~Well, I'm finally back. If you haven't seen me around much before and don't see me around much in the next week or two, blame finals. Yay, finals. :/
Anyway, given the timeframe and the tone of the end-credits scene, I think this is the most likely aftermath.
So. . . angst, puke, and henchmen fluff while we inch ever closer to Graduation.~
The first twenty cupcakes are wonderful.
Down to the very last crumb, they are moist and ripe, as if distilled down to the absolute essence of chocolate, vanilla, and Hank's Gourmet's other thirteen flavors. The maraschino cherries click divinely between his teeth as Dr. Drakken clips them off their stems. (The cherries, that is. . . not his teeth.) The icing - oh, the icing! - forms the perfect protective coating on his esophagus, which feels rough and rashy after his screaming match with Hank Perkins.
Okay, it was more like his screaming match at Hank Perkins. Perkins stayed as calm and cool as every other smug, self-assured person Drakken has ever had the misfortune of encountering, a fact that only makes him snarf and chomp harder.
The next several dozen are still lovely, but a step down. The icing now seems too rich, the cake part somehow not rich enough. Drakken frowns to himself.
Are they starting to go stale already, losing their battle to the ravages of passing time? They are perishable foods, after all, and the sound of the word "perish" is so depressing that Drakken increases his intake speed by twenty percent. He has to work faster!
Some fifteen, twenty minutes later, Drakken has lost count of individual cupcakes and is counting by boxes. That's also around the time that his lab coat starts to feel tight, which he doesn't give too much heed to. It's been fitting funny ever since he got out of prison - loose and sweeping, with sleeves that flap around like mutant extra tentacles, which would, admittedly, be kind of cool.
He loosens his belt fifteen boxes in. Discards the thing entirely after seventeen. And not long afterward, he treks back to his closet, juggling the nineteenth - or is the twentieth? - box on his hip, and pulls out the red sweatsuit he wore in his short-lived career as a hip-hop star. It goes on with no fuss whatsoever as more cupcakes slide down.
There's just one problem with your sweats. They make you. . . well, sweat. Forehead. Nose. It even seems that his tongue is sticky with perspiration. That's one of the most ridiculous thoughts Drakken's ever had. The human tongue does not have sweat glands; it's impossible.
Impossible. Drakken grimaces. That sounds too much like the name of his nemesis. Oh, how happy she would be to know he went out of business! How happy and triumphant she would be to see him now. Drakken rips the wrappers off the bottoms of two cupcakes and shovels them simultaneously into his mouth.
They have no flavor at all.
Now Drakken runs a Sharpie over the box he just emptied, squeaking the number 39 onto its side. He turns to the next box and writes 40. His jaw muscles are tight and taxed by now, but he must persist! His precious cupcakes shall not end their days rotting in a landfill, phased out and unloved. The threat hangs low over him. Already the cupcakes are tasteless lumps of coal, the cherries buttons, the icing putty.
That's just because you've been eating them too fast, Drakken scolds himself. You haven't been taking the time to truly savor them.
Drakken silently apologizes to his edible creations, holds another cupcake up, and takes a long, deliberate bite of it. Ahhh, now that's more like it! A nucleus of ganache bursts and layers, thick and rich and almost still warm, over his lips, which he cleans in tiny licks. The taste is practically injected behind his molars.
The second bite is even more splendid. For an instant, Drakken thinks he sees stars. Is there such a thing as being too delicious?
That's what he's wondering when Shego wanders into the room and parks herself in a chair. Drakken isn't sure whether to lament her presence or welcome it. She will mince no words about his plan and his business both being failures, but perhaps she can help him out with the cupcakes. Drakken is no greedy-guts, after all. Although Shego doesn't have his sweet tooth, she could maybe take out two or three boxes. Drakken looks at the intact cupcake in his hand and, for a shameful moment of disloyalty, he wants it to go away.
Even from over the stacks and stacks - and stacks and stacks and stacks - of boxes he has yet to touch, Drakken can see the cynical twitch that serves as Shego's smile. "So, you went out of business," she says.
As if he didn't know.
"Low-carb trend was coming; should have been ahead of it," Drakken muffles back at her, cheeks stocked. He doesn't mention the business with the henchmen, not to her. They were "Drakken & Co." after all, and the "& Co." didn't need to know everything the Big D decided to do.
"A problem is just a misunderstood opportunity," Shego says in a mediocre imitation of Perkins. She doesn't have the energy to capture his nuance.
That kindergarten-teacher note in it, however, the one that says, If you were a better businessman, you could have figured this out - that is all too familiar.
Drakken commands himself to swallow, and his throat muscles send him an error message in return. He repeats the order, more viciously this time, and the bites slink down with a splash he has to be imagining. "Are you gonna help me with these or not?" he demands.
Shego hones in on him like a bird of prey. "Wait - what are you doing back there?" she says.
Sigh. Can't she ever keep up?
Drakken vacates the column of boxes and joins her in the open-ish room, walking with oddly splaying legs. Box #40 is still hugged to his side. He lifts another cupcake from its depths and glares at it.
From the direction of the kitchen, something gurgles. Shego better go grab that coffeemaker, Drakken thinks as he shifts a hunk of cupcake to his cheek. It sounds ready to boil over.
Shego doesn't, though. She doesn't do anything except stand there and gape at him, taking in his sweatpants and his sweatband and the accompanying sweat that feels to be springing from every pore. "Okay," she snaps, waving a finger at him, "that's taking Casual Friday too far!"
Drakken shoots a scowl at her in return. With Herculean effort, he swallows.
There is a brief pause before Drakken lifts his hand again, and in that pause, Shego has landed by his side. To Drakken's horror, she snatches away the cupcake with its one bite mark, the dent in the frosting. He stands there, blinking, trying to synchronize the harshness in her eyes with the amusement around her mouth. "And how do you feel right now, Mr. Genius?" she asks.
Drakken makes a weak grab for the cupcake. "Shego, I need those!"
"Uh, no." Shego drops the cupcake into the box, quite un-gently. "These are actually the very last thing you need."
Strange. Whenever Drakken has a Plan, whenever he is on a Mission, the intensity of his concentration always keeps him comfortable, regardless of any backaches or headaches or old bruises his body may still be sporting. Now, though. . . she has literally snatched the plan from his hands.
Drakken registers pressure first, the tight pull of a balloon two breaths away from bursting. Then he's aware of pain that cramps his whole body, that can't be escaped. Then the room-blurring nausea. All three combine to overwhelm him. He can only place his hand against the afflicted area - his stomach - and begin to cry.
Not crying in sadness or fear or general wimpiness. Crying the way that six-foot-four guy from Cell Block E did when he broke his leg in three places during his escape attempt. Pure, unadulterated pain, which only grows worse as Drakken glances down at himself.
At his stomach. Because that's all he can see.
The tie-pull on the sweatpants balloons six inches out like the funny duck face on his inner tube. The front of him also resembles an inner tube, his elastic waistband straining in torment, and there's certainly one inside of him as well. That urgly-gurgly noise Drakken could have sworn was coming from an angry coffeepot? It was his stomach, and in its own strange language, it continues to read him the riot act for his crime against it.
His belly's been full before, overfull more times than he cares to admit, but it's never threatened to burst its banks the way it's doing now. The ache is so intense, so total, it takes him several miserable seconds to identify the source.
The cupcakes. Oh, of course, the cupcakes! Drakken takes a toddling step backward as it sinks in. He greatly overestimated his storage capacity, and now there are so many in there, stuffed in there along with his heartbeat. He should have split it up. Should have done something different. Should have, should have. . .
His legs are too wobbly to support him, but his taut tummy won't let him sit down. He does the only thing he can possibly do: he tilts his body back and crashes to the floor on his back, amidst much rustling of the inner tube. Drakken clutches at it with both hands, trying to shrink it, turn it back into the easygoing organ it once was.
"Shego! I feel sick!" he cries.
Shego remains unmoved. "Uh, ya think? The human stomach wasn't meant to do that."
Drakken pushes himself up onto his elbows, like a turtle with the wrong size shell, and flops over so that the floor can caress the bulging pulse in his belly. It feels like a pencil that's been sharpened way too sharp and is now about to snap. Well, the lead at least.
(Not genuine lead - graphite - but who cares when their stomach's about to break?)
"It hurts," he sniffles.
"I'd bet so," Shego says. She shakes her head, and the back-and-forth motion rocks inside Drakken, too.
Drakken squeezes tighter. "It's never hurt this bad before," he admits, hungry only for her compassion - not anything else, not ever again.
"Yeah, this was impressive even for you." Shego gives the pillars of cupcake boxes a contemptuous look. Her head is still wagging.
Something dreadful is taking shape behind Drakken's navel, and he knows how a kinked hose feels, so much everything in there and no place to put any more of it. Eventually, they just split at the sides. "I'm going to explode!" he hollers.
"Wouldn't surprise me."
All right, that is just about enough. She answers everything with sass, and that is really the last thing he needs right now. He leans back against the floor and moans.
"Hey, here's an idea," Shego says. "How about you go to bed and sleep it off? And I'll see you in the morning?"
She says this as if he's the town drunk, and every single hair on Drakken's neck stiffens into its own miniature rake handle. "You mean you're not. . . staying?" he asks.
"Nope." Shego crosses one leg over the other. "Get into your jammies and go to bed. I'll be back in the morning."
This is unbearable. Drakken makes an attempt to sit upright, and his abdomen might as well be a plot to conquer the world, for all the luck he's having with it. "I can't move," he reports.
Shego rolls her eyes. "Look, I know it hurts, but. . ."
"N-n-no. I can't - I can't move." Panic streams sweat down Drakken's face.
Shego squints. "You serious?"
"Yes. I mean - I can -" Drakken raises an arm and leg and lets them each flop like beached trout, one at a time. "But I can't - I can't bend." He squints, too, so he won't have to see the beached whale sticking up in front of him, blobbing him to the ground.
Shego mutters something that Drakken is pretty sure is an oath. "How do you do this?" she says a little louder. "Haven't I warned you about consuming twice your weight in cupcakes?"
Her voice is a needle of accusation. Everything in Drakken wants to turn away from it, everything except one little stubborn streak that thrusts his chin out at her and keeps his eyes riveted on hers. He bites his tongue to keep from sticking it out at her. "You are not the boss of -" Drakken begins.
Then stops. Some terrible thing is stirring in the depths of his belly and rushing up his throat.
"Oh no," is all Drakken can say. His mouth feels too loose and rubbery compared to the rest of him, yet it'll barely move.
Shego's rotation toward him almost verges on interest. "What?" she says.
"Ohhh, man," Drakken says. He can't see Shego anymore; there's frosting in his contacts; there's frosting everywhere. His stomach is revolting (as in in the act of staging a rebellion), and it's about to get revolting (as in ewww, gross!). "Shego, you were right you were right all along I shouldn't have eaten all those -"
But no sooner does the word "cupcakes" leave his mouth than his gullet decides to supply visual backup. It's an atrocity to all five senses.
Fortunately, Shego has the reflexes of a lynx (which Drakken thinks he remembers hearing is the same thing as a mountain lion). She snatches up one of the empty cupcakes boxes and plants it under Drakken's nose just in the nick of time.
Shego's reaction would be flattering if she were a different person and he were menacing her at the point of a doom ray. She cringes back, wiping her unsoiled hands on a black panel of her jumpsuit. Probably the dirt - not that there is any - won't show up as well as on the lime patches. "Ugh. Oh, that is nasty."
As soon as he's done, as soon as he's able, Drakken glares at her through a goopy layer of tears and frosting. "Well, you know, I'm not exactly having a good time, either." He chokes on the final remnant of self-respect.
The glacier that is Shego. . . well, it doesn't melt, not even close, but it almost softens somewhat, as if two decades of global warming have finally had an impact. "Look, I know it stinks," she says. She stabs a look down at the box. "I mean, literally, it stinks. But it's over now. You feel better, right?"
Drakken hiccups and pauses to consider that. Every other time in his forty-two years of being, he's always felt at least marginally better after throwing up. Universal law that the scientists haven't gotten around to naming yet.
But this time. . . nope. Nothing. Nada. There's frosting everywhere, everywhere, and that ejection made no difference, didn't even make a dent. He's still nothing more than a warehouse overflowing with surplus inventory.
Drakken manages to shake his head. It's the atomic weight of helium - there's no blood there; it's all fallen to his stomach.
Another deep-rooted spasm grasps him and heaves him forward to retch all over again.
Well, this is not what I signed up for when I went to work for a supervillain.
Sure, everybody gets sick. Shego hadn't complained once when Drakken had gotten that awful cold two years ago and she'd had to hover around him even though she wasn't feeling one-hundred-percent herself yet, because he was running the triple-digit fever and not her. But this isn't sick from germs. This is sick from stupid.
