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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
- 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 7
O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.
-William Blake

***
The steam swirled delicately around the dome of Zim's base. Sitting next to the glass wall, Jex leaned the side of her head against the cool barrier between herself and the harsh environment outside, fidgeting absent-mindedly with the denim of her jeans. With each exhalation, her breath blew patterns of fog on the glass. It had been several days since she abruptly parted ways with Zim in the depths of his lab and she had not seen him since. Truth be told, it could have been four, five, six days, even a week-- Jex had lost track of time completely. One day melted into the next as her mind whirled like a dust devil, the white noise of the volcano remained a static backdrop, and she slept a great majority of her time away. She allowed herself to frequently drift off into sleep both out of boredom and, unbeknownst to her conscious mind, as a coping mechanism. She slept on the couch, on the floor, next to the window, near the doorway, at the kitchen table, even in the bathtub. The combination of endless days, monotonous scenery and total absence of communication with the outside world had the power to drive her mad if it were given enough time.
When she was awake, she spent most of her time either being pseudo-entertained by GIR, eating something small or staring out of the seamless window that surrounded every room of the house. In the rare moments when the steam outside died down, she was able to catch a glimpse of the sky. She waited for it with bated breath if it seemed that the volcano's never-ending effluvial aspirations were dissipating even the smallest bit. Variation in any form was a welcome respite from the tedious sameness that saturated almost every waking moment.
A couple of times she attempted to take a shower, but without any real soap to speak of the only viable option was to ask GIR to show her how to use the Irken cleansing chalk. While it fulfilled its intended purpose, using it was counterintuitive and it did not grant her the same immaculate feeling of cleanliness she was accustomed to. Not to mention the fact that she would have given just about anything for even a cheap shampoo and conditioner to take care of her long, now increasingly dull hair. She combed it with her fingers but it felt constantly unkempt and matted. More often than not she just kept it in a ponytail with the one hair band she happened to always keep in her pocket.
At least she smelled okay thanks to the chalk. As a matter of fact, the chalk seemed to have completely neutralized her scent, at least as far as she was able to discern with her human senses.
Sleep was interrupted by repetitive, fitful dreams and an occasional loud noise from the lab deep underground. Zim's activities were a complete mystery; ever since he had received the transmission from the Tallest, he hadn't emerged from the zealous immersion in his work. Whatever he was doing, it consumed him completely and occasionally caused him to erupt in loud fits of either triumphant laughter or bellows of frustration. She could hear these outbursts floating up into the main house from below, reminders that he was indeed still there and hard at work on projects that completely eluded her. Something sinister brewed under her feet.
Occasionally he would end up outside and she'd see him walking around the spaceship he called a Voot Cruiser, tinkering with it or... something. Emerging only long enough to attend to the vehicle, he disappeared quickly back into the depths of the mountain where he presumably resumed his work. A few times he actually took off in it and came back many hours later; each time she wondered if he would come back at all.
While she most often devoted her thoughts to ideas about what Zim's activities might entail, she also found herself brooding about their last interlude in the lab. In retrospect, she was embarrassed and a little bit horrified that he had affected her as intensely as he did. That she could desire something so alien, someone so inherently other to her, was alarming enough, but she shuddered to think that she could be tempted by a creature who wanted to exterminate her own people. How could that be possible? How could she be enticed by a genocidal maniac? Furthermore, how could her mind wander in that direction when there were far more important issues to be concerned with? Shouldn't she be thinking of ways to stop him? She still had loved ones out there and they were oblivious to what awaited them. Shouldn't that be her primary concern? Her only concern?
Now, sitting there with her head against the glass, these ruminations floated in and out of her conscious mind as she tuned out GIR's endless voice. He had been talking at her for hours, usually babbling nonsensically. Right now he was telling her stories of their past exploits on Earth, although she took most of it with a grain of salt, considering the source. She assumed that when GIR emphasized the color of a dog or the taste of a snack in one of his recollections, he wasn't exactly honing in on the relevant details of the story. Initially she had been very interested in hearing about their adventures, but it wasn't long before she figured out that she wasn't gleaning any real information from him. In fact, it was all but impossible to follow his trains of thought.
"...the big-headed boy. I WAS ON TV!" GIR exclaimed and spun around several times before sitting down in front of Jex again.
"TV, right. That's great, GIR," Jex said unenthusiastically as she realized he was indeed still talking to her.
"And then this one time I rode on Mars and Master squished a poop can," GIR shared.
Still staring out of the window, Jex nodded. "Uh huh, Mars. I'm sure that was great too."
"It would have worked had the filthy human not interfered," Zim chimed in.
The sound of his voice seemed to have emerged unexpectedly from the air immediately behind Jex and she nearly jumped out of her own skin, bumping her head against the glass in the process. "Ow. Zim!" she said in surprise as she looked over her shoulder at him and rubbed her head. She started to get up. "I didn't hear you come in here."
"Of course not, you don't have antennae. And sit back down," Zim said with his mouth full as he leaned his back against the glass next to her, slid down to a sitting position and bent his legs at the knees. He held a small pouch in one hand and had some kind of stick hanging out of his mouth.
GIR walked to where Zim was, curled up underneath the inverted V of his legs and went to sleep.
"He talks to me for hours, then you show up and he's lulled to sleep. Amazing," Jex laughed. Then she shifted her weight a little and leaned her head against the glass again, looking at Zim. She knew she shouldn't feel this way, but the detached part of her mind, the piece of herself that observed her own actions and emotions like an uninvolved third party, realized that she was far more comfortable in his presence than she had been in the past. Something had changed over the past few days and she wasn't sure if it was just the complacency of having been in his base for an extended period of time, the memory of his past mercy, or the undefined moment that had transpired between them, but she could feel that the dynamic had mutated. Whether or not that would bode well for her had yet to be determined.
Dipping the stick into the pouch he was holding, Zim pulled it out covered in what looked like sugar and popped it back into his mouth, lolling his head toward Jex while keeping it rested against the glass. His posture and demeanor suggested that he was completely exhausted, mentally even if not physically. He spoke with his mouth full again. "He's always been--"
"Is that Fun Dip?!" Jex interrupted.
"Huh?" Zim said, pulling the stick out of his mouth and looking at it. "Fun... Dip...?" With a raised eyebrow, he examined his snack.
Jex laughed again. "That's exactly what it looks like. It was a kind of candy I ate as a kid, it's basically a sugar stick that you lick and dip in a packet of powder sugar. You know, one of many ingenious ways to energize a kid to the point of hysteria."
Zim looked at his treat again. "It's not a ‘Fun Dip', it's an Irken snack."

"Is it made of sugar?" Jex asked, genuinely curious.
He tipped the packet toward her nonchalantly and gestured a little. "Want to try?"
Taken aback for a moment, Jex just looked at him.
He kept holding it out to her and again gestured for her to try it.
"Um... okay," Jex said tentatively. She looked mistrustful, but she hesitantly licked her finger and poked it into the packet. When she pulled it out, the tip of her finger was covered in a light purple powdery substance. The fleeting thought that cocaine or heroin could just as easily be a delightful afternoon Irken snack momentarily crossed her mind, but at this point she almost didn't care. She looked at Zim with a raised eyebrow of her own and then tasted it.
"Is it a ‘Fun Dip'?" he asked.
"Actually... yeah, I think it is," Jex said, grinning. "Something close to it, anyway. Who would've thought?"
Apparently unimpressed, Zim dipped his sugar stick in the packet again and then put it back into his mouth, a little bulge forming in his green cheek.
