~I have returned! With another December tale. . . just in time for Halloween. Enjoy and don't think about the timing too much. ;)~
Ding-dong.
Dr. Drakken marches in place on the Stoppables' front stoop as he waits for the front door that's always surprised him with its fanciness to swing open. The driveway is rather poorly shoveled, but Drakken doesn't mind. Gave him ample opportunity to stamp across the snow, leaving rubber-boot-prints that announce to the world that Dr. D is in the house, yo dawgs!
Well, not literally in the house. Not until Stoppable - Ron - opens the door.
The kid doesn't greet him with their regular fist-bump, the one only known by the coolest of nerds. Instead, he cries, "Dr. D! Get in here before you freeze your bohunkus off!"
Drakken obeys. He's rather attached to his bohunkus. (Snicker - or vice versa.)
Once inside, Drakken scrapes his soles against the welcome mat before letting his feet touch tile. Pauses to examine a glove bearing a one-of-a-kind snowflake. Which, sadly, is soon liquidated - liquified - liquidized - whatever the darn word is - by the heater.
"Did you hear the weather report, Drakken?" Ron asks. His eyes are as round and brown as the centers of sunflowers - one of the many plants Drakken has read up on since his, erhm, transformation this summer. "We've got a stadium-sized blizzard comin' our way!"
"Blizzard?" Drakken's ponytail lifts in excitement, exposing his neck to the last of the frigid air. "That sounds promising!"
Ron nods. "They said we could get a foot and a half of snow tonight!"
"Unfortunately," Mr. Stoppable calls from the hallway.
Drakken scowls. How did this man who's only been around a few years longer than Drakken himself get to be such an old stick-in-the-mud? Probably because he has a Very Important Job that he'll need to drive on those snow-packed roads to get to because you can't miss a day -
Oooh. Suddenly Drakken doesn't like where this is headed anymore. He busies himself with how fortunate he is to be able to bypass the roads altogether in his brilliant hovercraft and is even able to stick out his right hand - it's the correct hand, which is easy to remember - when Mr. Stoppable offers his.
Mrs. Stoppable glances up from her papers at the table and offers him a spaced-out smile that clearly pigeonholes Drakken as a distraction. His stomach doesn't even get the chance to clamp down on itself before little Hana toddles in and hooks a stubby arm around her brother's leg. Her other hand waves at him. "Hi, Bloo," she says.
Drakken melts. Not physically - although his ears are going from cold to warm so quickly they feel as if they're being pierced with pine needles. Hana can always smother whatever villain-fire he's got left in him.
"Hello, Hana," Drakken says. It's amazing to him how easily his boom translates into a coo. "How are you doing today?"
Hana giggles.
"She's doin' fine," Ron answers for her. He picks the baby up and bounces her. "Havin' a great time, and she's glad to have her brother home for the holidays. Aren'tcha, Han? Aren'tcha, aren'tcha?"
Drakken follows them into the living room and sinks onto a faded navy couch, the kind that has been softened and gentled by many years and many bohunkuses (bohunki?).
Ron sits down next to him, Hana turning mini-cartwheels in his lap. "And get this," he says, voice slightly quieter. "Mom actually managed to get off work for five nights a' Hanukkah! She hasn't done that since I was a little kid."
"Good for her!" Drakken cheers. It is a victory for this scattered little family he's beginning to care for.
And then jealousy volleys through him - eight nights of presents? - and he wonders why people don't actually celebrate twelve days of Christmas, except in song. Although, Drakken has to admit, he can't see what use anyone in the suburbs would have for eight milkmaids. Now, eight doggy-pooper-scoopers, those could come in handy. . .
Drakken gives the house another perusal and his gaze lands on an item on the kitchen counter. It's a candle holder - a menorah is how he recalls Ron referring to it - one large candle standing tall and impressive in the center, each side a perfect clone of the other. (Well, you can't clone candlesticks, since they don't have genes, but they're absolutely identical.)
"Do you really get eight days of presents?" Drakken says, trying to keep the envy from souring his question.
