~Onward we plunge. :D Thanks to all my readers and reviewers!~
2. Lair
Fresh air was vastly underrated.
That was what Dr. Drakken decided as he gripped the sides of the helicopter's door with fingers that he just now realized were shaking - come to think of it, everything on him was shaking, including his breathing. What was that about? Shego looked up at him quizzically from the forest floor where they'd just landed, and Drakken knew there was no time to stop and ponder that. He swung himself out the doorway and his feet met the ground with a satisfying smack.
And immediately, his ankles crumpled beneath him. To keep from falling flat on his belly, Drakken had to reach behind him, catch onto the helicopter and hang his weight against it like an astronaut returning from a decade-long voyage into space and now trying to readjust to gravity. Ooh, how he hated to show such weakness in front of Shego, but surely even she would understand if she had just spent a near-eternity crammed into dimensions almost too small to pace in, among surfaces almost too hard to sit on.
When she'd blasted into the prison and left a steaming trail of destruction behind her, Drakken had been rattled by the same feeling he used to get as a child when Mother arrived to pick him up before the bigger boys could start their after-school torment of him. Only a thousand times bigger, more powerful, an earthquake compared to the seismic quiver of seeing Mother's car pull into the school parking lot.
He didn't even know her that well - Shego, that is - but she was the one spot of color he'd seen in that same near-eternity. Everything in and around the Arctic pen had been blue-white, including Drakken's own hands when he caught worrisome glimpses of them. She was also the first human being to walk in without wearing handcuffs and a flashlight on her belt and an expression on her face that blamed him for everything from Watergate onward yet simultaneously dismissed him as no great threat. How Drakken loathed the only guard who showed up at seemingly-random intervals. Had daydreamed multiple times that a polar bear would eat him for supper.
But that didn't matter. Shego was here now. Something about her pointy-angled presence was a reassurance to Drakken, a guarantee that all would be right in time. Drakken didn't doubt for a second that he'd have melted into sheer panic if anyone else had been with him on that helicopter, once again behind the glass that he was very, very fed up with.
All anger fizzled out in Drakken's brain as he lifted an arm to soak in the air that felt like a cool handshake and smelled like fallen leaves and tasted like bonfires. It was fall; it had to be. The prison at the top of the world had existed in a permanent winter, and of course the guard hadn't let Drakken celebrate anything - Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July. Just one more reason why he should have been polar bear chow.
"What month is it?" Drakken asked. The ground suddenly felt slippery underneath him, like it might squirt off without him the way the time had.
"September," Shego said. She jerked her abundant mane of silken hair at him. "Now, if you've gotten your land legs back, I'd kinda like to get you to our lair before we've attracted too much attention."
Lair!
Drakken knew everything on him was perking in joy, right up to the hair that should have been longer. He still remembered the slash-mouthed way the warden had looked at him as he'd sheared Drakken's ponytail with one decisive snip of his scissors, as if he'd just clipped a bird's wings. The analogy began to break down from there, because Drakken could have escaped even if the man had shaved his head completely, but the symbolism remained. It was meant to represent the loss of his freedom.
The polar bear ate the warden for desert in most of Drakken's daydreams.
"Well, by all means," Drakken began, relieved to hear the evil cackle rise as naturally as helium, though fortunately not as squeakily. "Lead the way, Shego."
By the time he blinked, Shego had almost disappeared from sight. A disorientated moment later, Drakken tore off in her wake, straining to keep apace with her - her legs were so much longer than his, proportionally speaking, and seemed to glide over the ground without ever truly touching it. Drakken imagined his own clumsy, ill-fitting prison sneakers chewing up the dirt as they passed over it and then spitting out behind them to lie in fresh-churned disarray, testifying to his villainous might. Shego vaulted over moss-covered rocks and hurtled fallen trunks without so much as breaking a sweat.
Drakken had broken a sweat - check that, he'd shattered a sweat, flung all over his face in sticky patches - by the time he caught up with her. His lungs throbbed back and forth inside his chest cavity, searching for the nearest supply of oxygen. They didn't find enough to keep Drakken from bending at the waist, hands on knees, the scent of dead leaves entirely too close now.
"If only the Olympic judges were here to see this." Shego's whisper was soft as a snake charmer's, but Drakken knew ridicule when he heard it.
His hands found his hips and clamped on. "I'm a mad scientist, not some bodybuilder hopeful!" The world seemed to fold in on him, but at this point his honor was far more vulnerable than his airways. "Besides, it's not like I was in some county jail with a gym! I never saw the outside of the glass!" Drakken spit the words at her, which sounded nice and scary before the gasps began to make supporting appearances. Drat.
