50. When the train you are on is set to explode, grab your doom weapon of choice and GET OFF IT! There will be other chances, other trains as long as you are still around to attack them!
The inside of Drakken's eyelids is black. Plain black.
The color so striking on evil-lair decor strikes him in a different manner - in the spirit, a bolt of discouragement. Normally, when he closes his eyes, it's the cue for the details of his plan to come frolicking in the space provided for them, resetting the scenario of his victory again and again and again. Even if he's in between schemes, he still has room to salivate over his end goal: the opulence of his palace, the submission of the crowds, the velor lining of his world-conqueror cape.
Now, no matter how many times Drakken clicks the mental file and begs it to open, there is only one distant still of a throne that appears more brassy than golden. A few algebra equations float, limp and unsolved, on either side of it.
Drakken groans and lets his head loll to the side, wincing at the blood pounding within, doing a fair imitation of a thundering herd of cattle - or of Silly-Hatted Scientists who had the gall not to invite him to their Brilliant Minds Convention. Today and yesterday, he has been immersed in pain. Everything is pain. Stand up, pain. Roll over, pain. Try to flick his eyebrow, pain.
Nevertheless, remaining still is not an option. Not after he has finally gotten a good night of sleep - well, a long night of sleep, sleep filled with red oceans and cloudy onyx masses that part enough to leer their fangs at him.
Let's see. That was last night, which means it was two - or has it been three? - days since Drakken's ingenious plan to slip mind-control serum into soldiers' sandwiches was sadly defeated. When he cranes his neck, which feels as hard and brittle as a piece of kindling, Drakken can make out the shredded remains of a notecard on the floor, the telltale green singe at its edges leaving no doubt as to how it met its demise. The train didn't even blow up after all, or so he assumes. A train exploding and taking everyone's favorite teenaged busybody with it would certainly have made national news.
The redheaded little nuisance - shouldn't she be studying for final exams or something? - will live to fight another day.
Drat.
Instantly, Drakken thrashes, feels salt water pouring in through all of his orifices, sliding down into his depths, tying itself together into a bundle, a bundle that threatens to pull him down to the ocean floor and keep him there among the giant squid and the anglerfish. It's the same feeling he's gotten, ever since the Disappeared Day, when he pictures destroying Kim Possible - completely different from what he always used to experience, which was the pure formula of triumph. Well, okay, maybe it was shot through with a pinch of hoping it wouldn't be too horrific to witness, but certainly not enough to taint the formula.
Where was he anyway? Kim Possible. . . the Disappeared Day. . . the train. . .
Ah, yes! The train. The train whose roof he skittered across, trying to find the proper boxcar before the whole line of them was obliterated. The train whose soot he tried not to breathe in as Kim Possible aimed her strong-legged kicks his direction. And then a deep, dark circle took shape behind her, like a well turned on its side, and only when Kim Possible ducked did Drakken realize what it was, and by then there was nothing his sluggish-with-cold instincts could do.
He doesn't remember feeling his brain glance off the walls of his skull.
Too bad, because it certainly would have been a unique and scientifically insightful sensation to remember. Surely much more so than this stupid, commonplace pain that Drakken already knows so well he could write its biography.
Everything becomes a drooly blur after that. Shego was there, all of a sudden, saying something - probably something unkind, because he remembers a gray curtain of sadness draping down after her words. Blindly, he staggered toward the hovercraft, the ground warping at interesting angles - toward him, then away - as he struggled to keep from losing the few bites of dinner his excitement let him eat. Resting his forehead against the dashboard, oh so lovely to just let himself fall forward.
Next thing he knew, everything around him was sterile. Poking. Prodding. The fizzy, almost ticklish smell that he recognizes from the little pastel bath balls that Shego keeps in her bathroom. (He doesn't go poking around in there that often, especially not since the Dress Incident, but one of the henchmen just wouldn't get out of the shower, and it was a Code Red emergency!) Shego's hands, steady as tiny tanks on his shoulders. People in stark white lab coats that made his own cobalt shade look even muddier and sootier than it was, moving around him.
No, "moving" is not the right word. He never saw them move. Just wink out of existence and pop up somewhere entirely different, like those little plastic targets at the carnival you're supposed to spray with water right as you finally got a good aim lined up. They always came popping up right when he was finally settling into sleep, too.
Ordinarily, sleep does not appeal to Drakken the way it does to other mere mortals. If he doesn't have a specific scheme in the works, he'll snuggle into his PJs once Shego has left for the evening, sometimes even enjoys burrowing under the covers, but only because it's comfortable. Sleep is a waste of time that could be better spent strengthening one's plans and perfecting one's weapons. And it's a big bully beside, sneaking up on you every couple of days and abducting you, forcing you into its world full of brilliant plans that would be forgotten as soon as you awoke and laser-breathing monsters that wouldn't.
That night, though, was different. His face weighed a thousand metric tons, tipping the rest of him forward, and he couldn't hold himself back. For once in his life, he wanted to sleep, and instead he was wrestled awake and interrogated on what his name was, where he lived, who was the president of the United States, what year it was.
The medical reason would be immediately obviously to anyone who hadn't taken a blow to the cerebellum, but then, if Drakken belonged to that category of people, he wouldn't have been in the hospital to begin with, now would he? He was released with instructions to rest quietly for a while. No reading. No notecards. No surfing the 'Net. And certainly no hunching over a lab desk, working the kinks out of a new evil scheme. The doctor specifically said not to let him focus on any one thing too much for the next couple of days.
"That shouldn't be too difficult," Shego quipped, obviously forgetting how intently Drakken can focus when he's stuck on an idea.
