SAGR

Summary: An Invader Zim one-shot, part of a series of unusual pairings. After being browbeaten by Zim, Skoodge gets comfort from an unusual source.

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"You idiot!"

"Euh..."

Skoodge whimpered, trying to flatten his body even more against the bathroom wall, but there was just no way to make his wide berth any smaller. He watched as Zim, still snarling, continued to wipe the dry, abrasive brown paper cleaning-cloths against his skin, removing what remained of the burning human victuals.

"I'm sorry, Zim," Skoodge stammered, eyes falling down to the floor. "But you told me to push the big-headed human!"

"But not onto me!"

Skoodge winced. "Well, you weren't very specific!"

Zim let out a growl and gave Skoodge a short, painful slap with the back of one gloved hand, curled into a fist with the human paper towel. Skoodge winced back again. It wasn't so much the pain, really, as the force of Zim's anger.

Zim threw the balled-up piece of paper towel onto the disgusting, germy hyuman Earth-floor, along with about a dozen others he had used to wipe the Dib-child's lunch from his AMAZING! skin. His face was completely clean now, except for one or two spots that Skoodge did not dare point out. "I'm going to class!" Zim snarled, the Dib's laughing face already visible in his mind. "You clean up this mess, unless you cannot even handle that simple task!"

"Euh. Y-yes, Zim."

Zim glared and then stormed out of the room. Skoodge got down on his hands and knees and began to pick up the pieces of paper towel. Eugh. This human waste facility was filthy, Skoodge thought. With each crawling step he had to tear his pants from the tiled floor, sticky with he didn't want to know what. Oh well. As long as there weren't any--

"RAT!" Skoodge screamed, jumping back onto his feet.

The huge creature snarled at Skoodge as the alien lifted away its towely hiding place, beady little eyes glaring red. It leapt up and bit Skoodge in the leg.

"Aaaggghhh!"

The rat let go and scurried away. Skoodge whimpered and examined his injury. Green blood flowed from the wound. Well, at least Earth-rats weren't venomous like the Blorchians, he thought, shuddering a bit.

Skoodge took one of the pieces of paper towel he had gathered and pressed it to his leg. The foodstuffs on it burned slightly. He sniffled. "Stupid Zim," he muttered in a tiny act of rebellion.

"You really shouldn't let him push you around, you know."

"Agh!"

Skoodge jumped again and spun around. Something potentially scarier than Zim and a swarm of Earth-rats was standing in the bathroom doorway, arms crossed.

"G-G-Gaz-human?"

She rolled her eyes at the appellation; yet another stupid habit he had learned from Zim. Skoodge took a cautious step back. The Gaz-human was a girl in his class, in the grade one year younger than Zim pretended to be. (He had insisted that Skoodge was too short to reasonably pass as a sixth-grader like him. Which always confused Skoodge, since it was actually he who was a tinny bit taller.) She was, among other things, the Dib-human's sister, secretly the smartest girl in the skool, and, Skoodge knew, very dangerous. She was prone to great violence at the smallest annoyance.

Now, though, Gaz's main annoyance was at Skoodge's complete wimpiness.

"Why do you put up with him?" she asked, one squinting eye widening, its light brown iris appearing after a long, sightless absence.

Skoodge blinked. "Who?"

"Zim. I mean, what are doing, picking up his trash?"

Skoodge stared at her. "Well, uh--" He closed his mouth. Why did he put up with Zim? How was he supposed to answer a question like that?

Gaz walked into the room. "Uh, isn't this room only for human males?" Skoodge asked, raising a finger.

"Yeah. So why are you here?"

Another question Skoodge had some difficulty answering.

Gaz took his silence as her opportunity to continue. "Every time I see you and Zim, he's always ordering you around and treating you like crap. Why is that? You're obviously smarter than him."

"No I'm not," Skoodge said, now utterly confused. He wasn't smarter than Zim. He knew it for a fact. After all, Zim had said so.

"Don't be stupid!" Gaz snapped, and Skoodge winced again at the sudden anger in her voice. "Of course you're smarter. He's been here almost a year longer than you, and he never thought to put on a disguise like that."

She motioned to the mirror. Skoodge turned without thinking and, as always, felt a mild jolt of shock by the human boy looking back at him, with very lightly tanned white skin and messy orange hair. It was very different than the first disguise he had used on this planet, which, like Zim's, had been nothing more than a bad wig and a pair of cybernetic contacts. Actually, it had been the Gaz who had first alerted him to the faultiness of that visage; Zim had insisted that it was perfectly fine and had not bothered to change his own when Skoodge upgraded his.

"And you're taller than Zim, too," Gaz commented, turning back to face him. Skoodge's face instantly turned to look her in the eyes. "That's how you base things on your planet, right? Height? Well, you're taller than Zim, so why's he the one ordering you around?"

"Well..."

Skoodge opened his mouth to answer, but hesitated. He thought about saying that Zim had outranked him, but actually Skoodge realized (with a bit of surprise) that that wasn't true, they were both Invaders of equal rank (despite whatever rumors he had heard to the contrary). He thought of mentioning the fact that he lived in Zim's base, on Zim's charity, and that Zim had been kind enough to let him as he had nowhere else to go. (The Control Brains were being remarkably slow about rescinding his death notice...bureaucracy.) He thought of just saying that he always listened to Zim, who else was he going to listen to with no other Irkens around? But he remained silent, which, he suspected, was what the Gaz-human wanted.

"If anything, you should be the one in charge. You should be the one telling Zim what to do."

"I can't do that!"

"Agh!"

He winced as he felt the spot where her fist had him; she, meanwhile, simply began speaking again as if nothing had happened.

"Next time Zim tells you to pick up his trash, you should tell him to pick it up himself. You should tell him that you're not his slave, and none of his actual slaves does as much work as you do anyway."

"But I--"

"You need to stand up for yourself."

"I do?"

"You need to tell him you're better than he is."

"I am?"

"You need to tell him you're not going to take this from him anymore."

"I'm not? Yeah!" Skoodge straightened, drawing himself up to his full (and rather meager) height. "Yeah! You're right! I shouldn't let him push me around! I need to have more self-confidence! I'm not his SIR unit! I am Skoodge, Conquering Invader of Blorch!" He smiled at her, suddenly feeling shy. "Thanks."

"You're welcome." And suddenly she whipped around, and Skoodge felt her backpack collide with his chest. He caught it awkwardly in his arms. "Now. Carry my things back to class."

He saluted with a grin. "Yes, sir!"

Gaz spun on her heel and marched out of the bathroom. Out of the corner of her eye she watched as Skoodge waddled behind her, grinning broadly. She allow the tinniest of tinny smiles to cross her face before turning to lead him back to Mr. Elliott's room.