~Well, I never knew how much I needed to explore Kim's state of mind after Stop Team Go until I started this chapter. Sorry to have been so long. (And, yes, I plan to finish 53 Things.) Enjoy!~
The sound of beeping from her locker was in a category of its own when it came to springing Kim Possible into action. She flew through the combination, the numbers basically old friends after three-plus years at Middleton High, and yanked the door open.
Sure enough, the screen inside was alive and filled with Wade's freckle-dotted grin. "Hey, Kim," he said. "Got a mission for you guys."
Okay - so he was smiling. That ruled out Dementor making another grab for the battlesuit or Monkey Fist continuing on his whacked-out quest for whatever "ultimate weapon" he was hunting for.
Yeah - my money's on Drakken.
"There's been a break-in at HenchCo. You remember that Emergency Broadcast Uplink Drakken stole last month? Well, now it's been stolen again. Security cameras are all knocked out. No prizes for guessing who," Wade said, snickering as he caught Kim's eye-roll.
Definitely no prizes involved here. Kim had seen HenchCo's security cameras, nested up in the corners where walls met ceiling - a ceiling high enough to meet the most claustrophobic mad scientist's standards. Shego was the only one of her NON-simian enemies agile enough to get up there and knock them out. And she was way too smart to slash-melt the things with her plasma and leave a trail that led straight back to her and Drakken.
That wasn't even super-intimidating anymore. It all locked cleanly into place in Kim's brain, a law so much easier to understand than the algebraic ones - lack of a trail equaled Shego. And Shego equaled Drakken.
"Drakken's really slipping," Kim said. She rolled her eyes again. "Now he's just repeating himself."
Post-prison Drakken had been as obnoxious and fortunate-for-Kim-clueless as ever, but there had been something different about him ever since he and Shego had patched up whatever it was that had them at each other's throats back in the fall. It wasn't always there, just sometimes. Sometimes he'd heave a sigh that sounded like it came from the depths of the stomach he barely had anymore, and sometimes he'd trudge instead of skitter, as if his shadow weighed ten pounds. His focus was also all over the place, natch. Sometimes it was kind of pitiful.
And other times Kim's laughter didn't leave any room for pity to squeeze in. Like the mission last month, when Drakken hadn't shut up about how he'd "purchased" a bottle of cologne in a fit of genius. Apparently he'd thought that, now that he smelled like someone's old campfire, the world would fling itself down in submission at his feet. Or something - it was hard to tell how Drakken's mind worked.
Or didn't.
"So - is it the gruesome twosome again?" That was Ron, loping down the hall, a little late for the party as usual.
Wade nodded.
Smarty-Mart-cheap deodorant made a beeline for Kim's nose as Ron leaned forward. No brand of cologne could ever smell that good. "They still in the suburban lair?" Ron asked.
Wade patted the keys a few times and then studied whatever had just shown up on his computer screen. "Looks like it. I'm getting heat signals and massive energy usage."
"Great," Kim said, and she meant it. A mission would be just the thing to clear her head after an especially grueling study hall, where Barkin had been practically cracking a whip at any poor kid caught with their phone out. That had to mean he was heartbroken.
Kim couldn't blame him. She'd been painted a slightly-different shade of sad after Miss Go's departure.
"We'll get right on it, Wade," Kim promised and closed her locker door. Her forehead found the smooth spot just above the grates and decided it didn't want to move. She gave herself thirty seconds to rest it there before she'd peel free.
Shego. Who had probably already burned her preppy teacher garb. Who Kim, unless she was mega-lucky, was going to be wrestling to the ground in an hour or two. Who was, without a doubt, the most infuriating villain she'd ever fought - but would Kim really be able to aim a roundhouse kick at the face that had pressed up against hers and smiled at the light inside the photo booth?
Her goodness was all Attiudinator. Her evil is the real deal.
Kind of hard to remember when you could still hear her giggle in your head, tinkling like the chime over an old-timey drugstore door.
"KP, you okay?" Ron's voice ended Kim's thirty seconds. He gave his head a gentle tilt. "Did Barkin give you a migraine, too?"
Actually, there was a beat of pain behind Kim's temples, but it wasn't anything she hadn't worked around a hundred times before. "No," she said. "It's just - Drakken and Shego."
Gentle became quizzical. "What about Drakken and Shego? I never thought you were scared of Drakken and Sh - ohhhh." Ron's mouth worked up and down like a puppet's. "Shego. After the whole Attiudinator thing."
"Yeah." Kim turned away from the locker and parked an elbow on the lock. "It's gonna be awk-weird."
For her, at least. Shego had some kind of ice-bath aura to her that only anger ever came anywhere CLOSE to defrosting. She might not feel a single thing.
A twinge of pain sparked in Kim's chest, and even though she chased it away, an ache remained. It was vague, like prodding a three-day-old bruise, but it was still easily recognizable as the exact same ache that shot through her when she'd looked into Drakken's trusting, mournful eyes and heard him say, "But I don't want to be evil." Only this bruise went about three layers deeper than Drakken.
"Are you gonna be okay?" Ron asked. He was back to gentle, from the sandy brows drawing together to the beat-up toes of his sneakers curved in so they almost met.
