told himself.

Two looked back at him. Hazy. Out of touch.

But not out of reach.

Dib’s blackened claws trailed across green skin gone blue in the pale light. He could slash so easily. Part that tender skin and let the blood flow, drain this Zim until he was nothing but another Irken marked off his list. But Dib was merciful, and could treat him well, as long as he earned it.

The alien’s eyes were unfocused, glazed with ecstasy. But they gazed toward Dib, and in them Dib saw everything he had accomplished, and everything there was to accomplish still. The ruin of the Irken Empire lay within those eyes, even as he saw his own reflection, a harbinger of what would be to come. A shadow cast long across the Empire, able to reach every nook and cranny of space, the most remote of worlds in the most barren of dimensions.

Every Irken would perish, but for the ones he deemed could live. And here he felt such joy, a radiance roiling within him once more. Two’s old life and the Zimvoid were behind them both. The future he’d have wasn’t, perhaps, what he’d dreamed of when he was a child.

It’d be better.

He moved like water, slipping over Two’s frame, leaving behind his coat in the depression where he had lain. The Irken seemed to barely notice the new weight, head lolling to follow Dib’s movements. He reached out, one slender arm with the pristine fabric of the cloak falling away, and touched Dib’s lips with one gloved finger.

“Say my name,” Dib murmured, taking the slim wrist in his hand, “say my name, Two.”

Faith was something Dib had gone without for most of his life. But after Zim’s death, after the Zimvoid, even with all the horror that he still could not come to terms with, faith had embedded itself within him, this innate knowledge that things would go his way. It had felt good, and he had let it lead him.

He had faith in Two. The Irken would get it right this time, he knew.

“Dib,” Two said, his voice chalky and high. Dib’s eyelids fluttered shut, and he squeezed Two’s hand, absorbing the way the name hung in the air with only the ambient sounds of the ship to accompany it.

“You’re the best out of all of them,” Dib said, and he meant it. He pulled off the alien’s glove with its strange outworld leather, and traced the pads of his fingers down the tendons, the knuckles, “you’ve earned your place.”

“Zim will...rule with you,” Two mumbled, near delirious, “compromise...”

It was a strange thing to say, or a strange way to put it. Dib hadn’t really considered ruling, only conquering. Controlling and destroying until there was peace, inside and out. But the alien was lost to his machinations, and had given him what he’d wanted; his name, spoken in that fervent whisper, and Dib was willing to forgive this strangeness.

“Isn’t it better to obey?” Dib asked, a rhetorical thing, and a hypocritical one too. When in his life had he ever obeyed? He’d tried to be what people wanted, for a time, but it had all sloughed away so easily. Now, even the laws of time and space were his to disregard. Too big of a responsibility to entrust to anyone else. No, he had to be the only one intelligent enough, determined enough, to move so freely through the rippling fabric of the universe.

He’d take it seriously. Eradicate the danger, and feel the gratefulness of all the races of existence as they exalted his name as well.

Two could only writhe beneath him in a renewed wave of bliss, antennae lax against the cushions. This would be his last night of ecstasy before Zero, Dib had decided. He’d give it to him in small doses, enough to keep him from withdrawal, but too little to leave him dazed and boneless. Dib could fight, he had all the weapons he needed at his disposal. He had the Dib Virus, he had Éxtasis. But Two was his right hand, invaluable.

This was a lesson Dib had learned in the void, after all. Taking down a Zim with another Zim made it so much easier.

And here again, hovering above this prone creature, Dib felt that desire, the heat that had taken him when he’d peered so deeply into Two’s memories, feeling the sweat of the Outlier and the roll of their hips. Whispered words filthy and beautiful, low pleas for more.

What had their lives been? Nothing but fighting some enemy Dib did not understand, fighting each other, and then spending their nights hot and panting. A strange existence, and one Dib could not grasp, because Two’s memories were so well hidden, and the ones he did find were a tangled mess of love and hate, triumph and defeat. It was all so bittersweet, and Dib had had enough of the bitterness. He wanted only the sweet, the taste of Two against his tongues.

The Irken’s lips were soft, parted in a low moan. Dib had learned how to kiss from the Outlier. His mentor, this ghost. He had shown Dib everything he needed to know. Two whined softly, trembling arms around his neck, weak with the drug.

Dib found himself wanting it. Just a little, just to feel the edge of bliss that Two was on. The metal cables slid past his shoulders, underneath Two, honing in on their marks with ease. Dib had found his way to these ports so many times before, it was almost a second nature now.

No more memories, he’d had enough of those. He would dream of them tonight, and they would plague him, but for now he was awake and simply wanted to feel Two, and the squirming pleasure the alien couldn’t help but drown in.

Only a taste. A tiny bit of Éxtasis, because anything more would be dangerous. He’d gotten doses like this before, when he’d delved into Two during this sublime state. It felt good, a pleasing hum through his body, and best of all was the pride he felt, the pride that this was his doing.

How many others could he control like this? They need not all die. Those smeets in their tubes, stray Irkens they might pick up along the way, the new army he’d considered, bowing at his feet for a chance at euphoria. Endless possibilities, as endless as the waves of contentment flooding through him. What wonders might he find, after all? It was a big multiverse.