Shego looked at him for no longer than a nanosecond before she flipped herself around and resumed jogging without any acknowledgment of the logic he'd just employed. Drakken remembered that about her - how she'd let even the most persuasive arguments roll right off of her and kept them rolling until they were too far away to challenge her stance. It was a stunning quality in a mercenary who planned to get the rest of the world to serve under her, but it boiled Drakken up inside when she was supposed to be serving under him.
Drakken took a moment to share a sigh with his loyal sock puppet. Shego's shoulders curled in disgust as she glanced back over one of them. Saying, silently, I can't believe you ever made that thing.
Well, so what? It wasn't as if he'd ever gotten well enough acquainted with psychosis to think the puppet was Shego. He just needed someone to huddle with in the dark, in the everlasting cold. Someone to carry on a half-conversation with until the sound of his talking filled the room, pushing the walls away from each other and covering the silence that he could have sworn hyena-laughed at him.
But it's okay now. It's over. Shego's here. You'll exact your vengeance. The world will bow. And you will be safe at long last. Drakken torpedoed the thoughts straight at the newest round of shaking that wanted to come claim his body.
Some crow cawed, exactly the way it would in a horror movie, rustled in the branches above Drakken's head. It pumped renewed vigor to his calf muscles, and he shot off after his hired sidekick.
Before the pain receptors could even stir in Drakken's back, Shego came to an abrupt halt between two still-bushy pines. Abrupt, but neat. The girl had to have landing gear or something. Drakken's attempt to replicate it, toes lain flat, rocketed him into a forward-sprawl. He crash-landed into a patch of exposed soil and wondered for a dizzy moment if he had somehow left his legs behind.
He hadn't, of course. If anything, he might as well have grown two or three extra legs, based on how difficult it was to unwind his limbs from each other. Drakken could feel Shego's sneer scalding its way onto his skin without even needing to look at her.
When he did look, she had her left hand up in a stop sign, her right index finger aimed at the ground. A square outline was punched so deeply into the dirt in front of them that it appeared to have been pressed down with a bulldozer claw. A thrill raced up Drakken's spine and turned it to a dynamite fuse. Even he probably would have walked by the thing entirely if Shego hadn't motioned to him.
Shego reached down and snagged hold of something that by all accounts could have been a ring of dead twigs and gave it a tug. Half the square lifted open on a rusted-out hinge, and darkness beckoned Drakken down a flight of stone steps. Darkness that belonged to him. Darkness that he had the codes to and could launch at will. Darkness that would envelop Kim Possible at an hour of his choosing.
Drakken swallowed back a squeal. "I've never had an underground lair before!" Didn't catch that exclamation point in time, but who cared?
"Yeah. Awesome. Just gonna remind you I'm not a realtor and you're gonna be disappointed if you want some gushy tour of the place." Shego's remarks were always basically notes on a music staff - either sharps or flats. This one was a sharp, and Drakken was glad. At least it cared, unlike the tone that sounded like it had been run down by a steam roller, as if none of this warranted a reaction way or the other.
With a casual flick of the mane, Shego descended the steps. In the instant before she vanished into the dark, Drakken watched her confident eyes pan from side to side as if everything she saw were already her domain. It was a marvelously malevolent look that Drakken did all he could to copy, though he knew didn't pull it off quite as seamlessly as Shego did - his eyes kept drifting too wide, popping in excitement.
And then he reached the bottom of the stairs, and he felt them slam down into skeptical slits.
He was standing in a single, giant, long-walled - cellar was the only word for it, and it sported carpet the exact color of pea soup, packed close and nubby like the top of a pool table. The geometry of the cellar messed with Drakken's mind - it had plenty of surface area but very little volume. After the rusty hinge creaked shut behind them, it took a good half-minute before the lights flickered on, and when they did, they were weak and watery as if they were shining up from the bottom of a shipwreck.
They were also directly above Drakken, so low that he could have blown any of them out with a good arm-flail. They were plugged deeply into a level surface that ran parallel to the floor, and they looked for all the world like they could smash together like the sides of a trash compactor. A truly classic death trap, and one with a highly efficient success rate - at least, according to the movies Drakken had seen. He should have been itching to throw Kim Possible in here and hear her cry for mercy that he wouldn't grant her after a year in cold storage.
But all Drakken could think was, The ceiling is lowering! It's lowering - on me!
And then he began to choke on something far beyond bitter, something far worse than any fish-oil tablet his mother ever forced him to take.