"I think so. Of course the beginning will be horrible." Kim forced the corners of her lips upward, but it was as half-hearted as a pep rally where the team had no chance of coming back and winning the game. "But then she'll start making fun of my fashion choices, and I'll want to wipe the floor with her, and everything will go back to normal."
Ron slid a lanky arm around her waist and held on tight, and Kim was glad. She wouldn't have gone toppling to the ground or anything if he'd let go, but his hold pulled her spirit back up into the perky-and-prepared zone where she always tried to keep it, especially heading into a mission. Yeah. She loved this kid so much.
Drakken was also the only one of Kim's foes stupid enough to "purchase" an evil lair with a skylight. Kim shinnied her way to the top, with Ron doing his best to keep up with her from behind, and his best wasn't half-bad anymore. Through one of the side windows, Kim caught a glimpse of Drakken rocking forward on his toes, gesturing like the carnival con-man he could have been in another life, complete with spastic flaps. Even from here, she could see the arrogance every time he moved.
Ugh. It was always so satisfying to knock that ego off its self-awarded pedestal.
Kim positioned herself almost exactly over Drakken's head and tried to flatten herself against the skylight's thin metal support - a tight fit even for her petite self. She snaked an arm into her backpack, felt her way to her grappling hook, and tugged it loose. As soon as it was in sight, the cold metal and her sore palms and any lingering fear of falling got filed into the this-doesn't-matter realm. The only things that existed right now were her hand and the grappling hook it was clutching and the skylight that led to the villain she was going to take down.
Villains, Kim reminded herself as she pulled the trigger.
The grappling hook bounced off the glass and back to her, and Kim grabbed the prongs before they could make any extra noise. Ron let out a screech, the under-his-breath kind he'd been practicing these last few months. Rufus's was a barely-audible thread.
Great. If Drakken - or, more likely, Shego - had heard the hook scrape across the glass, they would be out here so fast -
Oh, well. They'd have to open a door to get to her, and that would at least give Kim a way in.
"Looks like security's been upgraded," Wade reported from her wrist. "Luckily, so has your laser lipstick. A couple minutes with that should wear the glass down, no prob."
He was right - so what else was new? Kim got herself perched on the support, balancing on the balls of her tucked feet to stay out of villain-sight, clinging with one hand. The other put all its strength into holding the tube of laser lipstick steady enough for the beam to sizzle away whatever Drakken had finally had the smarts to use as reinforcement.
Three minutes later, Kim pocketed the tube and gave the glass beneath her a careful smack. An almost-perfect circle of it dropped in and shattered, shards wheeling across the floor to congregate in every corner of Drakken's living room.
It definitely got Drakken's attention. With a dying-moose scream, he popped off the floor as if he were about to explode, each hand and foot reaching for a different direction in midair. He dragged blank eyes from floor to ceiling and beyond. They crossed the second they landed on Kim.
So they were doing eye-crossing today. Kim shook her head as she popped through the hole. Her name would follow in three . . . two. . . one. . .
"Kim Possible!" Drakken bellowed.
Oh, Drakken. You never disappoint.
Drakken's hands flapped, butterfly-style, in front of him. By now, he was also grumbling about "today's teenyboppers" with their "idealism" and how "everybody thinks they can save the world" - all of which Kim heard just fine. Drakken did even his grumbling at top volume.
Kim used those seconds to grapple down the rope to what she deemed to be a safe height and then let go with a leap. She hit a glass-free zone on one knee and one set of knuckles. Pure victory, the type she always felt when she stuck a landing, merged with her adrenaline to produce something MUCH stronger and cleaner than just a rush. Ron slipped down behind her without much grace. At least his pants had stayed on so far.
The grumbles gave way to nonsensical syllables, and then Drakken got it together enough to throw back his head and shout exactly what Kim was afraid he would - "Shego!"
Shego tossed her nail file behind the counter she was propped against and made a too-slow show of crossing over to Kim. Her green gaze swept up and over Kim like the scanner on a copy machine. She hadn't so much as lit up her hands yet, but Kim's skin was already stinging like a low-grade allergic reaction.
Kim ducked into a crab-crouch and didn't break contact with those scanning eyes. Shego had been known to take her sweet time moseying toward a person and then at the halfway mark suddenly break into a jog - and then a series of backflips and handsprings. With her, it was always best to be on your guard.
Behind Kim, she heard Ron's footsteps trouncing the floor, followed by a second, feeble set that had to belong to Drakken. Not a whole lot of nervous sweat formed on Kim's neck when she imagined Ron having to take Drakken on alone anymore, now that they were close to the same size. And Ron, as delightfully un-ripped as he may have been, had been bulking up his stamina on the football field, so it wouldn't have surprised Kim if he were stronger than Drakken - especially this recent, constantly-looking-on-the-verge-of-collapse version of Drakken.
The world narrowed for Kim again. It was just her and the big sister she'd never had, sliding one sophisticated leg forward at a time, ready to rip into Kim. Kim stared back, scrutinizing her the way she would a villain she'd never fought before, searching for any emotion, any weakness.
Okay - she'd admit it. She was searching for any trace of Miss Go.
