~First of a two-part tale for MDaA because I realized I really didn't want to have to address Grande Size Me. XD And, yes, I promise eventual reconciliation!~
43. You should have made a huge alien woman who sees world domination as just another day on the job your sidekick a long time ago!
This has been a real humdinger of a day for Drakken.
Woke up in prison. Moped around in prison. Played checkers with Lucre. Was abducted straight out of the multipurpose room. Spent a good amount of time in a spaceship outside Earth's atmosphere, staring down a laser that would have been really cool if it wasn't going to hurt him. Told Warmonga he was the Great Blue - he's mentioned in an alien prophecy, who'dve thunk?
Old sidekick a traitor. Old lair collapsing. Didn't matter. Now he has a new sidekick who can punch pipes in half, and a new lair, and most importantly, he's not in prison anymore! The walls tower above him, tall and broad and protective, orange and blue-white, obviously having never seen a speck of grime before. He was just preparing himself to dive headfirst into Operation Revenge 2.0 - now with higher-budget effects!
And then Shego had to show up.
She stands there now, her scan of the lair having come to a stop on Warmonga. Shego only stands as high as Warmonga's belly button - or would aliens even have belly buttons? Drakken has never stopped to consider this before. Warmonga has her hands smashed on either side of her possible navel area. Shego's expression is casual, but her posture is stiff, as if she is trying to set every bone in her body at once.
Drakken searches his data banks for the number of bones in the adult human body. He comes up blank.
Maybe he's dreaming - but, nope, a pinch and Shego's still there, flesh and tendons and tissue and hair, so much hair, exactly as he pictured her for - for - for - holy litmus strips, how long was he in the joint? The only thing that prevents Drakken from classifying it as "eternity" is that his time on lockup has finally come to an end and eternity, by its very definition, never will. She is the puzzle piece that will hold the entire picture together, keep it recognizable even with so many other pieces missing, and Drakken approaches her with his arms outstretched.
Once he's beside her, though, his hands cramp into clammy shaking-claws. Perfect for grabbing her and rattling all smart remarks out of her. Drakken hunts for hideous, demeaning terms to throw at her and instead finds only flat stumps of consenents with no vowels to separate them, like Oreos without any filling.
All of this is wrong - her reappearance, her face, her stern straightness. All of it. Drakken's head is a hot-air balloon, a butane flame in its center, pushing its top up and up with its rising heat (yes, heat rises - all good chemists know that), stretching the sides longer and sparser, filled with vapor rather than intellect, drifting out of his grasp.
Even in Warmonga's shadow, Shego doesn't so much as blink. "Whoa!" she says. "Someone's been drinking their milk."
Drakken takes a surrepitious step backward and in an equally-stealthy move slides halfway behind Warmonga's fortress of a body. "Warmonga, this is Shego," he says. "The sidekick -" he stresses the word on the off-chance that Shego can be humbled - "who -"
Abandoned me.
Betrayed me.
The accusations are true, yet Drakken can't figure out a way to chemically convert them into words without spewing corrosive substances everywhere. Even his eventual, "Didn't break me out of prison!" sounds swollen, as if it has been stung by thousands of wasps.
No movement from Shego. Her understructure of muscle and sinew still fits healthily inside her jumpsuit, bearing no sign of having ever been locked up at all. Drakken is suddenly, stabbingly aware of how his lab coat billows away from a prison-shrunken waist. Of course, he could be wearing a cummerbund and cuff links and still feel underdressed next to Shego.
Warmonga's eyes light up yellow and red. "Sidekick? Oh, so you too pledged your being to the Great Blue?"
Nnnggh. That also sounds very wrong. Drakken turns away and has to widen his stance to keep from flinching.
"Uh-huh," Shego says. "Seriously. . . what planet are you from?"
Drakken peeps out from behind Warmonga's elbow to see if Shego is being sarcastic or not. One look at her face, one attempt to read it, and he becomes the second-grader squinting down at his reader once again, the too-wide, off-eggshell pages, where letters in small, crowded font were herded into combinations that meant nothing to him.
Warmonga extends her arm and holds her hand level like a school crossing guard. "Warmonga hails from Lorwardia! Victor in the battle of the 13 moons of Jingos!"
Lorwardia. The name resonates off the inside of Drakken's skull, anchoring the wandering hot air balloon. In the rich, dignified reverberations, he hears support.
He hears power.
Shego jabs one pointy finger at Warmonga. The look she gives Drakken is questioning and not squeezed out through selfish slits.
Drakken parts with a shrug before he catches himself. Before the reminders of her crimes pinch him and tie all his emotions together and threaten to strangle him. He shoots a scowl her way, wads his arms together in front of his chest, and heel-swivels away from her.
"Super!" Shego says. "You know how to pick 'em, Doc. Though I do like what she's done with the place."
When Drakken sneaks a glance back at Shego, he expects to be mowed down by her anger.
There is none. Her gaze is unfeeling. She doesn't care about him anymore.
If she ever did.
All the moments Drakken refused to remember lunge forward now and make themselves known in bold high-resolution stills. Her riciduling every single plan Drakken ever came up with, even though it would have been in her best interests to see them succeed. Her dropping his bereft-of-evil self over the side of the hovercraft to make room for the buffoon, who stole Drakken's evil and passed it off as his own, getting away with patent fraud because he made it look cooler. (Sort of like the cotton gin.) Her gliding onto the witness stand at his trial to testify against him.