He might even pick up other versions of himself. Inferior, yes, but willing and able to join the fight. And they'd look more like him and less like the Outlier, would be strong like him, not weak things like Dib-Zero. He could teach them how to properly deal with their Zims. No floundering about, desperate and alone against the alien threat. No tender moments under the glow of an ungrateful moon, when there should have been blood instead.

“We’ll destroy him...”

Two’s voice had been so soft, so muffled by Éxtasis, it had barely registered. Dib pulled back, gazing once again into those cherry red orbs, fractured through the cracks in his lenses.

“We’ll destroy him, querido,” he repeated, a whispered promise, claws to Two’s skin once again. Two’s golden medallion glinted in the meager light as it was unclasped, the pristine purple cloak set aside with Dib’s jacket. He pressed against Two’s body, holding him close, Éxtasis tingling through his extremities.

Something in him knew that Two’s mind was elsewhere, the words not meant for him. He didn’t care. Because Two was here now, with him, and Dib’s reality was Two’s reality, whether he liked it or not. Dib had laid his claim there in the spotlight of the hangar, where the Irken’s old cloak lay like a thin corpse, forgotten. Cast off from an old life liked a used second skin, peeling it away and emerging fresh, and ready for whatever more may come.

Though it had hurt, Dib had done this more than once, and he’d left all the useless skins behind to rot.

So would Two. 

---

It wasn’t something he dwelled on much, but part of Dib wondered if he’d ever feel truly comfortable again. There was something so uniquely disruptive about existing outside your own dimension – something he had long come to terms with, long adjusted to. Two had been a fine distraction. But nowhere was quite the same as home, and home had been lost.

Still, when he saw the passing planets of the solar system he knew, the great celestial bodies he’d seen time and time again on television and in books and on the NASAplace feeds...there came a modicum of that old comfort, a slice of home in this little corner of space.

The Massive had dwarfed the blue sister planets, had sliced through the ice ring of Saturn and was now stationed beside Jupiter. Dib watched the roiling and eternal storms through the cockpit window, feeling so small for once in a very long while.

The size of the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, and all universes beyond, all the realities he had rent and fought his way through, it was all boggling to the brain, something that could drive a human mad. The PAK had helped with that. Zim had helped with that. That was something Dib was loathe to admit, but had to, if only to himself. His old adversary had seen wonder upon wonder, so many treasures the universe had to offer, and paid them no mind. Background noise against a larger purpose. Zim had kept him sane, in some ways.

Was this gratefulness? It couldn’t be. Dib refused it. And the ghost inside his head could hiss and spit all it wanted, because Dib had something much more important to focus on.

They were ready to depart, to leave this ghost ship and its legions of dead behind. Dib had readied the Cruiser himself, Two’s tattered cloak lain across one of the seats.

Dib had incinerated it.

The Irken waited for him in the ship bay, head bowed. Dib couldn’t say for sure what he was thinking about, but he had a feeling it was the Tallest. Those precious bones, left behind, PAKs cracked open and hollowed out like shells bleached by the sun. Their souls erased from existence, all to save a man who wasn’t even there.

Had it all been worth it? What would Two go back and do differently, if he could? Deep thoughts weren’t really what Zims were known for, but Dib could see all this on Two’s face, and something more embedded; acceptance despite the questions. Obedience despite the pain.

And excitement. Two liked to fight, and liked to win, and Dib had given him new prey. It was a kindness. Two was beginning to realize that.

“Are you worried?” Dib asked, conversational as he did one last check on the ship. It was loaded with weapons, and, most importantly, uploaded with the Dib Virus and Éxtasis both. Two looked up, eyes tinted purple from the hood of his cloak.

“About you?”

“About how this is gonna play out,” Dib said. Two shrugged stiffly.

“Zero is dangerous.”

“He is,” Dib acknowledged, cupping the alien’s cheek in his palm. Two’s eyes fluttered shut and he leaned in to the touch, almost an impulse, and Dib could barely contain his glee at this little moment. He pressed a kiss to Two’s forehead, just under the apex of the hood.

“And unpredictable, even for one of you. Still have doubts?"

It was a rhetorical question. Dib knew they could, and knew they would. 

"Zim is an Adept soldier,” Two responded, both an answer and a refusal to answer. He paused for a moment, silent and looking up at Dib, scanning, as if searching for what Dib wanted him to say. Trying to find the words in Dib’s eyes, to pull them from his head and repeat them, that he might be rewarded.

“I think it will turn out...okay,” Two said, but those words were from somewhere else, somewhere long ago and lost to him now, “we’ve come this far.”

The ship groaned around them, old and tired and ready for them to evacuate her vast and barren halls. Two’s eyes were fevered, beautiful.

Zero’s eyes would look the same, before the end. Like those of his own Zim, wide and red and endless. Full of spirit just waiting to be smothered.

Dib pulled Two toward him by his chin, another kiss that Two did not ask for but would take, because this was his world now. It could be a good one, if he let it.

“I have faith,” Dib said, repeating those words of comfort he had sought so many times. The voice of a wraith, dead and dangerous.

“And I have you.”

