A/N: I do not own any of the characters in this chapter. For those of you just tuning in, this is a darkfic. Anybody could die at any time, including your favorite characters. Do not read on if you value your childhood.
I originally had a song called The Organization Without A Cool Musical, but I'll have to fit it in some other chapter. Unfortunately, there's going to be another song next chapter, and I couldn't have three songs in a row.
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You could escape from here. Why don't you?
There's nowhere to go.
A little boy sat alone in a white room. The only decorations in the room were a telegraph machine, a painting of sunflowers (and original Van Gogh) and a telegraph machine, quietly tapping out messages from the world outside. He was as thin as a pencil. Worse than thin, he looked like he hadn't eaten in days. His black hair fell across his face as he peered through it to his work. He looked up at the painting, once or twice, then he looked back down, and continued carving.
A light knocking came from the door. Not waiting for an answer, Dr. Dementor walked into the room. "Drew?"
The boy only nodded, not looking around.
"What are you… how did you get out of your straight jacket?"
Drew shrugged. "Just set down dinner anywhere."
Dr. Dementor walked in, and felt something crunch underneath his boots. The floor had thirteen chess boards, arranged in a way only Drew could figure out, and chess pieces set on them even more strangely. Looking down, he saw he'd just stepped on several pawns… with jewish stars carved onto them.
He felt sick. Did his son plan for him to step on… no he couldn't have…
He set the dinner down next to the machine. "You should leave." Drew said, moving the Queen named Alice across the board. "And check up on Anna after this. And then check up on Dr. XXX."
"Why?" Dementor asked. His son was brilliant. He could calculate the future… see every step in front of him like a grand design.
"Dr. XXX will succeed." Drew said. "And for a while, you'll fall out of favor. But eventually the end result will rebel and he'll have need of your surfaces. Anna is about to do something to curry favor with Maleficent. You'll need to help."
"Right." Dr. Dementor opened the door, but he stopped. The question nagging at the back of his mind wouldn't go away. "Son… if you've escaped from your straight jacket, you could escape from here. Why don't you?"
"There's nowhere to go."
Dr. Dementor nodded, and left. He didn't see him place the rook he was carving onto the chessboard. He'd carved letters down the side; O.W.A.C.A.
"Yet."
The mighty ship the S.S. Unconquerable streamed across Doe Bay at full speed. But even as it evaded the Nazi battleships chasing it like a pack of wolves, the majestic ship seemed to stand at full attention as the helicopter containing the royal families landed on the command deck, where waited a man in full Captain's uniform. His name was Fergus Flynn, and he was the second in command of the O.W.A.C.A.
"This way your highnesses." Agent B helped the royal families off of the helicopter. Agents F and V flew off to pick up the Go family. Flynn was really uncomfortable about dressing kids up in spandex and sending them into war. But he trusted Monogram about these things. It was his job to make him look good.
"Your majesties!" Flynn bowed deeply, in proper English fashion. "Welcome to the S.S. Unconquerable!" A nearby explosion rocked the ship. "I apologize for the delay in getting here, but as you can see we're doing the best we can."
"Ex-Commander Flynn." The Queen of Maldonia strode coldly off of the ship. Her husband behind her was less formal, hovering over his wounded son. "Thank you for the prompt rescue. My son is in need of medical attention."
"Of course Ma'am." Flynn gestured, and Agent B hefted the bleeding prince to the infirmary. "And I must thank ye for asking for our help."
"It was my son who asked for aid, and only when all other options were exhausted." The Queen said. "I myself have severe doubts about your… organization."
"Well we did jus' save yerself and yer family Ma'am." Flynn pointed out.
Another explosion rocked the boat. "Not yet, Ex-Commander Flynn." She gestured ahead. "And as we flee, perhaps only delaying the inevitable, my country burns. And the lives of my family and friends are in the hands of a madman."
