This one came out unbelievably fast. In fact, it also ran way long so I finally decided to cut it where I did rather than the VERY nasty place the next one may end, unless I decide to change things again. A LOT of the threads that have been running in the background are finally coming to the fore, so that made this installment heavy on the dialog and psychological drama but 26 will be a rock-em sock-em action fest, guaranteed. Thanks to those who're sending in reviews. It's really the only feedback I get on this besides my own satisfaction, so even if it's not positive, I like hearing what's going on. As a reward for reviewers, I'm working up a chapter that I drafted out but never actually wrote that will be sent to reviewers only via PM. I'll post when it's ready, and for those who've reviewed in the past, I'll be sending out a PM letting you know when it's available and if you want it because… yes… it will include some adult material. And as a hint: Twister. Ye Old Legal stuff: Kim Possible, Shego, Ron Stoppable, Will Du, Yori, Rufus, Wade Load, the Tweebs, Dr. Director, Dr. Drakken and all other characters borrowed from the wonderful KP Universe are the creations of Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley, and those names are all trademarks of the Disney media organizations. Although use in this context may be considered fair under parody law, just in case: this work was not created for profit, no money changed hands etc. Also, this story takes place at a time at which all characters shown should be considered to be over the legal age of 18… except, obviously Wade and the Tweebs.
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AT THE CENTERFOLD OF THE STORM
Chapter 25
#######
The wind tore at them with tiny daggers of volcanic glass as ripples of sheet lighting shattered the skies overhead. And they hadn't even made it completely out of the ship yet.
"Grav-Levs on!" Shego voice yelled from inside the hovercraft.
"Got it! Safety locks off! Push!" Kim screamed back/commanded as she snapped off the restraints and she, Ron and Yori pushed the now weightless hovercraft out of the back of GR One. Anna was already on the ground with Will and Yori, but Cyn's video captured the frightening moment as the vehicle seemed to tip ominously as it hit the steep incline and spun sideways in the howling wind. Instead of capsizing, however, it ultimately simply slipped smoothly over the edge like soap out of a nervous prisoner's fingers, bobbing, bouncing and wiggling on an invisible cushion of anti-gravity jello as it settled to the ground below. And no sooner had the masterpiece of Drakken's engineering plopped itself to the unfirm terra firma of the Riri's volcanic soil than the pilot inside cut the power and popped out of the hatch… just in time to see Will Du sprinting back across the helipad with a frantic look in his eyes.
"Will!" Shego demanded. "You're already finished prepping the Helo?"
"No!" Will screamed as he ran past in the direction of Volcanolab 2. "Don't even ask! You have to see it to freaking believe it!"
That was too much for Shego. She ran back across the mini-field and peered into the chopper's cockpit. Will was right. It was the stupidest thing she'd ever seen.
"Why the HELL would someone put a Safe-T-Klub on a helicopter?" She vented as she looked at the heavy metal bar that had been awkwardly locked down over the controls. She could PROBABLY melt it off… at the risk of severely damaging the instruments… but instead of a pickable key, the device had a combination lock.
"Shego, what…?" Kim managed as this time it was Shego who ran past in the direction of the lab facility.
Kim sighed. Apparently the demon Murphy had already made his appearance.
#######
Inside the lab, Will was having a heated discussion with the senior researcher in charge, who unfortunately wasn't very senior. The actual head of Volcanolab 2 had been… what a shock… over at Volcanolab 1 trying to score the latest videos when the lava flows hit. Apparently one of the pilots had been taking a certain sleep medication… something that was almost ubiquitous among the staff given that they were literally living on top of a giant and very active geological bomb… and had actually been caught attempting to lift off while still sound asleep. Unfortunately, no one knew what the combination was and the erstwhile pilot had been… this was beginning to get monotonous… over at Volcanolab 1, although he was listed as visiting the infirmary to see about a lung infection.
They were interrupted by the loud pounding at the door… roughly the same volume and intensity as would be achieved were a lovesick rhinoceros attempting to copulate with the entrance while wearing a titanium condom… and a vaguely feminine voice bellowing something that was impossible to hear amid all the other din.
"What the hell," the senior researcher, a burly, bearded ginger-hair whose name, coincidentally, WAS Murphy, blurted, "is that?"
The number three researcher in charge… a title they had actually given to the small, wrinkled and probably more than a little senile man in order to both justify his enormous salary and keep him out of the hair of his superiors at the main lab, peered out the tiny quartz safety window and gasped! "Aaa! It is the Lowardians!"
"What?" about half of the staff inside the lab responded in shock. As shitty as their day had been going, an alien invasion would have been just about par for the course.