He was in the middle of his fifth-worst nightmare - no, fourth-worst, because he hadn't seen hide nor hair of a Ferbie in twenty years, so his scenario where he was attacked by a flock of mutinous ones was probably no longer rational. Drakken pulled his arms snug around his chest, locked them, clasping his own elbows, fortifying himself as best a madman could when denied weapons. Tried to breathe through whatever substance was sliming his throat.
It was enough to continue basic respiration and nothing more. Of course, who would even notice if you stopped? That had been The Guard's favorite - and only - joke. You're already blue!
Typical intellectual inferior. As if there were no other symptoms of asphyxiation. Drakken knew Shego was bright, and he had to trust that she would be bright enough to pick up on the bulging eyes and the terrifying silence and all the other things he couldn't think about anymore, couldn't, not right now with the ceiling descending on him.
Drakken didn't realize his body was sinking until he felt his backside meet the floor. It gave beneath him, and Drakken allowed himself to imagine for a moment that it was damp shag carpet and not fungal life. His eyes slammed shut, too, as if all of his other organs had gotten together and decided on a plan of action without consulting his brain.
Normally at these times when the wheezing overtook him, even a blink would reveal a face painted on the inside of Drakken's eyelids - a distorted disturbance of his tormentors, as if they planned to go as a gruesome version of themselves for Halloween. This time, however, there was nobody. Nothing beyond a black pool with no lifeguard on duty, beckoning Drakken to swim ever deeper even as fear gnawed at his gut.
It was a thousand times scarier than anyone who could have appeared.
Not that he could have fought any of them off, anyway. His heartbeat was the strongest thing about him at this point, and even it quivered in his ears. Drakken crouched down farther with his knees together, hooked his arms over his throbbing head, and rocked back and forth to the best of his ability. To remain still was to rupture a blood vessel. Maybe two.
"Hey, Drakken," someone said to him. Whoever it was was young and female and didn't lay his name down with the appropriate veneration.
Drakken's mind snapped to Kim Possible, naturally, and his eyes flew open to shoot virtual lasers at his foe. She wasn't there. The green eyes matched hers almost exactly, but the long hair would have had to have been given a thorough dye job, and the lips were layered with both black lipstick and an attitude Kim Possible's perky teenaged persona would never have thought to cop.
Shego. Of course it was Shego. Drakken blinked up at her as a thousand terrors brewed inside him.
Shego angled her chin down at him. He'd always envied her that strong little scythe of a chin. "Yeah. Guess what, buddy? The Blitz ended, like, seventy years ago. You can stand up."
Debatable. Nevertheless, hearing Shego's voice was like feeling a cat's tongue - it scratched him with its abrasive texture, yet somehow managed to put every matted piece back where it was supposed to be.
Drakken caught on to the ends of his thoughts and cinched them tightly together, the way he would pull the strings on his poncho to get the hood to lie close to his head. As everything huddled together in the front of his brain, his temper came rushing in and offered to rescue him.
"This was the best place you could find?" he roared.
A very effective roar - the walls themselves shivered. Then again, that could have also been due to poor construction. Scars larger and nastier than the one on Drakken's cheek chased each other down their lengths, dripping green through the cracks. The whole place was rank with the smell of mold, and not the delightful kind that turned an orange you had forgotten you had into a science experiment. No, this was the kind that settled in your lungs and began to remake them in its own image, killing you one inhale at a time. Humidity seeped in from all four corners of the room.
He might as well have been living in a terrarium. Complete with crickets. Drakken could hear one tuning up for its nightly concert even now.
A tiny part of him sang along: I want to go home!
Shego took a step backward. Drakken saw surprise register in her eyes, but no alarm, as if she'd detected motion on one of the security cameras but was pretty sure it was just a moth trying to fly into the screen. "And what's that supposed to mean?" she said.
"What is it supposed to mean?" Drakken repeated in disbelief. He pressed all ten fingertips to his forehead. "It's supposed to mean that this place is disgusting and - and - and - nggh - cramped! So very cramped! Ghhk!"
Drakken jammed his foot into the ground with each word (or nonstandard equivalent) and only stopped because dust flew up into his face.
Shego didn't move at all this time, but the look she gave him came from much farther than one footstep away. "You were expecting a Hilton suite?"
"No, Shego!" Drakken's voice wasn't as quiet and deep as it should have been. It ricocheted off the ceiling - hardly a long journey - and then broke open on the floor, releasing what sounded embarrassingly close to a whine. "I was expecting a private island of sorts! All the great supervillains have private islands these days - Duff Killigan, Senor Senior, Senior! And I used to have one -"
Drakken let himself trail off. The abyss in his mind rapidly began to fill up with images of every villain he'd ever met. They looked upon him and his avowed goal of total global conquest with the same snickering they'd have spared a baby who climbed into a minivan and attempted to start the ignition with a set of giant bright-colored keys meant to be teethed on. Well, maybe not Senior. The man had always seemed to have been dealt an extra hand of decency.
