I'm Not Crazy (ZaDR)

1

Until ten years later when he came back.

The green boy was back.

And he was sitting in Dib’s window. Dib grabbed his glasses off of his nightstand and turned to him.

“Move. I need to close the window. It’s cold,” Dib said.

Zim just looked at him for a moment, processing what just happened. “You… you aren’t surprised to see me? I disappeared for ten years!” 

Dib sat up and shook his head. “Not really,” Then pushed Zim out of the window.

Dib looked out to see Zim fall into the seat of his spaceship. It looked like it had been repainted. Now it was a more vibrant purple than before. A bit scratched up, though. And it looked like Zim had done some work on it.

“Not even a little bit!?” Zim shouted up to Dib. This has to be some kind of joke, right? Zim thought.

He watched as Dib shook his head and closed the window. 

“...Well that didn’t go as planned,” Zim muttered to himself. Ten years and the Dib-stink didn’t even say hello? 

Zim sighed and started climbing up Dib’s wall to the window using his spider-like PAK legs. When he got to the window and tried to open it, it was locked. Dib was asleep inside. Zim groaned in frustration as he failed to force it open.

Zim knocked on the window. There was no response.

He knocked again. No response

He knocked again.

And again

And ag--

“Would you stop that? I have an interview in the morning!” Dib hissed, rolling over in his bed, facing Zim through the window.

“How do you not care that I, ZIM, is back?” Zim shouted, dumbfounded.

“You’re not even real. Go away.” Dib said, closing his curtains over the window, blocking Zim from view.

Zim blinked at the now covered window. He thought he had finally understood the human’s weird emotions. Was he wrong? Did he need to do more research? 

Zim knocked on the window again until Dib opened the curtains to glare at him.

“I told you to go away, Zim,” Dib growled. 

“What do you mean I’m not real?” Zim asked, ignoring Dib’s request.

Dib sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to explain anything to you. You’re a hallucination because my brain doesn’t work properly,” Dib said. “Or, as some would say, I am defective.” 

Zim slipped one of the skinnier legs from his Irken PAK under the window and played with the lock, trying to unlock the window. “Defective?”

Dib turned around, and Zim watched as he looked at papers sprawled across Dib’s desk, some hung on the wall. Some were pictures of Dib, with writing. Some were of Zim. Some of things like the chicken-foot incident. “Defective. Imperfect or faulty. Weak. Broken. Not normal. I’m defective, Zim.” Dib swallowed and wiped a tear from his eye. “I’m useless.”

Zim finally got the window unlocked and started to open it slowly. “We--”

“I’m not like other people. I’m crazy! I see things! Things that aren’t there! Like you. You aren’t real, Zim! You never were! You are just a result of my faulty brain,” Dib blurted. He turned to Zim, and sighed when he saw him halfway through the window. Zim stared dib in his puffy eyes and swallowed. It was clear he had been crying far before Zim’s arrival.