The moment that everything went wrong was when Dib climbed into that giant robot.

At the time, Zim was sitting in a pile of fairly comfortable trash on the street side, temporarily vanquished. For a second there he'd assumed that the day was over, so he'd just been biding his time, waiting for his PAK recovery sequence to rearrange his tissues into their correct positions. The giant robot had been slumped, powered down after its defeat, with Dib at its heels poking around in the wiring to satisfy his curiosity. And then some neighborhood mud monkey had leaned over their fence and shouted at Dib, "Hey, boy!"

Dib looked up.

The mud monkey, slumping over the fence and waving some kind of recreation beverage, said, "You got your–your damn robot all over my lawn! Lookit Marge's petunias, they're, uh, flat! You done smashed 'em! You big headed little hooligan!"

Dib looked down, at some sort of foliage flattened underneath his boots as well as Zim's giant robot. They'd started fighting at one end of Zim's neighborhood and ended up on the other side, and they had taken out a fair amount of lawns with the big metal feet in the struggle as Dib tried to uncouple the power cells from the inside. The neighbor on the other side was missing a chunk of roof tile.

"Oh," he said, "sorry? It wasn't really my fault, but sorry anyhow."

"You better get your car off my lawn boy!" the human said, jabbing his bottle at the robot.

"Okay, okay," Dib said, "I will, jeeze. Give me a second, I'm trying to figure out where the power lifting mechanism connects to the joint–"

The human neighbor squinted one of his bulging eyes. "I know you," he said, "you're Membrane's wacky little nutjob kid. Hey, hey, how did that worm taste? I saw you hack it up on the tv."

Dib flipped up his collar, covering his neck. "I wasn't–I had been poisoned, I didn't eat it because I wanted to."

"I saws you," the human insisted, rattling his mostly empty bottle. "I saws you eat that worm good. You a bug eater, boy?"

Dib turned to Zim, making helpless gestures at the human on the fence. "Tell him," Dib said, "tell him you poisoned me!"

Zim gave the situation a shrewd once-over. While he was still immensely proud of himself for poisoning the Dib Human with that swamp worm, as he was of everything he did, he was also wary of agreeing to anything the Dib asked him in front of other people. "Zim has no recollection of this," he said, kicking his feet against the trash bag.

"Zim!" Dib shouted. "It was just last week! You put the worm in my milkshake straw! You called me on the phone while I was on my dad's show just to tell me about it! I had to induce vomiting or I would have died!"

"Are you sure?" Zim said, inspecting his gloves for damage. "This dirt monkey says you're a bug eater. Maybe you just like eating bugs."

"I do not like eating bugs!"

The human at the fence took a swig of his beverage. "You throw up bugs on purpose, boy? That's some sick, that's, man, that's some crazy stuff."

"Because it was poisonous!" Dib shouted.

"Hey Marge!" the human shouted, waving back at his house, "Marge, come laugh at the crazy bug eating boy!"

A distant voice shouted, "From the TV?"

Dib buried his nails in his scalp. "I'm not crazy! It was a rational–"

The neighbor human's mate appeared at the fence, hair stacked precariously with curlers. She pointed one of her claws at Dib, opened up her jaw, and erupted into caws of corvid laughter.

"Would you listen–"

A small child appeared at the fence as well, also pointing its finger at Dib and spewing laughter. More neighbors began to surface, curious about the epicenter of the amusement, and quickly joined in the ridicule. Public shaming was an activity that never failed to bring a group of earthlings together.

Zim watched with interest as Dib twitched visibly, in the middle of the garden, his whole body spasming. And then, rather than shouting and stamping and making a speech as he usually did when large groups of humans began to ridicule him publically, Dib simply turned on his heel and walked back to the robot. He scaled the robot's leg with a series of deft pulls, climbed into the dark cockpit, and then–quite matter of factly–punched the big red activate button.

The arm cannons blazed to life.

"Who's laughing now!" Dib howled, throwing his whole weight against the steering levers. The mecha rattled and roared, one enormous step heavy enough to rattle Zim's teeth in his mouth. Black smoke poured off the auxiliary engines. Dib scream-cackled, his eyes huge and wild, as the mecha bore down clumsy and utterly unstoppable. He wrenched a knob and a hail of fire exploded the concrete all around them, chunks of it sailing up into the air as time seemed to slow down, and Zim-–in the middle of the smoke and shrapnel and wailing humans-–just stood there.

Watching.