Geez, I leave him alone for three hours and he completely wrecks himself.
Shego stoops, picks up the barf-box with every ounce of the caution she uses to handle live bombs, and marches it to the lair's huge trash receptacle a couple of rooms down. It so shouldn't be her job, but there was no way she could trust Drakken with it. He's helpless enough when he ISN'T about to lapse into a food coma.
As the box disappears into the dumpster, Shego catches a glimpse of a recent-Sharpie-job black shine. "Hey, Dr. D," she calls toward the living room. "What's this 3-9 on the box mean?"
"Thirty-nine. It's the thirty-ninth box," Drakken croaks back to her.
Shego's fingers clench the doorknob. "The thirty-ninth box that Perkins shipped here?" she says, knowing even as she asks that it won't be. Not with her luck.
"No. The thirty-ninth one I ate. I was working on Number Forty when we. . . errr. . ."
Shego doesn't bother listening to however he ends that. She takes a Drakken-can't-see moment to rest her forehead against the wall, breathe in sharply, and assemble all the strength that lounges around in every corner of herself ready to be whipped out. "How many cupcakes were in each box?" she says.
Please say ten. Please say ten.
"A hundred. I think," Drakken replies, in that halting, I-was-halfway-through-the-truth-before-it-occurred-to-me-that-it'd-be-better-to-lie way he's so good at. "I kind of lost track."
"So you ate four - thousand - cupcakes?" Shego says.
"Well - eh-heh - the math would make it appear so, yes." The broken-foghorn that follows those words might have been intended as a chuckle.
Shego waits to talk until she's tamed her vocab down to, "Holy dang, Doc. How are you still conscious?"
Not that it wouldn't be fun to say something a little stronger, watch him flush and squirm. At this point, though, one cuss word just might drop him dead on the floor.
"Am I?" Drakken says vacantly.
Eeyore himself couldn't sound more forlorn. A silent guffaw bursts inside Shego.
Shego strides back into the living room and scans it for her accidentally-bulimic boss and the natural disaster he's just made out of his stomach. He's right where she left him, basically wadded into place like a lump of clay, and greener than she is. She dodges a column of stacked-up boxes on her way over to him. They're all deep enough to store a coffeemaker or two in.
And they're all empty.
Shego feels herself shudder FOR Drakken, and she's not exactly big on empathy. Her skin bristles against it as if it's being forced to wear Kimmy's straight-out-of-the-seventies battlesuit.
"Come on. Get up if you can." Shego reaches a hand down and grabs one of Drakken's tiny ones. They must be frying in their own sweat, if the condition of his gloves is anything to go off. Good news is the puking's left him capable of bending the bulge and rising to his feet, though he's wobbly enough to flunk a sobriety test on sight.
Shego's mind barrels down one path the same way her body will lock in on one target. He couldn't actually, like, die from this, could he? Not exactly like there's a heckuva a lot of research on whether or not a person could survive downing four thousand cupcakes because, uh, nobody else in the history of sweets has been whacked enough to even try. She's never heard of death-by-cupcakes. . .
. . . but if anyone can manage it, it would be Drakken.
Drakken stumbles to the couch with Shego leading him, and she hefts his engorged self - more bulky than actually heavy - across its three maroon cushions. His face is blocked by what could easily be a beanbag chair wedged under his sweatshirt. Except it isn't soft. Its puffiness is the consistency of a zit that might pop any minute. Shego can barely see his chest, crashing in and out at top speed, a cruddy stab at Lamaze breathing.
Shego can't hold her snickers in anymore.
"What about this is funny?" Drakken snaps. The pout is audible.
What about this isn't funny?
"It's just - from this position - " Shego shakes her head - "you look like you're about to give birth."
"That is not funny!" Drakken bellows.
"Doctor, it's a bouncing baby cupcake!" Shego exclaims. Too good to pass up.
"Do not say that!" Drakken says. He comes across as less authoritative than your average flight attendant. Shego actually does feel kinda bad for him.
Not bad enough to stop her laughter from squeaking out.
That doesn't happen until Drakken sits bolt upright on the couch, nearly flipping backward over the sofa's low-slung arm. Ho geez! is screaming across the goofiness of his face.
"She-Shego. I'm g-going to thr-throw up again." Drakken garbles the words he didn't even need to say in the first place. Shego's already vaulted for the thirty-eighth empty box - like seriously, how did he think this was going to work? - and within seconds has it plunked into Drakken's hands because he has virtually NO lap at this point.
Drakken gives her a grateful pseudo-smile. Shego can't bring herself to return it. She pivots on one flat heel and pulls her nail file from her leg pouch, going after her glove-blades with a vengeance while the barf-fest picks up right where it left off behind her.
And to think I could be waiting tables at the Go City Bueno Nacho.
After a few minutes, Shego piles her latest paycheck, a granola bar, and a bought-for-when-Drakken-gets-really-boring paperback book into her shoulder bag for her flight home. Drakken himself is now mostly settled on the sofa, pretty much a bleached blueberry in there with all that russet furniture.
Settled, but not silent. Sickly noises keep ripping from his general direction - Shego can't tell if they're coming from his mouth or his gut, and she doesn't especially care to find out.
Shego perches on a cushion beside him, her feet still solid on the floor just in case. "I'll file this under 'What NOT To Do When Your Business Goes Belly-Up.'"
"Please don't say 'belly.'" This time there's no mistaking that the groan comes from his own.
Shego drags her fingers through her hair. "Boy, when you make a mistake, you make it whole-hog, don't you?" she says and prepares herself for a flood of enraged, Donald-Duck-style gibberish.
It doesn't come. When Shego turns around to make sure Drakken hasn't passed out on her, the shoulders that sink down into the couch and the hands that paddle around each other in circles are undeniably ashamed.
And Dr. D. doesn't get ashamed when someone tells him he's done something stupid. He gets defiant and irritated and obnoxiously assertive of his own "genius."
"I wasn't trying to be a hog," Drakken whines. "Really, honestly, I wasn't. I just needed them gone." He gives his neck a frantic, queasy-looking jerk toward her and blinks his getting-damp eyelashes. "I was going to let you have some, Shego. . ."
Okay, wow. This is sad.
"You're fine, Dr. D." Shego feels her lips twitch at him. "You're dumb, but you're fine."
It isn't a super-gentle response. Still, it must've seemed like it, at least compared to her normal retorts, because Drakken crumples from the hairline down, the look of somebody who's finally been understood. "I just -" he sniffles and curls his fists on either side of his droopy sweatband - "I just didn't want them all to end up in the garbage."
Shego has to snort at that. "Doc, they're all ending up in the garbage anyway. You're just the middleman."
No protest from Drakken. He just flinches, the beanbag chair dunking up and down.
Shego drops the phone beside one weakly-clenched fist. "Here. I'm going home."
"Really? You can't stay?" Drakken's giving her the Pound Puppy eyes.
Shego frowns to herself. He really is hurting. Ordinarily, he'd get all angry and indignant, say something like, "Indeed! Well, let me show you the way out!" and flourish toward the door like she HADN'T seen the rubber-latched thing a thousand times in the past four years. Now his voice is about two notches shy of a beg.
But there's no way he's going to make her feel guilty about not sticking around to see Operation Puke My Guts to its glorious end. He did this to himself, after all, and she's off the clock as of thirty minutes ago. Drakken can't afford overtime pay, and it wouldn't be worth it anyway.
"Isn't there something you can do?" Drakken continues.
"No." Shego hikes her shoulder bag and leans over her limp employer. His breath smells like a forty-pound sack of refined sugar. Even the stomach acid hasn't been able to sweep that away. "Look, there are only two options here. We can take you to the hospital, and they can pump your stomach, or you can stay here and. . . let nature run its course." She rolls back her upper lip. "And you so owe me a raise just for making me say those words."
Drakken shrivels right there in front of her. "I vote for nature," he says in such a tiny whisper Shego can barely believe it's him. She's almost relieved when it hikes up into a gripe of, "But nature hurts!"
Shego takes a step back. "Stomach-pumping hurts, too, pal. And then a whole ER staff is gonna know how bad you messed up instead of it staying between us."
"Ohhhhhic." Drakken puts one hand to his temple and sends the other one across his beanbag-belly in timid little strokes. "No. Definitely. Staying home. End of discussion." His eyes spring wide again. "I might die, though."
He doesn't believe it, or he wouldn't have said it so calmly. Nope, that's a patented Dr. D. guilt-trip, and Shego grins sweetly back at it. "I brought you the phone. Call me if there's an emergency." She shows him her palm before he can get his next syllable out. "Let me clarify for you. Something spontaneously combusts: emergency. Your puppy pees on the floor: not an emergency. You start leaking blood from your ears: emergency. You throw up again: not an emergency. Got it?"
Drakken nods. There's a but-I-don't-LIKE-this all over his face that he doesn't even bother trying to say. He just sighs, and even that sounds painful.
Shego straightens back up. "'Night," she offers Drakken as she heads for the door. "See you in the morning. Good luck digesting."
"I'm gonna die!" is the last thing she hears, and Shego does some sighing of her own. Sympathy has given way to disgust.
Good. She wouldn't have it any other way.
Drakken groans and lets his head fall back against the arm of the couch. Its soft surrender brings him no solace. The world is tight and ringing.
From beyond the door, Drakken hears Shego mutter something. Something that sounds an awful lot like, "Freak of nature."
And, just like that, she's gone. It's just him and the contents of his stomach. Cupcakes. So many cupcakes, with ganache and frosting and merange . . .
Has anyone ever, in the history of the human race, been this sick?
There in the darkness of the lair begins the longest night of his life. Longer than the one when Richard Lipsky's shiny black loafers stepped out the front door and never came back. Longer than the one he spent at Eddy's house, where he didn't sleep a wink because he had still been known to put the pee into PJs - Eddy isn't the teasing kind, but his knowing would have been enough. Longer than any he's spent in prison, where they don't even have PJs, just scratchy fabric that never lets you forget where you are and why.
After a few minutes, Drakken raises up on one elbow. The only thing there is the excruciated pull of his sweatpants and the mound beneath them, which seems to glare back at him with enmity. It rides low and heavy on the horizon, like a sunrise. His sphincter convulses, waves of acidic pain. Drakken shuts his eyes so he won't have to look anymore.
He can't actually die from this - can he? Oh, the stories children will be told fifty years from now in school, when they study the planet's fiercest tyrants and would-be conquerors! "This one was assassinated. This one died in battle. This one was poisoned by his own wine bearer. Dr. Drakken ate four thousand cupcakes and exploded."
And that will be his legacy. He'll be the laughing stock of history.
(Plus, he'll be dead.)
No, no, no, no. Drakken. Calm down. Drakken makes a valiant effort at taking deep, dignified breaths, but they invariably turn to belches. His heart's beating faster than he can count, and it makes it hard to regulate his breathing.
You're not going to die, he reassures himself. After all, he's already started throwing up - the all-natural method of cleansing the body of toxicities. Even if the process is as unpleasant as being struck by lightning, it's doing what it was meant to do to ensure he won't die.
Lightning. You know, he tied Kim Possible and her buffoon-friend to a lightning rod once. Left them there in the onslaught of a storm that his weather machine had just finished brewing. Oh, that was such a good trap! If only it had worked. Kim Possible would have been the toast of the town.
Drakken chuckles to himself, and everything inside him shifts and scrambles. Goes back down kicking and screaming. Definitely doesn't settle.
What would Kim Possible think if she could see him now, lying here like an over-packed duffel bag, possibly on his deathbed? She'd be gloating, no doubt about it. Wait - yes doubt about it, if there's something worse she could be doing. Like laughing at him. Drawing back in disgust. Pitying him.
She probably thinks he should be punished for the Atmosfreezer scheme. Which he already is, as far as Drakken is concerned - utterly mortified and helpless, with his stomach puffed up like a bullfrog's throat.
Drakken eyeballs the phone. For a moment, he considers pushing himself farther upright and calling his mother. He could use her hands on his back, the smell of her lotion, the gentleness of her face. But he knows, he knows with scientific certainty, that if she walked in here now, she would immediately start in on a see, Drewbie, this is why we don't eat that many sweets spiel, shrill enough to puncture.
He can't even think about it.
In spite of the sticky wetness that glues his hair to his forehead, Drakken shivers - a shiver that doesn't stop, that goes all the way down inside him and seizes his insides. A dreaded thing is grabbing his belly and pulling back on it, stretching it like a slingshot. Any second now it'll release.
Oh, please, no. Not again!
Drakken has no idea who he's talking to, and whoever it is doesn't listen, anyway. He rises and bolts for the hall. Tries to bolt. His normal birdlike sprint has turned to a baby-duck waddle, and Drakken's prayer quickly becomes only that he will reach the bathroom in time.