Having been bored out of her mind, Jex scrambled to think of a way to keep Zim engaged long enough for her to have some kind of coherent conversation. She wasn't an extremely social person by nature, but humans weren't meant to live in isolation. She needed contact with other sentient beings at least to some degree, and although GIR was certainly gregarious enough, he wasn't exactly intellectually stimulating.
Zim tilted his head a little while sucking on his snack and looked at Jex. She was staring out the window, one leg bouncing nervously. By the look of it, she was unaware that she was betraying her own anxiety with her fidgeting. She was on edge about something. He couldn't exactly blame her; even when he took an occasional break from his laborious engagement, he deliberately avoided Jex because she unsettled him. It was only when his mind finally pleaded with him for a real, solid break in concentration that he condescended to grace the prisoner with his presence. Or at least he rather liked to think of it that way.
Another part of him took perverse pleasure in knowing that she was probably squirming inside her own skin all this time while he assiduously attended to developing the technical pieces of his design. Making her wait, stew in her captivity and contemplate her fate was his way of perpetuating the fear he had instilled in her from the beginning. In part it was also punishment for the way she had so audaciously breached his personal space. Of course, it was also far easier to gnash his teeth in resentment than it was to confront the fact that he had felt anything when she had touched him.
"So," Jex began, clearing her throat. "What's this about Mars? I haven't heard much about that planet since it fell out of orbit when I was a kid."
"Huh?" Zim's attention had been elsewhere. "Mars? Oh that's right, GIR was talking to you about that, wasn't he?"
"Talking would be putting it in loose terms, but yes," Jex said. "He's been regaling me with stories of your past adventures." She grinned. "I've heard more about how things tasted along the way than anything else, which is a unique perspective to say the least. I didn't know you were interested in the other planets, though."
Zim pulled the candy stick out of his mouth and dropped it into the packet. "I heard about this face on Mars people were always talking about," Zim recalled, staring off in no particular direction. His eyes remained glazed over as his memory traveled back in time to some of his first attempts to annihilate life on planet Earth. "It seemed like a good idea to investigate it. You know, see what I might find that could aid me in my noble mission."
Jex was rapt with attention, curious to hear about this alien's activities on and around her world. All this time he had been here and she was blissfully unaware. She grew from a little girl into a woman, her self-involved goals centered around figuring out what she wanted to do with her life, and meanwhile he secretly plotted the demise of her species. To think of him trying to exterminate her people like pestilent cockroaches while she ignorantly went about the trivial business of daily life was mind-blowing.
"Turns out that Mars is a giant spaceship," he went on.
"Wait, stop," Jex raised her hands in front of her incredulously. "What?"
Zim rocked his head to the side a little to look at Jex, still leaning his head against the glass wall. "I was surprised too. Being an Irken Invader, I've seen a lot in my time. After all, a life like mine is truly extraordinary; there isn't much that amazes me." He seemed incapable of talking about himself in mundane terms. "But a spaceship planet? That was a new one. And did you know the Marsoids were a race of instruction manuals?"
"Huh?" Jex was beyond confused.
"Yeah, weird," Zim said, mistaking her tone for surprised understanding instead of total bewilderment. He stirred the stick around in the sugar packet and then popped it back into his mouth, muffling his speech again. "Anyway, so Mars is a giant spaceship. My idea to put the planet to good use was nothing short of brilliant, of course. GIR and I steered Mars toward Earth and then I slowed it down just enough so that I could slide it across the surface of your planet and squish the entire biosphere into extinction." His hands gesticulated in demonstration with the air of a war veteran who was reliving the glory days.
Jex's eyes widened in what Zim first took to be amazement, admiration, fear or disbelief over his ingenious plan. Rendered speechless by his brilliance, of course. As she continued to stare at him and her eyes started to water ever so slightly, he observed her posture, the tension in the muscles around her mouth, the way the corners of her eyes were twitching and wrinkling just so. The impudent human was not stunned into amazed silence; no, she was stifling laughter.
His blood started to boil and his antennae stiffened against his head, rigid with resentment. The Tallest had the same reaction to him those many years ago when he had transmitted a simulation of his plan to them. Rather than show him the gratitude he so desired, they had laughed at him. Mocked him. As these memories coursed through his brain and the bitter taste of a bruised ego filled his mouth, Zim became increasingly incensed. He bit his sugar stick in half indignantly and crunched its remains between his teeth, glaring at her with narrowed eyes.
Taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly, Jex knew she had to restrain her laughter because this was exactly how she had gotten herself into such serious trouble last time. Honestly though, how could she not be amused by the idea of eradicating Earth's biosphere by "squishing" it with another planet? The idea of this powerful alien going to such great lengths to destroy her home was indeed terrifying, so it wasn't that she believed him incapable. It was perhaps his use of the word "squish", or maybe the mental image of Zim riding the planet Mars like a vehicle, or just the fact that with all of this incredible technology and intelligence at his disposal, he came up with the strangest ideas. Whatever the reason, she was having one hell of a time trying to remain cool and it was obvious to her that she was tapping into his choleric tendencies again.
"Zim," she said, trying desperately not to betray her amusement, to keep herself calm and composed. "You are by far one of the most creative people I've ever met." She let out a measured exhalation clearly intended to settle her nervous energy and pressed her lips together as she tried not to laugh. "I don't think that idea would have occurred to anyone else."
This took Zim by surprise and he looked at her suspiciously. Creative? Had an adjective like that ever even crossed his mind? He was a genius, yes. A scientific mastermind, yes. The future hero of the Irken empire, most certainly. The evil prodigy who would become the sole harbinger of chaos, absolutely. But creative?
He stared at her, noticing how hard she was trying to keep herself composed, and suddenly he was overwhelmed with the realization that yes, his plan had been extremely... innovative. Unconventional. That few people, Irken or otherwise, would have been able to devise such an unexpected assault on Earth. What other brilliant mind would conceive of riding Mars across the Earth's surface in a slow attempt to squash life into a bloody mess?
Furthermore, if he were honest with himself he would have admitted that the moment Mars had touched down on Earth's surface, he knew it was a plan that was destined to fail. Not only would he have taken far too long to brush the entire Earth's surface with his mobile planet, but effectively maneuvering it would have been a logistic nightmare. He did, in fact, learn from such mistakes but rarely wanted to admit to anyone that he even made mistakes, least of all to himself.
Scowling at her again, Zim leaned in toward Jex and tried to look at her with the most livid, menacing expression he could muster. He saw her brace herself as she anticipated another physical assault as punishment for her recalcitrant behavior.
A cloud of powder exploded against Jex's face.
Rubbing her hands on her face and shrieking for a second, Jex had been caught completely by surprise. She had no idea what had happened to her and for a moment believed he had spit a toxic alien venom onto her face and that perhaps a corrosive agent was peeling away at her skin . With eyes burning and itching, she rubbed at them instinctively, not considering the fact that it would only make it worse.
Of course, some of the substance had found its way into her mouth and she was flooded with the taste of sugar.
That's when she realized Zim was laughing. In fact, he was gripping his stomach and leaning his head back on the glass. Laughing! Cracking up. Beside himself. He was cackling at her expense, apparently thoroughly entertained by the sight of her covered in his Irken snack. She was shocked.
Zim's laughter exploded through the house with renewed enthusiasm every time he stole a glance at her, creating round after round of hilarity for himself. GIR sat up and started in with his own shrill laughter despite the fact that he had no idea what he was laughing about. Any excuse to have a good time was motivation enough for the little robot.
Leaning her head back against the wall of the dome, a nervous wreck from having believed he was going to attack her again, she closed her eyes and started to chuckle. Eventually her chuckle grew into genuine laughter and the relief she felt cascaded over her entire system, releasing so much of the tension that had built up inside of her over the past week. The carefree feeling of laughter was the medicine she had so desperately needed. She occasionally wiped some of the sugar off of her face while she laughed, but quite a bit of it was sticking stubbornly to her skin.