Chapter 9: Even Then

He saw a palace in the distance. Some grand estate, shimmering white and blue like a cut jewel among the verdant treetops. It reminded him of his father’s laboratory, somehow, a place that existed now only in memory. The shape was different, palatial and sprawling instead of looming, reaching toward the sky. The location doubly so, buttressed by cliffsides and gardens and forests, with the sound of birdsong in the air as opposed to city streets, passerby chatter and the honk of cars.

The sunlight was warm against his skin, the wind cool in his hair. All the simple and untouchable pleasures of Earth, things Dib had gone so long without. The weighty crunch of dirt below shoes. The rustle of foliage in the breeze. Things that had been absent in the Zimvoid, in the dead dimensions he’d slunk through on his way to freedom.

“Trying to set it on fire with your eyes won’t work.”

And there is Two, pretty in purple among the leaves, cloaked face framed against a blue and cloudless sky.

“You need actual fire,” he continues, circling Dib, and his head tilts playfully as his grin grows wicked, “luckily for you, Zim is an expert.”

“An expert at not knowing what you’re talking about, maybe,” he scoffs in return, a metal hand gesturing toward the building in the distance, “destroying the building means nothing if the right people aren’t inside when we do it.”

“You’re just stalling,” Zim says, rolling his eyes, “being sentimental.”

“Sentimental for what?” Dib sits on a boulder, the fabric of his cloak bunching around him, “a building? It’s all a facade, anyway.”

“Facade,” Two repeats, face screwed up in frustrated confusion.

“Pretty on the outside, evil on the inside,” Dib says. He can feel the tug at his lips as he glances toward Two, “kind of like you.”

Two is uncharacteristically silent. He has no response. Or maybe he does, but has learned enough to know what pains Dib to hear, and doesn’t want to hurt him at this time. A rare moment. One that is appreciated. Dib stares hard into the distance. The windows shine. Watching back.

“So you’re just afraid,” Two says, breaking the silence. His tone is light, but undercut with enough sharpness to be confrontational.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“I understand that you had the opportunity to take the shot back in Miami and couldn’t do it,” Two scoffs. Something in Dib’s chest constricts. It aches. A memory within a memory, crouched high up on some tower, his finger on the trigger. Aiming down, past the crowds, their roars in his ear. A target he can’t hit.

So much for Zim not wanting to hurt him. The alien seems to regret it, almost. He moves to sit beside Dib. Hip to hip. Familiar. They’ve been closer than this, and many times. For how long? He doesn’t know. He can’t reach back that far.

“What would it take for you to kill your Tallest?” Dib asks softly. He gazes down at his prosthetic hand, how the gunmetal glints in the light. Dangerous. A shimmer that could be seen from afar. He usually keeps it covered.

“Nothing,” Two says, haughty as ever.

“Even if it was my life on the line?”

A hard stare between them. Two doesn’t know what to say, and that much is obvious. They don’t talk like this, not often. There are too many feelings at stake, too many openings for heartache. But they both know, at the crux of it, the words between them mean nothing. Actions speak louder than the both of them.

“You talk too much. Did you know that? Some guerilla,” Two rolls his eyes dramatically, the great ruby depths shifting in their alien way.

“You didn’t even know what that word meant when we first met, pendejo. You’re the one who loves the sound of his own voice.”

True and biting, but fond. He’s been pulled in too deep, he knows. His life has become a mire, thorny and choked with survival and vengeance and justice – and in the center of it, cocooned amidst the chaos, Zim. It was Zim, from the moment they met.

And it will be Zim until the end.

Whatever end that may be. 

---

 

The dreams came like birds, fluttering in and out of his mind, each carrying in its beak a new branch of a memory. The recollections were not his own, but that didn’t bother him. How many years had he been living with Zim’s soul inside his? How many stray thoughts, how many foreign memories, had wormed their way into his brain? Countless. Visions of enormous structures built with impossible metals, sprawling cities choking the world. A ring around a pink planet, artificial. Disaster upon disaster – cataclysms of Zim’s own doing, things that would have traumatized Dib were the memories his own.

But they weren’t. They were Zim’s. And Dib tried to compartmentalize, to explore without sinking too deep, to fight off the Irken inside. Some wounds remained, he knew. Open sores left over from his own childhood, from Zim’s life. Dib could recognize his injuries. Zim could never recognize his.

It was...fascinating, these dreams, these memories. Things Dib would like to study. All in due time. He’d have to cast this aside for now, because Earth was in view, and he could not lose focus. Something Two had repeatedly warned him about. And he trusted Two, didn’t he? His right hand, oh so loyal, and all it had taken were months of indoctrination, years of weakness, weeks of violence, and days sinking into a total pleasure beyond the mortal effort to describe.

Two was the best of them, a right won by bloodsport. Dib had seen to it himself. And now he’d conquered the alien, had assimilated him, the same as he’d done with his own Zim. Two Invaders down, added to his arsenal. One more, to be disposed of. A universe infested with Irkens. He’d strike at the heart of their bed, watch them pour out of their nests to convulse and die.

He’d save a few, perhaps. The worthy. The breakable. After all, Two had brought him such joy.

