45. Trying to amass the continents into a supercontinent causes earthquakes, apparently. Remember that for next time.
When he was little and he heard cartoon superheroes say, "Another plan bites the dust," Drakken never thought the expression was meant to be taken so literally.
All right, so if one wants to be truly literal, the plan, as an intangible thing, has come nowhere near the dust. The newest lair has bit the dust, but again, if one wants to be literal, lairs do not have the mandibles necessary to take bites out of anything -
Well, analogies aside, the lair is kaputski, and there was nothing he could do about it, just as there'd been nothing he could do when his lair-in-a-cube clammed back up into a cube that would never open at his authority again. The incidents are revoltingly similar. Both times he was close enough to establish contact with global domination, the promise of it buzzing in his bones, only to trip over something annoying, something unplanned-for, something totally obscure, and fall from a position of power to one of powerlessness. The only difference is that this time he's not alone. This time his sidekick stands beside him in sneering solidarity, her shoulder firm against his.
These thoughts and others are bobbing in Drakken's mind like so many rubber duckies in a bathtub - ducks, he is quick to correct himself, rubber ducks - as he gazes back at the rubble-remnants of Intercontinental University. It's the first time he's been forcibly ejected from a college, which no one seems to be able to understand right now, and it still doesn't count, because it was a fake university in the first place! Bubbles roll up and down his esophagus, bad bubbles, torrid and sickening.
Kim Possible and her buffoonish boyfriend, last he saw, were left dangling by their fingers from the scaffolding, or whatever you call that big flat ceiling beam across the door. Drakken had called down to her - his boom not a quarter as harsh or thunderous as it should have been, all muffled up with tears or something - that her new mission clothes were not, as a matter of fact, all that.
Actually, they are kind of pretty. But she doesn't need to know that. Girls and their need for new clothes. Kim Possible must have finally realized that her first shirt didn't fit her and hadn't fit her since the first day Drakken met her. And they call him unobservant. Stupid.
Loser. That was the one Kim Possible flung at him as she leaped in through a window he never bothered to close because it was eighty feet off the stupid ground.
The word lashes across Drakken's back. Clearly, it's in the same taxonomic group as bluiser, the nickname the guys in prison gave him without his consent as they hip-checked him in the lunch line and stepped on the backs of his sneakers so that he'd step out of them because they were too big and then chuckled at the soft, chubby soles of his feet.
Drakken sniffs, valiantly if a little runnily. Suddenly, he can't take it anymore. He has to be in a place without insults, without falling rocks, without danger or fear. He has to be on a planet ruled by him.
Somewhere behind and far beneath him, Intercontinental University still lies smoldering. Drakken can feel the draw back to it, can picture himself executing a Kim-Possible-perfect leap down into the remains, scrambling around to see if there is anything left of his machine to scavenge, if any piece of his dream for Drakkenegea can be salvaged. Only Shego's hand on his arm keeps him in the hovercraft.
Well, no, that's what he'd like to be the case. The truth is, when Drakken glances back at where Intercontinential University once stood, the bitten dust still billows into the air and turns it smoky and hazy, reminding him of cigarettes being puffed in Cell Block D's multipurpose room, fire alarms blaring as Pyro Pete had another one of his episodes, the smell of tobacco clinging to that one guy with the winch-like grip, the guy who always carried a circular, foul-oozing tin around. It took Drakken longer than he wants to admit to realize it was chewing tobacco.
The world becomes hot, then cold. Black spots prance at the edges of Drakken's vision, and he isn't strong enough to swat Shego's hand away. In fact, he shudders, all the way down a spine that's already one big scab of barely-healed hurt.
Drakken rests his chin on the side of the hovercraft and watches Middleton pass below him in a smear of oil paint. The bubbles have fled his throat by now - no doubt terrified of him - and been replaced by what seems to be a thick glob of paste.
"So, boys and girls, here's the million-dollar question." Shego has lowered herself into the driver's seat, fiddling with the controls as if she wants to rip them from their sockets. Her entire body is like one big fireplace poker, every part of her a weapon. "What exactly causes earthquakes?"
"Your mouth," Drakken mutters back in irritation. No, something beyond irritation. Irritation is just a two-dimensional figure compared to the vast plane of whatever he is feeling right now.
Because he knows what causes earthquakes. He's studied plate tectonics, the same as everyone else who ever graduated from Middleton High. If he weren't being goaded into a fury, he could quite easily explain exactly what fault lines are and where they are most likely to be located. Could give a pretty snazzy PowerPoint presentation on the precise standards for every number on the Richter scale, decimals included. He knows it. He's smart enough.
He just was so busy revolutionizing continental drift that he didn't think to think about it -
"Wow. That wasn't even one of the options I was about to give you," Shego says. She widens her flinty eyes. "If that's your answer, no wonder you never graduated coll -"
"Shego!" Drakken lunges forward and seizes the back of the seat, tries to wring it, although its hard plastic mold stands a good chance of winning. His voice sounds as if it's being eaten away by termites. "Stop it, stop it, stop it! If I have to tell you. One! More! Time! that I am a dropout - that they let me in and I let myself out - " he sucks in a breath and the desperation he can tell is practically foaming out of him - "That was a really good retort, too! Why won't you respect it?"
