46. Surplus inventory is not to be eaten! End of story. Period - no, exclamation point!
It's.
Not.
Fair.
Everything is ruined. His plan to plunge the world into the next Ice Age. His venture into the corporate world. Even his desperate, perhaps not well-thought-out solution to the problem of being saddled with thousands and thousands of extra -
Ugggggggggggh. I can't even think the word!
Drakken lifts his head from the arm of the couch - not soft enough tonight, even though it has always been before - and aims a glare at his bubbled-up, treacherous stomach, shielding his view of his feet, as if the toes of his squishy black boots are too hideous to be looked upon. Scientifically, he's not sure he can even prove they're still there. The churning misery beneath his rib cage has numbed all other parts of him. Everywhere he turns, there's a green sea of pain that clashes badly with his lair's decor, which is too deep and wicked a red for the contrast to even form Christmas colors.
Usually during a post-scheme sulk, it helps him to picture the deat - the successful defeat - of his arch-nemesis, the purple-clad dream-wrecker. Reconfigure the scene of her escape, making her near-miss a no-miss - a hit, in other words - and leaving himself the victor. This time, that's not going to help, because this time his doom trap of choice involved lowering her as quickly as he could (those painstaking inches are for villains who want to be defeated) into a boiling, gurgling vat of chocolate ganash, and Drakken doesn't want to think about ganash right now or ever again. He already feels like he's been thrown in himself, drowning in it, and to save his own life had to open his mouth and swallow it all, draining the vat dry. He's certainly boily and gurgly - and gut-stuffed - enough.
Not to mention Kim Possible had brought that little kid with her - the darker-skinned, freckled boy who Drakken had never seen out from behind a screen, and his soft-cheeked innocence is compromising the visual aesthetic of the whole scene! Drakken tries to shove him into a corner, obscure him with racks of baking trays, but he still can't forget the child is there.
He can mess with the scene as much as he wants, though, and it will still be easier than rearranging and re-graphing himself. Drakken hitches, trying to adjust the position of his shoulders. Maybe he will find comfort in an equation with a steeper slope, or at least in not having to stare at the stacks and stacks of empty boxes whose overloaded burdens have been transferred into him. No, that sounds too mild, transfer. He took them all, lips parted, teeth chomping as he snarfed them down with the speed of a mechanical reaper -
Uggggh.
Drakken grips at his temples. Someone is dancing around inside them, wearing those heavy, silver-soled tap shoes. He can't get them out, can't stop the rest of that day from playing out in his head.
Kim Possible's boyfriend showing up and rescuing her, being her knight in shining armor - well, more like her knight in opaque jumpsuit, and why did they have one small enough for him, anyway? Shego lunging for the buffoonish beau, her face both enraged and satisfied, if Drakken was reading it correctly - he was never sure. Slicing a pipe open as she swung for him. Chaos and dust around him as Drakken watched everything he worked so hard to build fell to the earth as though it was never more than cheap, fake scenery for an elementary-school play. When said dust and chaos cleared, Drakken wandered through the rubble of his broken factory, sniffling (not crying, no, not in front of Shego).
It took another two or three hours to realize that the Atmosfreezer must have also been destroyed, and with it his chance of world domination.
(He should have thought of that first, shouldn't he?)
Drakken flips over onto his other side. Well, really, only the upper half of him flips. His belly doesn't jiggle like a bowl full of jelly the way Santa Claus's does - just stays put, standing, anchored in place as though it's weighted down by sandbags instead of - those other things he isn't thinking about. His fingers tighten on the pressure points that pulsate with every mother's favorite aphorism when their child begged for a large Thing-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named and then wasn't able to eat the whole thing: Someone's eyes are bigger than their stomach.
But Drakken knows they are wrong. Because there's not anyone, anywhere - with the maybe-exception of a giant squid - who has eyes bigger than his stomach. The thought tosses a net of barely-kept-at-bay nausea over him.
Discouragement and despair usually show up and spend the night after a thwarted scheme. In the aftermath of this one, though, they only stuck around for a few hours, and Drakken even allowed himself to wonder if the Atmosfreezer going up in smoke hadn't been a blessing in disguise. Gave him time to focus on his business endeavors. In significantly less explosive surroundings.
And then the company folded.
No, not in the way his lair-in-a-cube folded, wrapping back into itself and tucking the corners in neatly. This was significantly longer and messier, like trying to remove a bandage one pore-ripping peel at a time.
The coal black in the company checkbook turned to red-hot embers that burned away the money in the cash register. (Well, that's what seemed to happen.) Less and less - or is it fewer and fewer? - parents began bringing their children in. Dr. Drakken, who has never liked children, not once in his entire life, began to miss the squeals and the scampering that always came with them. At least they would join him in his excitement, whereas Perkins's face was constantly withering into a prune those days.
