A/N: Just a few things to say here: one, I feel I must reiterate the M rating. I tend to err on the side of caution, meaning it might not be an M yet, but then again it might and I want to be safe. Two, I didn't want to say anything earlier because I didn't want to spoil the surprise, but if you haven't read In the Still of the Night or any of its sequels, you might want to. I wrote this story into that universe as thanks to all who liked that series. And three, this story is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual style, so any and all feedback is appreciated, because I am rather nervous about the whole thing. (Meaning, if I suck at writing drama, I'd really prefer to know. :) )
Chapter 2 – I Only Want To Be With You
GJ Headquarters – 22 years ago
"Kim Possible, I say Kim!" Drakken called out as Kim left Dr. Director's office.
"Oh, hey, Dr. D," Kim said, stopping short. One of his vines waved at her and she waved back. It had been four years, but it still wigged Kim out ever so slightly that she, Drakken and Shego were now friends and that he worked for GJ. "What seems to be the problem?"
"Did Dr. Director just send you on another mission or could I possibly ask to do me a small favor?" he asked.
"No, Dr. Director just put me on call for the summer, so I only have to come in if there's an emergency," Kim answered. "She says I'm gonna need to rest up from college so I can get right to work when I start working here permanently in September. What kind of favor do you need?"
Drakken's face fell and his vines drooped. "Shego's disappeared and she's been gone for over two weeks this time," he confided.
Kim frowned and nodded. Shego, unlike Drakken, had never really adjusted to being on the side of good, and she was prone to bouts of moodiness that made her disappear for days, sometimes weeks. She usually returned on her own, but sometimes she didn't and Drakken, especially now that they had become engaged, fretted until he had tracked her down. If he was asking her for help, that meant Shego had done a really good job of covering her tracks and he couldn't find her this time, which in turn meant that Kim, as her best friend, was now the person who had the best chance of finding her and he was hoping she would be able to help him. "I'll see if I can find her, Dr. D," Kim promised.
"Oh, thank you so much, Kim," Drakken said gratefully.
"It's really no problem," she assured him. He beamed at her and went bustling away, called to duty by the echoing voice of Dr. Director. Kim sighed. It wasn't the way she had been planning to spend her time off, but if one of her best friends was involved, relaxation was going to have to wait, especially since Kim had an inexplicable bad feeling about this particular disappearance, probably tied to the fact that Shego and Drakken were getting married in about a month and Shego had not been very circumspect about her reservations about getting married. Add in the fact Shego usually told her when and where she was taking off, but this time she hadn't said a word, and the situation worried Kim, especially since Kim had been so busy she hadn't noticed Shego was gone.
"Wade!" she demanded, activating her ear-bud Kimmunicator.
"What do you need, Kim?" Wade replied back.
"I have a wayward GJ agent I need to track," Kim answered.
"Shego disappear again?" Wade guessed. Shego was the only GJ agent Kim would ever care about tracking and Wade knew she had a tendency to disappear.
"Yup," Kim said. "Drakken can't find her and this time she didn't tell me where she was going."
Wade tapped a few keys. "All the GJ jets are still in the hangar," he mused. He tapped a few more keys. "How long has she been gone?" he asked, knowing he was going to have to delve a little deeper than using a tracking device.
"According to Drakken, two weeks," Kim answered.
More tapping followed. "Can he be any more specific?" Wade asked.
"He's gone, so no," Kim retorted. "And how do you know she took a plane?"
"Well, according to the surveillance cameras in the garage at her and Drakken's place, her car is still there, and she hasn't used her credit cards to buy any kind of ticket," Wade answered. "A plane would be the only kind of ride she could get for free."
"But she could be walking, she might have used cash or she might have stolen a car," Kim pointed out. "Maybe some gave her a ride?"
"Quit being an anal pain in the ass, Kim," Wade said, cutting her off good-naturedly. "She's a pilot; Logic would dictate she took a plane."
"Yeah, but Drakken couldn't find her," Kim reminded him testily. "Even he would know to check the planes."
"Easy, Kim," Wade said evenly, knowing she only got snippy when she was upset. "This is me you're talking to. Drakken went through the GJ guys; I'm better than they are and that's why I am on your payroll and not theirs. Shego disappears like this all of the time. Why is this time different?"
"Because I don't know where she is this time, Wade," Kim snapped. "I always know where she is."
"And why is that bugging you so much?" Wade countered. "You don't care this much when Ron is gone for a few days," he said pointedly. He had been with Kim too long not to notice some things and Kim's conflicted feelings about and, truth be told, preference for Shego were pretty damn obvious. But Kim refused to acknowledge it, and so he got these little jabs in whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Kim was grateful that they were using the audio-only ear buds and Wade couldn't see her face; it might have given far too much away, and Wade already knew too much. "I don't have to worry that Ron is going to turn back into a supervillain," Kim said flatly, though that was her last concern as far as Shego was concerned too. "And I know where he is."
