39. Be as cruel as you need to be. Maybe even more so.

Drakken leans back in his CEO seat of honor, his suit rippling in silken layers against his back. One, twice, he shifts from side to side, seizing himself before it can evolve into a squirm. No, he doesn't squirm anymore. Kim Possible doesn't make him squirm anymore.

But for the first time in over a month, a lump the size of a dinner roll presses against Drakken's windpipe. All those clear-breathing weeks have made him as sensitive as a fairy-tale princess to even a pea-sized lump. His goal bulks large in front of him, so close he would have to be a brainless loser, like Kim Possible's little friend who just called him, not to reach it, not to touch it. And now she has sprung up between him and it, thinking she blocks his way.

What she doesn't know is that he had her ensnared long before she left her big cozy house for the prom.

Tonight, she will be educated. Tonight Drakken will illustrate, graphically, for Kim Possible what it means to be powerless, how it feels to watch your world ignite around you.

Drakken's grip on the side of the desk tightens, whitening the tender skin beneath his fingernails. He doesn't have to scroll back through his memory very far to recall that - it could be as recently at this January, when Team Impossible's veritable air raid smashed through the roof of his mountainside lair and left it burning. Ugly sounds, hisses that should have been his to throw around, not theirs. Shego ran away, which was fine because it meant she was able to break him out within twenty-four hours, but he was still left on the floor of a lair surrounded by fire. Drakken can remember the sweat pouring out of his palms as he inched, snake-style, toward a distant door, willing the ceiling beams above him to hold up at least until he was out of their way. How that sweat condensed in the eternal Alpine winter as a wordless celebration that might translate as "home free!" gilded his body once he pulled himself outdoors. How it came crashing back into him as that man buried his fist in Drakken's gut, as if he had laced his yellow glove with fear and it all rubbed back off onto Drakken just when he managed to get rid of it.

He was gaining on the stars, only to find out that the objects in his mirror were farther away than they appeared.

That will never happen again. It can't happen again, not now. That was the Old Drakken. New Drakken feels far too sturdy for such a thing to ever happen. Looks too sturdy as well, in the spangled suit, with the open spangled lapels and the black area under them padding the gulf between where his muscles end and where they need to be. Kim Possible may plow into him tonight as she has so many other times, but this time she will meet solid titanium where before there was only wet paper.

Middleton shall be attacked early. In the next hour or two, Kim Possible could be gone for good. The thought strikes him as almost anticlimactic.

Strange.

Drakken rests his chin on the backs of his hands and squints until he is hit with an image he once saw on a nature show. A lioness (in a lion pride, the womenfolk do all the hunting - most people don't know that) yanking an antelope carcass away from a scrawny, shivering cheetah. Yes, scavenging another animal's kill will curtail her hunger just as well. . . but how much more infinitely satisfying would it be to bring the antelope down yourself?

That's it, then. He must set a trap for Kim Possible. Not a trap-trap or a trap-trap-trap or a trap-trap-trap-trap or any of those other ridiculously overcomplicated affairs the Old Drakken somehow believed would work. No, this must be a simple, ruthless trap, one that will neutralize Kim Possible's charismatic, peppy cheerleader-powers, exposing her as a foolish do-gooder who'd taken a mouthful she could never begin to chew.

She will be exposed, and then she will be ended. Alone. Afraid. Smothered in self-doubt.

Drakken gazes around his luxurious office, thoughts seeming to seep out of every object he stands to lose tonight if he fails - the plush velvet carpeting, the exquisitely carved glass of his lookout window, the brass lamp stand in the corner, hunched over as if it too has been captured in a perpetual villainous chortle. These thoughts don't scamper across the walls of his head and dare him to chase them down, like they did for the Old Drakken, though. These line up, one by one, in neat rows, subservient to him, only bending and curving in the ways he permits them to.

The final piece does not fall into place, though, until Drakken's eyes land on the framed photograph on his desk of Eric, one side of his mouth hiked up in a lethally handsome grin. Eric. His pride and joy. The boy whom Kim Possible probably believed was spun directly from the threads of her fantasies, when the actual process was far more complex and scientific, and she will never understand.

Eric. Of course, Eric!

Drakken picks up the phone yet again and punches the speed-dial button for Eric's cell phone. It barely gets one jingle out before those Syntho-instincts kick in and Eric snaps it up.

"Hi, Dad," Eric says. It's the greeting they decided upon together, designed to blend him with the general teenage populace and divert any suspicions. Drakken can feel the smooth glow sliding across his face nonetheless.

"Hello, Eric? Where are you?"

"Just dropped Kim off back at her house. She knows something's up, Dad. She's going to go research the Diablos right now. We don't have much time." Eric's clear, calm voice flows through the phone, unhindered by panic. The very sound of it reinforces the binding in Drakken's spine.

"We're attacking Middleton now. And we're going to lay a trap for her. I need you to come home immediately," Drakken reports, surprised by his own tone - instructional, maybe, or perhaps protective.

"You got it, Dad."

The call is terminated with a click. The dial tone that Drakken usually despises hearing pulsates to the rhythm of his own power.

When Eric arrives back at Bueno Nacho Headquarters, Drakken reviews the plan for him. It's odd to go back to explaining a plan in such detail after so long, like putting in the wrong prescription contact lens, and Drakken hopes he won't grow too accustomed to it.

Eric obediently lowers himself in the chair, and Shego - now barely recognizable without a scoff at the ready - ties him to it. Just as she loops the last of the ropes into Eric's armpit, Drakken impulsively bends down and gives his greatest invention yet a hug. It's the only rash thing he's done for days and days, and yet he doesn't regret it at all. Eric, too, feels strong and stalwart, his Syntho-brawn packed so hard so that no one would ever suspect it isn't real.

"You'll do wonderfully," Drakken says into Eric's convincing-looking ear. "You'll knock her dead."

Eric smiles with the same confidence that turns his thumb up, even as tightly bound as his arms are. "We'll do wonderfully, Dr. Drakken," he says.

Shego says nothing. It must be killing her, Drakken thinks, not to have a single flaw to grab at and rip open. Except her expression isn't annoyed anymore. It is on the near edge of. . . could it be? Admiration?

The ache flushes through Drakken's belly again, same as it did when the Team Impossible man's fist collided with it. This time, however, it isn't hot and churning but cold and steady, as if he has swallowed a Tupperware container and it has somehow insulated his insides from all semblance of fright. He is centimeters away from his goal, near enough to smell the rocket fuel and hear the sounds of terrifying conversions from harmless kiddie toys to weapons of global conquest.

Imagining what this will do to the villain community alone tingles in Drakken's palms so that he has to rub them together to keep them from smarting. The outcast supervillain, scorned by his peers for his lack of wealth and superpowers, shall be the one who finally destroys Kim Possible. Without any backing from Jack Hench, the old profit-hound, no less. Why, won't Professor Dementor's face mask just melt off in his fury?

Still and dark lies the night outside his window. Though it won't stay that way, it has already slipped into his soul and its clinging tendrils guarantee that it won't be budged.

The sun will rise on the reign of Dr. Drakken.