And then there was that bank of smeets back on the Massive, asleep and waiting. He’d never abandoned the notion that he could use them, rebuild his army. Not an army of Zims that needed their own stupidity turned against them, but new Irkens, all outfitted with custom PAKs, all rigged to obey without question. If some free will snuck in, he had the Dib Virus. He had Éxtasis. He could run this army through the worlds, cleansing each universe, taking what he wanted, ruling over it all.

Such grand plans. He felt in so many ways like his life had been leading up to this. All the pain and the struggle, the deterioration of his world and his body and entire dimensions as he crawled through them, just slingshots to the apogee of his greatness.

“What if his Dib is there?” came Two’s voice beside him, shattering thoughts like glass panes. Dib looked over, eyebrows raised.

“Then we’ll kill him. Save us the trouble of tracking him down.”

The answer didn’t seem to mollify Two. He’d become receptive to Dib, accepting of his place in their lives now. But there was no trace of the cheer and excitement Two had displayed back in the Zimvoid, in those fluttering memories. He was all dour and bleak, worrying over their imminent confrontation, over their chances for survival.

The only time he seemed happy was when he was in the throes of Éxtasis, when he would smile and moan and kiss Dib, lean arms wrapping languidly around him. A pleasure brought on by the drug, not by Dib, but the Irken was learning to conflate the two. He lived for each hit, relied on Dib for them, loved him for them. Dib had squashed any notion of rebellion, and in doing so had squashed some part of what made Two Two.

A mournful thing. A loss, definitely. But a necessary one. It was better this way.

“His Dib will likely have access to weapons as well,” Two said pointedly.

“And?”

“And, he might not be happy about us taking Zero out. What if they’re…”

He trailed off, but the implication was clear. Dib snorted derisively.

“You think just because you and your Dib were a thing, that’s how it goes for every Zim and Dib? It’s not, Two. You guys were an aberration. He was an aberration. Barely a Dib. No, Zero’s Dib is a total moron, but not moron enough to hook up with Zim.”

Two cast him a look under the dark hood of his cloak. Judging him for his hypocrisy, Dib knew.

“It’s not the same, Two,” Dib insisted, and the alien dropped his gaze. It wasn't the same, and they both knew it. Two was his. Two had been beaten, the threat he posed to Dib long since evaporated. The Irken needed a reason, of course, for living, for fighting...and now, Dib was it.

And why wouldn’t he be? Where else would Two have gone? He could leave if he wanted, really, and wander through this unfamiliar universe, wracked with withdrawal, writhing in anguish, crying out for an ecstasy that would never come again. Two was the smartest of the Zims, and he saw what his future could become, if he chose poorly.

The Cruiser was cramped, and Dib already missed the endless desks of the Massive; he was still that intrepid explorer he’d always fancied himself to be, and the Irken mothership had been a treasure of undiscovered wonders. Even after all his time aboard, there were still things, he knew, to uncover. But Zero took precedence. He liked this forced closeness, anyway. The brush of Two’s arm against his. The flutter of long antennae.

The Earth was big and blue and bright below them, and Dib could see it reflected in Two’s eyes. Unreal. Gorgeous.

Infecting Zero’s base remotely was child’s play. Literal child’s play, Dib would have well been able to do this at age twelve with no issue. He’d only learned more since then, had only grown more capable, more deadly. Zero would regret having ruined the world Dib had built, the world he’d destroyed, and Dib-Zero would regret it too.

Only briefly, though. Only briefly. A moment of suffering, to know they’d done wrong by crossing him, and then they could rest. Go on into whatever beyond there was, no longer a threat to him or his mission.

He was merciful in that way.

“The upload will take a while,” Dib said, watching the hologram of a progress bar flash on the dash console.

“And if he discovers his base is being uploaded with a foreign virus?” Two asked, surly. He’d been two days now without Éxtasis, and it was showing. Shaky. Irritable. And he’d taken on a desperate look, an intense longing that enraptured Dib almost as completely as his mission.

“This is Zero we’re talking about,” Dib assured, “he won’t. It’s disguised as a routine update. Even if he notices, it won’t be anything outside of the norm. Two…”

He turned to the Irken, placing his palms on slight shoulders. Small, but tight with muscle. Spring-loaded and ready to kill.

“You’re with me on this.”

No question. No demand. Just a statement, and one he knew to be true. One Two knew to be true as well, because there was no hesitation. Just a nod, almost a bow. The alien was trembling. Dib took Two’s face into his hands, lifting it up to meet his gaze.

“We have time,” Two said, high voice a whisper, a plea.

“And when we go down there?” Dib asked, “when we confront Zero?”

“I won’t let you down,” Two affirmed, and the look in his eyes was wild now, anticipating what was to come. One more hit before he helped Dib kill their other selves, and a lifetime of hits beyond.

“Éxtasis,” Dib murmured. Two melted into his arms, slipping against him with a shaky exhale.

And Dib was happy. Truly, wholly happy, with Two languishing in his grip and with his infection worming its way through Zero’s base. Soon all those wires and tubes and cables would seethe with the disease, pass the plague on to Zero, flood him with blue light and devotion. Dib dare not land on the planet while the upload was in progress; too soon. Best let it unfold from a safe distance, let Zero fight the sickness alone, if he could. Humans were persistence hunters, after all.

