Drakken pushed the hover-saucer as hard as it would go. He was fairly sure that they were over international waters by now, but they wouldn't really be safe until they were back on the island, in the lair – if even then. The planes with bombs had bombs designed specifically to deal with lairs hidden in caves these days.
Shego had been crying virtually the entire time. Under other circumstances it would have freaked him out, but one of them had to hold it together.
"Are you sure she's dead?" She sobbed for the third time.
"Yes," He answered shortly. He'd tried to be gentle before, and gentle hadn't worked.
"B-b-but h-how? D-dih-did y-you see h-her…"
"Her body?" Drakken finished for her. She winced. "They'll be lucky if there is a body." The statement had the same effect as a slap in the face, which was what Drakken had been hoping for. Shego stared at him with her eyes wide and shocked, but her hysteria had been broken.
"But if you didn't see her body, how can you be sure?" She asked.
"Shego, I'm a mad scientist. I build weapons. Explosions are a big part of my job. And it is simply impossible that she – that anything human standing in front of that blast – lived through it."
----
For the rest of his life, Ron would never remember how he got from where he was, crumpled against one of the cafeteria's remaining walls (Is that what I hit?) to the pile of rubble that Monique said Kim was buried under.
What he would remember instead was Monique's shock-shaky voice, telling him what had happened:
"You were already dead, boyfriend. I mean that. That crazy green bitch was goin' critical and there was no way you were moving in time. But Kim did. I never seen anybody move so fast. One second she's with me, fighting the green goo guys, the next she's across the room, and she must've known she didn't have time to pick you up this time because she just kinda hit you or shoved you and you went flying and that's when the CGB went off. By the time we could see and hear again, the wall was gone, the CGB was gone, the blue guy was gone, and…and Kim was gone! You have to find her!"
Monique kept repeating that last sentence, or variations on it. In her shock, she'd somehow gotten it into her head that only Ron could find Kim. It made no sense, but neither of them was in a condition to notice.
If Ron did, in fact, have some intuition about where Kim was buried (and she was buried yes she was not blown apart and scattered through the parking lot like the rest of the debris), he didn't dare trust it. If Kim really was under there, she couldn't wait while he wasted time digging up a wrong guess. Not when he had a much more accurate way of finding her.
"Go, Rufus."
The naked mole rat leaped out of his outstretched hand and dove into the pile, squirmed through an opening between two cinderblocks, and was gone.
Then Ron started to dig anyway, dig randomly, just taking bricks off the pile and tossing them away. The less pile there was, the less Rufus had to search.
He had other memories of those terrible moments, but they were fragmentary, like flickers from a damaged film reel, or scenes from a randomly-skipping DVD:
Skip
Brick putting Felix down – at Felix's frantic insistence – and wading into the rubble, tossing away bricks and cinderblocks, levering up slabs of concrete.
Flicker
Students and teachers fleeing the school – except some are running toward the rubble, unwise as that is. Mr. Barkin. Zita. Others.
Skip
Bonnie closing her cell phone – was it even possible that no one had called 911 yet? Well, the more the merrier – and taking a place at Tara's side, scraping their perfectly-manicured hands raw pulling bricks and cinderblocks out of the pile and throwing them away.
Flicker
Wishing desperately that Felix's chair was still functional, wishing for the strength of its robotic tentacles as he tugs uselessly at a chunk of roof. Thinking for a moment that his wish has been granted when two very similar tentacles latch onto the piece of debris and flip it away, then recognizing the Wade-bot.
Skip
Josh Mankey staggering out of the hole in the cafeteria wall, stumbling drunkenly, the left side of his face grotesquely swollen, needing to be forcibly pushed away and sat down beside Felix so he doesn't do himself further injury while trying to help.
Flicker
The sound of sirens.
