A/N: This is my headcanon. This is Shego's story, from the comet strike to post-canon. I wrote this whole monstrosity in three days, so please help me with the typos and whatnot. And in general, please comment. I like comments.
Each chapter will open with notes with specific trigger warnings. The overall rating of the fic is Teen. Most chapters could be called Gen, however. This first chapter starts with a prologue in italics. When the italics are gone, chapter 1 has begun. Warnings for this chapter are: children in danger and fire.
This is also posted on AO3. I decided to put it here because I think more of the fandom hangs out here. I've noticed that it's harder to format fics here than it used to be... And since only allowed four characters to be tagged, this also includes Gemini, Mego, Wego, and some OCs.
A little bit of necessary background about my headcanon... This takes place approximately four months after the episode 'Graduation.' Drakken and Shego, still desiring to do evil of course, have decided to lay low and pretend to be good since world governments are now only too happy to throw money at them for all of Drakken's evil inventions. A team of doctors and botanists have developed an experimental cure for his plant mutation which he has been using for about two months, but it has only been marginally successful. Meanwhile, the pair of them are creating all manner of secret evil plans to launch at the right time.
And that should bring you up to speed for the beginning of this fic. The reader POV changes back and forth between Drakken and Shego, but it's Shego for almost the entire fic. Strap in and enjoy the ride!
Prologue
"Good riddance, Electro-foe!" Hego said, then turned with a grin. "Thanks for your help, Miss Possible. Sis'!" he wrapped Shego in a warm embrace. "It's good to see you on the side of justice, and all things right and good again!"
"What he said," Mego added, setting his arm around her.
"Ditto!" the Wegos exclaimed and gave her a squeeze.
The five siblings shared a smile and moment from a time long past, and then the four boys waved and went their way. Shego turned to see her former teen foe watching her with an affectionate grin.
"Hego's right," Kim said, "It
was good to be on the same side."
Shego set her hand on Kim's shoulder. "Yeah, Kimmie, I couldn't tell you this when I was evil, but...I actually think you're pretty awesome."
Kim's brow rose. "You do?"
"Yeah. In fact you remind me of me. Or what I could have been, if I had grown up with what you have. Sometimes I'm really, really jealous."
"Oh..."
"Don't ever change, 'kay? One of us deserves to get it right."
Chapter 1: You are lost out in the desert
Shego grimaced as Drakken pulled off his shirt.
"Turn around," she said impatiently, and he quickly complied. "Just because I agreed to this doesn't mean I want to look at you."
Her comment had the desired effect, she saw, as he sat on the small stool and hunched forward in insecurity.
She squeezed the prescribed tube until a generous amount of medicated cream was on her fingertips, and then approached him.
"Move your stupid ponytail," she said.
He swept the offending hair aside, revealing the breaks in his skin where the mutant vines would emerge.
"Eugh," she scowled in disgust, but noted that it was definitely better than the last time she had done this. "You've been taking the pills?"
"Every day," he said shyly, glancing over his shoulder slightly. "How does it look?"
"Disgusting," she didn't hold back, biting her cheek to hold down nausea as she applied the cream. She knew that mutant super powers shouldn't bother her, but his vines were nothing like her glow. "All right, move your hair."
He reached back and started feeling around at the nape of his neck until he found the other exit point—where the flower petals had burst from—and held his hair aside.
"This one's better..." she said absentmindedly as she added more cream to that spot, frowning. When she finished she took his hair and re-tied it for him. Goodness knows whenever he tried he spread the cream through it and it became an oily, tangled mess.
She stepped back when she was done and wiped her fingers on a towel. "There, it's done. Now put your shirt back on."
He hurriedly complied and then turned to face her, a shy smile on his face.
"Thank you," he said.
She rolled her eyes. "I'm as sick of those stupid plants as you are," she said, leaving his room. She wasn't surprised to hear him follow.
"I'm...sorry for all the trouble they've caused you," he said.
She raised a skeptical eyebrow at him before plopping onto the sofa and picking up her nail file.
"Well, we'd be slaves on an alien planet without them..." she said with a half-shrug. "If you'd had better control over them, they could have been useful."
