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Dib starts running, and he doesn’t have a plan.
He doesn’t have to think about where he’s going, his feet automatically pounding the sidewalk along the same path they’ve taken so many times, so many years, for so many reasons. It never dulled, that adrenaline rush, the double dose of exhilaration and fear of what he might be running into. Today’s the same, except it’s different, familiar thoughts running through his head: gotta keep going, gotta get there before it’s too late, gotta stop -
“GIR! Take those squirrels out of your head!”
He’s not too late: the bug-eyed bane of his existence is out on his front lawn, no doomsday device, just tapping away at a floating electronic pad while his minion cartwheels through the gnomes. “I need to shrink the base down to the containment cube - eh?” He glances up as Dib rounds the corner, his eyes narrowing in challenge. “ Diiib! ”
“That’s right, Zim! ...I mean, obviously. Who else ever shows up? Anyway - I’m here! To stop you!”
“Ha! Foolish Earth-stink, as if you could ever hope to stop Zim from carrying out his ingenious escape from...hmm, wait, what?” Zim tilts his head and blinks, scratching at his wig as defiance fades to confusion. “You’re here to stop me from...leaving?”
“That’s...what I just said!” If Dib just keeps shouting, maybe he won’t have to think about why this time is different, before he can lose his nerve. “So, uh...You can’t go!”
“I can’t? Oh, okay - I mean wait, no! I’m not falling for your big-headed tricks!” Zim jabs an accusing claw in Dib’s direction, his face scrunching up with suspicion before he puffs his chest out proudly. “ Your days may be even more meaningless without your greatest Irken adversary, but Zim is destined for greater things than enslaving your worthless race! My Tallest have entrusted me with a special mission to the sun, where I will…”
“The sun? ” Dib echoes, eyes wide and incredulous as his stomach twists itself into knots at the thought of - no, he can’t even think about it. “Zim, your Tallest lied to you, remember? They were never coming to Earth. They’re sending you to die! You can’t actually believe that -”
“ You lie!” Zim snarls, his teeth bared, hackles raised and body tensed up like a cornered wild animal - but Dib can see the words hit, recognises the flinch. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Zim look genuinely hurt, and it’s harder to look at than he remembers - but that brief glimmer of vulnerability might be his best shot at getting through to him. “Lies, lies - filthy, disgusting lies! Your head is made of lies!”
“I’m not.” Dib’s voice comes out surprisingly calm, despite Zim’s glare practically searing into his eyeballs, despite the sense that he’s standing right on the edge of a swirling black hole of dangerous, unspoken, unpredictable emotions. If Zim leaves, it might swallow him up - but if he stays … “C’mon, Zim - even you’re not this dumb. You know you’re better than this, being the galaxy’s laughing stock -”
“ Silence! ”
The shriek - raw and desperate, closer to a plea than a real threat - pierces the air as one of Zim’s PAK legs shoots out without warning, seemingly headed to stab Dib straight through the chest. He steps aside and it plunges into the ground instead as he steps aside, clawing through the dirt just a few inches from his boot. “Insolent dirt-monkey, you know nothing of the almighty Irken Empire’s grand design! And why...why are you not gloating? You hate me! You loathe, despise and detest me, you curse the name of Zim with every fibre of your miserable being, you fantasise about my demise in creepily specific scenarios...You should be happy! I command you to be happy!”
“ I know I should be!” They’re both yelling now, familiar territory, except it’s never felt like this , like the words are burning Dib’s throat and his eyes, all the confusing and conflicting emotions he’s tried to push deep down bubbling to a boiling point he can no longer contain. “Believe me, I wanna be! I wish I could just forget you ever existed, you and your stupid incredible alien tech and your insane robot dog and your world-destroying tiny moose! I wish I didn’t need -” His voice cracks, hands flailing uselessly, fingers twisting in his hair with frustration. Happy, he should be happy, this is what he’s wanted since he was twelve - except it isn’t. He should be happy, finally saving a world that only ever ridicules or ignores him for it. Going back to whatever his life was before, hunting Bigfoot and ghosts and cryptids that could never give him the same thrill of the chase, the ecstasy and agony of victory after defeat that didn’t mean anything to the oblivious masses, but meant everything in the moment, to the two of them. He should be happy, he should be victorious , but how can he be, without that feeling - without Zim?
“...I don’t want you to go,” he says instead, voice small - he feels small, vulnerable, even though he towers over Zim now. He folds his arms defensively, hugging himself as he looks down at that lone PAK leg, “where...where I can’t follow you.”
Silence. Too much silence.
Zim’s eyes are wide when Dib finally forces himself to look back at him; he blinks, obnoxiously slowly, lifts a claw to scratch at his chin as he scrutinises Dib like he’s a particularly difficult math problem.
“...You’re surrendering the Earth to me?”
“No!” Dib snaps, throwing up his hands because - honestly, he doesn’t know what he expected, this is Zim. “But can’t you just, I dunno...be a little less evil? Or only to the people who really deserve it? No murder or blowing up planets, but you could...mess with the skool timetable, dye people’s hair pink, start a heartless corporate empire, stuff like that. And then I’ll be here to stop you! It’s...our thing, you know?”
Zim hums, his expression remaining unusually, unsettlingly unreadable. Then…
“You don’t hate me.”
Dib groans quietly, rubbing the back of his neck - does he really have to say it like that? “I mean, I guess...maybe not all the time, entirely?”
“Yes.” Zim nods, something like satisfaction dawning in his expression as his mouth curls into a familiar - but no less unsettling - smirk. “You like me.”
