47. Keep better track of your sidekick. Shego's presence is vital to just about everything - and do NOT let her see this!

Dr. Drakken picks up a butter knife, the kind that can't harm you even if you forget you're holding it, and hums a tune - a catchy ditty that was in his head when he woke up and has spent the rest of the morning with him. For some reason, it is a spirit-lifter rather than an annoyance as he slices strawberries onto his corn flakes. Donuts and chocolate-chip pancakes aren't options today, and haven't been since what he's come to ruefully refer to as The Cupcake Incident.

It's not an effort to get back into shape. His GI tract took care of that on its own, purging every last crumb and rendering him hollower than he was before. He just can't look at anything rich without his stomach shuddering and threatening a very real uprising.

Feet swinging just a few inches above his floor's wood finish, Drakken pats his cereal down with his spoon and rustles through the newspaper until he finds the funnies, getting a special kick out of the Corporate Comedy strip - "Constructive criticism is very valuable," the boss says, "for everyone below me on the corporate ladder." Whoever wrote this must have known Hank Perkins for sure.

After breakfast, Drakken paces back and forth in front of his giant security monitor, glancing at the door with every turn, willing it to open and sweep Shego in. In the last twenty-four hours, he has come up with the most brilliant hiding spot ever for a Doomsday device, and he can't even attempt to be still until he's shared it with her. Along with the fact that he remembers it's "most brilliant" and not "brilliantest."

He still hasn't entirely recovered from her disappearance last week, from the days and days with only the dubious assistance of his henchmen to rely on, and from the strange sensation that the darkness of the lair could have turned on him at any moment. Every turn that goes by without her at that door stabs yet another needle into some unknown, intangible part of Drakken's anatomy that he decides to refer to simply as a "haystack," since needles and haystacks go well together, at least in wise old sayings.

At last - at long, long last! - there's a knock on the door that jump-starts Drakken's arms and legs as they flail him forward. With his blood cells cartwheeling inside him, he presses the entrance panel and the door splits in two. Shego stands there, a silvery-gray bag hooked over her shoulder.

"Shego!" Drakken greets her. "Ah, you're here at last! I have come up with my most brilliant" - he can't stop his hands from wiggling as he weights those words - "scheme yet, and I know you're just dying to hear it!" There's a bit of a squeal to it, and he works on tempering it down to something more sophisticated, something that better matches the tapping of her shoes across the entryway.

Shego points her gaze at him. "Hi, Shego, how was your weekend?" she says.

It's such a bizarre thing for her to say, and he frowns at her. "Um, I suppose it was fine, but that's hardly relevant, and I'm not the one named Shego."

"Drakken - "

"There! You got it right that time!" Drakken says encouragingly.

"What I was trying to do was remind you of some basic common courtesy." Shego lets her bag ker-thunk to the floor. It has little beaded stones on it, and not the kind tacky-glued on, either. The light refracts from their inward curves, dazzling his concentration until there is not much left.

Courtesy? Since when does Shego care about courtesy? She can insult an entire auditorium full of people with a single carefully honed smart remark.

"Is that what you want me to ask you, then?" Drakken says. He feels as if he's trying to balance on one leg, the way she always does without the slightest struggle.

The sharp-angled face that looks back at him couldn't communicate Duh more clearly if it were stamped onto her cheeks. In fact, that would probably be less clear - he mentioned the concentration being shot? Herding letters is beyond its scope when it blurs like that.

"Fine, then," Drakken says, and it almost comes out a growl. "Hi, Shego. How was your weekend?"

Apparently the question deserves nothing more than a shrug, because that's what he gets. "It was all right. Still too cold for the beach, so I just went shopping."

A-ha! Drakken identifies a chance to make connections and lunges for it. "Is that where you got your new bag?" he asks.

Shego squints at him. "Dr. D, I've had that bag for two years."