Drakken stepped toward her, fidgeting. She tensed slightly, knowing this was a sign that he was about to say something she wouldn't like.
"How, um...how did you get used to your powers?"
She sighed loudly to express her annoyance and crossed her legs, starting on her nails.
"I mean, um...you didn't just...know how to use them immediately, did you?" he pressed.
She glared at him. But something about the look in his eyes gave her pause. He wasn't trying to pry into her life. He seemed to genuinely need and want...support.
He looked down in disappointment, continuing to fidget. She rolled her eyes again and reached over next to her on the sofa and patted the empty space.
"All right, sit down Swamp Thing. I'll tell you all about it."
He frowned at her, hurt, but the look changed to curiosity as he sat and moved closer to her than she would have liked.
"You were hit by a comet, weren't you? How did you survive that? Why isn't it in public record?"
She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
"N-not that I've looked, or anything," he said with an innocent grin.
She ignored him and leaned back, focusing on her nails. "Shut up before I change my mind."
"Shutting up," he said, scooting closer to her with a look of anticipation.
Shego sighed. "Okay. So, it was...eighteen years ago..."
"Brendan, stop it!"
A husky, energetic boy of thirteen had just leapt from a rickety bench over the head of his sister and twin baby brothers to the floor near the window of their tree house, slashing back and forth with his toy sword all the while.
"Yeah, cut it out!" said the fifth sibling, a lanky boy of eleven reclining on the bench and playing with action figures on his chest.
"Mom isn't going to let us bring them up here again if you don't stop!" the girl continued, her arms hugging the two one-year-olds who were trying to toddle away.
"Come on Sis'," the oldest boy protested with a wide grin, "If they're going to be part of our superhero team we have to train them to be fearless!"
"Hey, not everyone wants to play your stupid hero game," the lanky boy replied, rolling off the bench and scooting over to his sister and the twins.
"Brody..." whined the oldest sibling, his playful mood crumpling, "you have to play! Otherwise we don't have a science expert!"
"Maybe I'd rather be a villain. I'll play the mad scientist, instead," the eleven-year-old said, grabbing one of the twins from his sister. "Hey...you know, we could experiment on Dylan and Alex, like in that episode of the Fearless Ferret! You know where those twins were separated at birth and one of them grows up into a hero and the other into a villain and then they end up fighting each other?"
Brody pulled the pacifier out of the mouth of the twin he had grabbed, and the tiny boy immediately burst into tears.
"Brody!" his sister shrieked, grabbing the pacifier and the baby back from him.
The lanky boy turned away sulkily and crossed his arms. "Just want someone else on my villain team..."
"You're not villains, we're all heroes!" the oldest boy said, leaping again and this time landing right next to his siblings and pointing his toy sword toward the babies.
"Brendan, if you don't stop it right now I'm telling."
"Sis', we have to make them brave," he said, his grin having returned.
"They're too young for your game," she said angrily. "Can you just grow up? We have to watch them up here! They could choke on a toy, you know."
"Heh," Brody said, laying on his stomach and smirking up at her. "Big sis' hits puberty and suddenly she's turned into Mom."
The girl gasped, her face reddening. She drew one of the babies into her lap and clutched him to her, finally allowing the other to toddle away from her.
Brendan, to his credit, plopped down on the trapdoor entrance to the tree-house in case the baby started wandering that way.
"Did your classmates start acting like this once they got to middle school?" Brody asked his older brother.
"Uh..." it was Brendan's face that reddened then. "Well, some of them, I guess."
"Ooooh, big bro' has a crush on someone!" Brody continued and started cackling.
"Hm," their sister smirked, looking over at her oldest brother whose face had turned even more red. Served him right. "Well, who is it?"
"Um...um..." Brendan sputtered, rubbing the back of his neck. "Well, it's...Donna."
Brody laughed even harder, and the wandering twin toddled over to him and tackled him as much as a baby can, joining in on his brother's apparent joy.
"But...she's in my grade!" their sister protested.
"Well, uh..." Brendan said, looking down at his toy sword in humiliation.
Brody snickered. "Come on, Sis', it's obvious."