Wade wanted to say more but he decided to drop it. "Gimme a few minutes, Kim," he requested. "I'll have her coordinates within the hour."
"Promise?" Kim asked, calming down somewhat.
"Promise," Wade answered. "Now settle the hell down would you?"
"I'll try," Kim promised. "Talk to you later, Wade." She tapped the bud to shut it off, and looked around wondering how she was going to kill the hour. She decided a snack at the commissary might take her mind off things. She grabbed the elevator and headed down to the basement, and it wasn't until she had sat down at table with her fries and coke that she turned her mind to rationalizing why in the hell she was so damn freaked out about Shego's latest disappearance.
She squirted ketchup on her fries and used a random fried potato product to push some of the red stuff around as she thought about Shego, her life and Wade's stupid but really not-so-stupid comment. His point was legitimate, Kim conceded as she bit down on a fry. Ron was often gone nowadays; his rapidly-rising status within the Smarty Mart Corporation had meant many promotions and many business trips to go with those promotions, but it never really bothered Kim when he was gone. Sometimes it was actually a relief to come home to a nice quiet apartment. Ron was her best friend, though, and her boyfriend/fiancé, he should matter more than a "good" friend.
Except he didn't, at least not anymore, Kim realized, pensively discarding one fry in favor of another. She and Shego had grown really close in the last four years; with no good/evil dynamic thing they had to deal with, they found out they liked hanging out together and they did a lot of it, especially over the summers when Kim was interning with GJ and she saw far more of Shego than she did of Ron. And even when she was in school and away from GJ, they still managed to find time to get together, usually just to talk, and those talks made Kim realize how much more she had in common with Shego than she did with Ron, a situation that grew more and more pronounced as her and Ron's career paths diverged.
Kim sighed and grabbed her coke, taking a sip. She shook her head. This stupid line of thought was getting her nowhere. She already knew that Wade and his annoying little remarks were correct and Shego was threatening to supplant Ron's place in her life, but that still didn't answer the question about why she was so freaked out that Shego had disappeared. Maybe Shego becoming more important than Ron and running away from her husband-to-be meant that she was finally going to come to terms with what happened between her and Shego four years ago, a quiet, almost mocking voice interjected. Maybe that accounted for the freak-out, it reasoned. She ignored it as she had for four years and continued to munch on her fries. No, it was just stress; she had just gotten done with finals and graduated from college and now she needed to decompress. Yeah, that was it, she decided, and it was really just a random bad feeling that really had nothing to do with Ron, Shego or how she felt about either of them.
She finished her food and wandered back to the elevator, hopping in and pushing the button for the lobby. The car started going up, and as soon as it started to move, her ear-bud chirped. "Whatcha got, Wade?" Kim asked casually, badly pretending that she didn't care.
"She took a plane," he said triumphantly. "The Team Go jet was reported missing a little over two weeks ago, and after liberating the tracking device frequency from the Go Tower computers, I tracked it to a little island in the Caribbean."
"But what if someone else stole the plane?" Kim asked reasonably.
"It's one of Drakken's old lairs," Wade replied. Kim nodded; that Wade figured it was Shego would seem to make sense. "But just to make sure, because I know how you are, I used the security cameras that GJ put up on the outside of all of Drakken's old lairs to scout around. Guess who came out for an early afternoon sunbath?"
"Thanks, Wade," Kim said.
"No problem, Kim," Wade replied. "I downloaded the coordinates to hovercraft number AFL45, so you just have to fly her there."
"Awesome," Kim said, pushing floor number seven now she knew where she was going.
"Talk to you later, Kim," Wade said.
"Bye, Wade," Kim replied. She hopped out of the elevator car at her floor, flashed her badge at the sentry on duty and looked for the hovercraft with the serial number Wade had told her. She found it easily enough and climbed in, strapping herself down, putting on the headphones and contacting the tower. "This is AFL45 to tower, request permission to depart."
"That's a negative, Agent Possible," the tower operator told her. "This craft isn't scheduled to fly today."
"Are you sure?" Kim asked, faking innocence. "Dr. Director gave me orders an hour ago."
"Standby," the operator requested, checking his computer. There was a pause, and his voice came crackling over the line. "Apologies, Agent Possible," he said. "You are clear for takeoff."
