Saving Zim by Dib07

Summary:

When you had it all. When old age forces you to change. When life isn't what you'd imagined. When you aren't prepared to be so powerless.

When a soldier's undetermined future remains his greatest fear.

Disclaimer:

I do not own the IZ characters. However this story and this idea is mine. Cover art lovingly designed and drawn by TheCau.

Warnings:

Angst.

A/N: For all those who aren't keen on fluff and angst, I suggest you avoid these scenes, sorry! I originally omitted them from the original story, as they were a little self-indulgent and not massively relevant to the plot. But here they are, for you to indulge in too if you wish! A MASSIVE thanks to ghostlydragonwings for requesting these, and thus encouraging me to put these out here - and for any of you who wish for more, feel free to ask! There are a lot of self-indulged parts that never made it to the main FFN upload, and just of lately I have only put snippets up on tumblr due to my shyness. Again they hold no real relevance or anything special. This is just what happens when I have too much fun! (I splash out on the angst a lot)

Thank you for all your continued support! I have been getting REALLY behind on my FFN replies and Tumblr messages due to a maelstrom of busyness, work, family, ferrets etc but don't worry, I will get round to you! I always make it my mission! I'm Captain Slow! And thank you thank you flipingoutfan/HaleyRiler for the awesome fan art of SZ Epilogue's chapter 8! It's amazing! I love and love it!

Confessions

Late at night
Things I thought I put behind me
Haunt my mind

Stand My Ground – Within Temptation

-x-

The soldier he had relentlessly fought broke in front of him: this formidable opponent and blockade tumbling down - and his world shattered in the same instant.

His right antenna had seesawed down by his head like a bit of loose rope when his left leg buckled. That detail - however small - had never escaped him.

"Turn him over! Get him on his back!"

They had tenderly tipped Zim over so that he could lie on his side – the PAK hindering the position they really wanted. His skin had felt like ice, and his head would tilt or thrash against the carpet as if he was trying to seek escape. That detail kept coming back as well in the midst of his thoughts.

Clara's face had been bloodless, her eyes dark pools that made him think of empty subways.

"Son? Son? Are you all right?"

Dib swallowed, shook his head. His throat didn't want to work. Not even to swallow the coffee that his father had given him. He hugged the still-warm mug to his chest. His father had tried warming him up by covering his shoulders with a throw. He didn't know why he kept shivering.

The nightmare restarted whenever he shut his eyes, and it might be a little different, or it might follow on from another point like hitting PLAY on a movie he had paused.

His father wasn't going to leave him alone until he answered. The older man stood there, fidgeting, not sure how to proceed.

Dib stared at his coffee mug, remembering in fragments as if he'd glimpsed the horror between his fingers. The whine of the defibrillators were predominantly memorable, as were the cranks and splutters of the PAK. That was when the strength had gone from his legs, tipping him to the floor. Zim had not been breathing for fifteen minutes – every second of which he had counted.

There had been no pulse.

He never thought an Irken's skin could be so... grey.

The PAK had gone dark. Even the metal itself seemed to take on an aberrantly dimmer shade, and it had cranked out these terrible noises before the three lights had blinked off.

He ran a shaky hand through his hair. The anger he had felt towards his father seemed almost silly in retrospect.

When he tried to speak, it took a few attempts. "How long... was it... before you... you could... restart..."

They had no idea at the time what state his brain would be in after it had been starved of oxygen for so long - but Zim seemed to be holding on to who he was.

"Well," his father seemed a little hesitant, as if he could not determine exactly what to say. "...Urm..." He rubbed at the bottom of his white collar. His son knew he was stalling. He had the answers. It was whether they wanted to be heard or not. "Let's not dwell on it!" He went to nonchalantly pat his son's shoulder. "Now, you go put some more cream on those burns, and take a moment to rest! You have not slept! You think your little friend will be impressed when he finds you keeling over?"

Dib pulled away from the touch, nearly spilling his coffee. He abruptly stood up, eyes more likened to holes. And there he stood for awhile, as if he'd quite forgotten what he meant to do. Then, with a heavy stiffness as if he'd aged overnight, he sunk back down into his chair. "I'm staying here." He said.