She had about as much luck as she would have had locating a clogged pore on the disgustingly flawless porcelain that looked back at her. Shego's expression was blank, guarded, her steps predatory, her arms swishing with deadly precision through the air. Her lips sported a cynical tilt that matched their Goth-girl color. The smile they parted into was as sharp as the blades at the ends of her fingers, with a grating, half-filed look Shego would never have allowed on her nails.
The thought smacked down in Kim's brain that she at least had Monique and the rest of the cheer squad - not counting Bonnie - to go to if she were ever in need of an emergency slumber party or eyebrow-waxing. Shego didn't really have anyone except Drakken, who had so very obviously NOT gone anywhere near waxing paper in the last twenty years.
Shego took another step forward, nostrils pinched, as if she could hear anyone feeling sorry for her and was out to make them regret it. She shook her hair, even fuller and shinier than Kim had remembered, back from her all-angles face. "Hey there." Shego plopped in a "Kimmy" that fell as condescending and cold as it ever had. "Where's your fancy battle suit? Did you finally realize disco isn't coming back and burn it?"
"No, I didn't bring it," Kim shot back on auto-pilot. "I only wear it when I go to fight serious threats." Every word came ripping out like a knife, the way it always did when she talked to Shego, only this time they nicked at Kim, too.
Shego's head went back, and a glint came into her eyes, familiar and hateful. Without peeling them off of Kim for a second, she tossed forward to her partner-in-crime, "Hey, Dr. D. Princess here is dissing you again."
"'Again'? Does - does that mean she stopped for a while?" Drakken's voice was so hope-packed that Kim cringed. For him.
Kim couldn't help grunting.
Shego scanned over the room with an upper-lip-curled smile. It was the look Kim had seen on her close to a hundred times, the most natural thing in the world, right up there with the bombastic squalls - that only Drakken could pull off - shoving Ron's way over in the corner.
Which meant it would probably stop looking about six degrees of unnatural before too long here.
In the half-second it took Kim to think that thought, Shego was out of her space and into Kim's with a tackle-bomb.
Kim was mentally kicking her own tail before she even hit the floor. Yikes, what was with her attention span today? Shego used to be able to find weak spots all over Kim and swoop down on them - back when Kim was a fresh-out-of-braces, just-earned-her-learner's-permit kid. Having survived to her senior year and peeked around the corner at eighteen, that had taken care of most of the places where Shego could possibly land. And now here she was, moving like she was in some kind of fever dream.
It didn't escape Shego, either. She wore it in the vicious split of her mouth - no WAY could Kim call THAT a smile - and announced it in the way she dug her blades into Kim's forearms. Kim crunched her jaw into its tight-vise set so she wouldn't flinch if Shego wound up breaking skin.
From behind her, Kim heard a careless ripping noise that had to be Ron tearing the EBU free and a set of footsteps pounding away, pursued by a decidedly-less-experienced pair that had to take three steps to even come close to matching one of Ron's lopes. Ron was quick and slippery - which had been what had gotten him on the football team - which had only made him quicker and slipperier. Him outrunning Drakken was a picture Kim could draw in her mind without a single smear of ink. Drakken was almost as short on legs as he was on originality.
Shego curled another glance down at Kim, a streak of teeth showing. She let go with one hand, keeping her elbow in the bend of Kim's arm, to crackle her plasma to life, and reared up for a swing.
That was Kim's chance. She pulled a knee up as if she were getting ready to bike down a steep hill and drove it square into Shego's stomach. Cliche move, yes, but it always worked. Shego was human, after all.
But only barely. Kim felt the girl fall back just long enough for Kim to wrench herself free, press her palms to the floor, and throw her heels in the air. One of them grazed something smooth and sharp - which could have been just about anything on Shego.
The growl from the other side of Kim was the closest Shego ever got to acknowledging pain. It was kinda admirable. Also kinda sad.
Kim never would have imagined she'd think of Shego and sad in the same context. Of course, she never would have imagined thinking of Shego and Barkin in the same context or Shego and rollerblading. This time, though, Kim didn't let it nudge her out of the zone. She kept her weight distributed equally between her wrists and moved away from Shego in a running handstand.
"So, Drakken," Kim called back as her fingers navigated the skinny lines in between tiles. "You've started doing repeat performances now? What, did you run out of semi-decent ideas?"
"If an idea is worth trying once, it's worth trying again!" Drakken's indignant yelp came out a little too high-pitched and desperate for this early in a mission. The guy was like a Tootsie Roll Pop. You knew there was a soft, gooey center under all that hard-layered sugar - you just didn't know how many licks it was going to take to get him there. And he'd started chipping away a lot faster right around the time the cheer squad had swapped their junior-varsity-childish bouncy skirts for the coveted, streamed-to-sophistication lines of varsity duds. Shego was the one you could count on for jabs at your fashion sense, snide nicknames, and emotions that stuck on anger when they weren't blanked out entirely.
Another reason why Kim couldn't afford to remember squeezing Miss Go's hand to within an inch of its strong little life when the mall's resident eyebrow-waxing expert stripped her follicles clean. The memory ripped off like the strips of hot wax itself.
