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Part Two: Kindred Spirit
The world has always been a host for two: one world inside, one world out. The world outside is always changing. Like now. Leaves, burning and trembling under their own colored flames, wither away into the color of their origin- Earth- and die. They leave branches, naked under a grey towel of a sky. The world outside loses its color and becomes a vast empty space of unending silvery white. But there are always traces of hope- a struggling plant here or there, or a bushel of shrubs that refuse to die- that reminds everyone that even in Nature's death, another life will follow. It takes time, but the snow will melt. The sky will glaze the hue of a Robin's egg, and the sun will rear its firey-haired head once more.
But as for now, the desolate expanse of loneliness remained.
_-=*****=-_
Dib sat propped up on his bed, deeply involved in one of his Sci-Ku anthologies. A cup of water and seven pills sat on the desk beside him, unnoticed and untouched. He had gone through some testing earlier this morning, leaving him one pint lacking in the blood department and two bells ringing in his head. A deep sleep to him now was more important than anything else, but as exhausted as he was, he couldn't get any. So he took advantage of his bed-ridden time to read.
"I can't believe you're actually reading that stuff," Dib heard a familiar voice say to him from behind the book.
Dib sighed inwardly and lowered the anthology to peer into the face of his younger roommate, Matt. He was certainly fine company- at times Dib was sure he'd have thrown himself out of the hospital window had Matt not been there to talk to- but the boy was, for some reason, /odd/. Two years younger than Dib, he could listen to whatever Dib said and understand him far more than any of the kids in Ms. Bitters' brainless class. But it wasn't just there. Something was off about him, something Dib couldn't quite place.
Dib shook the thought out of his mind and grinned as he shut the book. "Well, you see that I'm reading this," he said slowly, holding the anthology up, "and seeing is believing. Therefore, I am actually reading 'this stuff'."
Matt rolled his hazel-speckled blue eyes. "Ha-ha. Very funny, Dib. And seeing is not /always/ believing."
"Whatever."
Matt glanced at Dib's table and then frowned at him. "You'd better swallow your pills, or Mrs. Ruthie's gonna have at it with you."
Mrs. Ruthie was the nurse that Dib had been acquainted with when he first entered this hellhole of a hospital. She was the one who had introduced Dib to his new home, and was Matt and his nurse ever since.
"I fight with Mrs. Ruthie every day over those pills," Dib grumbled, glancing at said sugar-coated objects. "It would be rude of me to break tradition."
Matt giggled. "Oh, fine. Be that- hey, look! It's snowing!" Dib rolled his eyes. That boy had the attention span of Zim's robot.
Zim. God, had it been that long since he thought of the alien and his dysfunctional piece of scrap metal? The memories of the constant fights with Zim were slowly fading... sure, when he first got here Zim was all he could talk about. But soon he found other things to think about. Dangerous thoughts- the kind you think when you lie awake at night with no one but yourself to keep you company. Dib still remembered what Zim looked like, but the faces, the haughty glares, the cruel smiles, the sadistic manner at which he held his countenance were all fading away. Zim was just Zim, a mere picture that begun to fizz away like Alka-Seltzer in water, until where was nothing left but unrecognizable residue.
Dib wasn't too surprised that the alien had yet to manage to take over Earth, even in the month of his confinement. But he'd always wondered what the alien had been up to all this time. Maybe he should take a day off to sneak into Zim's lab and destroy a few things, just like old times-
Dib was suddenly smacked in the face with tiny crystals of ice, firmly molded into a snowball and chucked his way. He glared at the "innocent" Matt, who wore a huge grin and, had this been a cartoon, would also sport an angel halo above his head. This of course may have been a perfectly guiltless picture had the windowsill been closed and the whirlwind of snowflakes not been drifting in.
Dib grabbed some of the snow that begun to slide off his face and chucked it at Matt, missing him by mere inches.
"Nice aim, paranormal boy! Care to try again?" Matt gloated.
"Hey! You had the advantage of an unmoving target!" Dib leapt out of his bed and began to advance on Matt.
Matt backed up, pleased with himself that his plan to get the older roomie to pay attention to him had worked. "Always be alert!"
The words rung familiarity in Dib's ear, but he paid no attention to it. "Exactly," Dib grinned menacingly before tackling Matt onto the ground and tickling the little boy to death.
"Hey- hey stop that!" Matt cried in between gasps of breath and laughter. He rolled around the floor as Dib continued the torture, tears in his eyes, until-
"What in fool's 'nation are you two doin'?"
The boys glanced up guiltily to see Mrs. Ruthie, hands on hips, glaring down at both of them. Matt stopped laughing and Dib stood to shut the window, hiding a grin as he stepped over the snow pile that had begun to collect on the floor.