He does. Careens in, collapses in front of the toilet. His knees and his gut give way at the same time, and Drakken bends over the bowl and retches, over and over and over again. It's as if he is a plaything, scooped up and shaken by some giant child.
Can you puke so many times that you actually jar your actual stomach - not the contents, but the physical organ?
When he's finally done - it must be years later - Drakken feels around for the lever and flushes. The ache in him hasn't yielded, not by a single parasec. The floor has gone missing underneath him, and he's drifting somewhere through outer space, beyond Pluto, maybe.
There's something that catches him when he drops, though. Drakken squeezes into a bulgy ball for fear that even the slightest move will set him vomiting anew. Well, his arms and legs squeeze. His belly remains hard and unbudging.
Drakken lies there for several more centuries, seeing his own glistening cheek where the cold tile has scrunched it upward. Heat roils from the soles of his feet. With one sleeve, he cautiously pats the sweat from his upper lip. And there he stays until his back, out of nowhere, threatens to splinter like a weakened board.
He wants a felt cushion for it. He wants the ability to unzip his stomach. He wants. . . Pepto-Bismol!
Yes! Just remembering its existence lifts Drakken's spirits considerably. It will fix things. It will negotiate a peace treaty with his gut. If nothing else, it will wash the contamination out of his mouth.
Drakken struggles upright and wavers on his feet for a moment before he manages to lurch out the bathroom door. Sloshing and churning, he hugs the wall and travels its length down the hallway, past the living room and on in the other direction toward his wonderful medicine cabinet. Somewhere, some tiny part of Drakken suspects he might be beyond the liquid pink miracle's ability to cure, a thought he quickly shakes away.
The bottle sits right there in plain sight once the medicine closet's door creaks open. Drakken breaks into his first grin of the evening as he reaches for it and pulls it toward him, stopping a mere millimeter short of kissing it.
Yet the bottle comes forward too easily. Drakken stops and pumps it up and down, and his heart plummets with the rest of him when he hears it - the horrific rattle of an empty container.
What kind of idiot puts an empty bottle back in the cabinet?
Definitely not him.
Tears pool below Drakken's eyes, too exhausted to even trickle down his cheeks. He tilts his head back, rests it against the wall, burps. It doesn't help.
Maybe it's just as well, Drakken thinks. There's no space in there for anything else, not even medicine. One drop of Pepto might be all he needed to detonate.
Drakken makes a fist and brings it to his chest. Now what?
Shego's advice waltzes, unbidden, into his mind: Let nature run its course.
What other choice does he have?
With his last ounce of strength, Drakken toddles back to the living room and plumps himself down in a sit on the couch. His tummy bubbles out in front of him no matter how much he tries to straighten and suck it in - which hurts like Charles Dickens (or whatever the expression is) anyway.
Glorp. Drakken sinks back against the cushions. He's now up against something he can't boss around. It isn't difficult like Kim Possible or even Shego; it's not even human, and it has no exploitable weaknesses. Until it accomplishes exactly what it has set out to do, it is unstoppable - and for some reason he thinks of the blond kid who pretended to be the Vice Manager of Climactic Action. Cupcake mush must be creeping into his brain.
All is quiet, save for the cacophony in his midsection.
Well, that and the faraway song that starts in the recesses of Drakken's eardrums, so distant it must be a memory instead. It's those creatures from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - what are they called? Loopa-Lurpas? Five or six high-pitched little voices are singing:
What do you get when you guzzle down sweets?
Eating as much as an elephant eats?
What are you at, getting terribly fat?
What do you think will come of that?
A single voice goes off on its own and waxes, I don't like the looks of it.
Guilt wells up inside, eating Drakken alive. He clenches his eyes shut in disgrace, as tight as he can to squeeze out the song, but the notes are still there, keeping time to the mutterings of his stomach. He knows how it feels to be served with criminal charges, and that is what's happening now.
Eeeka-Weekas?
Drakken slides back into a reclining position and stares at the ceiling, resting his hands on the swelling that knocks about under them. He wasn't trying to be greedy. He really wasn't. He was trying to keep the cupcakes from going bad and having to be thrown away. It's a horrible thing to waste good food when there are starving children in Africa.
Then again, he also thought it would be really fun to be able to eat as many cupcakes as he wanted. Is that a horrible thing?
Whatever his motive, his belly pokes out as People's Exhibit A. It's so full and fat now. So terribly, terribly fat.
Drakken can visualize Kim Possible again, in her new non-midriff-baring outfit. It's his midriff that's noticeable now, and she hasn't missed it. Her eyes aren't laughing anymore or even jeering. They flare with disgust.
Gross, Drakken, she scoffs. Now you're FAT, too?
In her shadow stands Hank Perkins, with his firm man-fingers and his tie that's never out of place for longer than five seconds. His eyebrows peak as his head wags from side to side. Behind him, there's a line that occupies the rest of the room - Eddy, the Seniors, Dementor, DNAmy, Jack Hench, James Possible. . . everyone he knows, here to catch a glimpse of the Amazing Blue Wonder Blob.
Even though he knows she isn't really here, Drakken works on drilling a hole into Kim Possible anyway. This is all her fault, really. If she had just been lowered into that vat of steaming ganache like she was supposed to be, none of this would even be happening! Her and her little friend. . .
Drakken frowns and hiccups. Her friend. He was so singularly focused on Kim Possible that day - because ha-ha, Shego, he can focus - that he never even paused to tag or catalog the person with her. Now he vaguely remembers. Freckled, but not the buffoon. Shorter. Darker-skinned.
The kid always on Kim Possible's computer screen.
The one who called Drakken and told him Avarius had Shego trapped. The one who talked his mutant-good self through fixing the Attitudinator. The one who probably isn't old enough to wear deodorant yet. Drakken shudders, remembering the period in his life when deodorant first became necessary. It's not a thing he looks back on fondly, especially not when his pits are already thoroughly saturated on their own.
A pang of guilt stuffs its way into Drakken's already-queasy stomach. He still wants Kim Possible dead and gone, but he feels bad about almost killing a boy that young.
But what else could he have done? If he let Computer Kid go, he'd head straight to the authorities, and they'd come for him. That would mean prison again, and he'll die - honestly, truly die - if he has to go back to that place.
Pitiful. He is really is going soft. Two, three years ago there'd have been no debate. The kid would have earned his destruction simply by alleying himself with Kim Possible.
Perhaps that wasn't meant to be Kim Possible's glorious end, though. Would've ruined a perfect good vat of ganache.
The child's prepubescent face glows in Drakken's mind as soon as his eyes close. He has to remind himself that that's not the reason he's feeling violently ill.
At this point, he'd rather think about his own fatness.
Drakken swallows hard, and not from reflux this time. He knows what the world at large thinks of fat people. They poke fun at them, shun them, consider them disgusting. He always considered them disgusting. Well, actually, it was probably more that he was glad to see someone who wasn't him being poked fun at. Still, he cringed and "eww"ed as much as anybody when a guy took off his shirt and spilled flab across the screen.
Society rallies a little more behind fat women, at least recently. He himself prefers women with a little meat on their bones.
But he's not a woman, and he can't see his feet, and the embarrassment runs hot and cold as if the Atmosfreezer is on the fritz inside his chest.
No, this isn't embarrassment. Something worse, something that plunges deeper than his gut, floods him with something more dizzying than nausea.
Oompa-Loompas?
No, that's the answer to the other question. Their annoying little chant resurfaces, giddy and giggle-soaked. In spite of his tightened shoulders, Drakken's eyelids, also bogging under so many cupcakes, droop lower and lower. Right as they clap into each other, he spies letters inside them - s-h-a-m-e.
He can't piece them together, but their backs are bent as though broken. Hot. So hot. Ever since he escaped prison, he's had such trouble keeping warm, and now he might as well be in the heart of a fire.
Sleep falls with a bloated thud.
"Welcome, one and all! It looks like another beautiful day here in the kingdom!"
A voice rings out, that chipper type of voice that Drakken always longs to silence after a scheme-gone-wrong. It reminds him too much of his own happiness, once so close at hand, now muted, diluted, and thrown into somebody's backseat.
The weather is in on it, too, serving up one of those ironically tantalizing days, one that would lead the less scientifically-minded to swear winter does not exist (despite all documented evidence to the contrary). The sun beams down at Drakken, in more ways than one - it sports a smiling face that appears to have been finger-painted on to it. The air is moist and healthy with the afterthought of rain, and when Drakken glances down to check the ground for mud puddles - the usual scourge of these days - he sees instead a path of small quaderlaterals in a medley of colors: red, purple, blue, orange, green, yellow.
Drakken feels himself perk slightly. He knows this game!
"We're so glad you've decided to join us on our 3:30 tour of Candy Land. This is meant to be a fully immersive experience, so please follow me and take in the sights, the sounds, and the smells." Her voice bats at it, playful, like a kitten's paw. "And, of course, the tastes."
Drakken knows he is grinning every bit as widely and dazzlingly as the sun. He bounces in his boots and takes off after the invisible tour guide in leaps and bounds. This might be just what he needs after having both world domination and an extremely promising bakery franchise ripped cruelly away from him.
First Stop: The Gingerbread Trees
Drakken never thought he'd be happy to see Plumpy - considering the card with his face on it is tantamount to one that reads, "GAME OVER. YOU LOSE."
The little guy makes Drakken think of one of the Seven Dwarfs, if any of them had thick, leafy body hair, and his laugh is something out of a claymation Christmas special as he nods at his visitors, granting them access to the famous Gingerbread Trees. Drakken rushes forward and jerks Plumpy's arm up and down in gratitude before rushing over to one tree and digging in.
Some of the others in his group opted for a shorter route, taking Rainbow Road at the first orange square on the board. That's what Drakken always does in the game if he's fortunate enough - but, come on, this is a tour, not a tournament. (Clever wordplay on his part.) They're only missing out on several destinations' worth of candy, thereby reducing their enjoyment by at least thirty percent.
Oh, well. More for him.
Yes, this is just what he needs, Drakken decides. He's been so busy lately, busy-busy-busy, as busy as a beaver - an odd, enterprising little beaver who plotted world domination instead of just gnawing through trees, because even Dr. Drakken's teeth aren't that strong.
He can gnaw on these trees, though. Their fruit is edible, as is their bark. Well, technically, Drakken supposes all bark is edible if one is hungry enough. Yet this - this is gingerbread, spicy and sweet and chewy and firm all blended and packed together just for him (oh, yes, and his tour group).
Gingerbread is sugar and spice and everything nice, as the nursery rhyme says about girls, whose biological makeup is actually much more complex and whose internal wirings are downright inexplicable.
For example - why wasn't Shego happy with their new business enterprise? Drakken frowns and doesn't bother to swallow his gingerbread mouthful before taking another one.
No matter how often he chomps at the tree, the hole automatically heals itself with more gingerbread, and the trees' white frosting-faces show no signs of being in pain. A person could probably just eat off them all day.
Drakken reaches an arm up and deftly plucks a plum from their branches. The soft flesh collapses beneath his bite, half the juice beginning a slow, runny journey down his chin, the other half moseying down his throat, royal purple in its richness. Most purple candy is grape-flavored, but this. . . this is the taste of purple, as far as Drakken is concerned.
Not that colors have a taste.
Second Stop: The Peppermint Forest
A scratchy snow clips beneath Drakken's boots as he weaves between candy-cane stalks. A short whiff drifts up his nostrils, and saliva leaps to the surface of his tongue. It's the smell of a dentist's office, minus the drill of dental instruments and the poking of tools and the cries of children who didn't want to come. Mr. Mint totters up to them on his long legs and bids them, with a sweep of an equally-long arm, to partake as they please.
Drakken needs no further encouragement. He skids to his knees in the snow and begins to nibble at the base of a cane. Each lick of peppermint pops on his tongue, like those special firecrackers that burst and spark when tossed on a driveway, the only ones Eddy's parents ever let the two of them have. His father just believed firecrackers should be kept away from "such a bright, mischievous boy," even though Eddy never meant anyone any harm.
Not like Pyro Pete.
Pyro Pete. That means something to Drakken, or it should, but it flickers out like a match itself.
Drakken shrugs and laps at the barber-pole stripes once more. It tastes precisely the same as the puffy mints Mother carries around in her purse. She gave him one the night of his first date when he was nervous that the peanut-butter-and-jelly scent could still be detected and give away what a babyish lunch he ate. Along with it came a chubby hand-squeeze and a reassurance that he would do wonderfully.
He hadn't.
Lick, lick, lick. It's bizarre, it truly is, Shego's lack of enthusiasm for the gourmet cupcake industry. He remembers that last morning before he activated the Atmosfreezer - Drakken strutted into the room, gulping his latte from a very chic paper cup, and gave Shego the businessman extension of his smile. She responded with a look so disapproving, Drakken was sure he'd dribbled coffee down the front of his white polo.
Nope.
