~Hello again, everyone! I was hoping to get this chapter up in time for Memorial Day weekend, and it looks like I just made it. I hope you all enjoy - I personally think this is some of the best writing I've ever done for Shego, but make up your own mind. ;)
Thanks to all who reviewed.
Timeline: Directly after Clean Slate.
Gettin' the heck out of Dodge used to be a heck of a lot easier.
Actually, Shego's helicopter was making great time. She'd already cleared the hilltops and had the nose pointed in the direction of her weekend apartment when a whisper inside her head had demanded to know what she was doing. Nah, not even demanded. This was a soft thought that weakened in her chest, and it bugged the snot out of Shego.
What was she doing? What she'd always done: looking out for Number One.
Which last left you stranded on a ship with a crew of undead who all make Dr. D. look like Boss of the Year, said the other part of her.
Shego sighed from her kneecaps and wondered if she'd always been this much of a pain.
Her fists gripped on the steering gears, she fixated on the gray-blue-black sky surrounding her. Drakken was somewhere down below it, probably pitching the fit to end all fits. The farther along his plans got the chance to go, the closer he came to full-blown psychosis when they unraveled.
You know you have to go get him, don't you?
Um, no. I know nothing of the sort.
Sure, she'd busted him out of jail after the whole disaster with Lucre. Midas hadn't been on call, and terminal boredom had been threatening.
You're contractually obligated to. . .
Does it look like I give a rip?
So you're just going to leave him there to be blown to bits? And give up the only job you've ever been able to hold down?
Shego shifted her jaw from side to side. How about NOT? I like my paycheck.
Then she'd better go and get him before some other alien swooped down to save his worthless butt and transfer his loyalties. 'Cause who wants a repeat of that, am I right?
Shego glanced at the notecard Drakken had given her earlier in the week - because that was his current solution to everything - which she'd finally found something adequately biting to jot down on. There was no way she was gonna pass up the opportunity to use a slam like that.
The thoughts hardened back into steel again, and Shego slipped the notecard into her leg pouch with genuine gratitude. She took a moment to make absolutely sure she wasn't playing host to any even-remotely-goopy feeling, and then she turned the helicopter around and headed back the way she'd come.
Okay, so Dr. D. had always been a little nuisance, but lately he'd fallen into a funk the likes of which Shego had never seen in the three-and-a-half years she'd been on his payroll. Ever since Kimmy had plucked him out of the ocean, he'd given new meaning to the word "sullen," sulking around the lair worse than Hego used to when the Go City Groundhogs were inevitably eliminated from the football playoffs. Sometimes now Shego would go for hours without hearing a peep from him. Before, even when Drakken was too preoccupied to talk - which hadn't happened NEARLY often enough - he was still humming or grunting or muttering.
And the notecard thing was the last straw. Wasn't that a warning sign of Alzheimer's or something? Yeesh, the Princess had gotten her memory wiped last week, and she was still in better mental shape than Drakken.
Shego hated him for making her worry.
The railroad came back into dim view through the helicopter's tinted windshield, and Shego swooped it down for a closer look. There was no train anywhere in sight - no evidence that a massive explosion had taken place, either. No sign of Kimmy or Loser Boyfriend.
Just a blue speck plopped in the center of the tracks.
You're so predictable, Doc.
Shego coasted the helicopter to a landing and hopped out. From sixty feet away, she could see Drakken with his tiny legs in a morose sprawl, one even-tinier hand pressed to his forehead.
This was almost unfair, but Shego still sauntered onto the tracks, fixing up her best mixture of irony and innocence. She squatted down beside Drakken, pulled the card from her pouch, and said, "You know, I had a card for this: Dr. D. loses."
Drakken dropped his palm and glared at her through heavy lids. That was when Shego noticed how funky he looked. Not that he ever would've made the cover of GQ, but. . .
Dr. D's hair sprang in all directions like scruffy clumps of windblown grass. And something was up with his pupils - they weren't really too big or too small, but with more of a blurry, unfocused look than was normal even for Drakken. Musta been some new tactic for keeping the tears in. Between the tumble off the train and the anger that all but rose off him, of course tears wouldn't be far behind.
"Curse Kim Possible," Drakken finally said. The sentence was a guttural snarl bigger than the neck it came out of. Yeah, he was fine.
"She escape?" Shego asked.
Drakken nodded, and Shego took a moment to kick herself for not making sure she'd left Kimmy with some third-degree burns, if not worse. Shego had never actually knocked off anyone with her plasma before - she was more than willing to, but only if she could make a quick, clean kill. Drakken had never really gotten over the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
"And stole your little brainwash formula?" Shego said.
Another nod.
"And lemme guess. She managed to save the train, too?"
Drakken nodded again, rolling out a trademark pout. Dangit. Shego had been hoping it'd at least be a hollow victory for the Princess.
"Well." She dusted her hands together. "Another day, another best-take-over-the-world-plot-ever failure. Let's call it a night, huh?"
Shego nudged Drakken. He didn't so much as twitch.
"Uh, Doc -" Shego dragged her voice down to certified-teacher mode - "this is the part where we go home and think about what we can do differently next time."
The silence was like a brick.