Ron snorts. "Well, yeah, technically. But half the time, it's batteries for the ol' CD player or gym socks or even -" he wrinkles his nose - "winter underwear."
Drakken's skin twitches in sympathy. There's nothing worse than tearing into a sparkling wrap job, adrenaline spiking your veins, and then discovering a pile of long johns inside.
Not that they wouldn't come in handy on a night like tonight.
Drakken gets up and crosses over to the window to check on their blizzard in progress. Flakes of snow are being hurled from the sky like the clouds want to be done with them, their migration to the ground slowed by sharp gusts. Drakken suddenly longs for meteorologist equipment to analyze their descent patterns. "It's really coming down," he says instead, as if the law of gravity is something new and mind-blowing to him.
"No kiddin'." Ron crosses to his side, arms Hana-less and dangling. "Good thing you got in when you did, or you woulda had icicles comin' out your nose for sure."
"Uh-huh. Green ones." The mole rat says his squeaky piece, and it makes the laughter rumble in Drakken's throat.
He presses his upper arm to the window and rests his forehead against it. By the power of suggestion, he can already feel icicles hanging from his nose. This blizzard is going to make all preceding storms look like incompetent flurries.
And he can't wait!
Sure, when people go out to get the paper in the morning - if anyone but him still gets the newspaper delivered to their door - the ground will be slippery. But snow-slick beats plain ol' mud-slick any day! Drakken got his fill of mud that one time when he tried to conquer Seattle with mountains of it.
And who could make a better snow-buddy than this kid? Whose name is. . . oh, come on, I just had it. . .
Ron!
A sudden shriek of wind rattles the windows, and Drakken takes a soft leap back. His left foot descends on something inconsistently pointy, and from there, it's not a long journey to the floor for the rest of him.
Silence throbs in his head.
Drakken pushes himself back to a vertical position, praying his back hasn't given out. Nope. It gives him a plenty stern warning, though, like a deputy in one of those Old West shows. Only the lack of scorn in Stoppable's giggles distinguish it from a thousand other times when he and Kim Possible watched Drakken make a fool of himself right at a moment where dignity was of the essence.
"You stepped on our dreidel!" Ron, still laughing, bends and picks up the object.
It's a - it's a - well, a top is the closest word that occurs to Drakken, though it's more square and more brown and more wooden. A strange, many-colored squiggle of a symbol decorates each side. "What are those?" he asks, pointing to one.
Ron beams and puffs out his chest. "That's some of the Hebrew alphabet," he says. He rotates the top one turn at a time, touching each symbol as he goes. "Nun. Gimel. He. Shin."
Oh. No wonder they tangle in Drakken's brain. Letters don't behave for him in any language.
"Do you play games with it?" Drakken says.
"You better believe it!" Ron's grin is dangerously close to breaking the Grin Record set by Dr. Drakken himself the morning after the night he saved the world. "And you win gelt."
"Gelt?" Drakken wrinkles his own nose. "What's that? Some type of fish?" As yummy as fish can be when Mother cooks it, a slab of it would make for some lousy reward.
"Noooo!" Ron howls happily, shaking his head. "They're these things."
He sticks one hand into his too-big pocket and it returns glistening with coins. They look more like video game tokens than legal tender, bronze-gold and missing the picture of a president stamped on.
Drakken gives one a cautious poke. It remains dormant. "Do you buy special prizes with them?" he says.
"Nope. Even better." Ron's eyes dance mischievously at him, and he peels back one corner of the gold - ohhhh, it's foil! - to reveal a solid, dark, mouth-watering brown. "They're chocolate!"
"Oooh!" Drakken can feel every individual hair joining in his full-body perk. "Well, then, pay up, kid." He fakes the villainous growl - it's a shame to let it go to waste after he spent so long perfecting it. "You owe me for a lot of broken property."
For half a second, fear flickers across Ron's face before it appears to register that Drakken's joking. Then he lets out a guffaw, in perfect harmony with the mole rat's, and plops a couple gelt into Drakken's hands.
Ahhh. Nothing like a holiday feast.
Ron suddenly comes up off the floor as if he's been shot out of a cannon, only without the gunpowder. "Dude! Where's Han?"
