My Only The Only One

Chapter 11

Zim paced like caged tiger. How could Dib, how COULD he!? He knew it wasn't rational to have expected to Dib have been waiting for him, worrying over him for almost ten years, but to have actually had a child with that human woman!? To have chosen a family he'd always claimed to have never wanted over his irken lover!

Again, he knew he was being irrational he just didn't care! It wasn't fair! The whole reason Zim had left is because Dib didn't WANT a child! He'd spent the last few months of their relationship telling his father to piss off because he didn't WANT kids!

How could any of that have made sense to the irken? It just didn't. There was no way any of that could be real. Zim figured he was having some sort of nighttime hallucination, like when a human dreams. Yes, that was it. He'd been knocked out by one of the Tallests' attempts at killing him and was currently hallucinating.

Or maybe he was dead and this was just Hell.

Either way Zim wanted out and as he headed for the door it swished open, Dib walking in with a superior yet entirely too calm look on his face. One would swear he wasn't about to interrogate his former alien lover, but rather was playing a somewhat difficult game of chess.

Zim stopped, his breath catching in his throat and his irken heart pausing.

They stared at one another, neither really knowing what to say. Zim wished Dib would yell at him. That he would yell and scream at Zim for leaving and throw insults so that Zim could yell back, and argue that Dib never really cared and had lied to him. That way he wouldn't be the only one looking bad in the argument. Unfortunately he knew Dib was way too rational for something like that and he was proven right when Dib finally did open his mouth.

"Going somewhere? Or did I actually catch you running away this time?"

Zim grimaced. That comment stung, but he quickly adopted an angry look, one he usually wore when ignorance and his supposed charm couldn't get him out of whatever trouble he'd gotten himself into.

"Go ahead, make jokes, be angry or whatever, but you have no idea-!"

Dib quickly interrupted. "Don't give me any of your bullshit Zim; I didn't come here for excuses. I don't even care that you left anymore. I stopped caring-...."

It was Zim's turn to interrupt.

"Seven years ago?" He asked, hiding his pleasure at the confused look on Dib's face. He didn't wait for the human to ask to elaborate. "At the most. I met your daughter. She's turning seven. That means you had to have stopped caring a little more than seven years ago."

Dib turned angry then. "You don't understand anything about that!"

"Of course I don't!" Zim yelled, feeling insulted. "I don't understand anything because I'm the stupid alien defect!"

"No you aren't!" Came an insistent yell from the still open door. Lix was standing there looking intensely upset. "You're not a defect Zim! You're just unique!"

Zim immediately calmed down at the worried look the hybrid held on his face and he said quietly. "Go lay down, Lix. I'll come talk to you in a minute."

"No!" He said, pouting. "You're upset!"

Dib looked back and forth between the two, watching in amazement. Irkens didn't have this kind of relationship. It was weird to see Zim suddenly so calm and in control of himself. And then there was just the fact that he was with anyone else at all. Zim just didn't make attachments like that.

Zim sighed and walked over to Lix. He put a hand on the other's shoulder and whispered something to him. To this Lix nodded and slunk off to his room, looking like he'd just been told he couldn't watch TV or something.