And Irkens, for all their sharp-clawed bravado and advanced weaponry, could now only be prey.

He’d told himself he wouldn’t let Two taste bliss again until their mission was over. But he deserved it, didn’t he? And he would fight better for it, if he had to. Dib wasn’t expecting much of a struggle.

He pressed Two up against the curved pinkish wall of the Cruiser, and, with Earth turning oblivious below them, kissed him. Deeply, passionately, in a way that lay claim, not that there was anything left he’d not taken for himself. Two had cast aside his old life, his leaders, his Dib – by force, yes, but the effect remained the same. It was all Dib’s now, and he ached with the ecstasy of it. Two’s lean arms wrapped around him, boneless, one clawed hand gripping at roughly-cut hair.

The only thing left to do was win. 

---

 

It was all so familiar. This cul-de-sac, with its looming circle of houses, Zim’s base strange among them, vibrant in its eeriness, like a color out of space. Dib felt he had stepped out of his new life and back into the old, into beloved boots that were too small for him now, something he’d missed that he’d had to cast off long ago. An ache, a longing for days lost to memory.

All the familiarities of Earth surrounded him in a miasma of sights and sounds and smells – the warmth of sun on his skin, the smell of the air, as polluted as it was, the intake of natural oxygen. So real, nearly tangible, more intense than even the stolen memories could have portrayed. He felt a great swell of emotion, a chest that threatened to burst with it all.

But this wasn’t time to reminisce, and it wasn’t time to soak in his home planet’s wonders. It was time for revenge. It was time for justice, time to win, time to shake off the remora of his failure so he could continue on with his life, take Two and his new family and march forward into the great and shining future.

Because there was Zero, small but unmistakable, slumped to his knees at the fore of the walkway. It had taken time, but the Virus had done its job, and the house had in turn; cables snaked from the open front door, plugged securely into the ports of Zero’s PAK. They pulsed with blue light, as did the Irken’s eyes, and though he twitched, though his claws curled and uncurled uselessly, he was otherwise still. Still and staring, waiting for Dib to seal his fate.

And there was Zero’s Dib. And he was...different. Of course he was different, after so many years. But some part of Dib had almost expected to still see the child there instead of the man; a man taller than him, in a body not stunted by malnutrition and the addition of an alien PAK. Not worn by the stress of staying alive in worlds that did not want him, scavenged clothes shredded by time and trials. But still, it was Zero’s Dib. As dumb and disappointing as ever. The one who hadn’t deciphered the signal, hadn’t know to stay away. Kneeling down by Zim, trying roughly to rouse him, eyebrows knitted in...what? Concern? Dib could have laughed.

Dib-Zero barely even noticed until Dib and Two were right upon him. He caught sight of Dib’s boots first. A look of surprise, and as his eyes roamed, as his neck craned, a jolt of shock. Dib took a deep and grateful breath, admiring this familiar world, and smiled down at him.

“It’s a nice day.”

“What the - Zib?!” Dib-Zero gasped, choking out that awful name. He scrambled back like a spider, red shoes scuffed and palms skinned against the pavement.

“Check the house, Two,” Dib commanded, pointing toward the open door with dual black-clawed fingers. The Irken was on it in an instant, striding past Zero without a glance, slipping over the cables and into the base. Back in prime form, ready to be the adept soldier he was trained to be, focused solely on this new mission.

Dib-Zero watched him go, stunned, too stunned to stand. His head swiveled back toward Dib, eyes gone nearly as wide as his glasses.

“You did this?” he asked, gesturing toward Zero in a jerky motion, palm upturned. His hand was calloused, Dib noticed, likely from working on machinery. Calloused but otherwise unblemished, normal human fingernails, healthy tan flesh, ruddy with human blood.

“Accomplished more in five minutes than you have in seven years, you mean?” Dib asked, eyebrows raised. The grin on his face was so wide it nearly ached, splitting the dehydrated cracks at the corners of his lips. “Yes.”

“But you-” the other him started before Dib rounded on him, leaning in close.

“Came prepared! Because I knew – I KNEW! - that you wouldn’t get anywhere with your Zim. Pathetic. All this time, the luxury of home, of having any materials you needed at hand, fresh air and rest and warmth...and you’re still right where you started.”

“And you...you’re here to what?” Dib-Zero challenged, finally clambering to his feet, “help me?”

“I’m here to kill you,” Dib said with a nearly sympathetic smile, head tilted to the side. The look on Dib-Zero’s face, the fear, the disbelief, it felt so good, and he didn’t know why. “Pin him.”

Zero sprang to life, all claws and PAK legs, curling inward like a spider, on his Dib in an instant. Height didn’t matter much against alien strength and cybernetics, and Dib-Zero was slammed against the fence, Zero’s metal spikes digging through his coat and the flesh of a shoulder, into the thick wood. Blank-eyed the entire time, nothing occupying his thoughts except Dib’s wishes. Almost a shame to lose. But Zero was too dangerous.

“Sorry it had to be this way,” Dib said with a shrug, walking closer to observe the tableau, red staining Dib-Zero’s blue shirt a fascinating purple, “Zero. Your self-destruct mechanism.”

