All right, kids. The last update for this fic was over a year ago now, the last update for Pact was several years ago; I'm sure some of you have seen the writing on the wall. I'm pretty much out of the IZ fandom. I'm sick of the infighting, the pairing wars, the rampant bratty behavior. The name calling. The character bashing. The character bashing of characters that I don't even like.
Man, it felt good to write that.
So, I have new fandoms now, and a growing interest in exploring my own original universes. I'm not going to be finishing this fic. However, since I myself hate being left hanging, what you will get is the summary of what would have happened if I had the drive to carry on with it.
Gaz was going to rescue Dib, and Zim unwittingly, along with him, and take them on to the Resisty ships. They were going to end up with some dead Irken bodies somehow, and transfer the pak onto them; Zim, in a rare flash of intelligence, was not going to reveal his true identity to them – although Dib would recognize him, and on impulse cover for his enemy once again.
Gaz and Dib were going to have their first face-to-face confrontation as siblings in the story. It was going to be revealed that Gaz had chased Dib (and Zim) all the way across the universe basically to avenge her father, Professor Membrane, who had been shot down when Zim blew through the bunker looking for Dib – and at that moment, her brother was going to remind her very strongly of her father. The siblings were going to part after a brief, emotional, intense, unsatisfying confrontation, and Gaz was going to feel a little lost as she realized that no matter how strong the resemblance, Dib wasn't her father – not what she was looking for after all.
She was going to go back to the control room, to direct Lard Nar and Resisty forces, and head the battle.
In the meantime, the defective control brain Smidge, Zim's savior, was going to be flushed out as an aberrant – however, she was not going to die. Being a clever girl and in a position of significant power still, she was going to copy herself and sacrifice her original brain in favor of sending out her consciousness in a viral package, waiting to infect the first suitable Irken pak she found.
Gaz was going to interrogate Zim; he'd successfully fool her, but not entirely. She'd leave only when urgently called, with a bad feeling.
Dib and Zim were going to have a confrontation, and come to an uneasy accord. They'd part with Dib holding the power in the relationship.
The Resisty was going to lead the Armada into a daring trap, to hold one big last stand – planning courtesy of Gaz.
Dib was going to go out and fight, springing Zim with him.
Gaz was going to be shot down in combat, and crash land on a small, barely habitable moon or something of that sort – Smidge was going to be revealed as having acquired the body of a soldier Irken, heading her own small combat vessel. Tracking Dib, Zim, and Gaz, as they were all players she'd deduced to be important in the game, she was going to follow Gaz down to the site of the wreck…
The battle was going to be grueling and awful, but Resisty forces would triumph in the end, and Zim and Dib would fight their way to the Tallest's control deck, as both of them would have a significant grudge against the Irken leaders. And there the tides would have seemed to turn, as Red and Purple put up a formidable showing in their own rights.
It would have gotten really dark. Both Zim and Dib dragging, almost dead.
When in would come Gaz, once more – only she would no longer be just Gaz.
As down on that dying planetoid, Smidge would have made a devil's deal with her, a ruthless, brilliant human, a girl who could have made herself a dictator if she'd ever cared enough back on earth. Gaz could live, even with the mortal injuries she'd sustained; Gaz could see her brother off alive if not wholly safe, if she'd just give up… her humanity. If she'd allow herself to mix with smidge, for their minds to melt into each other, for them to combine into one creature, resembling both of its origin minds but completely different.
And Gaz, the perennial survivor, would have taken the deal.
Coming in healed, a wholly unexpected force, she'd have killed the Tallest, taken up their mantle (by way of their combined hacking expertise) and ended the battle.
By then, she would have been something wholly different from either of her disparate parts.
The Resisty, she would have treated with, as the Armada was in no position to really be making demands – it would have been a long and bloody fight for them to beat back the Irkens, but it was a fight that was in their favor.
Zim and Dib, the instruments of her succession, she would have sent away – as a vestigial bit of kinship-sentiment from Gaz would have rendered impossible the idea of killing her brother, and the alien who was important in some indefinable way to him.
They would have left together, as castaways, outfitted with a ship, with no particular destination.
The freedom to go anywhere.
Dib might have insisted that they return to earth, rebuild civilization from the crumbled remnants that must have been left behind. Personally? It seems likely. He could have become the messiah he always wanted to be.
Or he could have decided to wander with Zim, and see where he wanted to go.