(Please, not Senior.)
Drakken was hardly in any position to prove them wrong, either. Listen to the homesickness echoing through him. He'd never thought of his lair as home, not before it blew up, but now he couldn't shoo away the thoughts of its mahogany furniture, its chairs whose long, pointed backs elevated you to a position of ruthlessness, its ceilings that met into perfect box tops far, far above where his hair could have grazed it.
His vision blurred - it had been too long since his contacts had been treated to the soothing touch of Saline - and three or four Shegos swayed before him, shimmering until he managed to squeeze them back into a single being.
"Look." Everything on Shego had turned into a scythe now, not just her chin, and she swung her hand forward with the finality of the Grim Reaper himself (or herself). "This place is in the middle of nowhere. It's functional. It's off Kim Possible's radar. That is what matters."
Drakken glared back at her, fury mangling his stomach, screams stacked in him from there all the way up to behind his teeth. He wanted to argue, wanted to say that this "place" was not a lair.
Except it is, Drakken admitted to only himself and only because he couldn't see so much as a faint gleam of glass around him. It was a stupid, shoddy lair, but it was a lair. A lair with a laboratory wing visible even from here and a bed and another room with a door that shut, maybe, hopefully, a bathroom.
Perhaps it would do until he could drag Kim Possible, gasping and broken, to him on all fours.
Yes, it was time to focus on his new arch-nemesis. It was time to stop being "mad" (in the sense of being "delusional" or "deranged") and start getting mad (in the sense of "incensed" or "enraged"). There was a huge difference between anger and madness, and he'd dipped his toe into the shallow end of the former during his stint behind - well, no, there were no bars. Just glass, glass, glass, which had helped his sanity not a whit.
It would a relief, of sorts, to let his fragile hold on sanity go slack, as he had a few times in the past. But something had been fuzzy and. . . weird, for lack of a better word, about that relief. It bore a striking resemblance to that shining, blurring moment of euphoria that would drape over Drakken right before he passed out from letting three meals in a row slip his mind.
And madness tended to be mistaken for stupidity, even though all the research said it was much more closely related to genius. Another example of the ignorance at work in the world-at-large.
That world-at-large represented by Kim Possible, all of humanity's worst traits compressed into one skinny little filament of a girl. The simpering smile she'd worn as the police hauled Drakken away, kicking and screaming, had effectively crowned him with a dunce cap - as if this girl who in all likelihood hadn't even begun to study algebra surely knew idiotness when she saw it.
(Idiocy, that was the word. Thank goodness he wasn't giving that speech out loud. That slip would have nullified the truth of everything else he'd just said.)
She'd flitted in front of him and planted her adolescent awkwardness right in his path at their first meeting, demanding Drakken give up or she would have to blow the lair sky-high. And then she'd done it.
That lair was sturdy and reinforced and - and - impregnable! He didn't even have time to consider that it might happen before he was standing in a pile of smoldering rubble that used to be ninety-nine percent of everything he owned. The rage, blast it, had brought tears to his eyes that Kim Possible had misinterpreted as a display of weakness.
There was something else about the girl that bothered him, too. There was something about her that drew people to her like yellow jackets to hot dogs or electrons to chlorine, whether it was her purposefully clever name or her ability to throw herself off the floor with the thrust of a pinkie and then perform a full loop-de-loop in midair. She laughed at gravity the same way she had laughed at him - confidence garnished with a side of disdain.
Drakken would be lying if he'd said he didn't envy her that quality.
Of course he did. That was what this scheme was all about. Kim Possible got his goat - make that a whole petting zoo of goats!
Silly girl had forgotten that goats had horns.
Yes, Drakken decided, being mad-angry was definitely going to do wonders for the kingly reputation he was working on building. If he couldn't reconstruct his wonderful island lair, at least he could add to his image, brick by brick. It also distracted him from the way the ceiling seemed to glower at him from not high enough above.
Disappointment hung heavy in Drakken's chest, but he went with it because at least it, too, was a distraction - from the parts of him that that were still wanting to coil in fear. He flapped an underwhelmed hand at the lair at large (make that at too-small). "I mean, I always imagined that if I moved on from the private island layout, it'd be because I'd have upgraded to something much cooler. Like an underwater hideout! Or the inside of a volcano. Although. . ." Drakken frowned, pondering. "I suppose a volcano would be much hotter. But have you ever noticed that the teens today use 'cool' and 'hot' almost interchangeably to show their approval? Those teenagers and their slang - "
"Do you know what 'can it' means?" Shego cut in, and that was no mere figure of speech. Her words ended in the same way her gloves did - in blades of steel.