Dib-Zero gasped and struggled as the hidden gauntlet sprung to life on Zero’s forearm, the button at its center looking all too large and easy to press.

“Zim, are you out of your mind?!” Dib-Zero cried, wriggling like a stuck pig, kicking, punching where he could reach, all to no effect. Zero’s antennae twitched, his fingers trembled, but he was torn up with the Virus, every vein alight with its fire, and it was an Éxtasis all Dib’s own to see this, to see Zero at his mercy, to see both him and his lesser Dib teetering on the cusp of destruction.

Victory on the horizon. So close he could feel it in his hands, could taste it on his tongue, mouth watering with success. The world stilled with this approaching triumph – the wind seemed to slow, birdsong receding into the distance as if muffled by a thick layer of cotton. A flash of heat, a subtle shift in the atmosphere.

And Dib frowned.

It was all too familiar. The smell of ozone filled the air, metallic like blood, overpowering. The scent of a breach in space, of something that did not belong. Dib was intimate with it. He turned.

A blazing golden shape stood strange against the suburban backdrop, shimmering like heat lines in desert sand. Unreal. Nearly unbelievable. A great rift where a rift should not be, a place where the fabric of the universe had been torn asunder. Large enough for a person to step through, a doorway between worlds.

“No,” Dib breathed.

How could this be? Who else could have possessed the knowledge, the willpower, to travel between realities? Who else would be willing to risk the madness, the suffering, the pain and exhaustion of a body being in a place where a body did not belong? Who else as reckless, as calculating, as single-minded?

Who else but another Dib.

Shrouded in darkness, in a heavy cloak and hood. The fabric was emblazoned in silver with what Dib realized with a shock was the old Swollen Eyeball logo, his long lost sect.

“No,” he said again, as if he could turn words to truth.

A gleam in the red sunlight. A metal hand reaching up to push the hood back.

“No.”

And there was the face he had seen so often through Two’s memories. A face that filled him with equal parts anger, jealousy, comfort. Calculating golden eyes, stiff frown marred by a long white scar. The Outlier was older now, older and more tired than in the memories – the marks were invisible, but Dib could recognize them just the same. The wear from seven years of searching, slipping through reality. Something more than human. Cosmic and indescribable.

Their eyes met. Recognition on both sides, and with an exhale like the air had been torn from his lungs, Dib realized. Each had dreamed the other’s memories. The Outlier knew him, and something about that was terrifying. 

“The house is clear,” came Two’s voice suddenly from the side, “his Gir and Minimoose are…”

Words evaporated into the heat. And now the Outlier’s eyes were on Two, wide and hardly daring to believe, filled with an emotion Dib both understood and hated. He didn’t even look back at Two. He didn’t need to.

“Kill him,” he said in a strangled voice, dead focused on the cloaked man before him, this strange and familiar other, “activate Dib Virus, kill him NOW, Two!”

He stumbled back as Two erupted forward, blue-eyed and springing past Zero’s tangled cables, colliding with the Outlier. The impact was enough to send them sprawling into the asphalt, struggling, clawing, Two’s expression blank even as he wrestled to best his former lover. The fight was immediately vicious, Two a whirlwind of PAK weapons and claws, blood flying – but the Outlier seemed to know all his tricks, blocking the worst of it even as they scraped in the hot street like wild dogs.

Captivating. Dib could hardly tear his gaze away. He hazarded a glance back at Zero and his hostage; Dib-Zero had temporarily given up the struggle to stare in awe at the spectacle. No good. Dib couldn’t kill Zero yet. He might need him if Two wasn’t able to overcome the Outlier.

Dib-Zero, though, was useless. The worst of the Dibs, a failure, and a disappointment. He could go.

“Kill him, Zero,” he commanded, “strangle him or something, I don’t care. Just kill him.”

“No-” Dib-Zero got one last gasp in before gloved hands wrapped around his throat, exerting their pressure. Zims were strong, Dib knew, and his doppelganger’s neck should have been snapped in an instant. But there was some hesitation. Some latent will, another flaw in his perfect program.

And then there was the whining charge of a laser, and Dib looked up just in time to see the Outlier, still grappling with Two, send a pulse of energy from his metal hand toward Zero’s base. The bright blue blast sliced past the cables, severing them and slamming into the side of the house. The resulting explosion wrenched the now-freed Zero from his prey, sending them both flying onto the black asphalt, splintered bits of fence tumbling around them. The cut cables curled and sizzled like mechanical snakes, live wires sparking precariously on the pavement.

Taking advantage of the situation, Two grasped the Outlier with claws and PAK legs, hurling him into the yard and sending him crashing into a lawn gnome, dangerously close to the cables. The Outlier seemed dazed, slow and struggling to pick himself up. The alien careened toward the prone figure and Dib watched in euphoria, having nearly forgotten about Zero and his Dib.

He could kill the Outlier himself, if he acted now - retreat to his weapons stash, blast him from orbit, anything it took. But he longed to see Two do the job, craved it like any other drug. The Outlier couldn’t kill Two. Dib knew this with every atom of his being. Despite all the muscle, despite the built-in weaponry, the hard eyes and height and strength, despite everything, the Outlier was weaker than him. Weak to let a Zim in, weak not to kill him when he could. Weak to search for so long, and for nothing.