Seriously? He was pulling this NOW? In the middle of a railroad track?
Shego reached down and gave one of Drakken's ape-arms a yank. That must've ignited whatever pride he could possibly still have left, because he struggled the rest of the way up himself and tore himself away from her the second he was vertical again.
Just in time to stumble over nothing and fall.
That didn't worry her too badly, because he was Drakken and he had a tendency to fall over at random. He also a tendency to scramble back to his feet before he'd even fully landed so he could flick imaginary dust particles from him and reassure his audience that he'd meant to do that. This time, he just sat there like some busted-backed chair at the dump, his hands planted on their opposite arms.
Shego was about to lash her tongue at him when she noticed that his arms weren't in a stubborn fold. They were rubbing up and down his sleeves with the force of a car-wash brush. Drakken's body shook as if it were reliving the I-want-to-pull-the-continents-together plan that had spoiled itself.
Of course. It was way below freezing, with snow spitting from the sky and a wind chill in the negative zone. She at least had thermal control in her jumpsuit. Drakken's lab coat had squat - unless you counted the shoulder pads that he thought made him look big and tough.
Right now he seemed anything but.
"Get up. Please," Shego said, her jaw in a vicious snap. "The lair will be warmer - I promise."
"She-go." Drakken gripped the widow's-peak sides of his temples. "My head. It - I hurt." The panic on Drakken's face was drenching him in sweat. With those defined cheekbones popping, he looked ten pounds lighter than he had just this morning.
"Oh, for the love of - " Shego wrenched Drakken upright again and maneuvered Drakken's long, lanky body into the helicopter's passenger seat before swinging herself decisively in next to him. She snapped the driver's seatbelt on and frosted a you-got-a-problem-with-this? look over at Drakken.
Drakken didn't protest any. He was already slouched in the seat, and his can't-focus eyes drifted off beyond the horizon pretty much into some other dimension. Probably one of those that was only accessible to the super-nerds.
He was with-it enough to heave a martyr's breath, though, and Shego welcomed the chance to insert an eye-roll. "So tell me, Peter Pufferpuff - was this the second or third time we've botched a Great Train Robbery?" she said.
Drakken's response? He stuck his fingers up about as close to his faraway gaze as they could get, unfolded them one by one, and began to count on them. "It was. . . let's see. . . . there was that one time, and then there was - which makes - wait - what was the question again?"
The question was, why do I even BOTHER?
Every time the helicopter banked a turn, Drakken gave one of those oh-cripes-I've-been-shot flinches. There wasn't a peep out of him, either. The quiet, refreshing as it SHOULD have been, brought a sour taste to the back of her mouth.
"C'mon. Let's go home and you can. . ." Shego swallowed her pride and the thick layer of disgust rising like phlegm in her throat. ". . .think up a new plan?"
That was the point where the Dr. D she knew would've unfolded out of his Quasimodo posture and come up straight, eyes all agleam. Nothin'. That meant the pep-talk ball was still in her court, and since when had she ever been the peppy one?
"Dr. D," Shego said, and this time she made sure to put plenty of weight behind it.
Drakken seized his temples as if she'd just threatened him with a lobotomy. His "Be quiet! Have I mentioned my head hurts?" was a mew of orphaned-kitten proportions.
"Have I mentioned you're a wimp?" Shego shook her head and then plowed on before Drakken's face could even register the insult. "No - seriously - Doc. I know you're bound to be in some pain. You fell off the train -"
"No, I hit the tunnel."
Shego jerked the helicopter around so sharply her own hair slapped her in the face. "You did WHAT?"
"Sto-op!" The hands descended from Drakken's temples to try and cover his honkin'-huge ears, and he squinted at her. "Why are you staring like that?"
Somehow Shego got her jaw to release. "Because I never believed in miracles before," she said.
The helicopter did another 180 and took off even faster.
"Shego, you're doing it wrong," Drakken said, slurring worse than the goofy drunk on every old-fashioned sitcom. "Home is that-a-way." He waved a finger in the more-or-less direction they'd been headed.
"Yeah, change of plans," Shego said. "We're going to the hospital."
Drakken's skin went pasty white, throwing the scar into black relief. He mangled the words, "Hospital? Why?"
"Because I'm ninety percent sure you have a concussion. How are you not dead?" Shego said. A laugh was in danger of bursting out of her. "Is your head really that hard?"
"Shut u-up, She-go!" Drakken's whine broke like a pathetic preteen's.
Shego decided to let that one go since he probably had a concussion. And because it was so darn funny.
He guided his fingers back through his hair with a bunch-load more concentration than even Drakken should need. "You think I have a concussion? Really?"
"Yes, really," Shego said. She tilted her head to get a better look at him under the melted snow running down from his shaggy eyebrow. It was hard to take stock of the pupils with those irises that blended right in, but there was no missing the fog in them. "If you looked at your eyes. . ."
Drakken cycled through a couple of too-slow blinks. "In a mirror?"
"Uh, ye-ah. Where else?"
"I don't like mirrors," Drakken said.
"Why not?" Shego said.
Drakken thrust out his lower lip, which protruded just fine by itself, especially with the swelling split at the corners that Shego was just now noticing. "Because I'm ugly."
