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Capax Infiniti	By : IJX Category: +G through L > Invader Zim > AU/AR-Alternate Universe-Alternate Reality Views: 2626 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Invader Zim, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 5
- 6
- 7
Capax Infiniti

Disclaimer: Invader Zim and its characters are, of course, property of Jhonen Vasquez and his fantastic production team. Any resemblance my original characters might bear to real individuals is purely coincidental.

Chapter 6
Zim raised his hand toward an empty piece of space in front of him, placed his palm against an invisible barrier and the door to his arctic base opened to them. They stepped inside and felt a warm rush of air as the seal to the dome enclosed them in the safe haven of his lair.
Jex raised a finger to the neck piece that Zim had put on her, intending to release herself from the protective barrier around her head, but Zim stopped her. "No, wait," he said. "Let me do that; you might end up doing something stupid."
Lowering her hand, Jex let him approach her and push the correct button. Her vision glimmered briefly in front of her like looking through a haze of heat in the desert. Pushing a second button, the neck piece popped open and dropped into his waiting hand. He stole a glance at Jex, whose cheeks were still flushed with excitement.
"I can't believe we did that," she said with a smile, her thoughts still obviously lost somewhere in the sky. "It was incredible! Did you see the colors? I've never seen anything like it!"
"Yes, I saw them," he said, feeling uneasy. His words were clipped and unemotional, a complete change from his relatively warm manner when they were outside. "I'm glad you enjoyed yourself. I need to get back to work now."
With that, he walked to his transport chute and disappeared quickly. Jex was left standing in the middle of the room with her purple and black excursion suit still on, stunned by everything she had just experienced and confused by Zim's suddenly frigid demeanor.
***
"Greetings, my Tallest," Zim said, saluting in front of the video feed in his lab with a confident grin. "You'll be pleased to know that I've officially moved into the last phase of my planning. The culmination of my invasion of Earth is imminent; you may want to head the fleet in this direction and witness the glory of my conquest!"
Red peered into the screen with Purple standing next to him. "Zim, you've been on Earth for fifteen years," he began superciliously. "You're realize that the Irken military can only back an invader with the strong arm of the armada if success is absolute, don't you?"
"Oh, but it is!" Zim declared proudly. "Failure is not possible! And you'll want to be here to see this one, trust me."
"I don't know..." Purple's voice was full of hesitation and he thought for a moment. Red and Purple conferred amongst themselves, obviously whispering and gesturing toward Zim as they spoke. Red shook his head with disdain and put his hand to his forehead.
"Zim," Purple said, clearing his throat. "We just remembered that we have an important, um, space... thing...y we have to look into first."
"Yes, a space thingy," Red agreed enthusiastically, nodding. "Top secret, high priority stuff. Of course we couldn't dream of keeping you from your important mission on Earth, Zim. So you just hang tight for awhile and... we'll be in touch!"
"But my Tallest, you said yourself that I've been here for fifteen years and--"
"Talk to you soon, Zim! Keep up the good work!"
The transmission ended. Zim continued staring at the white noise for a moment before sighing and putting his head in his hands, elbows resting on the communication console. The frustration was almost debilitating and despite popular opinion on his home planet, he wasn't an idiot. Yes, he had a sensitive ego and his pride was too great to ever acknowledge it to his colleagues or his leaders, but he knew that he was a running joke to his beloved Tallest. That they see me as a plague on their great mission, he mulled privately. Briefly, memories flashed before his eyes-- the Tallest laughing at his expense, being locked in restraints during his terrifying existence evaluation in front of the control brains on planet Judgmentia, the sickening sensation of his PAK being forcibly removed.
Shaking off the memories, he didn't want to dwell on the past. This was his one opportunity to redeem himself and he knew he could do it if he was given the chance. Unfortunately, convincing them to do nothing more than show up for the invasion was proving more difficult than he had anticipated. This had easily been the fifth or sixth conversation of its kind and their lack of faith in him was still a bitter pill to swallow. He was beginning to realize he was truly on his own and would have to serve Earth to the Tallest on a silver platter, ripe for the sweep. He was comforted by the fact that he would execute his plans with impeccable precision. The Tallest would never again have a reason to doubt him.