Drakken nodded at her, and maybe he took a little too much pleasure in doing it, but so what? "I believe it means to stop talking."
Shego's green eyes broadened from their slits just long enough to roll. It hit him like a dodgeball to the ribs - a sensation the pre-Drakken Drew was all too familiar with - how young she was. For a crazy moment, he could picture her at a party on some campus somewhere, trying to decide whether or not to take the beer some sorority girl offered her. For an even crazier moment, he wanted to jump into his own imagination and swat the can out of Sorority Sister's hand. "Yeah. That was an imperative."
Drakken decided to respond with his Superiority Sniff. "Indeed."
(He actually didn't remember what an "imperative" was, but there was no chance he was going to ask Little Miss Collegian. She'd just load it into her lippy cannon and shoot it back at him.)
Still, no matter how much she mocked, he would not be dissuaded. To bring down the teenage beast, one must know how to communicate with the teenage beast.
Drakken sighed. "I suppose I can endure this lair for the time being."
The corners of Shego's mouth flicked up and down, up and down, faster than a roller coaster car. It dizzied Drakken to look at them. "Yeesh, if I'd known this place would freak you out this bad, I'd have -"
"Found a better one?" Drakken suggested.
"I was gonna say 'brought earplugs', but, yeah."
A "NNGGGGH!" sputtered from Drakken. He'd kind of given up keeping reign on them during his stint in the Big House.
Shego turned to survey her surroundings. If the lair was as unimpressive to her sensibilities as it was to his, she wasn't showing it - or anything else, for that matter. Just a smooth, strong nothingness that made the scraggling strands at the base of Drakken's neck itch like crazy.
Even more so when she rotated back to Drakken and raked her eyes over him in the same way. "Lemme guess: you're claustrophobic because your daddy used to lock you in some tiny closet when you were bad."
She gave even the word "daddy" a sardonic slash, but there was some strange out-reach in it, the way you invited someone to take a bite of something truly atrocious-tasting in order to confirm that your taste buds were correct and it was just sort of poison. But the words hurt him, and he didn't want her gross old food.
Drakken shook his entire body from head to toe before said body could begin shaking him first. His legs felt as rickety as the old wood that made up his mother's porch, but he didn't have to share that with Shego, especially not when she shared nothing with him. He imagined his tone to be bread dough and pounded the lumps out of it. It took more concentrated effort than it would have to artificially craft a new element.
"Oh, come now, that's ridiculous," Drakken told the both of them. "I am not some frightened child, and deep psychological bruises are not what is motivating me to conquer the world! I am a vicious, ruthless supervillain who desires only vengeance, glory, and domination of the massage-chair industry! Kim Possible shall soon see that she tangled with the wrong mad scientist."
No response for a moment. Smug now, Drakken let his shields drop.
And - confound it, he should have kept them up! A renegade sentence came flying out before he could find the command to abort it - "And besides, my father didn't stick around long enough to lock me in anything."
Silence fell. Although, to be honest, even the word "fell" itself wasn't clumsy or cumbersome enough to describe the silence that smacked down on them. Shego's mouth didn't flicker this time. It twisted to the side of her face in an inky knot.
"Fantastic," she said at last, still secreting sarcasm. "By the way -"
Drakken glanced up just in time for a rumple of cloth to come flying toward him and bash him in the torso.
"- here's your dorky lab coat," Shego continued. "Better go get changed unless you like the look that screams, 'Escaped convict'!"
Drakken stared at her for a moment. She had just spoken beautiful words, but the way her voice crunched them up tight almost wiped the magic right out of them. They deserved to be lilted over, almost sung.
Shego turned her hands over, palms up - and plasma off, which should have made them less intimidating. "Ditch the jail duds," she said. "And maybe lose the sock puppet while you're at it?"
She finished by snickering. Drakken was attacked by the same feeling that always roughed him up when Professor Dementor saw him and began spewing out German - that he was being made fun of in a foreign language.
For the first time, though, Drakken was aware of how much warmer this lair was. After his escape from one of the most dismally cold places on the planet, the muggy, humid air should have sizzled steam right off his skin - or at least settled into a nice threatening smolder. Instead, it weighed down on his skin like strips of waterlogged wool, serving as a reminder of just how very much of him was exposed by his prison-issue striped tee and swim-trunk bottoms.
