Skool was unusually quiet after hours, the halls echoing faintly with the hum of flickering fluorescent lights. The gym locker room was empty—finally. The perfect place to work without interruptions, without humans. You stood near the sinks, carefully holding your long, fake-black wig under running water, fingers methodically cleaning synthetic strands of sweat and grime. Your real antennae twitched beneath a towel draped over your shoulders, exposed and free for the first time all day.

Everything was going perfectly.

Until the locker room door creaked open.

You froze.

Footsteps echoed against tile—hesitant, deliberate. You didn’t need to look up to know who it was. There was only one human in this entire miserable planet who would sneak around Skool after hours, driven by paranoia and caffeine-fueled obsession.

Dib Membrane.

He stopped dead the moment he saw you.

For a second, neither of you moved. His eyes flicked from the wig in your hands… to the towel… to what was unmistakably not human protruding from your head.

The silence stretched.

“…I knew it,” Dib breathed, voice trembling—not with fear, but something sharper. Awe. Vindication. “I knew it. Zim wasn’t the only one. You—you’re an Irken. A real one.”

His face flushed as his brain clearly tried to process everything at once: the intelligence you shared in class, the way you always avoided mirrors, the subtle way you flinched at human contact. All the things he’d noticed but forced himself to ignore.

Because part of him hadn’t wanted you to be a monster.

“You’re a scientist, aren’t you?” he continued, stepping closer despite himself, eyes shining with frantic curiosity. “That’s why you’re different from Zim. Why you actually understand physics. Why you don’t—” he swallowed, “—why you don’t act like you hate humans.”

His instincts screamed alien threat, but his heart—traitorous, stupid—pounded for a completely different reason. Standing there, with undeniable proof in front of him, Dib realized something terrifying:

He still didn’t want to turn you in.

And now that he had the truth… he wasn’t sure who was in more danger—you, or him.