"Um, actually, have you ever heard the definition of insanity? It's doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results," Kim replied. Shego's body heat - about the only trail she ever left - was closing in behind her, so Kim flipped back to her feet, catching Shego in the chest in the process. Shego ended up sloppy-weaving to the left for a second, but she never lost her footing. Of course.
There was a long, dull silence. Kim could almost hear the wind whistling through the wide gaps between the blue-version-of-Ron's ears.
"In other words, you're insane, Drakken," she said as she leaped over the plasma bolt Shego launched in her direction.
Drakken sniffed. "Fifty-eight juries have disagreed with you, Kim Possible, so I'd say you're in the minority!"
Shego's gaze clinked to Kim's, glimmering with annoyance spread thin over nothingness. The fact that Kim had actually been hoping to see anything else inside her made her ache to throw a right cross. She did hurl a fist toward Shego, but Shego ducked with literally a second to spare, letting Kim's knuckles swish harmlessly through her black waves.
"More like fifty-eight juries couldn't stand to see you get off scot-free," Kim called over the plasma sizzling on Shego's fingertips.
The silence THEN was thick but fragile, sort of the way Ron's fingers had felt laced through hers when they'd stumbled back into the gym on prom night. Sounded like she'd struck a nerve. And that was so typical of the Drakken she knew, even after his run-in with the Attitudinator had left him a pasty, five-foot-ten kindergartener who'd never been separated from his mom before but was willing to give the school day a try. Color-changes aside, his transformation had been way less out-there than Shego's.
And at least when that was all done, Kim had been so wrapped up in the whole relief mantra that Drakken had faded away to the corner of her mind where last year's boy bands went to be forgotten. Him and everything else not directly related to to a big old best-friend-coming-back-from-the-dark-side exhale. The only upside to Shego's morph-back was that Kim got to recognize her life again, and that didn't exactly seem like a fair trade-off.
Kim kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, tensing her muscles, getting them prepped for Shego's next attack. She didn't risk a glance back over her shoulder. She was so beyond needing to check up on Ron at three-minute intervals. And she so didn't need a glimpse of Drakken standing there all lost-eyed, half the person who had built Eric to turn her heart inside-out and half the person who sobbed at her feet after Shego had tossed him overboard for Zorpox.
Drakken gave another indignant sniff. "I don't expect you to understand in your youthful nativity!"
Kim had to bite back a laugh as she dodged another flame-thrower punch.
"You mean 'naivety', Doc. A 'nativity' is one of those barn scenes your mama puts up for Christmas." You could have coated Shego's throat in moisturizer, and she still would have sounded all dry and crispy. There was no resemblance at all to the young woman who'd squatted down beside Ron Reiger's lab computer and walked him through how to properly format a paper at ultra-soft volume.
Kim could picture the bulge of Drakken's throbbing, snakelike forehead veins. "Shego, I have just about had it with your insurrection!" he said.
"Annnnd that's not the word you're looking for, either," Shego said without so much as a backward look at her employer. She plunged another fist toward Kim's head, and Kim ducked so barely-in-time that she felt the warmth tease against her scalp.
"THE POINT BEING," Drakken said at the top of his drum-solo lungs, "that I have, at last, recorded all the footage I need to turn cable television into the twenty-four-hour Drakken Channel! And if all of that were to go to waste - well, that would just 'tank,' wouldn't it?"
Kim felt the vague near-nausea that kicked in whenever Drakken tried to be hip. It was right up there with someone's grandma thinking she could still pull off short-shorts. "Maybe for you," she said.
She knew she could count on Ron to put in, "Not so much for the rest of the world," and he did. If they'd been any closer and any less villain-preoccupied, he would have high-fived her to seal it. Ron was the only guy Kim had ever dated who could make a high-five almost sweeter than a kiss.
Drakken responded with his trademark alphabet-soup grunts. "What does that phrase even mean, anyway?" he snapped. "'Tank.' Does that mean fish tanks? Artillery tanks? Top tanks?"
Sometimes it was hard not to feel sorry for Drakken in all his help-this-doesn't-gel-with-my-knowledge-of-the-world panic. Probably had a lot to do with why he thought he needed to conquer the whole thing or send it up in flames.
"Tank tops," Shego said. Two months ago, she and Kim would have exchanged eye-sighs of girl-disgust, but Shego was studying a point somewhere on the right of Kim's head. Yeah, that would have looked awkward on anyone who DIDN'T apply a cool-girl aura as durable as waterproof mascara every morning. It had taken three days of Shego waking up in the Possibles' guest room to convince Kim that it wasn't already in place the second Shego rolled out of bed.
Even with Shego filling up her line of sight, Kim easily envisioned Ron's wiggling eyebrows. "I don't expect you to understand," he said, "in your. . ." He trailed off, and Kim knew he was looking to her.
"Geezerhood," Kim supplied with a grin. Drakken was, after all, only a few years younger than Kim's dad, even if his maturity was more on-level with her brothers and all the other freshmen who sat through health class either snickering hysterically or wanting to disappear on the spot. Kim had Drakken pegged for one of the latter group.
"Oh, right," Ron said. "Man, I keep forgetting you're a lot older than you look."
