Chapter 21: Hello, Sir

Author Note: Here it is, guys! The BEGINNING of THE END!

Time: moments later

"...tell me...see...blip, understood?"

"Yes, Sir."

The words floated around in Drakken's head without meaning. He felt weirdly numb, as if he'd taken too many pain pills at once, and he heard an odd ringing tone in the distance, like a teapot whistling, high and piercing. It made his eyeballs hurt.

The sound of footsteps passed close by, and then he heard a mumbly noise from the opposite direction, like somebody griping to themselves. He tried to make out the words, but his stomach suddenly reported that it was nauseated. Crap, I'm gonna ralph, he thought dimly.

That was something you never saw in the movies. Good guys and bad guys alike could get knocked out ten times in two hours and just pop back to consciousness. In reality, for many people, there was a lot of barf involved. Drakken already knew he was one of those lucky people. After the prison beating, he'd nearly choked on his own vomit because he'd woken up on his back. Thank god someone had found him in time and turned him over. The move had saved his life, but the ewww factor had been enough to make him vomit all over again.

His stomach cut him a break this time. As the nausea subsided, he realized he was lying on his right side on a very hard floor. He tried to open his eyes and thought at first that he was blindfolded. But it was just grit stuck in his eyelashes. He blinked rapidly several times to knock the gunk free.

When his eyes were finally open and clear, he saw that he was in a dark deserted warehouse. How cliché, he thought. He was an ex-supervillain, after all. He'd used deserted warehouses enough himself. Whoever his silk-suited enemy was, the man operated by good old-fashioned villain rules. The angular shadows criss-crossing floor and ceiling were precisely foreboding. Each far corner of the big building was hidden by just the right amount of evil gloom. What little light there was—a faint lamp with a sickly yellow glow—was obviously designed to weaken even the stoutest of hearts. The place was empty except for random bits of scrap metal sheeting and other industrial garbage. The air was thick with dust.

Drakken felt as if it could be one of his very own properties.

A pair of shiny boots appeared in his field of vision. "He's awake, Sir," came a male's nasal voice.

"Good," came an answer. "Get him up."

Drakken was hauled to his feet. Ohhh, not good! he thought as his stomach protested anew. He gagged and leaned over, lost in dry heaves for a moment. Whoever was holding him abruptly let go, and he heard their footsteps shuffle quickly out of the line of potential fire.

Drakken stood there, stooped over, hugging his mid-section until he was sure it was a false alarm. Hooray for small favors, he thought.

That's when he heard a long low growl, like a dog's first warning that it's going to bite. Words then formed out of the growl: "Oh, how I hate you."

Drakken looked up. The old man was hobbling toward him with icy malice in his onyx eyes, his cane tap-tapping on the concrete floor.

Drakken spoke one word, his voice hoarse and pleading. "Why?"

"I've followed your career," the man said, ignoring the question. "When you started out, I held such hopes for you. I said, here is a villain whose genius will conquer the world!" The old man clenched his fist and shook it as if in triumph. "Yes, I had such hopes. I watched each of your plans unfold..." His voice grew waspish. "...and to my growing dismay I watched you bungle every single one of them! You let a child defeat you not once, but over and over again! You are a worthless fool, and I was a fool to put my faith in you. You've ruined me, that's what you've done. I should have it all by now!"

Drakken blinked. "All of what?"

"The world!" the old man bellowed. "What, you think I was going to let you keep it? You were supposed to conquer the world for me!"

At that, Drakken managed to straighten up, a wash of anger giving him the strength to glare at the old man eye-to-eye. "As if I'd give it to you!" he spat.

"Well, of course not. I'd have to kill you for it." The man's tone was so suddenly and unexpectedly conversational that Drakken felt his flesh creep.

He studied the man's face. Wrinkled, but the features were strong. He wasn't handsome, but he had the kind of face that would be hard to forget, what with those deep-set eyes, that stout chin, and that wide mouth with thin lips that made Drakken think of a snake trying to smile. "Who are you?"

"Someone who tried to help."

That answer was so unexpected, so totally ridiculous, that Drakken actually laughed. "What, by sending thugs after me who did everything but pull out my liver and eat it raw?"

The old man looked over Drakken's shoulder and gave a curt nod. Drakken whirled around, expecting to be attacked, but all he saw was a hawk-faced man in a tidy black suit standing by a door. Hawk-face nodded acknowledgement to his employer, opened the door and stepped through, closing it softly behind him.

Drakken turned back to the old man, who commented quite cheerfully, "I must say, I'm impressed by your resilience. The result of an experiment gone awry, am I right? I expected you to be an easy kill, but not only did you survive my little scenarios, you actually fought back when push finally came to shove...so to speak."