The professor stood idle, as if wanting to say something more: a reprimand - a word of comfort? But he turned away, idled again, glanced over, then shook his head and left. Dib did not acknowledge it. His eyes were on the thin green lines travelling along the little ECG screen. The signals were keeping to a weary 55 bpm. Zim's body was accepting the fluids from the drip, and his skin didn't look so slumped and sallow. Dib stroked the left side of his head, feeling the warmth of his skin, and the soft contours of his cheekbone. All the while he kept one ear continuously trained on the bleeps of the ECG, waiting for a particular pulse to drop, even when the machine would set off an alarm should the bmp fall too low.

He took a slow, listless sip from his tepid coffee. It made his stomach roil and painfully twist.

So long they had battled, like two opposing tides eternally colliding. The time that was left was a thinning trickle escaping the hour glass. Zim had passed off this gusto, inching up that indomitability Dib had fought so hard to match.

"We're cursed, space jerk. Did you know that?" His soft touches did not rise the Irken from sleep.

The night came like a dark fever. It clung and it stayed, a thick miasma that only stubbornly lifted when the shy dawn peeked through the curtains. Zim waned through the night.

Dib didn't know why.

He tried many different things, like forcing the old bastard to swap the side he slept on, and easing him upright against an extra pillow to help tackle those chest fluids, and he turned the heater blanket's temperature all the way up.

The clock inched its way past half one in the morning. Sometimes he dropped in and out of wakeful dreams, barely catching himself in time, and he would rub angrily at his eyes beneath the glasses, get up and work some circulation back into his legs. He shuffled over to the window to peek out between the curtains to see the darkly lit world beyond. If he felt particularly woozy, he'd open the window and feel the cold air on his face, hurting the new skin that had started to grow back on his cheeks. Then he'd close it, shuffle to the chair and collapse back into it.

You'd think the bypass and fixing those corroded neuron pathways would have increased some stratum of cognition, but Zim remained eerily soporific. The PAK was producing those same soft humming noises - but Dib anticipated the horrendous cranking and jarring and grinding to end the lullaby.

Keeping his lungs alleviated was a meticulous discipline - and the PAK had to be supported so that he had less chance of sliding back down. His head was resting almost upright, his chin leaning towards his chest. The blankets were up to his collarbone to keep him snug, and his breathing, though steady - was still producing those difficult wheezes.

Dib's eyes roamed over the furnishings he had already looked at some sixty times over, his attention religiously returning to the lines on the ECG screen. The ECG machine was an older model, bulky and black, and nowhere near as sleek or as small as some of the newer editions. Perhaps it was more reliable than the newer models, and that was why the professor had never replaced it? It looked oddly out of place beside the sleek, hybrid versions.

Zim's life had become nothing more than pinging, undulating lines.

The clock on the overhead wall read one forty-five. He began to drowse again, eyelids lowering as he tried to concentrate on the pulsing lines. Only when they'd dropped and he'd dip briefly into a waking dream did he start, scrambling awake and heaving for breath.

There was a sharper squeak for air and Dib snapped his attention towards him.

Hooded crescents slanted upwards, revealing that reddish autumn gloom. He stared ahead, towards the foot of the bed, his intakes for air short, and desperate. He did not turn to look around, or even try to detect any presence with his antenna. Concerned, Dib leaned in and rested a hand against his forehead to gauge his temperature. The Irken did not flinch or move away. It was like he wasn't even there.

"Fudgekins? Hey. It's me. Are you hurting?"

The blips on the overhead monitor began to hasten.

The old Elite would sooner suffer pain, than confess it. He had always been a stoic creature who hid pain in order conceal weakness - which would be a death sentence for him, his career and his code.

Dib reached for the green button above the bed and pressed: it was a dispensary that injected the Irken with a dose of norcine and dobutamine via his drip.

"It's me, goofball. You're gonna be okay." He squeezed the limp mittened hand, helpless to watch untimely shivers come and go through the creature's body. "I've given you pain relief. It will go. I promise. Just tell me where it hurts."

But Zim remained an icon of solitude – lost as he was in the discord of personal sufferings. He continued to stare ahead, eyes closing to hemispherical curves.

After twenty seconds of administrating the painkiller, Zim's stiffening shoulders drooped, his disparaging shivers eased, and his body melted back into an exhausted heap, his tightening inhalations gradually evening out. The lines on the ECG softened too, slowing to a jerky tempo.

"Zim?" Dib tried, wanting a reaction so badly. A word, a look, a scowl. "Zim, I'm here."

