⭒ Banishment Planet ⭒

It starts innocently enough.

Zim is perched outside his window like a cursed gargoyle, eyes narrowed into slits, antennae strapped to his skull as if afraid the glass would try to fight back. He streaks a claw against it—lightly, just enough to leave a mark.

Dib does not think of the word cute.

That was a psychological trap set up by the universe.

Instead, he stares.

Zim stares back, frozen like he'd been caught mid-crime.

Dib pinches the bridge of his nose.

Closes his eyes.

Briefly wishes the ground would swallow Zim up.

Opens them.

Zim is still there, legs latched onto the sill of Dib's window, claws scrambling for purchase. His antennae flinch back like synchronized chaos.

Dib marches to the window and—with more regret than the galaxy should have been able to withhold—opens it.

"Hello," Zim says, voice flat and cold as a knife's edge. And then he's tumbling onto Dib's kitchen floor like a shopping cart with one bad wheel being pushed down a hill, arms windmilling, legs practically nailed to his chest.

He lands on the tile with a thud.

There is a long pause. Not like the absence of sound. The uncomfortable awareness of it. It stands between them, not unlike an unwelcome house guest trailing mud over an expensive carpet.

Then, despite every warning sign his brain attempts to raise, Dib laughs.

Just once.

A short bark of sound.

Accidental.

The room goes still.

Not comfortable still.

The kind of stillness that comes before an earthquake.

Zim shifts his legs.

Dib barely remembers to blink.

"...My dad is still asleep."

"Zim is aware."

"It's 3:00 a.m."

Zim looks at him as if he were the one who had broken into his house.

"Completely irrelevant information. Has your brain stopped working, Dib-idiot?"

"Why are you inside my house?"

Zim looks at him—through him, really—the way most people would look at priceless jewels they'd scoured galaxies in search of, something behind his eyes lighting up. "I missed you," he says, with a kind of breathless softness Dib didn't even know could crawl out of the boarded up room inside of Zim's chest he had in place of wherever his heart would be, and Dib nearly breaks.

Nearly.

"You could have called, you know. E-mailing is a thing," Dib says, deadpan, the words leaving him like dropped rocks.

"I don't have your email," Zim bites back, with all the venom of a rival nation.

"When has that ever stopped you?" Dubious. Distrusting.

"Never!" Jeering. Sudden.

"So why," Dib asks, and it's the past six years rolled into one sentence, the question that had been slowly collecting over them while neither was looking--the way unwashed laundry did, or an unpaid debt.

Zim mumbles something, barely above a whisper, as if reluctant to let it out. Dib doesn't quite catch it.

"What?"

"I said, because I lov—" Zim freezes, sudden, as if the sentence had escaped through security. He coughs. "—because Zim wanted to make you happy. Is that a crime, Dib-worm? Is it?"

Dib briefly loses his ability to speak. Zim takes that as a sign that he should plunge on ahead. Which is the way he always takes things.

"You're hideous, and revolting, and inferior in every way. But that doesn't make you any less interesting, or, dare I say, impressive." Zim gags, then, as if he'd tasted a particularly sour lemon. "Erase that from your memory. That was not Zim. I must have been ill."

Dib's brain crashes like a computer with too many tabs open, except all of the tabs are just Zim's face, half-blue in the kitchen light, calling Dib impressive. One, approximately the size of an atom, is playing slow romantic jazz. Dib crushes it immediately.

His face must have been doing something weird, because Zim's antennae jerk back the second the thought hits him.

"Dib-idiot? Are you broken?"

Dib makes a sound at a pitch only dogs can hear.

"No."

Zim waves his hand.

"You've gone all—how do the earthlings call it—tomato."

Dib's shoulders hike up to his ears.

"I have not."

Zim tears through the distance between them, poking Dib on the nose. Dib squeaks. It's less of a squeak and more of an imitation of a kettle being stepped on.

"You have. Your face is practically glowing."

"No."

Zim hums. He gives a wave of his hand, like a conductor instructing musicians.

"...Continue."

Dib had not once, in his entire life, thought that he'd end up dating an alien small enough to smuggle in a suitcase that said "continue" like it was the name of a weapon of mass destruction.

Except for that one time.

"You're not the worst alien I've ever met?" he says, and somewhere, a tiny version of himself sets up a scoreboard reading "Emotions: 1, Dib: 0."

Dib ignores it.

"You know other aliens?" Zim all but hisses, fists clenching in a way that wouldn't be noticeable on anyone else but him.

Dib tenses, like he'd touched a hot stone.

"Er. Not on a first-name basis."

"Un-be-lievable," Zim says, sprawling himself over Dib's lap like he owned the place, earning an indignant squawk from Dib. "Dib-cheater," he addresses, " you will let Zim occupy your house. Or else the entire galactic net will know of your infidelity."

Dib rests a hand over Zim's back—right under where his PAK sat—to say:

"Are you blackmailing me?"

"Is it working?" Zim asks, and there's that wolfish glint in his eyes that must have been glued on from birth.

"...Yes. Hey, what were we fighting about, again?"

Dib wakes up with a headache thick enough to spread on toast, a sense of dread heavy enough to anchor ships, and one arm placed behind his neck sore enough to feel like it had been designed by a committee of people devoted to being petty.

Professor Membrane opens the door to his room with the confidence of a man who hadn't been told the word no in fifty-plus years.

"Son. I can't help but notice that you didn't attend breakfast. Is everything quite alright?"