"Affirmative," she radioed back, sending silent thanks to Wade. He was better than the GJ guys. She waited for a few seconds until the roof had opened and then lifted off, hovering for a few seconds to access the coordinates Wade had given her before taking off towards the southeast. She let her mind wander as she flew; the coordinates were preprogrammed and there was little actual flying she had to do. She thought about why Shego might have run away this time, deciding not to dwell on why she was freaked out about it, but only on why Shego had run away. It took about half a second of thought to decide her first hypothesis was correct: Shego was getting cold feet. But why, she asked herself. Inevitably her thoughts turned to the rumination of before and that nagging little voice that was getting harder and harder to ignore. Was it right? Had Shego run away because of her and what had happened between them?
It had been a stupid mistake, though; it hadn't meant a thing to either of them, she protested internally. But then again, here it was four years later and she was still obsessing about it, so maybe Shego was doing the same thing, she admitted reluctantly. Those stupid fucking photographs, she cursed. They were mementos of a time all too brief, but the fleeting time that those photographs served as a reminder for and the even the photographs themselves had caused a turning point in both of their lives.
As hard had she had tried to forget it, she still remembered it as if she was waking up this morning in a room bearing the barest hint of the unique fragrance that was Shego. Shego had been in her room and after a brief inspection of the surroundings, Kim had figured out that Shego had stolen, yet put back, the strip of photographs that showed the two of them as friends. That she would steal something like that intrigued Kim to no end, and as luck would have it, the very next mission she had been sent on involved Shego and Drakken. Nothing had been resolved during the mission; the most they had said to one another was "hi". After the mission had been something else entirely, though.
Shego had come back to her room that night, and amazingly enough, it was to apologize for invading Kim's space and privacy. Kim chuckled as she remembered Shego balancing precariously on that limb outside her room with the guilty version of the puppy dog pout on her face. She had been adorable, a word that Kim had never thought to use with Shego, and Kim had let her in. Shego apologized immediately and Kim had accepted her apology on the condition that Shego tell her why she did it. Shego hemmed and hawed, but eventually admitted that it had been nice being Kim's friend. Kim had laughed and then hugged her gingerly, but instead of the hug being a friendly gesture, it rapidly escalated into kissing, which in turn escalated into touching, which then escalated into a complete lack of both clothing and restraint.
Shego had bailed in the middle of the night after Kim had fallen asleep, and Kim was actually glad for it. Shego's departure had made it easier to classify that night as a dreamy mistake, a weird happenstance that had nothing to do with real life. Even after Shego had turned reluctantly back to the good side, had joined GJ and had become Kim's friend, they never spoke about it, and the silence allowed Kim to almost pretend that it had never happened. It certainly allowed her to pretend that it meant nothing, even though she knew it had, evidenced by the fact that to this day, they had never hugged one another again and avoided all kinds of physical contact in spite of being really good friends.
Her thoughts still in turmoil, Kim sighed as a dilapidated structure in the classic Drakken design emerged on the viewscreen and the hovercraft started to descend. She took over the controls and landed the hovercraft gently on the roof, shutting down the controls and popping the top as the craft landed with a soft thud. She looked for the nearest access point and found a convenient air duct that she pulled the grate off of and used to slide into the building.
Kim found Shego in what used to be the living quarters of the lair, tucked in a small bedroom that obviously used to be hers back when she was Drakken's second and not his future wife. She was reclining on the bed, and her eyes were jumping back and forth between the ceiling and all three of the surrounding walls. Her eyes flicked to Kim as she walked through the door, but then just as quickly flicked back to whatever it was she was looking at. Kim paused briefly, a little unsure of if she was welcome, but she decided to continue walking until she was right beside the bed. She sat down and Shego shifted so that she was closer to Kim, but her eyes remained on the walls. "Found me, huh?" Shego asked, somewhat unnecessarily.
"Yup," Kim answered.
"Wade?" Shego inquired.
"Yup," Kim replied.
"I figured if it had taken this long, the GJ guys Drew have working for him couldn't manage to find me," Shego said.
"Why'd you run away this time?" Kim asked, wanting to see if she knew Shego as well as she thought she did.
"I can't marry him, Princess," Shego said softly.
It seems she did. "Did you really ever think you could?" Kim asked gently.
"Maybe, for a little while, yeah," Shego answered. "But as this damn wedding gets closer and closer, it's becoming more difficult to convince myself that I want to go through with it."
"Why?" Kim asked.
"Because I don't love him and I've never loved him," Shego said bluntly.
"Then why'd you say yes?" Kim asked, perplexed.
Shego sighed. "Long story, Pumpkin," she said, lifting her eyes to the ceiling.
"Enlighten me?" Kim requested.
"Marrying him was the only way to keep what I really wanted but what I thought could never have," Shego explained, her eyes moving to the walls.
