Our Purpose

Chapter 6

He was already questioning himself, questioning who he even was, questioning why he didn't see it sooner. 

He didn't know where he was going; his legs were seemingly taking him in a random direction.

His whole world was falling down. His mind was in a downward spiral. His world was crashing, pummeling into oblivion, and he couldn't stop it. 

It was so hard to keep the tears in his eyes, to keep his composure while he continued to run and run down the sidewalk.

He'd been lied to his whole life. Everything he'd been doing for so long... To prove that this alien life existed, it was all for nothing. 

His struggle to prove he was right wasn't needed in the first place. 

His father lied to his face for his entire life, called him insane, publicly humiliated him, and even put him in an insane asylum, and for what? To keep his cover? To make the boy stop doing what he was passionate about?

At first, he didn't believe it. How could he? 

But as he had sat there, as he had thought about it, pieces started falling into place. Why his father was so stoic about not believing him, why he never took off that stupid lab coat and those stupid goggles, why he never heard or saw anything about their mother, why Dib was always obsessed with the paranormal, but most of all... why his father never seemed to believe the younger Membrane despite the undeniable evidence presented to him. 

It was all part of this selfish plan that his father had, one that put even his own children, who apparently weren't his biological children, in harm's way. Countless times, he'd lied in front of the whole world at his childrens' expense, and for what?

It was because he was the paranormal, he was insane, he was the outcast that society made him out to be. 

He was a clone. He was partly the thing he was trying to prove was real all this time, an Irken. 

He felt like such a hypocrite. Why, in his right mind, could he expect everyone else to see what he was showing them, the evidence he was so clearly presenting them, when he himself couldn't see what was right in front of his own face?

It didn't matter. Dib didn't care anymore. He felt drained. So, incredibly drained. The anxious determination that was present in him just a week before had faded into a deep, dark depression, and despite everything within him telling him to just turn around and go back home, to shut himself in his room and cry himself to sleep, he knew he had to talk to someone. 

It didn't matter to him whether or not this trip ended up with his body bruised and swollen, he just had to spill what he was feeling, and there was one other outcast that he knew he had to talk to. 

As he looked up, he realized that he was running toward them, anyway.

Zim might've been his rival, but Dib didn't trust anyone else. He didn't even trust himself. He knew that his sister must have known this whole time; his father had made him feel like he was so alone, and now he felt even more so. 

As he continued to run down the sidewalk in the direction of Zim's house, he sank lower and lower into the depression that'd been threatening to spill over. 

He kept thinking about how everything had been so obvious. He kept reminding himself that he was the very thing he'd been trying to protect Earth from. 

He kept telling himself, over and over, that his entire life was a lie, that the person he looked up to the most, the one he had wanted validation from since he was a baby, had made him feel like he'd lost his mind for all those years.