He tried to chalk it up to Shego's typical attitude problem. But it still wilted Drakken inside. He'd been planning to make her Employee of the Month, and how could he now, especially with the henchmen having "upped their game," as the teens today say?
Lick, lick, lick.
Third Stop: The Gumdrop Fields
Drakken rear-bounces off a gumdrop, a move that rockets him straight into the sky. From this altitude, he can see the entire valley with its dense clustering of gumdrops and the whipped-cream stream that bisects it into Big Drop Peak and Little Drop Desert. Too joyous to feel any fear, Drakken careens toward the ground, bellyflops on a large red drop with elastic-like resilience that throws him on his back against another sprig of green-jellied ones. Ahh, these things even provide better lumbar support than some of the massage chairs he keeps intending to steal.
With a sigh, Drakken plucks a particularly fat nodule from the midst. He gazes at it, squinting just a tad to imagine it's glowing, imagining that he holds some omnipotent orb in his hands. Not the mystical kind out of a fairy tale - something scientific, that elusive core of clean energy the world searches for, perhaps. Or the chemical bomb that will turn all humans into creatures like Plumpy - all, that is, except for the innoculated, which shall be Drakken, his mother, Shego, and the henchmen.
Two weeks ago, that list would have included Perkins. Before he cut and run like a coward.
Drakken feels a safety-pin-pang and turns it around to penetrate the gumdrop. Something airy and scrumptous fills his mouth, and the corners of it make their way upward.
That's more like it.
Detour: Lord Licorice's Manor
Many of those on the tour took a page out of Perkins's book and used the narrow Gumdrop Pass to avoid Lord Licorice. Even the tour guide that exists only in sound steers them nervously around this spot on the board. Lord Licorice, she tells the group, is your standard mustache-twirling, snake-eyed villain, and he might just run them off with a licorice whip.
Which is exactly why Drakken breaks away to meet him.
Lord Licorice recognizes a kindred spirit with one look, despite Drakken's inability to grow a mustache - even when facial hair does sprout, it's scattered thin and patchy, the effect closer to a Dalmatian's coat than anything else. He and his licorice-bite guard dogs invite Drakken to sit on one the rocks dotting the wasteland where he lives.
"So then we went out of business," Drakken reports, his fingers sifting candy sand. "And instead of staying and helping me plan how to get back on our feet, finanically speaking, Perkins got up and ran away! Bolted for the hills. . . well, I'm not actually quite sure which geographical location he headed for - STILL - he ran away and stuck me with all our excess merchandise!"
Something else, something else has happened since then. The thought, however, is a no-show, misplaced somewhere between brain and spinal column.
Lord Licorice nods his sympathy. "That is such a betrayal, Dr. Drakken," he says in a dignified accent that strangely reminds Drakken of Senor Senior, Sr. "No wonder you are so upset. Even us villains, we must have those we trust, yes?"
"Yes!" Drakken bursts out. Finally, someone who understands.
Lord Licorice passes Drakken two licorice strands, one black, one red, knotted and tucked together like something contraband. Drakken graciously accepts it, unabraids one section, and drops it between his lips. It barely brushes the insides of his cheeks as it strings down.
He'd love to stick around and chew the licorice (a sophisticated, villainous version of the old saying "chew the fat") with Lord Licorice for hours on end. Yet it has just occurred to Drakken that his stomach is finite in its scope, and he's still only halfway through a tour.
So he reluctantly bids his new companion adeau and heads in the direction where his tour group has disappeared.
Fourth stop: Grandma Nutt's house.
It's made of peanut brittle! How she got the zoning committee to consent to such a thing, Drakken has no idea, but he's sure glad she did. Perhaps they started to protest and she cut them short by stuffing peanut brittle in their mouths, the way Perkins did to him with the cupcake -
The thought is sour in Drakken's mind, so sour he can feel all the other thoughts pucker around it, and a chunk of peanut brittle jabs the inside of his cheek. He's already vowed to stop thinking about Perkins. This is Candy Land, for Pete's sake, and he should be light and carefree here!
So what if Perkins bailed? He just missed out on his shot to get a finger in the global-supremacy pie. Now he won't get so much as a passing mention in Drakken's memoirs. He'll snub Hank far worse than Hank snubbed him. Dr. Drakken can out-snub anyone.
And out-eat them, too, Drakken thinks with a grin as he peels another sliver of peanut brittle loose from the windowsill. If legal disputes could be settled via pie-eating contest, the scales of justice would have tipped in Drakken's favor, guaranteed.
Just like the Gingerbread Trees, this house is self-refurbishing - take a bite and watch it heal on the spot. This is a resilience human technology has yet to perfect, and Drakken longs to take it back to the real world with him. He'd surely be labeled a genius then. Come to think of it, if only he'd known about it when he built his Syth -
No, no. If the subject of Hank Perkins is off limits, then the subject of Sythodrones is radioactive, incapable of being touched by human hands.
Okay, now where was he? Liveliness. Carefreeity. Peanut brittle.
Mmm, peanut brittle!
Drakken devours the chimney again in a volley of salt and sugar and crunch and savor. After he's whittled it down to a point, he pulls back and wipes his lips, sticky as double-sided tape, on his sleeve and watches the chimney bloom back into place. He could be very close to full very soon. And his tour group probably misses him.
With another peanut brittle fragment tucked into his cheek for the road, Drakken continues to loop the board.
Fifth stop: Lollipop Woods
It's possible to get lost in here, too, Drakken remembers. If you land on that particular square - the one with the black spot, shorthand for "IT'S A TRAP" because not all children who play this game can read - you're stuck there until you draw a blue card. Theoretically, they could be a problem. Thus far, though, Drakken hasn't had any trouble with it. Blue is never far from him. Part of the cosmic irony of his life.
And that is the heaviest topic on his mind as Drakken twirls, lively and carefree, through the lollipop-poles that rise from the grass like telephone poles, only tastier. Also, they don't short out in a thunderstorm.
Being blue isn't so bad, Drakken decides. Blue is a lovely color; pretty much everyone agrees on that, and just because he's the first human to try it on his skin doesn't mean he should be treated like a mutation.
Well. . . technically, he is a mutation. But he doesn't have six heads and a toucan's beak, which is how people look at him sometimes.
With a burst of athletic ability that probably no one would have expected from him, Drakken shimmies to the top of the pole that holds a light-red lollipop and gives it a thorough sweeping with his tongue. Eventually the candy-shell begins to weaken, and some bits crack off and land in Drakken's possession, tiny pieces of heaven.
In the comic books, a mutated supervillain usually gained some amazing powers and often the respect of the villain community at large as a result. Shego did, and she pulls the strange coloration off very well. Not Drakken. He gained blue skin and black eyelids and an itch in his chest that can't be scratched.
Those other things could be yet to come, he supposes. Still, it's been five years, and that window is shrinking down to the size of a keyhole.
Several brushes of the lollipop later, Drakken lets go and hops down, grimacing when his feet smack the ground. That didn't feel so keen on a tummy as full as his is beginning to get.
He better catch up with his tour group while he still has room.
Drakken neatly sidesteps the blue space with its menacing black dot and can't resist beaming a smug face back at it as it disappears from sight.
Sixth stop: Ice Cream Sea
Chocolate waves stroke the graham-cracker shore. Strawberry sherbert clouds hang low on the horizon, fluffy with fruit juice. Waffle cones are studded throughout the reefs on their pointy ends, opening up into wide bowls at the top where ice cream nestles in a shade of fuchsia that doesn't even really exist.
If ice cream isn't technically a candy. . . Well, to-MAY-to, to-MAT-to. And is it a vegetable or a fruit? No one really knows. No one really cares. They just enjoy eating it.
It's rather fitting that the sea in Candy Land is made of ice cream anyway, Drakken notes as he wades calf-deep into the chocolate ripples. Seaweed - or kelp, if one wants to use the professional terminology - is an ingredient in many different types of ice cream. Give a surfer enough milk and machinery, and he might just be able to create ice cream right there on the beach.
Drakken reaches into his pocket and whips out a straw - also something no one would suspect - longer than he is tall. Reclining on his back, he bobs in the creamy current, wedges the straw down into the seabed, hunches the tip down to his lips, and begins to guzzle.
It cascades down his throat like a velvet cape will one day cascade over his shoulders. As he sits on his throne. As ruler of the world.
Slurp, slurp, slurp. Ahhhhh.
Drakken isn't sure how much time has passed when he takes a pull on the straw and knows it will be the final one, for nothing comes through but graham cracker crumbs. He glances to either side of him to find he's drained the immediate vicinity of - hic - ice cream.
Well, that's probably good enough.
Drakken folds the straw, repositions it in his pocket, and rolls over on the crummy seabed. (In the factual sense - "composed of crumb particles" - no offense intended.) With some difficulty, he manages to haul himself to shore. His fullness is actually starting to ache.
And chill. Drakken shivers a little. Maybe he shouldn't have eaten all that ice cream.
Oh, well.
Seventh stop - Molasses Swamp
This is the third and final trap-space on the board, and Drakken has a plan to get around it. He inches sideways, crab-style, off the board and navigates a two-seventy-degree turn out onto the grass before he sets foot back on a safe tile. Still no sign of his tour group. . . No sign of anyone or anything. Just the molasses swamp with its Fudgsicle cattails and its pools deep enough to drown you.
Drakken veers from the path and heads straight for one of them. Just in case his tour guide fell into one by mistake. He's just checking.
She didn't, Drakken can tell right away. The boggy land around the swamp doesn't play host to any footprints, and the prickled feeling that always comes from being around a mess of non-worshipful humans isn't flaring in him.
Just him and the molasses.
Drakken bends down and gathers up a handful so dense it doesn't even dribble through his fingers. He nudges his head down and his hands tip the molasses forward to eat it. It's succulent enough to give his taste-buds goose bumps, and he eagerly dips his hand in again.
He knows he shouldn't - he already feels like he's going to burst - but it's just a little more, and he's only a couple dozen squares away from the end-game where he meets up with his tour group, where he'll pop a few M&Ms or something and then head home.
Slurp.
Final destination: The Kandy Kastle
Candy everywhere. The doors are caramel bars, striped by skinny pipings of icing, jawbreakers for knobs. The floor looks to be pie crust reinforced with fudge squares. Outside the windows - formed by cinnamon donuts, of course - Drakken can see the ice cream sea winding its chocolatey way around the Kastle.
And him without an iota of appetite to his name.
The ambiance is partially to blame, Drakken determines. He's not sure how well Necco wafers ventilate, and the inside of this place is definitely too hot, so hot he's surprised the taffy on the walls isn't running down like Mother's eye-makeup after she cries. Exhaling is hard. Inhaling even worse.
Drakken leans against hard-candy walls and holds his belly. It feels like a tight little fist under his palm. "It's okay," he tells it. "We just need to catch up with our tour group, and then we can go see if they have any fizzy-water hot springs or something."
A memory decades old clobbers Drakken. Mother's just read about how Peter Rabbit has stuffed himself with the plants of Mr. MacGregor's garden - "and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley." He could use some parsley right now.
Yick. Things must be bad if he's seeking out a green vegetable in the midst of a candy confectionery.
The tour group is nowhere in sight. Not that they were ever in sight, but now they're completely undetectable. He senses another group going by with an equally-perky guide, and though Drakken never caught a glimpse of his tour guide's face, he can discern somewhere in the depth of his over-satisfaction that this isn't her.
Drakken sags a little farther down the wall, held in place only by the stubborn clench of his feet. Boy, when he builds the Candy Wing on his own palace, he's going to construct it out of a material that breathes a lot better. Fruit leather or some other thing he doesn't especially want to think about right now.
Ah, there's his tour group! Drakken gears up to bolt for them, but his legs are incapable of moving at anything faster than a waddle. He begins to regret those last couple of - brrrrup - molasses mouthfuls.
Drakken inches painstakingly after them. At long last, he passes under another arc of caramel and finds himself in another room and, more importantly, caught up. He bumps his way to the front of the pack and flashes an innocent smile.
"Welcome back," the tour guide says to him before turning her vaporous form to the entire group. "This is where Candy Land manufactures all of its goods, and we're lucky enough to have backstage passes." She winks, Drakken can tell.
Drakken lets his gaze wander over the room. Compact conveyor belts are layered into the far wall, following its every bend and swerve. A chunk of nougat plops from the valve at the top and trundles along to the next belt, where peanut butter is applied to it. The penultimate ramp wraps chocolate around its outside before it finally clips perfectly to the end of a larger conveyor belt in the middle of the room at the approximate level of Drakken's straining waist.
"Tah dah," the tour guide says. She takes the finished project and offers it to Drakken in midair. "Care to try a sample?"
Something in him gurgles and whimpers. "Oh, no more for me, thanks. I'm full," Drakken says in his absolute most polite tone, which only makes the very-loud belch that sneaks its way out at the end all the more frustrating.
