~Happy New Year, all! I'm sorry I haven't had the chance to be more active over the holiday season - I'll try to get caught up sometime this next week. Hope you enjoy!~
30. NEVER involve family.
Something is wrong inside Dr. Drakken, and he can't figure out what it is. It's too far up to be a cardiac incident, too far down to be a migraine, and too far below the surface to be a skin rash. No, this is more like someone has phased inside him, grabbed his soul, and turned it inside-out.
Which is ridiculous, Drakken knows. The soul is not a physical organ, not of the variety that can potentially be damaged in a crash. And scientists have yet to perfect the art of phasing inside matter. Maybe that's something Drakken can work on for his next scheme, now that the Doom-Vee lies crushed and lifeless in an alley somewhere. . .
He should feel good, he knows. Well, in an evil way. He finally stood up to his mother.
Drakken still doesn't see why it's such a big deal, but when the arresting officer told Mother that her son and nephew had stolen a wheelchair, she nearly swooned onto the pavement. "There must be some mistake, officer!" she cried, tearing at the policeman's sleeve. "My Drewbie wouldn't hurt a fly!"
Those should have been exactly the words Drakken wanted to hear. He has always wanted to be good in her sight, and right now she was his best chance of not being taken downtown and fingerprinted. Yet he could almost feel himself shrinking down to the bespectacled fifth-grader whose mother burst in the classroom door, yelling, "You forgot your lunch!" and made him squirm inside his too-big jeans. Mother didn't even like him wearing jeans to begin with - dress slacks were always her first choice - but they were expensive, and Eddy's hand-me-down jeans (the ones that survived for Eddy to outgrow, that is) were free.
Mother straightened up, and even though she's a foot-and-then-some shorter than Eddy, she bore down on him like the Wrath of God. "It's Eddy's fault! He's a bad influence! Just look at his hair!"
That was when Drakken's heart sealed shut like a spaceship hatch. He'd grown used to the feel of his hair skimming his shoulders over the past several hours. It doesn't scratch at the back of his neck any longer, just flies free. Even the way the ends don't all line up seems a liberation to him.
He leaned in and told his domineering, clueless, wonderful mother that it was called a mullet, whipped his own back and forth, and then, at Eddy's behest, played a mean chord on his air guitar.
There was a screech - which at the time Drakken assumed to be a bat, but which he is now realizing probably came from Mother. He didn't care either way. For the first time in a long time, he knew exactly who he was. He was one of the evil Lipsky cousins. He was a man who pilfered wheelchairs from children when the necessity arose. He was a man who aimed lasers at self-styled teenage heroines without a second thought.
(He was a man who was still shaking from being whiplashed by his seat belt as Kim Possible crunched the Doom-Vee into a brick wall over and over, until it collapsed into glass shards and leather scraps and broken dreams. But nobody else needed to know that.)
Another police officer is crouched in front of Mother, advising her to calm down. Mother doesn't look calm at all. Drakken turns away so her clenched fists and upset face will not be his own undoing.
The paddy wagon door clinks shut then, and Eddy turns to face Drakken. Drakken half-expects to see sheepdog-drool hanging from his cousin's grin. "You totally rock, cuz," Eddy says.
Drakken feels those words light up the reward center in his brain, a section that gets very little nourishment. "Seriously?" he asks.
"Seriously." That is the Eddy-version of a solemn oath.
Two more doors, the front ones, slam shut, and Drakken frowns. He always imagined that he'd be in the driver's seat, both metaphorically and literally, by the close of this day. Never mind that he doesn't have an official license - he'd award himself one as ruler of the entire world!
The paddy wagon rolls forward, and Drakken lurches sideways. The criminal-containment unit in the back doesn't start thrashing around the way the Doom-Vee did, but Drakken still sticks out his hands and grabs onto the padded bench for support.
It is there, twisted and wishing for lumbar support, that he glances out the mouse-ear window straight ahead. The height should make it so Drakken can hear Mother but not see her, but that's the opposite of what's actually happening. She's hopped up onto a nearby crate so she can get right into the officer's face and give him what-for, a what-for too high-pitched for Drakken to even hear. Mother's hair, fever-pink, wavers up and down as the officer talks to her - about Drakken, surely - and Drakken doesn't for one moment believe it to be in agreement. She's weeping, he knows.