Drakken pulled himself up taller, flattened his eyebrow at her, snatched his lab coat closer to his too-visible body, and scampered for the first room he could find with a toilet inside. He was going to go ahead and conclude that that was the bathroom. (If not, this place's aesthetics were even weirder than he'd imagined.) Drakken closed the door behind him and locked it, because he could feel The Guard breathing down his neck even from four countries away, not to mention the walls sliding in on him like the sides of a boa constrictor, crushing and wrapping until its prey - the great Dr. Drakken - was suffocated.
One fist flew to his throat, and the other pressed so hard against his lips that Drakken thought it wanted to jump down his throat.
Get a grip! Drakken commanded himself. You're a supervillain. You can do this. You can destroy everything that ever dared scare you! It was the same speech he'd given himself back in the hoosegow when he'd been sure he didn't have the strength to make it through another day of loneliness, when he couldn't bear to role-play Kim Possible's destruction one more time.
It didn't take long to shed his prison clothes. When he'd first been ushered into the glass cell, they'd fit him as if they'd been welded onto him, but now they hung emptily from his shoulders and hips. What he had remaining of either. The cool caress of his lab coat and matching pants was more comforting than any actual caress Drakken had ever received. He was just pulling his collar over his head when he caught a whiff of the fabric and forgot what he was doing for a moment or five.
It was the scent of his island lair. All he had to do was inhale and, as if transported by TARDIS, he was back to scribbling down his latest scientific discovery on a piece of paper at his scratched-and-dinged desk, back to allowing himself a brief nap on his squishy, burnished red couch, back to plotting against Kim Possible while he leaned against his wide, horned chair.
Drakken sniffed and sniffed and sniffed until his nasal passages were completely clogged with memories.
Remind me to get out my chemistry set, extract this smell, and bottle it! It would keep as a reminder of everything he'd lost at the hands of Kim Possible. Kim Possible, who had probably never lost so much as a pet goldfish or a favorite stuffed animal, much less a home. . . base.
Drakken ripped his sock puppet off his hand but didn't have the heart to toss her into the trashcan beside an empty paper-towel roll and a dried-up bleach wipe. She was pretty high-quality for having been whipped up in a place where he had very few materials to work with. And she smiled at him without sneaky shadows behind it, which Shego didn't. He compromised by plunging her so deep into his pockets that Shego would never find her.
With fingers shaking less now that he was back in his own clothes, Drakken turned the doorknob and strutted back out into his new lair. Shego wordlessly handed him his old boots and gloves, which he donned without hesitation. There! The image was complete.
Now on to the reputation.
Drakken rubbed his hands together, the marvelous familiar friction of his gloves only adding to his glee. The fear had fled, and in its place hopped the anticipation of doing something absolutely terrible. "Now - may I see the laboratory wings?"
"Knock yourself out." Shego walked over and pressed her hand to a black panel that looked like a crow feather in the tundra against the unrelenting gray of the back wall.
Drakken shivered. Ugh. Shouldn't have thought of the tundra.
But he couldn't keep his thoughts on the tundra for any length of time once the back wall scrolled up and Drakken stepped into a room of coolest cerulean with light fixtures casting wavy panels on the walls as if he truly had dived underwater. The ceiling wasn't much higher, maybe a bump or two, but the room seemed more substantial when one factored in the enormous computer command system hugging the wall, the circular platform rising dramatically from the center of the room in sloping concrete steps, and - best of all - the robot incubator tucked like a secret into the side wall.
Drakken ran over and threw his arms around it. And, okay, maybe he had spent a little too much time in jail, because he could have sworn it hugged him back. "It's perfect! It's wonderful! Did you fire it up as I instructed?"
"All fired, Chief. It's cooking in there. You ready to take a look?"
She had to be kidding again. Ready? She might as well have been asking Thomas Alva Edison if he was "ready" to finally succeed at creating the incandescent light bulb. "Yes!" Drakken gasped - had to gasp so he wouldn't squeal.
In the foggy metal surface that appeared to have been dusted casually with someone's sleeve, Drakken saw his reflection - his heaving chest, his black circles the size of parking lots under his eyes, his pallid blue skin. The kind of sight that made pretty little preteen girls turn away with a shudder. Drakken had hunted through his two-hundred-count pack of crayons - a gift from Mother that probably hadn't survived the explosions, either - looking for one that matched his own tint, and the closest he could find was called "Absolute Zero."
Fitting, Drakken supposed, though he never shared it with anyone. It helped him remember what the other villains saw him as and the temperature he would have to operate at to disprove them.
Kim Possible was soon going to wish she had stuck to baby-sitting.
