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It’d been a week, and Skoodge was positive Zim was avoiding him.
He refused to sit next to him in class. He took a charging station in an entirely different pod. And yesterday during height assessment, he’d moved down the line as to not be next to Skoodge, when normally he tried every trick in the book to secure a spot further up.
Skoodge was no fool. He knew it had something to do with… whatever it was that’d happened. He still didn’t know, since Zim still wouldn’t talk to him about it, no matter how many times he asked. But whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t nothing like Zim claimed. “Nothing” wouldn’t throw Zim off his normally indefatigable rhythm like this. Sure, Zim had always been a little… odd, since the beginning. But his weirdness had reached a new level ever since he’d been taken away two weeks prior.
And it was only getting worse. Skoodge hadn’t been getting to see much of him lately, but when he did, Zim looked either panicky, with wide eyes and laser-straight antennae, or utterly zoned out, his gaze fixed hollowly on the floor. His holovid assessment scores, while never particularly outstanding, had become positively dismal. And the other day, he’d nearly skewered another smeet at Meal 2 when it’d bumbled into him from behind.
No, something had definitely happened, and Skoodge needed to get to the bottom of it. Because, he’d carefully reasoned, the success of the Irken Empire depended on the success of all of its members. So Skoodge needed to get Zim back on track. For the Empire’s sake! Plus, Zim had apparently caused them extra work once already. Skoodge was simply saving them the trouble by stepping in.
The best chance he’d have at intercepting him would be in the walk from General Session 3A to the Advanced Field Tactics class he, Zim, and a handful of others had been ordered to take. Recently, Zim had taken to bolting from 3A as soon as it ended, and by the time Skoodge and the others caught up to him, he was already sitting with the holovid visor jammed firmly on his head.
(Yet another indicator something was wrong. The day Zim was actually eager to start a holovid session was the day Skoodge would eat his own PAK.)
So for 3A that day, Skoodge sat in the back near the exit instead of the front like he was supposed to (the solitary perk of being height deficient: people stopped caring about what you did). When Zim slunk in, he shot Skoodge a suspicious look, but took a seat at the opposite end of the row. And when the dismissal tone droned and Zim ran for it, Skoodge was right behind him.
Or at least, he tried to be. “Hey Zim!” he called. “Zim! Wait up!” But Zim didn’t spare him a backwards glance as he scrambled for the exit. Skoodge shouldered his way through the massing smeets, earning himself a few dirty looks as he tried desperately to catch up to the small figure ducking and weaving through the crowd. “Zim! Hey! Zi- oof, sorry, sorry!”
When Skoodge finally tumbled out of the room, Zim was already a good distance down the hall. He wasn’t running outright, but it was a close thing. Skoodge did, though. The physical conditioning supervisors always mocked him for how he looked while running, sneering that perhaps he should look into an assignment as a class B2 planet draft beast with that lumbering shuffle.
(Skoodge always quietly thought that it shouldn’t matter how he looked so long as he got done what needed to be done. Which he did. Better than most, actually. But he never voiced it. After all, to suggest that appearance had no bearing on capability was, objectively, incorrect. Everyone knew that.)
“Hey,” Skoodge puffed as he slowed to a half-jog beside him. There was no response. “Zim?” Skoodge tried to catch his eye. A stone-faced Zim somehow pressed on even faster. Skoodge frowned and followed. “Zim, I-”
“What do you want, Skoodge?” Zim sounded more irritated than anything. But when Skoodge caught his wrist and tugged him to a stop, the look Zim turned on him was affronted and outraged, sure, but also… something else. A couple something elses. Skoodge wasn’t quite sure what they were or what he was meant to do about them, but he did know he wasn’t going to waste this opportunity now that he finally had it.
Zim tried to wrench his arm free, but Skoodge kept his grip. "Skutch told me about a shortcut, and I wanted to check it out with you. Come on," he said, casually. He hoped. Zim’s eyes narrowed, and his PAK vented with a curt hiss of air. But he allowed Skoodge to pull him along, albeit a step or two behind just to be contrary.
