🛸👽Invader Zim Oneshots👽🛸 (ZADR, RAPR)

We'll Be a Fine Line (ZADR, Gaz)

og summary: "Are you...blackmailing me?" He doesn't sound angry so much as surprised, maybe even pleased, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. "Wow. It's been a while, I didn't know you cared."

"I don't." It's almost the truth; Gaz wants to be able to not care about her brother's deeply questionable life choices. If she could take another summer of him melting into a miserable chair-dweeb, stinking up the whole house and too pitiful even to laugh at. If she didn't know that, in whatever twisted way, Dib needs Zim, and he's gonna go after him no matter how obviously terrible a decision that is. With an exasperated groan, she elbows him in the side with maybe 98% of her full power, hard enough to make him yelp but not to go flying across the room. "Now get out of my face and go get your gross alien boyfriend."

(or: the mating dance of the dumbass.)

***

As far back as she remembers, there's two constants in Gaz's life: she has Dib, and she's annoyed.

When they were tiny gross babies, she'd shut him up with a clunk to the head from her bottle; sometimes he'd cry, and that was funny for a while until it hurt her ears, so then Gaz would start crying too to prove she could do it louder. She didn't have much else to entertain her, back in the bad old days before she could play video games. It was mostly just the two of them and the NannyBots, unless their dad managed to schedule a half hour of non-science time to spend with them. 

But that was fine, because Gaz has never needed much attention. She just wanted to be left in peace with her stuffed animals, since they were much more intelligent company than other people - especially other kids, who were dumb and annoying and ruined everything, a constant stream of irritating enemies she had to fight for the good stuff in life, like pizza or the latest GameSlave.

Dib, on the other hand - from the moment he learned to babble he's been disgustingly desperate for attention. Always tugging on her sleeve to look at those funny lights in the sky, come see these prints in the garden, help him stalk that sickly guy across the street who is obviously a vampire, Gaz, don't you see? There's something new every week, but the ending is the same: there's nothing worth opening her eyes for. Professor Membrane shakes his head in vague disappointment before telling Dib that when he's older he'll grow out of these tiresome conjurings of an overactive imagination and come to appreciate real science. All the kids at skool call him a freak, and Gaz just...doesn't get it, why he cares so much about convincing other people, chasing validation that he's never gonna get. That wouldn't mean anything anyway because the people in their town are all dumb as rocks and will believe anything that fits with their idiotic fantasy worldview and aggressively ignore anything that doesn't. Gaz could've told him that years ago, if he could get his stupid big head out of his butt long enough to consider that she might have better things to do than help him make tinfoil hats. But there's maybe also a kind of trainwreck fascination in watching her brother edge a little closer to the brink of insanity every day. She wonders if one day he'll snap, steal one of their dad's lasers and start blasting everyone who ever ridiculed him, except that sounds too cool for Dib.

Instead, Zim shows up, and Dib doesn't so much fall as cannonball launch himself into the abyss, never to return the same.

The thing with Zim isn't that he's an alien or whatever - he's obviously too dumb to take over the world (except for that one time, but seriously, Gaz could do way more diabolical things if she had half of his tech. She's considered it, but ruling Earth seems like too much work and way too many people). It's that he, unlike everyone else, actually does notice Dib - considers him a threat worth engaging with, water fight after muffin battle after bologna head - and that, it turns out, is pretty dangerous. With his self-proclaimed mortal enemy, Dib's like a bottle of Poop that's been shook up, fizzing with manic energy, constantly scheming, plotting, spying, and laser-focused on Zim, Zim, Zim. Which, she guesses, is sorta an improvement, because at least if he's stalking Zim he isn't bugging Gaz as much, apart from when he's bugging her to stalk Zim with him. But Gaz's had her whole life to perfect ignoring him, so this is normal now. Dib's too pathetic to convince anyone else Zim's an alien, Zim is too incompetent to pull off any of his schemes and they're equally pig-headed (literally), so they'll probably be doing this mating dance of the dumbass until they either die or get married. Preferably the former.