The twelve-year-old girl looked between her two brothers, the oldest looking less and less like the hero he was always pretending to be and the younger more and more like the villain he always whined that he wanted to play.
"What does Donna have that the girls in his grade don't?"
"Um..."
He scooted closer to her, beginning to giggle. "She...she has..."
"What?" his sister asked, frowning now as Brody started to laugh uncontrollably and Brendan began to look very nervous.
"She has...she, she has...big boobs! Ah hahaha!"
Brody was now kicking the floor in his fit of laughter. The two babies joined in gleefully, not understanding a word, only the apparent emotion.
Brendan looked over guiltily at his sister, who looked down at her own flat chest as her cheeks reddened again.
"I'm telling!" Brendan growled, his ever-present smile vanishing. He began to open the trapdoor when Brody suddenly stopped laughing and sat up.
"Hey, what's that?" he asked, pointing out the window.
The three oldest siblings crowded into the tiny hole in the wall of the tree-house to peer up into the sky. They had to shield their eyes from the brightness of the sun, which had a strange multi-colored hue today and seemed to be getting larger.
The babies toddled over to join their siblings, bumping into their legs.
"What's what?" Brendan asked.
"That thing that looks like the sun!" Brody said.
"It's not the sun?" Brendan said, squinting.
"No...it's not," their sister said in alarm, reaching down to scoop up the babies. "It's a meteor!"
"Meteors are what they're called when they're in space," Brody corrected. "So it would be a meteorite."
"Help me!" she said in a panic, trying to open the trapdoor with her foot, arms full of babies.
"Come on Sis', it's not going to hit us," Brendan said, still squinting at it.
"Uh..." Brody said nervously, starting to back away from the window.
Brendan's eyes widened and he met the terrified gaze of his sister. He leapt for the trapdoor and took one of the babies from her as Brody tried to push past them.
"Me first!" he said.
They were the last words spoken before the siblings' lives were forever changed.
The memories of the actual comet strike none of them could recall, but they all remembered waking up among flaming timbers and hours having apparently passed given the sun setting on the horizon.
"Ugh... What...what...?" were the first words to leave the twelve-year-old girl's lips when she woke up, her head throbbing and every inch of her body tingling with...something.
She gasped as she sat up suddenly and looked around at a foreign landscape. Around her were broken and blackened timbers, some smoldering and others not. The tree that had held the cherished place of imagination for she and her brothers had fallen, its roots ripping up the earth beneath it. And beyond the wreckage was more destroyed earth where the...meteorite? must have continued its journey.
She gasped in fear as she saw her home on fire, and the neighbor's home, and their trees all aflame with smoke rising high and blackening the sky. And then she saw the water from the fire hoses falling on the flames, slowly putting a halt to the devastation.
"Brendan!" she shrieked, standing up and brushing soot from her pale arms. It didn't occur to her in that moment that she had no burns. "Mom! Dad!" she cried, running toward the house. And then she stopped, eyes going wide with fright.
"Dylan! Alex!" she screamed, turning back to the destruction.
"We've got them!" the steady voice of her eldest brother spoke from somewhere behind her.
She turned toward the sound, and through the wafts of smoke she saw the familiar husky figure holding one of the babies in his arms, and her lankier but just-as-tall brother holding the other. They were standing against the back wall of the house near the corner, where there were no flames. She ran toward them.
"What about Mom and—" she stopped suddenly, eyes going wide again as she took in the appearance of her brothers. They were all covered in soot, as she imagined she was, but...beneath the soot was something else.
The color of their hair had changed. Brendan's was blue, Brody's was purple, and the twins' wispy locks were red.
"What's wrong with your hair?" she asked.
"We don't know," Brendan said worriedly.
"And...Brody, your skin!" she cried, noticing despite the soot that it was distinctly purple.
"What about yours?" he countered, crossing his arms and looking uncharacteristically afraid.
She looked down at her hands and saw that beneath the soot, her skin had changed to a ghoulishly pale green. She gasped in shock and then pulled some of her thick curls over her shoulder. Her hair was still black at least, but she could see a hint of green when the fire shone on it just so.
"What happened to us?" she said.