There would have been a line about his eyesight not going if Shego hadn't been actually, maddeningly concerned.
She clamped down tighter on the steering gears and concentrated on turning her shoulders to iron rods. She'd been to the ER no less than five or six times with Drakken over the years, so this was nothing new. She was contractually obligated to make sure this didn't do any permanent damage to Dr. D's scatty little brain. And as comparatively placid as he was being, he might not be the patient from Hades tonight.
Speaking of placid - it was suspicious. He'd finally shut up, and Shego couldn't even appreciate it.
She jerked around just in time to see Drakken's chin drowsing toward his chest. Shego shot one hand out and caught a fistful of Drakken's sleeve. Flying one-handed was way less of a risk - especially for her - than letting him nod off.
"Leave me alone," Drakken croaked. "I want to sleep."
That doubled the speed of Shego's pulse and honed her voice down to a knife. "Yeah, and that's how we know something's wrong. Since when do you EVER want to sleep?"
"Since now." Drakken took a weak stab at wrenching out of Shego's grasp, which only enabled her to shake loose and then come back with an even-firmer grip.
"Look, buster," she said, "your brain just bopped off the walls of your skull. We have to go to the hospital to make sure it doesn't cause brain damage. And if you pick now to catch up on your beauty sleep, I guarantee that you can kiss that whole 'Dr. Drakken achieves global conquest' thing good-bye." Shego stopped only because she was going shrill, and she couldn't afford that.
At her use of his self-awarded villain title, a doped-up smile appeared on Drakken's lips.
"Okay?" Shego said. She left one hand clenched on Drakken's forearm. Her fingertips could practically touch, which didn't sit well on her nerves either.
Drakken's smile flip-flopped into a frown, every bit as big and oafish. "O-kayyyyy."
"That's the spirit!" Shego said. "And - all right - just think about all the cool tech the emergency ward'll have, y'know? MRI's - CAT scans - "
"Space-age thermometers," Drakken said, still sounding for all the world like someone had spiked his chocolate milk that morning. He tried to drag his gaze over to her, flinched, and put it back. "Will you stay with me?"
Fair question.
Shego's nails squeezed the gears until she half-expected them to start crying for mercy. "Yeah, like I'm really gonna leave you alone in the hospital with a concussion. People have gone psycho from those things."
That visibly perked Drakken up. "I might fly into a panicked rage, and you would be the only one I'd recognize!"
"And then I'd get to save everyone," Shego said. The dryness came without any coaxing.
Drakken began to grin stupidly at the flurries falling past the windows. "Did you like saving people, Shego?" he said. "When you were a superhero?"
"If you didn't have a concussion, I'd give you one," Shego muttered.
The helicopter's on-board GPS indicated the nearest hospital was 50 miles away. That could've been an issue, but Shego remembered Drakken assuring her in one of his many tech-envy rants that HenchCo's helicopters could "make time." If they did, Shego vowed she'd never give him a hard time about THAT particular outdated phrase again.
It could, and it did. Shego spent most of that "time" either hunched over the steering gears, mentally cursing Drakken, or snapping her fingers in front of his slackening face so that he jerked upright again with some antenna-on-the-fritz noises.
The nearest hospital turned out to be an aging building whose white stucco walls thumbed their noses at the glass-fronted trend. Shego hadn't set more than a toe into the ER waiting room when the scent of phony pine needles bullied its way into her nose. But at least it wasn't blood or puke. Either of those might've set Dr. D. off.
Shego encircled Drakken's wrist with her fingers again and abbreviated her usual long strides to Drakken-friendly ones as she hauled him toward the front desk, where she glared holes into the receptionist's frizzy-haired head until the woman looked up - with a you'll-have-to-wait look that churned up a wealth of dry-eyed fury.
"No, you don't understand, pumpkin," Shego said before the receptionist could say a word. "Put Dr. Drakken at the top of your list. We've got a concussion here."
"Sustained by what?" the receptionist asked. With all the interest of a cop reduced to parking-violation duty.
"Collision with a train tunnel," Shego said.
"Face-first," Drakken added behind her. There were times when she really liked the guy.
That brought the receptionist's head up, and her frizz puffed out 'til she could pass for Einstein. "I'll let you know as soon as a room opens up." The professionalism clamped to her words didn't match the open-mouthed gawk she was sending Drakken's direction.
"I can breathe!" Drakken thundered, sounding close to his old obnoxious self. "It's a skin condition!"
And then there were those other times.
Drakken took a sprawled-back seat in an uncomfortable chair while Shego stood in front of him, muscles tingling. His gaze swept over the ceiling as if there were gonna be a quiz on it later.
"It's better to close your eyes, Doc," Shego said. There'd been some first-aid classes in her child-development-degree past.
Drakken shut 'em. In the harsh hospital florescents, the hollows underneath seemed even deeper than Shego remembered. Yeesh. Prison really had done a number on him.
"Promise you'll stay with me the whole time?" Drakken said. "I'm scared."
The soles of Shego's feet went numb. The Dr. D she knew would have sooner passed a kidney stone than admit he was scared. She got an "I already promised" out before being succumbing to a case of lockjaw.