The hatch inside bursts open again. Drakken lets his gaze travel down the length of his lab coat, to make sure the pants below them aren't sprawled around his ankles. Even if they were, the coat itself would shield his - ahem - undergarments from view. But there would still be that stripped-wire feeling that threatens to short-circuit him.
And to think this all started with Mother depositing Eddy on his doorstep and telling Drakken to take good care of him. As soon as she was gone, Drakken had muttered that he would, indeed, take care of Eddy and activated his security system, complete with spiked clubs and whirring blades.
He wasn't planning on killing Eddy. Not that he didn't consider it - spewing crude come-ons to Shego should certainly be a capital offense - but something else insisted on immunity for the man who helped Drakken learn to ride a two-wheeler back in the day. All that mattered was that as long as Eddy thought Drakken would kill him, Drakken had the proverbial upper hand.
Drakken sinks into a sit on the bench and blinks hard. His eyes are over-lubricating themselves, and they're really thwarting their own plans, because every new drop of water feels like it's being stuck in with thumbtacks. Kind of defeats the purpose of having tear ducts in the first place, doesn't it?
It had been Eddy's idea to steal that one boy's wheelchair and use it to "trick out" the Doom-Vee, "trick out" being a term that Drakken has run across in his research into teenage slang but never would have thought to use. He was happy to abandon his own catchphrase - which would have been "kick it up a notch," gleaned from that one celebrity chef on the Celebrity Chef Channel - and adopt Eddy's instead. It was Eddy who stupidly forgot to mention that the wheelchair could be remote-controlled, who didn't think to snatch the remote control during the wheelchair-heist.
It has to be Eddy's fault that Mother is crying. Drakken needs it to be Eddy's fault, needs it the way a body needs vitamin C.
With inadequate warning, Drakken springs a leak - of tears, of saliva, of horrible whimpery sounds - and he can't find the valve to turn them back off again. He brings his hands up and plasters them over the soggy calamity. The darkness behind them is painful and stifling, but he can't do anything except plunge deeper and deeper into it.
He remembers how Shego looked when she caught wind of the plan to steal the wheelchair. Her tensed-up face didn't call Drakken a moron. It called him something worse, something evil, only most things regarding evil were high praise coming from Shego.
This wasn't, not by a long shot. It almost reminded him of Kim Possible, standing up there in Self-Righteousville, where she will never have to leave because everything she wants will always be hand-delivered to her. It went back and forth from Eddy to him and judged them to be the same, even though Eddy had actually grabbed Shego and tried to force his lips to hers, which Drakken would never have done unless she was in dire need of CPR.
For a fleeting, vicious second, he wonders if he should have killed Eddy.
A disk wiped as soon as it is inserted. Murderers bring even more shame on their mothers than wheelchair thieves.
"Hey, cuz."
"What?!" Drakken crabs back. He lowers his hands gingerly, but the furthest thing from anger looks back at him as Eddy sits on the other bench across from him, his meaty shoulders spanning its width with ease. Drakken's more aware than ever of the narrow binding of his own as they quiver with regret.
(Regrets are different than remorse, right?)
"What's wrong?" Eddy says.
What's wrong is that I've been thinking about killing you, and you're just still worried about me! A cold blast of sleet comes over Drakken's arms, and he pulls them in, drapes them over each other, cursing the awkwardly long, thin bits that still poke out. He turns away, but no matter where his focus lands, he sees the same things - Eddy's approval, Mother's disapproval, Shego staring at him from a moral high ground she doesn't even like.
"You got nothin' to cry about," Eddy says, in a tone that wouldn't know how to scoff if it wanted to. "You were cool with your mom."
The thought of his mother - looking at her, listening to her - ties Drakken into a stiff knot. It nauseates him to picture her gazing at him with her gushy, blind affection, but watching it empty out of her eyes is a terror he doesn't have words for. Possibly they don't make words for it.
"Yes, I suppose I was, wasn't I?" Drakken says. It's his first sentence all weekend that doesn't end in an exclamation point. His inside-out soul isn't in it.
