~The long-awaited end to So the Drama! And the beginning of everything else. . .

Love you guys. Take care and stay safe.~

40. What is the matter with you? Why did you put her backpack in the room with her? Why?

The foolproof has failed.

He has failed.

Diablos clunk off the pavement on all sides of him, the sky hurling them down at him angrily. No, there's a different explanation, a scientific explanation, a scientific explanation that he designed, but he cannot for the life of him remember what it was.

Stoppable's eyes are pitiless. Drakken would know - they are the same eyes his reflection has worn for the past three months, except that Stoppable's eyes are a runny, mud-puddle brown rather than the flat-packed-earth that Drakken has watched dilate and contract and waver in his own mirror.

Drakken can't move, really. Wouldn't want to anyway. He'd just trip over the pieces of his ruined scheme.

Above him, lightning forks and thunder breaks into maniacal laughter.

And somewhere in the stir of sirens and anger, he listens to himself weeping.


It's no use.

Ever since the tranquilizer wore off, there's been no way for Drakken to sleep. No way to get comfortable, either. How a person can be so cold hunkered down into a ball under a blanket in the middle of April and yet still have sweat collecting on the surface of his skin is a mystery to him.

If he lies on his left side, he is millimeters away from a cinder-block wall. If he turns to his right side, a mattress-mound that he can't flatten no matter how hard he tries makes a dent in his rib cage. If he lies on his stomach, he puts pressure on the wide gaps Kim Possible opened on his lips planting her fist there. Sitting up would be a viable alternative, except that as of two or so hours ago his vertebrae have filed for bankruptcy, declared themselves useless. He can prop himself halfway up on the cot, his pillow cushioning his most achy spots, but that leaves him with a clear view of the TV screens, turned to the world news, which shows the Diablo attack over and over, as if there's the slightest probability that anyone doesn't know about it yet.

The thought that once burst with rich goodness inside him is now a jagged, broken edge, cutting away at the air. The newscasters are talking about him with frowns that seem to be dried on. His deeds and his dreams are being equated not with Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, but with the likes of Stalin, Moussilni, and worst of all, Hitler.

Hitler. The man who thought he could exterminate an entire religion, an entire race. Hitler.

As Drakken falls back against the pillow, half-prone, taking hard, hollow breaths, he wonders if Hitler ever felt this utterly alone.

Kneeling, he scoots closer to the window and peers out. The sky, now sawed into four striped quadrants, is blue-black and starless in the glare of the streetlights. By tomorrow night it will be searchlights. As soon as the work day begins, Drakken knows, he will be transferred to a federal penitentiary to share punishment with all the other men deemed too dangerous to live among society. And women, too. Shego will be on the other side of the yard, across a mile of steel and curlicues of barbed wire.

Something Drakken thinks he read about once in high school, filed more as a trivia item than a memory, careens into his mind. During World War II, the Nazis swept through every country they invaded and stole all the gold. Made it illegal to have it shipped out of the country. A couple of scientists in one of those countries had golden Nobel Peace Prizes and didn't want to surrender them to the Nazis, and Drakken doesn't blame them - if he had a gold medal, he'd never give it up either. A noble chemist melted down the gold and mixed it with aqua regia to disguise it. After the war, the chemist pulled the mixture back out and precipidated the gold out of the acid. The medals got recast, and there was much rejoicing.

Drakken opens his mouth, yet instead of the screams he has never run short of before, out comes a thin, trailing cry that dribbles away. He always thought of himself as the chemist. When did he turn into the Nazi?

It's a bad question, one that makes him feel he is trying to digest an ounce of barbed wire.

Drakken lays a hand across his heart. It patters too fast against his palm, a leftover from the ADHD pills the police confiscated. Heat shivers up and down his limbs, pooling in his joints and splitting to fan through his digits.

With a frown that he knows without seeing to be heavier than any newscaster's, Drakken swivels and surveys the unpleasant little room. It looks the same as it did ten minutes ago and six hours ago, too - the sink, the cot, the toilet, the forty-watt bulb that has been dimmed just enough to subdue shadows and, Drakken guesses, fool the more gullible prisoners into thinking it's been turned off. He waits to smell the musty, moldy smell so at odds with the cell's spic-and-span appearance, but if it's there, he's missing it. Every sense is turned inward, encumbered by pain.