The Day-Glo-green letters sprayed across the crumbling interior of his lair: Drakken's a loser. Ha-ha.
Enough of this.
Being separated from Shego is like leaving behind one of his own appendages. But that appendage has gangrine, and he needs to amputate it or risk being dragged down with it.
"Warmonga, show her the door!" Drakken commands.
Warmonga's point lurks at least three feet above Shego's head. "If you guide your vision to the left of our aft reactor core, you can see our primary entrance."
Oh, nibbles and biscuits, are you serious? A magnetic field takes shape around Drakken's forehead, drawing both hands to clamp tightly to it. "No, Warmonga!" he yells. "I mean, have her exit through the door."
Personally, Drakken thinks that was a perfectly-explained request. It still, however, falls short of whatever language one must speak to get through to an excessively-violent extraterrestrial.
Warmonga scoops Shego from the floor and hurls her, a wiry projectile, across the room at what must be the speed of light. It must be, for before Drakken has even figured out that Shego has vanished, she crashes through the door in a detonation of wood. Splinters fire in all directions, and with any luck, they also burrow into his ex-sidekick in some very, very irritating places.
Triumph, ungentlemanly and painful, burns through Drakken. He licks his chops and waits for Shego to get up.
Waits. Waits. And waits some more. Drakken can't even recall the last meal he ate, but whatever it was, it's slowly creeping its watery way back up.
At the very moment Drakken is rolling his tongue backward to see if that will hold back the retches, Shego whirls to her feet. Every pale inch of her glimmers angrily. She unleashes a gutteral noise that she doesn't seem big enough to hold. It isn't the growl she lets out before she dives for Kim Possible with her plasma at the ready. Its rattle doesn't stem from agitation or annoyance.
This is a rage-frustration-hate-helplessness-desperation combo that Drakken knows all too well.
His jerk-of-the-knee reaction is to sympathize with her, but the reflex never gets beyond his kneecap.
There are only ten minutes left in the countdown. Why isn't Kim Possible here yet? Shouldn't she be here?
Drakken paces in circles around the timer. Each of its glowing digits are longer than he is tall, their value rapidly dwindling literally with each passing second. In less than ten minutes, the Earth's atmosphere shall be deprived of its oxygen, suffocating all who call it home, and while that is a wonderfully aggressive move on his part, it wasn't supposed to be the plan, just a lure.
For some reason, Drakken pictures the checkerboard, the game he won back in prison (or would have won if Warmonga had waited another thirty seconds to spring him). All of his pieces are precisely, climatically positioned, blocking his opponent's every path. And just now, his opponent has crossed her arms, turned her back, and refused to make the only move left open to her - the one that will crawl her straight into his clutches.
Is she trying to call his bluff, thinking he isn't mad enough (in every sense of the word) to actually go through with this attack? That at the last second, he will cancel it and spare the planet that has never done a single thing for him?
The Drakken of two years ago might have done such a thing. But now pain has captured the spot where his heart should be. That's a metaphor, of course. Has to be, because nothing except a jellyfish can live without a heart, and yet the beat rapping on his eardrums is a thousand times stronger and more forceful than a pulse.
"Unnnnnnnnnnnh!" Drakken cries. "What's keeping her? I want my victory!"
Beside him, Shego smirks, even with her wrists and ankles shoved into what remind him of glowing fuchsia toolboxes. Seeing her chained up is like eating kale - it tastes foul, but it satisfies the quakings of hunger inside him. He hasn't jeered, "Comfy?" at her yet, the way he never fails to do with other captives. That isn't the role she is playing.
(And he doesn't trust himself not to release her if she says no.)
"Like you could even handle Kimmy without me," Shego says. Her voice contracts around the words in a way he's never heard it do before.
Drakken rotates away from her, but he knows his grin is unmistakable from any angle. "Oooooohh!" he squeals. "I think somebody's jealous!"
He wants her to be. Oh, he wants her to be. Jealousy hurts.
And it would prove, once and for all, that her job is - that he is - something worth being jealous about.
"Hey, I'm just sticking around to watch the cheerleader kick your great, blue -" Even from the back, Drakken can feel Shego's eyes taking aim, so penetratingly that for an instant he is sure she knows because those eyes have dived through his layers of clothes and seen for themselves, not just that she's made a lucky guess based on the fact that one's glutes are not usually too differently-tinted from the rest of their body. . .
"Shego!" Drakken barks before the blush can raid his blood vessels and make off with his composure. "It's not going to happen! Because Kim Possible will never be expecting my secret weapon!"
Even now, saying that - my secret weapon - rumbles a little maniacal chuckle from him. Warmonga. Bigger and greener and better than Shego. She is the prosthetic limb, steely and unbreakable, that comes complete with lasers and missile launchers built in.
There's a slight hum in the space next to him, and Kim Possible materializes out of absolutely nowhere, in exactly the defiant-checker-player pose Drakken imagined her in. He shrieks - also out of absolutely nowhere - and scrambles backward until he nearly trods on Shego's foot.
She just formed. She can teleport now. Or turn her visibility on and off at will. She has once again broken every one of the universe's rules. A blind panicked hum rumbles in Drakken's head. Behind him, a clock is counting down to something, and he can't for the life of him remember what.
He's pretty sure it's nothing important, though.