"GIR," Zim said, laughing as he spoke. "Go get a cleansing cloth for Jex. She's spontaneously crystallizing!!" He started in on a new round of hysterical laughter, endlessly amused by his own witticism.
"Yes, sir!" GIR saluted and toddled off, still giggling mindlessly.
"Great," Jex sighed through some of her own laughter. "It's stuck in my hair and all I have to wash with is your damn cleansing chalk. Which doesn't work very well, by the way!"
"It's your inferior human biology that doesn't work very well," Zim said with a derisive look on his face, the last traces of laughter finally leaking out of his lungs. "There is nothing wrong with Irken soap. After all, you're the one who needs water to clean yourself." He shuddered with disgust.
"So you mean to tell me that your chalk is supposed to be able to get this stuff off of my face? Some of it was sticky!" Jex kept wiping at her face but all it seemed to do was spread the sugar around instead of cleaning it off. Continued rubbing only caked it onto her face and in her hair.
GIR walked back into the room carrying a large box and dropped it onto the floor in front of Zim. He started pulling cloths out just like the one Jex had seen in Zim's lab, one after the other, letting them fall onto Zim's lap. "I got a purple oooone and a bluuuue one and a white one and anoooother white one and a red oooone and a white one and a purple oooone and a GREEN one..."
"YES, thank you, GIR. That's enough," Zim said, collecting the cloths as GIR continued raining them down on Zim, listing their colors methodically in his sing-song metallic voice. "GIR!" Zim shouted. "THANK YOU GIR, THAT'S ENOUGH."
"YAY!!" GIR shouted, throwing several more cloths into the air and watching them flutter to the floor. Satisfied, he ran out of the room.
Jex laughed. "He can be annoying, but he's really cute."
"You're half right," Zim said as he rolled his eyes and put most of the cloths back into the box, trying to organize them.
Scratching at her face as she tried to get some of the more stubborn patches of sugar off of her skin, Jex thought about how odd it was that GIR would be such an inept assistant in light of Zim's obvious mechanical intelligence. Surely he could have tinkered with GIR well enough for him not to be such an obviously constant nuisance to Zim, albeit an amusing one.
"Zim, have you ever tried to--"
Jex cut herself off. When she had turned to look at Zim to pose her question about GIR, she had nearly smacked her face into his hand. He had been raising a cloth, prepared to touch it to her skin.
"You wanted to get the sugar off of your face," he stated pragmatically.
She shifted her weight so that she was facing him, their figures silhouetted in the natural light that poured into the base through the glass. The curtain of steam outside had parted momentarily, allowing the full intensity of the sun to penetrate the glass. "Yeah, thanks," she said quietly. Her sense of smell was inundated with that sugary sweet scent from the snack that painted her skin, woven with the faint earthy odor that she'd come to associate with Zim.
He moved closer to her so that he could wipe her face with the cloth. Raising it to her forehead, he pressed it firmly against her skin and pulled it across the top of her face. To Zim, the scent of sugar was so strong that he could taste it in the air. Antennae twitching, faint particles of sweetness danced around him. Her eyes scorched a path across his skin but as images of their last interaction flashed through his mind, he couldn't bring himself to return her gaze. He just kept his attention focused on the task at hand, removing bits of crystalline candy from her brow. He did his best to devote part of his concentration to keeping his antennae in a rigidly unexpressive position to avoid accidentally divulging any emotions this time around.
Jex was transfixed. There he was again, close to her, touching her, being kind to her. He really had shown her a great deal of mercy for a kidnapper, so much that the lines between his role as her captor and the person she'd come to know as Zim started to become compartmentalized in her brain. In this moment he became a set of sensations: the gentle stroke of the cloth, the granules of sugar rubbing against her skin as he removed them, the soothing scent of him, his smooth red eyes examining her face. Her body tingled and she wanted to reach out and touch him, to familiarize herself with his alien skin.
Zim felt his eyes glazing over as the overpowering smell of sugar intoxicated him. A sugar rush was easy to come by for his kind and it was more biologically profound for Irkens than for Jex's species. Although he didn't need to eat to survive as his trophic needs were provided for by his PAK, all Irkens loved to snack. It was a beloved recreational pastime on his planet, and any food or beverage containing this substance very similar to sugar was favored above all others. It released a chemical rush not unlike the pleasure of endorphins in the human body. Thanks to the innate acuity of their senses, the smell and proximity of concentrated sweetness was enough to act as an intense aphrodisiac.
His antennae twitched again a few times as he deliberately prevented them from vibrating. Folding the cleansing cloth so that he could access an unused side of the material, he lifted it toward her face again to try to remove the more stubborn bits of sugar.
"Where have you been?" Jex asked very quietly as he prepared to wipe the other side of her face. She looked down at her own hands and fidgeted with them, afraid to meet his eyes, remembering his hostility the last time she pried into his activities. Whether she was risking his wrath or not, she couldn't stand it any longer. She felt like her mind would atrophy if she spent much more time just sleeping, listening to GIR talk for hours on end and trying to pass the time looking out the window. The combination of inactivity, boredom and not knowing what he was working on in the meantime was starting to drive her nuts. Risking more abuse at his hands was almost worth it just to sate her curiosity and give her mind something substantial to digest.
Zim didn't know how to respond. He wasn't angry this time; he knew he couldn't expect her not to be inquisitive after he'd disappeared for that many days on end. Work of such great import would always keep him engaged with a fervent perfectionist drive. With his goal consuming him while he was engaged in completing his preparations, he hadn't bothered to keep track of how much time was passing. All he knew while working was that time marched forward and they were inching ever closer to the end game.
After Zim didn't respond, he felt her question penetrating him as her eyes remained fixated on his face. An unspoken layer to Jex's question lingered between them. Once again, he realized that he didn't know how to handle this situation. He knew very well that being engrossed in his work wasn't the only reason he'd left her alone for a week. His antennae twitched with confusion and he cleared his throat, touching her cheek with the cloth as he prepared to continue cleaning her sugar-laden face.
Determined to find some answers, Jex searched his face for any modicum of expression, any insight into his mind, into his activities, into anything. Some sign that he was going to throw her a breadcrumb. Why am I here?! her mind shouted at him. Tell me what you're doing, why you're keeping me here, whether or not I'm even going to live, you asshole.
Zim had been wiping her face with the material but then abruptly stopped. The hand holding the cloth dropped back into his lap. He looked toward some distant point outside the base and his antennae jerked around erratically while he seemed to be contemplating something, waging a war with himself. Even his eye twitched and he rubbed it, his frustration growing.
"...Zim?" Jex said nervously. "Are you okay?"
He looked at her with a hard expression and leaned in, grabbing her shirt roughly. "You," he spat, the view of his sharp teeth underscoring his rancor. "You. Before your untoward intrusion, I was FINE!"
Breath hot on her face, he was growing increasingly threatening again. Jex was thrown, confused by his sudden transformation and she wondered which appendage or organ his ire might target this time. What would he be so kind as to bestow upon her now? Another set of bruised ribs? Maybe a crushed windpipe or a clean evisceration?
I'm so stupid, she chided herself inwardly.
Red eyes danced in front of her as he scanned her, a look of pure rage flittering across the surface of his face. "YOU have caused me more distraction than is acceptable. I'm practically on the eve of my life's greatest achievement and you... you... human, you just... you think you can just... I am ZIM, and you think... "
Jex felt herself trembling in spite of her efforts to keep herself under control. This was it. He was going to throw her into the volcano or drop her off the side of the mountain. She knew it. It was so high. He would throw her over the side and she would fall for ages, hitting terminal velocity long before the ground, and her bones would break on rocks and ice on the way down.