"Well, thank goodness for that." Flynn said. "Because it's not like sane men have gotten us anywhere, eh?"
He could tell from the look on her face that this didn't reassure the Queen. "Look, right now we're yer only hope. Jus' give Max a chance eh? I wouldn't sacrifice my military career over him if he weren't the best man for the job. I believe his 'madness' is just some deep, deep strategic thinking, that mere mortals cannot comprehend."
"Flynn!" On reflex, Flynn turned and sharply saluted Max Monogram. "How many ships to Port?"
"Five sir!" Flynn yelled. "And one to Stern! I've ordered to head Stern!"
"Nonsense!" Monogram yelled. "That's what they're expecting! Order the ship to escape to Port! All power to engines! Ramming speed!"
Queen Maria stared, superbly disdainful. "the man you've placed your trust in is a Muppet. And he is not wearing trousers."
"Begging yer pardon ma'am, but if you were a genius you wouldn't wear pants either. You should get below deck and tend to your son."
He left the shocked queen to issue his orders.
The S.S. Unconquerable used to be his ship when he was in her majesty's Navy. And he wouldn't see her fall to these savages. Doe Bay opened up into two openings, divided by an island. On the Island's stern, five Nazi battlships blocked their escape, and to the Island's port was a single enourmous flagship, large enough to make the Unconquerable look like a dwarf. And behind them, to boats pursued them. "Steer to Port!" He yelled. "Present 'em with as little a target and as much metal as you can!" He hoped his ship could live up to her name.
Cannon fire ripped across the ships, and then he saw the cunning of Monogram's plan. If they had tried to blow past the one ship, they would have presented a clear side of their ship to the enemy, making it a bigger target. And by steering through the larger number of ships, a good many portions of their shots ended up hitting their own ships.
They could make it.
"Sir!" Agent P pointed. "There's a ship dead ahead."
"That there is." Flynn acknowledged her, hoping the sweat on his brow didn't show. "We stay the course."
This was it. There were only a few agents in O.W.A.C.A. and this was their first battle against the enemy. This was where they showed their metal. Officially, they were pirates. He'd deserted the British Navy when Max came to him with his madcap plan for a special situation unit and he decided it was worth the risk. If they succeeded here, they might get approval and funding, and then they could really get into Hitler's business.
"Hold fast lads!" He called out, before gripping the railing himself. The ship's head sheared clean through an enemy ship's side. Multiple explosions rocked the vessel, and in the end, the Unconquerable emerged through the smoldering wreckage of two halves of a ship.
The crew let out a loud cheer, even as they continued firing.
And then the ship began to slow down.
"What happened?" Flynn asked. "Why are we slowing down?"
The anchor hadn't been pulled up all the way. Normally it wouldn't matter, but not when the Horseman held onto it and dug his heels into the silt at the ocean floor.
Nobody escapes the Horseman.
"Prepare to be Boarded!"
They had made it out of the bay, but they were going increasingly slowly. The pair of boats on their tail had managed to catch up. The other four boats were turning around. O.W.A.C.A.'s few agents took cover and got ready for a fight. They may be few, but they were selected because of their special skills.
Agent M, otherwise known as Gabriella Montez, ran out of ammunition as she tried to pepper the enemie boats with lead. An enemy sniper noticed, and took the opportunity to shoot her directly in the stomach. Agent Spinelli dropped his own weapon to help her. Flynn badly wanted to yell at him to get back to his post, but seeing Agent M like that, he couldn't find it in him.
The Nazis got close enough to put up ramps and begin to board. However, they met with much more reliable resistance then O.W.A.C.A.'s gunners. Agent P, Nim Possible to her friends, dove among the boarders, red hair swirling, as she dodged gunfire like they were throwing snails at her. Flynn was honestly shocked that he managed to convince the first woman to finish the Navy's Basic Underwater Demolition Course to join a half-baked enterprise like this.
