Chapter Text
Dib didn’t know how long he’d been out, only that his body hurt in places he didn’t know could hurt. His eyelids peeled open slowly, vision unfocused, and the first thing he registered was the faint scent of antiseptic... and burnt toast?
A voice cut through the haze.
"Oh, good. You're alive. Would’ve been a waste of perfectly good bio-glue if your disgusting human carcass had decided to rot on my med-table."
Zim. Right. He'd passed out when Zim decided that he was 'a failure of a human' with no 'self-restriction' and 'continuously injuring himself like a fool' and carried him to his base.
Dib groaned, trying to lift his head. His limbs felt heavy. Wrapped. Restrained. Not tied down, just... immobile from exhaustion. Bandages covered his arms, his ribs were strapped, and there was dried pink smudged on his fingernails, his face felt like it was held together with whatever Zim was slathering over its entirety.
"You patched me up?" he rasped, voice barely a whisper.
Zim turned, his smirk visible from the glow of some cracked monitor. "Zim salvaged you. Like you salvage rotting garbage off the side of the road. Except less pleasant."
Dib let his head drop back against the pillow. He didn’t even have the energy to argue.
"Your spine was partially dislocated. Your fingers broken, knuckles split, multiple cuts and fractures. You had a cracked orbital socket and were losing blood at an alarming rate. Not to mention the self-inflicted damage. I’m surprised you didn’t just implode from sheer patheticness."
"Thanks," Dib muttered. "You’re a real humanitarian."
"I’m not human, you wretched crust-slug."
Before Dib could retort, a shadow loomed over him.
A pillow slammed down on his face.
“MURDER NAP!” GIR cheered, riding the pillow like a deranged cowboy.
“GET OFF HIM, YOU INFECTED BLENDER.” Zim screeched, yanking GIR off and flinging him across the room. The robot landed with a sproing and cheerfully flopped onto his back like nothing happened.
Dib coughed, dazed, hair sticking up in every direction. “Did... did your robot just try to smother me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zim said, inspecting some kind of scanner. “He tries to smother everyone. Consider it a rite of passage.”
Dib tried sitting up, wincing. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”
“You look like it, too,” Zim snapped, nose wrinkling. “And you reek. Like gore and burnt protein and... adolescent failure. Go shower.”
Dib blinked. “I’m sorry, where would I shower? You’re deathly allergic to water. Remember? Hiss, burn, screams of agony?”
Zim scoffed, already walking away. “I built a non-lethal cleansing chamber, obviously. I’m not a barbarian, Dib-stink.”
He gestured at a sleek, vaguely coffin-shaped structure humming against one wall.
Dib stared at it. “You built a shower.”
“A state-of-the-art, human-compatible rehydration and filth-removal unit.”
Dib rubbed his eyes. “You built a shower.”
Zim crossed his arms. “Are you going to use it or keep repeating things like a malfunctioning audio loop?”
“I’m not even gonna question how it works,” Dib muttered. Then glanced down at his stained, torn clothes. “Still gonna smell like blood, though. These are wrecked.”
“GIR,” Zim barked. “Retrieve the human’s Earth garments. All of them.”
“YAAAAY CLOTHES HEIST!” GIR zoomed out through the ceiling.
Dib sighed. “I can’t believe I’m letting your robot break into my house.”
“Be grateful,” Zim said, already busy with another glowing panel. “Zim was going to harvest your skin and replicate it with scent-neutral fibers. But apparently humans are too squeamish for improvement.”
Dib limped to the shower pod and muttered, “I’m too tired to unpack that.”
Some time later, clean, bandaged, and wrapped in stolen laundry, Dib lay on a cot in the far corner of Zim’s base. His phone was dead. His body felt barely stitched together. And yet, he’d managed to order takeout with one of Zim’s disguised transmitters — because if he had to suffer, he wasn't doing it hungry.
"Disgusting grub." Zim wrinkled his non-existent nose at him, while Dib continued to eat his pizza in peace, GIR having an entire box to himself. "Oh," Dib said after a moment, "your eye grew back."
Zim, adorned in his disguise because he was the one that picked up the food from the delivery man, rolled his eyes at him. "Of course it did, idiot. My body far surpasses your primitive one."
Dib picked up a pepperoni and threw it in his face. Cue screaming and death-threats.