The elderly Irken's eyelids were shut fast and did not flicker, his chin sloping forwards, mouth partly open as he took in the nursing oxygen. There was no sign that he had heard him.

Dib willed back the tears, and was only half successful.

The pain always rose up suddenly like this in cycles.

Either the professor had neglected to administer the due norcine dose, or Zim's metabolism had gone through it all the quicker. Dib brought out a pen and chartered it down on Zim's medical file for the records. Stiffly, he leaned back in the chair.

Zim did not seem to notice the absence of his PAK legs, or the weight difference in their removal. Probably because he had disengaged himself from everything - as a means to survive - or as a means to die.

He saw the estrangement in his friend's life: the permanent loss of everything that personified him. And wondered that, if he were in Zim's position, could he come back from such a blow? Zim was endowed with a strong spirit, coming back from near-punishable defeats with a formidable smile. This defeat entombed the Elite in heavy shackles that he did not seem able to lift.

-x-

The moon was a bright white pearl, hanging, suspended in the dark. He never noticed it.

He picked up the tube, shook it about a little, and watched the colour of it change from a lime green to a more fluorescent shade.

Toxic. He thought, frowning. The data from the blood analysis machine read loud and clear that injecting such a substance into the creature's system was fatal. In fact, these very words were stamped across most of the samples until he had a whole assembly of red negatives.

The professor shook his head, and put it back in the rack. No good.

He picked up another that had trace amounts of the epinephrine drug. He had expected most results to come back negative, such was the nature of his patient's 'alien' composition, but the professor had a deluge of negativity. Irken physiology did not like or tolerate human drugs very well, and trying to find something that would help sustain normal heart function was becoming more impossible. Irkens were such profoundly delicate creatures. It justified why they relied on their PAKs as a prop for essentially everything. It had sustained them for too long, weakening their natural bodies, and forcing them to rely on external needs to survive. The professor wasn't sure if this was mechanically engineered to dispose of soldiers in due time, or to keep them purposely reliant on whatever governed their society as a whole.

Membrane combed through the data again, worried he'd missed something the first time. He had risked too much when he'd first infused a high dose of epinephrine into Zim when the electrical shock from the defibrillators hadn't given him the results he'd been hoping for.

Every stimulant and glycoside known to man he fed into the analysis machine, each one formulating an algorithm with Zim's blood to produce something that bonded, or something that didn't, such was the playground of the elements.

The epinephrine stimulants had been a life saver, but every time he used it on Zim hence, it became that little more toxic until it began to cause detrimental effects.

The PAK repair had been largely successful and strangely straight forward when you didn't have to worry about the fragility of biological constitutions. Zim's organs however were proving more delicate and harder to improve than the machine on his back. One crack in the balance, and it all fell apart.

Perhaps the trauma from the PAK operation had caused unfavourable harm he could not have predicted as the Irken's body tried to conform to the changes, or it was simply a knock-on effect of everything else. Zim had used up his last reserves of strength to listlessly wander the corridors for Dib. Since then, his vitals had kept dropping.

Membrane reached for his cup of iced tea to stave off his thirst.

The blood results held no secrets, and told all. Science never lied. Hard truths were revealed in strings of numbers that the Irken in his care was not able to make a full recovery. His blood pressure irrevocably fell no matter what he tried, and the levels of oxygen in his system kept dropping with it. His lungs had become a place where things were dumped: precious resources ending up as a clogging backflow.

He was drowning in his own blood, and was simultaneously starving from the lack of it.

The tide needed to be pushed back. A balance needed to be found.

Radical drug intervention had to serve as props to maintain that precarious balance, but which drugs would work, which ones may work for a time, and which ones may prove false? Meddling with something that was so delicate had the scientist sweating. Get it wrong, and Zim would reap the cost.

Beside him the blood analyser purred away, as hard at work as he.

The final results came in.

Silence for a beat, aware of the dryness in his mouth. He allowed himself a small chuckle.

Something promising at last.

Zim tested positive for the rare antiarrhythmic agent labelled as blueH, and the best result the professor could have hoped for was another positive for a cardiac glycoside: the digoxin kind: nifedipine. In safe quantities, these would stabilize him for longer.

He was dubious of these try-and-test methods; never wanting to actively put something that might turn out to be poison into the tiny creature's body.