He watched Dib, up there in that 20 ton deathbot, losing his Irk-forsaken mind, and Zim's insides gave a horrible, perfect heave. It was like he was going to be sick, only, if he puked now there would just be little cartoon hearts all across his boots.

Wow, he thought. Look at the Dib Monkey go.

-V-

That wasn't the first time that Dib had taken the invader's breath away; it was only the first time he noticed it. There had been other moments, forgotten now—an aerial battle where their ships had been locked into a mirrored freefall, cockpit dome pressed to cockpit dome—an impromptu team-up, as Dib threw himself out the window of a building rigged to explode below him—a field trip in the park where Dib had casually handed Zim a ice cream cone, barely noticing what he had done in the midst of monologuing—

Zim's attention was not entirely on the task of mixing radioactive isotopes into concrete solution. He turned the mixer on with half a mind on the day before, turning over the memory of Dib's nervous breakdown backlit against the yellow sky, the light glinting off the mecha around him—it was the most focused he had been on anything in a very long time, although he didn't take any note of that change in himself. He was preoccupied with other sorts of changes.

Scowling, Zim thumped himself on the side of his head. "Be silent, brain meats," he muttered, thumping himself harder. "Obey Zim."

Across the laboratory, perched on a biohazard canister, GIR giggled and imitated him. "This is funnnn," he said, clanking with each tap.

"It must be my brain meats," Zim muttered. "Blasted wetware. Obey your master!"

"Maybe it's your cute lil backpack!"

"Impossible," Zim said. "My PAK is a state of the art piece of advanced computational brilliance. It is flawless! The error must be organic."

GIR oooo'ed at nothing in particular. Zim gave up on his work and tossed the mixer into the vat, stalking across the lab as the isotopes quickly swallowed the mixer whole. He pulled his goggles from his head and threw them over his shoulder. The memory of Dib, sunlit and gloriously mad in his tons of deadly metal, had been troubling Zim for hours now, distracting him from even the simplest of his nefarious doings. It was like a tumor. A tumor obstructing the beautiful correct function of his intelligence interface. And if it was a tumor, well then, Zim would just have to remove it forcibly.

"GIR," he shouted, "prep the medical lab for surgery!"

As the tiny robot went screaming ahead of him, Zim stripped off his hazmat gloves and grabbed a box of medical ones from a passing shelf. As he stepped into the irritatingly bright medical lab, the computer chimed in with, "REMINDER! Invader Zim is four solar orbits overdue for medical evaluation!"

"Ignore," Zim said.

"REMINDER! Invader Zim is four solar orbits overdue for—"

"Ignore!" Zim shrieked. "Ignore all!"

"Acknowledged," the computer muttered.

Zim took an uneasy seat on the edge of the operation table and pulled one of several extendable arms from the ceiling apparatus. He unfolded the square at the end and lined its edges up with his forehead, flipping down a series of lenses until the magnification on the video feed was sufficient for his purposes.

"Engage hard light scalpel," he ordered. Heat immediately flared to life against his skin. "Incision area one by four by four."

In a sizzle and pop, the surgical droid severed a square of skull and plucked it from the opened site. Zim squinted at the image projected across the wall in front of him.

"What have you hidden, Dib?" he said to himself, guiding the video probe deeper into his frontal cortex. There was a strange feeling as it passed into him, a fuzziness across his tongue and a static hum in his belly, but the pain receptors were neatly turned off by the PAK interface. After a minute or two of poking around in his own insides, Zim started losing patience.

"Where is it?" he snarled, poking hard enough at his brain matter that his left arm gave a spasm and knocked a spanner off the side table. "Computer! Scan for irregularities!"

"Beep," the computer said. "Boop."

Zim crossed his arms and tapped his heel impatiently while the program did an exhaustive malware scan. Finally, the monitor flashed in large letters: HORMONES.

"Hooooormones?" Zim read, "You mean the Dib introduced foreign chemicals into my Zim Veins?"

The screen flashed snow and then returned with the words corrected to: IRKEN HORMONES

"Computer!" Zim snapped, "Explain this!"

The computer hummed. "You appear be exhibiting primitive BONDING HORMONES, resulting in ATTRACTION and HAPPINESS."

"The Dib did this?" Zim said. "How dare he make Zim happy against his will!"

"Uh," the computer said.

GIR spit out a mouth full of broken syringes. "Sounds like Looove."

"Preposterous," Zim said. "Zim is a hardened combat veteran, not to mention an elite invader! It's just some kind of… slow acting poison. Kinda thing. Computer, initiate blood draining protocols!"