The two of them walked until they reached a hallway going off to the left. It was less a hallway and more a narrow break in the wall, really, lined with pipes and valves and dim red lights, just wide enough for mechanical maintenance drones to enter. Or, two already undersized smeets. Skoodge shot a furtive look around, then quickly ducked inside, pulling Zim behind him.
“Alright,” Skoodge said, letting go and whirling to face him once they were far enough in. He looked to Zim expectantly, and when nothing came forth, gave an impatient gesture of the head and raised his brows. “So?”
The lighting from the main hall behind Zim cast his face in shadow, but Skoodge could read the irritation in his tone and antennae easy enough. “So what?”
“So what happened!” Skoodge demanded. “I know you know what I’m talking about.” He looked pointedly around the ceiling. “And there’s no cameras back here, so you-”
“Skoodge,” Zim interrupted, a note of warning in his voice.
“Zim,” he fired back. “I know something happened. Ever since-”
“Skoodge,” Zim growled again. Skoodge could almost feel the glare pressing on his face. “Nothing. Happened.”
“Yes it did!” Skoodge insisted.
“Skoodge!”
Skoodge ignored him. “Zim, you were acting weird last week after you came back, and now this week you’ve been even weirder. And don’t think I forgot the conversation we had! Or, or that I didn’t notice you avoiding me, or how you barely talk anymore, or… IRK, just how WEIRD you’ve been acting! You’re jumping at shadows, and falling out of protocol, and failing like, ALL of your exams-”
“Shut UP!”
“-even Explosives and Directed-Energy Weaponry, which I KNOW is your favorite, and…” Skoodge swallowed, his spooch thrumming. “Last week when I brought up deactivation you didn’t say yes, but you didn’t say no either-”
“Skoodge, shut up…”
Skoodge barely heard him. “-and that’s, that’s…” He looked everywhere but Zim. “I don’t even know what to say to that. I-I don’t even know if it’s true, since you won’t talk to me, but…” Skoodge paused, then looked sideways at him. “You’ve been acting weird, and wrong, and soon I’m not going to be the only one who notices. So just talk to me, tell me what happened, tell me if what I think is true is… true, and... I- I- I don’t know, I can help you, or… something?”
Zim was as still and silent as a hologram awaiting input, but Skoodge didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean- I can’t- if you’re- you know, if there’s something wrong wrong I can’t fix it, but if it’s gone this long it can’t be that bad, and Zim, I... maybe I can help you, um, work through it, and then you’d be fine, nobody would know, I wouldn’t tell anyone else and everything’d be fin-” He stopped abruptly, and then gave a desperate little laugh. “But that can’t be right, can it? I mean, you can’t be defective. That- that doesn’t make any sense.”
Across from him Zim had started breathing manually, his chest rising faster and faster, gaze fixed somewhere around the level of Skoodge’s upper primary port. But Skoodge wasn’t in a place to notice. “Cause if you were defective-”
...It is possible for errors to occur during this process, either in the biological hardware, PAK coding, or both. An Irken with such flaws is prevented from functioning at the requisite level and fulfilling their duties to the Empire, and are therefore classified as “defective”...
“-and they noticed-”
...Defects may be minor, thus remaining undetected until their presence is made known through an impact on performance...
“-then they would’ve had to take you away-”
...However, whenever discovered, such things cannot be tolerated…
“-and you COULDN’T have come back-”
...and for the good of the individual and the Empire…
“-and-”
...the only option for a defective…
“-and-”
...is...
“-and Zim how are you still here if they sent you to be deactivat-”
“SHUT UP!” Zim roared, and suddenly his PAK legs were filling the air, as broken and bent as the last time Skoodge had seen them, and Zim was launching himself at him.