Skip
Rufus appearing out of the pile, chittering and screeching, jumping and waving. All of them rushing over to him, pulling, digging, throwing, sweat dripping from their brows and blood dripping from their fingers. Finally, a section of wall that had somehow stayed in one piece, all of them straining, grunting, growling, then the Wade-bot anchors itself to the ground and pulls and
Freeze Frame. Still photograph.
And it's Kim.
And she's
Shattered.
When Ron Stoppable gets his words back, that is the word he will use. But for now there are no words. There is no world. The people standing beside him – some of whom scream, or cover their eyes or stagger away looking for someplace to vomit or faint or all of the above – cease to exist. Even the sound of the sirens fades into the silence of an empty planet. There is only the scene before him, this image of perfect horror in ice-crystal clarity, this image that will stick in his mind like a splinter and feed his nightmares for the rest of his life.
The left side of Kim's body looks barbecued. Her face has been spared the burns – perhaps her arm was in front of it, still stretched out with her body at full extension to push him out of the way – but it has not been spared the glass. She must have been blasted through a window, because the right side of her body is a web of glass-cuts, dripping blood into the concrete dust. Her limbs are skewed from her body at angles that nature never intended, and the white of bone peeks through here and there. Worse, her body itself is twisted in ways that, limber as she is, simply should not be possible.
Only the tiniest whisper of sound and motion sullies the perfect stillness of this snapshot in time: the liquid rasp of Kim's breathing, and the fine red mist that settles on her lips.
Ron drops to his knees, ignoring the pain as they hit the bricks, and reaches out for her. He still has no words – his mind has been reduced to reds and blacks, the purest of primal grief, despair, and rage. He wants to gather his mate into his arms and howl.
Then a big hand slaps into his chest, holding him back, shattering the moment and its screaming silence.
"Don't even think of touching her, Stoppable," Mr. Barkin's gruff voice orders. "There's no way her spine is in one piece. You move her, she never moves again."
Pause. Reset.
The world comes back with a rush of sound and begins to move at its normal speed again.
----
Steve Barkin took a firm grip on the blond boy's shoulder and prepared to either physically haul him away from Possible or defend himself against hysterical resistance. God knew he'd had to deal with both before.
Not this time. Stoppable apparently didn't need the proverbial slap in the face. The will he'd demonstrated at Wannaweep asserted itself, and he pulled himself back from the brink on his own.
"But…she's…we need to do something!"
"You've already done more than anyone could've hoped for, Stoppable," Barkin said. "Now all we can do is stand back and let the paramedics do their jobs."
Obeying Mr. Barkin's insistent tug, Ron climbed to his feet and stepped back. As if that was some sort of signal, the paramedics in question swarmed into the area, concealing Kim from view and shouting things Ron didn't understand.
"Can I go with her?" He asked in a small, lost voice.
Mr. Barkin shook his head. "I've seen them let the boyfriend ride along before," he said. "But I don't think they want anyone in their way this time."
A slim brown hand settled on Ron's other shoulder. "Come on, m'ijo," Zita said. "I'll get you there."
"Mr. Stoppable, if I let go of you…"
"I won't do anything crazy, Mr. Barkin. I promise." Ron didn't look at Mr. Barkin as he spoke. His eyes didn't move from the paramedics as they worked on Kim.
Mr. Barkin released his grip, waited a moment to make sure that Ron would keep his word, then nodded at Zita.
"Come on, Ron," Zita said, tugging gently at his shoulder. "Vamonos. We can meet them there."
"No…wait…just a minute."
Zita knew very well what "just a minute" meant. Ron wouldn't move from the spot or even look away until Kim was out of his sight. She wasn't quite sure what to do about that. She didn't want him to see any more than he'd already seen. It could do him nothing but harm. But would dragging him away be any better, even if it was possible for her to do so?
Then it became a moot point. The paramedics lifted Kim up off the ground, strapped to a backboard, and rushed her to an ambulance that was waiting at the edge of the blast zone.
Ron flinched when the doors of the ambulance slammed, then watched it drive away until it was out of sight. Only then did he allow Zita to lead him away.