"No toxins have been detected in the blood of Invader Zim."

"Well drain it anyway!" Zim shouted. "I want it out of me! Right now!"

"The hormones are being produced by several of your key glands," the computer said, sounding a little reproachful. "The source is too complex to be removed with traditional surgical procedures."

Zim sighed and dug a scalpel out of his supplies. "Zim must do everything around here," he said, examining the joint of his arm where he knew there to be at least one major hormone producing gland. There was also a major artery but, eh, he'd cross that bridge when he burned it.

"The source of the hormone production starter enzyme is located in the organic brain," the computer continued. "Even if you removed the glands, once they regenerated, the enzyme would only order production to resume."

"Curses!" Zim said. He lobbed the scalpel across the room, where it stuck in a secondary monitor with an electric fizzle and a puff of smoke. After a moment, he smoothed a hand over his uniform and righted himself.

"No matter," he said. "I will simply have to hack my fleshware."

He stalked over to the monitor and pulled down a keyboard from the suspended apparatus.

"I have researched this 'love'," Zim said, making quote-y marks with his claws, "before. I recognize the symptoms. If I have contracted this 'emotion' then the Dib has certainly infected me with his primitive disease in order to take me out of the game. How cunning. Not!"

Zim swung back around to the keyboard, inputting a search for "rmoance" which he belatedly, after cursing at the error404 screen for a few moments, corrected to "romance".

"Foolish worm baby," he muttered, "for I am Zim! Master of all research and HOLY QUIZNACK what is that?"

GIR toddled up behind him and took a look at the screen. "Pogo stick," he said. "Weeeee-hoo, lookit em go."

Zim had already smashed the escape key. "Okay," he said, "never mind that. I don't need to research romance specifically, I can just research earth diseases. COMPUTER, search the 'inter webs' for information on curing this disGUSTING affliction."

The computer buzzed with static for a moment, and then popped open a neatly formatted Gadzooks Answers page across the screen

The computer announced, "Mommy blogger 92 says to feed a fever, starve a cold."

"Hmm. HMMMM." Zim peeled back one glove and pressed it against his forehead. "But I am neither hot nor cold! Useless!"

GIR piped up, "Try thinkin about smoochies!"

"Ugh," Zim said. "No way. There will be no swapping of the spit for this invader. The Dib would have to beg me, beg me on his weak little human knees, crawl through the mud on his hands and knees and then PERHAPS in my beneficent glory I would allow him to kiss… the mighty boots of… Zim…" He paused. A terrible expression passed over his face.

"GIR!" he shouted, "Get the thermometer!"

Two minutes later Zim threw the thermometer across the room, splattering mercury over the far wall.

"FINE!" he shouted. "Fine! The illness is a fever! How does one feed a fever?"

GIR listed a number of items, most of which were not edible. When he got as far as soap, Zim let out a heavy groan and threw himself into the spinning chair.

"Sources say," the computer interrupted, "chicken noodle soup will DESTROY YOUR FEVER."

"But it's…. all meaty… and full of water," Zim said, barely holding in a gag. He tapped his claws on the arm rest for a moment, considering. "Noodles seem harmless enough," he decided at last. He levered himself up from the chair and marched off towards the elevator, hands clasped behind his back.

"Come along GIR," he called, "I'm sure we have some extra soda around here somewhere…"

-V-

When Zim took his seat for homeroom the next morning, Dib was already at the blackboard trying to explain something to a blank-faced and uninterested audience. He was covered in white dust, practically vibrating in place, and jabbing a piece of chalk at a rudimentary graph of some footprint. He paused in mid jab as Zim walked into the room.

"…What on earth are you holding?" he said.

Zim looked down at his bowl of soup. Then he looked up at Dib. "None of your beeswax, Dibberton."

"That's… not my name," Dib said.

"Hey," a kid in the front row said, "lay off him, Dibberton."

"That's not my–ugh." Dib turned back to Zim, who had neatly perched himself in a seat toward the back. "That looks like noodles in grape juice."

Zim shoved a tangy purple noodle into his mouth. "That's because it is, Dibberton."

Haha! From the look on the monkey's face, Zim had thwarted him indeed! The flavor of success was sweet! And also, a little carbonated. Zim slurped up another noodle and watched the journey of disgust and despair rolling over Dib's facial features.

Yes, he decided. This was certainly going to solve all of his problems forever.