42. This isn't working. You need to get tougher. More prison tats. Maybe even a few piercings. That'll work, right?

RIGHT?

". . .and once your cybertronic technology has quietly infiltrated the homes of unsuspecting citizens - dont'cha love that word, 'infiltrating'? I have from the very first time I ever heard it in the first James Bond movie I ever watched - which - gosh - which one was that? One of them with that one guy in them. What's his name, Pierce?"

The drone. The constant, everlasting drone of the man known as Frugal Lucre. It crowds this underdone excuse for living quarters until there is barely enough room even to hunch.

It.

Doesn't.

Stop.

Drakken clutches the pillow more tightly around his ears and shifts his jaw from side to side so he can breathe. "It's okay," he mutters to the parts of himself that won't quit trembling any other way. "They're coming for me. Any day now, they'll come."

It's true. There are few familiar faces in the lunchline or the exercise yard - well, actually, there are many faces that are becoming entirely too familiar - what he means is that he doesn't recognize many people he knew from the outside (except Eddy, who he's not speaking to anyway). And that would signify that the world's supervillain population is still largely at large - no, that's a weird way to say it. Largely free to plan a prison break for one of their captured compatriots. Any day now.

Surely, one of the world's villains is sympathetic to his plight. . . Killigan? The Seniors?

Shego?

All Drakken has to do is think her name, and boom, it singes the back of his throat like that one kind of alcoholic drink he tried once and found he greatly disliked. His sidekick has disappeared into thin air, which is not unusual except that Drakken doesn't even know where she is.

Much as Drakken wants to write her off, his mental pen just won't sign that waiver, not with the flourish he loves. When a fight breaks out between other prisoners, he thinks that Shego could beat all of them up if she were here. When two of the guys decide to try and out-swear each other, he realizes that Shego would verbally scalp them all without even moving out of G-rated territory. When it's visiting day, he wonders if any of Shego's brothers ever came to visit her.

She'll come back for him, though, Drakken knows, once she's made aware of how empty a mere sidekick's life was without an employer to serve. She's probably just taking a break to recuperate and psyche herself up to face the prison scene again. Self-preservation instinct - strong in any supervillain, and extremely well-developed in the nastiest of them - prevents a person from charging toward a prison.

See how understanding and supportive I'm being, Shego?

Shego may be the biggest contender, but there are others, too. Dozens of them. And one of them will get him out of here soon. When a thing likely to happen doesn't happen, each passing day just makes greater the probability that it will happen the next day. It's simple scientific theory, postulated by - by - someone whose name Drakken forgets. (He doesn't have his books and notes anymore, either.) Why, by the end of the month, his odds of being broken out are going to be very near one-hundred-percent.

By the end of the month. If it isn't already the end of the month. And which month, Drakken has no clue. Inmates in the movies keep track by scratching tally marks on their cell, but at the beginning of his stay, he only expected to be here a few nights at most, and it's certainly too late to start now. He has entered a vortex where time and space have no meaning, a place where experiments cannot be performed because the only constant is misery.

Drakken rolls over onto his right side and winces, anticipating a battle to come between his arm and his creaky mattress, even though the wound under his sleeve has officially become a painless, deadened scar. It finally doesn't smart when he leans his body weight on it. Of course, it probably helps, too, that his body weight has plummeted so drastically since he was first brought in here. . .

With shaking fingers, Drakken rolls up his other sleeve to check not his latest scar, but his latest prison tat, a skull-and-crossbones pirate flag. The colors - blue and white - aren't as vividly saturated as they were when he first applied it, yet it hasn't turned pully and pinchy on his arm, either, so it would probably fool your average Cell Block D imbecile for a while longer. Guaranteed street cred for a few more days.

Whatever "days" feel like anymore.

But by the time it wears off, he'll probably already have "blown this joint" (as they say in "the joint"). Someone will have generously sprung him from prison, and then his life can go straight back to normal. No more cell-claustrophobia, no more Lucre-migraines, no more down-time-flashes of 752, the cursed luminous numerals that mark the number of casualties, creeping up on him.

This, too, shall pass.

Yes, well, so will a kidney stone, but it's still going to be a terrible, organ-ripping experience until then, isn't it?

"Someone will come for me," Drakken whispers. At least, it's a whisper compared to Lucre.

". . . and, of course, you'd need a signal tower to wake up the cybertronic technology in the first place. Maybe some kinda. . ."

Self-preservation instinct takes over, and Drakken squeezes his eyes shut. It doesn't help, though - he can still see his signal tower pulsing pale smoke as it collapses and takes his sidekick down with it.

Drakken clutches the pillow tighter, and then it switches from being his ally to being his projectile as he heaves it at Lucre's dim shape across the cell. The sound of the pillowcase flapping uselessly to the floor gives Drakken a queasy, oily feeling right about down where his liver is, as if it's producing turpentine instead of bile (and bile is bad enough). Lucre evidently doesn't feel it, because the chatter remains incessant.