A room opened up twenty-five endless minutes later. Shego eased Drakken down the long hallway and into a jumbo room that had obviously just been power-blasted with antiseptic. The nurse got Drakken propped up, tucked in, and practically tied down in a bed with an assurance that a "Dr. Kennedy" would be with them shortly.
Drakken wriggled his skinny little fanny - about the only part of him that couldn't be pinned down - frantically across the sheets. Before the nurse left, she gave him the type of glance usually reserved for service dogs you weren't allowed to pet. Shego would never figure out what some gals saw in that man.
Especially now. Though there was absolutely no gray running through his hair - how DID the man do that at forty-two? - Drakken suddenly looked old, all sunken into the sheets like a wizened geezer. His lips were set as if he were prepared to keep being cantankerous the whole dang night. Lips that would never have spit the word "wench" of their own free will.
A doctor who must've been Kennedy ducked to keep his scalp from hitting the doorway and then filled the room, dwarfing Drakken even further. "Hello," he said. There was no strain in the arm he extended toward Drakken. "Terribly sorry for your wait."
"Why can't you leave me alone? I just want to sleep." This from a brittle-voiced Drakken.
Kennedy didn't even peek at the clipboard in his hand. He nudged a wheeled stool over with the back of his hand and dropped onto it like a gymnast. "Because you, my friend, have suffered a concussion, and it's very important that you stay awake for right now."
Some of the life seemed to come back to Drakken's scraggly ponytail. "Are you here to fix my head?" he said.
Oh, I don't know if anyone could do that, Dr. D.
Dr. Kennedy beamed. Shego half-expected him to pull a lollipop from the pocket of his coat. "That's the goal, yes. I'm going to need to ask you a few questions, okay?"
He scooted the stool over and angled it to get a better look at Drakken's eyes. Kind of a challenge when they hadn't budged from Shego's the whole time. She knew it wasn't just the glaze-thick-as-frosting over them that kept away any spark of accusation.
The poor slob actually trusted her.
Shego felt the faintest wave of something in her chest, and she wasn't any more at home handling that than she'd be with anything in Drakken's beloved chemistry set. Becoming more dangerous, having an actual shot at world domination - those were things the Doc would've sold his soul for in a heartbeat. What, just because she didn't stop right there and perform an exorcism, she was on par with Benedict Arnold? She couldn't even be sued for breach of contract, because what the heck kind of employment contract had a demon-possession clause?
Kennedy tilted his head in what looked a lot like bewilderment to Shego. Drakken tended to do THAT to people, too. "First of all, how in the world did you manage to hit a train tunnel face-first?" he said.
"I was on top of the train," Drakken said. "Running on it. From my arch-nemesis, Kim Possible. Oooh, that Kim Possible! She thinks she's all - "
"Let's worry about Kim later," Dr. Kennedy interrupted. His gentleness was nothing short of amazing as he tapped his pen against the clipboard. "Can you tell me what your name is?"
"Didn't they tell you?" Drakken said. The booming voice trailed out in threads.
"Yes, but I want to hear it from you," Kennedy said.
"Dr. Drakken."
Kennedy looked to Shego, and she nodded her confirmation.
"All right, Dr. Drakken, where do you live?" Kennedy asked.
"On an island in the Caribbean."
Shego nodded again.
"What year is it?" Kennedy said.
Drakken's forehead furrowed into pastel-blue strips. "I think. . . two thousand. . . uh. . . seven?"
He brought the twig-fingers up to count on again. Kennedy pushed them softly back down and fanned his own. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Three."
"Good, good." Kennedy scribbled on the clipboard. "Now, I'm going to need to ask you a few more questions - about the accident, all right?"
Drakken didn't answer. His eyes were already at half-mast again, and Shego gave him a full-strength pinch. It was the first time she'd found herself wanting to load Dr. D. up on caffeine.
"Okay," Drakken mumbled.
The stool squeaked as Kennedy readjusted his posture to something even more solemn. "Did you lose consciousness on impact?"
Drakken's mouth smacked. Shego's own curled back in disgust when she noticed the dried drool flaking at the corners of his. "I don't remember. Everything was black."
"I'll go ahead and take that as a yes." Kennedy's voice was dry. Shego was ready to nominate him for a Nobel Prize.
"He was awake by the time I found him," Shego stuck in.
Kennedy won some more cool points by not demanding to know why in the world she wasn't with him when he'd bashed into the tunnel. "Can you explain your relationship to the patient?" he said.
Sure. And why don't I go ahead and describe microgravity while I'm at it?
"Employee," Shego said, cranking her jaw.
Dr. Kennedy turned back toward the bed. "And, right now, are you dizzy or nauseous?" He lifted his palm toward Drakken. "And just say yes or no. We need that head to stay as still as it can."
"Yes," Drakken said, and Shego believed him. The syllables were hunkered together the way they always did when he was about to blow chow. It was a sound she'd learned to dread.
"Did you vomit?"
Drakken squinted. "I don't think so," he said.
"No sign of it when I found him," Shego said, limiting the shudder to her insides. She was way more familiar with Drakken's barf than she'd EVER wanted to be.
"That's good. That's good." The pen attacked the page again. "Is your vision blurred?"