Steve Barkin watched them go. He noticed that Bonnie Rockwaller and Brick Flagg were leading that Monique girl away in the same way that Ms. Flores was leading Stoppable. That was good. Possible's two best friends shouldn't be alone right now. He had no doubt where they were going – they had a lot of bedsides to visit and friends to check up on, a lot more than just Possible's – but they were in no condition to get themselves there.
It was only as he watched them led away that he realized that neither of them had asked THE question.
Neither had asked if Possible was going to be okay.
----
Ron Stoppable walked numbly through a landscape from a nightmare, gently navigated by the girl he'd once bought tickets to every show in the Middleton Multiplex for. From. Not that she'd asked him to, but…
No, really. A nightmare. Granted, most of the dreams he'd had about the school getting blown up were actually happy dreams, but friends and innocent people didn't get hit by the flying pieces in those dreams.
Maybe that's what this was, a dream. Maybe he would wake up any second, in math class, Barkin yelling at him and Kim sitting next to him, looking disappointed but okay, and he would be so happy that he'd hug Kim first and Barkin second.
"Ron?"
"Uh?" Ron turned his head and saw a sight that reinforced his dream theory. But then, the Wade-bot always made him think that.
"Hey, Wade. Thanks for the help. How did you get the Wade-bot over here so quick?" His words were no different than they would have been at another time, but they were dull and lifeless, as if he was reciting them by rote.
"I sent it as soon as I lost contact with you," Wade answered automatically. "But forget that. Ron, what happened?"
"I was hoping you could tell me that, dude. Last I heard, Drakken and Shego were still in a GJ jail."
"They blasted their way out this morning. Shego's become a lot more powerful somehow – "
"I kinda noticed that."
"And they caused so much damage on the way out that it took hours for Global Justice to dig themselves out and re-establish communications. By the time they got the warning to me, Drakken and Shego were breaking every air-traffic law ever written on their way to you guys. I guess they were going for speed over stealth."
"Hey, whatever works," Ron said. But what Wade said made sense. Real-world sense, not dream-logic. So much for the Dream Theory. He looked around, and the Theory crumbled further. There were details here that he would never dream.
Students wandering around in shock, but the paramedics too busy with the injured to even offer a blanket.
Tara hovering anxiously by while a paramedic examined Josh Mankey's damaged face.
Felix slapping a paramedic's hands away, shouting, "Stop poking me! Of course I can't feel my legs! I haven't been able to feel my legs since I was four!"
That was too much. The paramedic's ignorance and Felix's indignation struck a spark of poisoned hilarity that Ron had no defenses against at the moment, not here in his nightmare.
He started to laugh. High, screamy laughter that he couldn't control or stop. His face turned brick-red and tears ran from his eyes. He wrapped his arms around his aching sides and his throat went raw, but still he couldn't stop. He bent over, then dropped to his knees, still laughing. His laughter was starting to sound more like sobs, and he was going to wet his pants any second now, but he still couldn't stop.
"Ron? Ron!"
He felt something poking at his knee while something else grabbed and shook his shoulder. That broke him loose, at least for a second. He opened his eyes to see Wade, Zita, and Rufus watching him worriedly. Rufus had been the poking, Zita had been the shaking.
"Ron," Wade said slowly. "You're scaring us."
"Sorry, Wade," Ron chortled, wiping his eyes. "I just…it was…'stop poking me'…oh, I'm gonna feel so bad for laughing later."
"Don't worry, m'ijo," Zita said as she helped him to his feet. "I don't think that Felix will mind." She glanced at Wade as she started to lead Ron away again. "I think you better talk to Ron later, kid."
"Yeah. I think you're right."
----
Dr. Colleen Possible raced toward the emergency room, along with virtually every other doctor in Middleton Hospital that wasn't actually in surgery. The ones off-duty but on-call were on their way.