"The woman outside knocking, she is green!" Number 3, whose actual name was Deschanel, informed them with alarm.
"Oh for the love of God," Will exclaimed. "That's Shego." To Deschanel's blank look of puzzlement. "You don't know Shego? Saved the planet along with Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable, who are also with us. And Dr. Drakken."
"Oh, the blue man!" Deschanel's attention leaped illogically, ignoring the pounding that was still going on outside. "I remember. With the pretty flowers?" He peered suspiciously at Du. "You are not Blue anymore? Where are your flowers?"
"I'm not Dr. Drakken," Will snapped, wondering who the hell's tax money was paying for this idiot and if it was his, how to get a refund. "I'm Will Du, Global Justice."
"Oh. Why did the blue man not come?"
"He wasn't coming. He never… " Du looked at Murphy for help. "Why are we talking about him?"
At that point Kim materialized inside the lab in the form of a hologram, which was holding a perfect holo of the Klub in its hands. "Will, you've apparently got your Shegofone set on mute; I had to hack in via remote. Let Shego in, and get the volunteers ready to go."
"How did you…" Du began, staring at the H-Klub.
"Yori did it." Kim shrugged. Ninjas. Best not to ask. "Dr. Murphy? I'm Kim Possible. I'd offer to shake your hand but I'm not real right now. Have you managed to make any further contact with the staff on Volcanolab 1?"
"Not exactly," the bearded researcher replied, as an irritated Shego was finally let in behind him and was filled in by Du. "But we know they're alive and well."
"How's that?"
"Someone finally snapped to the fact that this is a seismic research center. They've been banging on things in Morse for the last two hours. It's not easy to make it out with everything else going on, but our people ARE good."
"Excellent," Kim smiled. At last some positive news. "Is there any chance that they could hear a message from us?"
"From this distance, no. Not with an active volcano in the way. But from a bit closer to the lab… maybe a thousand feet or so, certainly."
"Good to know," Kim nodded, filing the fact away. "Agent Du here will be ferrying Ron and your volunteers over to Rahi to start the bore-in process. If you have someone familiar with Morse, I suggest you try to make contact as soon as you land. If nothing else, they ought to be able to detect the sound of the Tunnel Diggers. If you pulse the power, it's pretty distinctive."
"I know Morse," Murphy informed the group, "So does Stephens."
"In that case, let's be about it. Shego, it looks like Will's got at least two loads to ferry in, so why don't you do your own preflight on the 'copter?"
"Right." Shego grunted, pulling open the mammoth airlock type doors… now noticeably dented on the outside… and walked back into the storm without another word.
#######
Fortunately, except for the stupidity with the Klub, everything else about the chopper… which was, as Will had guessed, an AS350, but one of the BB series rather than the B3 Shego had hoped for… seemed to be fine. She'd never actually stolen one before so she couldn't be sure, but she had a suspicion that their new ride had probably started life as an RAF Squirrel HT.1 or its Australian RAN equivalent. It wasn't a bad vehicle, but the derated Arriel 1D1 engine… a compromise to improve operational life-cycle, which made sense stationed out in the middle of nowhere… lacked the kick in the pants of its big sister, an ultra-high performance version powered by a thumping Arriel 2B that had been the first helicopter to ever land on the top of Mt. Everest.
Normally she'd be drooling.
But still, it beat swimming or walking, she thought at she locked the cyclic and collective controls, put the master fuel valve in and started flipping the circuit breakers. When she got to the fuel, she was pleased to see that the tanks were nearly full.
The door on the other side of the cockpit opened and Kim popped inside, clutching two canvas SmatryMart carrysacks with the words 'explosives' scrawled on them in magic marker. Like Shego, she'd tied her hair back in a ponytail and tucked it inside the collar of her thermal suit. Not the best way of handling it, but certainly the quickest and it would make putting on the sealed helmets on a lot easier. It also had the effect of making Kim look even younger than she already was.
"Okay, Will's ferrying over the…" The redhead began.
"Quiet," Shego cut her off. The last thing she needed was a distraction while going through her checklist on an unfamiliar craft. She'd have preferred to have kept the Hover, but it moved a lot more weight and, frankly, was easier to fly. She sought escape in her checklist:
Fuel boost on
Fuel cut off in for 3 seconds
Fuel cut off out
Fuel boost off
Throttle closed
Damn, she wished she'd flown one of these before.
Pressing the engine starter button, she waited 'til it fired, depressed the fuel cut off and rolled on the throttle to increase engine rpms. Between inside and outside she could barely hear a damn thing.