"GIR!" Zim called, swiveling his seat to face a computer screen with a set of rotating blueprints on it.
The robotic assistant rounded a corner and toddled into the main room of the lab, feet clanging against the floor as he jovially swung his arms. "Master!" he said, mouth agape with joy. "You're so GREEN!"
"Uh huh," Zim dismissed the comment, entirely accustomed to GIR's eccentricities. "I need to make a few modifications to the Voot Cruiser and I don't want the human paying attention to my activities. I'm hopeful that she would be smart enough not to question me, but all the same I would prefer not to deal with the headache of her uncovering my... intentions for her species. You will distract her for me."
GIR's eyes flashed red and he saluted. "Yes, SIR." Suddenly he gasped, eyes quickly returning to their normal turquoise. "Cupcakes!!!" He started to run toward the transport chute.
"Wait, GIR," Zim ordered.
Stopping mid-stride, GIR looked worried. "But the cupcakes..."
"Yes, yes, cupcakes. If the human asks about my activities, you know what you should do, right?"
"YEAH!" GIR replied with powerful enthusiasm.
"And what's that?"
"I don't know," GIR smiled.
"Exactly," Zim said, nodding. "Tell her you don't know. You're moronic enough that she'll believe you."
"Yay! I really don't know!"
"Yes you do, I told you three days ago."
"But you said I don't know..." GIR burst into melodramatic tears. "I'm so confused!"
Sighing, Zim turned back to his blueprints and waved his hand dismissively. "Clearly, you'll be fine. Just keep her occupied."
***
Again she was ten years old. Images flashed rapidly before Jex's eyes, propelling her through several successive moments in time. Sunlight pouring through the trees as she watched them whiz by through the window of their car. Her father explaining the nesting habits of several species of bird. The sound of leaves crunching beneath her feet as she hiked through the forest and identified poisonous plants. Lazily dipping her fingers into the cool water of the lake as her father paddled them along in their canoe. Waking up in the middle of the night to a strange sound and, with the bravery of the very young, slipping out of their tent to investigate. Touching the smooth, cold, iridescent metal she remembered only in her dreams. A rich scent filling her senses and turning to see--
Heart pounding, Jex awoke in a cold sweat. Dizzy with the disorientation of waking from a vivid dream, she put a hand to her head, making sure she didn't have a fever. Her temperature was perfectly normal, but she was overwhelmed with the feeling that she was on the edge of understanding something and it troubled her. As wakefulness replaced the last haunting images of her dreams, the potential revelation was slipping away. She had been experiencing this recurring dream lately and its plot seemed to be an amalgamation of the many summers she'd spent camping with her father. But then, that last part...
Jex realized she was being watched. Turning onto her side on the couch, she met two large cerulean eyes on a metallic face.
"Cupcakes!" GIR exclaimed happily when he saw that she was awake.
Sensible conversation was confusing for her upon first waking, but this was on another level entirely. "I'm sorry, what?" She yawned and added. "What cupcakes, GIR?"
***
Completing a final set of calculations, Zim touched the input button on the screen of the computer and sat back in his chair. After staring at the flickering images in front of him for a minute, a satisfied smile spread across his face and he began to chuckle to himself. The chuckle grew steadily louder until he was awash with a giddiness that consumed him completely. He laughed triumphantly, unabashedly, leaning his head back against the head rest of the chair and pounding his fist against the arm a few times as he bellowed. Had anyone been observing, they would have had a difficult time discerning whether he found something hilariously amusing or he was caught in a moment of pure exaltation.
It was done. The blueprints for his plan danced across the screen, elegantly, flawlessly complete. There would be no failure this time. The respect he would command from his peers and, yes, even the Tallest, would make his past blunders as irrelevant as the humans themselves when he was finished with them. He had even devised a very special role for a certain human he had come to positively loathe.

