A/N: Thanks to zzzoo99, Guest, Ponks, gypsy069, crkswolf, jim89, MisterMagic25, and Lhyaran for all their wonderful comments!

Again, I'm a couple days early on the update, but I really don't want to study for my micro cell biology test. Really with a capital 'R'. So instead I'm doing laundry and posting more chapters. (My life is so exciting, isn't it?) Either way, enjoy!

Dear Diary: Chapter Four
Hero

When Kim woke the next morning, she immediately dashed into the shower and scrubbed herself clean before throwing her pajamas back on and crawling beneath her blankets again. It was a flagrantly lazy thing to do, but she didn't have any plans on moving anytime soon. Not until she finished Shego's journal.

She was already a dead woman walking, she reasoned. Sating her ethically questionable curiosity wouldn't make her any less or more so. Dead was dead. So why not? Kim did a mental double-take at this line of thinking, and smacked herself on the forehead with her palm, reprimanding herself for being morbid. Again.

That being said, she still proceeded to pick up the little purple diary of Michelle Mae Govetsky and open to the page where she'd left off. She simply did so feeling more idiotic than she usually felt. But hey, she was Kim Possible, human cockroach. She was pretty death-resistant. Shego's future homicidal rage was an unstoppable force pitted against her 'Anything's possible for a Possible' mojo, an unmovable object. She gave it a 50-50 chance she would live to legal drinking age.

Kim could work with those odds.

"Dear Diary,

I am fifteen years old today. It's December 2, 1999. It's been busy since I last wrote, that's for sure. I've been keeping up on my studies in the martial arts of course, and I've been controlling my powers very well. There's more to them than I ever thought possible, actually. (Not that I ever imagined such a thing was possible in the first place, but whatever.) At first, I thought all I could do was light myself on fire and burn like a bonfire, my hands being especially susceptible to my powers. I almost immediately relegated my use of my powers to my hands, because I tend to burn off the clothes I'm wearing otherwise. With Team Go happening though, we have a bit more money coming in. We're not really being heroes, per say. Hego's making it a press run, for the most part. I can't complain about the donations we're receiving though. Stupid suckers all over the city want to 'help our great city's resident heroes promote justice' and throw money at us in front of the media. With the money, we had new suits made.

Hego's is durable, so the cloth doesn't tear on impact if he punches something. Mego's suit grows and shrinks as he does, so he isn't running around showing off his (quite literally) tiny little pecker. Wego's suits somehow reproduce as they do now. (Don't ask me how. All I heard was 'blah-blah boring blah' when Hego tried to explain it to me.) MY suit is highly flame retardant, with special gloves tipped in porous metal that lets my green glow out to play more easily than solid material does. That's how I found out that my powers can do more than just toast marshmellows.

I actually got shot, if you can believe it. We were stopping a bank robbery, and one of the robbers had a handgun that he was aiming at Wesley. I was so angry that he was going to shoot my little brother that I went full-body-burn and jumped at him. When he shot at me, my plasma (That's what Mego calls it, because it's apparently not fire.) actually melted the bullet slightly so that it didn't pierce my body when it hit me. It just gave me the mother of all bruises. My brothers were freaking out because they saw me get shot, but I was actually fine, and I proceeded to kick some serious ass.

I'm a badass.

After that, I decided to do some experimenting. I found out quite a few things. My plasma always starts at my hands. Or fingers, really. I can either contain it there, or allow it to spread over my entire body, like I did when I went 'bulletproof'. I can also control how hot it burns. I can melt through metal or I can warm up Wego's hands when it's cold outside. Temperature changes seem to be largely mood driven, and whenever I get mad and burn hot, I think of Yoda. You know, 'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.' Except the suffering is for whoever pissed me off. Because I'm fireproof. So are my brothers actually, to some extent, though not nearly so much as me. We all have mad metabolisms too, especially when we're hurt, and have been known to tuck away more food than is strictly physically possible if we're healing. We all heal ridiculously fast, which is probably a good thing, considering our idiotic day jobs.

None of the boys have given up on Team Go. As I've said before, the whole team of rainbow vigilantes in spandex is surprisingly popular with the sheeple. (I told Hego we should march in a gay pride parade, because we'd fit right in. He didn't think I was funny.) We don't really fight anyone really bad though, which I think is a joke. More than one weirdo though. This one guy who we put away just last week has a bird fetish or something, and we once arrested a girl who only stole blue nail polish from day spas. (And it was so not her color.)