"Sorry Mrs. Ruthie..." they chorused the mumble as they returned to their respective beds. The nurse shook her head, her forever-rosy cheeks brightening as she did so.
"I swear, if it isn't the boys down the hall makin' a mess of themselves, it's you two. You should meet 'em someday."
Matt perked up and asked in the same breath, "Oh can we? Is there anyone my age? How many of them?"
Mrs. Ruthie chuckled, her entire body shaking with her, and extended a dark, plump hand to ruffle Matt's equally dark hair. "Someday, punkin." She glanced over at Dib's table and sighed. "Boy, when are you going to learn that you can't get out of this? I swear you're going to give this dear old nurse a heart attack one of these days."
"I don't /want/ to take them," Dib growled.
"Son, it'd be a boring world if we all got to do what we wanted to all of the time," she strode over to the table and swung it so it was set right in front of him. "Now let's get this over with. You know what today is and you won't get to see them if you don't finish your meds."
Dib could've slapped himself. "It's visitor day? /Already/?" He thought to himself, /Time sure flies when you're stuck in a place like this/. Mrs. Ruthie shot him a look and he shrugged. "Fine, fine." He once again lost the fight, and begun his daily intake. When he finished he gave the nurse a stubborn be-ready-for-another-battle-tomorrow smirk and handed her the cup.
Mrs. Ruthie rolled her eyes and left, mumbling about how some boys should be put in cages and never let out. Dib glanced at Matt, who had become suddenly quiet. He didn't have to ask why; by now Dib had figured most of Matt's problems out.
He lumbered out of bed and handed Matt a copy of one of his issues of Paranormal Weekly. "Hey, wanna read something /really/ dumb? This magazine says that the Trix Rabbit is really a government conspiracy and was initially created as a government spy tool... but because of an accident, the poor little bunny is a victim of market advertising."
Matt raised an eyebrow. "Those tabloid magazines must've taken over your brain, Dib."
"Another conspiracy theory!" Dib faked astonishment, and grinned to show he was joking. "Wow, Matt, I didn't know you were as paranoid as I was. I think maybe these magazines have begun to sink into /your/ brain."
Matt half-heartedly stuck his tongue out but rejected the magazine offer. "Not today."
Dib shrugged and returned to his bed. "You know, we should get some sleep. This morning wasn't exactly fun and those pills are starting to kick in." He turned his back to Matt and shut his eyes, hoping the boy would follow the example and avoid the awkward question that always came up around this time of the week.
"Dib?" a tentative voice called out moments later.
Dib's hope fell. He sighed and turned around in his bed, sitting up. "I'm sorry, Matt. I don't have an answer for you. I didn't last week and I don't today. I don't know /why/ your family doesn't come visit you. I don't know why they don't call when they say they will, or write when they promise you letters. I'm sorry."
"That's... not what I was going to ask," the young boy said slowly.
"Oh." Dib blinked, suddenly feeling like a jerk. He bit his lip and spoke, "What /were/ you going to ask, then?"
"I... um..." Matt bit his lip and turned to Dib, wide-eyed. "I wanted to know if you could pretend to be my brother. I never had one and I was thinking that if I did... I'd want him to be like you."
The statement caught Dib off guard. At first he didn't speak at all, not sure of how to respond. But then he smiled, warmly, breaking Matt's troubled frown into a smile with his response: "Of course. I'd love to."
Matt, overjoyed, slipped underneath his covers. "Thanks! Have a good nap, brother..."
Dib smiled, set his glasses on the table, and slid under his own blue hospital sheets. "You too."
_-=*****=-_
Dib woke up to find his outside window pitch black and the room deathly cold. He sat up and fumbled around his table in search of his glasses, blinking quickly to get rid of the fuzz of sleep vision. Sitting next to him was a blurry, purple-headed figure, tinkering away at an object in her hands. Dib finally managed to get the glasses on, which were just as cold as the rest of the room, and found the figure to be his sister, playing her Game Slave 2 in 'mute' mode.
"So, you finally woke up. As much as you sleep around here, one would think you were hibernating," Gaz said, keeping her concentration on the game.
"Why hello, Gaz. Nice to see you, too," Dib stretched out, yawning, and moved to turn the heater on. He glanced over at Matt's bed, finding nothing but a bunch of messy sheets.
"The little monster'll be back. He just went to go bother some other unsuspecting victims." Gaz smiled in that odd way of hers- a classic Gaz smile that wouldn't look like much of a smile to anyone who didn't know her as well as Dib did. "How's it going in the Dib world?"
"Same as ever, I guess. Same drugs keeping me alive, same window, same bed. Nothing changed around here."
"Au contraire," Gaz interrupted.
Dib shrugged. "Whatever. Where's dad?"