"Headsets," She reminded Kim, who put on her own pair of ear protectors as Shego engaged the radio, transponder and beacon in rapid order, leaving out the in-copter intercom circuit. RPM were at 1400, still climbing. Dummy check to see if any fools were in the area attempting to make like Marie Antoinette… no, clear. Engaging rotor. Clutch… oil temp looking right. RPMs at 2200… increase manifold, 2 seconds left, 2 secnods right, rotor up and…
"We got everything?" She shouted to Kim over the engine roar.
"TD's aft in cargo," the Redhead confirmed. "Charges here, dets in back. Thought I'd keep 'em separated for now."
"Good idea," Shego nodded. She knew more than she should about explosives, but somewhere along the way Kim had picked up full ATF certification and some not so official and considerably more advanced hands on-demolitions training from some SEALS. Was there anything dangerous the girl hadn't found a way to get her tiny mitts into? Which brought the thought that had been rubbing her raw inside, that she'd been suppressing for hours, rushing right back to the fore…
"Here we go," Shego announced, ignoring the issue, and the Volcanolab chopper rose into the stormy sky to meet its namesake.
######
"It's unbelievable," Anna gasped as they came in from the south side of the Rahi, snapping off a handful of stills. The lava fields dwarfed anything she had seen in her visits to Hawaii or Iceland, though she'd never been at either of those during a full eruption. After a lot of talk back and forth, it had been decided that she would be staying on the hovercraft with Will and Yori while Cyn would join Ron and his group as they bored down into the flesh of the volcano. Cyn's comparative youth had been a major deciding factor, although Anna liked to feel she was still in great shape for someone her age, but the truth was that she also felt that the actual rescue process would be somewhat simpler to document. Anna envied the emotional content of the footage her assistant was going to capture… assuming everything went well… but seeing the epic scale of the destruction and chaos enveloping the island, the photographer was now glad that she'd be staying above the Earth. She was used to photographing beautiful celebrities in their worst moods, but compared to gorgeous Mother Earth have a full out tantrum, all else paled into insignificance.
"I've never seen anything like it either," The bearded scientist named Murphy agreed as he fought for a vantage point with Ron and Cyn, who was already grabbing video. "When this is over, the entire shape of the island will have changed… if it's even still there at all. Half of the west side is already gone."
"Kinda like Atlantis," Ron marveled. He ought to be scared, but instead he was excited. It had been too long since he'd run a mission with Kim. He'd never be the danger-junkie she was, but while you could take the boy out of the adventure…
He wished Yori could be here, but the flight was already over-packed and she was basically being treated as a reserve asset at the moment. He'd get to see her briefly when Will came back with the second load, but it did make sense to partner her with Will where her vastly superior experience in climbing and rescue skills would serve as a good match for the GJ man's piloting ability. And Kim was right about Will, Ron had to admit; he'd been prepared for the usual officious butthead he and Kim had run into in the past, but he'd firmly accepted his place as Kim and Shego's subordinate and… Ron wondered if Will had noticed this himself yet… seemed to be accomplishing a lot now that he wasn't trying to do everything by "the book."
Actually, Will WAS doing everything by the book. It was just that the BOOK was no longer the GJRegs, it was the Global Rescue Ops plan that he'd already committed to memory. An ops plan that emphasized synergy and individual initiative over regulations and regimentation. Yes, there was a chain of command, but when the goal was to save lives, the person on the spot was encouraged to take whatever action necessary as long as they were certain that they had a full grasp of the situation. In this order, it was actually Wade who was the lynchpin on which all else hung, not Kim, Shego or, in this case, Will Du, who would eventually move to a less field-orientated position that would perform many of the task that Wade and Kim's brothers were performing now.
He clamped down on the anti-gravs as they began to hit the thermal turbulence being put off by the now nearly mile wide lake of lava. With the Hovers, the trick was actually to increase gravity rather than power when going through rough patches. Otherwise, the essentially weightless vehicles were inclined to flip or go into a spin, something that would be very bad with as many unsecured passengers as he was currently hauling. He imagined Shego could do much better… in both training and analysis they'd repeatedly watched videos of the woman performing feats in Hovers that Drakken still claimed were impossible, despite the evidence to the contrary . It had become both Du and Dr. Director's conviction that the real reason the crazed genius had refused to bring Shego over to GJ with him had been fear for his own job security, and having since learned that a number of the tweaks to the grav-systems had been developed by the green woman rather than the blue madman, that theory seemed to have advanced to the status of an almost certain of that fact. But at the time it had seemed like Shego, while a deadly presence in her own right, had been just a hired hand for Drakken. In the end, it looked like only Kim Possible had ever really understood the green woman or her true potential.
