~Been a little under the weather this weekend. With try to get caught up later this week. No, I haven't forgotten you guys - how could I? ;) Thanks for the reviews!~

4. If you have to leave your body in someone else's care for awhile, make sure you give it knockout drops! Or chain it up like Houdini, whatever! Just make sure you don't lose track of your body!

Private Dobbs' body does have one advantage aside from the government-approved retinas, Drakken decides as he scampers away from the time-share lair, lungs nearly hissing steam. Longer legs.

Drakken may be a chemistry major in spirit, but he has a close relationship with the principles of physics as well. Longer legs equals longer strides. Longer strides equals faster running. Faster running equals farther away from the lair before it -

Kaboom!

Hopefully no one hears Drakken's yip over the roar of the explosion. Thrown forward more by his own momentum than by the blast, Drakken collides with the ground, lower mandible first. He brings his hands up and locks them, trembling, over his head. His hands, with their nails bitten down to stubs underneath their favorite gloves, and his head, with its hair suspended away from his brow. Ahh, yes, it is good to be back in his own body.

Drakken pushes himself to all fours and refuses to glance backward. He can't bear to see the Neutronilizer reduced to scrap metal. The lair he couldn't care less about - it was registered to Professor Dementor, and that man is nothing more than an easy-living snob. If it takes lairs blowing up to knock Dementor and his bank account down a few pegs, Drakken is all too happy to oblige.

Still, if just one of the world leaders responded to Drakken's demands, he'd still have his sleeve up the aces (or however the saying goes). If only one country, even a tiny little country like Monaco, had said yes, he would be able to pack up his few things, fly over there, and assume ruler. . .ship . . . hood immediately. He even tapped his own phone line so that their concession would be recorded for posterity. It was an idea he thought up earlier in the day, and it was so mind-bogglingly brilliant it melted his words into electric little squeaks.

Those squeaks are still happening, their polarity reversed, as Drakken remains parallel to the ground. If he had even one country under his belt, which would have happened if he hadn't lost his own body. No one would take Private Dobbs' body seriously, and why should Drakken blame them for that? It was ridiculously tall and even more absurdly thin, so that Drakken felt tugged and tightened inside it, like a guitar string. Its fair-to-middling skin and pair of round, geeky glasses sent a shiver wriggling through Drakken. It was like looking at some future version of Drew Lipsky, if he'd never become Dr. Drakken when he grew up. Drakken had spent most of his excursion into Dobbs' body feeling the flop of bangs that were not his; breathing excessively through wide, flaring nostrils that also weren't his; and speaking in displaced snarls, almost certain his enormous voice would blow Dobbs' body flat against the wall.

The puppet, though - he's surprised that didn't work.

Drakken slowly edges his way to his feet. Yes, they are his feet - his small, eager feet. And there is his scar, scratchy and tough, shieldlike against his soft flesh. Now he can thaw out in his real body, shorter than Dobbs' and with broader bones, even if they don't have quite as much meat on them as Drakken would like. He shakes his wider shoulders in pride.

All right, so some of that is due to the padding in his lab coat. At least they no longer feel like they're clamped in twin vises.

No thanks to Kim Possible and her little do-gooder team, who had the nerve to claim they'd "rescued" Private Dobbs. Why, they actually put reclaiming the Neutronilizer above returning the poor man to his own body!

Drakken can almost feel Jack Hench's schmoozing elbow driving into his ribs, hear him hissing, You should have taken better security measures. He knows he should have, probably would have - except - except -

Except he never anticipated anyone in his body could win a fight against Shego, much less against Shego and all the henchmen. It simply wasn't feasible. Dobbs was military, though Drakken doesn't know if that's what made the difference. To what extent did that stay in his body and to what extent did it transfer with his brain? Drakken had done enough research on the theoretical bio-exchange to build his machine and make sure it didn't turn people inside-out, but he didn't know every in and out of swapping brains.

Anyway, whose fault is it that Dobbs escaped in the first place?

Oh, right. . .

The henchmen cower the second Drakken looks at them, although they still hold their stunner-sticks. An ember wafts down onto Shego's black glove before Drakken can turn his sternness on her. "Crud!" she barks and in one panther-fast move rips the glove off and shakes it out.

This confuses Drakken for a moment. Her gloves must be flame-retardant or else her plasma would have burned them up seven times over by now. Then again, if the fabric somehow lets the plasma out without burning the gloves, it would probably let the ember in without burning the gloves, either.

And isn't he supposed to be angry at her, anyway?

Drakken turns around and scowls his eyebrow down at Shego. It's a pretty impressive scowl, too - the kind that crushes his skin against his facial bones rather than elongating and highlighting the roundness.

And it lasts until he spots the magenta mark spilled across Shego's wrist like red wine.

Except - no, it's not a spill. It marches up from her close-fitting sleeve in four rod shapes, with a reddened mass beneath them and then a fifth, stubby mark nearly at a ninety-degree angle from the first rod.

It's a handprint. A bruise.

Drakken narrows his eyes and has no trouble commanding them to harden. "Shego? What is this?"

Shego makes a very un-Shego sound, sort of a giggle, constructed from sugar crystals. It leaves a terrible aftertaste in the air. "This? Nothing."

"Don't tell me it's nothing, Shego!" Drakken barks. He takes a step closer. "Who grabbed you? Who hurt you?"

Shego pulls in the biggest breath Drakken has ever heard her take. "Okay. Uh, actually, Doc - you did."

Drakken stops halfway through his next step, his leg clomping nervously against the ground. "I did?" That can't be true!

But now it's coming back to him. Back at the time-share lair. He was yelling because his body had disappeared. Shego tried to distract him by telling him this body was cute and reached up to touch his face. That was the very last thing any supervillain ever wanted to be, "cute," and no matter which body Drakken's residing in, he cannot handle randomized touch.

He'd gotten mad. Grabbed her hand. Squeezed it.

Brought her blood out under the skin.

"Shego, no. Ohhh, I - I - " There is a word for what you are when you have accidentally hurt your friends, but darned if Drakken can remember what it is right now. He's shaking much too hard. "I - I - I - I didn't mean to!"

"Of course you didn't," Shego says. There's no sarcasm in her eyes as she snaps the glove back into place, hiding the bruise he left on her. "Army Man's got a way stronger grip than you do." She tosses her head. "And, I mean, it's not like it's ever gonna happen again, right?"

"No." Drakken shakes his ponytail. "Not with my brain-switching machine destroyed." He glances at her again - he is still taller than her, but not by much, and it's as if he is shrinking in exponents that increase the longer she looks back at him. "Shego, I really never would have done that on purpose - "

Shego raises one hand, fingers clamped together, her signal for his lips to do the same. "Bruises heal, okay? Don't give yourself a stroke or anything."

Drakken lowers his head and studies his hands. His again, with their short, slim fingers. Hands made for delicate scientific procedures, not wringing the life out of someone.

It is fantastic to be back in his body, which Private Dobbs gave up so willingly and ungratefully, as if Drakken lent him a hideous sweater to wear to school one day.

"It's ugly! And it itches something fierce!"

As Drakken watches his hand, it curls into a fist. If there were some kind of machine that would lift Shego's bruise off her wrist and smash it down hard onto Dobbs', he would stop and invent right here.