Killing Dib would not be enough, or the pitiful human would have been dead a very long time ago. Zim was under the impression that Dib believed himself above retaliation, that he believed he had maneuvered his way out of Zim's grasp thanks to his own cleverness and intellect. The idea that a single human child, albeit now an adult, would be capable of thwarting genuine attempts on his life from a mighty Irken Invader was beyond laughable. Nevertheless, for inflicting constant, consistent and unrelenting irritation on Zim throughout their oh so pleasant acquaintance, there would be a very special kind of vindication.
The excitement was too much to bear, the beauty of his genius almost too great to behold, and so all he could do with the building restlessness was laugh until his body ached. Very soon he would be able to channel that anxious energy into the execution of his plan.
Suddenly, GIR shot out of one of the transport tubes and slid across the floor, giggling and buzzing with frenetic energy. "HEEHEEheheheheeeee! I love it so muuuuch! It's a nice ride."
Still laughing loudly, Zim gradually pulled himself together, looking at GIR. He still chuckled occasionally in the way that one might after hearing a particularly gripping joke, one that grabs the reins of your imagination and won't let go even as you try to turn to other thoughts. "GIR, there you are!" he said with a smile inspired by his good mood, letting out his last few little huffs of laughter. "What were you doing?"
"Keepin' the lady busy!"
"GIR, that was eight hours ago. I was finished working on the Cruiser after about three of them. I even told you when I came back inside."
"But I had to make my cupcakes..." GIR replied distractedly as he sat on the floor and played with his own legs.
"You mean to tell me you've been tormenting the human this entire time?" Zim asked, not sure if he should be delighted or horrified.
"Uh huh," GIR nodded, tongue sticking out. "We made us some cupcakes!"
"GIR, what did you do?!" Zim shouted. As nightmarish visions of a volcano full of baked goods filled his mind, he decided it was time to check in on his captive.
***
Zim stepped out of the transport chute in the kitchen and gawked at the sight before him. All of the cabinets were open and full of cupcakes. Cupcakes of varying sizes, colors, consistencies and shapes swarmed on the counters, in the sink, on the floor around the counters, on the table, on three of the chairs and on top of the stove. Two large piles of cupcakes spilled over into the living room. The air in the kitchen smelled sickly sweet, as though the walls themselves were coated in a layer of sugar and icing. On the one chair free of cupcakes sat Jex, whose arms and head were sprawled on the table, surrounded by one particularly purple battalion of the cupcake army. Flour dusted her hair and she had a few small smears of icing on her face. She was dead asleep.
All that human does is sleep, Zim observed.
GIR came shooting up out of the transport and immediately dove into a pile of cupcakes, munching happily on whatever happened to find its way into his cavernous mouth.
"Jex," Zim said, bending over the human and poking her in the arm.
Stirring slowly and opening her eyes, Jex looked at the alien standing over her. She blinked a few times, lifted her head and stretched her arms across the table in an effort to pop her stiff back. She immediately stopped as she knocked several cupcakes off of the table and just sat back in the chair instead.
"So," she said as she stretched her back again, obviously physically exhausted. "I take it your day wasn't anywhere near as... interesting as mine."
"I was productive," he replied and surveyed the room again. "but it would seem that GIR kept you occupied well enough."
"I tapped out after about five hours of baking, Zim. Do you know what it's like to spend five hours baking with a manic robot? I don't even bake at home. I barely cook."
A series of brief images flickered through Zim's head, memories of mind-numbing stretches of time during which he was forced to endure some of GIR's more obnoxious personality traits. Not the least of which was his six month voyage from Irk to Earth that almost resulted in Zim disassembling GIR before they had even arrived. "Yes, I have some idea."
"So, Zim," Jex began, clearing her throat. She was hesitant to prod him about her place here, but she couldn't help wondering about the point of having her bake cupcakes with GIR and sleep her time away. The baking marathon was one of the most absurdly surreal things she had ever experienced and she felt entitled to a few answers.
"Are you really going to keep me here?" she asked.
