Ayam

Hate

The boy's face held its expression of surprise for a moment or two before it sort of relaxed into resignation as his body toppled forward. Zim instinctually dove to catch him, grabbing his shirt before he hit the ground. He lowered the human to the ground and checked his heartbeat.

Purple lifted his blindfold, then groaned. Red punched his shoulder. "I told you you'd shoot the alien first, you owe me monies."

Purple glared. "Stupid alien, cost me monies. Red, if I find out you rigged this, you'll owe me triple."

"Dib!" Zim screamed. "Don't you dare! You... you! You do not get to die. Do you hear me? I forbid this!"

Red and Purple burst into fits of cackling laughter.

"You forbid him to die? Do you still think you have any kind of power?" Purple snickered. "Where's your almighty Ayam? If he's almighty, he should have stopped this." Purple raised his voice. "Am I right everybody?"

Hesitant murmurs from spectators around the room lent their support, but Purple wasn't satisfied. He said, louder, "I said, am I right?"

The murmurs turned into hearty agreement. Nobody wanted to be thrown out the airlock.

Zim raised his head and shouted, "Ayam, make him alive again! You did it, you did it for your friend in the Records, you did it for a female smeet and a male smeet, make Dib alive again!"

For a moment, the room held its collective breath, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing happened.

Zim crumpled over the body of the boy, his shoulders shaking.

Red strode down from the dais and grabbed Zim by the collar, yanking him up to eye-level. To his shock, great goopy globs were falling from Zim's eyes, as the Irken shrieked and clawed at Red's arm.

"You defect." Red sneered. "You've sunk so low you would actually cry over the death of an inferior species." He flung Zim to the floor, curling his lip in disgust as the smaller Irken crawled right back to the alien's side and pulled the shell close.

"Get him out of here, and dispose of the body."

...

Zim slammed his fists into the wall over and over again, screaming. His spooch felt like he'd been eating jagged metal as he shouted repeatedly, "HOW DARE YOU! HOW DARE YOU! HOW DARE YOU!" When he stopped shouting that, he started yelling, "WHERE WERE YOU? WHY DIDN'T YOU STOP THEM? WHY DIDN'T YOU BRING HIM BACK?"

After about an hour of this, he finally slid down to the floor of his cell, spent. He closed his eyes, but it didn't stop the images in his mind. Images of the laser blast drilling a neat, bloodless hole through Dib's head. He wrapped his arms around his stomach as if he could hold himself together that way.

He waited. Waited for Ayam's voice to come and answer his questions, make everything clear and sensible. Waited for the soothing peace that would come and the assurance that, somehow, Dib would of course be brought back.

Instead, he was met with silence. Hour after hour of silence.

Eventually, he broke the silence. "He was only a smeet," he hissed venomously. "He had no business being killed. He was supposed to live longer. He was supposed to go back to Earth and get a new arm and live a normal life. Humans are already ridiculously short lived as it is, and you just stand there and watch as he dies long before he's supposed to? You know what?" His voice rose. "If you're that unfair, that unjust, you're no better than the Tallests. I hate you! Do you hear me? I HATE YOU!"

Silence was his only answer. He lay down on the floor and vehemently wished the guards would come back. He was more than ready to die, if only to stop this horrible throbbing ache in his gut, the feeling borne from the thought that he had been betrayed by his commander. Again.

Note: I wrote this chapter in particular because I am dealing with the probable death of a friend. This friend incurred a staph infection at a hospital that didn't know what it was doing, and it can't be counteracted. Short of an intervention from God, I will be losing this friend sooner rather than later. So I am also grappling with the issue of death. And I don't know all the answers. I wish I did. Like I said before, I process things in terms of Zim sometimes.

And yes. I have had my shouting matches at God. The best thing anybody ever told me was, "He's big enough to take whatever you can dish out."