"He couldn't wait for a lazy bum like you to wake up. He'll come back next week, I'm sure he won't take the time off later tonight to visit."
"Good old Gaz. As brutally honest as ever. See what I mean about nothing ever changing?"
Gaz opened her mouth to comment when the door burst open and in stepped Matt, hands filled to the brim with candy bars and other sugary goods.
"As if he needs any /more/ incentive to be hyper," Dib groaned.
"And you're the one that has to live with him," Gaz grinned, raising an eyebrow as the younger one stuffed it all under his mattress to hide it from the nurse.
"Hey there, sis!" he chirped cheerfully, grinning as he leapt atop his bed and they all could hear the loud crunch! of the crushed candy bars.
Her split-eye glare, one eye squinted and one eye open, set dangerously upon Matt. "Dib. Any reason why the half-pint is calling me 'sis'? I have a feeling this is going to be your fault."
"Heh, heh," Dib scratched the back of his neck nervously. "Well, I sorta said he could be my brother, since he doesn't have one. And technically, that makes /you/ his sister."
Gaz shook her head. "How is it that I always end up getting involved in your stupid schemes? Jeez, and I thought this would be over once your dumb obsession with Zim stopped."
"Who said it'd ever stop?"
"Which reminds me," Gaz continued, thoughtfully. "Zim was here."
Now *that* was certainly a surprise. So much of one that Dib almost fell out of his bed. "What?!"
Gaz repeated calmly and slowly, as if it were no big deal, "Zim. He was here."
"Oh yeah... the green kid!" Matt shouted from his side of the room.
Dib spun around. "You saw him, too?"
"Yeah! He was just like you said," Matt continued, remembering the times Dib had bubbled incessantly about Zim when he'd first gotten here. "Green! Like an avocado! Well, not as green as the outside of an avocado, he was more like the /inside/ of one. Hee. Avocado. I like saying that."
Dib cocked an eyebrow at Matt but did not comment. Instead he turned back to Gaz. "He was /here/?! But why? How did he know I was here? What did he say?"
"Yes, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know," Gaz scowled as she answered each question. "I just know he was here looking for you. He was on his way out as I was on my way in.
Dib leapt out of bed, grabbing his robe off the floor and fastening it around himself. "I have to follow him! Find out where he went!" The excitement and thrill of chasing Zim was rejuvenated within a mere minute. He felt the powers of the old Dib returning, the old personality he thought had died away as the endless days dragged on in his imprisonment. He was on his way out the door when Gaz grabbed his shoulder and forced him back.
"Dib, don't do this."
Dib protested, "But I have to-"
"Not now," she interrupted. "First of all, how do you think you'll ever be able to get out of here? They're not going to let you just waltz out without Dad's consent. And it's snowing out there. You'll freeze to death before you're even halfway to Zim's house."
Dib slumped, defeated, back into his hospital bed. "But..."
"I'm sure he'll be back /next/ week, Dib. Trust me... Zim's almost as obsessive as you."
_-=*****=-_
A silhouette sat in front of the computer, pensively tapping his chin with a leather-clad finger. Eyes, a deeper shade of red in the rest they lacked, reflected the screen. An arm reached out and pushed a button- a button which seemed at first to have a face of indifference. The face, once red, became green and grinned hauntingly at its owner. The smile was returned.
"Computer," Zim called out. At first it was rough, and weak. He cleared his throat and continued. "Locate the Dib human's file. Code: Xenolyst three two oh."
The computer whirred as it thought, and quickly the code was unlocked. The single file contained hundreds of others; all which opened to reveal vastly different but vitally important pieces of information on the subject in question. One folder labeled 'Genesi 1.312.4' was chosen.
"Computer. Begin audio file."
"Audio file on," was the machine's response. "Begin audio recording... now."
"The human seems to be imprisoned within this "hospital" place- a primitive and barbaric medical facility." A clawed hand lifted up a small slip of clear paper to scrutinize it in the dim light. A splotch of dried blood was all that could be seen by any eye- human or alien. "His condition has been confirmed by microscopic studies as a dangerously lethal viral infection, one which seems beyond aide of human or Irken. The human will die."
There was a pause. Zim, though briefly, vacillated in his thoughts- enough to cause his judgment to be weakened. He nodded, as if convincing himself to firmly confirm his decision. "Computer, close audio file. Open the Dib virus file. Work on a catalyst."
The computer beeped, and a program opened.
He went on, "When the catalyst has been created, contain it in an injection tube for me."
"Preparations are beginning," the computer responded. Estimated time until completion: point zero zero four three kriells. Earth time translation: four weeks, two days, six hours, seventeen minutes."
Zim smiled menacingly, his sharp teeth gleaming dully in the poor light. "I think that gives time enough to make another visit."
_-=*****=-_
-Talk to Spooky!