"Not especially."
"How's your balance?"
"Not. . . that. . . great." Drakken's fingers flinched on the sheet. There was no sign of the Nightmare Patient.
"Passed out on the impact. Has he been unconscious since?" Dr. Kennedy directed that question to Shego.
She shook her head.
Back to Drakken. "But you are fatigued?" he said.
"Yes, sir," Drakken mumbled into his lap. "That's normal, though, isn't it? I don't sleep good. Well. Nicely."
Shego watched the embarrassment squirm across the Doc's face. Another thing he'd never admit, even though those pink splotches were about as easy to miss as those CPR and Heimlich posters screaming from the walls.
"Well, I'm sure that doesn't help," Kennedy said. "But we need to hold off on letting you sleep until we determine how severe this concussion is. You appear to be fairly alert, which is good, but a loss of consciousness means you've given your brain a doozy of a whack. We're going to need to do a few tests on your reflexes, and then I'd like to do an MRI to rule out any internal bleeding or swelling."
Shego waited for a squawk that never came. Drakken rolled his pupils up so he could look directly at her then. They were milky and confused, and they gazed at her as if she HADN'T just sat back and watched while his body was repurposed for Demon Fury Part XV. Since, of course, he didn't remember.
If only we could all be so lucky.
In light of that, Drakken's third "You'll stay, right?" raked across Shego's skin. Her fists ached to be driven into someone's gut.
Closest she could come was turning to Kennedy and saying, "You got a bathroom around here where I can freshen up?"
Kennedy cracked the door open and pointed down the gray-carpeted hall. That was when the Nightmare Patient returned, and Drakken set up a holler as if they were operating on him without anesthesia. "Shego, you said!"
Shego's patience had flat run out by now. She would have popped him one if turning him into a total vegetable hadn't been a legit concern. She closed her eyes and forced herself to picture the Drakken of Diablo Night, the Drakken who led her around the mall waiting for Kimmy to embarrass herself to death, the Drakken who was willing to plant a bomb on a world leader's T-zone to win their compliance.
Once she had a semi-decent picture of it in her mind, Shego told it, "I'll be back in a few." She patted Kennedy's shoulder. "Don't start the MRI without me, 'kay?"
The only makeup-related thing Shego had bothered to store in her leg pouch this evening was an almost-empty container of moisturizer, which she dabbed halfheartedly onto her cheeks beneath the bathroom's less-than-flattering light. Everything else she made a point to touch only with her elbows. The tasteful odor of bleach didn't cover the fact that people had brought the plague in here.
With a shake-back of her hair, Shego peered in the mirror again. There was a pretty disturbing tinge to her face. Concern.
She plucked it off like a piece of lint.
Dr. Kennedy was testing Drakken's "coordination and reflexes" once Shego made it back to the room. She could practically feel the barb puncturing her throat as she swallowed it.
Drakken did manage to walk in a semi-straight line across the floor, although Shego saw him practically gnawing his lower lip to shreds in concentration. And his legs popped up right on cue whenever they were tapped with that metal hammer thing - though Drakken yelped at each tap as if someone were beating him with a pipe.
Pain seared through Shego's clenched jaw. I know you have a concussion, Doc. But - seriously - why can't you ever just -
Drakken chose that moment to gaze mournfully up at her.
Why did the little wimp have to have such big eyes? Shego had the urge to kick the bed, but she didn't want to rattle whatever was left of his brains.
"Good, good. This bodes well." Kennedy made some more marks on his chart and then punched the business end of his pen against it several times. "He seems a tad foggy - "
This time, Shego couldn't HELP but add, "He's basically always like that."
" - but nothing that would give us immediate cause for alarm," Kennedy finished pretty darn graciously. So darn graciously that Shego had a bizarre flicker of jealousy. He clapped his hands and turned to Drakken. "So, Dr. Drakken, are you ready for your MRI?"
Why'd ya have to phrase that as a question?
Drakken sighed down at the legs he'd swung over the side of the bed - the ones that dangled several limp inches above the floor. "I suppose," he said.
Kennedy turned an if-I-weren't-so-professional-I'd-be-grinning face to Shego. "Will you accompany us?"
Shego felt a groan oozing down from her temples. Everything in her screamed No way! Yeah, even when she looked at Drakken, who was clutching the sheets so tightly the knuckles in his gloves were about to be torn through. But it seemed like her only alternative was the waiting room. Enough time in that dull place and she'd end up needing to be admitted herself.
"Whatever," Shego said, tapping her way toward the bed.
Drakken's gaze stayed locked on Shego's. He had this really annoying habit of being completely helpless half the time, but every now and then, he'd genuinely mess himself up too bad to undo it, and he'd turn into this little orphaned cub or something. Actually could make you wanna take care of him. Not all the way - just throw him a bone.
She thought of Blackbrown Eyepatch's leer, as if she were just one more treasure chest that he couldn't wait to plunder if all went well. You could fill a five-hundred-page reference book with Drakken's faults, but at least it wouldn't even OCCUR to him to look at her that way.