All right, so maybe "full" is understating the case.
The tour guide smiles as if she understands. In that moment, she goes from just a presence to a physical persona - identical to the strobe-light effect in the horror movies where a full shot of the monster is revealed for an instant and then plunges back to black before your mind can even begin to register what it's just seen.
Then she's gone, and the rest of the group with her. Everyone is gone. Just him. Drakken lets out a breath of relief and hugs his middle. It might forgive him. In time.
There's not even a box at the end of the belt, Drakken notices when he raises his head. Not a box, not anything, just candy zipping down the belt and getting ready to drop to the floor. And somehow Drakken is suddenly entrusted with the knowledge that if the candy touches the fudge-tiles, it will produce a matter-antimatter reaction strong enough to obliterate Candy Land.
He can't let that happen!
Drakken makes a cup with his hands, wishing he had a baseball mitt. Made for someone with hands two sizes larger than his. As he leans down to catch the candy, something rams him from behind - who, Drakken has no idea, because it's just him and the belt and the candy. He falls flat on his back, watching the candy teeter on the brim of the belt; he is a plane that can't pull out of a nosedive, complete with cranking, fit-to-burst engine.
Some force that Drakken can't control opens his mouth for him, and it fills up so quickly he has no choice but to swallow. A surfeit of chocolate hits his stomach, and to Drakken's horror, it expands another belt-notch before his very eyes.
The force makes another grab for his mouth, and Drakken tries to rock away from it. No! he tells it. I don't want any more! I've had enough! I've had too much!
It is pitiless. Opens, closes, swallows, opens, closes, swallows, and Drakken can only lie there and bear witness to it all.
He has no power, he has no control, he has no sway, he has no influence, he has nothing, nothing at all, except a belly inflating like a water balloon attached to a full-blast spigot, and little warning lights flash in the corners of his vision, same as they did before the cupcake factory blew up, only now he will be the one to -
KABOOM.
The sound effect has barely touched off in Drakken's mind before he jerks awake. Awake, but not up. Someone's giant foot is stepping on him, keeping him nearly embedded into the. . . couch? Is this the couch? It's certainly not his bed.
After several attempts, Drakken finally lurches his body into a sit - ugggh, why is he so heavy and sore? Everything around him is just a clot of sheer blackness, and his sensory awareness blinks away in a jiffy. He only knows three things.
One, he can't figure out which direction he's headed - left arm and leg sailing west, right arm and leg flailing east, and his belly pointing straight north. Two, the room is spinning as if the whole thing is being sucked down an enormous funnel.
And three, the Dreaded Thing is pressing urgently on his throat.
Oh, man. Oh, no. It's coming back.
He frantically rolls off the couch, jiggling his already-queasy stuffings when his feet hit the floor. Bile pumping toward his mouth, he sprints in the direction of the bathroom.
Well, he doesn't quite achieve a "sprint."
There is another element to add to the agony of the whole experience, one Drakken hadn't taken the time to factor in: with the rest of his frame still prison-scrawny and his belly so pain-pooched, he's massively off-balance. Simple physics would have told him that immediately, but he's a chemist first and foremost, and his genius is distracted by the liquid-nitrogen bomb going off in his stomach. No matter how anxiously aware he is that he needs to dash, he can only hitch from side to side - that's what Mother would say, that he's "got a little hitch in his get-along" - one cramp at a time. He somehow steers his load, unwieldy tummy first, toward the bathroom.
Repeat for hours. Every command Drakken gives himself to stand up straight and maintain some dignity whites out between brain and spinal column. On about the fifteenth leg of his never-ending round trip, his legs forget how to waddle in a way that distributes the bloat evenly, and he bumps right into a wall and all the way down it. Drakken can almost hear the voice-over informing college students that this is the point where they need to confiscate their friend's keys.
Not that Drakken has any keys.
By the time he reaches the bathroom door, he's gasping, his lungs fishing for oxygen and then unsure what to do with the samples they manage to find. Everything above the pinch of his sweatpants is too light, too lax, too empty - compared to his stomach, at least. Drakken leans forward, hip bones banging against the porcelain, and more cupcakes jump ship.
And there is nothing else, nothing else in the world except him and the great greedy opening of the sink and the reek of his own vomit. Humanity has gone extinct, and Dr. Drakken, the brilliantest of them all, is doomed to succumb to a slow, painful death by cupcakes.
That is ludicrous, Drakken knows, and can easily be disproven in any manner of ways, yet he can't reach any of them. It is that sort of question Shego always asks about his plans, one he has never prepared an explanation for because it is so naturally obvious, and how do you explain to someone who doesn't get it? He can't, he never can, and he always ends up looking stupid.
Drakken rests his chin on his fists and leans his weight on his elbows, which quake on the sink, the vibrations traveling up his entire arm to the aforementioned fists, so that he is essentially socking himself in the jaw. He glances at himself in the mirror and yips aloud. The dampish sweatshirt sways off his concave chest. Drakken doesn't dare look below that, at the part that still caterwauls in protest.
His head is a depressing enough sight. The recesses under his eyes look bruised, like he's been punched in the face twelve times. His eyes themselves are so shot through with red, it's left the rest of his face bloodless, save for a patch of raw pink around his lips.
What a fine specimen of villainhood he is.
At the thought, Drakken bends over and pukes again.
This time, the ocean waves crowd into his ears and crash in there and pour from his forehead, overwhelming him, threatening to drag him down to the bottom. Into some sort of heat vent fortified by Shego's mocking laughter, Perkins's sniff, and Kim Possible's short, fingernail-scraping noises of triumph.
And footsteps. Drakken could swear he hears footsteps. Of course, he could also swear that he's already dead and rigor mortis has set in because he can't move so much as a pinkie toe. He squeezes his eyelids and his hands and his diaphram.
"Boss?" a man says.
Drakken can't answer. The Dreaded Thing re-barrels through him, and he doubles up over the sink again, barely remembering to knock his ponytail out of the way so he can't mess it.
"Boss?" the same man repeats. "Are you sick?"
While Drakken's puking in the sink two feet away from him.
As soon as he's free to, as soon as his mouth isn't otherwise engaged, Drakken snaps at him, "No! I just do this because it's fun!" It's the first time he's heard his own voice in a few hours. It sounds like that rough sponge Mother uses - steel wool, she called it, as if those things can somehow coexist - scrubbing burnt crumbs from the bottom of a cakepan.
Filling the doorway, Bill the Henchman just stares at Drakken.
Sarcasm always works for Shego, but it never works for him.
"Yes, I'm sick!" Drakken says - not a snap this time, more like a snarl. He gives his neck a jerk that turns out to be a little more forceful than necessary, considering he must have nothing left in his skull except air and feathers.
"Oh," is all Bill says.
Drakken waits for him to ask why, though he probably doesn't need to ask. It's not that the henchmen haven't seen him this way before. Thanksgiving dinner. The occasional villain expo. The buffet table at that one hotel in Panama.
Although this is certainly worse than any of those. He's spent most of the night staring into the toilet, and he's still stuffed to the gills he doesn't even have. Still feeling as though a vise is strapped around his abdomen. Still eclipsing the view of his feet with his stomach.
Drakken folds his arms at his former waist, as if they could possibly hide it. As if its mutterings wouldn't give it away even on the off-chance they could.
"You need anything?" Bill asks. He tilts his roughly rectangular head. Drakken can feel himself shriveling, until he is microscopic, invisible except for the elephantine belly.
"No! I'm fine!" Drakken says. He tries to flip himself away, but his head is still in a nauseous stupor, and his body sort of slithers down the length of the sink to land, cockeyed, on the floor. A "NNGGGH" - a complaint that doesn't need to wait for words - comes from him, and he lies there, a clump of blue wax melted off the birthday candle and marring the cake.
Urgggggh. Why does he keep thinking about cake?
Without permission, and without so much as a grunt, Bill squats down and hoists Drakken in his arms, voluminous middle and all. He carries him out of the bathroom and turns down the hall toward Drakken's bedroom, and all Drakken can do is watch his precious bathroom slip farther and farther away from him. He does not want to picture Shego's look if she came in tomorrow morning to find a puddle of puke on the floor.
"No! The couch, the couch!" Drakken barks.
"Sorry." Bill does a one-eighty and clomps off down the cavernous hallway. Drakken can almost hear the drip-drip-dripping of mineral water off the peak of a stalactite - or that could just be another audible reminder that he shouldn't drift too far from the bathroom.
The grip beneath him does nothing for Drakken's mental state. Besides the humiliation factor of being picked up and cradled like a baby, strong hands on his tender, nervous flesh can only be a source of anxiety, especially after prison. Yet a part of him wishes he could forget all that and rest his head against that broad chest, secure as a well-loved little brother.
"Its okay, Boss," Bill murmurs to Drakken. "You'll be all right."
For the first time, Drakken notices that Bill is in pajamas and a bathrobe instead of the red hooded jumpsuit and shielding sunglasses. His eyes are blue. Drakken never knew that.
"I'm sorry I yell at you so much," Drakken says. It sounds more like, "Mmsiryilltyoomch" squished up against Bill's bathrobe, but Bill nods as if he understands perfectly.
Fred and Noah are standing in the living room when Bill carries Drakken in. Drakken turns away so he won't have to take in the pillars and pillars of cupcake boxes behind them.
Bill lays Drakken down on the couch with as much reverence as if he were placing him on an altar. Gently, too, although it still jostles the cupcakes. Drakken puts one hand to his itchy chest and tries to focus on anything other than the bulge before him.
"Is he okay?" Noah asks Bill, as though Drakken can't answer for himself. "What's wrong with him?"
"His tummy's upset," Bill says - all in a hush - as though Drakken can't hear him, either.
But Dr. Drakken is not deaf. Nor is he dumb, in either sense of the word. He pries his head from the armrest and rolls his eyes at his uneducated henchmen. "Actually, I have increased acid production and digestive turmoil resulting from the overconsumption - "
Drakken stops. Caves. A boomerang of hiccups reverberates throughout his system. He wouldn't be surprised to see sickly cartoon bubbles popping beside his head.
"Yeah." Drakken minces back into the sofa cushions. "My tummy's upset."
"Aw, I'm sorry, Boss," Noah says.
"Yeah, that must feel awful," Fred adds.
Neither of their postures has sagged - well, no more than usual. Drakken must look even more bedraggled than when he woke them up bashing into the wall, but they're treating him as if he's as commanding as the boss who paced before them, spitting out orders.
Drakken nods without thinking and then wishes he could pull away from himself. The sickness has disabled his firewall. His shields are down. That could be dangerous.
And they still don't mention the obvious. Why not? They must see. It can probably be seen from space.
The henchmen continue to stand there. Are they - staying? Even with the knowledge that he could regurgitate again at any given second? That's not just inconvenient; that's disgusting! Even I don't want to be around me right now, Drakken thinks.
Bill picks up a blue-plaid comforter from the end of the couch and layers it over Drakken. Before he can even tuck the ends under Drakken's chin, Drakken kicks it away.
"No! I don't want it!" It's as if someone else is speaking for Drakken, someone who sounds more like a puny, nasty, bridge-dwelling troll than a supervillain, and he hates it, hates everything. "I'm too hot!"
The faces that look back at him have all the intelligence of cotton swabs. "Maybe that's 'cuz you're in your sweats, Boss," Bill finally offers.
"Yeah. Why aren't you wearing your lab coat?" Noah says.
It is an honest question, and yet it still manages to sink into Drakken with sharp little fangs and burrow inside and wreak all kinds of havoc. The word shame comes to him all too easily now, and he glares down at himself, overflowing with more than forty liters of cupcakes.
"Because - it won't FIT - over my big fat gut!" Drakken yelps, and his shoulders begin tweaking back and forth. His insides are so charbroiled, he's sure the tears that eventually stutter out are black.
His henchmen's response is lost in a sudden crash into sleep.
When Drakken wakes up again, he remembers where he is this time, even though something is very different. Good-different. There's a spring coolness on his limbs instead of the thick flannel that wrung the sweat from him.
Drakken peeks down at himself. He's in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. Size Henchman.
Which is nice and loose.
Drakken sighs and collapses back against the sofa. Cupcakes are still pressed bumper-to-bumper in his stomach, but it's no longer strangled by the waistband or imprinted with its stitching. Short sleeves rustle with his movements, crisp and refreshing. The buttons are nowhere near popping, and it masks the rumbling pouch he can still feel pressuring his lower back.
They changed me, Drakken realizes, and he feels his cheeks sizzle medium-rare. It's the first time all night he's been grateful for Shego's absence.
Still. . . no way could they have missed the shape he's in at that point. The very-obvious root of all his problems hadn't deterred them from helping him.
It's a wonderful, freeing experience, being treated like you're not stupid. Sort of makes Drakken want to treat the henchmen that way.