Agent B, who refused to be called anything but Cobra, helped himself to another helping of boarders. Of the Nazis fished out alive from the waters that day, half of them would report that the last thing they saw was a fist coming towards them, tattooed with the word Cobra. The other half would, more bewildered than anything, saw that the fist that decked them out was tattooed with the word Bubbles.
The helicopter landed again, and Flynn rushed up to it. He could see another small boat speeding towards them from the mainland, and this was just the lucky break he needed right now. "Agent F! Grab a machine-gun and go!" He climbed aboard as Agent V left. "Himgo! Himgo I need you to make a shield around the ship!"
"I can't!" Himgo said. "I have to keep Shego from burning us all!"
Flynn saw the girl, encased in an orange sphere and burning with bright green flame. He knew nothing could get past Himgo's shields, but he swore he could feel the heat. She looked like she was about to pass out from lack of oxygen, the tears streaming down her cheeks evaporated almost instantaneously. He'd known she wasn't ready for this. She was only a child. It wasn't right to force her into war. He only wished he could reach out to her, in that moment.
"All right then. Hergo, I need you to make an ice…" He suddenly realized that Hergo wasn't there. And then he knew why Shego was crying. He clenched his fists. This was bad. Agent J was down, and if this kept up, then by the time they finished off the two ships, the other five Nazi ships would have converged, and then the big one after that. They needed to get the royal family out of here, and they needed to do it now.
"Captain Flynn!" The young agent S ran up to them. "Another Nazi ship approahcing, but it has a white flag up!"
That piqued Flynn's interest. He jogged over to the railing to get a look at the ship.
It was coming in fast on their tail. On its prow was a boy, dressed in red leaves and a red pirate's longcoat. He had a knife in his hands and was waving it like a madman. "Avast ye scurvy dogs! We've come to lend ye the blade of Captain Jack Hook!"
The Nazis on the boat to the Unconquerable's stern, began to scream as the new boat came towards them. The new boat knocked them out of the way. The boarding ramps fell into the ocean, along with the Nazis running across them. The crew of the Unconquerable cheered as the newcomers took their place.
Monogram was at that side of the ship in an instant. "Go defend the Port side!" He yelled, and the crew joined the others where the fight was. "What are you doing?" He asked the newcomers.
"We're helping ye! Is that not obvious!" The red-headed child said, in an atrocious pirate accent.
"We're here to fight Nazis!" A cheer rose up from the ship's crew, and Flynn noticed that most of them wore Nazi uniforms but no Swastica armbands.
Monogram noticed too. "Hey! Are you lot Nazis?"
"No, we hate Nazis. We're just Germans."
"Then come aboard!"
"Come on men!" A soldier with a hook for a hand gestured to his crewmates. "For our dreams!"
The boy with the knife leaped over the bridge between the two ships, followed by the swarm of Germans. "Hoist the colors!" The boy yelled. "Weigh the Anchor! Avast me mateys, dying is the day worth living for!"
Oh well. Flynn thought. Two madmen are better than one.
"Ahem."
He felt a tugging at his leg. He looked down. The mouse tugging his leg wore a red robe and a pointy wizard hat. He blinked. "Slap me thrice and hand me to me mamma. Do you know, you're a talking mouse. Or I'm insane."
"You're not insane." The Mouse said. "But we can't go out to sea. Look."
Flynn obligingly looked. There were storm clouds on the horizon, and a shape moving amongst the smoke. "What in the name of the Queen's knackers is that?"
"It's a dragon." Mickey said. "But she can't come into Maldonia, or Rhodigan, or Genovia. Not while the royal families are alive."
"Well we have the royal families on our ship, right now." Flynn said. He was beginning to panic.
Mickey's eyes boggled. "But… but they're outside of Maldonia's borders." Mickey said. "She can get them. And then she can go into the Kingdoms…"
Flynn didn't hear the rest of it. He was running up to team Go. "Himgo!" He yelled. "Get a shield around us now!"
