~Ha-ha, this one was so much fun. :P~

35. Okay, so maybe Doomsday devices and file cabinets don't belong in the same room. . .

On his hands and knees, Drakken crawls out of the rubble of another broken dream.

Literally. It's as if someone took a hacksaw to his vision of himself as world ruler and left it to crumble alongside the ragged pieces of the Centripetal Oscillator. A reflective shard lies a mere inch from Drakken's right knee, its black sheen seemingly engaged in the same struggle as Drakken to keep its dignity, and he has to swallow against the hitch in his throat.

Shego stands nearby, surveying the wreckage with boredom. A sneer crouches on her lower eyelids. Drakken wants to yank it away, to yell at her that he is not the only one today who fai - fail - fell slightly short of success.

And Kim Possible wasn't even there. Just the buffoon and the rodent and the metallic body of the kid who Drakken knew was a robot all along. She's defeating him by proxy now?

The thought pinches Drakken's blood like an aneurysm, and he grabs for whatever remains of his hope-rope. (Much too cutesy a saying. He must never share it with anyone.) "Give it to me gently, Shego," he says. "Is my Centripetal Oscillator totaled?"

"Yep," Shego says, and Drakken can't detect so much as a proton of gentleness in her delivery. "It's actually kind of amazing you're not totaled."

Her words are sharp enough to trim his hair, and just imagining that, something coming at his head, preparing to shear his security away from his neck, floods Drakken with hot adrenaline. On the strength of that, he gathers his limbs and begins to rise, looking down at her, having to reach a little farther than he would like to find his haughty self. "Of course I'm not totaled, Shego," he tells her. "I have the durability of a -"

His left ankle bows out at a painful forty-five degrees.

"Ow, ow, ow!" Drakken cries, sinking down again.

"An ow-ow-ow," Shego says flatly.

Oooh, the frustration! Drakken lifts his head and glares at her. "That's not what I meant, Shego!" he says.

"I know," Shego replies through twitching lips.

Humiliated, foiled, and degraded. How can this day get any worse?

For an instant, the type of despair a villain should never experience pulls Drakken's spirit down to his toes, and he throws himself prostrate across the floor. He hears a click, feels the push-in of a button, and he realizes what he has activated and just how his day will get worse 3.35 seconds before it happens.

A jetpack sprouts on either side of his lab coat and fires into the air, dragging Drakken with it. The flames burn faster and hotter and higher than he remembers. Someone is screaming, screaming shrill like a girl, so it must be Shego, has to be Shego concerned for him for once. Drakken fumbles, fingers refusing to cooperate, with the belt, but he can't get it off in time.

He hears a crunch. Feels a crunch. And the next thing he knows, he's staring up at a blue sky bruised with peculiar black and purple clouds. Even more peculiar considering the sun is still shining.

Drakken tries to wriggle free and can't, arms jammed in a stretch, wrenched against him by what remains of the ceiling. This has to be how criminals felt back in colonial days, strapped into stockades that restrained them and prevented them from fleeing the mob of townspeople who stepped up to hurl rotten vegetables at them.

And there is nothing beneath his legs - well, no, that's not true. Everything is beneath his legs, but there's nothing immediately beneath them, and if he falls his twisted ankle will be the least of his injuries.

Someone pads across the lair, approaching Drakken's dangling legs. Without glancing down, Drakken knows it must be Shego - not only because she is the only other person in this building, but because if footsteps can manage to sound droll, these do.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Shego says to no one, "here we observe the rare blue-billed sapsucker, known for its erratic, almost kamikaze flight pattern."

Her voice continues to chew on him. "Stop it, Shego!" Drakken squirms in the ceiling's jagged, confining grip. For being so tight, it can't even do him the favor of cutting off his circulation, stopping his blush before it can start. "It was an accident!"

This doesn't soften Shego any. "Have you ever noticed how accident-prone you are, Doc?"

"Accidents can happen to anyone! That's why they're called accidents!" Drakken takes a breath, and his heart rate begins to - well, not slow down, but steady itself, no longer hammering harder in one eardrum than the other. Yes, he is the boss, and it is he who shall lecture, and she who shall listen. "Accidents can happen to anyone! That's why they're called accidents! Why, in fact, Consumer's Guide reports that ninety-six percent of. . . err, owners of homemade jetpacks crash in this fashion at least onc - twice! In their lifetimes."

Okay, now he is bluffing, but so is everybody else when they use statistics, right?

"Uh-huh," Shego says. "Got any numbers on accidents that could have been prevented if people didn't keep bowling balls in their file cabinets?"

His partner in crime. She should be clapped in the stocks next to him. Instead, she's at the front of the mob, arms loaded with spoiled cabbage.