"I'll take that as a compliment." Drakken's voice rang out smug, even as he strained it and every other part of himself toward Ron.
Of course you will. If he hadn't, Kim would have had to check his vital signs.
"What are you doing, anyway, buffoon?" Drakken demanded.
All the pity that had formed on his behalf exited Kim's spirit immediately, replaced by the neck-tingling urge to take a hot glue gun to Drakken's lips. He could gloat and rant and preen as much as he wanted and hardly beat out the Tweebs on the annoyance scale, but dumping on her boyfriend? Nuh-uh.
"Playing keepaway," Ron said. Kim didn't have to look to know his too-big, fast-moving hands were tossing the EBU between them.
There was the smack of faux-leather against worn-out rubber, which Kim also didn't have to see to identify as the sound of Drakken's foot coming down on Ron's. If that was the worst Drakken had at this point, that put the threat factor somewhere near zero. Ron had moved up three sneaker-sizes since the day he and Drakken had first crossed toes.
"Dude, there are no footsies in keepaway," Ron said. His newfound chill must have tweaked Drakken even more. Half the duo was already beaten.
Now if I could just get Shego off my business. . .
Right. She might as well try to shake her own shadow.
Kim stuck out her own foot and wiped Shego's legs out from under her like slush off a windshield. It would buy them a little time, but not much - Shego hit the ground at a roll and Kim could tell she'd get herself angled upright again any second.
That was when Kim heard Ron yip with pain.
There was a time when that sound would flood Kim's brain with groans of, Ugh, Ron, grow up! But that was the thing. Ron HAD grown up - a lot - during their almost-five years of crime-fighting, and he'd mastered the art of flustering Drakken into uselessness. That yip had gotten rarer and rarer until it'd become one of the only noises that could spook Kim when it did make an appearance.
She whipped around.
Ron's right arm was wound around his body like a kite string tangled in a tree - and Drakken was clutching the other end of that string, flashing a sad excuse for a smirk. When he caught Kim watching him, Drakken spread it wider and pinched his twiggy fingers harder into Ron's sleeve. Strangely, the words Mr. Barkin had said the day he'd accepted Ron onto the football team came back to her - What he lacks in strength, he makes up for in tenacity.
It was a perfect fit for both of the boy-men looking back at her right now, Ron's freckles coming together in a brave pucker to keep the next yip inside, Drakken's eyes shimmering with the unfamiliar joy of having someone he could overpower even for a minute or two.
Kim broke into a sprint toward her boyfriend. Shego neatly diverted her aim by chucking another shot of plasma in Kim's direction. The thing was lobbed so high that Kim instantly knew she wouldn't be able to jump it. That left her with only one spur-of-the-moment option.
Limbo skills, don't fail me now.
Kim jerked herself as close to the floor as she could get without lying down flat and let the plasma whiz over her. Almost before its sizzle had passed overhead, Kim dove between Shego's legs. In the process, she snatched one ankle, sending Shego into a backward somersault that knocked her head against the tiles and finally dropped her on her back, her stunned-groggy face directly in the path of Kim's shoe. That face seemed almost vulnerable, a look Kim never would've imagined Shego would achieve. At least not above that jumpsuit that fit her like a snakeskin instead of the teacher garb and tiny earrings, reinforced by the heavy ripples of hair instead of those tame, straightened lines that had stuck damply to either side of her porcelain skin back when it was puffy and tear-wet and twice as beautiful.
As Kim reeled back her leg for the kick, she did something she had never done before with Shego.
She hesitated.
It was just long enough for Drakken to give Ron's arm one more good twist and then release it, turning Ron into a tornado-in-a-bottle that bumped a few beakers to their demise on the floor - Drakken groaned over them as if they were close buddies of his. The EBU went sailing from his hands and thudded against a wall. Kim didn't have time to figure out which wall before Ron careened into her, landing both of them in what Kim guessed had to be a pretty dorky heap of purple-on-black.
Shego did not hesitate. Kim was still trying to disentangle herself from Ron's belt in a way that wouldn't leave him pantless when something blurry and nimble yanked her free and then pounced. Together they slid into the nearest corner, where Shego held her talons at Kim's throat like something out of a nature special.
Even with Ron shrieking beside her and Drakken cheering directions from a cowardly distance, everything went very, very still. There were about thirty different moves in each of the sixteen styles of Kung Fu Kim knew that would break Shego's grip - or her arm - or her neck. She just couldn't fashion a scenario where she used any of them WITHOUT simultaneously getting herself slashed to death. It wouldn't even take an attack - pick the wrong move in this position, and Kim could do Shego's job for her.
Kim closed her eyes so that they couldn't beg into Shego's. Her heart slammed at her throat, right in the spot where Shego's claws sat poised. The thought of Shego being able to feel that was all the motivation her Kimness needed to try and crank it down a few notches.
Below her, on the floor, Kim heard Ron grunting and wriggling, and she knew he was busy reorganizing his lanky limbs. Shego must've noticed it, too - because she slipped one neat step closer to Ron and crunched both his thumbs to the ground under one foot. His "Yow!" revved the pulse right back up.