Drakken shoves his own face into the sofa cushion, the skin around his scar hot and itchy with fury and regret and sadness and an unprecedented case of indigestion.
He had no choice, then. He had to go back to being evil.
In some magma-deep, microscopic segment of himself, a segment that betrayed every evil trait he worked so hard to cultivate, Drakken would have rather stayed a You-Know-What salesman.
The thought is an interloper, a foreign body that any good brain surgeon could have removed with their hands tied behind their backs. Drakken pictures Ann Possible and heaves out a groan. The reminders just won't quit.
And beneath them an odd, strained scenario plays out. Drakken watches from outside his own self as he pores over every manner of world-domination weaponry known to humankind. Gaping in delight as he skitters back and forth across a long room with an amphitheater ceiling. Not the kind of room he would ever want to leave, Drakken thinks, but now he finds himself abruptly scanning it for doors and windows. And there are none, and claustrophobia barks in his veins, and nothing is right, nothing is safe.
Devising another dastardly plan should have whetted Drakken's appetite. Except he's got no appetite anymore, just the sensation that those cavernous walls are closing in, and he's pretty sure his tongue will never be properly damp again. It feels rough and beaten and cracked like a strip of beef jerky, or maybe one of those old leather belts Richard Lipsky used to wear. Drakken never really went for leather himself - has nothing to do with the fact that it was usually out of his price range, truly - and his own belt is slippery fabric to match the rest of his clothes.
Not that it will do him a whole lot of good right now. It was flung aside several hours earlier, and even if Drakken could remember where he flung it, it surely couldn't stand up to the combined forces of four thousand -
Thingies, Drakken quickly thinks. He rests a hand on his rumble-ridden stomach, triggering an angry belch. As if he could have possibly forgotten how unhappy his body is with him. He wishes Shego, the sidekick of the calm hands and caustic reassurance, were here.
And yet he doesn't.
He can't explain it, this desire to crawl back to two months ago and curl up there and stay like a cat in a sunbeam. If it doesn't make sense to a genius mind like his, it will certainly be beyond the scope of a merely above-average one like Shego's. Especially since she was already cheesed off (as the teens say. . . or have said sometime in the history of Western civilization) that the plan took so long to go into effect. In fact, if it hadn't been for her not-so-gentle urging - which involved destruction of company property - that plan might still be bundled in some storage closet somewhere, never to see daylight.
It's just that - it's just that -
There were shadows in his You-Know-What store, too, where the light poured in through the windows and hopped off the glass display cases, but none of those shadows were big enough to hide in, and Drakken wasn't drawn to them. He can't get any clearer than that, only knows that in the tinkling of the bell over the door and the rush to retrieve a special order, he knew how it felt to be free.
And now, as he lies here, he knows what it is to be chained to a stake.
Three different manacles, three different failures. All in a row. Bad, good, and well-intentioned. And all because of Kim Possible!
Okay, so he probably can't blame her for the low-carb trend. . .
. . . Except he can! He is sick and he is cross and he is evil, doggone it, and he can blame whoever he darn well pleases!
Queasier than ever, Drakken knots his fists at his chest. His usual doubts appear to taunt him - Would a true evil genius really fail this many times in a row? they hiss.
Of course he would! Well, he could, Drakken retorts immediately. After all, didn't it take Thomas Edison some ten thousand tries to find a suitable filament for his incandescent bulbs? Didn't the Slinky get invented by accident? Didn't Beethoven go deaf trying to perfect his own music?
Well, he's not sure about that last one, but the other two are definite yeses. It should soothe his ragged reaches for air. Instead, the doubts fall back and regroup, mutating into something far grislier than even Drakken knows how to fashion.
He tried doing something non-evil. And it started off so well, a shipment of hope that got to run its way back and forth in Drakken's mental mail room, only to be yanked away from him again - Ha-ha! Just kidding!
Boy, how familiar does that sound?
It's the story of his life. Make that the song of his life - one of those blasted songs that loops around on itself and will not stop until the end of time.
Failure. Failure. Failure everywhere.
Last time he sprinted to the bathroom to puke - well, as much as a man can sprint when his legs are skewed sideways, displaced by the swelling they're trying to evenly distribute - he almost couldn't identify the blue quivering line in the mirror. He was a washed-out, wrung-out, limp version of the supervillain he claimed to be, as if he were just drakken with a lowercase d. He looks like a lowercase d, a little stick of a thing with a bulge out in front.
Drakken frantically rummages for his ego. At this moment, though, when he thinks of himself, he thinks of a smell - the type of smell that clings to Smarty Mart's seafood counter by the end of the workday, brackish and briny. It's probably just from the sweat that drips down the sleeves of his sweatsuit to pool in his elbow creases, but he can't shake it.
Big round droplets of moisture cruise out of Drakken's eyes. They're the first things all night to come out of him without a convulsion and, therefore, his favorites.