49. No team-ups with former cellmates! No matter how adoring and full of great ideas they may seem!
If only Lucre were giving him the cold shoulder.
The "silent treatment," that is, because Drakken doesn't really care one way or another about the temperature of Lucre's scratchy-sweatered shoulders. But nooo. The guy keeps hammering and hammering - well, Drakken thinks the term might actually be "yammering," but all he can see is a line of nails being driven, one by one, into his poor defenseless skull - for the whole ride to the police station, the whole process of being booked and fingerprinted, and the long walk down a hallway that is probably meant to shame them.
"Gosh, this is only my second time being arrested," Lucre says. "Well, if you don't count that time back in college when the cops busted up our study party. It turned out a couple of the guys weren't really studying the fermentation process. Well, they were, but not in the way they said they were - "
The door locks with terrible finality behind the amused-looking policeman. Now Drakken is sharing a holding cell with Frugal Lucre and a larger guy whose cursing graffities the air.
And it's Lucre's hammer-yammering that unnerves him more. If it doesn't stop soon, a whole lot of foul things are going to come winging out of the dark closets in Drakken's mind where he stores them away. Listening to Lucre blather while Drakken puked his throat raw. The sound of Lucre's laughter at his own unfunny jokes as Drakken tried not to breathe in the scent of aftershave and deodorant feverishly working to overcome secondhand smoke. Hearing Lucre yelp - it must have been Lucre's yelp, the sound far too wimpish to have come from Drakken's manly vocal cords - when yet another man bashed yet another table corner into Drakken's side, adding yet another bruise to his already-impressive collage of them.
In less time than it took to locate the Stockbot Master Remote, they will be transferred back to Cell Block D. Home of the unpalatable food, the public toilets, and the company of men who make Graffiti Mouth over there sound like a Boy Scout.
Home disgusting home.
Drakken tries to give the thought a sardonic flip the way he's heard Shego do, but even in its immaterial state, it quivers back and forth in his head. He's lower in vitality than he was before the Disappeared Day in the ocean, and he spent it all at Smarty Mart - an ironic turn of phrase, Drakken realizes. The shelf he's formed with his chin is in danger of collapsing, and to his horror, his mucus production has increased. If he lets it drizzle out, he will be branded a bawler for sure, and he'll be done for. They'll stuff his head into a toilet and flush it - the toilet, not his head - and knowing the exact amount of water pressure swirling around him will count for absolutely nothing.
An invisible weight presses down on Drakken's wrists, even though the cuffs were taken off twenty minutes ago. It, along with the specters of every other time he's ever been touched, press in on him, flow thick through him, all but saying, Ooooooooohhhhhoooo. He's already threatened Lucre's life if the man lays another hand on him - the good old unfinished, "Touch me again and so help me I'll - " because Drakken can't really think of how to complete it. Jerk away is probably most truthful, but how is that a threat?
It isn't.
A rock pings off the bars of the window, and Drakken jerks away from that. Great. Now Kim Possible has probably shown up to actually throw accuser's stones at him, even though he didn't do anything to her today, unless you count commanding the Stockbots to grab her and hoist her into the air. Which Drakken doesn't, because she did the same thing to him not long afterward, and he can testify that it doesn't even hurt. And those robots weren't even humanoid enough to be creepy the way the Bebes were. He's come quite a way since his Bebe-days. He doesn't have the stomach for it anymore.
Literally. His belly is a treacherous place to be as it is.
"Hey, Clueless, over here," someone says by the window.
It's a woman's voice, one Drakken recognizes even before he whirls back toward the window and looks up into a mask of disdain. It doesn't matter, though, because her hands are also out, lit by plasma. For a second, Drakken thinks maybe it is a mirage, fashioned by six months of waiting in Cell Block D, waiting to see her face at the hole punch of a window, where it never showed up. But if she were a mirage, he would have conjured her looking at him more kindly.
"Shego!" The name begs to be screamed, but Drakken has to settle for squeezing it tightly out, straining his gums.
Shego motions for him to get back, and when Drakken doesn't right away, she swings her plasma forward anyway. Drakken jumps in his boots and scrambles to stand back against the opposite wall as Shego slices through the bars as if they're made of dough.
Lucre's jaw practically dangles to the ground. Graffiti Mouth is stunned swearless.
Drakken doesn't waste any more time with them. He hurtles toward the window and slips into the hole, a narrow one that still gapes on either side of him. Man, he has lost weight.
"Is he coming?" Shego jerks a thumb in Lucre's direction.
"No!" Drakken snaps without hesitation.
Lucre sags like wet paper mache.
The thought of Lucre tracking along behind them, continuing his monologue about his college years, as if anybody wants to hear about those, is enough to skewer Drakken where he lies, half in and half out. But, if nothing else, he makes a handy scapegoat - it's Lucre who failed today, not Drakken - and for that, Drakken decides to grant him something.
"You can escape if you want," Drakken says. "But don't come chasing us down, or we'll - we'll -"
"We'll make sure you regret it," Shego says.
"Yes! That! Exactly!" Why, oh, why couldn't he think of that before? Drakken turns to Graffiti Mouth, who has recovered enough to jeer at him, and adds, "I always forget the English word for that."