The new Tallest, singular again, with a new element of human flexibility and sentiment, coupled with Irken technical genius and drive, would have forged a nation of greatness, better than the last, and only watched as the boy who was once her brother and the alien who was almost his friend went on their own ways.
That was what was going to happen.
Sorry if it seems stupid, or ill-thought-out, or whatever. I started to write it without really having a goal in mind. The plot came together as I went. I was fifteen when the story started, I'm nineteen now. Goals change, interests change, tastes change.
I still look back nostalgically, and even with a kind of love, upon the beginning of this story. The first chapter still works well as a one-shot, don't you think?
I feel like the least I could do in respect for it was to tie up loose ends.
Here, also, is a some stuff that I actually wrote, before I realized that I'd never actually have the drive to finish this.
"LOOK OUT!"
Gaz ignored the screams, narrowed her eyes and fired. Another gangly Irken flung itself to the floor thrashing with its entrails boiling out of its stomach, the pak sparking like a firework until it died. Her allies threw themselves undercover behind her engine pods, bobbing up like whack-a-moles to pop off little shots at the defending Irkens. The control room was a mess of fires and noxious smoke, screaming aliens and squalling machinery, shots going awry so that every corner was a death trap.
Death trap, yes, and Dib wasn't here. Gaz wouldn't have him here; she hadn't come this far to see him dead by chance. She wasn't going to find him either, as long as this kept up – the ship was trapping her, on foot she could've scouted the area and taken enemies by surprise but locked in the metal coffin she was just -
"FUCK!" she screamed. She was an aneurysm ready to blow, a volcano bubbling lava, a nova about to occur -
"PENNER!" she screamed. "PENNER, I NEED TO FIND MY BROTHER," and Penner, from where he dueled with two drones at once, flipped out of range of their jabbing, flashing paklegs and glanced over at her. He must have figured what she said, or just realized her displeasure, because his skin bristled and spiked and his membranes paled to grey-blue.
"All right, I'll tell you," Gaz snarls, furious, sickness crawling under her skin. This, the last, like plunger a finger into a wound, and seeing how many maggots churn up. "You wanted to know, you'll find out. Fine."
Dib winds his hands tight in the light cloth covering him, but he doesn't look away from her; the hammered-gold eyes as wild as always.
"It was a little after you had to go – a little after they conscripted you, took you wherever, I don't know, the Congo, Jamaica, Mongolia, wherever. I don't know. Things were okay, Dad was busy, everybody was busy. Everybody was working. Some superweapon I guess, something to finish off the war for good – I think, I don't think, at the end I don't even think they were even working for anybody but themselves they just wanted the fighting over, we all did, didn't care who came out on top as long as it was over."
The chilly subterranean base, where condensation crawled down the walls and it always smelled strongly of something – some chemical, unidentifiable to her unpracticed nose, but omnipresent and inescapable. The movement and rush of science in the halls, knowledge jam-packed into human form moving back and forth and the flicker of fluorescent light and her father in her room sometimes with his hand heavy, warm, heavy on her forehead. Sleeping curled up. Wet dirty hair. Face buried in the crook of the elbow. Canned music from another life.
"I don't know how long it was, I didn't keep track. Dad was there, he was always busy, working – things were going all right. They were going to work it out and come out on top in the end. And... I... then there was..."
The noise reaching in, grabbing the guts and shaking back and forth like a dog worrying a rabbit. Or like God worrying the world. A sound so huge it shunted aside everything else, the blare, the blaze, the roar -
The wall coming down in, and then, like a herald, the ship.
"Zim found us. Your alien. I don't know how." Bitter, so bitter... the impotence, the frenzied rush, how small, how base. Dib closed his eyes, gelled over with tears, and those tears swelled over and fell in tracks down his face.
"He was shouting something. Nobody could understand him. Not that it was really possible, I think. He was yelling, screaming, just raving – I guess I could understand him a little. I'd heard it often enough, right."
Dib was looking at her again, with pale and exhausted face. In his eyes she could see it, that knowing.
It was new, for her brother to be so perceptive.
Zim coming in: the clouds of dust, the ship gleaming with hellfire, the primal scream of a building as it was shredded. All that noise, the belling out, running from the labyrinth collapsing at her heels – feeling the darkness lap up her ankles and start to pull. Hard.
The chainsaw yammer of his voice – Dib Dib, Dibdibdibdib, DIIIB DIBDIBDIBDIBDIBDIBIDIBDIBDIB...
"The scientists came up and tried to stop him. I don't think they thought they could do anything."
People dissolving like paper, in flame.