Dib was stronger, and he craved that proof.

Two had reached his former partner. Ready to end it, ready to deliver the killing blow, and Dib could have swooned to see there was no hesitation there. It would be over in an instant, the one last torn thread of Two’s old life severed at the neck. A jagged pink-metal dagger glinted in one hand, already red with blood and eager for more.

But as Two thrust it forward, a hand caught his thin arm to yank it forward, and another grabbed one of the downed live wires, jamming its sparking end against the edge of Two’s PAK. The Irken screeched, convulsing, electricity pulsing through his body, and still the Outlier held it there, bleeding and grim-faced, bracing the Irken to ensure contact. Finally, he threw the wire aside, and the Zim, lithe and lovely, Dib’s Number Two, blinked blue eyes gone red, and collapsed into a smoking heap.

Dib shook his head, not daring to believe it. So close. So close. His fantasy of seeing Two kill this other self had evaporated, gray smoke in the air. He was frozen with the surprise, the disappointment – unable to move, unable to do anything but watch as the Outlier staggered to his feet, chest heaving in exertion. Disheveled hair fell into his eyes as they fixed on Dib, glowing hot, furious.

And for the first time in a long while, certainly since he reunited with Two again on the Massive, Dib felt very real fear. He took a step back as his other self took a step forward, a wholly unconscious movement. There was no way. Dib had handled Two with such ease – manhandling him, beating him, hurting him when he deserved it, when he needed it – but he’d had the advantage of the Virus, of Éxtasis. The advantage of Two’s weakness, hanging alone in the dark of a dead ship for ages. He pulled out an Irken laser pistol, barely in his hand before it was skewered and wrenched away by a PAK leg.

Zero, freed from the Virus, sneered from the wooden rubble.

The first blow came so suddenly that Dib was caught off guard. He heard a crack, felt pain radiate across his jaw. He stumbled to the side and when he looked up, all he saw was the Outlier’s face, the fury in his eyes, and a metal fist gearing up for another punch.

Dib was not a fighter, not in this way. Two was meant to be his muscle. Dib was the brains, meant to observe and command, to sit and direct and to think for other people because they were too stupid to think for themselves. It had all gone wrong. His PAK legs sprang forward, stabbing, ripping; making actual contact, spilling actual blood! But the Outlier did not care. A prosthetic hand curled around one of the legs embedded in his shoulder and he wrenched it out, yanking it forward and Dib along with it, sending his knee up and crashing into Dib’s temple.

Dazed, Dib scrambled. But the Outlier did not let up. He kept a grip on that PAK leg, the other hand in Dib’s hair, smashing his kneecap over and over into Dib’s head, rattling his brains, blurring his vision, sending him reeling. Claws scrabbled and scratched at blue fabric, Dib gasped for Two to help, gasped for the Virus to activate, but it wasn’t clear if he was even making any sound at all.

He was dropped onto the pavement. He rolled onto his back, coughing, head resting awkwardly, painfully, against the PAK’s curve.

The sun was hot above. The sky a terrible red. And Dib felt like there was fire in the distance, that there were sirens, and smoke and screams, though he knew there were none. Faces loomed above him, and there was the memory – Dib himself, his shadow falling across Zim, arms raised high, holding the flash of metal in his hands, its jagged razor edge reflecting the burning orange sunlight, the exertion and rage and anguish on Dib’s face as he brought it down-

The Outlier stood above him. Expressionless. Merciless. Zero and Dib-Zero, battered and bewildered, watched on. A metal palm spread above him. Gleaming, with a blue light at its center, glowing bright, brighter by the second. His chest constricted with fear, breath catching in his mouth, the last precious air his twisted lungs would breathe again.

“No.”

The voice was hard to hear over the whining charge of the laser. Two’s voice, cutting through the noise. Dib’s vision swam as the Irken came into view. His head was bowed, face smudged with blood and black soot. His legs quivered, and he dropped to his knees beside the Outlier, one hand clutching feebly at the blue cloak.

“No,” he repeated, a sound like gravel. His head shook, antennae limp and frayed and swaying with the movement. The Outlier’s eyebrows knit as he gazed down at his partner, some hint of sympathy under that hardened visage. He didn’t speak. He didn’t make a sound.

“You can’t kill him,” Two said weakly, and Dib’s heart soared even through the pain. Two was his. He’d known it all along, but here it was, as plain as the ground at his back.

“Not kill him?” Zero barked, appalled, “it’s better for all of us if you put that thing out of its misery. Look at it!”

The Outlier did look. He gazed from Two to Dib, and back again. And Dib laughed, blood along with it. Because he’d beaten his other self in the only way that mattered. Two was his, and always would be. Something in the Outlier’s expression shifted. That realization, perhaps. That pain. He lowered his hand.

They formed a ring of faces around him. Two Dibs. Two Zims. Reflections of his old life. What a life he might have had. Human and whole. He’d tortured himself in an effort to save the world; and no one was even left to appreciate it.

But it was okay. Because he could still win. He’d survived cruel circumstances before, a cruel universe. As long as there was life in him, he could still win.