"Oh." Drakken knows a blush is rising, and he tries to swat it out of the way. In order to maximize its efficiency, his genius brain tends to strain out all facts not directly related to world domination. There may, just may be a chance his brain misjudged on this one. "Oh, no matter. What matters is that I've come up with a mind-boggling scheme that shall redefine what it means to be cunning!" He turns to Shego, rocking on his heels because the excitement is almost too much to contain. "Where's the last place you'd expect to find a doom ray?"

Shego rolls her eyes back as if trying to inspect her hair. "Dr. D, people don't expect to find doom rays anywhere."

"Kim Possible does," Drakken says. He punches his chin in her direction to punctuate his retort. "And the last place she would go to look for one is. . ." He pauses, one, two, three, four, and - now. ". . . the bottom of the ocean!" The plan comes fountaining out of him as soon as he lets that first drop go. "My latest doom ray shall rest safely undetected in the Mariana Trench! Of course, it will have to be constructed from material hardy enough to withstand the eight or so tons of water pressure down there, so it looks like we'll need to outsource from the Criminal Headquarters of Aquatic Supervillainy. . . "

Nothing from Shego.

"And that's what I was doing this weekend, while you were shopping!" Drakken finishes with a harsher boom tham he intends. But he can pretend it was all part of the scheme. No, it was all part of the scheme, and his body picked up on it before his conscious mind did, which is really saying something. . .

Drakken leans forward, staring Shego straight-on so he can press his authority and status as the boss into her rebelliousness. She looks back, and for just a second, he could swear there's something excessively smooth and neat in her eyes that reminds him of those hasty, discolored paint jobs in movie theater bathrooms, where some kid thought he was so clever to scratch in obscenities with a pencil. Something whose prime directive is to conceal.

For a moment, Drakken is lost in envy. His anguish always exposes itself in black rings around his eyes, grinding teeth, and raw cuticles - at least those he can hide beneath his gloves.

Anguish. Is that what Shego's feeling now? For the first time, Drakken wonders from a place outside of his pickle craving where she was when she wasn't here and kept not being here.

Some cold, invisible shadow creeps up on Drakken from behind and wraps him up into a hug every bit as joint-jarring as his mother's. He barely recognizes it from the day when he discovered Shego had a family - a family she doesn't like but couldn't betray, a family she never told him about, a family that operates in a sphere entirely separate from his and thinks Shego belongs there, too. Before he can even ponder what he's about to blurt, he's blurted it - "Is everything okay, Shego?"

"Why do you ask?" Shego says.

"Because you're acting really. . . weird lately!" He meant to express that more gently.

"Says the man with the stick of celery behind his ear. It doesn't look fresh, either."

Drakken dissolves into a nervous laugh that startles them both, him more than Shego, he can tell. "Oh, that's where that went! It's from yesterday. I was going to have a midnight snack before I went to bed, so I took some celery, but it didn't taste very good by itself, so I went to get some peanut butter, only I wasn't sure if my stomach was up for peanut butter yet - "

A noise drifts out of Shego. If she were anyone except Shego, he might think she was trying not to cry.

And if it were anyone except Shego, he might not care.

"See?" Drakken points an emphatic finger her way. "You're sighing now!"

"Dr. D, everybody who's around you for longer than two minutes sighs," Shego snaps back.

The insult sticks, but not by lodging between the panels of his ego as it usually does. It disappears into uncharted territory, and it hurts so bad that he can't find it.

"No, something's going on with you!" Drakken declares. "Why don't you let me be your head shrink and figure it out?"

"That might be your worst idea yet," Shego says - mildly, but with her fingers flexed in front of her. She's not getting out of this, though. He won't let her.

Drakken drops into his Thinking Chair, exchanges a clipboard for the celery, which he disposes of in the nearest trash receptacle, a squatty can with red stripes zigzagging down its circumference. A pencil rests teasingly on the end table beside him, and Drakken makes a dive for it, taking the brunt of its corner in the shin. He responds in a professional manner - with a yelp, but a deep, professional yelp.

No answer from Shego. Drakken blinks into the silence, and all of his emotions tangle together and go into warp drive before he can sort out where one ends and the next begins. He likes quiet when he's in the planning stage of a scheme, but now it's Sharing Time, and there is supposed to be a lively dialogue! It's like turning on the radio and finding nothing but itchy static. While driving through the woods. At night.