Like THAT's going to work, Kim said to herself. It might have worked back when the two of them were a couple of sophomore kids taking on their first real-life baddies and Ron could trip just as easily over his Velcro tabs as he could over untied shoelaces. But ever since then, the crime-fighter part of Ron had really matured, and he'd muscled up in spirit - which to Kim was way more gorgeous than it would have been in body. Now would be a really, really good time for some Mystical Monkey Power to kick into gear, though. . .
"Attagirl, Shego! Finish her off!" someone else wheezed from behind Shego, clearly not caring how much he sounded like a dogfight cheerleader.
From the against-the-wall position she was shoved into, Kim couldn't help seeing Drakken over Shego's head, slightly to her left and about seven strides back. He was folded in the middle like a clean towel, his spiky hair collapsing onto his forehead in ragged, suffering-from-a-home-haircut bangs. Yeah, he looked plenty puny.
Kim riveted her eyes right on Drakken's. Order Shego to decapitate her? Yeah, he could do that in his sleep. Stand there and watch it happen? Um, that was totally never happening.
Sure enough, Drakken squirmed inside his unstylish, baggier-than-they-used-to-be mad-scientist duds, and his eyes scampered off to the side somewhere. It was such a Drakken-before-prison expression that it was almost kind of a comfort. At least compared to the fact that Shego was still clutching at Kim's throat with those add-ons to what was already a spankin' set of nails that had never known a nervous-nibble.
Hello! So not relevant right now!
What was relevant was figuring out how to get Shego's claws off her. Under most circumstances, Kim would have led with a leg-sweep that would've forced Shego to let go of Kim if she wanted to keep her balance. In this particular sitch, though, Shego slipping equaled Kim's face getting buzzsawed. There had to be something else.
Shego's fingertips bit at Kim. Distant warmth rose inside them, sort of like that not-quite-burn you got when you inched your hold up too high on a sizzling sparkler. The plasma was arriving at the speed of dial-up Internet - either Shego was experiencing some leftover hesitation herself, or she was planning to savor the moment as long as she could. Kim gave her a quick scan, but she'd have needed to break out a magnifying glass before she could spy any clues.
Kim tightened herself against the ten pinpricks in her skin. They didn't hurt - adrenaline worked better than Novocaine at that - but the feel of them was gorchy enough, especially on the designer heels of Miss Go and their time together, to scramble Kim's stomach. She made a fist and kept it ready.
"Wait - you can't kill us yet!" Ron cried from the floor. His voice made a brave effort not to crack that Kim loved it for. Especially when she saw the K-word explode all over Drakken like a paintball, ruffling his eyebrow and shrinking his cocky, spread-wide stance. "KP still owes you a soda!"
Yeah - points for trying, but Mystical Monkey Power would've been handier at this point.
Shego whipped to give Ron a you-are-so-naive look, but her grip on Kim didn't loosen. If anything, she drove her index finger nearer to Kim's jugular, and Kim ached to realize that whatever they'd said in unison had already washed right out of both their memories. "Like I care," Shego said.
"You should!" Ron shot back.
"Yes, you should, Shego!" Drakken was suddenly at Shego's elbow, his too-big-for-the-rest-of-him voice nudging at her in the way that even DRAKKEN was smart enough not to do with his hands. "The laws of the Jinx must be respected! Particularly when they are in your favor!"
"Otherwise, you could upset the balance of the universe or something!" Ron added - laying it on just a bit thick.
Shego blinked. "Are you two for real?"
It was a question she and Kim would probably have jinxed on a half-dozen times over the last three years. She stood there, blades gripping, flickering between Kim's slumber-party pal and the woman who'd been hired to shorten Kim's lifespan like one of Cousin Larry's trading cards that showed a different equally-obscure video game villain depending on where the light caught it.
Drakken tipped his sweat-drenched head in Kim's direction as if he actually knew what he was doing. "Perfectly. There is a reason to keep her alive now." There was just enough time for Kim to look him over, too. A Drakken-study was a heck of a lot less complicated than a Shego-study. Yep, there was intensity there, but it was normal Drakken-intensity, not the bolt-for-the-garage-and-pray-everyone-you-love-can-outrun-the-Diablo type.
And right now he was frowning. "Although I do wonder when she owes you a soda from."
Kim exhaled as quietly as she could. Well, of course he wondered. Drakken had been late to the party - as usual - right on time to crush the Attitudinator with a streetlight and with his endless ability to wreck things up. He wouldn't have any way of knowing he'd just destroyed an entirely new reality. Unless Shego had told him - and THAT was about as likely as Shego donating everything in her wardrobe to charity.
Shego stared back at him, blank as if she were wearing a ski mask. "Um, I have a life outside of you, and seriously? I should keep her alive for a soda?"
Drakken rocked back on his heels and gave the air a bony poke. "Oh, come now, Shego! Have I not taught you that you don't eliminate your enemies until you have exploited them to their full potential? Bled them dry? So to speak?" he added, a touch too quickly to be tough.
Kim felt like guffawing - if not at Drakken's straight-out-of-a-B-movie attempt at the whole "ruthless" thing, then definitely from how Shego's fingers eased up just the slightest bit.
