~Entering the home stretch now, guys! Thanks to everyone who's been reading. :)~
48. You can't prepare for everything. But things work out in the end. . . usually. . . don't they?
He's drowning again.
Not in a formidable ocean this time. Not in a swift-flowing river or a deep lake. Not even in a pond, which would still be a feasible, if embarrassing, way to meet your end.
No, this time he is surrounded by a thick, black substance, tar-like and yet corrosive. Fantastic if he were able to scrape it onto a slide and slip it beneath a microscope lens. Far less so when it rushes up his nostrils and into his sinuses, down his throat and into his lungs, where it multiplies, spreads, infests him.
He tries to do what everyone else on the planet would do, yell for help, but thin sutures of the substance hold his lips closed. And when he thrashes and swings, he hits only emptiness that still manages to sting where he connected with it. He is in a world without the laws of physics, a world where his substantial brainpower has been neutralized.
That's when the laugh starts from beside him - a laugh without bottom, without limits, without mercy. Its cold notes plunk to the ground, one by one, like a pile of bricks, and with each one, an identical brick of fear drops onto Drakken. It shouldn't be happening this way. Laughs shouldn't have brute strength lurking behind them.
"I will take it!" slinks out around the laughter. "I will take it all! Everything you think you have taken for yourself - it all goes straight to me!" Its cruelty crawls toward him, and he instinctively knows that if it should reach him, it and the spiraling, spitting darkness inside him, the person his mother loved will never again emerge.
As its first touch blisters his flesh, he -
- bolts upright, and he screams. And screams. And screams.
But how, when his lips are stitched shut?
Except they aren't. Drakken lifts a hand to them and finds them dripping with sweat and raw-gnawed, but intact and mobile. And he can feel things here. Not good things - his belly going through the spin cycle, and his contacts burning as they rub his retinas. Still, it's enough to cement him in reality.
The reality where he has yet to conquer the world. The reality where it's the middle of the night, and Shego isn't here to set things right. The reality where he only climbed into bed because the old plot-well has run pretty dry, and sometimes unusual geniuses receive inspiration through dreams.
Yes, sometimes they do. And sometimes. . . this happens, instead.
It sure seemed like that dream was sending him a message, but it did so via a bunch of abstractions that cry out for translation. The thought of deciphering them is far too similiar to being a college kid and taking a chemistry test where you're counted off for spelling. Or being asked to explain just what makes a painting pretty, when you could just point to it and anyone who isn't legally blind can figure it out for themselves!
Drakken glances down at his legs and releases another scream. Some red thing is wrapped around them, strangling him, like that carnivorous mutant octopus he almost fed James Possible to, all of his misdeeds come back to haunt him.
Wheezing in dry air, Drakken kicks and flails his legs free of its clutches. The carniverous mutant octopus lets go without a fight, which is surprisingly submissive for a carniverous mutant octopus. Suspicion piqued, Drakken leans in to take a closer look and discovers it is, in fact, his own bedsheets. Must have gotten tied up in his less-than-restful sleep.
Drakken wipes his forehead and tries to chuckle, but receives little cooperation from his body. A low-pitched keening comes out instead - the sound of a vampire bat being tortured, if he had to guess. Strange, his powers of observation are usually - all right, not as impeccable as he would prefer, but certainly not this. . . peccable, either.
Everywhere else in the world - well, everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, Drakken corrects himself - it is spring, but here in the lair the thermostat is set to winter-frigid all year 'round. Perfect scheme-brooding atmosphere. He blinks, surprised that frost doesn't crust his lashes.
It has now been four days since he awoke to Kim Possible holding his head above water. Drakken knows that for an indisputable fact, even though he usually has trouble keeping track of time. He knows because he remembers each individual sunset, how he watched it, dreading the night it dragged behind it, the night that used to be a close personal friend of his.
Four days since the world broke, and he doesn't have a single evil plot to show for it.
At first, right after the blackout ended, Drakken tried to assume the best - that the world was his, any muss or fuss handily deleted from his memory banks. But as the next few minutes unfolded, it became agonizingly obvious that he hadn't taken over the world, just somehow lost a day-and-a-half of his life. Enough time to change his clothes. And wake up in an ocean the color of Mars dust.
The only other time he had a gap this big in his memory was the day he got his wisdom teeth out as a senior in high school. When he surfaced from the wavy-edged haze, Mother told him he'd begged "that nice lady at the counter" for an "A+ patient" sticker, which featured a star remembering to brush - brush what, Drakken couldn't tell you - and stamped it proudly on the corner of his desk. Horrified, he ran to peel it off. Off it came, but it left behind this sticky residue no amount of saliva-shining could remove.
That's what he's feeling right now. The residue.
Fascinating, Drakken can almost hear some college professor purring at him. Please explain this symbolism to the class.
Why is it he must always be called upon to explain things he doesn't know how to, and then every time they get to something he wants to explain, is dying to explain, everyone tells him to shut up?
In spite of the chill, his silky-smooth jammies have turned slippery with perspiration. The giant monitor perpendicular to the foot of his bed gazes down at him, a rectangular cyclops, and Drakken knows beyond a doubt that, as much as he adores his giant soft bed, he will throw up if he spends another second in it.
Drakken catapults himself off the mattress and hurries back and forth across his room in a moaning, gasping tumble of energy, scarcely making barefoot contact with the floor, zigzagging between his closet and his shelves of science manuals. His bedroom is large but dozens of also-large objects crowd it, creating narrow spaces between walls and bookcases and television screens. Two or three laps around it winds him in a way it didn't use to, and he has to pause and prop himself against the laboratory desk he keeps in every room for those moments when impulsive geniuis strikes.