Zim's torso expanded and contracted as he breathed heavily in his rage, eyes narrowed in spite. He continued clutching her shirt tightly. How dare she, he thought. How dare this pitiful excuse for an "intelligent" creature cause such a problem for ME? For an Irken Invader? Grinding his teeth together, Zim's mind fought back and forth against itself while the scent of sugar played with his senses, mocking him and cajoling him simultaneously. The scent of sugar, and the scent of Jex, and the look on her face, and his anger over being distracted from his mission for even the briefest second-- they all collided in his mind.
Waiting for him to speak or act, she just stared at him, trembling in his grip. No matter how many times he threatened her he was just as terrifying as the first time she laid eyes upon him. This creature really could destroy worlds, she thought. It would be such a small thing to eliminate her. The mountain is so high, she continued thinking to herself. It's so high, and I'm going to fall for such a long time, he's going to throw me off, I know it, he knows I'm afraid of heights, it's so high, I'll break my legs on the way down--
Zim startled Jex out of her grisly rumination when he quickly released her, stood up and brushed his hands over his shirt, dusting off the stray grains of sugar that had fallen on his lap. Crossing his arms, he waited for her to join him but didn't look at her.
"There is a cleansing chamber down in the lab that can remove the rest of the residue," he said prosaically. "We'll take care of it and then I need to finish my work. Follow me."

***
Once in the depths of the base, Jex again felt inundated with a feeling of foreboding inspired by her surroundings but she couldn't put her finger on why. If she peered down one of the shorter hallways she could see the room where Zim had repaired the damage he had done to her face, the room lined with cylindrical glass enclosures. There was something about that room that bothered her, although it could easily just be the fact that she had attached an anxious emotional memory to it, or the simple fact that it was the lair of the one who was trying to kill her people.
"This way," Zim directed. He clasped his right hand around the left wrist behind his back, walking purposefully toward a room on Jex's left.
As she watched his back disappear down the hallway, she realized he reminded her a little bit of a fairytale antagonist with his angular physique and intense drive to conquer her people. His face was much softer than the rest of his features, at least as far as she could discern given his odd Irken clothing, but it was almost always hardened with a stern, determined expression. It was only when she caught him off guard that she could catch a glimpse of Zim's contemplative side.
Jex moved to catch up with him. When she rounded the corner, she saw him waiting patiently by a door at the far end of the room, which was, like many rooms in his lab, lined with numerous controls and computer screens. She walked toward the door and found herself becoming increasingly nervous. What if he was leading her to something other than a "cleansing chamber"? What if this was to be her prison? What if he was going to roast her alive in there or torment her or starve her to death? Or gas her? A thousand of these macabre what-if scenarios ran through her head as she nervously approached the alien.
Zim turned to the control panel next to the door and started entering some kind of sequence, pressing the symbols on the screen before him. Jex was unable to make any of it out, but she assumed he was programming something. As he did, the door to the chamber became transparent and she could see inside.
It was nothing more than a room. There was an eldritch feel to it, but it appeared to be nothing in it, just sleek, immaculate grey walls. Roughly the size of either a luxuriously large walk-in closet or a painfully tiny bedroom, she could see nothing spectacular about the space other than the fact that it would be very dark inside without the one transparent wall.
"The cleansing cloths and chalk are for spot cleaning. I usually use this to decontaminate myself after walking around on the surface your filthy planet for extended periods of time, but it will suffice for your needs as well. I suppose the moisture in your skin bonded a little strongly to the snack," Zim explained. He almost added a courteous "sorry" but decided against it. He wasn't sorry, and it should be more than enough that he was allowing her, a loathsome human, to use his equipment. He pressed something on the screen and the transparent wall flashed and disappeared completely.
Jex looked at him and then into the dark room, her face full of apprehension.
"Well? Get in," he insisted. "I do have more important things to do, you know."
"Okay, sorry," she said nervously. When Jex heard her own voice she felt a hot flash of anger rise to the surface of her skin. The fact that he was constantly putting her in situations that caused her to be so meek, so apologetic and hesitant, was infuriating if she let herself think about it too much. She wasn't like this by nature, and the few people who had been able to obtain this kind of power over in the past never maintained it for long. Of course, that was with regard to mundane human concerns like jobs, finances and family disputes. This recent close encounter was the first time she'd been given a real reason to fear for her life.
Stepping into the room, she turned around to face the open wall and looked up and around. Even close up she could see that the walls were perfectly smooth. There was nothing in the ceiling, nothing on the floor.
Zim sighed. "Well, go on," he gestured at her. "I know the technology is far beyond anything you've ever seen thanks how easily distracted by monies your human ‘scientists' are, but you're trying my patience. I need to get back to work."
Pure confusion crossed Jex's face. "Zim, I'm in the room," she shrugged. "With all due respect, I don't know how this thing works, am I supposed to say some magic words or something? Push a button? I don't see any controls in here."
"Ugh," Zim muttered, still standing close to the opening of the room near the control panel. "Now you're just being obtuse. I know your species doesn't shower in its clothes and neither do we. The computer is going to base the treatment on the chemical composition of your skin, so do you really want your clothing to be added to the equation? Just hurry up and disrobe. It takes about thirty seconds and then I'll send you back upstairs."
Immediately Zim saw Jex's face flush pink. She just stood there.
"I don't have time for your juvenile nudity taboos. Or I can let you spend the next few days trying to rub that stuff off of your skin if you'd prefer? It will come off, but if the cleansing cloth didn't remove it, it's going to take some time and it will probably irritate your skin. Either way, it makes no difference to me, but hurry up and decide on what you'd rather do," Zim said, impatiently shifting his weight. "You continually interrupt my work and I really do have to get back to it."
Suddenly Jex felt vulnerable and exposed even though she was still completely clothed. The mere suggestion that she should put aside her comfort in his presence and just deal with the obvious humiliation she would experience from this was horrifying. He didn't seem to care, or else could not understand why she was so unwilling to remove her clothing in front of him. She rationalized it by believing they really had no concept of shame or privacy on his planet, but it would still render her psychologically vulnerable and powerless to force herself to disrobe so unceremoniously like a...
Like a prisoner, she thought. Because that's exactly what I am.
Zim opened his mouth to say something else but Jex raised her hand, avoiding his gaze. She just looked off to the side. She turned her back to him and lifted her hand to her hair, pulling her ponytail out and letting her hair fall down past her shoulders. I have to do this, she thought. I have to overcome this, I can't be weak. How am I going to survive if I can't get past something so small?
Besides, Zim wasn't looking at her. In fact, he looked like he was deliberately looking away. Why? To preserve her dignity? That would be hard to believe.
Pretending to read something on the control screen, Zim was indeed avoiding the fact that Jex was getting undressed. He had told her to come down here to use his cleansing chamber so that he wouldn't have to deal with being so close to her; because Irkens did not attach any special significance to nudity, he assumed it would be a trivial thing to shove her in the cleansing chamber for thirty seconds and be done with it.
Sexuality was suppressed completely in his race and had been for centuries. Technically speaking, they were biologically capable of experiencing arousal but the more numerous male half of the species completely lacked any means with which to act on it. All male smeets were genetically manipulated during incubation to prevent the development of external sexual organs as a means of controlling reproduction. Only the select few, the elite, would be chosen to donate their DNA to the gene pool and even then breeding was conducted by Irken geneticists under the direction of the Tallest. There was no sexual intercourse involved. Most Irkens would have no idea what to do with each other even if they were engaged in a forbidden romantic tryst, which was almost unheard of.