She didn't know what was going on. None of them did. All that any of them knew was that all of the ambulances had been dispatched, and a lot of patients were incoming. Had it been some sort of mass pileup on the highway? A fire in an apartment complex?
She'd find out later. Right now, there were people who needed help, and that took precedence over everything else. Just like it did for her daughter.
Someone stepped out in front of her and she nearly crashed, but she managed to sidestep and keep going – or she would have if the person hadn't grabbed her.
"Excuse me – oh, Donna, it's you. I – "
"You can't go down there, Colleen."
"Donna" was the head of the hospital, Dr. Donna Richardson. She was one of the few people who could tell Dr. Colleen Possible what she could and could not do, but Colleen was more than a little surprised by this order.
"But I thought the ER needed all hands."
"They do. In about five minutes, the place is going to look like a field hospital in a war zone. But you can't go down there. You won't be able to help."
Colleen stared at her quizzically. "Why in the world not? What are you talking about?"
Dr. Richardson told her. When she finished speaking, Dr. Possible agreed: her concentration would be far from the task at hand if she went down to the emergency room. And her hands were shaking far too much to be of any use with an Ace bandage, let alone trusted with a scalpel or stitches.
----
Ron Stoppable had been wandering the halls of Middleton Hospital for hours. The doctors and staff were long-since used to him, so he was mostly left to his own devices. If it had looked like he was about to wander someplace private or dangerous (whether it would be dangerous for him, or dangerous for a patient if he wandered in), he might have been stopped. But it never did.
Of course, during the first few hours, everyone was so frantically busy that Dr. Drakken himself, wearing a neon sign and using a loudspeaker to announce "Hi, I'm Dr. Drakken, Mad Scientist and International Super-Criminal", could have gone wherever he liked.
Zita had been with him for those first hours. They'd mostly hung out around the ER, waiting to find out how their friends and classmates were doing. Not well, of course, but just how badly they were doing varied.
Monique, Brick, Bonnie, and Tara had all been treated and released. In Monique's case, she'd been sedated first. For a time, the doctors had wanted to keep Brick for the night, under observation for a concussion (as they were doing with Felix). Except, well…he didn't have one. Apparently, the boy was as hard to hurt as his namesake. Tara had actually lingered for a time after being released, keeping her boyfriend company.
He needed it. Josh Mankey was among the worst-injured of the victims of the attack on Middleton High School – after Kim, of course. He did have a concussion. A bad one. Hours after the fight he was still seeing three of everything, though no one was sure if that was because of the concussion itself, or the damage to the orbital bone around his left eye, which was going to need surgical repair. On top of all that, it looked like he was going to have his jaw wired shut for about half the summer. Tara stayed until visiting hours ended, then left with the promise that she would return as soon as they began the next day.
Zita's parents came to get her at some point in those hours, and she offered to take Ron home. He declined, saying he was looking for someone.
Now, hours into the evening, he finally found them sitting on a padded bench in what looked like a random section of hallway but which probably wasn't.
"Hi, Mr. Dr. P. Mrs. Dr. P."
----
Kim's parents looked up at him. He'd been at the Possible household before when one or the other of them came home from a long, hard, overtime day of work. He'd seen them tired. But they looked more than tired, now. They looked weary. They looked drawn and pale, except for their red-rimmed eyes (Ron was surprised to see that Mr. Dr. P's eyes were almost as red as his wife's, though he supposed he shouldn't be).
They looked old.
"Hello, Ron."
"Ronald."
"I guess it would be stupid to ask how you're doing," He said.
Mr. Dr. Possible snorted, though not in a bad way, and Mrs. Dr. P actually smiled. It was a bleak, terrible smile, though, and Ron wished that she hadn't.
"We've been better, as you can imagine," Mr. Dr. P. said at last.
"Where are the twee – Jim and Tim?" Ron asked.
Both Ron and James Possible winced. Ron at his mistake, James to hear a word that should, by all rights, have come from Kim.