He patted the blood analyzer machine. Sometimes it just took a little longer to find another way.

The scientist opened a drawer, scouring the contents for sterile and packaged hypodermics. He selected one and took a new vial from the dispenser when it ejected the potentially life-saving cocktail. He loaded it into the hypodermic syringe.

"Half a dose, I should think."

Zim lay with his PAK half raised by pillows to help keep his breathing steady, the translucent oxygen mask latched to his lower face. Dib was by his bedside, his larger hands clutching an ever so tiny one. The respirator's valves were on full to provide the essential oxygen his body was demanding, but Zim's inhalations were always shallower than they should be, and too rapid. Though the oxygen was there, he wasn't taking it in properly.

When Dib saw him come in, the younger man's eyes grew cold and sharp. I thought you fixed him. Those eyes said.

"I have a little elixir for your old friend." Membrane announced: his enthusiasm slightly strained.

"He... he was... doing okay..." He paused, eyes flashing. "What's happening to him?"

"Creatures with fast metabolisms tend to go downhill very quickly when something isn't right." He came over, the hypo carefully held in gloved fingers as if it were an ink pen. "Do not despair! Solutions for these things just take time!"

Zim's sleeve was loose and soft, and all the easier to roll up. Dib pressed limp green claws to his cheek, and held them there. He'd rushed to the Irken at about the same time as his father in the dark of morning when his bpm had fallen again.

"When your little friend chose life, he knew it would be hard. But get back up again we must." The needle slipped smoothly into a tiny vein. The Irken feverishly grunted in sleep, but did not wake. His little chest swooped up and down too quickly. The professor patiently eased on the plunger, noting the millimetres on the syringe's measurement. When the dose was inoculated, he eased the needle out and covered the puncture with a cotton bud.

"You're just experimenting on him." Dib croaked. He hadn't slept since last night. Hadn't washed. Hadn't eaten. His eyes were mostly vacant holes, always staring for long periods at anything and nothing. "Seeing what works. What doesn't. You might be killing him dose by dose for all I know."

"Son. You know I'm doing everything I can." He was hurt by his son's mistrust, and afforded him a crestfallen frown. "You assisted me with his PAK. We were in it together, and we're still in it - together."

Dib clenched his jaw all the tighter. His father wasn't sure if his son was close to having a breakdown. He never liked it when his son sat and cogitated: like a black star drinking in all light.

"Do you not recognise the symptoms?" He asked of Dib, gesturing shortly at the gasping Irken.

"W-What do you mean?"

"The constant backlog of blood in the lungs? The coughing? The dizziness and exhaustion? The chest pain?"

"It's his PAK!" He bit back, amber eyes ringed in fire. "We didn't fix it, did we? You lied to me, just to make me feel better! That's what you always do!"

"No, no son. We repaired what we could. You know the math. You did the calculations alongside me. The new parts and bypass are working with greater efficiency – and it will go on to sustain his mechanised functions. But he can no longer heal as he used to. See here?" He couldn't believe he had to guide his son along like this. Membrane put the hypo down so that he could pull back a lip of blanket and a leaf of clothing from the Irken's chest to expose the bandaging beneath. "Observe! No healing!"

Dib glowered at the bandages, feeling like a young boy eternally awaiting answers, no matter how much older or wiser he became. "Yeah. So?"

"Your friend had the amazing feat of super fast cell regeneration! He could duplicate his own blood cells, his own DNA and stem cells in but hours, minutes even, if the damage was only minor!" His father went on to say, clearly awed by this highly evolved regenerative gift once given by the PAK, the very same gift that had been taken away. "Now those regenerative purposes are gone."

"And?"

His father was not baited by his son's anger. With care he eased the edge of clothing and blanket back into place. "Damage done, is damage done, I'm afraid. The strain of his failing kinetic systems triggered multiple organ failure. Zim has sustained irreversible damage, which will only get worse if he's not treated appropriately."

Overhead, on the ECG, low vitals began to pick up. The professor watched the figures rise, and felt his heart lift in sync.

His son noticed too. He looked round at the pinging lines; grimly squeezing on Zim's little hand.

The penny dropped, and that smouldering rage in his eyes began to pale. His father could almost see him putting the dots together. "Are you..." He paused to swallow. "Are you telling me that... that..." He tried to say it, but the words wouldn't leave his lips. He started shaking his head, the fire in his eyes burning anew. "No. No! His regenerative healing will kick in! Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but it will!"