"Come on, Shego. I did take psychology, after all." That shudder digs all the way down, as if prospecting for bone marrow. He took psychology right before all Diablo broke loose.

Breathe. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

Drakken pulls a pretend pair of the spectacles he discarded after dropping out of college down his nose and peers at Shego over the top of their imaginary lenses. She's gripping her temples with the insides of her fingers - not the tips, not with the blades and all - and below that rests a dark scowl. Literally dark, thanks to her chosen brand of lipstick. At least, he thinks it's lipstick that does it. . .

He thinks back to the time Shego was able to psychoanalyze him. The night with the storm - with the thunder that just wouldn't stop, kept coming back for encores no one asked for - when she asked him questions probably more out of boredom than anything else, and he gave her answers that he didn't realize were true until they came tumbling out of him. She can snap him open as easily as she popped the lid off that pickle jar, but Drakken could - and likely will - conquer the world without ever knowing what is inside Shego.

That thought deserves to be shaken out of his head, and Drakken is happy to do so. There's no room for discouraging thoughts on your To-Do list, Perkins used to say, although in light of his betrayal, his words seem puny. Cheap, like one of those plastic squirt guns that shatters the first time it slips from your grasp. Ten or twelve more hard shakes, and Drakken can't even remember what he's about to give himself whiplash disagreeing with.

At this point, he likes it better that way.

Drakken's pen wiggles excitedly across the paper spread across his clipboard, wiggles out Shego's name. He has handwriting worthy of the doctorate he never officially earned, Drakken notes with pride. "So, Miss Shego. How would you describe your current state of my mind?" he begins. For a moment, he considers wedging in his best psychiatrist-accent, but that always comes out somewhere in the vicinity of German, and that makes him think of Dementor, and neither one of them needs that right now.

Nary a second passes before Shego replies, "Disgusted." Her upper lip springs back as if to prove it.

Drakken nods and sagely strokes his pencil across the beard he doesn't have. "And how long would you say you have felt this way?" he says, purposefully ignoring the fact that that would make a great beginning line of a song.

"As long as I can remember." Shego's voice bites each word off at the roots, clean and crisp with nothing behind it.

He and Shego never seem to want to chat at the same times. If it weren't for all the scientific evidence to the contrary, Drakken just might believe they're two separate species.

Confound her! Drakken grips the pencil tighter, the lead - graphite, that is - sliding between his fingers. How dare she make him care about her and then duck all his questions? How dare she?

Shego watches him with her arms clamped in a fold. Just another set of barred doors he needs to somehow disable without activating the security system. And he always needs her help for those. He puts the pencil back to her diagnostic sheet and adds eight question marks and an exclamation point.

"Yes," Drakken says at last with a nod. "And what do you think may be causing that state of mind?"

Shego takes a step toward him. The top of the Thinking Chair and the top of her rise to about the same height, and Drakken wishes she'd sit down. "Um, maybe because the entire world is stupid?" she says.

Oh, yes. Definitely a different species. A species with pale green hoarfrost in place of skin.

A species he can't show he fears. The sadness and the anger try to disentangle themselves, and they just can't.

Drakken looks up from the paper. "Are you stressed, Shego?" he ventures.

Shego's expressionless expression doesn't change. "Me? Nooooooo, why would I be stressed?"

Okay, he's not so befuddled (Drakken's absolute favorite way of saying "confused") that he doesn't recognize sarcasm when he hears it. She is stressed.

Drakken bounces his eraser off the Thinking Chair's arm, plump and firm as a hot dog; it isn't the type of chair that greedily devours every object left unattended on its cushions - another reason he loves it so. He dons another frown, a thoughtful one, and it doesn't pinch as much to wear it. "What would you say is the biggest stresser in your life, Shego?" he says, and ooh, it's the most like a radio talk show host doctor he's ever sounded. Mother would be so proud!