The veiled reference to the rape made Drakken nauseous all over again.

The old man went on. "I almost felt proud of you, do you know that? You showed some spirit after all." His face darkened with fury. "But you wouldn't die!" He instantly calmed back down. "You must understand that I chose to cut your life short because of the Diablos." Now he smiled, showing sparkling white dentures, the teeth too big for his withered snake mouth. "My god, the utter brilliance of it! I thought, ah-ha! Now he'll do it! He can't lose!" The hateful frown returned. "But you did lose. You failed beyond all failure with a plan that should have finally delivered the world into my hands!" For a moment he glared at Drakken with the eyes of the very Devil. Then he let out a howl of pure animal fury.

Drakken took a wary step back as the sound echoed in the empty warehouse. Dealing with unstable personalities was nothing new to him—he himself had his moments—but this old geezer wasn't your average villain, weirdly obsessed like Monkey Fist or annoyingly vindictive like Dementor. No, this fellow was certifiably insane. He looked okay on the outside, but now that Drakken was close to him, he could feel the bone-deep wrongness of the man. He radiated madness, and Drakken shied away from it, realizing that although he'd lost a hinge or two in his time, he'd never come close to this.

The door behind Drakken opened and Hawk-face stepped through. He held the door wide so that a short plump woman in a flower-print housecoat could hesitantly peek out.

Drakken's terror turned to dread. "M-Mother?"

Mama Lipsky took one look at her son and brought her hand up to her mouth. "You're dead!" she cried, then fainted dead away.

"Mother!" Drakken yelled, and he moved toward her.

"Stay right where you are!"

Drakken stopped cold at the sound of a distinctive click. He turned and saw the gun in the old man's wrinkled hand, pointed straight at him. Normally such a sight would have sent him groveling, but with his mother now in the mix, Drakken found the strength to push his fear aside. "What is she doing here!" he demanded.

The old man shrugged. "She's my wife."

Seconds ticked by.

The old man chuckled.

Drakken couldn't breathe. No. No no no, he thought. Not true not real not possible no can't no not isn't no nonononono...

"You were a disappointment before you were even born, Drew." The old man waved the gun in a casual gesture of dismissal. "Clearly I should have killed you in utero and saved myself forty-six years of grief."

Drakken couldn't utter a sound. He could barely make his eyes focus on the maniac who had tried to kill him repeatedly, mercilessly. Knife. Fists. Rape. Losing everything. Becoming no one. Falling into a black hole. No meaning. No context. No purpose. A living death. His fate.

His father....

"I was quite the actor in those days," Sir said with a nostalgic sigh. "Oh yes, I could be quite charming when I wanted to. And at the time I thought I'd made a good catch. She was beautiful when we met. I know it's hard to believe, but I wouldn't have married an ugly woman. Glad we parted when we did, though. The years have not been kind to her, have they? Ugh. No, not kind at all."

Drakken's shoulders shook. It wasn't a sob. He didn't know exactly what his body was doing. He had no control over it. All he could do was stand there and listen to words that struck him like the back of a large, cold hand.

"For the record, she had no idea I wasn't really a building contractor when we married." The old man laughed. "But she became suspicious. Wives should know better than to interfere with their husband's business, but Gertrude? Oh, she was difficult. A sharp mind, that one. Too sharp."

"She..." Drakken struggled to get the words out. "She...said you died...in a boating accident..."

"I owned a yacht, yes. And I suppose she considered me dead. But I'll have you know that she was the one who left me when she found out. Being married to the head of the Middleton Mob wasn't good enough for her, I suppose."

The Middleton Mob? Drakken knew his villain history, especially the infamous MM and the mysterious madman who ran it: Sir. No full name, just Sir. A cold blooded murderer. Heartless. Cruel. A man who was supposed to have died many years ago. Forty-six years, to be exact.

Drakken moaned as long-buried childhood memories resurfaced in his mind. His mother had told her little boy, always with tears, that "Daddy" had died a month before he was born. Daddy had been a good man, she'd said. Daddy had loved him, she'd said. Now he knew the truth—why she had always been so clingy, why she had insisted on walking hand-in-hand to school with him every day even when he'd reached high school, why she had cried so much when he'd begged her to back off and let him grow up.

Why she loved him so damned much.

The old man took a step towards his son. "Don't you see now, why I watched your career? I knew you were destined for villainy. It's in your blood." He raised the gun. "But you let me down."

Drakken shut his eyes, expecting to hear a loud blast. He figured he might feel the bullet rip into him, but he hoped not. What he heard next wasn't what he expected.

"Dewby?" Then, "Charles, no!"

It was his mother. She'd come to and was reaching out to her husband, a mother pleading for the life of her son.