Weird. He's never felt that way before, ever. In his life. Perhaps he's drifting in the final, hypnotic throes of a sugar coma before he blows up.
Yes, he did fall back asleep, Drakken deduces, because he had another nightmare. One about giving birth to cupcakes. It was very biologically troubling.
Drakken rolls over onto his side and after about twenty seconds, his belly follows with the slow-motion suction of a waterlogged boot. In the far corner of the room, his sweats lie in a crimson, shamed heap. He's not sure he'll ever be able to wear them again.
Not just for psychological reasons, either. After this fiasco, he'll be lucky if he doesn't need to invest in a whole new wardrobe. He'll have to waddle in to see Jack Hench and request another intimidation-blue lab coat tailored to fit Blubbergut proportions, and Hench will give him the look people give dead fish, and it'll be awful. . . and what if Dementor is there?
A trail of acid reflux scalds up Drakken's chest, and he gasps for a coolant. The lair's villainous iciness barrels toward him and touches him, and he feels a tiny mushroom cloud go off inside him.
Drakken tries to sweet-talk his stomach, coerce it into behaving - no hard feelings, just a big misunderstanding, they can work this out, no need to get violent. But it is as if Hank Perkins is at the controls, persuading Dr. Drakken's own body that Drakken is a loser, not to be listened to.
Trying to spin himself off the couch gets him nowhere fast - or nowhere slow - or - well, when you're going nowhere, does it really matter what your speed?
And then someone else's arm, much stronger than Drakken's own, props him up and someone else's legs stride the both of them down the hall. Drakken barely recognizes an un-sunglassed Marc before the bathroom door is being kicked open and Drakken is scrambling for the sink and serving more cupcakes their eviction notice.
Oooh, he should be used to it - should be used to it by now. But he's still in an ugly, hot squeeze, as frosting-filled and dizzy as ever.
Drakken stands there, clutching the sink and shivering like a guinea pig, and he knows if he were to issue an order, it would come out as a guinea pig's snivel, too.
But Marc dutifully covers Drakken's entire shoulder blade with one meaty paw and rubs the other up and down Drakken's back as if he has been commanded - or threatened. "It's okay, Boss," he murmurs. "Everything's gonna be all right."
Drakken takes an unintentional step backward and stumbles into Marc's wide, soft chest - the one he's poked his finger into so many times during yellings and scoldings, the one he insisted on firming up with HenchCo's Molecule-Enhancing Ring. He doesn't want to look at himself in the mirror, doesn't want to see how sunken his eyes have become, can't stand another glimpse of his pregnant-toothpick self.
Marc steers him back down the hall. For a guy the size of Herman Munster and with about as much coordination, he moves with the utmost gentleness.
It's like. . . like he knew I would be scared.
Back in the living room, Marc helps lift Drakken onto the couch, one wobbly part at a time. Once Drakken is settled - relatively, with his limbs lax and his camel-hump of a stomach bulging toward the ceiling - Marc takes his hand and says, "There anything you need, Boss?"
"Total global domination would be nice," Drakken hears himself mutter. The frosting floods his vision then, and he knows he's about to either fall asleep or pass out, and then he's too unconscious to care which one has happened.
That's how things go for the rest of the night.
The henchmen take shifts. Each time Drakken blinks awake again - which seems to be about every ten minutes, though there's always the possibility that his internal clock is also gunked up with cupcake residue - there's a different one there, watching him as though they expect him to start sleepwalking or something.
At least they can help him to the bathroom, Drakken decides. Straightening his body and limping it forward is still akin to lugging around a block of drying cement.
Some of them come in with him while he's folded over and puking and powerless, and some opt to stay in the hall, depending on how strong their own stomachs are - Fred, Drakken remembers, doesn't even like it when Commodore Puddles throws up. Yet no matter what, they're always there when he's finished with a steadying grasp and some words of reassurance.
Truly, he never thought he'd be so grateful for their big, oafish presence, their huge hands surprisingly careful as they support him. Right now, the comfort of that is overriding the embarrassment of it.
Ted is the one there when Drakken develops a rabid case of hiccups at around two in the morning. It's not good to get the hiccups when you're super-duper full. Things in you are jolted up and down, up and down, only sometimes without the "down" part. Not pretty, yet Ted remains by his side.
Bob helps Drakken sit up on three pillows almost as puffy as Drakken's tummy and douses Drakken's cranial fire by dabbing a cold wet washcloth on his eyebrow. Ted tells him how to bend in what he's read is the least painful position. It isn't spring enough to stay warm all night, and the henchmen don't offer any "I-told-you-so"s when Drakken reaches for the blanket he winds up needing after all. In fact, Fred tugs Drakken's shoes off and then replaces them with slippers before the cold can do more than nibble at his feet.
How could his henchmen have had better foresight than the great Dr. Drakken? The cupcakes must have mushed his brain. To mush.
Proven by how that theory was so scientifically unsound it's frightening.
Drakken snuggles down under the blanket and rubs his temples. Maybe this time he'll dream about something more pleasant. Like hippos in tutus.
Fat chance. Literally.
In this dream, he's a video game character at the whims of a player not terribly talented, attempting to out-jog a machine equipped with seven different methods for turning him into bacon grease. Drakken hasn't gotten a good look at it, but in his peripheral he's sure he sees horns rising from its metallic skull and interlocking over its head.
That does nothing to slow the heartbeat in the roof of his mouth. If anything, Drakken runs faster than ever, huffing and puffing because it's not easy to carry a tummyache this big around. But his character is weak, on its last health button, and the player insists on running Drakken through every power-up in his path. Cupcake power-ups. Despite Drakken's protests.
Drakken knows why. They're silent protests. He can feel the shriek pressing against his neck veins, but sound has already fallen victim to this destroyer of worlds. And despite his scientific curiosity as to how and why this happened, he has to get away.
Finally, he can't eat another power-up, he just can't. So he turns to the right, and his foot slips, and he goes down, skidding across the gravel on one knee. His lab coat rips, and his skin does too, screeching in pain.
Drakken glances down to assess the damage. Instead of the blood he expected to see, though, a thin line of batter comes dribbling out of his torn kneecap.
Cupcake batter.
Drakken thrashes himself awake, panting, nauseous. Before his swimming eyes have even found their way back into focus, he hears someone say, "It's all right. You were just dreaming."
Right. The cardiovascular system isn't connected to the digestive tract in that way. Any scientist worth his weight in ion microscopes knew that.
Drakken's belly grumbles again and he right back at it. He's not in the mood for any more of its shenanigans, even if they are his own fault.
Bill sits across from him on the couch, loyal-eyed and clutching a glass of something that fizzles like an interesting chemistry experiment. Drakken crawls his backside over to study its behavior.
"What is that?" Drakken says. It may be, he realizes uncomfortably, the first question he's ever asked one of them that wasn't rhetorical and soaked in self-righteousness.
"Ginger ale," Bill says.
Drakken bursts out crying.
Lips pulled to the side in bewilderment, Bill holds up a finger full of muscles. "What is it, Boss? Did I do something wrong?"
"No!" Drakken chokes through the sobs that are every bit as much a surprise to him. "You did something right, and now I feel guilty!"
Bill frowns for a second, but he passes the glass into Drakken's clammy hands. "It's supposed to help," he says.
"I know!" Drakken didn't mean to grouse at him like that, and more guilt buildup crowds his arteries.
Even just the smell has already helped. One whiff of it, and Drakken is smelling things that should not have scents at all - cartoons and thermometers and his mother's kiss on his forehead. His body shivers the way it always does when he slides into a hot tub after a too-long frolic in a sub-zero pool.
Drakken raises the glass to his mouth and forces it open. The swallow has to fight against every nerve inside him, hollering, Don't you dare! Don't you even think about putting another sip in here! Don't you DARE!
What feels like several lifetimes later, his esophageal muscles finally give just long enough to admit a long, refreshing spiral of ginger fizz. His stomach cramps stabbingly, makes a sharp pull to the left. And then the burp to end all burps trumpets out of Drakken. He can actually see the swollen orb lower several inches beneath the Hawaiian shirt.
Drakken collapses back against the pillows. "Ohhhhh, that felt good." He rubs his relieved tummy and adds as an afterthought, "I mean - excuse me."
Bill only nods.
Drakken swipes at his wet eyelashes with his fingertips. "I didn't know you. . . like, knew things."
He also doesn't know if that's a nice thing to say or not, but Bill's sheepish grin takes it as a compliment. "My mom taught me that," he says.
Oh boy. Drakken's fingertips dig hard into his cheeks so they won't start to convulse in sobs. "Did - did she used to bring it to you when you were little and home sick from school? Watching TV on the couch?"
Bill nods again.
Drakken pulls in another mouthful of ginger ale. "So - so did mine." He sounds less like a guinea pig now and more like some form of reptile, though he can still barely hear himself. "Have you met my mother?" he asks Bill, making actual eye contact, which is also new for him.
Bill squints. "Oh. That little red-haired lady who comes by sometimes?"
It's Drakken's turn to nod. He doesn't trust himself to speak.
"Yeah. She's nice. I like her," Bill says.
For a minute or two, there is no world to take over, there are no cupcakes bleating in his belly. There's only this soothing drink, this blanket, and this fact that, for once in his life, he is being treated better than he deserves.
Drakken swallows and says a phrase he may have never used with his henchmen before - "Thank you."
"Welcome," Bill says with a shrug. Drakken peers at him, and he can't see a scrap of any of the attributes Perkins instilled in the henchmen.
Thank goodness.
They're still treating him as if he cuts as imposing a figure with barf breath and sweaty skin as he did in his business casual. Not like he's greedy or stupid or disgraceful at all.
And you know what? It's better than all the ginger ale in the world.
Strange. The medicinal properties of kindness. He'll have to study that if he ever recovers from his massive digestive trauma, Drakken decides.
Or maybe he can go ahead and say when he recovers.
Night has turned to dawn when Drakken awakens. Though his blackout shades don't permit any of the rays to trickle in, he can see them tensed, working hard to hold something back. Drakken turns sideways to get an inch or two closer to the light he can't see.
The moment is stained glass that shouldn't be broken, not just yet.
Drakken would never admit it to anyone: Mad scientists spurn sunlight, after all, and wear their pallor the way bodybuilders wear their muscles. But after such a long stint in prison, where it seemed to be night round-the-clock - a sharper, more demanding night than any Drakken had courted up until recently - well, given the right circumstances, sunlight may be able to substitute for antacids in a pinch.
Actually, it takes several delicate minutes for Drakken to recall his continuing discomfort. He rests a hand on his tummy, which is still distended, but the basketball that he might not have swallowed after all appears to have deflated a little. His feet are visible again, at least. Instead of screaming at him, his midsection's mellowed to the sound of a thunderstorm still a decent five miles away.
All of that combined lets Drakken breathe deeper and more peacefully than he has all night. He chances hauling into a sitting position and manages to do so without inciting a rebellion. Yet the stickiness about him is smothering. Even in the henchmen's beach duds, sweat has riveted his arms to his sides and collected in lakelets on the backs of his legs. Drying and unshakable, it tries to tell him that he is only something on the side of the road waiting to be picked over by vultures.
But Dr. Drakken will not be dictated by his own martyr glands, no matter how valid their complaints!
(Also needs to stop thinking of them as living things, because he's freaking himself out.)
A few cupcakes do raise their voices when Drakken stands upright, but he quashes that with haste like the feared tyrant he will one day be. He waves at the henchman on duty across the room - Bob again - and forms a stop sign with his palm to show he doesn't need help, even though his head tingles as if in anticipation of a sneeze. Still slightly bow-legged under his contents, Drakken channels it into a wide-swiveling swagger toward the bathroom.
Time for a shower.
Drakken sighs in ecstasy as he feels the grime melt off him and swirl away down the drain. Done and dried, he's able to wiggle back into his lab coat. Despite the belt that won't clip shut right now, Drakken knows this is progress.
What he really should do is brush his teeth about six times, because they feel pretty "grody" at this point, as the teens of today would say - well, the teens of sometime, at any rate. But just imagining the bite of the Mint Blast flavor nearly doubles Drakken over again. Instead he rinses and replaces his contacts, tosses a splash of water on his face, and lumbers back out to the couch, a new man even with the used-up-and-reused taste in his mouth.
This round of sleep, he dreams of only a golden nothingness - some sort of theoretical vacuum that can sustain objects without mass.
When Drakken's eyes open again, they automatically search for whichever henchman has the next shift. They don't find one.
Instead, Shego is sitting on the couch.
Drakken warns himself that it probably isn't really her, it's probably a cupcake-induced mirage, but he can't keep from lighting a smile at her anyway. "Shego?" he ventures.
"Hey, he lives! So how do you feel, Doc?" The voice is concerned and yet fully prepared to turn caustic at any moment.
It can't be anyone but Shego.