Skoodge knew he was small. Knew it when he had to stand on tiptoe to retrieve his nutrition trays. Knew it when the other smeets stayed away as if his smallness was something they could catch. Knew it every time he met the disapproving stare of a smeetery worker. But never had he felt smaller than in the face of the sudden and wild rage of a smeet even smaller than him.
Zim slammed him against the wall, and before Skoodge could do more than grunt, Zim bunched his uniform in his fists and did it a few more times, hard. “SHUT UP SKOODGE!” he screamed. “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SHUT YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU’RE TOLD?!” The joints of his PAK legs thunked into the wall as the points skittered off to the side, too damaged to support the pressure Zim was putting on them. “NOTHING IS WRONG WITH ZIM! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? NOTHING!”
“Zim, I-”
“NOTHING!!”
Skoodge’s words caught in his throat. Zim’s eyes were bright and burning and for a moment Skoodge thought he was going to shove a PAK leg in his chest and worm it around til the primary cable tore like he’d been made to do to his partner during Sparring Session 2 a few days ago.
The PAK legs overhead creaked and trembled, protesting the weight being put on their mangled structure, but stayed put. Skoodge didn’t dare move, or speak, only watched as ever so slowly, Zim’s breathing grew more and more shallow, his gaze unfocusing and sliding to the side, until he looked exactly like Skoodge had been seeing so often these days. Skoodge ventured in a small voice, “...Zim? Are you-”
“Zim is fine.” He still didn’t meet Skoodge’s eyes. “Zim… is fine. Zim… is…” He trailed off.
Skoodge had just about mustered up the courage to rebut that no, he clearly was not, when a tiny snicker bubbled up from Zim’s chest and chased that courage right back where it came from as it tumbled into full-blown cackling laughter.
“Don’t you get it, Skoodge?” Zim shook him a little once he’d finally stopped, eyes back on him and clearer than Skoodge had seen in weeks. “Zim is fine! Zim is absolut- NO!” he interjected, finger to the air, as if he’d given Skoodge time to respond in the first place. He leaned in. “Zim is perfect.” He laughed again and suddenly dropped Skoodge. His PAK legs clattered to the floor like a bundle of dropped pipes.
“Uh, I-”
“It’s allll just a BIG misunderstanding,” Zim waved his hands, surging forth on the crest of his own energy. “Nothing is wrong with me! There’s just been some sort of mistake! How could I have done anything wrong, when I’m such an exemplary…..ehh….EXAMPLE of an Irken!”
Skoodge, smoothing down his uniform, quirked an antenna. “If you’re-”
He jumped when Zim suddenly whipped back to him. “Nothing happened, Skoodge,” Zim said, low and intense and just a touch off-center, “and nothing is GOING to happen. Because Zim is perfect.”
For a moment, Skoodge’s world was red. The red of Zim’s eyes, the red of the hallway, red red RED. And then Zim straightened and clapped his hands, and the moment was gone. “Now come on!” he said, wobbling a little as his PAK legs tumbled and jerked back into his PAK, screeching all the way. Skoodge winced, but Zim didn’t seem to notice. “We have class to get to! Unless you want to be put in the Closet of Pain!” He grinned and bolted.
“Hey, wait up! No fair!” Skoodge scrambled back out into the main hallway after him, but Zim was taking full advantage of his head start, cackling all the way.
Skoodge grimaced. Zim might’ve been shorter, but he was quicker. Closet of Pain it was. At least he’d finally gotten to talk with Zim, and he seemed to be feeling better. There was no way he was perfect, because only the Tallest was perfect, but he was acting normally again. Well. Normal for Zim.
Skoodge frowned. Maybe nothing had happened, and Zim had just been being weird like usual. After all, it’s not like the Control Brains could make a mistake. Either someone was defective or they weren’t, and if they were, they were deactivated.That’s all there was to it.
The warning tone sounded overhead. Skoodge ran faster, unsightliness be damned. He’d take the Closet of Pain over the Tardiness Correction units any day.