Kick in the Head
He can't believe it. It's so wonderful, he's almost afraid to believe it.
Another opportunity to dominate the world - a second chance - has fallen out of the sky. Well, okay, it didn't actually fall out of the sky. It appeared on a spaceship and beamed him out of Cell Block D, away from the prison food and the cells and especially from Lucre. And that's good enough for him.
But it gets better. The person behind it - well, he's not sure if personis the right word - is a nine-foot-tall alien woman who calls herself "Warmonga." At first, he was kind of - well, not scared of her, not exactly. Just - what's the word? Uneasy?
Yeah. That's a good word. He congratulates himself for thinking of it.
So he was kind of uneasy around her, maybe because she had this thing that looked like a laser gun he invented once, only hers was much bigger. And it didn't look like it would break if you pulled the trigger, the way his did, which really disappointed him, because he stayed up all night trying to build it, finally conking out on his lab table at six-thirty the next morning. And it was pointed at his face.
But once she found out he was this Great Blue Person or whatever, she was silly putty in his hands. She pledged her eternal devotion to him - those were her exact words, and it made him feel all dizzy with delight - and promised to give him whatever weapons he needed to dominate this planet.
Heh-heh. It was part of his master scheme all along. Really, it was.
They already stopped at his secret Alpine lair to pick up his lab coat - his good ol' blue lab coat. He missed it so much in jail. It smells kind of musty from sitting in that closet for six months, but underneath that - underneath that, he can still make out a faint chemical scent. He only smelled that once in jail, and that was when the laundry room almost blew up. (Serves them right for letting Eddy work in there. He doesn't know the first thing about chemistry.)
He leans down to sniff it again - ahhh, it smells good. They should bottle that smell and sell it as cologne. It's awfully baggy, though, which he doesn't remember it being. Maybe it stretched out after not being worn for so long.
Now they're on their way back to his regular lair, the haunted island one that's not actually haunted. Hopefully the signs kept out any intruders.
They didn't.
His lair - his home - is trashed. His giant TV screen, the one that kept him up-to-date on what was happening on the planet he doesn't control yet, is smashed, shattered into dozens of pieces that he cringes away from. Shego always tells him not to touch broken glass, because he'll cut himself, and she doesn't want to have to take him to the emergency room again. "That wasn't my idea of a great day," she says.
Humph. He wasn't exactly having a blast, either.
There are big holes in the wall with plaster falling out and covering the ground, and pipes are leaking water all over the place. There are more puddles on the floor than the day he got Commodore Puddles (who's been staying at Mother's house while he's in jail). The couch - the soft, comfy couch he fell asleep on so many times - looks like it was slashed to ribbons, with a knife or something.
Razor blade.
The thought sends cold shivery needles up his spine, and he shudders away from it. Touches his arm without thinking about it. It still hurts a little.
Who did this to his lair? Who would be horrible and rebellious and - and - and - just plain bad enough to ignore signs that said, "KEEP OUT"? Who wouldn't be scared off by the "HAUNTED" signs?
Someone who knows the place isn't haunted.
Kim Possible!
That thought disappears, evaporates into water vapor when he turns around and sees graffiti on the side of the wall. "DRAKKEN'S A LOSER," it says in big letters. "HA-HA."
Everything in him wants to run away from it. He can almost feel the hatred coming off the letters in a big fist and smashing him into the opposite wall. But instead, he walks toward it - did someone magnetize it? - and reaches his fingers out to touch it.
They don't sizzle through his gloves and burn his fingers with acid, the way he expects them to. They don't even leave marks on his fingers, so the paint's dry. Whoever did this is long gone. He hopes they fell over the cliff and smashed into the beach and broke all their bones - and hit their funnybone in the process. No, both funnybones. He snorts in satisfaction at that idea.