Drakken runs frantic eyes over the room, stomach already knotting into a game of Cat's Cradle.
"I'm so stupid!" Ron cries. "You can't take your eyes off her for five seconds!"
"You're not stupid," Drakken says, and then marvels at how automatically that phrase came out. Since when does he refute that in those whom he considers intellectual inferiors, which is most everyone? Since never, that's when.
Score one for the non-egotistical side of me!
Ron bolts for the kitchen, stumbling over dangling shoelaces, and calls, "Mom? Dad? Have you seen Hana?"
Drakken gives the room the requisite once-over again, but the child is nowhere in sight. His gaze lands on the window, where the outdoors is, save for a few fuzzy streetlights, pure black. Pure black that a dusky-skinned little girl could so easily slip into.
His heart has a panic attack.
What if she did slip out when no one was looking? Just because she's got that Toddler Mutant Ninja Monkey thing or whatever her older brother's dubbed it, does that mean she can regulate her temperature? Shego, he knows, has thermal control in her jumpsuit, but the Stoppable parents - who, if he may be blunt, pay very little attention to either of their children - probably wouldn't have bothered installing something like that into her little winter overalls.
And what if she gets sick? Colds are caused by viruses and not dropping temperatures, he knows, but you can get hypothermia, and that has all kinds of complications. And this is Christmas, where total health and wellness are needed to appreciate the majesty of the season!
Drakken wastes no time with long, dramatic strides; just skitters to the doormat and flails his arms into the sleeves of his coat. "I'm going to look for her outside!" he hollers to any interested parties.
No answer - harrumph - which Drakken decides to take as a yes. He opens the front door.
And immediately, a spray of whiteness and wetness blasts him in the face like liquid nitrogen. Drakken's brain equally-instantly switches over from winter wonderland to wilderness survival.
Problem being, he retrieves only "this file could not be found" screens on the latter.
Drakken inches crabwise across the side of the house to avoid the worst of the wind. Snow continues to blow straight at him anyway, and he spits out a mouthful of flakes. They seemed friendly earlier. Now it's as if they want to drown him and bury poor little Hana in the process.
And that hulking, snow-drenched mass around the corner - that appears suspiciously hostile, too.
Drakken edges up to it with his neck hairs standing in spaghetti-spikes and memories of the North Pole on the spin cycle in his head. He's half-expecting a polar bear to materialize out of the long shadows, baring drool-glistening chompers that outdo even Drakken's own.
But, of course, it doesn't. The suspect mound turns out to be a newfangled swingset, all frosty metal with nary a splinter-ready patch of wood in sight. A double-seater swing. A trapeze. A twisty slide.
It puts Drakken in a momentarily playful mood. With snow still sticking in his eyelashes, he lowers his body onto an already-thick layer of what could be the world's coldest blanket. He pumps his arms back and forth, forth and back, legs stretching and compressing about the origin.
When he's finished, Drakken plants his hands several inches away in the snow and hauls his backside over to them so he won't leave a footprint in the middle of his perfect snow angel.
It is pretty much perfect, too. Drakken gives a satisfied nod and then scratches the icy nape under his ponytail. Why does he feel as if he's forgotten something?
Let's see. Stoppables. The house. The swingset in the backyard. A pretty cool set, especially for those tuned-out parents. Did they get it when the buffoo - when Ron was little, or was this just for -
Hana! Drakken whacks himself smack dab in the eyebrow. No kidding.
He squints. He knows his way around the Stoppables' backyard plenty well, but the landscape is dramatically different smothered in white. Bushes become mounds of flour. Trees snow-covered skeletons.
The snow angel was a mistake. Infinitesimal flakes have drifted into the gap between his lab coat and his coat-coat to bite at his wrists, cracking them as they dry them out with their wetness. That's scientifically sound, even if it doesn't - heh - sound like it. His chin is frozen frigid, jutting out at the obtuse angle it does.
"Hana!" Drakken yells. The snow rushes in to fill his mouth, and his voice crackles, too, as if the wind is trouncing it into submission. Pure black above him, pure white below. Only his paler-than-ever blue interrupts the old-movie color scheme.