Kim looked around curiously, wanting to see what exactly on the walls and ceiling were capturing Shego's attention so thoroughly even in the middle of a potentially life-changing conversation. It looked like strips of something, but they were all too far away for Kim to get a good look at them. She rose from the bed and went to take a look, stopping just inches from the wall. A jolt of something she didn't want to acknowledge shot though her as she realized the strip and all the others like it were strips of those warmly familiar photographs, the same ones that to this day resided on her mirror at home and the ones she had been cursing earlier. She felt Shego's warmth behind her and her presence, usually calming, unnerved Kim considerably. "I didn't think you still had your copy," she lied haltingly, trying to fill the silence in order to quash the anxiety and other sensations that were creeping up her body.
"You had to know that I still have a copy," Shego disagreed, her voice soft, yet deep and tantalizing, her lips incredibly close to Kim's ear as she came closer. "Just like you have to know these are the reason I can't marry Drew."
Kim closed her eyes and she swallowed reflexively as Shego's distinctive scent swirled around her. It was the same scent she had smelled in her room years ago, the one that had told her that Shego had been in her room. It was the same scent she smelled almost daily, but now memories came flooding back that forced her to admit that yes, she did know that Shego still had a copy. "Why do you have so many?" Kim asked, not trusting herself to open her eyes.
"At first, I was just trying to correct an impulsive mistake. Since I joined GJ, I use them to convince myself that being good is worth it if I can be near you," Shego said, her arms sliding past Kim's hips to loosely encircle her waist. "And that if I'm near you, then maybe one day you will get over yourself and realize who you actually want, instead of being with the one you think you should."
Kim's breath caught and her heart, already beating at a breakneck speed, picked up its rhythm even more. Shego was too close, far too close. She needed to get the hell out of here and she needed to do it now, before four years of self-delusion and self-denial were completely lost. She spun around, intent on slipping out of Shego's grasp and heading for the door, but Shego moved closer as she did so, pinning Kim to the wall. Kim looked up, the fraction of an inch more of height that Shego enjoyed over her seeming to be more like feet as Shego lowered her head. Kim felt the unexpectedly gentle kiss on her lips and she cursed herself as her knees started to give out from under her just like some sort of fucking cliché.
That moment of weakness allowed Shego to know that she had an advantage and she used it, tightening her grip and deepening the kiss. Kim knew she should try to resist, but she couldn't, instead yielding to Shego's insistent mouth. She opened her own, and her stomach plummeted as she realized that Shego tasted as sweet as she ever had. A soft moan escaped Kim's lips, and Shego drew back slowly, breaking the kiss and taking in Kim's expression before shifting her right leg forward, nudging Kim's thighs apart with her own thigh and using her hands to cause Kim to come to rest straddling her outstretched leg.
Kim shuddered at the contact, her hands around Shego's neck as she hung on for dear life, her body overcome by sensation and her mind vacillating between desire for the one she wasn't supposed to want and duty to the one she was. Shego started to slide her slowly back and forth, and Kim's breath became ragged. "Please stop," she pleaded softly, her mind and body almost at the breaking point.
Shego's hands stilled but she didn't let Kim go. "Is that what you really want, Princess?" she asked, her soulful green eyes willing Kim to be truthful.
Kim hesitated. If she answered yes, Shego would let her go and she could return to Ron and her perfectly planned life. She would most likely lose Shego as a friend, but it would be an acceptable sacrifice to live her life the way she had always thought she wanted. If she answered no, it meant giving into feelings and desires that she had been holding back for over four years and maybe becoming a person she had never planned to be. A split second and her choice was made. "No," she admitted softly.
Shego didn't say anything, but the brief look of utter joy on her face told Kim what she needed to hear. The look disappeared as Shego took her at her word and she found herself being lifted up and carried toward the bed where, within seconds, deft hands, claws and plasma had rid her of her clothes. She did her own damage to Shego's clothes, rendering her naked in short order, and they lay there for a few seconds savoring the skin-on-skin contact before Shego's ever-inquisitive mouth found its way to her left breast.
KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
The clock chimed midnight and jolted Kim out of her reverie. "Oh, for fuck's sake, snap out of it, Possible," she ordered herself irritably. She was a forty-three year old woman getting a fucking divorce, not a naïve twenty-one year old, and the last thing she needed to do was to start obsessing over shit that had happened years ago, even if said shit did have a hand in what was happening now. She got off the couch and went to her bedroom, closing the door grumpily behind her. She got undressed and into her night clothes before flopping down moodily on her bed. She attempted sleep, but sleep would not come. Her mind, even though she ordered it not to, kept slipping back into the past that was now determining her future.