"Oh son. Wishful thinking does not get anything done." He sat down opposite him in the easy chair Clara frequently used. He went to touch his son's hand: the one clenching at the bed sheets. "Zim... well, he has..."

Dib cut him off. "You think you know everything, don't you? You've done the math, as if he's just another calculation! As if it's already set in stone! Well, guess what dad, science can't prove everything! It can't detect the existence of ghosts, but I know they're there!"

"Son..." This time his voice was gentler. "The last test will be an MRI on his heart. That'll determine..."

Dib shoved away his touch.

"Not all is lost." He said in a brisk attempt to ameliorate his son's despair. He put an arm around him only to feel the boy trembling. "We can manage it. See?" Again he nodded at the sleeping Irken. His quickened breaths were starting to slow and deepen. The pinging waves on the ECG screen were keeping to a steadier consistency that the professor had struggled to achieve after resuscitating the Elite.

He gave him a moment. Dib seemed to hang in the nether, his pupils blank dots in the whites of his eyes.

He did not like seeing his son so withdrawn. Talking about things helped offer solutions, a work-around, but silence was something he did not know how to work with. "I...I wish it didn't have to be this way." He added, gathering the strength to admit the rest. He hugged his son gently, but the young man was as inert as a statue in the middle of a snowy field. "Managing it the right way can help reduce his symptoms and slow the progression."

Dib sat, quiet and blank as if he'd been shot: mute in the space of moments. Eyes wide and staring. The only movement was his constant deep trembling.

"I'm... I'm sorry, son." He rubbed him on the back, trying to spur some warmth into him, and some life. If he had to repeat himself to help break this spell, he would do just that. "We can manage it! Science is the answer!"

Something snapped free, some cord of restraint maybe, and Dib buried his face in his hands.

His father kept rubbing his back, hushing him gently, as he once did when he had been six years old on the night of his mother passing.

-x-

He was like a working computer himself, thinking up data, connecting sums and then taking them away, his brain its own algorithm as he persistently and tirelessly analyzed mathematical equations and theories.

Mumbling heartfelt apologies to Zim, he hefted him up in his arms from the bed (which was a rude thing to do when the bug was busy sleeping), and bundled the tiny creature in a thick fleecy blanket before carrying him in his arms, his heavy head resting on his shoulder as he took him to the next room. There was no need for those untidy telemetry leads. Special touch-motion pads decorated his chest, and its wireless signals were shown on a live-feed screen on the professor's wrist strap, but the IV drip still had to be carted along on wheels. Zim was so severely underweight and dehydrated that his body needed a constant supply of nutrients and fluids.

He'd sit at his desk, tucking the Irken snugly against him, and go back to crunching numbers on his computer. The drum of the keys was Zim's familiar lullaby.

The window blinds and curtains were drawn – but he could see the rising silhouette of the moon within a crispy scrim of ice as its halo shined through.

The PAK legs lay like old metal poles on the shelf above him. He'd managed to open a tiny panel to examine the thick and compact nest of wires and fibres inside. Every tiny synthetic fibre, built like muscle fibres, once communicated to Zim's brain as perfectly as organic neurons, allowing efficient functions that rivalled any modern machinery to date. But without his PAK, the technology was useless. He would have needed the main communication's hub; the PAK, that conducted this incredibly sophisticated aptitude between organic and inorganic matter to see how it worked. But since his wife's passing, mortality and life was just as important to him as science.

"Gir..." The tiny creature muttered in sleep. "...Oven... left... on..."

His breathing kept to a methodical rhythm, and was steadier than earlier. Even with the pillows raised high to keep him from feeling less bogged down in chest fluids, his respiration was always a fraction better in company. Warmth, protection. The Irken seemed to unconsciously respond to it.

When the days and nights were long, and there were no more calculations to sum up, his patient fast in sleep, and when there was nothing to demand his attention, his restless and busy thoughts were left to stray back to memories he'd rather not visit. Keeping busy held them at bay. Dealing with something in front of him was far more reasonable than trying to deal with something he couldn't control - like regret.