Drakken struggles, feet brick-heavy, to the nearest solid object - a tree - and pauses to regain his breath, now visible as it puffs out of his nose as if he's expelling comic-book speech bubbles. He no longer feels heroic. He's small and cold and numbly aware that hunting for a baby in a snowstorm is like trying to find a single Tic-Tac in that enormous purse Mother carries around.
Hmmm. If he could get to the top of that tree, he might have a better view. Then again, he might also fall and break his neck. He can't look for Hana if he's in the hospital.
Proud of his good-decision-making skills, Drakken walks away, giving the trunk a quick pat to reassure it it's nothing personal. No one is going to catch him being inconsiderate of Kingdom Plantae again!
In fact, as he drags his getting-stiffer-by-the-second body up to the top of the swingset, he awakens a flower and asks it to act as a periscope. Though he feels guilty bringing one of them out in the harsh climate he knows they hate - well, the sooner they find Hana, the sooner they can all get inside. Drakken's lips shiver with the prospect of hot chocolate.
Yes, master, comes the whisper, green in his consciousness, with no letters to mentally - or telepathically - trip over. Not too hard on the ol' self-esteem.
At once, the flower shoots up to the amazing height that Drakken hasn't found a limit to yet. Even so, it must take somewhere between ten minutes and twelve hours before the vine is long enough to rake the whole of the yard and report back to him: There is no sign of the girl.
"Doodles!"
Drakken hits one knee and puffs into his gloved palms to warm some feeling back into them. The child has either vacated the premises or was never here to begin with. Despite how stupid he'll look, he hopes it's the latter.
Yet part of him still wants to be the one who saves her.
Drakken huddles against one chilled bar and sticks his hands into his armpits. He can't even think of what's stinging his cheeks as flakes anymore - it's more along the lines of getting shot at by a refrigerator with a surplus of ice cubes and a grudge.
And then it comes to him, a voice, like an audible guiding rope:
"Dr. D!"
His name! Well, his nickname. Drakken tumbles to all fours and skids down the slide headfirst. (Mother would've had a conniption if she'd seen.)
"Hana?" he asks hopefully. The heroism is returning to expand his chest. Maybe she needs him after all!
"Dr. D!"
Nope, that's the brother - whose name Drakken can't remember right now. But his plant-powered super-hearing latches onto the words and tugs him along through snow that now humps over his ankles. More angry ice cubes are hurled at him, and surely every step takes him more steeply uphill.
Lots of white. Lots of black. It's boring, it's frightening, though Drakken's pretty sure it's a good sign that he's not hallucinating Shego's favorite beach or anything. Not yet.
The house he can make out through the swirling deep-freeze alternates between getting closer and falling farther away. Is there really such a thing as snow madness? Drakken wonders. He saw a TV show once where a kid thought he had snow madness, but it turned out just to be chicken pox.
No, it's not chicken pox for him, Drakken can be certain of that much. He already caught them when he was in second grade. Nasty case, too, the type where you can play Connect-the-Scabs -
That's about where his thoughts are when he walks, chin-first, into a door that's been left ajar.
Heat floods Drakken and sends the hibernating touch receptors into waking-up pain. He cries out without meaning to, slumped over in the doorway, with four pairs of Stoppable eyes watching him in various stages of curiosity.
But for the moment, it's only Hana's that register. "Bloo?" she says, chubby fingers outstretched to him.
"Hana!" Drakken scoops her up in his arms before realizing he has very little experience with toddlers and even less idea of what to do with her. He awkwardly shifts her to one hip and trails his opposite hand down her back. "Oh it's so good to see you where have you been?" he blurts, forgetting to use punctuation.
A giggle. A bubble. Well, that's no help!
"She was in her room. I looked there at the beginning, but I forgot to check the ceiling. Man, that kid has moves." Although Ron's freckles are twisting into confused bunches, his tone is kind. "Are you okay?"
"I am now," Drakken says as water drips off his frosted hood and puddles on the floor. He delicately places Hana back on the floor - he really doesn't know what to do with her. "Now that I know she is."