The instant Dr. Kennedy strapped one of Drakken's wrists to the bed, his Adam's apple did a furious yo-yo imitation. Shego put a hand on Drakken's arm, just so he wouldn't think about bolting. Luckily, Dr. Kennedy squatted down across from her, and his bedside manner was more comforting than Shego's could ever hope to be as he assured Drakken that the MRI was perfectly safe, thoroughly painless, and always supervised just in case.
Shego felt the thin muscles soften and give as one hand squeezed hers. The grip was almost as cold as she remembered the pirate ghost's, but weaker and kinder.
That was good enough for her. She was more than glad to shoot to her feet and notch her arms over her chest and trail Kennedy to the MRI room, where they were greeted by a technician who couldn't have been all the way through college yet.
He gave her the kind of concerned glance a pasty-green girl got used to. It was still preferable to being hit on. "Miss, are you sure you're all right?" he asked. "You're looking a little -"
"Absolutely fine. I guess you could say I've got a skin condition myself," Shego said, rummaging for the silky-without-being-slinky voice she'd spent years perfecting.
The tech kid did crack a grin. "Must be genetic."
Shego didn't even bother to correct him. Wasn't the first time that mistake had been made. And if nothing else, the dad-or-big-brother-in-the-room factor tended to shut down all but the most hopeless flirts.
They were probably leaning toward dad about now, even though Drakken still had the type of face that a bartender would eye with suspicion. With his chin tilted like he was still trying to be He-Man and his cheeks so drained that the scar was like black graffiti spray-painted against white walls, he currently looked every bit of forty-two. It made her strangely angry.
Kennedy bent over Drakken and murmured some more words of encouragement. It seemed to work. His big-man face emptied with sheer exhaustion, and his eyes fluttered shut.
For the sake of her paycheck, they'd better open again.
Shego hung back as they slid Drakken into the MRI as if they were slipping a Pop-Tart into the toaster. The oversized camera started to whir and beep immediately, clicking a slow journey around Drakken's hard little head. At one point, the camera rotated to the back, and Shego was able to catch a glimpse of his mouth.
It was set in a dreamy smile.
He was smiling. He was getting scanned for brain hemorrhages and he was smiling?
Man, you talk about a serious case of the geeks.
Even after Drakken was popped back out of the machine and wheeled back to "his" room - he'd already taken to calling it that - he still wouldn't stop mumbling excitedly about buttons and switches and attachments that meant even less to Shego than a software license agreement. Good news was, the oldness was long gone from his face. It was sloppy and soft at the edges.
Bad news was, she was the one who had to LISTEN to him. For what seemed like hours before Dr. Kennedy stepped back into the room, holding a recent printout and wearing half a smile.
"Good news, Dr. Drakken." Kennedy took a crisp, clean seat on his stool and crossed one leg neatly over the other. "The MRI results indicate no internal bleeding and minimal swelling."
Shego's breathing evened out, and a snicker hitched a ride with it. Because he's got the thickest skull the world's seen since the Jurassic Age?
Drakken's eyes dimension-hopped back and lit up. "So. . . that means. . . it's not severely severe?"
"No, not 'severely severe'." Kennedy pressed his fingers together as professionally as he'd done everything else so far, but Shego recognized a person on the verge of laughter when she saw one. "Since you did lose consciousness, however, we'd like to keep you overnight for observation."
Oh, good. I didn't need to sleep tonight anyway.
"Observation of what?" Drakken gave Kennedy a suspicious squint that Shego could've slapped off him if she'd been any closer.
"Post-concussion symptoms. Vomiting. Seizures."
Shego grunted to herself. Drakken's entire life was pretty much one big seizure as far as she was concerned.
To her surprise, Drakken chirped, "Ooh! Sounds exciting!" He wiggled his fingers in the air and wormed closer to the doctor - and then let out a yawn they probably heard up in the operating room.
"You'll be permitted to sleep," Dr. Kennedy said, still visibly blinking back traces of amusement. "But we will be waking you up every few hours just to make sure you're still lucid."
A chorus went off in Shego's head, and it wasn't exactly singing hallelujah. "Good luck with THAT," she muttered.
The tech kid wheeled a cushioned chair into the room, and Shego accepted it with a rare, generous dose of sincere gratitude. Whatever it was that had brought her back for Drakken was warning her not to leave the room. These guys may have been pros, but they didn't have the Drakken-experience that she did. They didn't know about his natural talent for generating disaster in the three seconds your back was turned. Hand stuck down the bathtub drain. Entire lab set on fire.
And, oh yeah, he's also been known to inhale ghosts.
There wasn't any peace in the hospital that night, and Shego wouldn't have been comfortable if there were.
Sneakers squeaked across linoleum, doctors were paged on loudspeakers leftover from the twentieth century, and dainty little wheezes puffed from Drakken. Without his usual buzzsaw-snores, he almost didn't resemble his pain-in-the-neck self at all.
Until his first wake-up.
Drakken came awake swinging at the air with his fists and yelping, "We strike Middleton - now!"
"He's dreaming," Shego said - instead of he's reliving the night he came closest to world domination. Drakken gaped at her in the bulgy-eyed horror he tended to pull out when she didn't tell the whole truth and he'd forgotten where he'd parked his supervillain brain for the day.
