37. Just because Kim Possible doesn't show up doesn't mean you're home free.

His shoulder blade itches.

Drakken rubs his shoulders against the back of the seat. Vinyl peels off, landing on his back, doing nothing for his mental state.

The brownheaded member of Team Impossible charged with watching Drakken - the one with the Giant Punching Death Fist - taps his fingers idly against his knees as he gazes out the window at his compatriots. Who are even now pulling enormous calculators from their pockets and converting a too-happy villager's gratitude into greenbacks.

"Err, excuse me?" Drakken ventures. "I don't suppose you could scratch my shoulder for me, would you?"

The man pivots in his seat, his eyes whittled down to slits. His already-tight-stretched uniform swells further as he shifts his legs. The itch freezes and falls off like a wart.

Drakken folds back against the vinyl, away from the man. "No? Okay then. Never mind," he says just as the itch begins to start up again.

For the first time all day - well, okay, maybe just for the first time since Team Impossible loaded him in the back of this low-budget squad car - he wishes Kim Possible were the one to have taken him down. She might have scratched his shoulder for him, and if she didn't, the buffoon certainly would have. It's the inherent goodness of those children that makes his heart throb in the roof of his mouth every time he looks at them. Where is their hate, their brokenness, their everything-else-he-was-already-carting-around-by-the-time-he-was-their-age?

Outside, the sun shimmers off the snow, nearly blinding Drakken. Large lumps of tough, stiff Alpine snow, weathered onto the landscape by centuries of harsh winds and low temperatures, beyond melting. Not at all like the wimpy powder they get in Middleton.

Aside from the gleam of sun on snow, nothing else is bright about his situation, Drakken laments. Unless you count the fact that he's never been arrested in Switzerland before, and that unknown can spark his scientist-curiosity if he lets it. He wonders if they really do all speak like they're yodeling all the time and if they will serve him the hole-punched cheese with his lunch while he's in jail -

Oh, who is he kidding? Drakken feels himself sag around the still-sore middle, loosening the seat belt that confines him to the spot and the biting ropes beneath that keep him from unbuckling. An arrest is an arrest is an arrest is an ar - anyway, it's just going to be more of the same.

An excessively lighted police station with cops feigning Superman all over the place. Scads of paperwork, paperwork for days, paperwork for forever. A holding cell not big enough to serve his pacing needs, where he will perch on a tissue-thin mattress and stare into space until Shego's face appears between the bars and her plasma claws them away. And it will all be so, so cold.

And he's already cold from kneeling in the snow as Brown Hair tied him up. Drakken shivers, the sound of fabric against vinyl intensifying his plethora of aches, and longs inside for some of his mother's homemade hot chocolate. It was always thin and watery, because they were on a tighter budget than - than - well, a Swiss cop, apparently. But Mother made every molecule of it count, and it went down warmer and richer than the laws of chemistry said it should.

Brown Hair snaps around again and glares undisguised contempt Drakken's way. "What are you smiling about?"

Drakken realizes that he has, in those last few thoughts, softened into a smile. He deletes it, aims a scowl in the big man's direction. "Wouldn't you like to know?" he says, his voice ripe with bitterness. Doesn't tremble or catch or anything.

The man raises his hand and pulls it back. His fingers are huge in the air, sturdy and rectangular like wooden Jenga bricks, and Drakken shoots backward into the vinyl again as if it's a portal, as if he can burrow through it and go straight to Narnia or Candy Land or someplace without cops and lawyers and vigilantes.

Brown Hair laughs. Drakken supposes that's what it's supposed to be. It's closer to the sound the gangsters in TV movies make when they release a big puff of cigar smoke.

Footsteps sift through the snow then, and Drakken glances sideways out the window to avoid the sun. The other two members of Team Impossible approach their car. If he were them, Drakken muses, he'd be sauntering toward it but good. They don't. They stride, the way army generals do, and when they slip into the front seat they pack it full and snug. The squad car seems to become a clown car, only there's nothing humorous about any of it.

"How'd we do?" Brown Hair asks his teammates.

The dark-skinned, bald man with the neat black beard reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wedge of paper. "We have an IOU here for a hundred thou," he says.

"Swiss or American?" Brown Hair says.

"American, of course." No Hair leans back in the seat. "Not our best score, but not bad."

He passes the paper to the third man, whose short, hard red haircut looks more painted-on than anything else and who handles the paper as if it's a clipped coupon instead of a representation of more money than Drakken's had in his possession since the day he stole the buffoon's loot. If Drakken could spit on them without getting his neck snapped, he would.

"Not bad at all," Red Hair says, "considering how easy this job was." He jerks his jaw, firm and resolute, toward Drakken, and Drakken clenches his own, hoping to at least put some corners on it.

"Oh, yeah," Brown Hair says, reaching across to smirk at the paper. "This was the easiest trash-hauling we've had in a long time."

As one, the men turn to look back at Drakken, who is ready to gnaw through the ropes if he has to. Those beaver teeth he was teased for all through middle school have to be good for something. He waits for their stares to accuse him of terrible things, knowing he will welcome those accusations - he has done terrible things, after all, and the great majority of them he's proud of.

Instead, they skim over him, brand him a child, half-heartedly stamp biohazard symbols on him as if they barely consider him worth the effort. For once, Drakken can relate to his perky, perfect nemesis. They looked at her the same way.

And they're so different from her, showing up with bombs that they lobbed into every corner without even giving him a chance to surrender. Kim Possible never has bombs - she's not old enough to legally handle those types of explosives, so she usually just turns his own machines against him somehow. She always strikes some kind of cheerleader pose and demands, "Give up, Drakken!" before he snarls a denial and she strikes, and he can't believe how much he would have appreciated that today.

Drakken shoves a foot into the seat in front of him. "You have no idea who you're dealing with!" he warns them.

Their heads don't so much as turn. They're done with him. Drakken leans back, skin itching every place the rope touches it, thinks about Mother's hot chocolate, and wills his waffling lower lip to remain steadfast.

Look at you, Drakken, some disgusted part of him hisses. It used to sound solely like Shego, yet over the past few weeks it has changed, deepened and expanded. You're pathetic.

I am not! is what bounces immediately into place in his brain, but a moment later Drakken stops and sighs.

It's true. Look at him, daydreaming about hot chocolate and fretting over the size of his future cell mate. Cowering behind these men for whom clobbering a guy in the ribs was just another day at the office. It takes no effort at all for Drakken to picture what Professor Dementor and the rest of the villains will be saying about him on the HenchCo forum once it gets out that a single punch took out the great and formidable, but not especially brawny, Dr. Drakken.

He is the wimpy powder snow.

He needs to be the immovable Alpine kind.

That's it, then. Drakken straightens and glares out the window. The time has finally come for The Big One. The hardest, sharpest, coldest, brillaintest plan of his or any other supervillain's career, the one that has been coming to him in hard-won fits and starts this last year.

Cybertronic technology camouflaging its own might. Synthetic life flowing through the bodies of multiple puppets. The clock striking midnight, marking the beginning of an era, ringing in Dr. Drakken's undisputed rule.

He just hasn't worked all the bugs out yet. . .

Drakken turns back to the window again. There's still a dull soreness in his stomach from where Brown Hair walloped him, but he can feel something else there, too, something so cold and comfortable, diffusing into the rest of him like some wicked red chemical through a vial of clear liquid. His soul is once again flipped inside-out.

He will do everything in his power to keep it there.