"Excuse me?" Kim almost expected the air Shego huffed to come out steaming. "You've never 'taught' me anything, Dr. D!"
Flashpoints of hurt appeared in Drakken's eyes, and the skin underneath them scrunched up as if he'd just been stung by a bee. "That's not true! It can't be true!" It was a raspy whine that scraped its crusty way down Kim's backbone. "Why, you were so young when you showed up on my doorstep! So green behind the ears! Why, surely you must have - "
"Wet," Shego said. Her hand went disgust-limp on Kim's neck. Kim used that opportunity to sneak her fingers around Shego's. They were still hot as little ovens, and Kim realized she was handling them in that tiptoeing, cautious way she'd handled all things Home Ec two years ago - things she wasn't exactly afraid would kill her, but things she might not have been able to control no matter how much Kimness she sank into them.
"Wha?" The "t" didn't make an appearance. It never did when Drakken was this bewildered, when his lips were too twisted and questioning to even find a scowl.
"The saying is 'wet behind the ears,' Mr. Experience. Which does not do wonders for your credibility."
Kim guided the fingers Shego was currently ignoring into a way-less-deadly clasp on Kim's shirtfront. Beside her, Ron's sweet-as-chocolate eyes couldn't hold back a sparkle.
"Yes - well - yes - well - yes - well - " Drakken grabbed his own arms and wrung them like a pair of damp socks. Yikes, he was floundering. Luckily for him, he regained the ability to say other things before he could choke himself off. "I bet you are green behind the ears, Shego, experienced or not!" He stopped, stared at Shego. "You do have ears somewhere under that hair, right?"
Kim almost let herself nod. She had seen them, dotted with cute little purple studs, which was a whole OTHER dull ache.
"Okay, I'll play along," Shego said - in a snarl that communicated the exact opposite to anyone without a rampaging ego problem. "Yeah, I have ears. And they're green. Yay, you're right. Confetti and trumpets, blah-blah-blah. Can you name one thing you've ever taught me?"
Every word Shego flung Drakken's way bought Kim another fraction of an inch of progress, getting those blades to her shoulder and then down her capped sleeve, until only a few threads connected them to Kim at all. Even her new mission outfit was out of the danger zone, tacking a shallow layer on to the victory that wrapped Kim's chest like an ACE bandage.
Drakken sputtered. "Gjj - gkkk - glll - NANO! I taught you what 'nano' means!" The dull flecks of light that struggled down from the too-high ceiling bounced off Drakken's ha-ha grin, white and enormous and not even half as formidable as he obviously thought it was.
Shego barely spared Drakken an I'm-embarrassed-for-you-because-you-don't-have-the-sense-to-be-embarrassed-for-yourself look. It matched the feeling that coiled Kim's insides fairly consistently during Drakken-encounters. "Yeah. . . no. I can open my own pickle jars. Oh, and I've also never walked myself off a cliff in my life."
Drakken's face was a mishmash of pink and blue, almost a perfect match for a cone of cotton candy. "Those were low blows, Shego!"
Kim squatted to Ron's level and didn't waste her time smirking - even though there had to be a couple of juicy stories there. Her pulse was zooming up to hummingbird-speed, and Kim savored every second of the so-alive rhythm it sent to her fingertips as they looped around Ron's sleeves and guided his hands, increment by increment, out from under Shego's boot. It was such slow going that Kim didn't even see Shego's boot rock with the final pull-free. She wouldn't have put it past Shego to have felt it, though, and Kim flung an at-the-ready arm up over her face just to be safe.
Nah. Shego was bearing down on Drakken as if she planned on eating him for dinner. "Sorry to disappoint you. But the needing isn't on my end."
Drakken actually gasped, louder than Mom had when the Diablos perched on their coffee table had punched through the roof. Kim could imagine his forever-pouting chin poking forward another inch. "Well, answer this, Miss Smarty-Leggings -"
"'Pants', Dr. D," Shego corrected him. "You were so close."
"WHHNGGGKK - WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITHOUT THIS INNNGGH - INCOME?" Drakken sputtered.
"Go work for somebody else. Rob banks. Set up tutoring sessions for new villains." Shego gave an elaborate shrug that was obviously just meant to further tweak Drakken. There was no life in it. No life in anything surrounding Shego.
Except for her employer, who was rapidly melting into a jittering mess of rage. "Oh, come on! Villainology 101: How To Be a Villain? Really?"
"Yeah. Matter of fact, you should consider signing up." Kim didn't have to see Shego's eyebrows to know they were wiggling wickedly. "Might learn a few things."
She is good at teaching, Kim thought - blandly. It was, after all, Miss Go who had sat Ron down after school and explained to him in anyone-can-follow-this terms how the moon landing totally could not have been faked with 1969 technology. She'd gotten him down farther on the acceptance-path than Barkin OR Dad - who had done everything but visit the moon himself - ever had.
There would be time for pangs later. Right now, Kim slammed a hand over Ron's mouth and pointed at his pocket. After a half-decade-plus of going on missions together, that was the only cue card Ron needed. He reached down and pulled Rufus out of his cozy, baggy hiding place.