"Shut up, Gertrude!" Sir commanded. "I swear I'll shoot you between your beady little eyes if you don't stop gabbling like a damned chicken!"

That did it. Drakken didn't think, he just moved, lunging for his father, fingers curled into claws, teeth bared. The next thing he knew he was stumbling sideways, his left arm hot and stinging, the sharp report of a gun filling his ears.

He clutched his arm, staggering. Blood began to seep between his fingers as he pressed on the wound.

"Pitiful," Sir lamented, lowering the gun. "Absolutely pitiful." He nodded again to Hawk-face, who spoke one quick word into a walkie-talkie. In seconds, the main loading ramp door of the warehouse rolled up to reveal Wabach and three other goons.

"Four against one," Sir mused. "Let's see how you do, you blue aberration."

The goons approached Drakken, whose first impulse was to run away. But then he thought, Why? Where can I go from here? This was it, the end. He could feel it in his bones. And his mother—his poor mother, who certainly knew the awful truth about her beloved little boy at this point—was watching. A surge of something besides self-preservation coursed through him. "What about her?" he asked, indicating Mama Lipsky. "Let her go. She hasn't done anything."

"Dewby, no!"

"Oh she hasn't?" Sir replied snidely, ignoring his wife's plea. "She gave birth to you, didn't she?"

Drakken winced and lowered his head. Of all the hurts he had suffered during this past year—even the bullet wound he now clutched with one hand—of all those hurts, those mere words hurt most of all.

Young Drew Lipsky had dreamed about his father for many years after the "accident," sometimes dreaming that he saved his father from drowning, sometimes dreaming that his father simply showed up at the front door, dripping wet but alive and ecstatic to see his son. Young Drew had woken up from those dreams crying his little eyes out. One night he had even prayed that he might die at that moment, just so he could meet his daddy.

The monster standing before him didn't deserve those dreams.

So the small light that had shined in Drakken's heart all these years, the light of his father's supposed love, winked out. The warm spot deep inside of him, the warmth that he'd always presumed would be the feeling of his father's arms around him, withered and grew cold.

He lifted his head and faced the monster. "Don't you dare put any blame on my mother," he hissed. "Or have you forgotten that fathers play some small part in the making of a child?"

"Not you," Sir declared. "Never you. Whatever I gave to you, you wasted. Besides, she left me! She would have ratted me out! I had to stage my own demise, for god's sake. Do you have any idea how complicated that is?"

Drakken's brow quirked. "Why didn't you just kill her like you did so many others?"

Sir frowned. "I thought about it but...even I have feelings."

Drakken burst out laughing. "Well, good for you! You want props for not killing your wife!" He laughed harder, needing the physical release of tension as much as anything else.

Sir's lip curled in a snarl. He turned to his goons. "Rough him up, boys, but remember—I take him out."

"Charles, please, don't do this!" cried Mama Lipsky.

Sir whirled and fired his gun at her. Drakken and his mother both screamed.

The bullet missed.

Drakken's world went red. He forgot the sound that the gun had made and the pain in his arm. He roared and leaped at his father again, this time getting a grip on the old man's silk lapel before he was wrenched back by Wabach, who shoved him to the floor. Drakken rolled, but before he rolled too far, he grabbed Sir's cane out of the old man's hand.

"Hey!" Sir shouted. "Give that back!"

Drakken used the cane to haul himself back to his feet before another goon reached him.

The goon swung. Drakken blocked the beefy fist with the cane. The goon howled and hauled off another punch, this time making contact with Drakken's jaw and sending the blue man back to the floor. His bad knee smacked against the concrete and his vision went white. He clamped his mouth shut so the sound of his crying was muffled. He didn't want his attackers to know that he had the handicap. But holy god it hurt, like a lightning bolt shooting up and down his leg! His eyes spilled tears and his whole body tensed as he tried to suppress sobs of pain.

Another goon rushed at him. No way could he stand up, so Drakken rolled onto his back and aimed the cane as best he could through his tears, viciously stabbing the goon in the gut with it. He heard a satisfying grunt and the goon went down, clutching his belly.

Then the others were on him, and Drakken felt the impact of boots, a horrid sensation he knew all too well. He didn't curl up and take it, though, not this time. Jaws clenched, he endured a kick to the ribs and then grabbed the foot, pushing hard against it and knocking its owner down. Then he swung the cane and hit Wabach in the face, sending the man stumbling back with a wail.

That was all he could do. His knee hurt too much. His heart and mind hurt too much. Briefly he wondered what he'd done to deserve so much tragedy, but the thought quickly faded under the onslaught of kicks.

"Look at you, a heap of useless flesh!" came Sir's venomous voice. "You're no son of mine!"

TBC

Heh heh heh.