"I can't!" He said. "Shego's hotter than she's ever been before! She'll burn us all if I let go!"
"Let me see." Mickey pushed through.
Shego couldn't stop seeing her. She couldn't stop seeing her sister burning. She was surrounded by fire, fire on all sides. Her fire. She wished she'd never gotten these superpowers. She killed her sister. The fire burned. She hadn't known how much fire had burnt.
"It's not your fault." She looked up. There was a boy there, walking through the fire without getting burnt. He looked sad.
"I killed her." She said. "I killed my sister."
"That's not your sister." The boy pointed out. Shego looked again. Hergo sas smiling at her, mockingly. But it was just her head. The rest of it was an armored man.
"What is it?"
"It's something horrible. Something not of this earth." The boy knelt down next to her. "That thing killed your sister, okay? Not you."
Tears welled up in Shego's eyes. "It should've been me instead of Hergo."
The boy held her hand. "My name's Mickey." He said. "What's yours?"
"Shego." She said.
"Well Shego." Mickey said. "I've lost a sister too. We were in danger, and she leaped in front of it to protect me. Shego, I almost died anyway, but I decided I needed to survive. For her."
He brushed the tears away from her eyes. "Shego, you're burning. And you need to stop. For Hergo."
Shego opened her eyes. She was trapped in an orange sphere. "She's awake!" She heard the boy yell.
The orange sphere opened. She fell into the hands of a boy. Except he wasn't a boy… he was a mouse! A talking mouse! Like the cartoons Himgo drew!
She looked around. Himgo was making a shield around the rest of the ship now. People were shooting at them from the outside.
"But we still can't leave!" Flynn said. "We're still stuck here."
"Captain!" Agent P yelled. "The boat is sinking!"
"How is that possible?"
"I don't know, maybe we've sprung a leak!"
Shego saw something peek out of the mouse's robes. Something small.
"Iridessa?" The Mouse asked. "Do you think you could help us out?"
"I… yes, maybe."
The little girl, flew over the ship. Shego watched in wonder, as it dropped gold everywhere. "Think happy thoughts!" A boy yelled somewhere. "Everybody! Think of the happiest thing!"
Shego tried to think of a happy thought. She pried her mind away from thoughts of her sister.
The Horseman braced himself against a rock.
His anger was such that a thunderstorm would shrink from a fight with him. Over the years he had been summoned countless times. Mortals had thought to control him, to have him kill their enemies. And he obeyed because they summoned him. He killed because he enjoyed death.
But he had always, always, finished his quarry quickly. They died and he would go back home.
Some just screamed. Some ran. Some begged for mercy. Some bartered for their life. Some tried to fight. It mattered not. When the horseman was summoned, their death was the one constant.
But nobody had evaded him for this long!
His grip on the anchor chain tightened. He put one fist in front of the other. He didn't care about their heads any more. He would kill them, and anybody else on the boat.
Shego tried to focus on her mom and dad. But it was impossible. She couldn't get the picture of her sister out of her head.
"Yow!" Mickey dropped her, pulling back his singed robe.
"I'm sorry." She cried. "I'm sorry. I can't stop thinking about my sister…"
"Then think about her." Mickey said, understandingly. "Think about all of the good times you had with her."
Shego turned her mind to her sister again. But this time she stopped thinking about her death. She thought about the time Hergo bought her and Mego ice cream. The times when she'd stay up with her to keep her mind off of her parents. She thought about how she stood up for her in front of Monobrow (and giggling behind his back when they made up that nickname). How when the man at the fair tried to cheat Shego out of a toy, Hergo had won the toy for her.
Almost against her will, a smile crept up into the corners of her mouth.
"Everybody!" Peter yelled. "Think the happiest thoughts you can!"
The Horseman felt it. The presence of fairy magic. He pulled down on the anchor with all of his demonic strength.
And the ship above him pulled up.