Irritated by her inquisitiveness, Zim narrowed his eyes and pierced her with the ferocious gaze she remembered from the night he first took her prisoner. "Are you questioning my decisions?"
Jex sunk against the back of the chair, trying to blend in with the furniture. Even barely an inch taller than her, he was terrifying when he was angry. She suspected some of her fear could be attributed to his cruelty on the subway, which still haunted her thoughts. Her life had been as peaceful as most who lived in the privileged ignorance of the first world; most of the violence she had seen had been on television and film. Of course, there was also the fact that he was, quite simply, an extraterrestrial being and she had no way of predicting his behavior. To attribute him with human qualities would be a mistake.
"I'm not," she sighed. "I'm really not. I just can't help wondering..." she trailed off for a moment and looked toward the glass wall of the dome surrounding the base. "I mean, what are you doing down there? Why are we out here?"
Zim wondered if the human need to sate one's curiosity was stronger than a sense of self-preservation, since he had made it clear several times that interrogating him wasn't the wisest course of action. His robotic spider legs emerged from his PAK and unfurled behind him. Looming over Jex, one of the legs stabbed one of the many purple cupcakes sitting in front of her, sending a thin split down the center of the table that almost cleaved it in half.
Jex tried to scoot her body back in her chair but had already been pushing herself as far into her seat as she could, nervous about inquiring into his activities. Now she was once again faced with his apparently erratic, angry behavior. One of these days she was going to get herself seriously injured or killed. Perhaps today.
Zim glared at her, staring intensely into her eyes. She got under his skin when she asked these questions. He bore his eyes into her, waves of his incredulity pouring off of him and making their way into her mind, or at least her expression seemed to suggest as much. As he scowled, one of his metal appendages swept the cupcakes off of the chair behind him and onto the floor. He pulled back and raised himself onto the chair to sit down, three of the spider legs retracting into his PAK as the fourth handed the cupcake to him. Zim took it and the last of the legs folded into the PAK.
Jex wondered if her rising and falling anxiety levels would kill her via cardiac arrest long before any cataclysmic event wiped the planet clean.
"As I said before, you're in no position to question me," Zim stated, holding the cupcake. "I already told you that I'm preparing to invade Earth. That's more than enough information," Zim stated. Preparing to bite the pastry, he paused to add, "I don't like it when humans get so complacent that they underestimate me."
A stifled snort of laughter escape Jex's lips and she immediately covered her mouth with her hand. A panicked expression immediately flashed across her face as she realized her mistake.
Zim was about to taste one of GIR's cupcake delights, but was now momentarily frozen, utterly shocked by her audacity. Laughing? At Zim? He threw the cupcake violently against the wall and it became a saccharine Pollock tribute. Two of his spider legs quickly shot out of his PAK again. Leaping toward her chair, he knocked it backward onto the floor, the back of the chair and her head simultaneously slamming against the hard kitchen tile. She shouted in pain, scrambling clumsily in her dizziness and trying to crawl out of the odd, toppled position she was in. Before she could get very far, the legs suddenly appeared on either side of her head and stabbed the floor, splitting the tile. Turning onto her back, she was trapped between the arachnid limbs and under Zim, whose face hovered over hers in a menacing glower.
"You dare LAUGH AT ME?" he boomed, grabbing her jaw. His grip gradually tightened and he spoke in a low growl. "Maybe I should rip your jaw from your skull and feed your tongue to the volcano so that you're incapable of verbal insolence."
Trembling under him, Jex tried to shake her head and fought back tears of pain. His hands were very strong and the claws at the end of his fingers were piercing her skin, steadily probing deeper into the curves of her face. She could feel small, warm trickles of blood dripping down either side of her head and neck.
"I wasn't," she struggled to say, looking him in the eye, lip trembling as she tried to contain her fear. Speaking was excruciating with his sharp fingers digging so deeply into her face.
"YOU LIE," he bellowed, gripping her with scathing fervor, sinking his claws a little deeper into her jaw line.