The paddy wagon turns a corner. Drakken goes cracking against the wall, and - oh, no, ghhh, no! - he sees the Doom-Vee interior, everything being broken and shredded all around him. When he blinks, it's gone, but he still can't loosen his knuckle-burning grip on the bench.
Eddy stands beside him, holds him up. His wide palm secretes sweat, the warm, hard-work kind, as opposed to the cold terror Drakken can feel under his own gloves - which makes no sense, because he worked every bit as diligently as Eddy today. Drakken shivers away from him, the surprisingly kind cousin who has turned out to be the best company he's had in a good long while. Certainly the most fun.
The cousin who Drakken knows he would never survive another team-up with.
"So, I been thinkin'," Eddy says. "Wanna be cellies?"
Cellies? All Drakken can think of are Kim Possible and her insipid little friends discussing their cell phones. "Huh?" he blurts.
"Cellmates," Eddy says, great patience in his voice. "You know, the Lipsky men gotta stick together, right?"
"Really?" Drakken peers narrowly at his cousin. He can feel the red rims forming around his eyes, swelling them into livid specters of their usual roundness.
Eddy nods. It seems an odd time for Drakken to notice this, but he does - Eddy has the same cheekbones as Drakken, the ones handed down to both of them from their fathers, the ones so sharp you could carve a roast with them. Of course, Eddy's are better balanced with the sturdiness of the rest of his face, but there's something to be said for the unsettling contrast of Drakken's, especially with the scar zigzagging under the left one, proclaiming that here was a man who wasn't afraid to get down and dirty if it meant he could rise to absolute power.
A tiny bit of warmth burrows its way back to Drakken's fingertips and dribbles right back out again when he remembers his last cellmate, a slick-goateed convict with about fifty hulking pounds on Drakken. Who could terminate Dr. Drakken's Patented Death Sneer with a simple, wordless, stormy stare and seemed to enjoy pressing Drakken against the bars and flexing his finger muscles as he held him there. Drakken can still remember the man's breath, hot and scented with coffee and cigarettes, fanning across his face and practically condensing on Drakken's clammy skin.
"Yes," Drakken says as soon as he can smell the memory. "I want to be cellies. However -"
He stops and swallows hard. Eddy studies him with those dark Lipsky eyes, gorged on mischief, and it makes it so much harder to add his stipulation.
But if he keeps hanging around with Eddy, Mother will get suspicious. And Shego will up and quit on him, and his chances for world domination will follow her out the door.
"Shego will be coming to break us out soon," Drakken hedges. The second he says it, he longs to take it back, because he sees the way Eddy lights up at the mention of her. He's seen it before, so many times. With Shego, lovelorn glances become lustlorn glances unbearably quickly. His most recent image of her, glimpsing off trash cans and shooting up a fire escape to safety with her hair all puffed out and disheveled in that way she can't stand, churns his stomach with a very different kind of desire. The kind to protect her from people like - well, people like Eddy. Yes, she has her plasma and her martial arts expertise, but it could still be improved with a - a - a -
Mullet-proof vest is what occurs to Drakken, and he has to suppress a giggle. Such a sound coming from a mad scientist renowned for his maniacal chortling is an endangered species that would certain endanger him if unleashed in public. It only takes one un-sinister noise, one less-than-villainous event, to fall out of favor with the crowd that frequents HenchCo.
So Drakken takes a long drag of air and lets it boom back out as he says, with all the frost he can muster and even a dollop that he can't, "And when she does break us out, I think we should go our separate ways!"
"Okay." Eddy shrugs, amiable as ever. He reaches out and claps Drakken on the back, almost denting Drakken in a place where he can't afford any additional dents.
Drakken's throat quite unexpectedly pulls tight, but he still rotates his body away from Eddy's. For the sake of his mother and Shego - no, for the sake of himself and his dream of global conquest - he has to part ways with his cousin, return to his haunted-island lair, and discover how to phase through objects.
His hands excavate his pockets. Sure enough, his special blue hairband still waits, fallen to the bottom as if it was afraid he would never return for it. Drakken loops it back around his hair - a symbolic, dramatic movement - and ow, it stings when it pops into place.
The lining of his pocket is flipped inside-out, too, and Drakken wishes it were as easy to punch the lining of his soul back into place.
~And the build-up to So the Drama begins...~