But I don't like being a hero. Not like this. If we were doing this to help people, I think I might actually enjoy it, but that's not what's happening. This is us being Henry's personal LARPing group to fulfill his comic book fantasies. We only help certain people at certain times, and spend more time playing to the media than doing anything worthwhile. Wes and Wen aren't really old enough to understand the difference, but Henry knows better. If we're going to say we're heroes, we'd better damned well be heroes.

But I'm just silly little Shelly-Mae, the green freak with no friends and a bad attitude. What could I possibly know?

There is true evil in this world. I've seen it. Bird-pervert Aviarius isn't it. If Hgeo truly wanted to make a difference, he would let us fight against the hunger of starving kids, and the creeps who wander the alleys downtown hoping to corner a woman for 'fun'. He would let us bust pimps that take little kids and force them into prostitution, or parents that beat on their children just because they're there.

But Henry has never wanted to see any of that, and he won't fight something he can't see. And I feel sick at myself every time I see a camera; because I know that the people who have suffered –people like ME—look at the show we put on and think that we aren't heroes. Not really.

Love,

Shego"

Kim's gut twisted as she read Shego's opinions on heroes, and she grimaced slightly. She supposed that the young Shego had a point. A true hero doesn't only save the people that are easy to save. However, Kim also felt from personal experience that there are some forms of justice that a vigilante just can't mete out. Perhaps more importantly, she knew that a hero can't save everyone, and if you fail, you only make things worse.

It was why she stuck to missions with take-over-the-world goons. Partially, at least. Being able to say that she had indeed 'saved the world' certainly appealed to Kim's bid for her parents' approval, but it also allowed her to save as many people as she possibly could at once, even if most of them never knew it. The latter reason was the most applicable to Shego's arguments.

And truly, Kim understood where Shego was coming from. Kim had always lead a rather sheltered life, growing up in an upper middle class suburbia, and it had taken a lot of growing up and traveling for her to really understand the scope of human suffering. For Shelly-Mae, it was personal. She'd grown up in deplorable conditions, and she was far more acquainted with pain than Kim had ever been. It was understandable that the only female member of Team Go had wanted to help people like herself. Hell, it was even understandable that a baboon like Hego would prefer to forget that his childhood had ever existed.

But Kim knew that being a true hero to those in need wasn't a task that could be accomplished by any one person, or even five, super-powered or not. Society had to handle it as a whole; otherwise, nothing would ever change for the better. As a vigilante, attempting to solve problems like those young Shego identified was the equivalent to scrubbing the floor of a strip mall with a toothbrush, or giving an AIDS patient an Advil. Kim was all about doing the impossible, but there was impossible, and then there was impossible.

It made Kim worry, because she knew that young Shego was only setting herself up for disappointment.

"Dear Diary,

December 2, 2000. I'm sixteen today. If you can believe it, Hego actually built Go Tower! It's dumb. Really, it is. Any villain could target us for miles. And I'm stuck in it. Except for school and missions, I'm not allowed to leave because apparently, I'm grounded.

Grounded!

There aren't words for how pissed I am right now. Henry has no right to ground me. He might be my legal guardian, but he's not my parent. He's being a hypocrite! I didn't even do anything wrong! I was HELPING people!

So there's this villain. Penny Savir, she calls herself. She's a bank robber, and a classic white-collar criminal. Filthy rich. We locked her up, of course, but before the boys in blue took her away, I managed to get out of her that she kept a cash prize in a safe in her penthouse. So the night after her arrest, I took the jet (We have a Go-jet with a garish paint job now. I'm the only one of us that can fly it, and do the maintenance. It is unequivocally my property in the Go Tower.) and flew over. I broke in, found the safe, cracked it, took the cash, and left. It was clean. No evidence that I'd ever been there, except that now a criminal is short four million dollars cash. I divvyed up the money into sixteen briefcases and left them at different charities. The next morning, they were talking about the anonymous donations on the news, and I felt… proud. I helped people eat, and get medicine, and have roofs over their heads, and any other number of things.

I told my brothers what I'd done, and Hego threw a fit. Hence being grounded for the foreseeable future. Henry told me that no sister of his would ever commit acts of evil. Never ever.

