When it was all over, the Irken race lost. Zim single handedly took the resisty from a failure to the strongest military power known to Irken kind- And he barely did anything.
This was years ago. Zim had grown quite a bit since then, being stuck on a pretty interesting planet hiding from anyone who would kill the unstable general.
Every day, Dib would call. Every day, he would talk to Zim and help him keep calm, helped him avoid the urdge to succumb to the pak's coding and betray the resisty to the tallest. They hadn't seen each other in person for so long, but with every call their bond grew stronger.
The calls became even more important when Zim had to come out of hiding. But, to his surprise, he was greeted with cheering and love. Even the elites were respectful to him, and some rather tall Irkens even hugged him and THANKED HIM for overthrowing the past tallest. And when it happened he realized... He'd become rather tall, too.
When it happened, it was almost too fast to process.
He swore to the resisty to prevent the empire from relapsing into it's past state of constant war and destruction.
He swore to the people- HIS people- That he'd never let the control brains control them again.
He was dressed in the traditional robes... And his thumbs were lopped off as tradition called.
Then his Pak was reprogrammed for the final time, as were the paks of all his people, so that it no longer controlled their personalities and opinions. And he was reasigned as the Tallest.
Even without his Pak being "defective" anymore, it was hard not reverting back to being violent himself. But every day, Dib talked him through it. Dib was always there for him, even though they were light-years apart.
Except for the last month. Zim was passing close to the Earth in the Armada, which was now just a group of explorational ships. He'd been having panic attacks without Dib, and he really wanted to stop on Earth to check on Zim. But as the leader, he worried that the other Ex-Invaders would snap just like he might.
So he didn't plan to...
But, on the day he was closest to Earth, he got word of an old Invader ship docking on the bay. He decided to check it out personally, curious as to who had such a beaten hunk of junk on the main ship of the Armada.
That was probably a dumb idea, but he was in for a pleasant surprise...