It always works so well for Dementor.
Drakken rolls the rest of himself through the hole, managing not to cry out - at least, not above ten decibels - when his leg scrapes the cinder blocks beneath. He drops to the ground beside Shego, finds one last sample of vitality, and stretches it in a sprint across the blacktop to the hovercraft, where he has to stop and wheeze for air that doesn't come as easily as it used to.
While he guzzles oxygen down, Shego slips herself into the driver's seat and flicks the ignition to life. She's wearing her jumpsuit again, the wig-and-dress costume gone, as if it never happened. Maybe it never did. Maybe after the Disappeared Day, his brain is simply trying to reach its monthly quota of memories by manufacturing fake ones.
The idea of that, along with the very real fact that he no longer knows every nook and cranny in his own brain, keeps Drakken sullen and staring at the skyline as Shego pilots them home, answering only with grumbles when Shego glances at him sideways and says, "So how was your playdate with Lucre?" Such a comedian, his sidekick.
Upon returning home, Drakken makes for his Thinking Chair and drops into it - the way pianos drop onto sidewalks in cartoons. Shego, however, stays standing, levels her entire forehead at him, and says, "Dr. D, we gotta talk."
Uh-oh.
He knows that tone. It's the same one Mother used when she found out that he was skipping meals in order to contribute his lunch money to the Buy Drew a Chemistry Set Fund. It's bad, bad news.
Still, Drakken collects himself nicely, crossing his knees together. At the very least, he can send the first dart her way, begin the conversation on his terms. "Ah, yes, of course. And what shall you be mocking me for today?"
"Nothing," Shego says, and Drakken nearly falls off the Thinking Chair. Her body is so stiff he expects to hear it crack and crunch as she turns her neck his direction. They have gone to someplace colder than mocking, someplace the sun will never touch and melt. "This isn't mocking. This is a serious discussion about whether or not you MEANT to objectify me."
"Object...i...fy?" Drakken has to run it through his speech processor, and he frowns at the unfairness of the setup. "Shego, you know that I don't understand all of your obscure grammar terms!"
"It's not about grammar. It's about attitude."
"What attitude?" Drakken rises into a half-sit and glowers at her. "I don't have an attitude! You're the one with the -"
Shego cuts him off with a swish of her hands, which even plasma-less is enough to shut him up before he can say 'tude (the very latest in teenage slang). "Why'd you send me to Martin Smarty's office?"
Hmmm. Shego doesn't usually ask questions about his schemes - questions that aren't insults in disguise, at least - making this one more of a stumper than a welcome guest.
"Because, Shego," Drakken begins, "Martin Smarty seemed the gentlemanly sort, and I knew he wouldn't be able to resist helping a lovely young lady find her way out of the - err - corporate wilderness of his headquarters."
"Uh-huh," Shego says. "And why the dress?"
Drakken blinks. "So he wouldn't recognize you. It was part of the disguise. The same manner as the wig."
Shego's eyes narrow, like scissor blades snapping shut. "It had nothing to do with him looking at my legs?"
Drakken immediately rockets his gaze as far away from Shego's legs as it can go without flopping him over backward. It seems the only courteous - and self-preserving - thing to do."Why? What's so special about your legs?" he says.
Shego gets a curious expression, as though she can't decide whether to hug him or slug him. It disappears bit by bit as she bites her next question - a question that, by all accounts, she should already know the answer to. "Where'd you get the dress?"
"Your closet."
"Oh-ho-ho. So now you poke around in my closet, too? How often do you go in there, anyway?" Shego's glare comes closer, digs in deeper.
This must be how the victims of the Spanish Inquisition felt. "Never often!" Drakken says. "I only went because - well, because I needed a dress for you to wear, and the best place to find a dress for someone to wear tends to be in her closet." He pauses, considers what he's saying. "Or his closet, I guess, but that trend hasn't really cycled back aro -"
"Should stop talking now, Doc." Shego has retrieved her nail file at some point, and it punctures the space between them.
Drakken takes a subconscious step backward, his usually iron will bending in the face of her. . . face, which is hard as the diamond he needed to launch Operation Catastrophic Doom two years ago, hard enough to cut absolutely anything, even scratch his surface. Everything on her is flaring, mad, and he doesn't know why. Can't produce an antidote without a diagnosis. Even a fake doctor knows that.
"Why is this. . . such a big deal, anyway?" Drakken says.
"A big deal." Shego slams one hand onto the back of his Thinking Chair, missing his head by an uncomfortably small distance. "Let's just say that the last time a guy put me in a costume and told me it was part of his plan, it didn't end well for either of us."
She is speaking the way the cardsharps at the Bermuda Triangle club deal - slowly, painfully, one card at a time. Drakken glances at the hand he's been dealt, and there are a lot of big, important cards, yet none of them match. He looks back at her and offers a shrug that pinches his ego.
"And it was a guy with the same last name, too," Shego continues. Her eyebrows fly up significantly.
For a moment, Drakken is sure he is made of cards - that is how fast and how easy he crumbles. Except a house of cards wouldn't have nausea pulsing inside it.
