"The L Word"
By Eoraptor
AN: Rated T for mature subjects. Kim Possible and Related Characters © 2002-2007 the Walt Disney Company. I do not own these characters and this work is not for profit and intended only for fair use and enjoyment.
Doctor Manuél Resucitación sighed, preparing to set about his grim task.
The family had said their goodbyes. Her partner had been removed from the room finally. The Press were waiting for an official briefing about her last moments. And more than one law enforcement agency was pressing for a thorough autopsy.
Before any of that could happen, however, her body had to be prepared. Normally that was a task for the mortuary or investigatory team claiming the body, but Doctor Resucitación took such matters personally. He had been responsible for the state the body was in when she was still breathing, the least he could do was clean it up before passing it along.
The first step was the photographs. Legally binding, they documented both the injuries as they appeared perimortem, and the steps taken to try to attempt to correct them. The attending physician carefully removed the last remnants of the girl's shredded purple tunic from behind her shoulders, placing it into a large clear bag. Already the bruises were darkening on her torso where she'd taken repeated blows from the exploding machinery that had ultimately claimed her life.
He snapped a few pictures of the bruises, as well as the hastily sutured skin near her collar bone where they had tried to stop the bleeding. The bleeding had finally stopped, but not before too much of her blood had drained away, it seemed. The tunic he had just placed in the evidence bag was less purple in places than it was almost as black as her capris.
He also made sure to snap pictures of the EKG and EEG electrodes scattered around her chest and forehead. Beside one of those on her forehead was a particularly nasty gash, going bone-deep. When the doctor went to remove it, he had to affix his thumb on the loose skin to keep it from tearing further, and grimaced as this forced some fresh blood from her wound.
"Sorry kid. I'm trying not to mark you up any more here, I swear," He apologized to the corpse as he finally freed the sensor relay and smoothed the skin flap back into place, trying to wipe away the fresh and wet blood. Raising his voice, he spoke to the room recording, "Note to autopsy, she's been pumped full of saline and fresh blood, she's a bit of an oozer from that."
With a morose sigh, he continued removing electrodes, lamenting just how well they stuck to her flesh despite the sweat and dirt which had coated her skin during the final moments of her life. As he disconnected the last two, he was startled by the EKG machine beeping in complaint. After a moment to compose his nerves, he cursed the machinery, "Oh shut up, it's just cross-line voltage. She's been flat for over an hour now."
And she had. Kim Possible had barely been alive when she'd been wheeled in from the helipad almost two hours before. Some doomsday ray she had been disarming had exploded with her atop it. The shrapnel had hit in just the wrong places, ripping open major blood vessels at the base of her neck and in her forehead. Even with her partner's super-human speed in getting her to an extraction point, and some decent first aide knowledge, it was just too many holes for him to try to stop up with his own two hands.
The poor boy was nearly as white as she was from his efforts and his panic, and he had no holes in him.
The team on the medivac had done the yeoman's work in trying to keep her going and to stop up what they could, but a helicopter is a tight confined space to try to find and stop all the bleeders; and by the time she had gotten to the trauma unit, she'd lost nearly half her blood volume. What was left was diluted with saline and with surrogate compounds to try and keep the pressure up.
The trauma team had managed to find most of the hemorrhages and get them stopped, but she was such a slick mess of blood and more minor slices that it had taken too long to tell what was critical from what was cosmetic. Forty-five minutes of surgery and artificial respiration attempts had finally ended the third time her heart went into arrest and failed to come back after multiple shocks.
They gave the teen another five minutes just to be sure, but she never came back, every bar on every machine flat as the table on which she lay.
Grabbing a few towels, Manuél began to sop up the excess fluids from around her torso and the table. There was so much saline and so much artificial hemoglobin in her body that she was still not coagulating nearly an hour after all revival attempts had ceased and the drips had been turned off. Hence being termed "an oozer."
The physician had to moderate his cleaning efforts, because he didn't want to disturb any "evidence" the autopsy doctor might want to collect. But by the same token, he didn't want to send her out a dripping mess either.
Yet every time he wiped the cut on her forehead, it seemed to bleed anew.
With a frown, Dr. Resucitación moved to unclip her earrings and drop them into the evidence bag next to her tunic, ignoring the oozing gash. As he did, his hand brushed one of the discarded EEG leads and caused it to bump back against the skin of her forehead, earning another beep from the still-active machine. He was about to again curse the damnedable monitor for making so much noise when he stopped.
