44. . . . . . never mind.
He is nervous.
Not awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night-in-a-cell-with-the-lights-buzzing-and-the-guy-across-the-hall-shooting-you-what-you-assume-to-be-gang-signals-nervous. But not a mere about-to-take-the-mic-at-karaoke-night-nervous, either.
This is most like first-day-of-high-school-nervous. Death and dismemberment are most likely off the table, but so many other things are on - a rat's maze of halls. Gym teachers that lean toward sadism. Wedgies in the locker room.
Drakken tightens his grip on the bathroom sink and thinks back to Shego's acidic expression as she hopped from the rafters of the new lair Warmonga had set up and let sprout. It was certainly the look of someone who was ready to start doling out wedgies indiscriminately.
Shaking his head before it can rehash its memory-list of every harsh hand that has ever snatched him by the waistband and yanked, Drakken lifts his eyes to his reflection and begins to experiment with his own expressions.
The first thing he tries is one of his big, hearty smiles, the one Mother calls "charmer" smiles, the ones that serve as a blaring advertisement for the hard work for Middleton's resident (now retired, of course) orthodonist. But Drakken is nervous about flashing all that hard work at Shego, because she can easily smash it all to pieces. And then incinerate it with her plasma for good measure.
So then he attempts to appear bored - blase, as Villains magazine once called it, which sounds much more sophisticated than just plain old bored - with his lids half-shut and the corners of his mouth level. On closer inspection, it reminds him more of the "You're Dead" animation that blinks up in video games when your character has taken too many hits to the health meter than Shego's trademark, which she probably paints on every day along with her lipstick.
At last, Drakken takes a stab at something stern and severe, eyebrow crawling menacingly down and neck held plumb to the walls. It is certainly the most success he's had yet, and he would grant it an A+ if it weren't for the way his eyes are shaking at the edges as if they are about to jump from their sockets.
Contacts stinging, Drakken lets go of the sink and taps his fingertips together. Keeping himself even-keeled is very, very hard at the moment, and it gets even harder when he goes to fling open the shower door only to knock against a tub rim that comes up to his knees because this shower is a hybrid. Still harder when he remembers that he is in his second-choice lair, the smallish urban one on the outskirts of Middleton, that his favorite haunted-island lair is being rebuilt, that Shego had a hand in destroying it.
The thought sizzles in Drakken's mind like burning bacon, and he aims a glare at the tub rim that dare to further bruise his body, which has already been battered enough. Gentleness is alien to Warmonga. No pun intended.
Comparatively, Shego is pleasant. Drakken perches on the closed toilet lid and shimmies his leg nervously against the porcelain, above the aqua-blue cubic tiles. In certain rooms of this lair, those tiles will fall, block by block, at the push of a button, dumping the unsuspecting occupant to a pool of pirhanas that are undoubtedly ravenous - unless some concerned piranha-rights activist came over and fed them during Drakken's stint in the hoosegow.
Today he will see his sidekick again for the first time in over a week. And for the first time in more than six months, it will not be on hostile terms. They have made amends, patched up their differences, sent the henchmen to do repairs on the main lair, and now everything between them goes back to the way it always was.
Except it doesn't.
Drakken frowns at the tiles. Something is amiss in this lair now - something colorless and odorless and vague, like carbon monoxide. Drakken knows that can't be it, because he just replaced the batteries in the detector - they were keeping him up all last night with that infernal, insistent beeping - but that is the feel of it, something close enough to breathable air for your senses to accept it without questioning, yet far enough away from it to kill you before you can even figure out what's going on.
And then the doorbell rings.
For an instant, Drakken is sure that this room, too, is equipped the piranha trap and that the cubes have begun falling away beneath him, even though that is visibly untrue - not a tile has budged from the perfect flooral arrangement. Nevertheless, Drakken takes quick, near-deft steps to bounce himself across the bathroom, down the hall, and toward the front door.
Toward Shego.
Drakken's nasal passages become increasingly soft and loose, as though they're in danger of spilling their contents. In a matter of seconds, he will embrace his sidekick again, feel the safety of her strength, watch her roll her eyes and set his life upright again.
The worries stack on top of each other like science manuals. New, malformed ones land at the top of the pile - What if Shego hates me now? What if she betrays me again? What if we can never return to being an evil family? The old worries - What if Shego listens better to her MP3 instead of me today? What if Shego picked up some new beau at the beach who turns out to be a shyster? What if Shego doesn't think my latest plan is as impressive as I do? - are last year's editions, out of date and unreliable.
Drakken narrowly avoids colliding with the wall as he puts on the brakes in front of the door. His quivering fingers punch the admittance code into the panel beside it. The numbers, of course, skip around and rearrange themselves in his brain, and Drakken is afraid that he will have to go through all ten thousand of the potential combinations before he gets them in the right order. Yet after only two or three mix-ups, the last numeral, an eight, clicks reassuringly, the panel flares green, and the doors hiss open.
Shego is behind them, staring at him with screwdriver-pointy eyes.
It is not the reunion he has imagined. Her face is as cool and sharp as an ice skate blade, torquing upward, as if prepared to meet something equally cold and smooth.
And Drakken has no idea what that "something" is, only that he is more frightened of it than a supervillain who was ten minutes away from asphixiating the planet should be.
The sizzling in Drakken's thoughts is no longer burning bacon, but an overloaded circuit board. Lacking a surge protector, it spews a fountain of sparks and leaves him holding a smoking husk, the way he has done so many times in real life. The welcome-back he planned to treat her to and the hug his arms were already bending into are fried along with it.