Eddy.
Drakken must have shoved that one particularly deep into a dark mind-closet and slammed the door on it. But now - the images are already stitching back together in front of him. The earrings wide enough to punch a fist through. The shirt where you could nearly see her navel from the top. The pants that looked more like they'd been tattooed on than stepped into.
His wrists smart from where they were forced together behind his back, crouching him into a Quasimodo pose that he loves when he's pacing and ranting. But that wasn't a pose of cunning; it was meant to be one of - what did Jafar call it? - abject humiliation. Something else hurts inside him too, everything and nothing at all, the vaguely-registering sense of having lost electrolytes and not knowing where to go to get more, so you wander weak and confused.
How could Shego accuse her loyal-if-conniving employer of such a thing? After all they've been through together, she won't offer him the benefit of the doubt? He gets compared to a lout like his cousin?
The hairs on Drakken's nape turn to tiny swords."I'm not like Eddy!"
"Uh-huh," Shego says again.
Distrust. She reeks of it. Like aftershave and deodorant and secondhand smoke.
"I'm not!" Drakken hates his own voice in the moment, trembling on the divide between treble and bass clefs. "I'm not a chauvinist! Women can do anything men can do. . . ." Drakken pauses to fact-check his latest blurt. "Except pee standing up," he adds in the interest of science.
"Did you seriously just say that to me?" Shego says, the curl of her lip echoing her.
Ah, a question mark! It leaves him room to lie.
". . . No?" Drakken ventures.
A choppy sort of laugh comes out of Shego. It, too, tests positive for disdain, and Drakken suddenly wishes it were directed toward his latest evil scheme, or his fashion sense, or anything other than this.
"Look, Shego, from the bottom of my heart," Drakken says, the bottom of his heart catching a little in his throat, "I never intended to -"
"You were wrong to do it," Shego says. Toneless except for a bristle.
She's as good as accusing him of a branch of evil that has never appealed to him. Didn't even interest him when he was a teenager - at least, not in the way it interested Eddy. How does Shego not know that about him?
Drakken feels as if a thumbtack has collided with his chest. "I wouldn't go that far!" he says.
"'Course not." The narrow eyes roll. "Because you're allergic to criticism."
"I am not!" Drakken says.
Except maybe he is. The strawberry marks on his cheeks are proof positive, or at least could provide probable cause in the hands of a good lawyer. Yes, maybe he does have an allergy to criticism, and he wishes it came with an EpiPen so he could poke. . . everyone else.
"Then you can admit you're wrong," Shego says, oh so sweetly and innocently. A threat simmers beneath her skin.
And to think when she made the flippant reference to Li'l Diablo earlier, Drakken believed that was as painful as it would get.
Drakken gives her the dirtiest, most ferocious look his facial muscles can concoct and clears a tickle away before he speaks. "I. . . was. . . wrong."
For the love of nanotechnology, how does anyone say that without anesthetizing themselves first? It's torture, pure and simple.
"Come again, Doc?" Shego says. Her twitchy mouth tells him she heard him just fine, but he knows he won't get away with it.
"Iwaswrong!" He thought it would hurt less, doing it more quickly.
He was wrong about that, too.
Drakken peers at Shego. The length of her arms lie furled at her sides in their usual lethal-ballerina pose, as graceful as his are gawky. He doesn't know what he sees in her that is so different from what other men see, but he should have remembered that he can't trust their voracious, predatory eyes with the sight of her. He should have, and that's a regret almost as big as not sewing the master remote to his glove or wiring it directly into his own body so that it couldn't get lost.
(Probably the first one. He didn't have surgical tools, or a desire to operate on himself.)
"Shego. . . I'm sorry," Drakken mumbles.
The words stick in his craw, but they're better than "I was wrong." And he is sorry, so sorry he wants to hug her - just unstiffen his arms from his sides and slide them around her, only he might have better luck embracing an ironing board. Or the steaming iron.
"I didn't meant to objectify you. That's the last thing I'd want to do. . . well, that and stick metal tongs in the toaster. That's hazardous to your lifespan." Drakken waits a beat, tilts his head. "But then, so is ticking you off."
The ghost of a smile appears on her pointy greenness. "You're a prince, Dr. D."
Drakken rubs his fingernails against his lab coat. "I prefer to think of myself as the 'Supreme Potentate' type."
A groan follows, and she can even make it ring with sass.
Drakken touches the back of his wrist, still tender where the cuffs chomped in, and takes another look around the lair, seeing the couch and the lab table and the television. The complete and utter lack of bars and eternal white-flame lights. He was cuffed earlier this afternoon. . . and now he's home. Somebody finally reread her contract.
"By the way," Drakken says, waving a hand around so as to make the remark seem casual, of no real importance, "thank you for springing me from prison. This time."
Shego turns her nail file to her fingertips. "No problemo," she says, and if there's anything under it, it's submerged deep enough that even Jacques Cousteau would have a hard time finding it.
Drakken sighs from the depths of his relief and throws all the rest of the day's events into a dark mind-closet. Locks it behind him.
Fortifies the lock with a chair under the doorknob.