There really shouldn't be THIS much bleeding an hour later. On a hunch, he lifted up the corpse's left arm and let it drop. There wasn't even a hint of rigor mortis yet. An hour later stiffness should definitely be starting to show.
Frowning, the doctor picked up a discarded suture needle from the tray still standing next to the trauma table. Examining her body, he moved the waist of her armored capris down just a bit, exposing bare skin over her pubis. There he found unmarked flesh, and a moment later he pushed the slightly hooked needle sharply into it.
The response was instantaneous, not only did the bare skin well up with fresh red blood around the puncture; but the corpse gasped, arching up off the table as it, no, as SHE sucked in a huge lungful of air.
"NURSE!"
~KP~
Three days later Kim lay in her hospital bed in a rare moment of solitude. Being in the hospital was bad enough under normal circumstances, with nurses in and out all hours of the day and night… but when one came back from the dead, it was apparently ten times worse.
Ron was standing guard in the hall still, convinced that someone would make an attempt on her miraculously restored life.
Well he was supposed to be standing guard. The redhead could hear him faintly snoring through her closed door. Not that she begrudged him the sleep. She wished he would just go home to do it.
He looked worse than she did as far as she was concerned.
He said she didn't look bad at all, of course; but that was what boyfriends were for. No matter how many times he told her that she looked great, like an angel risen in fact; she could easily follow his eyes to the five stitches in her forehead and the two on her chin.
They itched like crazy. The Doctors all said that that was a good thing, meaning that no nerves had been severed. Frankly, she'd almost rather the paralysis than the maddening itches that she couldn't touch for fear of reopening the delicate skin.
Sighing, she again picked up the hospital-issue hand mirror and examined her reflection, "Well, those aren't going away any time soon…"
"Eh, it adds Character."
Kim's eyes shot up from the mirror, seeking out the voice that had startled her in her quiet contemplation.
Shego stood before the foot of her bed, clad in her best black and green catsuit. The fact that she could still hear Ron snoring in the hall meant that the woman had not come in through the door.
Narrowing her eyes, she took in the villainess's stance. Her arms were crossed impatiently or imperiously over her chest, and her foot tapped slowly as she looked on the redhead in bed before her.
Seeing that she showed no intention of attacking; rolling her eyes, the heroine smirked, "What, no flowers?"
"I'm not bringing anything into this room that could die, it's bad karma." The villain snorted derisively, looking at the acers of flowery salutes already filling the room. "Seriously, how do they even move around in here?"
"This is nothing. I skyped with the tweebs this morning, you should see my parents' house."
"I did," She chuckled a bit, uncrossing her arms, "It's a regular floral singularity. So, I know you've probably been asked this six-hundred-and-seventy-two times today alone, but, how you feeling?"
"Like I wish people would stop asking me that." The redhead huffed.
"I bet… but you look like-,"
"If you say death warmed over, I'm getting out of this bed and kicking your ass." Kim glared tiredly at the villainess.
"Oh come on Princess," Shego held up her hands, feigning innocence, "You know I've got better material than that!"
"I also know how lazy you are," the heroine shook her head. Grunting softly, she lifted herself up in bed, straightening her position a little. "Now, why are you here?"
"Couple of things… One, wanted to check your security detail. Frankly, I'm impressed. Took me twenty minutes to find a way in, and I can hear your guard monkey on the other side of the door. I bet if anyone came in here with foul intentions they wouldn't make it two steps."
Kim smiled. It was true. Ron might be asleep, but the moment anyone even looked at her door, he would wake up, just like she'd been told he'd done for the last three days. That Shego knew that made her feel a bit better, even if the woman was a wanted felon on six out of seven continents.
"…and?" she prodded after a moment.
"and what?" the villainess shrugged.
"You said ~a couple of things~. That's just one."
"Ah, brain function still intact, that's good," Shego snidely remarked as she moved around to the side of the bed. "Also, no need to worry about Dementor trying again."
"Oh?" the redhead tilted her head a bit, "Did the blast get him too? Ron never mentioned…"
"No" Shego stated bluntly, an irritated look marring her face. Then her lips curled into a deadly smirk, "Let's just say Karma's a bitch, and so am I."
"Shego! You didn't!?"
"The hell I didn't… Besides, Old Man Senior put up a bounty… like I was going to pass up that kind of money even if it wasn't half as fun as I hoped."