For a moment, Shego lifts her head and scans the lair's ceiling, and for that same moment, Drakken believes she will answer him because it's such an authentic, un-composed move. And then she says, "Well, there's my boss - Dr. Drakken. He's a pain."

Strike! Or foul! Or whatever it's called in sports!

"I mean, for one thing, he barks orders at me all the time. And whenever things don't go his way, he throws a massive temper tantrum. Plus, he's super-needy and can't do a THING for himself." Shego sniffs. "Just for starters."

Every sentence is punctuated, not by a period or an exclamation point, but by a barb that nestles at least three layers deep into his feelings. Drakken squeezes the pencil so hard his knuckles pop - or maybe that's the graphite - and turns his most wounded, most scandalized look to her. He will refute that, he will counter every one of her points, except his throat needs to be oiled before it will let anything other than a long, seething grunt escape. He sees the black-smudged areas beneath his eyes piling into bunches as they always do when he's upset.

Shego alternates between watching him and examining the cracks in the floor that announce the presence of a shark tank beneath. Geographically, she is much too close to him, but psychologically, she is much too far away. Another barb twitches on her lips. "So, you got a diagnosis for me yet?" she says.

Drakken glares up at her through what seems to be a thick choke of smoke between them. The comparison makes him picture soldiers in mud-trenches, craning their necks above ground every few minutes to see if the enemy is gaining on them, a picture that wads up inside him, another knot. Shego isn't an enemy. She is an ally - a hostile ally, if there is such a thing. And she should be crouched in his trench, with Drakken, covering him and once in a rare while, when she is caught off guard and he has a Doomsday device at the ready, letting him cover for her.

A tempo starts in Drakken's eardrums, hot and clanging. He remembers Shego clutching her temples. Is there any way that she has this going on inside her, too, and her wiseacre routine is just a Halloween costume for it? A really, really immaculate costume with no seams or tears visible? Drakken finds himself close to smiling at the idea.

He takes a moment to practice, to oil his throat with several dozen swallows, before he speaks in the smooth, deliberated manner he has been working on as of late, because he understands that spewing out facts makes him seem more overloaded CPU than formidable foe. "Yes. I think you're lonely, Shego," he says.

"Lonely?" Shego's eyebrows knife together, which is almost as scary as a green-glowing hand or a body tensed to pounce.

Drakken gasps a mouthful of eraser crumbs down his windpipe, requiring several brutal fits of hacking to clear it. Shego doesn't appear particularly impressed. At least she doesn't try to give him the Heimlich or anything, probably because she's smart enough to know that coughing equals breathing. Drakken reminds himself of that - he is breathing, as useless as the air he's taking in feels.

If she's that mad, does that mean he's very, very, wrong - or very, very right?

"Yes," he says again once he's able. "And I would prescribe - getting a dog!"

"A dog?" Shego repeats, as if he has recommended adopting an entire colony of free-range fire ants. Actually, she'd probably like those better.

Drakken nods. "Like Commodore Puddles."

Commodore Puddles trots into the front hallway - must have been drawn by the sound of his name, the smart little pup. He prances back and forth between Drakken and Shego, toenails clicking. His tail wiggle-waggles, quick and hopeful, as he looks up at Drakken, and it warms a chamber of Drakken's heart that he really should try harder to keep hidden.

"See?" Drakken gestures down to his splendid, panting poodle. "It's simply marvelous to walk in the front door, and have someone be so happy to see you! Jumping on you, dancing in circles, drooling, trying to lick your face, making you feel like the most vital person on the face of the planet - "

Shego turns a palm upward. The twitch still perches there, ready to be launched, but the hornet-stinger look to it has faded. It's. . . gentler now. Not gentle. But gentler.

"What do I need a dog for?" Shego says. "I've already got you."

With that, she turns and walks away, the swish of her footfalls disturbing the relative quiet less than the swish of his pencil across the paper. Drakken stands there, bewildered and interrupted and a score of other things that can't explain the grin poking its way through like a mole peering out of its tunnel.

That might just be the nicest thing she's ever said to him.