The little guy stifled a yawn and snapped a salute at Kim. Smiling under his whiskers, he scampered across the floor, almost soundless, over to the spot where the EBU had fallen. Rufus had to use both front paws to hoist it over his head like a loaded-up Bueno Nacho tray. The thumbs-up Kim shot his way got him tittering to himself.
Kim inched her way over to meet Rufus, trailing her boyfriend behind her by the sleeve. When all three of them were gathered under the break-in-the-glass they'd used as an entrance, she pulled her grappling hook from her backpack, and Crimefighter-Kim scooted over to make room for A-minus-math-student-Kim. She had to hit the hole on the first try. The firing noise would be enough to jolt even Drakken back to reality, and she probably wouldn't get a second shot, not with Shego and her killer reflexes coming for her.
At the mo, however, those killer reflexes were pressing Drakken's back against a wall, into a scuffed-up corner that Kim was pretty sure even he didn't deserve to be in. "Look, I was the one who went and stole your little Cable-Hacker - both times -" Shego said.
"Emergency Broadcast Uplink," Drakken growled.
"Gesundheit," Shego replied without so much as a pause. "And I -"
There was a short, snapped-off silence as one of them - Kim's money was on Shego - realized exactly who was NOT here anymore. Both heads swiveled in Kim's direction like a pair of birdwatchers'.
Math-student-Kim did one more fast calculation, and then flew back to the pages of her geometry textbook and stayed there. It really didn't matter that much anymore. She squeezed the trigger and shoved Ron against the resulting rope, giving him time to do his still-klutzy-but-getting-faster shimmy to the top.
Kim was halfway sprinted up herself when she heard the cry from below. And it wasn't Drakken's, the one that wobbled between man-frustration and little-boy-indignation, the one she was expecting. Instead, it was a too-sharp shriek that could only have come from Shego. Kim had heard it more in the last six months than she had in the first two years she'd squared off against Shego.
Shego, who spurted for Kim and Ron and flung her glow at the rope at the exact second Kim moved out of her reach. The rest of the rope fell away, leaving the ends green-singed. Kim could feel the smolder even from way above.
You could really use some anger management therapy, Shego. It was the same thing that had floated through Kim's thoughts at least every other month, but before, it had always been as a burn. Now it softened with almost-concern.
All right - new plan. Kim hooked her hands on either side of the smooth-cut glass, took an I-sure-hope-this-works breath, hiked her body, and backflipped out of the hole. She couldn't hold back a grin, especially when Ron cheered and Rufus raised a champion fist.
Through the skylight beneath them, Kim could see Drakken shaking his fists in true Mini-Man fashion while Shego gave the rope a murderous glare, so totally having realized she'd just burned up her fastest chance of coming after them. Any other time, it would've brought a laugh to Kim's lips. For a minute, though, there was just her and Shego and the slashed-away rope that separated them.
Appropriate, Kim decided. Kimmy and Miss Go had been awesome pals and honorary sisters for - what, a week? - and then their connection had been severed, yanked out of both of them. Only difference was, Kim had other people to stitch her up. Shego wouldn't even trust her wounds to the one person she did have, and Kim could hardly blame her. What were the odds Drakken would know what to do with internal injuries?
Whatever Shego's ish was, no wonder she dyed it black and decked it out in combat garb.
Before the gal could march straight up the wall to reach them, Kim snagged Ron's wrist again and slid them both down the sloped roof to the hardly-a-sidewalk below them. Satisfying rushes of air slapped Kim's lungs with every running step past the No Parking signs that had banished her Sloth to a block away. Ron's mad running-away skills kept him on pace with her, and their hands slapped on the magenta hood at roughly the same time. Kim had the back wheels fishtailing into lunch-hour-on-Friday traffic almost before her seat belt was buckled.
A quick glance in the rearview mirror showed Shego fuming on a street corner as she hacked away at someone's hedges that hid the rest of the street from view. The homeowners' association must have been WAY too busy dealing with Drakken's neighborhood eyesores to bother with whoever had let their hedges grow so out of control.
"A 'boo' and a 'yah' and a 'score'!" Ron cried. He held up his hand to Kim for a high-five.
Kim clutched her fingers tight as she made an even-tighter right turn. "I am so not letting go of this steering wheel right now, Ron."
"Understood. Understood." Ron nodded and sank back into his seat with only-slightly-disappointed eyes and shoulders that didn't even lean in to meet each other. No one had ever made maturity more adorable.
It was a full five minutes before Kim took another mirror-check. By that point, she couldn't see Shego at all anymore.
Drakken's hulking lair, though? That was a whole other story. The noon sun burned off its glass front and crawled down its gray sides, and Kim studied it with as much geek-investment as Larry. Before she had to look away, she could have sworn she saw them - Shego with her headband-tamed hair hanging gently on either side of the purple earrings, and Drakken wearing an apron, looking like he'd been painted with Nana's almond butter instead of nursery-blue.
Both gone now. Both folded back into their villain-personas - Shego so much deeper than Drakken. Both nice while they lasted.
Kim wasn't crazy about how much the smile she gave them felt like a good-bye. But she turned her gaze on the future again and raced right ahead into it - because with that first step out of the way, the rest fell into place super-easy.
It was the only thing she'd found that worked.