Drakken can only hope the red blotches of shame are low enough down on his neck that they will be covered by his collar. "Well - errr - gkkkk -"

"Why was that even in there?" Shego flashes her face up at him. On its pale surface settles one of her few discernible expressions - Drakken, you are pathetic.

Drakken gives her the only answer he can. "Under B. For 'bowling.'"

Shego explodes into laughter, the kind that almost rocks a person backward. There are times when Drakken loves to hear her laugh. This is not one of them. Each individual note squeaks as it collides with his self-confidence, striking at it again and again until Drakken is sure it, too, will blow just like his Centripetal Oscillator.

A few million years later, Shego appears on the roof and works Drakken free from his little enclave. "Well, so much for your little plan to get the world to revolve around you," she snips at him.

Seriously? Drakken feels the corners of his mouth twisting downward. He spent an entire monologue on his plan to control the orbit of the Earth, and that was all she got out of it?

Still, the frown flips upside-down before too long. By saying that, Shego has (quite unintentionally, but brilliantly nevertheless) made him the smarter of their duo. Drakken polishes his knuckles against his clavicle and glances down at the hole he left behind, in the rough shape of a bullet that he's seen on Old-West TV shows, only much larger. Closer to a bullet train.

I made that bullet-train hole.

It's a nice thought.

"Really, now, Shego," Drakken says. This time, he doesn't have to reach at all, extracting haughtiness from embarrassment in the way only the brilliantest of chemists can. "The planet couldn't revolve around me - nor could it revolve around any other person! A planet would need another heavenly body to revolve around, preferably the largest one around for lightyears so that its gravitational pull is strong enough to attract all other - Shego?"

Shego is staring straight ahead, her eyes as blank as wax.

"Are you listening?" Drakken asks.

Shego responds with an unrepentant blink. "Sorry, Doc. You say 'body' and my ears just close up all by themselves."

Drakken draws his blotchy self farther inward, elongating his shadow over hers. He points his own eyes at her and slams his hands down on either side of his belt. "The point which you missed is simple: he who controls the Earth's orbit -"

"Or she," Shego interjects.

"Gkkr! Yes, he or she who controls the Earth's orbit has the power to mess with the tides, the seasons, the climate - even Daylight Savings Time!" The potential spills out before him, an all-you-can-eat buffet of global destruction, and Drakken almost chokes at its disappearance. "Just think of it!"

Drakken thrusts his arms toward the sky. The dark bruise-clouds have also vanished. "And it all would have worked if -"

" - it weren't for those meddling kids and their nosy mole rat," Shego finishes for him, only that wasn't at all how he was planning to end that sentence. Twitches animate the skin around her flawless smear of black lipstick again. "Don't think I didn't notice how you jumped on a stool and screamed like you were expecting that thing to eat your face."

"Don't be absurd," Drakken says, waving a hand. "Everyone knows rodents are herbivores. Except for the mutant, flesh-eating type."

Fingers seem to snap in Drakken's brain, and he finds himself smiling for the first time since he and his Centripetal Oscillator blew up together.

"No," Shego says.

"'No' what?" Drakken hears himself threatening to screech. "I haven't even suggested anything yet!"

Shego shakes her head. "You got that look, though."

Drakken immediately goes to work blanking his face as Shego helps him down from the roof and he limps back into the lair, a weakness that depresses him, especially combined with how his back keeps creaking and groaning the way the pipes in his abandoned-warehouse lair do when he tries to run hot water. Especially-especially when the door swings open to reveal every knob and wire of his Centripetal Oscillator littering the floor of the lair. Drakken supposes if only one of them could have survived the explosion, he should be grateful it was him.

Hard to be grateful, though. His power-needle has been shot across the room and lies limp by the back wall, pointing at nothing, so forlorn. The only thing that could be worse is if it had skewered him, and it already sort of feels like it has.

As Drakken picks his way toward the large crater left in the center of the lair, his mind swarms. Bowling balls as instruments of devastation. Of course; it's perfect! All he'll have to do is create seven large bowling balls, anonymously donate them to each continent as abstract sculptures - say something nice and schmaltzy about trying to inspire the next generation to seek peace through modern art - and then, at the appointed hour, he could control the balls remotely, commanding them to flatten everything in their path and not stop until the leaders of the world knelt before him and begged for mercy.

He wants to take a hacksaw to their dreams, too. Or maybe even take one to them.

It's not the idea that startles Drakken, but its vividness - every hue saturated, every nook and cranny expertly shaped, every impulse encased in clear plastic. That and the fact that there is nothing within him beckoning him to pull away from it - and so he doesn't.

A grin forms deep inside Drakken, a grin that feels harder, grimmer than his usual wide-spreading one. Another piece of his soul turns inside-out and spins away, and he doesn't know how to retrieve it.

More importantly, he doesn't know if he cares to.