#######
At that particular moment, Kim didn't understand what was going on with Shego at all. And it was driving her crazy.
As the Squirrel was blasted back and forth by alternating thermal drafts and hurricane force winds, Shego's eyes seemed locked in permanent scan mode out the front of the cockpit… Which was fine, but why wasn't she talking to her? Kim had put on the acoustic-damping headsets as soon as she'd been told to, but Shego had never gone on and made the final step of switching on the connecting intercom. Realizing Shego's attention was occupied, Kim had waited patiently for the green woman to eventually turn them on, and hopefully to tell her what was on her mind, but they were a third of the way to their destination and she still hadn't spoken. The dragon's face seemed stony. And cold. And it was starting to worry her.
So Kim went around the system. Reaching up to a place directly below her ear she engaged the remote override mode on the Kimmunicator hanging on Shego's belt. The woman already had her own blue-tooth earbud in, so they had an uninterrupted private chanel that Kim now controled.
"Is something wrong?" Kim asked.
Shego flinched at the unexpected voice, but turned her head to look at Kim with an expression of… no, it wasn't quite incredulity, it was something else…
"Is something wrong?" The green woman parroted back, then with far more emotion. "Is something WRONG?"
And to Kim's horror, Shego burst into tears.
"You asked me to BURN you Princess. Right after you implied I wanted to punish you. In front of EVERYBODY."
"Oh." Kim gaped in shock, an 'oh' as in 'Oh dear God.' What had she been thinking? "I… was just…"
"I know you were trying to make light of it, Kim, but it still hurt," Shego tried to pull it back in. Unsuccessfully. "And while I was doing it, it took me to a really, really dark place… back when sometimes I really DID want to hurt you."
Kim remembered the nausea that had been on Shego's face. She'd attributed it to the smell. The burning smell.
Maybe she'd only been partially right.
For all the pain in her voice, Shego's hand still reached out and touched Kim's knee for brief reassuring squeeze, an effect unfortunately diluted by both her thick gloves and Kim's heavy suit. "I'll get over it but… if you love me Kim; if you REALLY love me, don't ever, EVER ask me to do something like that again."
"Please." The voice that came out in didn't sound like Shego at all. She sounded like a lost little girl; a sound so completely out of place in the competent professional pilot who continued to steer them forward through the worst flying conditions Kim had ever seen.
"I… of course I love you, you…" Kim bit off the word 'idiot' before it escaped, that would be smart, wouldn't it? Especially when Kim had been the idiot! "And I don't even know how to begin to tell you how sorry I am. You don't think I wanted that do you?" A horrifying thought. "Oh God, you DON'T think that, do you?"
A strange sad smile twisted Shego's face, highlighted by a sky-wide flash of lightning that seemed to turn the entire canopy into a Chiarosuro relief. "My head knows, but the heart's got some issues. Finding out what a danger-freak you really are has got me a little unhinged, okay? Like maybe there's a suspicion that I'm just the new rocket-powered, razor-tired unicycle in your life."
Kim stared at her in shock. How could Shego think Kim was thinking of her as a… a… SEX toy?
Heavy crosscurrents slammed into the copter and suddenly they were going thirty degrees further away than they had been a second before, but Shego responded before Kim would even have had time to comment, had she not been so stunned.
"I told you you were getting the world's most fucked up girlfriend, didn't I?" The green woman smirked awkwardly, showing she'd read Kim's thoughts perfectly. "And I said I understand everything intellectually, which I do. But I never promised I was always going to be logical about it either. There are days when I'm doing good just to appear rational. And when I'm PMSing… one of us may need a hotel. Or a bomb shelter."
Kim found herself letting out a partial sigh of relief. As sucky as it made her feel, the good part about all that was that obviously Shego still intended to stick with her. Not that Kim was out of the hot water yet, because she had made a critical and criminally stupid mistake in not taking the other woman's feelings into account. She'd barely been able to handle boyfriends before, and a girlfriend, as she should have known by virtue of her own emotional maelstrom, was going to be a lot higher maintenance.
Did this make her the 'guy' in this relationship? With her personality, that may have been what Shego was expecting… or did they both have to assume both parts of the dance? But at least right now she knew how to do the one thing guys NEVER seemed to. She knew when to simply listen.
And Shego must have seen that that's what she was going to do, because the words started to flow. "I'm sorry for melting down like this Princess, but I spent years… years… afraid to get close to anyone because of what I am. That's one of the main reason I disappeared after the Lowardians. To get a handle on myself. I… I knew I loved you a long time ago. Monkey boy saw clearer than both of us, but I tried not to think about it because I couldn't trust me not to hurt you. I had to see if I could function as a normal person… as normal as I can ever be, anyway.