Not to mention, they were socially and culturally conditioned not to desire intimacy on any level. His sole purpose was to serve the Irken military and that was all he had ever known. Zim had no reason to believe that he would be affected by Jex in any way, shape or form, and the fact that he had experienced fleeting moments of what he knew was attraction to her only served to remind him of the lowest point in his life, the moment when the control brains had deemed him a defective and sentenced him to death. His survival was a random fortuitous event but he took it to mean that he was indeed destined to become a truly remarkable Irken Invader. It had ignited and even greater determination within him, so the fact that this human would interfere was intolerable.
Only a defective would allow that ancient inconvenience to awaken, especially in reaction to an enemy species, he thought to himself as he mulled over these issues. The Tallest would have me spliced open for it.
This is why he was so deeply disturbed by what happened when he stole a glance at Jex. He would later ask himself why he'd bothered to look at her. Perhaps he was attempting to test himself, to confirm that he was indeed not a defective, that he was capable of dismissing what were surely short-lived psychological aberrations. That he had only been intrigued by the close proximity and prolonged contact with a female of the alien race he was hunting. A real hunter enjoyed studying his prey, didn't he? That's all it was. Curiosity. Fascination with the enemy. Nothing more. Perhaps indeed he only wanted to prove to himself that he was not capable of feeling anything for this human beyond the appropriate contempt and disgust. Besides, he needed to know when she was ready so that he could disinfect her and get on with his plan, which would include figuring out what he should even do with her in the long-run. All of this crossed his mind as he glanced innocuously in her direction.
She wasn't ready. She stood there, still wearing her jeans, still wearing some kind of small... shirt? He was unfamiliar with what it was, but it covered very little of her. She had been unbuttoning her jeans and was clearly hesitating. Zim's antennae buzzed erratically with that quiet, irksome hum he often had to quell in her presence. The thoughts which had previously been whirling around in his mind had vacated the premises and he was left with a blank, paralyzing anxiety.
Sensing his eyes on her, Jex looked over her shoulder at Zim and turned slightly to face him. She almost said something akin to an apology for being slow in her nervousness, but he moved before she could even think.
Nothing but a blur, Zim leapt at her, his spider legs expanding out of his PAK. Her body slammed against the far wall of the room and he could see that he knocked the wind completely out of her. A sadistic rush filled his body and he felt high on the power of subjugating the creature who was causing his otherwise superior brain to spiral out of control. He had no plan, he was just angry and wanted to break her.
Not this again, Jex's mind panicked as she struggled to regain the breath that the forceful impact against the wall had stolen from her. She wanted to cry. Her body was so tired and her mind was weary from the strain of the whole complicated mess she was in. A thousand thoughts competed for her attention-- the Earth's impending destruction, her body's repeated abuse, the reality of the peril she was in and the moral fear it incited in her, the disturbing lust she had felt for Zim, the almost human quality he had about him when he wasn't in a murderous rampage, the alien aspects of his personality that she would most likely never understand even given a lifetime of study, the fact that all of these things were simultaneously real and true.
A sob escaped her throat. If she let herself topple over the edge of her fear, she might start displaying inappropriate affect by laughing uncontrollably in her hysteria. The volatile nature of the alien in front of her was doing terrible things to her mind, turning her emotions inside out as she balanced herself over a chasm that divided her terror and what she knew to be an abominable desire.
Zim breathed heavily as he bore down on her, his arachnid limbs surrounding her on both sides. The razor-sharp end of one of his spider legs raised up below Jex's jaw and threatened to skewer her head from underneath. He stared at her. Gored her with his eyes. He was done with her. He had to stop playing around, stop being ambivalent and just be rid of her. The course was charted and he had to stick to it lest he betray both himself and his empire.
With that thought, he pierced her skin and drove his leg into her jaw just barely enough to cause her to shout out in pain and terror.
Jex felt her knees giving out but she struggled to maintain her footing, not wanting to fully impale herself in a final act of mindless stupidity and weakness. Her heart was pounding furiously and she could feel a steady, warm trickle of blood running down her neck and pooling briefly in the recess of her right collar bone before running down her chest. Dizzy and disoriented, she closed her eyes and tried to think of something calm, something peaceful. She stole images from happier times, thoughts of her childhood and her friends and her family and the planet who would all presently join her in oblivion. Her last thoughts should be of something beautiful, not of the impending atrocities of the here and now.
Please let it be quick, she prayed, feeling more blood trickle down her neck.
Zim's mouth curled into a menacing grin as he prepared to invite her to say her last words (he was not, after all, above such a cliché when it would excite him so much to say it), but as he opened his mouth to speak, he breathed in the scent and taste of the sugar and of Jex's skin, her hair, and the pungent metallic smell of her blood superimposed over the mélange of odors. The sweetness of the substance on Jex's skin mingled with the intoxicating effect of his power trip, swirling in and out of his senses.
You're trying to impale yourself, you idiot, a dark, hidden piece of his mind chided him. It was the fragmented section of his psyche that he had been trying to shove back down into the depths of himself. Still it awoke, still it taunted him and mocked him, still it haunted him. You don't really want to kill her, now do you, Zim? It won't make it untrue. It won't change the fact that you're a defective.
"I AM NOT DEFECTIVE!" Zim shouted into Jex's face.
Jex kept her eyes closed and pressed her lips together to keep herself from crying, but a couple of tears escaped the corners of both eyes. He was ranting about something that made no sense to her but it ultimately didn't really matter. She just had to maintain her sanity so that she could face her death with as much courage as she would be able to muster. Every five or ten seconds she would cycle through a feeling of preparedness, a willingness to face the end of her life, but then it would be replaced by an overwhelming urge to live, to keep existing, to not stop breathing. All the while she had to prevent herself from collapsing so that she didn't kill herself inadvertently on Zim's metallic appendage. The longer he waited to be done with it the more torturous it became for Jex.
All she could feel was the cold harshness of the leg under her jaw, the warm little rivulet of blood that ran along her skin, and Zim's breath hot against her face. She swallowed and then winced in pain as the movement pulled her jaw against the sharp edge of the metal penetrating her face. She kept her eyes firmly shut.
Zim was shaking, filled with acrimonious resentment and internally collapsing on his violently eddying emotions and thoughts. If he wanted her dead, why didn't he just do it? Why was he just standing here raging within himself and not taking action? Why was he staring at her and trembling instead of thrusting the leg through her skull, through her brain, eradicating the problem as he had with the agents on the subway? It was effortless then, so what was the problem now?
You know what the problem is, why don't you face it, Food Service Drone?
Squeezing his eyes shut and still shaking, Zim shouted, "SILENCE!" He wasn't experiencing a hallucinatory psychotic episode, he was merely fighting with himself. Fighting with that part of himself that he was trying so desperately to conceal from his conscious mind, fighting a losing battle.
Jex calmed. She centered her mind and eased the constant torrential downpour of emotions. Just breathe until you can't anymore, she reminded herself. Let go.
Then, unexpectedly, the leg withdrew from her jaw. The pain was excruciating as the wound was exposed and she started bleeding out profusely. Just as she was opening her eyes to find out what had happened, a hellish burning sensation radiated out from the site of the trauma and washed over her. She could smell the acrid scent of burning flesh combined with some other odor she was unfamiliar with. All she could see was Zim's face close to hers, presumably looking at her puncture wound.