Days passed. Mostly in silence. Zim tinkered. GIR screamed. Dib healed.
And then, of course... they argued.
The trigger had been stupid. Something about a half-installed defense turret mistaking Dib’s sandwich for a biological threat and melting it into sludge.
“You could’ve WARNED me!”
“You should’ve had better reflexes, Earth-worm!”
“You’re a menace!”
“You’re a weak, squishy liability!”
“You think you’re better than me?! You’re a narcissistic, overgrown insect with abandonment issues and a god complex!”
Zim froze mid-step. “At least Zim has a complex. What do you have, Dib? A victim complex and unresolved parental neglect?”
Dib’s breath caught. His fists clenched.
Zim sneered, stepping into his space. “Pathetic little human, screeching about pain and betrayal when you run your mouth and hurl cutlery like some feral, domesticated slug-beast. Maybe if your family didn't actively wish your demise, you wouldn’t smell like trauma and stale corn chips.”
“Fuck you.”
Zim blinked.
Then smiled, slowly. “Ah. Yes. The Earth curse word.” He leaned in, eyes narrowing with eerie delight. “I am aware of what this ‘fucking’ is, Dib-filth. Though it is not yet clear why you would wish to participate in it with your parental unit and the Dib-sister, when you have ZIM.”
Dib made a noise somewhere between a shriek and a gag. His whole face went pale.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!”
Zim looked smug. “You’re the one who said it.”
Dib’s whole body went rigid. “You are so—so fundamentally broken. What part of ‘fuck you’ made you think I meant—”
“I am not an Earthling,” Zim said matter-of-factly, circling him now, his fake lenses glinting with interest. “Your crude idioms must be taken literally until context is proven otherwise.”
“That is not—no. Context is very clear.” Dib’s voice cracked again. He hated that it did. His face was on fire. “And I wasn’t inviting you to—”
Zim’s grin widened, sharp and feral. “You are red in the face. Your scent markers are spiking. You’re secreting additional sweat. Interesting. Are you... flustered, Dib-beast?”
“No. Shut up.”
“Or perhaps... you are inviting me. In your own backwards, violent, Earth-monkey way.” Zim’s voice lowered, and something in his tone shifted — from mockery to something speculative. Something darker. “After all... you did come crawling back to me, half-dead and helpless.”
“That is not what happened!”
“I cleaned your gore. Bandaged your disgusting limbs. Watched you twitch in your sleep and moan.” Zim’s eyes glinted. “And now you sleep here. Eat here. Bathe in my chamber.
You’re practically mine already.”
Dib’s breath hitched. That word—mine—crackled through him like lightning, wrong and exhilarating and deeply humiliating. “You’re—God, you’re so full of yourself—” he took a shaky step back. He couldn’t look away. “You’re making this weird.”
“Zim is weird,” Zim hissed, stopping right in front of him, Dib's nose nearly touching the smooth skin where there should be a nose on Zim's. “And so are you. Twisted little human with abandonment wounds, craving punishment just to feel seen.”
Dib swallowed hard. “I will punch you.”
Zim leaned closer. “Do it.”
The air between them snapped like a wire pulled too tight. Dib didn’t move. His fists were trembling at his sides.
Zim’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You smell like adrenaline and shame. It’s intoxicating.”
“I hate you.”
“Lie better.”
And then Zim touched him — two clawed fingers against the side of his neck, featherlight, tracing the pulse there. Dib didn’t flinch, but every nerve lit up like live wire.
“I can hear your heart pounding,” Zim said softly. “You want something. You don’t even know what.”
Dib’s breath hitched. “This is a really bad idea.”
“Then stop me,” Zim whispered, eyes glowing faintly.
But Dib didn’t. His voice caught in his throat. His skin was burning. His whole body ached, not from injuries now, but from how tight he felt inside, like he might shatter if Zim kept looking at him like that—like he was prey, puzzle, conquest.
He just stood there, every muscle wound tight, and when Zim’s mouth brushed his jaw — just shy of a kiss, just enough to taste his panic — Dib finally moved.
Not away.
Forward.
Their mouths collided like a car crash — messy, desperate, violent. Not a kiss so much as a collision of heat and hunger and years of unresolved hatred tangled with something that felt too much like need. It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t kind.
It was claiming.