"And could you?" Kim had to ask.
"Not really." Shego frowned, sparing as much of a look at her as she could while dodging the copter around a particularly nasty looking cloud, and at the end the dark face was broken by a warmer ray of light. "I missed you too much… even just what we had before. As pathetic as it is, that was the closest I'd ever got to anyone… to a relationship. I mean, I had the weird employee/employer thing with Drakken, but in the end I was really just a tool for him."
Shego's tone was stronger and surer now. "So when I got Lucre's invitation I was ready for any excuse to come back. I high-tailed it across the Pacific so fast I probably left skid marks in the clouds."
"How'd he know how to find you?"
"You're kidding right? Don't you know all us reformed ex-supervillains belong to a club?" Yes, the old Shego was definitely coming back. "He never didn't know where I was. He'd been sending me updates on Middleton and… everything else to do with a certain red-headed sex kitten."
"Oh." Kim was beginning to wonder if she was the only one who hadn't at least some idea of what was going on between them at that point.
"Oh she says," Shego made a strange sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh. "If you only knew. That morning we first met, to talk about the calendar? I must've changed clothes six-seven times. Twice I had the catsuit on, but then I'd think what if it brings back bad memories? The outfit I ended up in I chose because I thought it made me look softer, less dangerous..."
"I'd wondered about the flip-flops." Kim admitted. And in retrospect, had found Shego's bare green legs fascinating.
"Bought in a quickie mart two blocks from the hotel," Shego confessed. "Decided the $400.00 Jimmy Choos sent the wrong message."
"Wow. So you went in with the idea of…"
"I don't know what I was thinking Kim." A downdraft batted the copter down almost two hundred feet, but Shego seemed to correct for it without even concentrating. "That we'd end up like this? Not in a million years. I just wanted…"
"Someone who understood." That was an easy jump to make. It was what Kim herself had wanted more than anything else in her entire life.
"Yeah. Exactly." A more serious expression as the copter almost flipped and Shego fought to keep it vertical while Kim fought to keep her illicit Bueno Nacho. "Which is why what you did hurt so much. Because we seemed to be on the same wavelength and then…"
Kim could see that. Hell, the question was why she couldn't see that before. And that brought up her own little issue that she'd been bottling up.
"Shego… I don't think I can apologize enough for that. But as to why I did it… the surgery, not the being an ass part." How to phase it so it didn't sound completely nuts?
"I did because… sometimes I get these hunches, okay?" That wasn't bad. "Except they're not hunches... it's like I NEED to do this. And every time I've ignored those hunches, really bad stuff has happened."
"What, so you're saying you're PSYCHIC now?" Shego blinked in confusion.
"Maybe. I don't know." Kim had never really thought about telling anybody about this, but if anyone needed, anyone DESERVED to know, it was Shego. "It's not like it's something I can control, it just happens, and for a long time I thought I was just going crazy. But it's been getting stronger lately. More vivid. And for some reason, I have this gnawing feeling that having that microphone implant in could be really important. Same with the trackers. And, for that matter, the OTHER thing. I thought that, if I'm wrong, the worst result is a little pain and maybe an infection. I never thought about how you would feel about it."
Despite the ever worsening conditions, Shego actually turned and looked at her full on. "You're really serious. About the psychic business?"
All Kim could do was shrug. "I told you we belonged together. That's something I just know. You're it. The One. And if you're a freak of nature, it's because of an accident. I was apparently born this way."
"Well…" Shego stared out the window, trying to assimilate all of this. "Well… fuck."
"And you have to know… I only asked you to do… that… because I trust you," Kim swore, telling the complete and absolute truth that she hadn't quite known until this very second. "You will NEVER hurt me love, not that way. We'll fight, we'll argue, we'll wrestle and fuck like demons. And someday…" A vision of two white dresses and so much more blossomed in her head.
"What?" Shego asked, having been left hanging.
Kim simply smiled. "Oh, why ruin the surprise? Trust me, you'll like it."
The rest of the run in was in silence. But it was a different kind of silence. The kind that occurred between two people who'd reached a nearly perfect understanding once more.
Well, almost. There was one thing Kim had to make absolutely sure of.
"So… are we… okay?"
"Yeah. For now." Shego confirmed on a soft exhale, but the look on her face was oddly… expectant. "But one thing Princess."
"Yeah?"
"For the honeymoon we go to Vegas."