She opened her mouth to speak and then Zim stopped her. He gave her a vicious look that told her that speaking would be unwise. The burning sensation dulled and was replaced with a strong, throbbing ache that seemed to penetrate her jaw and neck to the bone. Zim's hand moved and he put something back into his PAK, something that looked very much like the pen-shaped tool he had used to heal her wounds the last time they were in the lab.
The arachnid legs were gone, evidently having retreated into his PAK before she had opened her eyes. As he finished putting the device away, he turned to her and, out of nowhere, put his hands on either side of her lower jaw and neck, bringing his face close to her cheek near her ear. She could still feel the warm trail of blood on her neck and chest where it had surely stained her bra by now. The wall of the room was still cold against her back but the silence of the moment was far more chilling. All she could hear was Zim's breath, warm against her skin. Her own breathing was labored with the remaining effects of the adrenaline rush that had coursed through her body when he stabbed her.
There they stood silently, Zim with his hands on either side of her face and neck, his forehead resting against her temple, mouth near her ear, both of them breathing heavily and frantically clinging to rational thought by that thin, gossamer thread.
Jex felt Zim's left hand move toward her cheek, the slight pressure of his gloved fingers causing the sticky grains of the sugar-like substance to feel abrasive on her skin. Lighter than whisper, Zim brushed his mouth against her skin and exhaled against her, his body close to hers.
"You smell so good," he said quietly, fighting his words even as he said them, mentally trying to stuff them back into his mouth as they were falling out. "Why are you doing this?"
Her mind reeled. Doing what? she thought to herself, thrown by this out of the blue accusation. He really was blaming her, wasn't he? Trying to pin this on her. Was it her fault? Because of what had happened before? So much of his violence had been unleashed on her out of pure frustration; she was the unfortunate casualty of her own simple presence in his base, but Jex genuinely believed that she had brought some of it down upon herself. It never occurred to her that he might have been posing the question to himself.
"Zim, I'm not..." she began, choking on her words out of fear while the alien's mouth lingered where it was. "I was... I mean, you just... I was just trying--"
She felt his body stiffen and saw his antennae flatten against his head. The air was thick with tension, the inexplicable magnetism between them palpable. Jex no longer wanted to fight against her own desires. She was quickly consumed; she just wanted him. Never mind his cruelty, never mind his purpose, never mind the fact that they were of separate species. Attraction defied logic, and this was the ultimate act of disobedience against propriety.
Touching his green, soft skin, Jex turned her face toward his and momentarily allowed her lips to linger over his mouth. Breath mingling with his, she felt another flustered surge of anxiety race through her.
Her mouth braved new territory. Her kiss was small. Soft. Gentle. Brief, but powerful. Her lips barely brushed his at first, and then she applied the smallest amount of pressure, her still slightly sugar-coated lips meeting his with the same tentative uncertainty of young people who were daring to touch a member of the opposite sex for the first time.
As their lips reluctantly parted ways, she pulled back and rested her forehead against his, trying to stop her heart from exploding inside of her chest. They were both breathing heavily, caught in the riptide of their respective emotional disturbances and the dizzying effect of their touch. The space between them was full with anticipation, fear, confusion, uncertainty. And above all else, the magnetism that refused to let them go.
"What are we doing," Zim said quietly. It was posed as half-question, half-statement.
Jex didn't answer him; instead, she pulled her forehead back from his and placed one of her hands on top of his, lifting it away from her neck. Glancing at his face briefly to decipher his expression, she found it unreadable and decided to proceed anyway. She rested his gloved hand in the palm of one of hers and traced the fingers of her other hand along the back of his. When her fingers reached the tips of the glove, she gently pulled on the material and she looked at him again.
He stared at her with his red Irken eyes, antennae vibrating shamelessly. He'd forgotten to pay attention to them now that he was preoccupied with so many other sensations and at this point, he no longer cared. There was certainly still a part of him that wanted to run now, to kill her as he had originally intended and run back to his plans and the work he knew so intimately. That was where he found comfort and familiarity. This was alien. Something inside of him was transmuting, becoming alien, and he wasn't sure how to feel about it. Or rather, he had no idea what to make about the fact that perhaps he wasn't actually changing at all, but awakening something deep within that had been asleep.
The glove of Zim's right hand slid down his arm, off of the sleeve of his shirt and, as Jex removed it completely, she took his bare hand with both of hers. She lifted it to her own face and gently placed the palm of his hand against her left cheek, keeping her left hand on top of his. She never removed her eyes from his.
The suppressed piece of him that had been battling to be heard stirred once again. It was that fragment of his inner mind that had been yawning, stretching, and fighting its way out of its long slumber. It had never known the light of day, but now that a small ray had broken through the surface it grappled toward the sun. Zim traced his clawed fingertips along Jex's cheek, feeling some of the remaining granules of sweetness moving under his touch. As his fingers made their way down to her jaw and he followed their path with his eyes, he came to the two puncture wound scars on that side of her face that he had created those many days ago when they had last seen each other. The digit that was the opposable equivalent of a thumb traced its way across the bottom of her jaw where he had nearly killed her mere minutes ago. He had almost eradicated her completely, erased her from existence. The scars on her face would be a permanent testament to his brutality.
Something broke inside of him. Visions of Earth's terminal days filled his mind in rapid-fire succession. Foolish new ideas, long-held ideologies and the profound impact of his duties all collided in his brain, causing him to make a rash decision.
"Jex," he said urgently, looking in the eye. "Answer something."
Startled, Jex replied, "What is it?"
Those red eyes searched her and he hesitated, removing his hand from her cheek and placing it on her chest where he could almost touch the life force pulsating beneath her flesh and his keen senses felt it quicken beneath his fingers. His green skin was a stark contrast against hers, as were the harsh contours of his claws touching the softness of her feminine body.
"Do you want to live?" he asked her urgently, frowning.
Jex shook her head quickly out of confusion. "What? Of course I do, what kind of question is that? Are you going to let me live?" Hope, a very dangerous thing, dared to rise in her chest as the unthinkable crossed her mind. "Zim! Are you thinking about stopping the invasion?"
"Jex, answer the question," Zim insisted as he leaned in closer to her.
"Zim, what's going on? Why are you asking--"
"ANSWER THE QUESTION BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND!" he demanded.
"Yes!" she said. She backed herself away from him a little, disconcerted by his sudden anger. "Yes, of course I do. I want to live."
Sometimes we have no idea what we are agreeing to and the profound impact of our decisions cannot be predicted.
Zim collected himself and exhaled, the building pressure within him apparently relieved by her answer, despite the fact that with his decision he was creating a new host of problems for himself. Right now, he pushed them from his mind. He rubbed his forehead with his gloved hand then ran it back over his head and his antennae, not meeting her eyes.
If she didn't know better, she would say that she saw a crazed look hiding behind those unreadable, extraterrestrial eyes of his. Something he couldn't contain was lurking behind his intimidating red orbs and she had the feeling that the intuitive part of her mind wanted to understand what she saw.
Just as she was going to try to investigate this further, Zim grabbed her and kissed her as though he was containing a frantic feeling of panic that only her touch could quell.
Because he had no idea what he was doing, he simply mirrored her previous actions, knowing at the very least that when she had done that to him he had been awash with an intense feeling that rested somewhere on the border between miserable, confused agony and bliss. The difference this time was that he pressed his mouth against hers with a hungry desire, the sleeping demon within him having unfurled and taken hold.
A flood broke inside of Jex and she lost herself in the creature in front of her, pressing herself against him, touching his neck and his face, showing him how to kiss her, how to enjoy it, how to revel in this entirely alien pleasure of closeness.