But who would hate him enough to do this? Kim Possible is swift and cruel in her defeats - ooh, he likes that! It sounds very villainous - but she's not usually that mean to him. He still remembers the time she patted him on the head like he was a little puppy dog, and it makes his cheeks go red. She likes to demean him, not out-and-out insult him.
Now, the buffoon - he called him a loser once, he remembers. But he doesn't seem like the graffiti type, and the "HAUNTED" signs probably would have made him run away. The kid's a big fat scaredy-cat.
Is that a spider on the floor? He freezes.
Nope. Just a piece of lint. Phew. That was a close one.
But who else would do something like this - who else hates him enough to go to all this trouble?
Dementor!
No, he realizes, tilting his head to look at the graffiti-ing from another angle - maybe that'll make it make sense. If it were Dementor, a lot of it would probably be in German, and he would have signed it. It's a mad-scientist thing, he knows.
He turns around, still pondering it - he likes that word, pondering - when he sees a second blob of writing over the door. Hmm. What would someone write there? "Welcome to Dr. Drakken's Secret Lair. Please wipe your feet and mind the shark tank"?
No. His heart stops in mid-beat and it feels like it falls right down to his ankles.
It says - it says -
SHEGO ROCKS.
Shego.
Shego did this. The person he'd been waiting and waiting and waiting to break him out of jail, to give him her smirk and her eye-roll that told him that even though they drove each other crazy, they were still best friends and she didn't hate his guts. He doesn't see why she would. They're very nice guts.
She didn't just abandon him. She betrayed him.
It hurts worse than banging your funnybone, worse than when he cut his face, worse than all those times he's thrown his back out. He feels like he's been kicked in the head, punched in the gut, elbowed in the chest, stabbed in the arm - okay, he doesn't want to go there.
But he's not going to cry anymore. He cried way too much in jail; probably made everyone think he was a weak, wimpy supervillain. Which he's not. Not even close.
He closes his eyes and pictures Shego teasing him, all the times she's called him names and pinched his cheeks and told him his plans would never work if he didn't do something different. At least, he always thought she was teasing. It hurt his feelings, sure, but he knows she didn't mean it. After all, some people tease their friends to show them they like them. He found that out way too late.
Still - is it possible she wasn't? That she really meant every nasty thing she ever said to him? That, even though she was his best friend, he wasn't hers?
Has she thought he was a loser all this time?
The weak, wobbly, dizzy, queasy feeling comes back. The jail feeling. He leans against one of those water pipes and feels his heart thud against his aching ribs.
Sucks his breath in through his nose. He's not going to be weak anymore. That's probably why Shego left, because he was weak. Well, he's not anymore. He's the Great Blue, and with his new sidekick - his new bodyguard - Warmonga, he will rule the world.
Warmonga'll be much better, anyway. After all, she's nine feet tall and - well, Mother says it's not polite to think about a lady's weight, so he won't - and has all these intergalactic weapons, like something off Star Trek. Shego, now that he thinks about it, is a little and skinny and not too impressive. Sure, she has those superpowered glowy hands, but - well - that isn't so special. Lots of people probably have those.
Yeah. He narrows his eyes and lets the anger burn somewhere deep in him, in some organ he can't even name. Maybe his appendix; after all, it needs to do something. If Shego hates him, he can hate her back. She's not all that, either.
Anyway, he and Warmonga will conquer the world, and all the good guys will be scared of him, and all the bad guys will be jealous of him, and everyone in between will just be his servants. Oh, and Shego will be there, he knows, admitting what a wonderful supervillain he is and just begging him to take her back as his sidekick.
And - he feels a wicked grin spread over his face - he'll look at her with his eyes half-closed and say in a bored voice, "I'm sorry. Who are you again?"
Then she'll feel like she just got kicked in the head and punched in the gut and all that other stuff. And he and Warmonga will turn and walk away and not even care.
He squirms a little, shifting against the pipe. That little ache in his chest, that little tingle behind his eyes, it must be because he hasn't taken over the world yet. Must be.
Because, really, what else could it be?