Well, news flash. It wasn't relevant, and the last thing they needed now was a fast ticket to the psyche ward.
The wake-up routine consisted of the same three questions - "What's your name?" "Where do you live?" "What year is it?" - each of which Drakken answered with a snap worthy of a drill sergeant.
"Dr. Drakken!"
"An island in the Caribbean!"
"2007!"
Shego waited for a second to make sure they weren't ACTUALLY gonna stick a gold star on the chart at the foot of his bed.
The nurse smiled as if Drakken had recited the Preamble from memory, patted his shoulder pad - which had slunk down to almost meet his elbow - and gave him permission to go back to sleep.
Drakken obeyed that order to a T. His head audibly thumped back into the pillow and got right back to its drool production.
Shego actually managed to dose off for a bit herself in the sofa-chair - it wasn't the most UNcomfortable place she'd ever slept - until the lab kid breezed in for the second wake-up. He gave Drakken the same slow round of questions. Drakken's answers were the same, though this time they were thin growls, a two-octaves-lower version of the kind his oh-so-ferocious attack poodle gave the FedEx guy.
Lab Kid nodded and scribbled and had barely cleared the door before Drakken conked back out again.
He didn't look innocent the way everyone always said people looked in their sleep, Shego decided as she watched him. He didn't look like a deranged supervillain bent on enslaving the earth, but you didn't have to be too perceptive to notice the economy-sized frown that constant stress had put there, the matching nervous twitches in his neck, and the sharp, shallow breaths that barely seemed able to hold it all together. It definitely wasn't a clean conscience she was observing.
But it was a conscience.
Which was his whole problem right there. If he'd ditched that thing along with the glasses when he'd dropped out, his life would be going a whole lot smoother. It was infuriating to watch him hunched over his desk, marinating in his own wasted potential - especially these last several weeks when all he'd done was brood and scrawl junk on notecards.
Shego felt herself going as stiff and gritty as her nail file, and she made a conscious effort to unclench her fist.
Dr. Kennedy himself returned from a just-long-enough-to-give-him-bed-head break for the third wake-up. He at least didn't sound sickeningly upbeat, not when Drakken came awake in hysterics again, screeching about killer robots and Brainwashing Shampoo and electric eels. He did wheel the stool to Drakken's side and soothe him until Drakken was calm enough for Kennedy to ask, "What's your name?"
"Drew Lipsky," Drakken slobbered in reply.
The light of concern that had waited dimly in Kennedy's eyes all night flickered on for the first time.
Shego actually felt sorry for him. She jumped in with, "No, no, it's okay. He goes by both." Drakken was too dopey to interject the whole radio-talk-show-host spiel - which was probably a good thing, considering his typical lie was about as obvious as a bad airbrush job.
Kennedy shot her a look of pure relief. "And where do you live, Mr. Lipsky?"
"On an island." Drakken flopped his arm vaguely against the sheets he was all but disappearing into. "In the Caribbean."
"And what year is it?"
"2007. May 2007." Drakken was with-it enough to throw a gloat together, as if there were some kinda prize for giving the right answers.
Kennedy came up from his perch on the stool that was starting to look like a natural extension of his body to Shego and tucked his clipboard into his armpit. "Well, Mr. Lipsky, you've done very well. I have full confidence that we'll be able to release you come morning."
That couldn't happen fast enough.
By the fourth wake-up, dawn was starting to blush on the horizon and the inside of Shego's mouth tasted like one of Hego's workout jerseys. Dr. Kennedy squatted down again and asked Drakken his name.
Drakken stared at him, bleary-eyed. "Don't you know by now?" he griped.
Shego would've laughed if she hadn't been propping up her eyelids with the backs of her knuckles. She was so getting paid overtime for this.
Shego awoke the next morning to tacky imitation sunlight and a spine like a set of Tinker Toys. Man, if this was how Drakken's back felt twenty-four/seven, she almost didn't blame him for being such a whiny baby about it.
Drakken himself, on the other hand, was sitting half-propped-up in bed, smiling faintly down at the Styrofoam breakfast tray in his lap. More faintly by the minute as he took in what he was being offered - a bowl of bran flakes wilting in fat-free milk and eggs-from-a-packet than even Mr. Human Garbage Disposal shunned. Drakken picked at them with a more cautious approach than Shego had seen him take toward bio-waste. How could the man function on such little sleep?
Shego held back another grunt. Guess it depends on your definition of "function." She'd already noticed several notecards poking their pointless, stubborn little corners out of Drakken's pockets.
Jokes aside, though, you'd have never pegged him for an ER patient - at least not once you got past the blueness. The deathly pallor was gone from his face, and he looked hearty again. Well, as hearty as Dr. D ever looked these days.
Speaking of beauty disasters. . . she didn't even wanna think about what state her hair was in. Shego took the chance to retrieve her compact from her leg pouch and crimp together a few flyaway black strands so that she WOULDN'T be mistaken for the Wicked Witch of the West from a distance.
A kid wailed from one of the other rooms, and Shego felt a rare pang. That suffering was too shrill to be relished and too pure to prick at the back of her neck. It turned her into someone she didn't even recognize.