"No," she said quietly. "No! Zim," she squeezed her eyes shut briefly and winced in pain, trying once again not to succumb to her fear. "The idea of underestimating you is laughable, you said people underestimate you. I just, I thought," she stuttered, starting to panic again as thoughts of the slaughtered government agents crept into her mind. "I'm afraid," she admitted. "I laughed because I'm afraid."
Zim looked down at her with caustic suspicion, examining her for any trace of deception. Bringing his face closer to hers, he wanted to scare her into total submission so that her curiosity would not lead to further prying. Yes, fear me, he thought.
He lowered his mouth to her ear while supporting himself with one hand next to her neck and the two spider legs on either side of her head, his other hand still firmly clutching her jaw. He let out a low laugh against her ear as his plans for this soggy planet danced through his mind. She had no idea what she was dealing with.
Jex's heart pounded a fiery tattoo inside her chest. He was unpredictable, megalomaniacal and short-tempered. Having him this close to her again was chilling, especially when he made such sinister threats. She let out a whimper and then pressed her lips together to silence herself. Where was the gentle one who had shown her the arctic sky? Did both he and this murderous creature really exist inside the same being?
"If I told you of my work, you would be plagued with such nightmares that you would never sleep again," Zim warned into her ear. "Do you really want to know?"
Mind racing, Jex shook her head quickly. She did want to know but she wasn't about to elicit more sadism from him.
Zim drew back and peered at her, loosening his hold on her. He was about to arrogantly congratulate her on her wise decision, but he was surprised to find that as soon as he looked at her face, all of his vitriol had drained from him as quickly as it had filled him. In its place was a sinking, sick feeling. He was awash with a sense of embarrassment that he had allowed himself to lose his composure.
And something more.
When he was bending over her with the intention of pouring fear into her ear, a warm rush had raced through his body not unlike the emotional surge he felt when having completed the design of his plan. Unlike the glee of triumph, this feeling was less giddy, more subtle and penetrating. The feelings she elicited in him were unnerving, and now he was left with a trembling mass of human jelly underneath him and no desire to torment her further.
What is he thinking? Jex wondered, fear permeating her entire being. His face was completely unreadable, and his alien features didn't help much. If Zim stared at her any longer, she believed her own eyes would burn away in their sockets. She didn't know why she kept opening her mouth and spewing stupid remarks; she needed to learn to keep herself in check. It was just so hard to be here without any idea of what the next five minutes will bring, let alone what her future might hold.
Zim's eyes glanced toward the deep wounds his claws had made on the side of her face. Blood, now drying into a dark maroon crust, streaked across her jaw and neck where he had inadvertently smeared it with his hand.
"Come with me," he ordered as he got up, arachnid components retreating to their hiding place.
Momentarily left lying on the floor on her back, Jex felt too numb to move. She wiped her face with her hands as if to rid herself of the terror of believing she had been inches away from losing the lower half of her face. How long would she be able to handle being under this kind of stress without breaking?
"Get up and come on," Zim ordered impatiently from somewhere behind her head.
Flipping over onto her stomach and getting up, Jex moved her jaw a little as it throbbed, the ghost of Zim's grip still haunting it. She saw that he wanted her to follow him into the transport tube.
"Down there?" she asked.
"You ask stupid questions," he snapped as he walked up to her, grabbed her arm and moved her forcefully toward the tube. "Get in."
Jex moved toward the unfamiliar elevator, noticing GIR curled up in a pile of cupcakes, covered in icing. He appeared to be comatose, but she couldn't imagine that a robot would need sleep. Either way, apparently he had been oblivious to or unfazed by the violent scene he had witnessed.
Tentatively, Jex stepped inside the transport.
"Computer," Zim said.
"Yes, Zim."
"Clean up this mess and have GIR help you."
The computer sighed audibly before sending Jex, followed by Zim, down into the lab.
When she emerged, Jex saw a large room decked in an array of what looked like computers and electronic equipment. Several hallways split off from the main room and there seemed to be several transport chutes connected to this place. She tried to take it all in but the unearthly feel of it was overwhelming.
"This way," Zim said as he walked past her, leading her toward one of the hallways that emptied into another otherworldly lair.