"Hello, Shego," is all Drakken can say. Even then, he chokes on the words as though someone has shoved a fist into his windpipe.
"Hey, Drakken," Shego says. Her voice is wooden, and the wood is unvarnished.
Or something like that.
The silence is so. . . silent that Drakken can hear the refrigerator dropping ice cubes, and it feels like they go smack down his back. He shudders and presses closer to Shego, and then he stops and dances away, because in that moment he understands what equally-cold thing Shego is expecting to encounter. It's him.
Drakken's insides wrench. Equality should mean respect, on some level, but on the bladed edge that looks back at him, it doesn't, only cynicism and suspicion, which have always seemed an insult to Drakken, even when coming from Kim Possible herself. It is nearly as hard to swallow as the enmity she showed swinging down into the snazzy, space-made lair.
Shego parks herself on the couch and unfolds a magazine with a snap. Even her laziness has precision. A gulf big enough to echo yawns in between them, and Drakken wants to cough to fill it up, to push it aside, to somehow neutralize it.
"I'm sure you're just dying to know about my latest scheme, Shego," he says finally. In truth, she probably is not, but he doesn't care if she listens or not. He just needs to talk about the latest scheme, let the details race each other out of his lips, not hold it inside so that it ruptures and begins bleeding internally and infects everything the way it did on - gulp - Diablo Night.
Shego briefly closes her eyes. That one new girl villain who signed up on Villainster while he was in prison - Karma Chameleon or whatever her stupid name is - wears glittery dust on her eyelids - for what purpose Drakken cannot fathom. But there is nothing decorated or dramatic about Shego's eyelids. They are just two little light-green wells above cheeks, exactly what they became when she collided with the enormous monitor and tossed shards across the lair, exactly what they stayed as Warmonga heaved Shego above her head, in a way that was more fitting for a Flag Captured in that one playground game than one of the most important people in this hemisphere.
A waxy ball of guilt starts to rise in Drakken, and he only barely maneuvers it back down.
"Sure," Shego says after the longest pause thus far in the new millenium. "Knock yourself out."
Her wish sounds literal, but Drakken utilizes his considerable talent for ignoring such things. Those words - knocked out - pin more guilt on top of him, and he has to thrash himself out from under it because he can't afford it. Especially when it's unwarranted. He didn't knock Shego out. Warmonga did. Well, if you want to get extremely technical, the monitor did. Either way, it can't be traced back to Drakken. . .
. . . can it?
"It involves the fine art of harnessing Earth's magnetic field in order to turn all kitchen appliances against the homeowners across the globe!" Drakken declares. Rather majestically, if he does say so himself.
Shego flips the magazine up over her face again and turns a glossy page without even tearing the corner, a skill Drakken has always envied her. "So, where did you get that wack idea?"
Drakken stiffens. "If by 'wack,' you mean 'fiendishly brilliant,' then I gleaned it from being attacked by Dr. Freeman's blender and stereo a few years back! If that power was in our hands, imagine the fear! Imagine the mass hysteria! Imagine the mess!"
The magazine lowers, and Drakken sees the ice-skate blade again. "Annnd what if by 'wack,' I didn't mean 'fiendishly brilliant'?"
It is amazing, really. With one torpedo, she can sink all his battleships, shrivel down his arsenal to nothing more than, "Gghhh! Nggk! Shego - bgrg!"
"Yeah. Nice chat." Shego hurls the magazine aside with such violence that it chills Drakken's heart, filling it with reminders of Warmonga's identical arm-fling, only instead of a magazine it was Shego, and he can still see her body slumped among the broken glass. "Later."
Shego stands up and stalks for the hallway. She moves like a deer, a deer with anger in her silent footfalls (hooffalls?). Why did Shego cross over from feisty and fiery to round-the-clock mad, and when, and why is she directing it at him, and how does he fix it? Drakken can't bear to let her get any farther away, not when they are already so distant.
"Stop right there, Shego!" Drakken bellows. "You have not been dismissed yet, and I am the boss, so you're staying! Please!"
He doesn't water down his usual villainous boom any for the last part, but it must stun them both, because Shego spins on her heel back to him and Drakken loses track of where he was in recounting his evil plan. To cover for it, Drakken sinks into his Thinking Chair and crosses his ankles in front of him and ventures, "So. . . how was. . . prison?"
Shego snorts, but what Drakken hears is glass splintering. "Is that your idea of small talk?"
"No!" Drakken says. "It's. . . it's. . . big talk." He bites his suddenly-tremulous lower lip.
"Great." Shego arranges herself on the couch with her limbs all perked up and happy. When she speaks, every syllable seems to be wrapped in marshmallow fluff. "Prison was super-duper. I made a ton of new friends and discovered my inner artistic side through finger-painting exercises."
The unfairness of it strikes Drakken between the temples, along with his own fist. "I knew I should have pretended to be a woman!" he says.
Shego shakes her gush of hair back from her face with a smirk. That's what her hair is reminding him of today, one of those gushers formed when drilling rigs strike oil, and it seems to have gotten bigger in the time he's been away. "We've been apart too long, Doc. You forgot how sarcasm works."
Drakken seizes a grunt before it can slip off his tongue. Why does she always -
Wait. She admitted it! She acknowledged it, too!
Drakken dethrones whoever once held the world record for smiling widest - chilly air stings his gumline, and he knows he looks like a complete fool, and he could hardly care less.