Alright. Time for a change of tact.
The Horseman let himself get light, and the ship shot up like a balloon. The Horseman kept putting one hand in front of the other.
"Avast mateys!" Peter yelled. "We're aloft!"
Flynn thought he'd never live to see the day. His ship, the Unconquerable, was soaring through the sky, an orange shield blocking off the rockets fired from below.
"Dragon off the Starbord side!"
He saw the dragon bearing down on them, a great black lizard that could devour any of his crew whole, smoke streaming out of her mouth, racing to get them before they crossed back into Maldonia.
Agent Spinelli screamed like a little girl. "Your… orders Captain?" Agent P asked with a tremble in her voice.
Flynn saw the dragon and thought of shooting it out of the sky. It was a happy thought. "Give her blood and thunder."
Agent F emptied the Unconquerable's main gun at the giant dinosaur. A cheer rose from the crew as one shell burst through her right wing and it crumpled in on her. She fell through the sky, transforming back into Maleficent in a burst of flame. She flew back down to the helm of the giant ship and began barking orders, but no matter how many rounds they fired, Himgo managed to keep up his barrier.
"That's showing the old dinosaur!" Flynn cheered. Then he heard Agent V calling from behind him.
"Captain! I think I've found out why we've been sinking!"
The Horseman's grip wasn't even phased when the anchor crashed into one of the towers of Maldonia's palace. He just kept climbing up. He would pursue his prey over world's edge if that is where their path lay.
One hand reached over the edge of the boat and he pulled himself up.
In front of him stood a man, and though he had no eyes the Horseman could see he was valiant and true.
That was it. The last straw.
He would personally massacre every last filthy reeking mortal on this ship.
He raised his sword, and the man reached into his trench coat and pulled out a really large six-shooter. The Horseman had met such weapons before, and would have laughed at the folly of it, had he not been in such a mood that would make monsters cower.
The man shot the Horseman at point blank range. The bullet stopped in mid-air, took one look at the Horseman, and fled.
The Horseman paused. He had never seen a bullet act that way before. It was almost… comical.
He laughed.
He couldn't help it. He knew the effect he had on mortals, but the fact that a bullet had ran away from him…
And Edward Valiant took the opportunity to push him off the side of the boat.
The gall!
The Horseman grabbed the anchor chain. He decided that he would kill the man in the trenchcoat first. He would keep his head, and when he accomplished his geass he would place it in his special trophy case, and wear it at parties.
Then the man leaned over the side of the boat and fired another shot. This time, the bullet raced toward the chain, pulled out an axe bigger than the one that had originally cut off the Horseman's head, and cleaved the chain in two.
The Horseman decided he hated this human more than any other being in any other world, and by the time he hit the ground, he had decided not to cut off his head, but to systematically break and destroy every single fibre of his being, starting with his toe tips, and continuing up to his neck, keeping him alive until the very end, and then wearing his head as a trophy during the Red Queen's gallas.
He crashed through the roof of a shop below him. When he hit the ground floor, it knocked a great many clocks off the wall, and all of them went off sounding out great bells and flinging cuckoo birds at him.
"Run Pinnochio!"
The Horseman stood up, and watched the carpenter stand before him, legs shaking, saw in hand.
Unacceptable!
First his quarry had the gall to elude him for a while, and now even a mere carpenter could stand his ground? No! the Horseman advanced, and the poor fool stood, trapped like a deer in headlights. A single swipe of the sword and he was no more.
The Horseman picked up the anchor, on top of a dead cat and a fish madly flopping around searching for air. He dragged it outside.
The boy the carpenter had died trying to protect was being molested by the Nazis. He cared little for the jewish lad's fate. He swung the anchor over his head, and it crashed through the window of a passing jeep.
The car rolled to a stop. The Horseman ignored the passenger's cries for mercy as he tossed the anchor in the backseat and threw him out. He got in the jeep and drove. His quarry would not get far.