They entered a room with numerous large, cylindrical glass enclosures lining the walls with various tubes emerging from them and snaking off into several directions. She walked up to one of the cylinders and placed her hand on the glass, peering inside. A hole sat in the bottom of the floor. There was nothing actually inside the enclosure but it filled her with a strong sense of foreboding. She could not tear her eyes away from it.
"Sit here," Zim ordered, snapping her out of her wonder. He was gesturing toward a small table on one side of the room.
Hoisting herself up onto the table, legs dangling off the side, she couldn't help but be reminded of countless uncomfortable doctor visits in their sterile examination rooms, freezing while waiting in her underwear for the medical personnel to arrive.
Zim had a cloth and a small device in his hand that looked like a thick pen or a laser pointer. He moved so that he was standing in front of her and he began examining her face where his claws had punctured the skin.
"Your planet is so overrun with germs," he said with obvious revulsion as he studied her skin with calculating precision. "I would rather not deal with you being infected by some disgusting Earth plague because you're wandering around in here with open wounds."
Jex felt it wise to remain silent.
Tapping something on the device, one end slid open and he moved it in the air close to her injured face. He first floated it along one side of her jaw and then around to the other, passing over the skin of her neck as well. Zim looked at the side of the pen and appeared to be reading. Apparently satisfied, he tapped something else on the device and the other end flashed a green concentrated beam of light.
Zim pointed the device at the three large puncture wounds consecutively, holding it over each one for roughly ten seconds. The skin on Jex's face sizzled slightly under the beam of light and she cringed, but the wounds healed themselves and closed. Fortunately, the device had not found any internal injuries to Jex's jaw, no dislocation or loose teeth. Zim had concentrated most of his venomous grip in the tips his fingers.
He put the device down and picked up the cloth he had brought to the table. Lifting it to Jex's face, he wiped it slowly and firmly across her skin, down her jaw, along her neck and across to the other side. As he lifted it from her face, Jex marveled that she could see dry blood on the cloth but the material itself was otherwise completely dry. Even the simplest aspects of his alien technology were amazing to her in their unfamiliarity.
Zim leaned in closer to examine his work, holding Jex's jaw and turning her head so that he could see each puncture wound closely. Once again he was close enough to her to make her nervous, but he was healing her this time. What would it be next time? Kindness or cruelty? Were his apparently gentle gestures indeed inspired by kindness or were they somehow self-serving? Or both?
He could see that the wounds would still be visible, probably forming permanent scars on either side of her face. Inferior human biology, obviously. His hand turned her face toward him a little so that he could look at the one puncture wound closer to her chin. It was then that he suddenly became hyperaware of their close proximity. Again that warm rush coursed through his body and he had to make a conscious effort to keep his antennae rigidly at attention instead of allowing them to settle into a quiet hum. It was starting to upset him, the fact that this human was affecting him in any way to begin with, let alone in a way that was so repugnantly unacceptable.
Jex was battling with her own issues while he examined her face and she swam in the scent of his skin and his breath. She felt lightheaded and disturbed by how intensely his presence affected her. Not more than thirty minutes ago he was making promises of mutilating her face and now she was again comforted by his closeness? This was ridiculous. Just because he was healing her wounds, just because he was calm and collected, didn't mean she should let down her guard. He had demonstrated his volatile nature on numerous occasions; this Dr. Jekyll still housed a very dangerous Mr. Hyde.
Having heard of that psychological condition in which people empathized with their captors, Jex wondered whether she might be drawn to the very power that frightened her. She couldn't remember what it was called but she knew it could elicit very strange reactions in the people who fell victim to it. Of course, she was too appalled by the idea to consider it seriously. Her life had been so vanilla up to this point that it was absurd to think she would be enticed by something that twisted.
She then noticed that he was completely still, his hand still touching her jaw but no longer tilting her head this way and that to examine it. He had simply stopped, his face very close to hers, holding his position. The air between them tingled with an invisible electricity. Jex felt her body tense from within and it froze her in place. Although Zim held himself very still, she saw that his torso was expanding and contracting more rapidly than usual. It was not the rise and fall of the chest that she was accustomed to in her fellow humans, but she was inclined to think he was nervous or uneasy. Could he get nervous?