"You went out looking for her?" One of Mrs. Stoppable's hands fans across the front of her purple shirt, while the other fiddles with a matching earring. Do women intentionally coordinate their outfits and their jewelry? This demands research. "In this weather?"
"You could have caught your death of cold," Mr. Stoppable adds, eyebrows bridging toward each other.
Oh-huh! Drakken snaps up to his full height, satisfyingly taller than anyone else in the house, and wipes at his thawing olfactories, preparing to educate this misinformed man. "Actually, cold and flu are viral infections and are passed from one contaminated human to another," he says. "Dropping temperatures often get the blame because these viruses' natural life cycles usually culminate in the winter. But if someone is so cold their body temperature actually drops, their immune system will most likely be compromised. . . "
Mr. and Mrs. Stoppable exchange befuddled looks. (That's a great word, befuddled, when it isn't being used to describe him.) Ron just spews out a laugh and says, "That's our Dr. D."
More warmth floods Drakken, and he doesn't think it's entirely due to the furnace.
"So - err - yes - I was out in the weather," he finishes.
He awaits the disdainful expressions, cues up the image of the medal hanging on his bedroom wall, shining golden. He has proven himself, and that will not change, even in the event that he has acted foolishly - well, that's a little harsh. Sillily - if that's a word - or -
But Mrs. Stoppable comes over and hugs him, and Drakken couldn't be more astounded if she'd turned into the Chiquita Banana and whipped out maracas. (Well, maybe a bit more astounded.) He wonders - vaguely, uncomfortably - whether or not she's aware that he is the man responsible for trying to blast her son with countless doom rays in his time. It keeps him standing there like the slowly melting icicle he pretty much is, despite her arms digging into his sensitive nerves.
When Mr. Stoppable joins in with a clap on the back, however, Drakken wrenches away. A woman's obnoxious touch is one thing; a man's too-firm one is quite another. "You put yourself in a very risky situation," Mr. Stoppable says. Drakken can almost see the exact hazard rate being calculated behind his glasses.
"For our daughter," Mrs. Stoppable says. "So thank you."
Drakken's cheeks flame anew. Praise is an even newer arrival in his life than Hana Stoppable is, and he doesn't know how to hold it, either.
Play it cool, Drakken.
"I'm just glad she's all right," Drakken repeats, squatting down to look his little toddler friend in the eye. "After all, what's Hanukkah without Hana?"
Then he dazzles the room with a grin, because - seriously - what he just did there was pretty cool.
Mr. and Mrs. Stoppable hunch in together, as if his sense of humor is Serious Business that requires a parent-teacher conference. Ron cries "Boo-yah! Nice one!" and holds up his hand for a high-five. From the mole rat, who's been chowing down on some spare gelt in Ron's pocket, Drakken collects a high-three (so named because Rufus's tiny paw can't span all five of even his twiggy fingers).
Drakken sinks gratefully, if not gracefully, into a kitchen-nook chair, clothes as soggy as a diaper that needs changing. (Not that he remembers being in diapers, of course, but he imagines it would feel much the same.) "Has anyone ever considered rigging up a machine that would allow you to teleport to the kid?"
"Nah," Ron says. "But Wade says he can hook her up with a tracking chip sometime. Only problem's gettin' her to stay still long enough."
Even now, Hana's dashed from the kitchen into the living room, selected a fat coloring book and a red crayon as thick as Drakken's big toe, and settled down to scribble. Ron rockets after her as if he expects the lion on the page to get greatly offended at Hana's utter disregard for the lines, rise out of the book, and attack her.
As Drakken strips off his coat, Mrs. Stoppable fixes him a mug of hot chocolate - from a powder packet - and the marshmallows she serves him are stale. Still, Drakken drinks it without complaint. (Well, okay, so he may curl his lip a few times, but that's an involuntary reaction.)
When he's thankfully washed down the last drop, Drakken wanders in after Ron and makes himself at home on the couch, ignoring the slush sogging the seat of his pants. Feet kicking happily, Hana sings to herself, "La-la-la-la, Flippy dance."