Safety descends over Drakken's chest, mollifying the ache. "Better," he says. His vocal cords scrape together like two of those tectonic plates he tried to shove around last month.
"Yeah, you look better," Shego says. "I think you're down to about the first trimester."
Drakken hunts for exasperation lines. There aren't any. That alone keeps him from pelting her with a volley of rage - well, that alone combined with how far down into him his words have been shoved and that not much volunteers to take their place.
Shego runs her hand over a section of the blanket as far away from Drakken's center as it can be. The tiny plastic plate in her lap doesn't even shift, of course. "Do you think you can keep something down?" she says.
"Yes," Drakken says. He can't be certain, of course, but he needs to get this taste out of his mouth.
"Good. Here's some toast. I figured you needed something in you that wasn't pure sugar and junk." Shego gives the plate a nonchalant shove toward Drakken. It's occupied by a single slice of slightly warmed, tanned bread. No cinnamon sugar. No butter. Just dry, bland grains.
Gimme gimme! his belly cries.
Drakken opens up to shovel it in only to discover his jaw is a rusty hinge, incapable of opening farther than an inch. Taking smaller bites than he has ever known himself to take, Drakken crunches his way through the toast, crusts and all, and places both hands against his midsection to keep it from leaping back out.
"Super." Shego swings her head to one side. "You've got a doctor's appointment at noon."
Ordinarily, Drakken would ask her what time it is now - if she hadn't just said that word that he only likes to hear in conjunction with his name. "Doctor?" he says, detesting the sawed-off edge of his whine. "How come?"
Something about the way Shego stands - as stiff and firm as a mechanical pencil from a towering vantage point - makes Drakken instantly regret his question.
"Uh. Doy." Shego's eyes roll. "To make sure you didn't, like, sprain your entire digestive system."
Oh no. It is possible, then.
"Plus, you haven't been since you got out of prison." Shego delivers this with the smoothness she delivers everything, unadorned like the toast. "You're way overdue."
"I'm not a library book," Drakken sniffs.
Shego ignores this. "Yeah, you get to go tell Dr. Truman how -"
Drakken's neck goes stiff as a plaster cast.
" - stupid you were last night."
The words cut him to the quick, but Drakken doesn't crumble. Oompa-Loompas don't write songs about stupid people.
And if that isn't a symptom of frosting-on-the-brain, he doesn't know what is! Any supervillain, much less one of the evil-genius variety, would much, much rather be called greedy than stupid.
Something must be dreadfully wrong with him, Drakken decides, because all that matters in that second is that Shego isn't looking at him with contempt. Well, no more than usual, that is.
The hovercraft ride to Dr. Truman's office must involve several time warps, because Drakken could swear it takes a decade-and-a-half to get there. Drakken's back must have aged three years overnight and also developed an allergy to the back of his plastic-molded seat, forcing him into a hunch-over that blurs his lap - welcome back, lap. Add to that the combustion engine in his pulse whenever he thinks about facing Truman and Drakken would sooner have skipped the whole experience.
All heads turn when Drakken and Shego enter the cough-syrup-scented waiting room. They turn, and they stay stuck there. Drakken returns it all with a cool, narrow glare - his black eyelids couldn't rise out of their swollen fall if they wanted to, but these imbeciles don't need to know that. He's about to try and wedge himself into a chair only a fraction less overstuffed than he is when Shego gives him a poke in the arm.
Drakken will be forever grateful that it wasn't a nudge in the ribs, though that doesn't quite show itself in his hiss of, "What?"
"Sign in, Oh Brilliant One."
All gratitude flees from Drakken, and a metronome begins keeping time in his stomach. The sign-in counter is all the way at the other end of the room, across from all these bug-eyed people. Their stares are making him feel like a piece of carrion again. Drakken's pretty sure it's the blue skin that's mesmerizing them so, but his belly appears a bigger, more conspicuous bruise than ever when he glances down.
Okay. Here I go.
You can do it, Drakken! he tacks on, because Shego sure isn't going to.
Drakken presses his feet together and clips up to the sign-in window. He will not draw attention to the paunch by accommodating it, he will not, even though it hurts like he's trying to enforce gravity in a space shuttle. Once he reaches the window, he props his elbows casually on the counter - not because he might fall over without it - and downloads his suave expression.
"Dr. Drakken to see Dr. Truman, please," Drakken says oh-so-politely. His belly-plumbing creaks loudly enough to be heard in the far corner, and he bites his cheek so that he won't shoot a hand down to it.
The receptionist barely blinks as Drakken signs his name, forks over his credit card, accepts it back, and swishes back to his seat in the narrowest steps he can take. He finally thuds down into the squishy chair, turns his back to the crowd, and lets out the tummy he's been holding back. Pruned down or not, it still pushes against his waistband and threatens to drag planets into orbit around it.
Plus it hurts.
Drakken picks up a magazine - which one, he neither knows nor cares to know - and shakes it open in front of him. He doesn't want to see the way people are gawking at him or the studied way they're redirecting their gazes. So I made a mistake! he wants to scream at them. So sue me!
I. Just. Made. A. Mistake.
That should make him feel better. So why doesn't it?
A freeze-frame curdles in his mind. Kim Possible and her computer kid. The kid Drakken is somehow certain she never gave a hard time for being fat. About to be dropped into a vat of boiling - well, let's skip that part - the point is, they're about to die. At his command.
Even if you were trying to be greedy - the cupcakes aren't what you should be ashamed of.
It's a soft, bubbling whisper, a clearing in Drakken's mind. But before he can turn it around and study it, maybe get a sample of it in a beaker, the thorns grow up around it and it's gone.
Drakken straightens a tad in the chair and begins counting by tens. He's surprised that he's only up to four hundred when a nurse pokes her head through the door and calls his name. He expected to be halfway to infinity by now. Well, infinity can't really be divided in half, since it's more of a concept than a -
Never mind.
Drakken hefts himself off the chair and trots, clamp-legged, up to follow the nurse through the matchbox-shaped door, which fits into the wall just about as snugly as his lab coat currently hugs his abdomen. Each move he makes is being tracked by everyone in the immediate vicinity; he can feel it.
The thorns reach higher, cry out that he is superior to them and he must let them know it. Drakken does a 180 and fixes his villainous, unflinching glare on the peanut gallery as he backs up. One step backward, then two, then three. . .
And then, due to nature's oversight in not providing humans with rearview mirrors at birth, Drakken's left heel crashes into an obstruction. His right heel quickly joins to reinforce it. Even with the team-up, the obstruction still wins, and Drakken cartwheels sideways and lies there, precariously woozy, as the obstruction hits the floor with a liquid clunk. When Drakken is able to raise his head and look, an old matted mop protrudes between his feet.
An ugly rush of snickers from the waiting room. Drakken always hated snickers - hated the idea, hated the name, and now they're making him think of the candy bar, which makes his stomach protest raucously.
People are said to "see red" when they get angry, and unlike with most idioms, Drakken can see the truth behind this one. There is definitely something maroon clotting his vision. For a moment, he thinks someone might have draped his sweatpants over his face.
"Thank you, he'll be here all week," Shego says, and Drakken wonders if her archness is meant for them or him. She shuts the door to a crack and offers him a hand up, which he doesn't remember taking but must because the next thing he knows he's upright again. "Ya know, I seem to remember some old saying about pride and a fall. . ."
Drakken dusts off the double-breasted front of his lab coat, afraid to venture anywhere further down than that. "Yes, yes, yes. You're very wise, Confucius."
"Actually, I think that was Solomon," Shego says.
"NNGGGGH!"
Drakken breaks away from Shego and speed-walks to catch up with the nurse, who's glancing at him with a mixture of confusion and suspicion. She must be new here. She's wearing a set of those nurse-pajamas with a kitten-and-yarn motif romping across it. How cloying can you get?
At least it isn't anything food-related.
The nurse leads him to Room 13 - just my luck, Drakken thinks, although he knows (as every good scientist does) that it's nothing more than a silly superstition and thirteen boasts no major differences from any other prime number. It nonetheless couldn't be more intimidating if it were pitch-black and framed on either side by plastic skulls and real spears. No, then it would be less intimidating, because it would remind him of home.
Room 13 smells as if a recent scrubbing and spraying have eliminated every natural-occurring microcrobe. Maybe that explains the patina of emptiness - although if the microscopic organisms were here, they might very likely be judging Drakken, too.
It only takes two tries for Drakken to hop up onto the examination table - compared to the seven it took to turn over in the wee hours of the night - and he rests his head against the soft crinkly spot where the wallpaper wants to peel. Refreshingly, it has no happy baby animals or images of foodstuffs, just bright colors and punchy shapes and clever use of geometry concepts.
The nurse takes his temperature - normal, even though he feels like he's been suspended over a Bunson burner all night - and his blood pressure - which almost makes Drakken gag again. Then she leaves, and she is more than welcome to.
Kicking out his legs, Drakken distracts himself by envisioning how he will decorate his world-ruler palace someday, someday soon. He's never really been much of a wallpaper man, himself. Too flimsy. Too gentle-looking. There won't be any of that in his palace.
Except for the enormous wing his mother will have all to herself. She will want wallpaper - probably something floral, roses or forget-me-nots - and she will have it. She will have anything because she is worth it.
Maybe he'll even be magnanimous enough to let Kim Possible decorate her own dungeon.
Actually, Drakken decides, he doesn't want his palace to seem just like a tricked-out version of his lair. Of course he'll want to add things - piles of jewels, supremely expensive massage chairs, and maybe a sauna - but he may need to completely redecorate as well. Since he wouldn't be living in the shadows anymore, the red-blackness and floor-to-ceiling rectangle supports just wouldn't cut it. No, he'd lighten the color - maybe to a dark sapphire - and keep the ceiling pitched to a happy height and install plenty of windows around a friendly, conversation-inviting table so that it'll be - it'll be -
Like the office you shared with Perkins?
The shudder begins in Drakken's stomach and works its way out to the rest of him. He's working to squeeze it back inside when Dr. Truman enters the room.
Clipboard under his left arm. Pen in his right hand. Professional curiosity, which turns to professional concern the second he sees Drakken.
Drakken reaches over and tries to cover his stomach with his hands - as though he could possibly begin to make it invisible with their bony help. His cheeks are flammable, unsafe.
But Dr. Truman's eyes land on Drakken's and that's where they stay as he says, "Dr. Drakken. What brings you here today?"
Shego, Drakken thinks, though he doesn't say it. It would never do for his doctor to be able to testify that someone on Drakken's payroll has the power to force him to come in!
Instead, Drakken traces a casual pattern on the wide stripe of tissue paper in the center of the table. "Oh, you know. I haven't been since before prison, so I knew I was overdue for a checkup. And then I was sick yesterday -" Drakken swallows against the gravelly reminder - "so I figured today was as good as any."
"Do you know why you were sick yesterday?" Truman asks.
Drakken gulps again. "I - uh, I have a pretty good idea, yes."
Truman just looks back at him, one eyebrow patiently cocked, pen poised between two fingers. The picture of the Hippocratic Oath.
Drakken lowers his head to examine the hole he's already scratched into the tissue paper. "I ate four thousand cupcakes," he says.
Dr. Truman's eyes pop open wide. He holds up his index finger and hurries out of the room, clicking the door all-too-tightly behind him.
Drakken gets the distinct impression he's being laughed at.
He puts one hand to his moaning middle. ("Moaning middle" - that would be a good name for a section of his torture chamber!)
When Truman returns, it's with nothing more than the suggestion of a smile. "All right," he says, taking his seat again. "There's got to be a story behind this."
Drakken tilts his head back to search the ceiling. His ego fidgets inside him. Still, a doctor is a fellow scientist, and he needs all the relevant information to make the correct diagnosis. "All right. You know that cupcake store, Hank's Gourmet? Went out of business a few weeks ago?" he says.
"Absolutely. Was sorry to hear that it folded. Those were good."
It's the last thing Drakken expected to hear. For a moment, he thinks his diaphragm is rattling with huge sobs, but it turns out just to be another bout of hiccups.
"Well, I was the owner," Drakken continues. "And when we went out - hic - of business, I was left alone with eight thousand cupcakes. And I didn't want to have to - hic - throw them away, so I decided to eat them all. I was halfway done when Shego stopped me. HIC."
Dr. Truman's lips are farther apart that Drakken's ever seen a doctor's be, and that's saying something. He's shown up in quite a few offices as a stick of charcoal with sooty stubble for hair.
"Four thousand?" Truman says.
Drakken twiddles his fingertips together. "Approximately. . ."
"That is. . . amazing." Dr. Truman opens Drakken's file, stares at it for a long moment without seeming to see anything on it, and then slaps it closed again. "Dr. Drakken, you're a medical marvel."
Is that just a nice way of saying "freak of nature"?
