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Zim cursed himself countless times, scrambling to fix the control panel of his Voot and slamming his fists down angrily when he made it worse.
Why, why, why!?
Why didn't he listen, why did he have to be defiant?
Why couldn't he just...
... Why couldn't he be normal?
He slumped down into the front seat, defeated. Gir, or what was left of him, sat at his side. Powered down long ago and scrapped as a last ditch effort for parts to fix the voot.
All of his years of blindly following the tallests amounted for nothing.
Zim watched a low oxygen warning flash violently on the control panel.
It didn't matter.
His mission was fake.
Dib didn't like playing with him anymore.
He couldn't fix his voot.
And he had defied his tallests.
He was lucky they even gave him another chance.
Zim was caught by the empire at a run-down gas station, swiped up by top Irken scientists.
Red and Purple had requested that he be studied, that he be given a high quality chamber to hopefully keep him stated. The main goal being to find the orgin of his defectiveness. To possibly find a cure for other defectives.
They would've dismantled his pak piece by piece.
In a panic, Zim fled. The tallest saw him skittering to the docs and followed suit. If Zim thought hard enough, he could still hear the tinks and screeches of pak legs chasing after him. He could still feel gusts of wind against him when the tallests had barely missed grabbing him. How his antenna convulsed every time they shouted for back up.
The frantic banging on the emergency door of his Voot, pack legs almost prying back the hatch before he escaped.
Zim had curled in on himself, rocking back and forth as he remembered all of his wrongdoings. It was against Irken nature to disobey a tallest's wishes, and yet... He'd done that.
Zim stood on shaking legs to retrive Gir's parts. He could feel his pak's fans kick on, pushing itself to the limit to keep him alive.
He willed them to stop.
After a few minutes of tinkering, he watched two, bright blue lights flicker on.
"Hi mahstur! ... Master?"
"Gir." One syllable. He heaved, just a short enunciation left him breathless.
Gir looked around, seeming to ignore Zim's voice. Only just now registering that they were in a ship.
"Where are the big tall ones?" Gir gestured above himself and cocked his head to the side.
Zim took a deep breath, and the air was unpleasantly thick. He had to stop his pak from activating oxygen backup again. "... We ran away, Gir."
"Oooohhhh." Gir sat dumbly for a few minutes, and for once Zim appreciated it.
But then he spoke up again.
"Maaahhhstur, you look upseeet."
Zim shook. His head pounded and his breathing was ragged.
"It's... nothing. Gir..."
"Oh! I know! You's is tired! I'll sing a lullaby!"
He looked at his companion, the robot humming as he tried to settle on what to sing.
"That's... nice- of you. Gir, thank..." a deep breath. "Thank you."
"Mhmm!"
Gir sang to him, loud and squeaky.
But that didn't bother him.
Zim shifited on his side, the light exertion nearly making him completely collapse.
It was fine.
The song became fuzzy, and his vision blotted.
He'd never thought that -being the failure of an invader that he was- he'd go out so peacefully.