"She's gettin' to be such a little chatterbox." Ron shifts his gaze down to pour affection all over his little sister. "She calls Rufus 'Wuf' now, and she loves to do stuff with him. Look - he even helps her color."
Rufus is, indeed, tracing a colored pencil longer than his whole body over the eighty percent of the area Hana's wild scrawl has missed.
When Ron flips on the television, Rudolph and his band of fellow misfits light the screen and Drakken's heart. It's the first year where he doesn't need to envy their happy ending anymore.
"They don't have many Hanukkah specials, do they?" Drakken muses aloud.
Ron's forehead puckers like the thought is a novelty to him. "No, they really don't. 'S'weird, 'cuz the real story of Hanukkah is super-amazing and would make a totally awesome TV show!"
Drakken's factual antennae (which, in the interest of being factual, do not physically exist) go up. Ooh! He's detecting new information to acquire!
"What is the real story of Hanukkah?" he asks as Hana pulls herself, one leg at a time, up onto the couch between them. "You know, my mother says we've got Jewish ancestors on both sides, so I should know, but no one's practiced in my family for a long time and - "
"Aw, it's pretty bon-diggety," Ron says with a sage-looking nod. "But you know who tells it even better than me? My dad."
"What do I do better?" Mr. Stoppable appears in the doorway that his children have encircled with paper snowflakes. (Drakken loves the fact that Ron, now a mature high school graduate, culinary student, and - oh, yes - Ultimate Monkey Master, does not consider himself too cool for fun traditions.)
Ron's volume drops to someplace hopeful but not expectant. "Tell the story of Hanukkah."
Drakken squirms, suddenly conscious of every damp bit of himself. Father-son scenes always make him feel like he accidentally walked in on a party he wasn't invited to.
The squirmy, sopping feeling dries up some, though, when Mr. Stoppable actually breaks into a smile - a small, tight one, but a smile nonetheless. "You know, it's been a long time since we've done that," he says. "Give me five minutes to wrap up this paperwork and I'll be right with you."
Ron relaxes into the couch until his back molds with its squishy one. "Boo-yah," he says again, only he whispers it this time, as if he might wake himself up if he's not careful.
It's closer to seven minutes, according to Drakken's high-tech watch, but Mr. Stoppable is true to his word otherwise. He sits in the center of the sofa and gathers Hana into his lap with an ease that makes Drakken jealous. By the look on Ron's face, he might be crawling right in with her pretty soon.
"All right, the Stoppable household presents: 'The Story of Hanukkah'," Mr. Stoppable says, his voice as solemn as a movie announcer. Drakken is secretly impressed.
"Subtitle: 'Don't Mess With the Chosen Ones, Yo!'" Ron interjects.
Drakken giggles and doesn't even mind how preadolescent he sounds.
Mr. Stoppable rests one hand atop Hana's hair and begins, "A long, long time ago - beginning in 190 B.C., if you can believe that - the Greek army took up residence in Israel to win a military battle and began persecuting the Jewish people who lived there. They banned the observance of the Sabbath and other signs of God's covenant with Abraham. . ."
The story he's spinning out is not pretty, with statues of Greek gods invading the temple, which even a very religiously clueless person like Drakken can tell is a major no-no, and Jewish people rebelling with death and bloodshed. But Mr. Stoppable recounts it so calmly - not in that maddening calm that reduces something amazing into a matter-of-fact series of events - just the softness that comes from not wanting to overwhelm your audience . . anyway, Drakken almost doesn't realize he's snuggling into the fabric of the couch. It feels utterly natural.
As Mr. Stoppable explains about the miraculous olive oil that burned a week longer than it scientifically should have, Drakken glances around at these people he once thought so little of. Their house is warm and cozy, velvet with the smell of dinner and chocolate - and they've opened it to him, Dr. Drakken, once a semi-notorious supervillain! And at this moment, he's not sure there's anywhere else on Earth he'd rather be. Not even Santa's workshop.
After all, Drakken knows from experience, it can get awfully cold up there at the North Pole.
~The "snow madness" show Drakken references is George Shrinks. I am a child of PBS Kids.~