"I...guess it was that meteorite," Brody said, and handed her the twin he was holding who had started to cry.
She coughed as the smoke grew thicker around them.
"We have to get out of here!" she cried.
"I know, but—" Brendan began, but was cut off as a loud crack like an explosion sounded from somewhere very near them. They looked around and gasped in unison as they saw a tall pine in their neighbor's yard engulfed in flames, falling rapidly toward them.
With smoke and fire all around, there was nowhere to run. The children cowered next to the wall of their burning house in fear.
"No!" Brendan cried desperately, throwing his hands up as he tried to cover his younger siblings.
The heat and weight of the falling inferno was suddenly all around them. But...the tree hadn't crushed them?
They all opened their eyes and gaped as Brendan's hands, enveloped by a strange blue glow, held the tree safely above them. And his hands didn't burn.
"Wh-...what?" he said, not believing his eyes.
"Get rid of it!" his sister cried, "before we all catch fire!"
Brendan took a breath and heaved upward. The tree flew off of them as if it were light as a toothpick and fell in the opposite direction of which it had fallen. Unfortunately, that was across a fence and into another neighbor's yard. The blue-haired teen stepped back in amazement.
"What...what's wrong with me?" he said, looking at his glowing hands.
"You have superpowers!" Brody exclaimed with a giddy, greedy look in his eyes. "What can I do?" he wondered aloud and stepped away from the house, his fear gone.
Brendan stepped back to his sister's side and picked up the other crying twin again, watching as his more reckless brother rushed toward one of the burning timbers with hands outstretched.
"Ow!" Brody cried when his hands connected with the flames. But in response his entire body glowed purple and then like magic, he shrunk down in physical size until he vanished.
The older siblings gasped, staring at the spot where their brother had been. And then suddenly he reappeared, growing up as tall as the trees.
"I have growing powers!" he cried excitedly, his voice booming such that the others covered their ears.
The amplified sound caused the babies to cry ever louder, and then suddenly instead of two of them there were four. And then six. And then eight. The two oldest siblings gasped again as the ground by their feet was now populated by far too many crying babies, in addition to the two originals in their arms.
"Don't put them down!" Brendan cried, or we'll never be able to tell them apart.
"I won't!" his sister agreed, her eyes wide in shock.
"Hey, watch this!" Brody boomed above them. They looked up and watched as he reached down across the street and grabbed two hoses out of the hands of the firefighters, and began putting out one of the house fires at point-blank. "Pretty cool!"
"Hm..." Brendan said, grinning and handing the twin he held to his sister. "Let's see what I can do!"
She watched as her now blue-haired brother started gathering up the burning timbers and piling them all together, effectively stopping the spread of the fire. Brody turned one of the hoses onto the pile as Brendan continued running about the burning lots and putting his apparent super-strength to work.
"Hm...I wonder what I can do..." the green-skinned girl mused to herself.
At the moment, there wasn't anything she could do as long as her ankles were surrounded by crying baby copies. So freaky.
"There, there," she rubbed her youngest brothers' backs. "It will be all right. Sister's got you."
Miraculously, their cries became less frantic and one by one the copies began disappearing in a red glow until she was left with only the real twins.
"Okay," she said, setting them down. "Now...what do I do?"
She looked at her other brothers, Brody's entire body enveloped in a purple glow, and Brendan's fists surrounded by blue as he lifted heavy objects.
"Hmmm..."
She walked toward the pile of boards from the tree-house that Brendan had created and then extended her hands toward it. Nothing happened.
She crossed her arms in frustration. She must have some kind of superpower if all of her brothers did, didn't she?
Just then a loud crack from above drew her attention, and she watched as a flaming branch fell from the other tree next to her house...right toward Dylan and Alex.
"No!" she cried, reaching for them desperately and knowing she couldn't make it in time. But as she reached out her hands glowed green and a nebulous blob of the glow shot out and struck the branch, knocking it away from her baby brothers.
She stopped with a gasp. She concentrated and aimed her hands at the branch again. When the green glow emerged this time, it did more than knock the branch away—it incinerated it.
Her eyes widened. "What...? Fire powers!?"