Zim realized she was looking at him; he knew his body was betraying his state of mind. Her eyes were burning holes into his face, but he tried to ignore her stare. He was afraid that if he moved he'd do something irrational. Or that he might once again become filled with rage and kill or maim her if he let himself. How dare she make him so uncomfortable? It was preposterous that he continually allowed this human to infiltrate his mind.
You know that's not true, some dark piece of his subconscious insisted.
He jumped suddenly, startled, when he felt her hand on his face. What in Tallest's name is she doing? he thought. He moved his hand to firmly grab hers with the intention of removing it from his face; however, when he did so he made the mistake of caving into temptation by turning his head to look her in the eye. He wanted to order her not to touch him, but she was looking at him piercingly and they were so close that he could feel her breath.
His fingers gripped hers tightly in both anger and desperation. He was unprepared for a situation like this. Nothing in his military training, nothing in his programming, nothing in his life experience had prepared him for it. All of the theoretical study he had managed on the subject of human relations said nothing about... this. Whatever he was doing. Or whatever was happening to him. Most certainly because the idea of even mild interest in a human was an abomination that only a defective would be susceptible to.
Panic flooded him as Jex's other hand boldly reached up and around his torso, pulling his body close to hers between her knees as she sat on the table. His hand still gripped hers but he had forgotten what he meant to do. The fingers of his other hands still lightly touched her face and neck as they hung in limbo. His mind was jumping in and out of his body as he struggled back and forth between trying to process the situation and wanting to extricate himself.
Jex had no idea what she was doing. Her mind was a frenzied, jumbled mess: oh my god what am i doing this is sick what am i doing--
In spite of herself, Jex felt a flood of heat race from the tips of her toes and through her body, up between her legs and to the top of her head, making her feel as though she would pass out. What in God's name am I doing? she thought. Why in God's name did he excite her so much, why did she always want to touch him? How could she want to touch him after his murderous outbursts? What kind of sick person desires someone who had inflicted cruelties on both her and her kind? What kind of twisted mind felt drawn to an alien with nefarious intentions? Was she just excited by his otherness? Was this some hidden, disturbed psychological condition rearing its ugly head?
She closed her eyes and felt herself overcome with vertigo. A part of her slipped and she let herself fall into her compulsions.
Zim pressed his antennae firmly against his head as he felt Jex's lips brush his.
WHAT IS THIS WHAT IS THE VILE HUMAN DOING, his mind protested incoherently. The physical sensation of simply not being completely disgusted by her paralyzed him while his mind fought with his programming. A back and forth internal struggle over how to handle the situation resulted in total inaction. He was frozen. Paralyzed. Stunned.
Her lips were barely touching his, their breath mingling.
Don't open your eyes, Jex told herself. Her heart pounded in her chest as several images flashed into her mind in rapid succession: his hand on her thigh, their bodies pressed together, his tongue licking her neck, her hands roaming over his unfamiliar body. She shuddered and gripped his shirt just under his PAK as her mind overloaded.
"Incoming transmission," the computer said as a beep issued from the speakers overhead.
Zim and Jex were jolted violently out of their mutually hypnotic states. They pulled back just enough to look at each other in a daze.
Putting one hand around Jex's neck and tracing his thumb along her jaw line, he spoke quietly, not moving away. "I fixed it," he said. He looked as though he was going to say something else, but then the computer prodded him again.
"Incoming transmission from the Tallest, Zim."
This seemed to prompt Zim to action. "Computer, transport Jex back into the house," he said, immediately pulling himself away from her and turning toward the main room of the lab. Whatever had been moved inside of him was again under tight lockdown.
"Use the transport tube all the way to the left," he said to Jex as he left the room, not looking back. "And go help GIR clean up the mess you made."
The next time she saw him, everything changed.
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Capax Infiniti