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Skoodge’s living arrangements are upgraded (or, perhaps, merely regraded) from “squatter” to “roommate” at the end of the first week Zim has back at Hi Skool. Zim upgraded the security system on the front door after that weird big-headed boy broke in for the schmillionth time, and the grate out back that he usually uses as a backup to squeeze into Zim’s basement was barred up after the resulting rogue gopher infestation. Why he decided he needed to live in this forsaken place, only the Brains may know.
Thus, he’d been standing at the window, trying to negotiate with GIR, which is only slightly less difficult than negotiating with brain damaged terrorists (or maybe exactly as difficult, since that’s kind of what this is), and heard an overly theatrical gasp behind him.
“A break-in?!” Zim shrieks, because he had gotten them both expelled from school before the unit on appropriate volume, apparently, “At…” A glow-in-the-dark wristwatch deploys from his PAK to inform him that it is: “THREEE-thirty in the afternoon?”
Then, Skoodge turned around, and Zim gasped even… gaspier? “Skoodge!” He points an accusing finger at him. “You’re breaking into my base? Why? Blorch wasn’t enough for you? You have to come steal MY mission?”
Skoodge does not question why this is one of the only times Zim doesn’t seem to forget about him entirely despite how many times it kept happening, or inform Zim that he doesn’t even have a mission anymore, or say something unsavory about how Blorch really wasn’t enough for him, and instead just says, “No, Zim. I got locked out of the house. I wanna watch the new season of Real Housewives of Vort.”
And Zim, in his infinite weirdness, replies, “Oh.” and then scratches his ass, and then says, “They have a new season? Didn’t we kind of, y’know…” He makes a vague handwaving motion to approximate ‘annihilate their planet and enslave their people’.
“Yeah, they’re filming on Plookesia now.”
“But,” he squints, “then it’d be more accurate to call it the Real Vortian Housewives of Plook—STOP DISTRACTING ME!” He flings an accusatory finger at Skoodge with the unwavering precision of a Double Doomer Super Duper Doom Strike and starts rambling about admittedly excellent but ultimately futile attempts at misdirection, which Skoodge doesn’t feel is warranted. Then again, he doesn’t feel like any of this is warranted. The sticky-hot anxiety that was pooling in his guts cools into fatigue.
He’s pretty sure Invaders aren’t supposed to be able to feel that, but he’s also pretty sure he’s not an Invader anymore. Does that mean he’s gonna end up like Zim? He passively watches him stomp around his own yard, screeching now about security measures. That would be… really unfortunate. This feels like one of those things that feel like they’re happening to someone else until he has time to melt down about it later. Like when the slaughtering rat people blew a hole into the side of his base, or when Zim remodeled the vent system in his base and Skoodge realized exactly how unprepared he was to be discovered. The creeping thoughts of exactly how terrifyingly capable Zim is seemed so far away compared to seeing him, in the flesh, freaking out about things that really don’t matter, exactly the way he always has and always will. How had he forgotten that?
“Zim?” He says, cursing the uncertainty that constantly plagues his voice. Zim’s head snaps back to him, and it feels so weird being the center of his attention again. He’d also forgotten how all-encompassing it is, like the cold, mortal tug of realizing that, no matter his PAK, or the thousands of years of evolution, or the training, or programming, or assigning, he is a little green thing in a very, very big universe. He had convinced himself that he’d hallucinated Zim’s strange gravity. How'd he forget that? It feels, almost, like he’s been in one big intermission between the last time they saw each other and now. It feels exactly like it did on Hobo 13, actually, the breathlessness and the thrill and the unbelievable mundanity of it all. How did he forget that?
Maybe whatever’s wrong with Zim is contagious.
“I’d like to go inside, Zim. It’s starting soon.” Skoodge gestures to the door, and shockingly, or maybe not shockingly at all, Zim just blinks and hrms and marches right up onto the stoop. The door swings open, and his mangled, deranged parents lurch out of the darkness within, sputter and spark a few times, and then fold neatly back into the walls.
“I, uh,” Zim says, “I gotta fix those, they’re on the fritz again.”
Skoodge does not tell him that they’ve been ‘on the fritz’ for the past three years, and instead nods sympathetically. The couch is exactly as comfortable as it is when Zim isn’t home, until Zim plops down on the opposite end from him and digs the remote out from between the cushions. Skoodge feels awkward, for some reason. The television flickers to life, and Zim clicks derisively through the channels before landing on the Intergalactic Melodrama And Regular Drama broadcast.
Zim watches Per Googy wail about her best friend sleeping with her husband with trepidation. Skoodge watches Zim watching Per Googy wail with his own trepidation. GIR frantically jogs past and whines about his quesadillas getting cold. Zim chides him for being unruly, but doesn’t elaborate. Skoodge is sitting on the couch.
Overhead, the weird kid is crawling on the ceiling. Skoodge pretends not to see this. He wonders if Zim does the same. He wonders if this is really what things were like when he was hundreds of feet below ground, when he was millions of lightyears away. If this is just constantly happening, regardless of anyone else’s input.
Per Googy smashes her wineglass over her husband’s head and Zim cheers and Skoodge jumps and Dib scoffs and GIR wheedles in the kitchen and Zim hums and crunches on his popcorn(?) and garbles, “Y’know, Real Vortian Housewives of Plookesia rolls off the tongue way better than Real Housewives of Vort,” and there is quite literally nowhere else he would rather be. Is that bad? That’s probably bad.
(That’s really, really bad.)