I was wasting time
Oh so sure to find somebody who would never go
How could I know
All I found was you
None could be so true
The only one love divine
My heart, my mind are yours
Everywhere I go I see your face through the crowd
Everywhere I go I hear your voice clear and loud
Everywhere I go you are the light that I see
Everywhere I go you've found me
Where could my heart go
Where you wouldn't be
Where you wouldn't go to find me?
Far, far from here
Still you are near
Still you are near to me
And I see
Everywhere I go I see your face through the crowd
Everywhere I go I hear your voice clear and loud
Everywhere I go you are the light that I see
Everywhere I go you've found me
I have seen you in the morning
In the evening light you hold me
Closer than the air around me
You surround me always
(Everywhere I Go – Five Iron Frenzy)

/This can’t be happening./ Dib stared at Zim, who looked back unblinking. /He can’t be doing this. It can’t be so easy./ He could tell Zim to shoot himself and the Irken would do it, no questions asked. Granted, there was only one bullet in the chamber, but he would stand and squeeze the trigger until he got to it. Zim had always been that way—so determined to reach his goals that he would let nothing deter him.

The knowledge that his enemy’s doom was so close somehow didn’t sit well with Dib. It was too simple. After chasing Zim, trying to stop him for eleven years, to have it come down to a game of chance... That wasn’t how he’d wanted things to end.

/How did I want this to end?/ He couldn’t say. He’d never thought beyond the glory of capturing and exposing the alien. What happened after that, he’d always assumed was in the hands of some higher power.

Zim’s expression unnerved him, and he found he couldn’t meet the Irken’s eyes. /Such resolution. How can we have grown so differently, when we started out so alike?/ Dib could feel his hands begin to shake, and balled them into fists, squeezing his eyes closed as though the gun was at his head and not Zim’s. /How could he love me after what I’ve done to him?/

The sound of the gun being cocked broke his train of thought, and his eyes snapped open. The alien’s face was closed, his eyes shuttered. He nodded once in acceptance, taking the silence as a rejection, and began to pull the trigger.

“Wait.” The word came out strangled by the lump in Dib’s throat. He tried again, and only managed to be a bit louder. “Wait, Zim.”

Zim cocked his head a little, relaxing his grip on the trigger; Dib felt a corresponding tension go out of his own body. “You...don’t want me to?”

Dib didn’t answer.

“Why did you stop me, Dib?” Eyes the color of human blood narrowed.

“You can’t do this.”

Zim looked confused. “Of course I can. All I have to do is pull this little thingy and—”

Dib shook his head, a little wildly. “That’s not what I meant. You can’t do this to me, Zim. You can’t put this off on me.”

The alien was silent for a long moment, a strange, creeping look of hurt spreading over his face. Dib could hear the air humming—the silence was too thick, and too long. Almost impenetrable. He couldn’t stand such silence. He had to say something, even if it wasn’t the right thing.

“You can’t make me decide for you, Zim. It can’t be me.” His voice rose steadily, both in volume and pitch, as he spoke. “I’ll make the wrong choice, and I’ll regret it later. You said you love me, and you trust me enough to put your life into my hands. But what if I say the wrong thing? What if I tell you not to do it and you turn on me? I can’t trust you...I never could.”

Zim looked stricken. “You...” He didn’t finish, trailing off with his eyes on the floor.

“I’m sorry.”

Something in the alien’s eyes hardened with a suddenness that frightened Dib and he looked back up. The alien’s gaze caught Dib, and the human found himself trapped in it, drowning in blood.

His eyes narrowed, breaking their hold on Dib, and the Irken made a small choking sound in his throat. It sounded almost like a sob, but Dib couldn’t believe it was such a thing—the anger in his eyes chased away any suspicion the human might have had that he was despairing. His voice was that of steel on steel when he spoke.

“So am I.”

The gun, which had steadily sunk to Zim’s side jerked back up to his temple. In the instant it took it to do so, Dib’s mind was filled with the image of Zim’s body, crumpled on the floor, blood and brain tissue spattered across the computer console behind him. The human’s hand jerked out toward the gun; however this was going to end, it wouldn’t be like that.

Zim’s eyes widened in surprise, and his arm swung toward the attacking hand and its owner, reacting through protective instinct. His instincts, however, could not stop him from pulling the trigger. Just as his arm finished arcing toward Dib, the gun went off.

Dib had never heard a noise so loud. It ricocheted in his skull, knocking everything else in there about, and he didn’t know he was on the floor until Zim was kneeling beside him. He was making that strangled, choking noise in his throat again. The human frowned. /It could be his way of crying, since his body isn’t equipped to manufacture tears./ Somehow, that thought didn’t seem very coherent; there was a dull buzzing in the back of his head that was distracting him.

The minute Zim touched him, the buzz blossomed explosively into full-blown agony, and he yelped.

“I’m sorry,” Zim whispered, his voice trembling.

“Wha’ hap’ned?” Dib slurred. His tongue seemed thick in his mouth, unwieldy and foreign.

“You’re going to be okay, Dib.” Gloved hands touched him gingerly. “You’re going to be okay. It’s just a gunshot wound—nothing I can’t fix.” But his voice belied that fact that he knew he couldn’t do anything of any use in time.

“You shot me?”

Zim stared at him for a moment, then leaned over and hugged him fiercely despite his wound. “I’m sorry.”

Dib whimpered, and Zim was forced to loosen his grasp. /I don’t want to let go. I won’t ever let him go./ His mind screamed, agonized wails of sorrow that he was sure Dib could hear. But the human wasn’t moving. Frantic, his eyes traveled up to the human’s, and met slivers of amber.

“I—shouldn’t have said those things,” Dib said. His voice was soft, and it wavered as he spoke. “I never meant for any of this to happen. I—I don’t think I ever really hated you.”

Zim blinked rapidly.

“In fact...” He took a long, shuddering breath. “In fact, I think I kind of like you, Zim. We...we could have been friends.”

Another shuddering breath went out of him, and this time he didn’t draw in another.

“Dib?”

When he received no answer, he hugged the body close to him. Already it was growing cold. He heard himself speaking to the corpse from somewhere beyond himself.

“I’ve waited for you for so long, always watching, always seeing you everywhere I looked.” His voice was oddly steady. “Everywhere. There was no where you didn’t follow me. No way I could run far enough. And I always looked for you, everywhere you chased me to. Even when I was honestly trying to stay away. And you know what, Dib?”

He forced himself to loosen his grip long enough to fish in the human’s pockets for the other bullets, and to slide the gun across the floor from the spot where he’d dropped it. His hands didn’t shake as he loaded it. He lifted the gun to his temple one more time, looping his other arm around the corpse’s waist. He looked down into the still open amber eyes, clouded in pain and death—

“All I found was you.”

—and pulled the trigger.