But the thing is, even though stealing is wrong, how wrong was I to steal from a thief and give that money to the people who really needed it? If the police had seized the money, you could be sure as hell that those four million dollars would have padded the pockets of fat politicians before you could say dickwad. The charities I gave it to would have never seen it if I hadn't done what I did, and I don't regret it. I didn't take Penny Savir's money for myself. Hell, it probably wasn't even hers in the first place. And the only people who know that I did it are my brothers!

So what's Hego's defect? Mego and Wego actually congratulated me on a job well done, until Hego bullied them into not talking to me. Henry's idea of right and wrong isn't the end-all and be-all of morality, Diary. Morality can't be quantified. My conscience is clear, and I wouldn't take back my actions for anything.

Love,

Shego"

This latest entry gave Kim pause. She already knew that Shego would eventually give up on the hero business and enter the world of villainy. It was, after all, how they had met. So it was safe to say that Shego's first trip into the grey areas of right and wrong gave Kim some seriously bad vibes. Not that she could fault Shego's logic, but because Kim knew that this was only the beginning of a path that would turn Shelly-Mae's world on its head. Reading Shego's insistence that she was doing the right thing by doing the wrong thing… it gave Kim shivers, knowing what was going to happen.

Shego was just so young, here. Kim supposed that it was hypocritical of her to say that, considering that she herself had been in the hero business since the age of thirteen, but it was true. Kim had learned a lot about the limitations of being a hero in her time, and she knew just how crushing it was to have to look a starving person in the eye and tell them that you couldn't help them. It seemed to Kim that young Shego had yet to learn that pain, especially after having been so successful with her reappropriation of Penny Savir's funds. Kim feared that it would be a hard lesson for Shelly-Mae to learn.

"Dear Diary,

It is December 2, 2001, and I am seventeen today. I graduated high school early at the end of the year. Guess it pays to be locked up in Go Tower with nothing to do but take online classes, eh? I started college classes as Go University in August, and I'm on track to graduate in two years, thanks to the credits I already racked up while in High School. Much to the surprise of absolutely everyone that knows me, I'm majoring in child development. They really shouldn't be surprised though: it's not like I hate people. I just hate morons.

Kids, though, I like. They can be cruel, but they're also innocent, and they can be taught kindness. Besides, I'm of the opinion that understanding others helps you understand yourself, and no one would ever dare question my selfishness. I like going to the University. It's different, but I enjoy my studies, and I've even made a few acquaintances that I might even one day consider friends. It's been good for me to get out for a little while.

I think I should relate what happened today, though. It was a breakthrough, of sorts. At least with Merrin, Wesley, and Wendell. We were eating breakfast together (because it's birthday tradition for all of us) and Wendell made a comment about how Merrin always did make pancakes better than Scott.

God, I hadn't thought about that bastard since we got our powers. I melted my fork. Henry got mad at me for that, and we ended up arguing like we always do. Except this time, he shouted at me that I ruined the best meal ticket we ever had by getting Scott arrested and being a selfish bitch, like always. And… I lost it. I was so angry, I was burning the floor where I stood, and I was yelling that if Scott had molested Henry, he would have hit him too.

Now, normally Mego and Wego stay out of our way when Hego and I are fighting, but all three of them started freaking out when I said that. Which is a first, because I know for a fact that they never quite forgave me for starting that fight with that creep. I didn't understand what their issue was at first.

All this time, and I never thought that they didn't know what Scott did to me. I thought they just didn't see it as a big deal, or something, but Mego and Wego didn't know. And they actually apologized to me for holding the incident against me for all these years.

Apologized!

It was probably one of the best birthday gifts I've ever received. I feel so… light, in the wake of it. Which is funny, because I didn't know that pain was something I'd been carrying around until it was gone. Henry was the only one who didn't say anything, but I don't think he'll bring up Scott again. I think he'd just prefer to pretend that it never happened.

In this case, I might agree with him.

Love,

Shego"

"Dear Diary,

Today is December 15, 2001. I know I just wrote, but something important happened, and I didn't know who else to turn to, Diary.

Yesterday, Michelle –Mother—died. After all the drinking, her liver gave out.

Really, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I just… never thought the harpy would ever actually die. I mean, isn't there a point where you are so evil you just become immortal? None of us had seen her since we left to live with Henry, so none of us knew that her health was flagging.