The little round, green light that gazed steadily back at him was easily the loveliest part of the entire unattractive lair. Drakken's heartbeat migrated to the roof of his mouth. The rest of the lair could have been struck by lightning at this very moment, and he wouldn't have cared as long as he had this light on this machine. Although such a scenario was highly unlikely, considering how far underground they were. Underground was the safest place to be during a thunderstorm, followed by cars, but not because of the old wives' tale about the rubber tires insulating you from shock. It was really. . .
FOCUS, Drakken, he instructed himself.
Drakken gave the button beside the light a wobbly push - hopefully, Shego wouldn't see just how wobbly. The machine buzzed just like an oven would to announce that your cookies were ready, only this was a thousand times more satisfying, more invigorating, more. . . appetizing than even a batch of homemade snickerdoodles. The stasis tray unlatched and slid out at the absolute perfect speed: slow enough to be dramatic, but not so slow as to aggravate him.
By the time the tray had hissed to a misty halt, fully spread, Drakken had become a pinball machine, his nerves ping-ping-pinging. His heels left the floor, and his fingertips crept closer together and twiddled with the excitement no human being could possibly hide.
Except Shego. Her eyes still expressed nothingness as they glanced down at the marvelous silhouette of silicon overlaid with soft-brown synthetic skin. Her body language was puzzling, too - for as tight as she was standing, you would imagine her to care what was going on, but she also held her barbed-wiry frame effortless and still and indifferent. Then again, most human beings couldn't produce green rays from their hands, either. Drakken wasn't entirely sure Shego was entirely human.
Oh, speaking of which. . .
Propped up before him was the beginning of the robot who had been left to simmer while Drakken was in jail. Crock-pots had nothing on this. The machine was so brilliantly designed, even by Dr. Drakken standards, that all Shego had had to do was tap the button for "fourteen-year-old female," saving them both the time-consuming - and frankly embarrassing - job of having to carve her body themselves.
Life painted a stroke of happiness across the wasteland Drakken had become in the last year.
The girl's face was blank now - truly, literally blank, unable to return his smile. Her body also stood blank, just an outline, no details or clothing. And her mind was blankest of all, a fresh snowfall just waiting for Drakken to jump into and leave his footprints everywhere.
What footprints he was planning to leave, too! He would program her, fill her with all the loyalty and adoration and respect he couldn't seem to find in anyone else. She, at least, would obey.
Something far beyond pride in his accomplishment swept over Drakken and turned him wobbly again. No, "wobbly" didn't accurately convey the way the room swayed around him, the way only her outline remained bright as if it had been constructed from glow-sticks. She was already beautiful.
This had to be the way fathers felt in the delivery room - minus the trauma of having just watched the woman they loved shove a person out of her body.
But she's not yours, said a thought that must have hidden behind a long string of intelligence and sneaked its way into Drakken's brain. Even though you're going to program her. You stole most of those parts. You weren't even the one to push the button and start her up. . .
Moralistic hogwash. And all Drakken needed to get rid of it was a sharp jerk of his head to one side. Just because the master chef didn't mill the flour and lay the eggs himself didn't mean he should get no credit for his own cake.
"Behold!" he bellowed.
Shego parked a hand on the buttonless side of the stasis tray and threw another look at Drakken's new android. She blinked. Had to be an impressed blink - it just had to. "So, how is it going to help us?"
Drakken jolted, winced, and slapped his own hands over the robot's ears. "'She'!" he corrected, and wondered too late if that would be confusing to Shego, him just firing back with the first syllable of her name. It would be like if she suddenly screamed, "Drak!"
He should have known that it took more than that to throw Shego off.
"She's a 'she'?" Shego said.
The scientist in Drakken compelled him to say, "Well, not technically." Forget the delivery room. He was back in his cramped third-grade classroom, staring down at the Classifying Nouns worksheet marked up with red on the slot where he'd written "robot" under Person instead of Thing. They were wrong. Things did not have workable arms and turnable necks and tappable toes. "She. . . she identifies as a 'she'! That's a thing among the youth, right?"
Shego closed her eyes as if the wavery, underwater light was too much for them. "That is a conversation I refuse to have with you, Drakken."
"Fine by me!" Drakken sniffed at her and folded his arms tight, Xing her out.
"So. . . does 'she' have a name?" Shego's droll voice had the first lift of interest he'd heard in it all day. But she sounded like someone asking a child to talk more about their pet guinea pig. It wouldn't quench his soul any more than salt water would quench his thirst, yet Drakken still dove for it and drank it down anyway.
"Athena." Drakken dropped his arms and inflated his chest bigger and bigger until his ribs said ow, and even then he only let it fall back a notch or two. "It's the Roman goddess of hunting."