“What - no , that’s not what I said!” Dib blinks, traitorous heat flooding his cheeks. “There’s a huge spectrum between not wanting someone to die horribly and actually -”
“Tell me,” Zim interrupts, completely ignoring Dib’s logic and reason as usual, “something you like about me.”
“ What ,” Dib splutters again, like a broken record, because this...wasn’t even in the top ten of ways he anticipated this going. “No, there’s no way, I’m not…”
“ Tell Zim - or I leave. Forever.”
Dib has never hated Zim more than he does right now. He hates his stupid face, his stupid smirk, the stupid way he tents his claws and the stupid tap-tap-tap of his boot as his leg vibrates in anticipation -
“I guess - ugh - sometimes...you can be...kinda funny? Usually not intentionally, but...”
“Yes, I am.” Zim chuckles, and Dib also hates the way the low, warm sound loosens the tightness in his chest, like it gets just a little easier to breathe. “Hilarious. An undisputed master of comedy. What else?”
“No - nothing , that’s it! I’m not just gonna stand here and…”
Zim sticks out his lower lip in a pout, like a child about to throw a tantrum, and Dib can’t believe it’s actually come to this, he hates every second of it, but if extorted compliments really are his best bargaining tool...
“Okay, look, how about this,” he says, before Zim can threaten him again, before Dib comes to his senses. “You stay and I’ll...tell you more things I don’t hate about you tomorrow. I mean, if I can even think of any. And only if you don’t do anything too evil.”
Zim scrunches up his face at that, but he doesn’t immediately say no. He doesn’t say anything for a few moments, which is starting to freak Dib out, because apparently the only thing worse than Zim screaming in his face is Zim... not screaming in his face.
“Pfft, ‘too evil ’.” Zim scoffs at the very notion, breaking the silence with pointed finger-quotes, but continues before Dib can do so. “Eh...very well! Perhaps I can delay my triumphant return for a few days. I wasn’t finished packing anyway…”
“Yuuup you were!” a third voice screams from underground, making them both startle as a half-dog, half-robot monstrosity burrows up, clutching what seems to be a whole family of angry gophers.
“GIR, I didn’t ask you!” Zim glares at his minion, back to his abrasive self, though his cheeks seem to darken. “Put those disgusting vermin back in your head. We’re…” He pauses to give Dib one last unreadable look - somewhere between suspicious and...hopeful? - before turning away, “not quite finished with this pathetic planet yet.”
And with that he marches back into his base, without a backwards look, and that’s…it. Dib is victorious, in the most complicated and confusing sense of the word that’s the complete opposite of everything he used to think he wanted.
But Zim stays, a few more days that turn to weeks, then months, back to skool, back to them . Back to normal, except nothing ever is, familiar but never safe. Drifting into some strange, uncharted territory between enemies and friends, something he’s not sure there’s a word for yet.
They still fight, of course, because it’s all they know. Because Zim’s still Zim and he still leaves tacks on Dib’s chair, even if they don’t turn him into bologna, and Dib still throws the odd muffin back at him for old time’s sake, though he might hold off on the meat stew that literally burns his face.
Neither of them forget, though, about Dib’s not-quite promise; it’s pretty impossible to when Zim sidles up to him at his desk or his locker, every day without fail, looking up at him with big, alien-puppy eyes, somehow both taunting and hopeful. And every day Dib groans, glances around to make sure no one’s listening, maybe asks if they’re really doing this (they really are), before he tells Zim...
He tells him that he has some pretty cool tech and maybe even some sort of neat ideas (and a whole lot more stupid ones) after they’re forced to be lab partners, and discover that when they eventually stop arguing...they make a pretty good team, sparking off of each other’s ideas, pushing each other further, even finishing each other’s sentences. That’s also when he learns that Zim chirps like a baby bird when he gets really excited and it’s cuter than it has any right to be. Dib isn’t planning on telling him that, until it just kind of slips out and Zim blinks and splutters and blushes , demanding that Dib takes that back this instant before he claws his eyeballs out and lays eggs in the sockets.
But he never follows through, and Dib maybe keeps inadvertently keeps finding more things he doesn’t hate about Zim, like when they’re bickering over the laptop and he prods him in the side and discovers - to his sadistic delight - that the almighty Irken invader is ticklish . Zim’s non-evil laugh is screechy and ridiculous and completely infectious, and he doesn’t hesitate to launch a counterattack until they’re wrestling on the sofa, fingers and claws relentlessly seeking out sweet spots and laughter filling up the room.
They’re both way too stubborn to call mercy, but eventually, Dib ends up on his back with Zim sprawled across him, just recovering their breath. He can feel Zim panting softly, his face flushed, claws curled in Dib’s shirt with his head tucked almost underneath his chin, and for a moment it just feels...nice. Comfortable. Right .
The next moment, Zim remembers that he’s stinky and scrambles off of him, to the opposite end of the couch where he remains for the rest of the night. Where they don’t have to acknowledge whatever this is, this new awkwardness, this hesitation, this whisper of a possibility that goes unspoken. Because it could be nothing, that frisson when Zim flashes him the stink-eye the next day in class and Dib sticks his tongue out and then they smile, actually smile at each other, a blip of madness, a temporary glitch in his system - or it could be something , a volatile, unpredictable, irresistible something that might crash and burn or it might soar among the stars, higher and brighter than he’s even dared to dream.
But it’s Zim, and it’s Dib, and he doesn’t know how to be without him, who to be without him. There’s no one else who makes him so mad, makes him laugh, makes him groan and yell and despair and smile and scream and feel so much, letting him go was never really an option.
Wherever they’re going, he doesn’t have a plan...but maybe they’ve never needed one.