The boys are all weepy about it, but I'm not sad. I… I hated Mother. I hate her. I hate her more than I've ever hated anyone. More than Scott, or the kids who spent their entire school careers campaigning to make mine miserable, or even Emma, who said she was my friend but abandoned me anyways. I hate her because she just let these things happen to me. Her child.

Why didn't she love me?

I got into another fight with Henry. He said I was a heartless bitch not to feel sad that my own mother is dead.

And maybe I am heartless. What kind of person hates their own mother? I do wonder how Lauren (my friend from my statistics class) can stand being around me. I'm not a good person. I have a temper. I'm condescending and abrasive, and take entirely too much pleasure in beating the crap out of people. I hate my own mother.

And I call myself a hero?

Love,

the last Michelle"

"Dear Diary,

It's December 27, 2001. Everything seems to be happening at once, and I don't know how much longer I can take this. For once, I was actually enjoying my life, and then this month happened.

Hego, Mego, and Wego are taking the month off from hero-duty, to mourn Mother. I don't understand why, as she never took care of any of us, but I didn't think I had the right to argue at the time. I just kept doing the small missions by myself. It's not a big deal, really, and it's almost easier to get things done without my brothers. (They're not exactly subtle, nor are they the best fighters.) Four days ago—two days before Christmas—I stopped to help with a car wreck. It was pretty bad. An SUV t-boned a limo, and the limo was on fire, with people trapped inside. The paramedics hadn't arrived yet, and since I'm fireproof, I thought 'Why not?'

So I rescued the driver, then pulled two men from the back one at a time. It was hard to see through the fire and smoke, and while I am flame retardant, I find that I still need to breathe. It took me longer than I would have liked to free the last man. I was choking and blind, and he was trapped underneath a twisted bit of metal. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I could've used Hego right then.

Because that last man didn't survive.

Normally, it wouldn't have been a big deal. I mean, people die in car wrecks all the time. Sure, it's sad, but I did what I could to save him long before the paramedics got there, and I saved the other two's lives for sure. I did my best. Unfortunately for me, the man who died wasn't just any man. He was a member of the Silverton family, who are probably the wealthiest individuals in the state.

I guess it made them feel better to have someone to blame for Benjamin Silverton's death, because that's what they did to me. As a member –even the least popular—of Team Go, I'm fairly accustomed to being lauded by the media. It's just that after that day, I learned that the media is like a dog trained for those fighting rings. Reporters will turn on you just as fast as they'll praise you.

Goodbye, Shego, hero of Go City. Allow me to introduce you to Shego, screw-up kid playing with the lives of respected citizens like they're her own personal toy soldiers. Shego, the reason an innocent life was lost.

It's bullshit. But the media and the public buy what the Silverton lawyers sell.

And let me tell you, with the amount of times I've saved Go City's collective asses? I never thought they'd turn on me like this. Hego is apoplectic, and I've been confined to Go Tower until everything blows over. Merrin says that everything will be okay, and that Go City will be back to loving me in no time.

I don't doubt that he's right, but the thing is: if this is how the world treats a hero, I don't want to be a hero anymore.

Love,

Shego"

With an exhausted sigh, Kim closed her eyes and leaned back against her headboard. The line a hero danced upon with public opinion was a treacherous one. Kim should know, considering her whole life so far had been devoted to cultivating a stellar public image. Shego's willingness to do exactly as she pleased and damn the consequences had been a trait that Kim had envied from the beginning. She just never knew that this was a learned behavior.

Kim wished that she had the courage to be like Shego. She had no desire to enter the field of villainy really, but she'd come to find that constantly pretending to be something she wasn't was as much a prison as any jail cell, and she wanted out. Ever since the Lorwardians had ruined her graduation and she had been seriously contemplating college options, Kim had been filled with a desire that she'd never had the courage to acknowledge to anyone, or herself for that matter. She did so now, however.

Kim didn't want to be a hero anymore either.

A/N: Gasp! Can you just feel the drama, people? Shego is just about to fall from grace, and the suspense is just killing me! (Well, not really, since I already wrote that part. But I betcha it's killing you, isn't it? *insert Drakken's evil laugh*) Don't worry. Next time, you'll all get to see Shego become an 'evil' villain, and see her reaction to meeting a certain redhead hero. Won't that be interesting?

Reviews feed the souls of nerdy college students, so be sure to leave a few for me! I'm just too cute to starve to death.