He can feel cells in his throat self-destructing. Hear his enzymes as they do battle with the barbed wire. Taste the platelets working to patch themselves into place over the cracks.

Somehow, Kim Possible won yet again. Got to her gadgets. In her backpack. Word was the backpack was somehow thrown in the broom closet with her. How? Did he put it there?

Drakken buries his face in his pillow and moans again where no one can hear him. He must have. There's no other way. The henchmen were instructed not to touch anything, anything at all, not all night, so they wouldn't mess anything up, and about the one thing they can do well is follow orders. And Shego and Eric were much too bright to -

Shego and Eric.

Just thinking their names doubles Drakken over. He wasn't the one to receive an electrical shock that would kill a mere mortal tonight, or the one to drain dry and collapse in a husk, but it sure feels like he did. All night he has been reliving the mole rat's teeth puncturing Eric's Syntho-flesh and the sight of Shego's blood, so vulnerable crusted on a cheek that seemed to be carved out of marble. It's as if Diablo Sauce has been poured in his own cuts.

Drakken kicks the blanket away. Not only did he spoil his own plan putting that backpack in there, but. . . but the people he cared for - they were hurt.

He did put the backpack there, right? He sits back up, strains until he sees himself tossing the backpack into the broom closet and slamming the door shut behind him. But Drakken isn't sure if it's there because it actually exists or because he is forcing himself to remember it in a desperate attempt to tessellate tonight's events, events which still make no sense to him. It's a blur of punches and Eric melting and Drakken crying, "Stoppable!", of Kim Possible curling a cold sneer at him as he was led away, of thrashing toward Shego and being told people died and a freezing room where they emptied his pockets.

Drakken gazes down at himself, at his odd proportions that appear to have shriveled in their drape of orange cloth. His prison-issue tennis shoes dangle a mere inch from the ground.

Sort of like his plans. Left dangling, success just beyond their reach.

Outside, the wind blusters against the sides of the building. It is the only one of them with any bluster left. Although some people find it easier to be brave in the light and much harder in the dark, Drakken has never been one of those people. All throughout his entire career as a supervillain, he has closed himself in darkness and flourished there.

But this darkness - this isn't his darkness. It belongs to someone else, and Drakken doesn't know if it will cover him or slurp him down as if he were a milkshake. He has been stripped of his Doomsday devices, his chemistry set, his authority, his everything-that-makes-him-scary. The uncertainty of his future or the all-too-definite certainty of his defeat - one of them, Drakken's not sure which, gets him to pull the blanket back up and tuck it good and snug around his goosebumps.

The word died overloads his circuits, and Drakken is left with his fingers digging into the mattress for dear life, wishing for a surge protector. People are dead now. All the wrong people. Because of him yet not because of him. At his command yet not at his command.

This Drakken does recall: observing the screens, smiling as he watched skyscrapers collapse in showers of glass and flames. His body puffed up in triumph. Did he think all of those skyscrapers were empty or something? Did he know?

Drakken whips back to the window and grapples for the sill as empty-bellied retches spasm up his throat. In the midst of it, he sees Kim Possible, her sleeve and the skin beneath torn back and bleeding. It made him crave more. (Not literally crave. He's not a vampire.)

Nearly three years of fighting her, and he just now managed to draw blood on her. Why? Because she really is. . . all that?

No! Drakken snaps his head to the side. There must be some other variable. Tons and tons of other variables. He would assemble an equation, but right now he couldn't even assemble a basic LEGO tower if the instructions were right at his fingertips. It's been too long since the last pill. It's wearing off, and his thought process is wrapped around his brain like Charlie Brown's kite string around a tree.

You killed people tonight.

He only meant to kill one.

When Drakken closes his eyes, Syntho-fluid pours across the floor, Eric's chiseled features melt, and Shego is a tiny, green speck against a throbbing-white electrical current. He forces them back open and leans closer to the window, watching as the night fades from deepest violet to a shade that puts him in mind of the thistles he planted last year around the premises of his suburban lair to curtail intruders.

Dawn is coming, Drakken realizes. And it is this knowledge that finally has him spin around, show his back to the coming morning glow. He doesn't want to watch the sun rise on a world that is even less his than it was two nights ago. The light hates him - and it always has, Drakken knows. It certainly will not feel any obligation to him, so he leaves it behind him.

The darkness adopts him.