She looked at Brody and Brendan who appeared very heroic now as they were cleaning up the mess and giving the real firefighters access to the more difficult areas.
"How am I supposed to help with fire powers..." she said, returning to the twins and picking them both up. "Maybe...if I just..."
She shifted the babies awkwardly over to one arm and aimed her free hand upward at one of the burning tree limbs that was still attached. She grinned when her hand glowed green, but then was startled as the twins suddenly cried out.
Her other hand had glowed as well.
She nearly dropped them in fear, but had the presence of mind to set them down as they cried in pain.
She had hurt them. She had hurt her baby brothers.
As they cried they glowed red, and in moments more than a dozen babies were surrounding her on the singed grass.
"Oh, no!" she said and knelt down, quickly gathering the two real ones into her lap. But then she held her hands away, afraid of touching them.
Sure, they looked okay, but she had fire powers and she had hurt them... What if her glow just...started up spontaneously as she was holding them? She had no idea how it even worked. What if it happened again?
"Brendan!" she called loudly, and her brother heard and ran toward her, the backyards now swarming with firefighters.
"Isn't this great? We're actually superheroes now!" he said, grinning widely.
"I hurt them," she interrupted.
"What?" he said, confused.
"My power is some kind of fire. I hurt them!" she said, tears filling her eyes.
Brendan knelt and carefully crawled between the crying copies until he could pick up the real twins from her lap. He examined them closely.
"They look fine," he said.
"But they cried when I touched them! I know I hurt them!" she said.
"I'm sure they're just—"
"No!" she said, and suddenly the green glow enveloped her hands again. She gasped and held her hands out to her sides, as far away as she could get them.
Just then Brody ran up to them, shrinking down to normal size with his purple glow as he did so.
"This is awesome!" he said. "It was getting dumb as a game, but being a real hero is way cool, Bro'," he said, grabbing Brendan in an uncharacteristic hug. "Whoa...cloning," he continued, staring wide-eyed at all the crying red-haired babies.
Their sister cried silently, wondering how they were able to control their new powers so easily while she had no idea. She aimed her hands at the timber pile again and thought about hitting it. As she did, both hands fired and the blast knocked several pieces of wood away.
"Hey, you're like a cannon, Sis'!" Brody said, admiring her green glow.
She tried to blink away her tears. Maybe...it would be okay. But she was no help in putting out a fire.
Just then a firefighter approached them warily. "Um..." the mustached man said, "are you kids...okay?"
"Better than okay, Mister," Brody said, facing him with his hands on his hips. "We're superheroes!"
"I can see that..." the firefighter said, though he sounded more afraid than reassured. "Where, ah...do you come from?"
All three siblings pointed at the house behind them, which was still smoldering.
"You live there?" the man said disbelievingly.
"Are our parents okay?" Brendan asked, his face sobering instantly.
"Yes, they're right out in front. They've been extremely worried about you, and—"
Forgetting her glow for a moment, the twelve-year-old girl grabbed the babies and began walking around the house in a hurry. Her other brothers followed her and soon all of the siblings were running.
"Mom! Dad!" she was the first one to cry out when she saw them standing next to an ambulance.
"Kids!" the two parents called.
A moment later the family were all hugs, tears, and smiles, marveling at the bizarre changes to the children.
If only life had just continued from there, everything could have been fine.
"So what happened?" Drakken asked, sitting cross-legged on the sofa now as Shego finished shaping her last nail.
"What do you mean?" Shego asked dully.
"I mean...you were just children. I'm sure Go Tower wasn't there waiting for you to show up."
"Well, sort-of," she said, not looking at him. She had opened the door on memories long-sealed and the pain of them was slowly creeping into her heart.
"What do you mean, 'sort-of'?" he continued.
She turned and glowered at him. "Look, it's none of your business. I just got used to my powers, okay?"
She rose and stalked away, deep into the lair.
Drakken frowned sadly. It...had been helpful, to hear that Shego hadn't immediately known how to use her powers. And hearing about her life before...knowing that she'd had a life before evil...somehow made him feel better about his choices, too.
He rose from the sofa and went looking for her. He wanted to know more.