Amusement flares up in Shego's eyes, as if the flint has managed to scrape together a flame. After so many months in the lonesome company of the despicable and loud-mouthed and crude, the sight is as welcome as that first flicker of fire must have looked to. . . to, well, to the ones who discovered it. "Dr. D, have you ever known me to 'respect' anything?"
Good point. Not as good as mine - though, really, what is?
"So it's nothing personal?" Drakken asks. The paste in his throat turns from sour to sweet.
Shego swivels away from him, but not before Drakken catches the outline of a smile. "I didn't say that," she says.
And then there are times when he can't remember why he missed her at all. Yet he did. He very much did.
Kim Possible called Shego a loser too, Drakken recalls now, and when he checks Shego for symptoms of deflation, he sees none. It hasn't humbled her. Nothing ever humbles her. Even in her unconsciousness, a memory that surfaces in his sleep at least once a night, she has her jaw etched upward in defiance.
Can't go there.
It actually weighs on him less to think about the destruction of Intercontinental University. His latest invention must have shaken itself apart, stopping the earthquakes but not in time to save itself. Or the giant, debonair statue of Drakken in the Thinker pose, or even the baseball bat he was planning to use to clonk Kim Possible over the head, which was the only type of home run a supervillain ever needed to be able to hit. Only she couldn't just come in through the door, oh noooo. . .
Drakken falls back into a crouch against the passenger seat, not quite sitting. It's jarring and hard on his pelvic muscles, but he has the distinct, newly discovered feeling that if his backside actually touches the seat, a trapdoor will open under him and spill him onto the Middleton Freeway, even though that has absolutely never happened before, not once. Plenty of other strange things, sure - but never that.
He never went to college, did he? Drakken hears the buffoon's voice, soaked in scorn it had no right to be soaked in, considering this child couldn't watch the Simian Channel without swooning or keep track of a pair of pants.
Worst of all, the buffoon was there for the Bebe incident. Well, the second Bebe incident. Bebe Incident Part Two: To Bebe or Not to Bebe? That would make a good title. . .
Titles aside, though, the buffoon saw the Bebe incident. Heard Drakken's backstory. Watched him lapse into a crying meltdown that wasn't on the agenda. He knows Drakken is a dropout, he knows. How could he say something so idiotic, so cruel, so. . .
Right. You see how rationally and kindly you can think when someone is threatening to club your girlfriend over the head.
The thought is so odd it must be someone else's, someone with scruples (and a girlfriend, come to think of it), copy-pasted into Drakken's head. Trying to snuff it, though, is like trying to shake a wet cobweb out from between your fingers.
For an instant, Drakken feels as though he has crawled out of his own purple-bruised blue skin and into the buffoon's with its more conventional hue. Limp and useless. Brain separated from the rest of his body. Arms everywhere, not knowing what to do with themselves.
It nearly scares the evildoer right out of him.
The image is completed when Drakken's cell phone chirps and twitches in his pocket. He bursts into giggles, because the buffoon was right about one thing - it does tickle, and it's hard to hold oneself to a manly chortle when all the receptors in one's leg are being tiptoed across at once. It's a surprisingly short tickle, however, which must indicate not a call but one of those newfangled text messages, which Drakken has never entirely understood. Why not just go ahead and call someone since you have your phone in your hand already?
Drakken flips his phone open and stares down at the pixelated letters. It's from Fred, the henchman in change of reconstruction. (Their own personal reconstruction of the lair, not that weird period of American history after the Civil War. How's that for college knowledge?) I think the lair's done, Boss, it says.
Unexpectedly, Drakken's fingertips beat a rhythm on the phone's dinged-up screen. Are u sure? he sends back, although he probably doesn't need to. Criminal masterminds his henchmen are not, but he does trust them to recognize when a building has all its necessary walls.
Sort of.
Yup.
About time, Drakken sends back. Someone else's scruples pinch at him, and he adds a smiling emoticon. Because he also can't deny the grin on his own face, nor the warmth that spreads through his chest the way he always imagined characters on television feel when they drink an antidote to a deadly poison. It's so rare these days, so fragile, that Drakken doesn't want to move so much as a pinkie toe for fear of startling it away.
Which is stupid. His state of mind - state of chest - is not some kind of flighty rabbit creature.
No, this is not at all like the collapse of the lair-in-a-cube. He has Shego. He has the henchmen. And he's not heading off to prison again. He's going home.
Home?
His usage of the word pulls Drakken up short, and he wags his head from side to side. Villains have a home base, not a home. He hasn't had anyplace he considers home since he went off to college, the college he voluntarily left, thank you very much! There are lairs, some of which implode or are infiltrated or collapse, and then other lairs to move on to. None of them are meant to be cozy. None of them are meant to be home. None of them are meant to bring him comfort that he isn't even supposed to be longing for.
At this point, though, Drakken decides he'll take what comfort he can get. It's not like anyone else has to know. This can be his little secret.
Well, it could be if he wasn't aware that he's still beaming ear-to-ear. His emotional transmitter has a kill switch somewhere, Drakken knows, but he's too far removed from the Dia - from That Night to search very carefully for it.