Kim sighed heavily, too tired to even argue the point, "Do I even want to ask?"
"Let's just say that the price was double sans toe-tag; so that's the option I took. What became of him after that? Not my concern." Shego lifted a leg up, planting a foot on the edge of Kim's bed and retrieving a nail file from her leg-pouch. "I'll never have to work another day in my life."
"Which brings me to item number three," she continued boredly as she began attending to her manicure, "I'd stay away from Drakken for a little while if I was you. After he found out that you were so unstoppable as to actually come back from the dead, he pissed his pants and ran off to the safe-room at the bottom of the lair. You showing up in the flesh might give the goober an actual heart attack."
Making a disgusted face, Kim shook her head to get rid of that image. After a few moments of steadying herself to the realization that no less than Shego and Senior had been on her side in all this, the heroine looked up, "Is there anything else?"
"Yeah, couple things," the villainess nodded, slipping the nail file away when she felt satisfied with her job. "One, a token of your recent adventure…"
She snatched a small box out of the same pouched and tossed it at the bed-ridden heroine.
Despite the IV line still in her hand, Kim easily snatched the package out of the air. She paused just a moment with uncertainty, studying Shego's expression, before opening it.
Inside was a small lapel pin, about the size of a dime. It was a circle, with a gold and diamond chipped braid set around the outside. The body of the pin was a glassy black field, but the redhead could tell that it wasn't glass or enamel, which meant it had to be expensive and hard-to-work onyx. Set in the center was a stylized and italicized letter "L," again in gold and diamond chips.
Kim looked up, confusion evident in her olive eyes.
"You're part of a very exclusive club now, Princess…" Shego explained after a minute of admiring the pin in the girl's hands, "One made up exclusively of those people who have met Death face to face, heard his offer, and then spit in his eye and come back to tell the tale."
"But I wasn't-,"
"Ah-bububuh" The redhead's protestations were cut off with a snippy gesture, "I saw your numbers Pumpkin. Electro Cardiogram, Electro Encephalogram, Blood Oxygen, Blood Pressure… your ticket was well and truly punched. You were, by all rights, dead and gone. And for no small amount of time either."
Sighing at the finality in Shego's voice, Kim allowed her head to fall back in defeat of the argument that it was all just a mix-up and they had called it too early.
"And before you ask," Shego added, her voice dripping with snark, "The L is for Lazarus. Since I know you're a victim of American public education and might not otherwise know."
"Hardy har har…" the redhead rolled her eyes, "I think I know who Lazarus of Bethany was."
"Well color me impressed," Shego scoffed. Then she flicked a clasp on her collar. The broach adorning her throat opened up, revealing an identical, if older, pin. "I sure didn't know it when I earned mine."
Kim stared at the portentous decoration, and then looked to Shego's eyes, seeking clarification.
"October twenty-eighth, 1998." She supplied by way of explanation, closing the broach again. "Top of One Go Municipal Plaza. Electronique hit me in the chest with a fully charged fist. Stopped my heart for thirteen minutes. Also holds the record for suckiest Halloween weekend in history; including the one where you lied to your parents, your friends, and me."
Kim blushed and flinched at the recollection of her own Halloween adventure involving Shego. After a long moment contemplating what had been said, she laughed and set the small black box on the nightstand next to her bed. "Okay, again, you said 'a couple of things.' What's the rest?"
"Oh, just something I neglected to do once before, and only just now got a second chance."
The redhead looked at the villainess confusedly where she stood. "And what would that be?"
She fully expected some promise that only Shego was allowed to beat her, to kill her even. She'd heard the woman say as much before, to the Alien Warmonga.
What she didn't expect was for Shego to suddenly bend over her bed, grab the back of her head, and pull her into a smoldering kiss. Kim was so shocked that her thumb inadvertently mashed the call-button looped around her wrist.
Hearing the electronic tone, Shego sighed in the kiss and then broke off, leaning back and grinning into the redhead's face. Then she set off around the bed and mounted the sill, opening the window.
Touching her lips even as the door to the room opened, Kim looked with confusion at the villainess, an unspoken question in her eyes.
Looking back, Shego smirked, "You know what they say Princess… maybe in another lifetime."
"…was that… Shego?" Ron was in the doorway and looking befuddled.
"You know… I'm not sure." Kim looked to the now vacant window.
AN: Inspired by a news blurb from The Smithsonian Magazine and a challenge on KP Slash Haven. Remember, Reviews = Love