Even, he thought, as the Outlier knelt, if he had to do it alone. He felt mechanical fingers in his hair, and saw the fist cocking back for a tranquilizing blow, the face beyond somber and exhausted.

Even then.

Chapter 10: Epilogue

Notes:

Thank you everyone for reading! Sorry for long pauses in between chapters as I got various parts of my life together. This fic has been a cross between writing experiment and a stream of consciousness, so I'm thankful for those of you who've stuck out my nonsense for so long!

He ached. He always ached, but this was new pain. Strung up like a martyr by some contraption, cables curling over his shoulders, plugged into his stolen PAK. Bound at the arms and legs and neck, useless. It was okay. Just another horror to survive. Victory still waited for him on the other side, if he could just weather one more storm.

And he could. Twice now his plans had been thwarted, once by a brilliant idiot, again by some strange happenstance, abilities that his other self should not have possessed. Both rare things, so infinitesimal in their chances that it couldn’t happen again. The blame didn’t lay with him. It never did.

“Zim doesn’t want me to kill you.”

The voice was familiar, of course. A voice from a memory. So much like his, so little like his. Dib looked up.

The Outlier was before him, setting some toasted bundle of fabric on a heavy white table. Deep purple in some spots, sooty black in others. Tattered and frayed, spotted with old blood. He gestured, metal hand gleaming in the harsh light.

“I fished that out of the Massive’s incinerator. ¿No sabías? It’s fireproof. If you want something turned to ash that badly, you should watch to make sure it’s gone.”

“Where is he?” he seethed, struggling fruitlessly against his bonds, “where’s Two?”

“I don’t know ‘Two’,” the Outlier said, flat-voiced, “I only know Zim.”

“Where is he?” Dib repeated in a snarl. His voice was the only weapon he had available at the moment, and he’d make use of it. The Outlier stared at him, drumming metal fingers against the table’s surface, percussion like faint rolling thunder.

“You did a number on him,” he said finally, eyes intense, mouth a thin line. He leaned in, head tilted slightly, words slow and dangerous and laced with some somber fury, “you must be so proud.”

“Let me see him,” Dib asserted. It was his right. Incapacitated for now, but not for long. Two would be on his side, and together they would escape, and -

“No,” the Outlier exhaled an incredulous laugh, “what kind of situation do you think you’re in?”

“You were supposed to be dead,” Dib hissed bitterly, reckless despite, “gone. Why bother, after all this time? How the fuck did you find me?”

“I didn’t find you. I found Zim. And you, unfortunately, were there as well.”

“The portal. Only I should have had the technology to-” he started, but then the Outlier stepped closer. As close as the memories, close enough that Dib could smell him, the scent of piney forests and black smoke. Golden eyes studied him. Unaturally golden, bright and burning.

Inhuman.

“Thinking small. Technology isn’t always the answer. You were a paranormal investigator at one time, no?” he asked, eyebrows raised, judging, “sometimes, when you want something bad enough, you’re willing to compromise. Let things in that shouldn’t be let in. Isn’t that right?”

He reached around to tap the side of Dib's PAK, the sound ringing through his skull.

“For you, technology. For me, something else.” 

"You’re a thrall?” Dib breathed, stunned by the realization, “what kind of demon-”

“Is that important?” the Outlier interrupted. He moved back, leaned against the table, arms folded, “the kind that lets me travel through dimensions. The kind that lets me find my Zim. That’s all that matters.”

“So what now?” Dib insisted, jolting once more against his bonds, “sold your soul just to find Two, he won’t let you kill me, and now you’re going to leave me in here to rot?”

“Rot? No. I’d like to keep you in one piece. You’re a valuable resource, you know,” the Outlier’s gaze was intense, and unsettling. There was a hunger there, something Dib recognized all too well. A thirst for knowledge. Wondering what he could get out of someone, how much of their worth he could wring from them before they became a useless husk to be tossed aside. The man nodded to himself, pointing to his head with a metal hand, ominous. “I think I could learn a lot from you.”

“I’m trying to save the world - the universe!” Dib insisted, mind reeling. Surely this other self would understand if he could explain, surely he wanted the same thing. What was he fighting for? Why else would he want to squeeze the knowledge from Dib’s mind, his PAK? “I’m trying to destroy the Irken Empire, and I can’t do that locked up. You’re a Dib, you should want that, you should join me-”

But the Outlier was obviously done with this conversation. He turned to leave, his cloak sweeping behind him, and Dib was enraged at the back being turned to him.

“I’m not going to give you what you want, whatever that is,” he huffed a mad and desperate laugh, “I’ll get out just like I did before. You know it’s true, and Two will help me. He's not yours anymore. I’ll get out, and you’ll get nothing.”

“You know…” the Outlier said, stopping beside the door. He studied the wall for a moment, hand hovering just over the light switch. When he pivoted to look over his shoulder, he nodded a little. Solemn. Understanding. And completely unthreatened. “...I believe you think that.”

Dib didn’t even notice when the lights shut off or the door clicked shut. Because the last thing he heard was the Outlier’s voice, an echo of his own, familiar and unfamiliar all the same.

“Éxtasis.”

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of The Revolution Series