Shego was glad when Dr. Kennedy swept into the room, his bleary eyes warm, and took a nimble seat on the ever-present stool. Drakken caught sight of him and instantly blurted, "My name is Dr. Drakken, I live on an island in the Caribbean, and it's the year 2007!"
"Good morning to you, too, Dr. Drakken," Kennedy said in an amateur monotone. "We're going to go ahead and release you, but first we want to make a few things clear. We want you to spend the next several days resting as much as possible."
Shego gave an inaudible snort. No way is that gonna happen. She still remembered the incredulity in Drakken's voice when he'd confessed, "All right, so I fell asleep again" - as if he were saying, "Twice in one week! Can you believe it?"
Of course, Drakken had never been in a slump this serious before. Not that Shego had ever seen. She missed the Dr. D. who got a sinister glint in his eye when he detailed his plan for Kimmy's demise.
"Keep your eyes closed as much as you can. And you'll need to avoid activities that are too strenuous on your brain for a while." Dr. Kennedy opened a folder on the wrinkled lap of his coat. "No staring at a computer screen, no staring at your checkbook. No reading - have someone else read to you."
Shego machine-gunned a don't-even-think-about-it look in Drakken's direction.
"Oh-kay," Drakken said - to both of them, Shego was pretty sure. She could tell without seeing that Drakken was pushing out something beyond the underbite pout and that his body was receding even farther into his own lab coat.
"Wonderful!" Kennedy clapped the folder closed and stood up. "We'll get you discharged, and you can walk right on out of here, all right?"
Right out of here, my foot. The Wegos had been BORN faster than it took to get someone discharged from the hospital.
Drakken spent most of the time sighing like an automatic door because he wasn't allowed to fill out any of the paperwork, which Shego woulda been glad to give him under any other circumstances. She hated feeling like the secretary about as much as she hated anything.
When Dr. Kennedy finally said they were free to go, Shego shoved the clipboard at him - without the full force of her superstrength - and practically broke into a run to get out to the helicopter whose invisibility cloak she'd clicked on last night. She expected Drakken to be right behind her on his little bird-legs. But when Shego turned around, Drakken had his hand resting on Dr. Kennedy's shoulder, giving him the businessman-handshake he'd learned from Perky Perkins.
"Thank you," Drakken said, panting between words, "so much for making certain nothing happened to me."
"It's what we're here for," Kennedy said. Shego could almost feel him shelving the urge to ruffle Drakken's hair. Her jaw had practically clipped the front of her jumpsuit already.
Yikes. If this is what brain trauma does to him, why didn't I induce it a long time ago?
Then again, I said that about possession, too.
Drakken seemed pretty convinced by Shego's argument that piloting a helicopter fell under "strenuous activity" and collapsed into the passenger seat, kicking his boots up almost onto the control panel before she glared them off. "Well," he said, eyes closing, "there were many ways that could have gone worse."
"Ya think?" Shego said as they lifted past the treetops and the hospital roof. "Starting with your death."
"Err, yes. I suppose." Drakken fidgeted, and one notecard squirmed out of his pocket and splashed onto the floor. "But I think we all know Dr. Drakken is made of sterner stuff than that, don't we?"
"No, we know your head is made of concrete," Shego said. "But I guess we kinda always figured that anyway."
"Now, Shego, I'll have no more of your sassigassity!" Drakken's eyes flew open, and the veins in them looked for all the world like they were going to leap out and wrap around her throat.
Shego guffawed into her palm so she wouldn't spray the windshield. "Sassigassity? Is that even a word?"
"It is," Drakken said. The pouty chin tilted upward. "Dickens used it."
"You've read Dickens?"
"I've been to school, Shego!" Drakken careened out of baritone, skipped tenor completely, and skidded into soprano.
"Yeah, but did you study?"
"GGNNNGH SHE-GO!"
Yeah, this feels better.
Drakken had fallen into a slobbery sleep by the time they landed at the island he'd had to relay to the doctors every two hours. Shego shot him a sideways smirk. No doubt she coulda picked him up, especially since prison, and carried him right into the lair. Be a nice drive-by to that ego - except that he probably wouldn't have even stirred, and she'd have wasted her strength.
Shego stood up and took a few steps toward him, and her heel caught on that dang notecard, which tipped her backward. She thrust her arms behind her before she could fall, got a grip on the sides of the driver's seat, and propelled herself off it, snipping the notecard between two fingers as she flipped over it.
Staring up at her was the sentiment, Thank Shego for getting me to hopsital. At a time when she's not beign insufferable.
Or, in Dr. D's as-messy-as-an-actual-doctor's handwriting, it might have been "unsufferable." Shego wouldn't actually have been that surprised.
Shego felt her mouth twitch for the first time in about eighteen hours as she leaned over and tucked the notecard back into the baggy pocket over his lack-of-hips. Normally, she'd have given him a rough shake to wake him up, but that kind of went out the window with an MRI in the recent past.
Instead, Shego rested a hand on his sleeve and crammed all of her focus into forcing her glove-blades not to claw in. "Wake up, Dr. D," she said. "We're home."
~Drakken has some trouble spelling when he's stressed. Also, Shego calls Blackeye Brown "Blackbrown Eyepatch," because she just doesn't care. ;)