"I was sick all night," Drakken informs him. The words are stiff, and he does his best to wrestle an airtight seal onto each one before releasing it.
"I would imagine," Truman says. "And you're probably still not feeling too great, are you?"
Drakken hics in agreement.
Dr. Truman's face takes on a twinkle that cements either his disloyalty or his loyalty, Drakken can't quite figure out which. He twirls his stethoscope. "Mind if I take a listen?"
Drakken winces as the stethoscope's metal circle, which could be mistaken for the Atmosfreezer at a touch, makes contact with the swell of his belly. He fills his brain with thoughts of diamond chandeliers and crowds salaaming at his feet until the hateful thing lifts.
"Well, there's definitely a pretty noisy argument going on inside there." Truman pops the tabs from his ears and drops them to hang around his neck. He rubs his hands six or seven times - Drakken knows why, and it's not because he's about to announce the most maniacal plot in the history of mankind. The motion produces friction, which produces heat, which means he's planning to touch Drakken.
It doesn't matter that the doctor's hands won't be winter-cold like the stethoscope was, it doesn't matter. Stethoscopes have never been used to hurt someone in prison, not in Drakken's experience anyway. Hands have.
Drakken juts his jaw, attempts to harden it. "Please be gentle," he says gruffly. It's not quite bravery, but it's somewhere within its margin of error.
Truman is gentle as he can be - which still produces plenty of groans and gasps from Drakken. A light-stick is pulled from his business-white pocket, and Truman looks in Drakken's eyes (bloodshot and puffy), up his nose (slightly runny), into his mouth (bitter and exhausted), and down his throat (every bit as raw and red as Drakken envisioned it to be). Despite all of that, Truman reports that Drakken's heart rate is strong and his breathing rhythm, though distorted a little by the hiccups, gives him no cause for concern.
At last, Truman snaps the tip off the light and lets it fall into the trash can. "Well, I've never seen a case this big before -"
Drakken folds both arms tight to minimize his stomach, scoots to the edge of the table so that his knees can bend around it.
" - but I'd say this is simple overfilling. Very common. Just usually in, uh, smaller quantities." Truman scribbles something on his clipboard, smiling in the reassuring fashion of those with the authority to proclaim you safe. "I see no reason to believe this won't be a self-correcting issue."
A noise like a buzzsaw drones from Drakken's tummy. He clutches it tighter and cranks up a grin, a self-confident world leader's grin.
"Now, I'm going to need to ask you to step up on the scale."
All of Drakken's vital signs hit hyperdrive. Two fistfuls of the tissue paper are crushed in his terrified - ruthless - grip. "No!" Drakken bellows. "I'll break it!"
"I highly doubt that." Truman's voice is a gram molecule away from a chuckle. "Step up, please."
Drakken grudgingly plops himself off the table, his back creaky and painful as if it needs an oiling, and creeps up to the menacing, cold, waiting scale. One foot at a time, he surrenders to it and stands there with his eyes pressed so tightly shut it's like he's hung blackout shades on them, too.
Sure enough, Dr. Truman sucks in a breath. A deeply troubled breath.
"See! I told you!" Drakken cries, almost literally. His eyes sting when he opens them and ignore his admonitions to not look down, whatever you do, DON'T look down.
It's his turn to inhale, a sharp pull of disinfectant into his lungs. Not only can he see his feet, but he can see the number.
And it's not a big one.
"You've lost fourteen pounds since your last visit," Dr. Truman says, almost scoldingly.
Drakken's genius fails him; the brainpower that usually propels it is running all around the room, pitching off the walls, the way Commodore Puddles does when he's avoiding a bath. "How - what happened to me?" he says.
"Well, I'm a physician, not a psychic," Truman says. Drakken had almost forgotten how grating his sense of humor can be. The man still smiles, though - odd how good that feels. "But if I had to guess, I'd say prison."
Just by saying the word, he might as well have plunged a syringe full of ice water into Drakken. He glances down at the crook of his inner elbow, just to make sure the vein is uncompromised. Finding it is, he crimps his horror into a hardened mask that he used to be better at.
"Errr, yes. That's very likely," Drakken says. Ooh, the voice, the voice! He's doing much better with the voice - smooth and lighthearted, just with a thunderous undercurrent of threat providing Plan B. "The food in there disagreed with me. And the company."
And the knowledge that people were dead because of you, all the wrong people, too.
"Well, whatever the cause, this -" Dr. Truman jabs his pen cap down at the scrawny number on the scale's digital display - "is not good. And as sick as you were last night, you probably lost a great deal of water weight."
Drakken half-raises his arm, and for the first time notices how limp and weak it looks, flopping there like a hank of wet straw. When he tries to move it, it swings drunkenly.
Truman removes one of Drakken's gloves, pinches the skin above Drakken's knuckles and draws it up. It meanders back down.
"You're awfully dehydrated, too," Truman says. "What do you say to a nice, cold glass of water?"
Drakken can't argue with him. Literally can't, because he's just now realized that his tongue is nothing more than a dried-up piece of jerky. He can only nod, and even that's shaky.
A few minutes later, the kitten-nurse steps in with a water glass that she passes off to Drakken. Her touch is quick-and-gone and speaks very highly of what kind of a shot-giver she must be. Drakken decides maybe the kittens aren't so sickeningly sweet after all.
The first water droplet breaks on Drakken's tongue, revitalizing the entire area. It's all he can do not to throw his head back and chug the entire thing down, but - "slowly," Dr. Truman says. "You don't want to get sick again."
No, he most certainly does not. It's one thing to be a vulnerable sack of nausea here, in the small room, protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. It's quite another to take it outside, where Shego waits with her wiseacre wisdom and Hank Perkins bustles around with some new client, Drakken already forgotten, and where Kim Possible and her little wholesome team think they're all that, even though they were so close to becoming all that and a box of chocolates - is that a phrase? He thinks it might be.
A Drakken fourteen pounds brawnier thought he could overpower them all. Now he's not so sure, and that unnerves him. The feeling is slippery, sticky, unfamiliar, as though it doesn't belong to Dr. Drakken, the fearsome evil genius, at all.
(Ahh, he remembers now - the phrase is "all that and a bag of chips." Which would have only worked if he'd owned a potato-chip-processing plant, too. Rats.)
Six sips later, Drakken is feeling a total of seventy-five percent more human. No less unsure, though.
Dr. Truman's clipboard is one of those newfangled plastic ones that can pop open, and he pops it now to pull out a fresh sheet of paper. "We're definitely going to have to come up with a way for you to gain some weight."
Now that was the very last thing Drakken expected to hear when he walked in here this morning. Well, the very last thing that wasn't in the realm of the utterly absurd such as, The tests confirmed it; you've been a woman all along or Great Scott! Your mucus is the antidote for swine flu!
"Ideally, we'd want you to consume 2500 calories a day for at least the next several weeks." Truman starts scribbling at a rate only graduates from medical school - and mad scientists visited with inspiration - can achieve. "Now, we'll want that to be in the form of meats, grains, fruits, vegetables." He looks up and winks at Drakken. "And, yes, maybe even the occasional cupcake."
Drakken glances back down at his cantaloupe waistline. Inside, a swarm of cupcakes slosh and thrash on behalf of their fallen compatriots, and he clenches his teeth. "No," he says. "No, never again. Not as long as I live."
"Oh, I bet you'll change your mind eventually," Truman says. "Once your stomach stops hurting."
That, too, feels like it will be eternal, but Drakken doesn't say anything.
Three or four more minutes tick by before Truman nods and clicks his pen back up. "Now, I've jotted down some mealtime suggestions and a tentative eating schedule. Would you like to go over that now?"
"No." Drakken gives his ponytail a vehement snap to the side. Vehement and - oooh, dizzying. "I don't want to think about food right now!"
"That's understandable," Truman says, nothing daunted. "Very well, then - you can look over it with Shego once you're feeling better, and you can give me a call if you have any questions."
Drakken folds the paper seven times - the scientific maximum that anything can be folded by hand - and tucks it into his pocket. Something hissing in his mind compels him to say, "Questions? Pshaw! I'm sure I won't have any!"
Truman's eyes do some dance - an enjoyable, lively type of dance, no resemblance at all to the one the cupcakes are throwing within Drakken even now. And, oh yes, they're also diving straight into Drakken's and resurfacing with a bunch of stuff he prefers to keep hidden. "Just remember, I'm always on call," is all he says.
All he needs to say.
Truman tests his reflexes really quick. Usually, that's the fun part of the visit, but this time Drakken slouches at the rim of the table, unashamed of his sulking. The fast twerk of his nerves is just another thing he can't control.
The hand Truman uses to clap Drakken on the back is gentle, and then Drakken is turned out to walk the narrow runway-style hall to the receptionist's desk, where Shego waits with her nail file poised above her glove-blades. "Dr. Truman says he'd like to see you again in a month," the receptionist reports as she types. "Would you like us to call and remind you at that time?"
Drakken nods. She knows him better than the nurse does, and she knows that scheduling a specific appointment a month in advance does not work for him. Drakken isn't sure whether she knows that's because he could very well be on the lam or in prison in a month's time. He's leaning toward the theory that she doesn't; otherwise she might not treat him kindly, and she does treat him kindly, so kindly, and he suddenly wants to hug her for that.
That's it. His brain has officially been submerged beneath layers of batter and frosting and sprinkles.
The receptionist looks up from the desk and extends a plastic-wrapped stick to him. "Would you care for a lollipop?" she says.
On any other day, it would be another kindness.
Today, boiling ganache melts over Drakken's face. The taste of sugar, so sweet and so rich and so much, pervades his mouth and jockeys into his belly. He waves away the tiny instrument of torture, heaving for breath, and bolts to the nearest trash can until he's sure nothing is going to be returned to sender.
"Guess we should take that as a 'no,'" Shego tells the receptionist somewhere in the haze. "He's had kind of a rough night."
Drakken takes one last big huff and straightens up.
When he passes through the waiting room, he keeps his gaze pointed straight ahead. The gaping waiting room is a microcosm of a world that needs to be governed with a firm hand.
And someday will be, one way or another.
Outside the waiting room, Drakken lets himself breathe and walk a little faster. This lasts until he collides with someone tall and prickly. "Oh, terribly sorry," Drakken says - it's part of the businessman persona Hank coached him in, and it would probably work marvelously if "someone" wasn't a potted plant.
"Oh. Right," Drakken says to no one. His hiccups echo through the wide spread of hallway and have a patient in the office next door twisting their head to see.
"Perkins would be so proud," Shego says. Drakken doesn't look at her, doesn't want to see her mockery.
He grips his middle for stabilization purposes and rolls his eyes. "Perkins can go suck on a lemon drop, for all I care."
Oooh. No. No lemon drops.
Actually, that might be the preferable course of thought at this point. Thinking about Perkins makes Drakken feel coarse and gritty, like he needs to gargle from the toes upward, even though he's already showered and his clothes almost fit again.
Sure, Perkins was a two-faced snake - although such a comparison might actually be too nice, considering Drakken's seen pictures of a two-headed snake before and it's probably never done anything to anybody. Anyway, Perkins was a slimy little corporate shyster with no concept of true loyalty.
Drakken takes their stint as "Drakken & Co." and tries to shove it back into the internal hard drive where he keeps the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer, the Brainwashing Shampoo, the Synthodrones, and everything else he would delete if he could. But for some reason it refuses to go, sticks there as if someone has pasted it to his frontal cortex with a hot glue gun.
Why?
It's just another failed scheme. Why won't the image of himself in his casual-Friday gear turn itself into a photo negative and fly away?
Because I liked it - better than I like supervillainy.
Drakken zips a hand over his mouth and is grateful that it only makes him appear ready to puke again. If Shego heard that thought, she'd lose whatever modicum of respect she still has for him. And so would everybody else in Jack Hench's villain directory.
He'd be excommunicated for saying such a thing.
And he doesn't mean it! Really, he doesn't. The cupcake business was - was just a distraction, a method of killing time until he could put his latest scheme into action. All right, so maybe he did get so swept up in the business that he forgot the scheme entirely, but, hey, Shego's always accusing him of having ADHD. That has to be it.
Just another scheme, and another failure, Drakken resolves with a grimace. This itch in his chest has nothing to do with wanting to go back. It's not like he gained anything from it, besides maybe a pound or two that he quickly barfed back up.
Well, except there's always the knowledge that his henchmen aren't like Hank Perkins after all. They didn't abandon him when things got rough, because they liked him. That made up, in a lot of ways, for their general incompetence.
Drakken swaggers across the parking lot against the tug-forward of his tummy. He swings a leg over the side of the hovercraft and drops almost gracefully into the plastic seat. The henchmen - they've never been so helpful before. He wishes he'd never given them a hard time for being heavy enough to ground their jetpacks. He wishes there were something he could do to - to thank them.
He wonders if they like cupcakes. . .