Shego sank onto a cheap-looking plastic chair, rearranged her legs, and from the pouch on one pulled out an object that it took Drakken several seconds to recognize as a nail file. Or, in her case, a blade-file. "No, it isn't," she said.
It was Drakken's turn to blink. Gggh. . . it was as if he'd spit into the wind just in time for it to change directions and blow right back at him. "What do you mean, 'no, it isn't'?" he demanded.
"Artemis is the Roman goddess of hunting. And the moon." Shego gave her blades an impatient rub. "Athena is some Greek goddess."
Drakken took a step backward and then danced forward again before she could notice. "Of what, Miss Smarty-Pants?"
"I don't know." Shego's face honed into a point you could have cut a steak with. "I'm not Google."
Could have fooled Drakken. Quick, efficient, and always obnoxiously correcting his spelling? Sounded like Google to him.
"I'll look it up later," Drakken grumbled, and then froze. A chasm opened up inside him, the part that felt tough and capable now a steep ravine away from the part of him he could display. It took him beyond wobbly once again.
Tremulous. That was it. That was the perfect word.
And the second he located the perfect word, the second it ceased to describe him. There were no more tremors, shakes, or quakes afflicting any part of Dr. Drakken's anatomy, outside or in. He was in the epicenter, watching the world burn down around him.
Drakken batted his wrist, cool and flexible, and turned away from Shego's eyes, which still called him a flake. "At any rate, her name shall still be Athena!"
From behind him, Drakken heard Shego groan. That was also fine by him. People didn't tend to do that when they won, not unless they'd realized their mother was losing every game on purpose to make them feel better. That was exactly what would happen if he changed her name to Artemis - Shego would win.
A kinder person would have granted Shego a victory now and again. But after being imprisoned in twelve months of winter, Drakken was certain there was nary a scrap of kindness left in him anymore.
Besides, "Artemis" was too stiff and starched a name, as if she were the Roman goddess of Safety-Pinning Your Hand-Me-Down Clothes So You Don't Fall Out of Them. "Athena" swung wider, a panorama of opportunity, a sweep of everything she could be. Everything Drakken could be with her help.
"Well, whatever her name is - " Shego's lip curled a tad, letting him know that wasn't the last he'd hear of this - "how does she fit into our plan?"
Sunrise. Drakken hadn't seen a sunrise in a discouragingly long amount of time, and yet now he remembered what they felt like, because one was happening inside him right now. "I'm so glad you asked, Shego!" he cried, uncurling his fists and popping up his index finger. "We all know Kim Possible thinks she's all that. And she may be right. But what if someone came along who was all-thatter than her?"
"Points off for grammar," Shego muttered. Drakken didn't look at her, didn't want to see what, if anything, she was communicating in that moment.
"Points off for. . . being. . . snide. . . ness!" Drakken grabbed the first words to volunteer for active duty and flung them out. It was the only way to beat Shego to the verbal-punch, which often felt far too similar to an actual punch.
You can do this. You can elaborate. You are a genius. You are a genius!
"What if someone came along who was a better athlete, a smarter student, a prettier cheerleader, and a more dependable friend?" Drakken clarified. "How do you think Kim Possible would feel then?"
Shego didn't answer this time. The crooked smile that streaked across her face like the shooting stars most people didn't know were meteorites said everything for her. Drakken got the strange, warm-washcloth sensation that they both knew a secret, that they were the only two people in the whole world who had deciphered the pirate's map to his hidden treasure. Together.
His lonely heart made a dive for it.
"We shall strike on the day she is most vulnerable!" Drakken continued. Vicious warmth flowed through him, so different from the angry heat that began behind his forehead and drizzled down to his fingertips. No, this started in his fingertips and scudded upward, ever higher, until it engulfed the whole of him, put a wall of magma between him and his enemies. "A day that can reduce the most confident adolescent to a sniveling mess!" Big pause. "The first day of high school!"
A shudder he didn't anticipate turned each of Drakken's nerves to pinball-flippers again. He tried to mask it with a brisk march in place, but it didn't escape Shego's eagle eyes.
"I mean, if it can break you, it can break anybody, right, Drakken?" Shego said. Much too innocently.
Drakken decided to filter out the sass, decided not to let anything spoil the moment. His reply of "Quite" had its own ironic bite. And as he threw back his head to laugh maniacally - how he loved to do that! - he once again envisioned the trash compactor's walls clapping shut, only on Kim Possible this time.
Not with her between them - as delicious as his wilder side found that prospect. Even worse. With her behind them, and everything she had ever lived for on the other side, unreachable forever.
She would know what it was to be an outcast.