Correction. How intently he could focus. For the past several weeks, ever since the Disappeared Day, his thoughts have been little live anchovies, so quick he could barely catch them, and too slippery to hold onto for long if he did manage to. Shego's thoughts, he's sure, have always been dead sardines, neatly stacked and balanced within the orderly arrangement of her brain.
It's as though he's having a midlife crisis, only his mind is what's receding, and he's always been decidedly more vain about that than his hairline. The brainwashing serum was the first plot to make it past the blueprint stage in nearly a month, and even that didn't cooperate as well as it should have. Letters that were so tidily printed inside Drakken's head came out twisted and scrawled and jumbled on the notecards, but by the time he was finished and capped his pen, he always knew what he had meant.
When he looked back on them hours and days later, they were barely decipherable. Drakken would snatch up handfuls of them in a blind panic and flip frantically through them, just like he used to do with his phonics flashcards, wondering how they reached out to every other kid in his class except him and terrified of forgetting one and being labeled the dunce he wasn't.
And then he did forget one.
A notecard, that is. Rather vital one, too. One that said that the train was only supposed to act like it was about to blow up. Not actually do it.
That isn't even the scary part.
The scary part is how Shego threw open the train-car door and hurled herself out, and Drakken. . . didn't. . . follow her. He remembers feeling something inside him rupture, the fluid of fury spilling out in the form of hundreds of tiny cries of No!
No! - this was his first truly inspired scheme in forever, and he wasn't going to stand back and watch it get tossed into the mass grave where all his failed schemes rest.
No! - he refused to allow himself to be foiled by Kim Possible, let alone his own oversight.
No! - he wasn't going to give up.
No! - he wasn't going to run away.
No! - because there might not be another plan - ever! - if he let this one go.
And so he'd hauled himself out through a skylight, up onto the top, running as fast as his infuriated legs could carry him, searching for the car that held the soldiers' food shipment before the whole thing could blow sky-high. Never once did he consider that even if he succeeded in slipping the serum between slices of bread and ham, it would all be destroyed anyway in a matter of minutes.
Too scared. Too desperate. Too shaken by the failure of the notecards he thought he could trust.
In the most abysmally frightening moment of his life, Dr. Drakken begins to lose faith in his own brilliance.
No! booms through him again, painfully of course, since he can't catch a break, with the force of a stick of dynamite shoved into his brain. No, there are other schemes in there, he thinks, crunching his fingers in his hair. No, I'm not done yet!
All he has to do is get to the lab. Nearly everything in the universe can be predicted - and therefore, controlled - by the use of algorithms. All Drakken has to do is find the one that pertains to total global domination, plug in variables he knows better than his own contact prescription, and he's in business.
Even Albert Einstein never found that. Of course, he was too much of a goody-two-shoes to even consider searching for it, much less sharing it with the world. That will make Drakken's discovery of it a billion times more significant than it already would have been!
(Smarter than Einstein. Ahhh, now there's a bolstering thought!)
Sitting up feels like raking a pitchfork along his muscles. Hot, fresh waves of pain course over Drakken's face, dragging sweat - at least he hopes it's sweat - behind them. Fortunately, the intensity of it closes his throat before he can make a sound. Gritting his teeth to bear it, Drakken scoots from the middle couch cushion to the bottom one, and the silky cloth of his pajama bottoms squicks across the cushions.
Just the smallest of squicks, almost inaudible even to Drakken himself, yet in an instant Shego plants herself at the foot of the couch. Her feet barely seem to touch the thin layer of plaster that's been clinging to every shark-tank crack in the floor since the henchmen rebuilt the place. Curse her and her superhuman hearing and her superhuman strength and the gibes he can see resting so easily on her twitchy lips!
"And where are you going, Sunshine?" Shego smiles at him, and the threat is unmistakable.
Drakken's own grin automatically flashes to life, shielding him from the wrath she could pull out any second. "Oh. . . nowhere."
"Darn right you're not." Shego drops onto the end of the couch and creeps her hand across the distance between them. It tells him, as clearly as any police blockade ever has, that he shall not pass. "Definitely not to the lab to bake up another one of your 'plans.'"
Her fingers form mocking quotes around the word, as if his plans don't even deserve the title. It aches in his head, right next to whatever's left of the concussion.
"Now, Shego," Drakken says, still holding the grin in place, "I'm sure you're aware that the doctors have underestimated my capacity for healing. . ."
"Hey, I bet you could get run over by a train and just get squished and pop back up like some cartoon character, but I'm gonna trust the guys with the medical licenses over Dr. Disaster Incarnate."
She's looking at him in that way again, as though he's a madman. Not a world-conquering madman, either. A kissing-pigeons-down-in-the-park madman. The very title that Drakken has always embraced begins to itch and peel at him like those fake tattoos he licked on in prison.
"But - but -"
"No 'buts,' except yours staying on this couch," Shego says, and Drakken blushes, because did she have to say that out loud? The glimmer in her eyes is almost playful, though that does nothing for Drakken's mood. "Seriously, give yourself more than six seconds to get better, okay? You're not Wolverine or somebody."
Or me. She wants to say it, Drakken can sense, but she leaves it hovering awkwardly above them. She must see that his frustration is growing, must know it is directly linked to his stubbornness.
Drakken growls at her but slinks his way back to the arm of the couch, as far from her as he can get, and folds his hands up so he can prop his cheeks on them. The equations of his life still flash in strobe lights behind his eyelids, but they're accompanied by an uncertainty entirely new. What if, after decades and decades spent trying to solve them, complicating and simplifying and working to keep both sides equal, they finally reduce down to something such as "five equals negative two"?
Unsolvable. False.
The thought is so disquieting that Drakken's entire body begins to quake against the sofa in loud thumps. He tells it to stop - commands it to stop - but, like everything else in the world right now, it is apparently outside of his jurisdiction. The power he craves has eluded him once again.
And he's weary of it.