It was the drive to the lab that the professor least liked to recall. During the elapse of twenty minutes, all three of them were condemned to listen to the drowning struggles and chokes. He had been able to do nothing but drive. He was happiest when he was in control, when he was acting upon a problem, but when he was fixed to the wheel, knowing there was nothing he could do, the powerlessness was an agony he had known before. When he had sat with his wife, he had to endure the slow agony as she died.

He hadn't wanted his children to endure it, young as they were, and he had closed them from it, protecting their hearts against the agonies he had endured.

-x-

His PAK's regenerative powers will kick in. It just takes time.

He needs another Irken to flick a switch on it or something. To restart it.

...Karthia.

Zim said something about Karthia.

What rotten luck that it had to be millions or billions of light years away most likely, if it did exist and Zim wasn't spinning another yarn. Kinda useless info though, when you had a ship that couldn't fly.

Professor Membrane's words came back from the grey storm like a locomotive pounding through him; 'Wishful thinking does not get anything done.'

He had the damn lollypop stick somewhere in his house, the one with the scratchy Irken runes. So many times he had almost thrown it away.

Cybernetic rust, huh? Is that all it took it bring you down, Zim?

The old Irken turned in sleep, looking less comfortable. The new drug was improving his heart rate, but it seemed to create these strange side-effects as his body reacted to the treatment. Some symptoms were latent, others not so much. He hadn't been taking this rinauh-drug-things either, and Dib supposed that was also playing a part.

He reached up and flicked the light switch. The room was never very dark, thanks to the cheery little blue nightlight the professor had set up for Zim, but it felt good to have honeyed yellow light beat back any shadows.

The Irken was rocking slightly on his left side, soft clothes sticking to grey, clammy skin.

Dib gently placed his bandaged hand against the Irken's wet forehead, and felt the spiking heat. Perhaps what the professor was medicating him with was a little like rinauh – or the new mix reminded his body of that nasty and powerful anodyne.

Loose, broken mumblings tumbled out of Zim's throat as he gently rocked himself against the tussled heap of blankets.

He always wished he could do something more for him.

It was a relief that Clara was not around to see him like this.

He could hear the burbling of the PAK's intravenous as it cycled round. It poked from a lip of blanket: the azure liquids sluicing round like slightly viscous water. He tried to have an educated guess at what the strange blue liquids could be, and how it worked with Zim. The fluids used to pass through their own tubular network, servicing every area in the PAK's cybernetic system like blood circulating through the body. He would occasionally reach over and touch it's smooth curving to find that was it warm. Strange, how the alien's too-frigid temperature had risen as soon as this bypass had been successfully installed. This guy was too much like a computer.

His father had put forward the opinion that it might be a kind of coolant, and then later, as if worried he'd assumed wrong, claimed it as adaptive electrical conductivity that served the PAK as a liquid. It was sustained by the same kinetic-cardiac system: each pulse powering this secondary circulation that was more mechanical in nature. Dib found it fascinating as much as distressing, for he saw it as a frail system now, one part always affecting the other that was no longer a perfect recycler of infinite energy.

Zim bunched up beneath the blankets. These episodes usually lasted ten or so minutes and were horrendous to watch, but pass they usually did.

"Not much longer now. I'm here."

These feverish bouts were doing his recovery no favours. And his father was increasing the daily dosage.

"D-Dib..." His eyelids opened, gossamer depths revealing many agonies.

"Hey, easy..."

"N-No..." He struggled more of less upright by way of supporting his top half with wobbly elbows. The blankets slipped down his PAK and slender shoulders. "The... the mission..."

"Don't worry about that now..." He went to touch him, solicit some calm, but the Irken cowed beneath the contact.

"Listen! To be enfolded back - to reclaim my rank - I had to come here." He dipped back into the pillow, antenna dangling, as soft as felt. "The Tallest would realize... would see..."

"Zim, please, it's okay."

"No... no..." His eyelids snapped closed, his right hand clawing unceremoniously into the mattress beneath.

The shivers weakened, and he simultaneously softened as he slumped down to rest, his shallow breathing taking awhile longer to quieten and space out.

Often Zim would fall asleep without warning, like a computer unexpectedly shutting down. It wouldn't matter what he was in the middle of - eating - talking - demanding - and he'd slump forwards or backwards depending on where his head would take him - and just like that he'd zonk out.

What were you trying to tell me? Dib pulled the blankets back over him.

Dib07: Next up: The Protector