He looks at his shaking, near-gaunt arm. Glares at it, actually.
If the laws of universal human experience broke in his favor, he wouldn't have asked any questions. Wasn't polite to examine a gift horse's oral hygiene too closely, after all. But the fact that it conspired with every other natural force in the world to foil his schemes - he can almost feel his fingers running over his childhood desk and jamming to a stop in the tacky patches that kept it from being the pristine surface it was made to be.
Drakken lifts those same fingers and probes - scientifically, clinically - at the non-hole in his right ear, where he'd pulled the pierced earring free. At least it would be a scientific, clinical probe if it weren't for the shudder that encompasses his entire framework, which seems to be mostly composed of bone these days. In the rattling-around, Drakken tries to pry free the section of his brain set aside for conniving, takes a mental crowbar to it.
Nothing. If anything, it tightens itself down even more stubbornly. Maybe it came bundled together with his understanding of how he would up in the ocean, and now they're both gone, as if someone has scrubbed his gray matter with a different strain of Brainwashing Shampoo, one that rinsed away memories rather than willpower. In place of the usual sickening squirm of knowing he should have done something different, BBs of pain shoot through Drakken's chest.
BBs. Bebes. His first, worst robots. His greatly improved versions who were too smart for their own good - or maybe just for his good - who plotted to overthrow him even as he poured his heart to James and Bob Chen and Professor Ramesh.
That plan was marvelous, if - Drakken can admit it now, three years later - a trifle shallow. Prove himself to his old posse. Show them how badly their mockery had wounded him. Make them regret every single hurtful word they ever said to him. All good goals, yes, but he didn't really have anything planned beyond the moment they realized their mistakes and apologized to him. Maybe make them scrub his lair's toilets was about as far as he'd thought. He had such a strong thesis statement that he just expected the rest of the essay to fall into place around it.
Ah, yes, continuing with the college metaphor. Appropriate.
In the end, it hadn't mattered. James's hard yank of the invitation from Drakken's hand - he forgot how strong James can be. The Bebes turning against him, leaving him literally surrounded by enemies. And even as he scrambled to understand how such an uprising was possible in the brains he built for them, to save himself, three masculine guffaws - guffaws Drakken can still hear in the night, if he listens hard enough. Their laughs were fearless, but he's never heard a more cowardly sound.
And for the first time in his life, Drakken hadn't just wanted to toss someone to his sharks for convenience's sake. Rage hardened his arteries and went off in little fireworks behind his eyes, red-white-blue. Nothing else remained of the room except him and these men who kicked the ashes of his hope and sniggered about it. He yearned to tear James limb from limb with his own underwhelming hands.
Drakken's knees buckle - what a strange phrase - and now the rungs of the chair are the only things standing between him and the floor. He's never been this weak before in his life. Unnaturally weak, like the little kid at the end of that horror movie Evicting Evil. Which has never made much sense to Drakken, because wouldn't it be much more exhausting to hold some kind of evil spirit inside than have it leave?
Why does he suddenly get goose bumps on his scalp?
Drakken pushes himself upright, wobbling on legs that didn't use to creak beneath him, and limps back over in the direction of his bed. It gapes, open and dark, the sheets drooling down at the foot of it, ready to devour him. An electric-type bolt goes through Drakken, and he rocks away from it. A splinter of moonlight catches on the huge screen then, allowing Drakken a glimpse of his reflection - mouth aquiver, cheeks blanched, chest heaving in and out.
Not exactly a great likeness of a supervillain.
He looks and feels like he has forgotten to wear his long johns on a day with a zero high, looks and feels ragged and exposed without his. . . his ego? No, even as he stands there, shivering under his nice warm pajamas, he doesn't doubt his brilliance or resilience. .. and he hasn't lost his knack for obscure rhymes, either, apparently. So what is he missing?
Bravado. Drakken can't remember the last place he heard the term. Probably from a police officer, upon one of his many arrests. It meant - as far as he could suss out - a sort of counterfeit courage, used when your emotional finances couldn't splurge on the real deal. Underneath is. . . not cowardice, not exactly, but certainly something that would lead Jack Hench to disbar him from villainhood if he ever got a whiff of it.
Drakken casts his gaze away from the screen, unable to bear the shame any longer. Eddy, Hank Perkins, and that flirtatiously fickle DNAmy have already failed him as allies, yet he always thought if nothing else, he could depend on an alliance with himself.
Now he's not so sure.
Drakken tries to lean back and rest on his heels, a movement that lands him back-first on his bed, his bleak stare directed at the ceiling.
It's time to face the facts. Trying to squeeze out a plan these last few days has been like trying to get blood from spinach, or water from a turnip, or some other vegetative impossibility. He was saved by his arch-foe - which in itself is nothing new, but the feeling that he owes her something is as foreign to him as wasabi. (Even in good Japanese restaurants, it's usually just green-dyed horseradish. Most people don't know that.) He's been at this for over twenty years, and the night he came the closest is in the running for Worst Night Of His Life.
Brilliant and resilient as he is, his life has become a YouTube video, buffering and buffering but never managing to load anything of substance. And he is the figure in his own nightmares.
Or is he?
Drakken bites down on his thumbnail, hears it crack off at the tip, coughs out the little shard before he can breathe it back in. He pictures himself as the main character in a video game, creeping armed around dark corners, not having encountered any little enemies in a while, knowing he is overdue and it can only mean a confrontation with The. . . Big One. (The boss is what the teens today call it, he learned in his forum-chatting time on the 'Net.) As skilled a player as he is, any gambler with a lick of sense would bet on him. But the fact he remains that he doesn't have a monopoly on frightfulness.
And it's strange how. . . frightful that is.