To him, she tasted sweet, and whether that was the remaining sugar or her skin itself didn't matter. Even without the saccharine coating, they were mutually, utterly intoxicated by the scent, touch and taste of each other. Neither of them wanted to face the fact that they should be horrified by the wrongness of their actions, and in the moment, neither of them forced themselves to care.
Zim allowed his senses to take over and silenced the warning sirens that shrieked in his mind. They were shut away behind an iron door, muffled, locked, temporarily forgotten. Alarms continued to blare all the while, but like a police siren heard in New York City, he treated them like a distant problem that was someone else's to contend with. He would later blame his actions on the fact that his judgment was impaired; he was drunk on the ambrosia of awakening the part of his species that had been forced into a deep hibernation. Consequences, implications, philosophical horrors-- they were systematically apprehended as they appeared and he buried them beneath fresh layers of denial. This was how he handled the more profound problems in his life.
Between breaths, Zim brushed his lips against Jex's and exhaled with a shudder, overpowered by his loss of control and his intense desire to have her, to possess her. He wanted to keep her for himself. He wanted to own her completely. The dichotomous feelings of power and vulnerability he felt in that moment spiraled his mind further downward, away from the safety of common sense and logic.
Jex's body was warm with her inexplicable desire for him. Everything about this alien was unsettling her in the best and worst of ways. Why she would feel drawn to him still confused her. Was it just the fact that he had shown her some small moments of kindness since they had arrived at the volcano? Or was it that she found his otherness alluring, his power intoxicating, his strength comforting? And the scent of him moved her in ways she still couldn't explain; it had since that first night he had slammed her body against the door of her apartment...
As that thought snaked through her mind, she placed a hand on the pink material of the shirt he wore and ran it along his chest, across his shoulder and down his arm. She kept her mouth close to his all the while, lingering at a distance of what felt like mere molecules away, and took each of his hands with hers. One of his hands still gloved, the other bare, she placed them on the exposed skin of her sides before running her hands back up along his arms.
The feel of his one bare hand on her skin, his claws and fingers and palm warm against her, threw him completely. It threw them both, toppling their mental centers of gravity even more than they already were. His palms now flat against her back, running along the bare skin of her body and over what he thought of as her "little shirt", he pulled her close against him so that they were pressed together, mouths kissing each other with covetous fervor.
Zim had no idea if this even vaguely resembled the way that Irkens were once intimate with each other, but it didn't matter. He was drunk on the sensations.
Jex's hands traveled to his shoulders and toward the neck of his shirt. As she touched it, she pulled back just a little, looking at his shirt and then at him, a questioning but pointedly lascivious expression on her face. "Zim..."
"Almighty Tallest," he whispered, leaning into her. "What am I doing?"
"Does it matter?" Jex whispered back, abandoning any desire to stop their now ever-escalating encounter.
He answered her by removing his remaining glove with his hands still behind her back, then returned them to the soft skin of her torso. Keeping his eyes trained on hers, paused for a moment and, without lifting a finger, his shirt faded from view and disappeared completely. He had used the neuro-electronic interface between his brain and his PAK to dissolve the material as he always did when changing clothes or running himself through the cleansing chamber.
When he traced his hands down her back and felt the form of her body, he was enthralled by how soft her figure was, how completely different from his angular Irken frame. In spite of how hard he had fought against his desires, he wanted to feel the rest of her. He wanted to explore her.
Jex felt the same way as she ran her hands along his now bare torso. He was obviously humanoid, but his body was completely different from that of any person she had ever been with. His skin was smooth and flawless from neck to waist, with vary little variation in the shape of his midsection. She could feel that the musculature beneath his skin was entirely unlike her own. These differences between them only served to intensify her want for him. With a boldness she would never have dared display before, she reached back and slid her hands under his, moving them to the clasp of her bra and unfastened it, showing him how. She never moved her mouth very far from his, placing slow, erotic kisses on his lips all the while. Sliding her undergarment off of her body and down her arms, she let it drop to the floor. Immediately Jex wrapped her arms around Zim's neck and pressed her body against his, reveling in the feeling of his skin touching hers, breathing against his neck lustfully. All of his past abuse was temporarily erased from her mind, as was the fact that being intimate with him would have repulsed most, if not all of her fellow humans.
While Jex had at least been intimate with members of her own species in the past, Zim had absolutely nothing to draw on. No romantic or sexual history, no cultural education on the subject beyond the obvious taboos and prohibitions. Everything he was doing, feeling and thinking was based on pure instinct and whatever Jex might be able to show him, although she was obviously at a loss when it came to his body. He had studied Earth relationships to a degree, but there was no reason for him to have believed that engaging in detailed research on human sexuality would be useful to him.
What he did know was that he craved her, wanted to explore her, consume her. The desire was so torturous that he briefly wondered if the Irken ban on intimacy might not be a good idea after all, not realizing that his dichotomously wonderful anguish was in fact a universal experience.
As Jex embraced him, she was startled to feel that the oblong backpack Zim wore was still attached to him. She touched it gingerly and looked at him with a quizzical expression. There were no straps attaching it to him, no clips, nothing. It was just... there. On his back.
Zim’s antennae twitched and he shook his head a little. “It’s me,” he said. “Part of me. I would die without it.”
Momentarily, Jex was perplexed. He would die without it? It’s part of him? It made no sense to her. She had believed it to be an extremely useful contraption of some kind, intended to provide him with quick access to tools, weapons and equipment. Never for a moment did it cross her mind that it would be somehow vital to his existence. She was intrigued and wanted to know more about it.
“What does it do?” she asked, touching it lightly.
Firmly but gently, Zim stepped further into Jex’s space, pushing her back against the wall again, placing both of his palms flat against the wall on either side of her. Burying his face against her neck and hair, he pressed himself against her and breathed her in, letting out a quiet, low grumbling noise that was a close but benevolent relative of the threatening growl he had unleashed on her when they were in her apartment. “Later,” he murmured into her ear.
The incredible rush of Zim’s scent and touch filled Jex’s senses as she closed her eyes, wrapping her arms around his neck again. She luxuriated in the feel of his body against hers and could not deny the fact that his strength and his power over her aroused her. The fact that pain, pleasure and domination were inexorably linked for so many people never made much sense to her until now. In this moment, she succumbed to both the mental and physical thrill of his authoritarian role. It was one of many things that had drawn her to him to begin with.
Still breathing heavily against Jex’s neck, Zim wanted desperately to do something, to act on his desires, to alleviate the building pressure within him and to just have her, but he was at a frustrating loss. “Jex,” he said tensely. “I don’t know...”
Putting her hands on either side of his face, she gently turned his head to look him directly in the eye. “It’s okay,” she said sincerely.
“No,” he replied, feeling a little panicked by what he perceived as his own ineptitude. When faced with a situation he did not know how to handle, he usually feigned expertise. That was not an option here. “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what to do. My people, we don’t... we’re all genetically castrated, we can’t... even if you were Irken, I don’t think...”
Jex smiled softly. “That’s okay, Zim,” she tried to reassure him in a quiet voice. “There are always other ways.” She hesitated but then added, “Is this really what you want?”
As she brushed her lips against his provocatively and the heat between them intensified, Zim shuddered. Rather than verbalize his response, he just grabbed her arms and kissed her again, shutting his eyes and trying to defy his natural inclinations by simply existing in the moment. There are always other ways, she had said.
Emboldened by his answer, Jex placed one slow, soft and seductive kiss after another sequentially along his cheek, his jaw line, his neck. The intensity with which she was affecting him became obvious when his grip on her arms tightened. She let his scent envelop her and traced her fingertips lightly along either side of his neck, down his chest and along his torso, where she moved her hands to her jeans and finished unfastening them.