"Dad came up last. I don't know, he thought he had a chance – maybe he did. More than any of them. I was still farther back and..."
Blue halos crackling around her father's hands and head as he reached up.
"I don't know if Zim even noticed him. Maybe he didn't even do it on purpose but... he was just shooting wild, not really aiming for anything. Probably not for dad more than anyone else. I don't know if he even hit dad. It was hard to see, everyone was yelling, there was so much dust and fires were starting...
Either he hit dad, and killed him, or something just fell on him and killed him anyway. I didn't see. But he was gone, I knew it, and Zim – hah!" The laugh erupted from her throat, a short involuntary bark. "He was done after that, more or less. He flew away. Everything was still falling apart around me but I got out, and I knew. I knew he'd find you, so I decided to come after you."
"To make him pay," Dib whispered, barely. He pulled thin, like a candle would have shown light through him.
"Yeah." No humor now, but the rising satisfaction, the glory of the hunt. The glory of hate. "Yeah. To make him pay. That alien... That bastard took away Dad. For that, I'm going to make him pay."
Gaz rolled onto her back, and gazed up with bleary, bleak humor at the alien sunset. The pain in her gut was shocking. She didn't want to look at it at all, but when she touched where she hurt her hand came away very wet, very red.
Dying like this... under a lurid sky, lying down, slowly having more and more trouble breathing as she drowned in her own blood... "No," she choked. Her throat burned, her eyes burned, and inside it just... hurt. Ringing waves of pain like a bell tolling. "Oh, no. Not now. Not now..." Not like this.
Slow.
If she hadn't been lying out here, if she hadn't taken out the last soldier as it descended on her, she could've saved herself a slow death and gone out quick. If somebody found her, if a friend found her, she wouldn't have to die this way at all. It would be so simple for a medic to patch up the ruptured organs and seal the bones into one piece again, and she'd get up and be better and be able to go home...
Gaz took a particularly deep breath, and agony rocketed lightning-bright behind her eyes. Oh, God.
Oh, God. If you're there. If you're kind If you're... Just kill me. Just kill me. Don't make me die like this.
Her head swam. The sky was darkening now, stars glimmering through in pin-pricks, the moon rising. Temperature dropping and if somehow incredibly she survived her body the cold would kill her instead. Gaz laughed, and then screamed because of how awful a feeling precipitated, and then laughed again, hysterically. Blood mixed with a foam of saliva and if she had flares she'd shoot them off, not caring who or what found her, as long as there was some some some some some some END to this.
Eventually, Gaz stopped laughing, and tried to breathe again. She was losing consciousness, and letting herself, when she heard a scuffling noise and a few pebbles knocked into her side.
She closed her eyes, breathing shallowly. Then she turned as much as she could to look at what had made the noise.
A female Irken stood several feet away from her, bracing herself on between two of the larger boulders. Tallish, narrow-shouldered, scrawny, with her antennae bristling in the cool air, the alien batted her eyes at Gaz and then shifted her gaze to scan the horizon.
Gaz clenched her fingers. Turned out she wasn't ready to lie down and take anything, yet. She was trying to figure out how she could get up and kick ass when the Irken apparently decided that the area was safe enough that Gaz could be dealt with at leisure.
Lightly, the Irken hopped off her boulder, and stole closer to Gaz. Her green eyes were fixed as a cat's and it was obvious from the easy way she moved that she was fresh. Gaz didn't move until the tips of the Irken's boots pressed into her side and then she curled her lip.
"What do you want, coward," Gaz said hoarsely.
The Irken cocked her head. "Coward?" she replied. "Human, what gives you this?"
The human shivered, and her lips pulled back further, into an expression of distinctive ugliness. "A warrior wouldn't just take on enemies who were already dying."
"Human, what gives you this?" the Irken repeated, crouching now and smiling a strange smile. "You say we are enemies. Should I kill you, in that case?"
A laugh wanted to come out again. Gaz stepped hard on the impulse; she knew how much it would hurt. "If you knew who I was, you'd know you should," she said. "If you knew who I was, you'd have known not to come close."
Almost tender, that hand was, coming down on her forehead and brushing at her bangs. "Oh, how you bleed," the Irken mused. "I never saw this. I remember this. How much blood and juice you creatures have inside."
"Irken," Gaz said. "Do you know who I am?"
The warrior looked at her. Such strange, flat eyes, like a moss-grown pool. "I am Smidge," she said. "I am Smidge and Zim and a little bit of Dib too, the bit that Zim had, and so, of course, I know who you are."