". . . actually, you'd need a ton of signal towers all over the world - maybe those fast-food restaurants ya slipped your toys into it - maybe they could - "

Drakken forks a finger viciously toward his cell mate. "One more word from you, Lucre, and so help me. . ." Drakken's voice gives way, and he can feel himself withering.

Silky silver moonlight bounces off the sink.

It's Lucre's longest pause yet, which isn't saying much. "Wow," he says at last. "I love how you don't even ever need to finish your threats because you're already so scary."

Scary. The word, by all accounts a compliment, sticks in Drakken's craw like a lump of gristle. Too late to chew it, too hard to swallow it. Yes, he is scary, indeed. If only he had just a tiny bit, just a gram more bravery so he could withstand his own power.

"And don't you forget it," Drakken mutters. He rises to retrieve the pillow, but as soon as he bends over, it feels like an angry little ninja made of dizziness dive-bombs him from the ceiling. And he goes down, right on his tailbone, as pain yips through his body.

Someone across the hall doesn't even bother to muffle a spit-take type of laugh. Drakken whips around to glare at them - what sort of supervillain wouldn't? - and he spots the all-brawn form of another prisoner, the one with all the hoops and studs shoved through every piece of cartilage on him. They glimmer in the murky visibility that is neither light nor darkness as he shifts a menacing half-inch closer to the bars. If you were going to name any man "Pierce," it would be him.

Drakken shakes his head, his ponytail flat and sticky at the back of his neck from sick-skipping his last two showers. This place is driving him to think like Lucre. Get distracted like Lucre. Have ridiculous rabbit-trail thoughts like Lucre. If he looked more like this man -

But he doesn't want to look like this man. He is a mad scientist, not a member of some motorcycle gang or what have you. Drakken swings one leg over the top of the cot, crouched and panting for twenty seconds or twenty minutes (he truly can't tell anymore), before he hitches his other leg up too and lies flat on his back. He was with Eddy when Eddy got his tattoo, and his cousin ground back a scream even as he declared the whole experience to be "righteous." There's no sense in trading pain, hours and hours of pain, for a picture that never comes off your skin.

Besides, 752 people are flat-out dead because of me. Doesn't that convert to, like, twenty-five or thirty tattoos in prison economy? It's the sort of line that might win Shego's snort of approval - which would have its own entry, adjacent to but separate from her snort of disapproval on the Periodic Table of Shego-Noises.

Still, Drakken has seen what being cred-less and intellectually superior gets you in Cell Block D. Pain. More pain. Pain everywhere. There is nothing he can do to avoid it, no direction he can turn to dodge it, the way Kim Possible does and Shego does and every single person in his whole stupid life does except him!

Drakken pulls the pillow up to his mouth to hide its quiver, and it floods with the grungy, unwashed flavor he smears across it tossing and turning every night. His body feels like a thin, bunchy rope of licorice, its framework twisted around itself, broken in half and re-braided with everything in the wrong place. He is lonely without any of the perks of being alone. He is recognizable without any of the perks of being famous. He is awake without any of the benefits of being conscious.

Maybe he has already died, and this is the afterlife allotted to manslaughterers.

You deserve it. The hiss is a rough catch in his mind, fingernails scratching down wire mesh. Drakken doesn't know whether it comes from the part of him that tells the truth or the part that lies, the part that holds itself up proudly or the part that shrinks down on the mattress and tries to disappear. It surprises him, but it shouldn't. Lots of things that surprise him shouldn't.

Drakken returns to the first night he sent Shego to steal from HenchCo and how he couldn't stop chortling - she called it "giggling" - when she arrived with the loot. "We're stealing," he explained to her questioning face, the badness of it slinking through him like a secret tunnel.

Shego raised her eyebrows in something a little like amusement, a little like disgust, and a lot like she had stepped into the room to address a king and found a toddler sitting on the throne, clad only in a diaper and a crown that slipped down to serve as chest plating. He can still hear her voice as she said it - "You are so naive."

The room presses at Drakken from all sides. He can't take it, he can't take it, he can't suffer like this anymore. But he also can't escape the knowledge that so many others have suffered because of him, too. Not just the goody-goody Possible gang. Unrelated people who Drakken had no grudge against. Children. Shego.

Eric.

If he were noble, he would own up to the fact that he deserves to suffer for all the hurt he's doled out. Then again, if he were noble, the Diablo attack would never have occurred in the first place.

And since it didn't work, wouldn't work, never happening would be the next best thing.

Drakken curls up on the mattress inside the black cloud of himself that frequents his nightmares now. He closes his eyes.

752.

Maybe naive isn't the worst thing a person can be.