“Computer,” Zim mumbled, obviously dazed in his arousal. He placed his mouth very close Jex’s as he spoke, letting their breath mingle.
The overhead voice echoed through the small room as the computer seemed to clear its non-existent throat disapprovingly. “Zim.”
“Remove Jex’s clothing,” he ordered, still focused on her. He let his hands wander down the sides of her torso and lost himself in the soft feel of her skin. As they meandered back up along her body, Jex inhaled sharply when he inadvertently brushed the thumb of each hand along the sides of her breasts.
The computer sighed and complied. A small beam of blue light emerged from a previously invisible point in the wall to Jex’s left, traced itself down the entire length of her body, and disappeared. Over the span of five seconds, her remaining garments grew warm and then dissolved into dust, vanishing completely. Zim paused and focused his attention inward for a brief moment, accessing his PAK’s interface to rid himself of his clothing as well. Thanks to the efficiency of his technology, there was now nothing between them.
Immediately, Jex pressed her entire body against his, overwhelmed by desire for him and the urgent need to be as close to him as possible. It occurred to her at this point that although it would be instinctive for a male human to be drawn to her erogenous zones, Zim would very likely not be aware that any part of her held a greater significance than any other. As she thought this to herself, she took one of his hands and guided it toward her breast, showing him what would stir her to greater sensitivity.
Understanding after a moment, Zim cupped her breast with his hand and brushed it lightly at first. When Jex let out a moan in response to his touch, clutching him closer to her, he was turned on by her excitement and touched her with a hungry fervency. She let out a groan of lust and trembled under his touch as his other hand slid down the side of her body along her hip and up over her stomach, exploring her. Again he marveled at the lush softness of her contrasted against his angular body. Zim felt something galvanic stir within him and a jolt of very low level humming electricity shot up through his body all the way into his fingertips.
When she felt it, Jex let out a startled cry, both out of surprise and stimulation. It felt amazing as it discharged from his hands to her body but she had been unprepared. So had he, for that matter. As soon as the hum of electricity had coursed through him, he had become dizzy and disoriented in a lustful haze not unlike teetering on the edge of an orgasm. It was a blissful agony that left him craving more. What neither of them knew was that the water content of Jex’s body served as a conductor to the electricity being generated within Zim, amplifying the effect and returning it back to him. Inducing enough of this charge through both physical and psychological stimulation would not only heighten Jex’s experience, but also provide Zim with a means to release the mounting lustful pressure within him.
There are always other ways, she had said, and she was right.
He clawed salaciously at her stomach with his hand, just enough to barely scratch her. With no idea that he had discovered how to sate his newfound desire, he was desperate to devour Jex.
Breathing heavily after the arousing but penetrating shock of electricity, Jex reached for Zim’s hands with each of hers. She lifted one to her mouth and brushed her lips along his wrist, the palm of his hand, along his fingers. As she did this, she lowered his other hand to the inside of her thigh and, guiding him gently up, moved her mouth to his ear to whisper, “Touch me here.” His hand found the warm slit between her legs and she showed him what she desired by directing his fingers. The moisture of her body caused him some discomfort at first, but then the very mild but ultimately harmless burning became another stirring sensation, galvanizing the electric current yet again.
Jex writhed against his touch and exhaled sensually, wrapping one of her legs around his waist and pulling him closer. As she did this, he moved his hand so that he was holding her up, reaching around the outside of her upper thigh to support her and continue touching her, exploring her inside and out. The reaction his fingers were eliciting was exciting; she was obviously somewhere between agony and ecstasy. This was an entirely new kind of control and he relished it as it served to amplify the electric current still buzzing and building inside his body.
She kept his other hand in hers, now tracing her tongue along the palm of his hand, breath hot against his skin. His hands were so sensitive that in this heightened state of arousal, they became erogenous zones. As Jex’s traced her tongue sensually across his palm and along one of his fingers, shivering against his touch, pressing herself against him, her other hand grabbing at his back both for support and out of hungry need, everything combined sent him over the edge again and the electricity coursed intensely through his body, exploding out through his fingers.
The shock was again overwhelming but not unpleasant, and Jex cried out. Never in her life had she experienced anything even remotely resembling this and it was amazing. As the current slowly dissipated and rebounded back and forth between them, she let go of his hand and grabbed the back of his neck, kissing him passionately, unconsciously moving her hips against him as he continued to touch her, to penetrate her with his fingers.
The current was once more building very quickly. Jex took Zim’s hand again, gripping him gently around the wrist, and he shuddered. She understood how deeply her touch on his skin was affecting him and began to trace her tongue along the palm of his hand.
Overwhelmed by the succession of sensations, Zim buried his face against her neck and in her hair, letting out another low moaning, grumbling noise. He could feel her heart beating rapidly; his antennae were vibrating erratically in a rhythm that almost matched that of his own blood. His mind felt simultaneously sharpened through his keen senses and reduced to a boiling, jumbled mess of base urges made all the more animalistic after a lifetime of suppression. Wave after wave of electricity, desire and indescribable emotions surged through his body, intensified each time Jex spoke, breathed, moaned, touched him or responded to his own touch. Her actions became more fervent and gripping as she reached the peak of her desire, her need to consume him culminating in just the same way that he was devouring her. He felt like he would lose his mind.
She writhed against him as she felt a few sparks of electricity jump from his fingers within her in addition to the finger she teased with the tip of her tongue. He was reaching the crest of his tolerance again and would soon detonate; this time, so would she. Jex kept her arm wrapped around him, gripping his back below his PAK, certain that if she were to let go in her quickened state she would lose consciousness and collapse.
As another current of electricity shot out from within Zim and Jex’s body served as a reverberating conduit for the energy, they both shouted and clutched each other tightly, breathing heavily. They died the little death, in one way having walked the path so many had walked before them, and yet having deviated so dramatically that the road forked into uncharted territory, both unknown and dangerous. Jex’s hand on Zim’s back clawed at him so intensely that she managed to leave a few deep marks, while at the same time he pressed himself against her, chest heaving, gripping Jex’s shoulder with the hand she had previously caressed with her mouth. Both of their minds were empty in a post-orgasmic fog.
Zim felt like an alien in his own skin. Jex had opened something inside of him that could never be chained away again, and there was no way he would be able to fully understand the repercussions until they came to pass. The seed that had been growing within him was sprouting leaves. Its branches were reaching outward into a world unlike any he had ever seen.

***
Three Days Later
Zim turned away from the display screen at which he had been staring when he heard the computer's voice. He wanted to be sure of what he was hearing. "Repeat that," he commanded.
"Local seismic activity indicates that a volcanic eruption is imminent," the computer restated.
Shit, Zim thought. "Connect to the transport station and prepare it for our arrival!" he shouted directions at the disembodied voice of the computer and then added, "GIR!"
The little robot had been spinning around on one of the chairs in the same room where Zim had been working. "Yeeeees, Master?" he replied happily.
While working frantically across several display screens, Zim spoke to GIR. "Get Mini Moose and ready the Voot Cruiser for departure. We're leaving."
GIR gasped. "But the lady's broken!"
Eyes flashing with irritation, Zim snapped his head toward GIR and repeated himself. "Prepare for departure, GIR! I'm aware of the human's condition. Just do as I command!"
"Yes, Sir!" GIR saluted and ran off to find the levitating purple moose.
"Computer," Zim said. "How long do we have?"
"Measurements suggest an estimate of three to five hours until eruption," the voice replied.
"Looks like my schedule has been pushed forward," Zim said to himself as he worked to ready the lab for their evacuation. His expression morphed from one of calculating concentration to unadulterated satisfaction. "Good."
- 6
- 7
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Capax Infiniti