"They're staying with your parents tonight," Colleen Possible answered. "They're really worried about you, you know."
"The twins?"
"Your parents."
"I called and let them know that I was safe here."
"They're still worried about you. They'd have come to pick you up if it weren't for the boys."
"Then they'd have to stay here with me," Ron declared. "I'm not going home yet."
"We know," James Possible said. "And we also know that you aren't even thinking about us or the boys right now, so why don't you ask what you really want to know?"
Ron looked down at the older man and realized just how exhausted that man was. The bluff, good-natured, absent-minded Mr. Dr. P was gone. He'd been scraped away, revealing the bare metal beneath. This was James Timothy Possible, Kim Possible's father and Nana Possible's son. He had no time or strength left for "how is your family?" – or anything else but truth.
So Ron Stoppable asked the question that he'd spent all these hours trying not to even think about:
"How's Kim?" He asked. "Has anyone told you anything?"
Mrs. Dr. Possible nodded. "They don't want to," She said. "But none of them are good enough to keep anything from someone who knows all the dodges and stalls."
"So…?" Ron prompted. "And…?"
"She's going to live through the night," she said dully. "That's the good news."
All of the strength went out of Ron's legs, and he dropped onto the bench beside them. "That's the good news."
"The cuts were bad, the burns were worse, the broken bones were catastrophic," Colleen Possible said, reciting it like lines from a monologue that she'd been running through her head over and over. As Ron was sure she had been. "And the internal damage nearly finished the job. Kidneys, lungs, spleen – she hardly has anything left that isn't ruptured, punctured, or bruised. But even that's not the worst of it."
Ron sagged in his seat. "It's not?"
"No," she said, her voice breaking. She paused, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then continued, her voice tightly controlled. "The worst is her spine, Ron. It's not a question of whether or not she's going to be paralyzed, but whether she's paralyzed from the waist down, from here down – " She leaned forward and touched her own back a little below her shoulder blades. " – or if she's going to be completely quadriplegic."
"But that only becomes an issue if she wakes up," James finished grimly.
Ron could only stare, wide-mouthed. No wonder their eyes were so red, and no wonder they were so emotionally blank and exhausted now. He gave them total props for retaining their sanity this long.
He could hear Rufus crying from his pocket. Not the imitation-crying that the mole rat used to express sadness or disappointment to the humans around him, but genuine whimpering.
Ron could understand his little buddy's reaction, but he couldn't cry himself. Wanted to. Couldn't. It was too big for him to get his head around. He'd known that KP was terribly, terribly hurt – hadn't he seen it himself? – but he'd never imagined that a human body could suffer such total devastation and continue to function.
"People can live through amazing things," Colleen Possible said, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. "And Kimmie is tougher than most. Still…" She left it hanging.
Still, Kim Possible – cheerleader, martial artist, skier, swimmer, world-saver and bon-diggity dancer, a girl who only needed a little help to fly – was going to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, if not actually in a bed. It was almost worse. Imagining a world without Kim was beyond Ron Stoppable's abilities. Imagining Kim so completely broken – he couldn't do that, either. And he didn't ever want to. But it looked like he'd better get used to the idea.
They sat in silence for a long moment, then James spoke up again: "So now we've answered your question, Ronald. Now it's your turn."
Ron tensed. "My turn?"
The older man nodded, and the look on his face was still James Timothy Possible, not Mr. Dr. P. He knew it was going to hurt all of them, but he still needed the truth.
"What happened, Ronald? No one will tell us. No one can. I don't think anyone knows. The only ones who do know are a bunch of kids who are mostly either in shock or sedated or both. That leaves you."
"That leaves…me."
"It does."
"Yeah…"
Ron took a deep breath, rose to his feet, and began pacing. This was what he had been thinking about during the hours that he'd wandered the hospital, trying not to think about how Kim was doing.
He felt sick. He didn't want to tell them this. Not now. Maybe he didn't want to tell anyone ever. But they deserved to know.
He took another deep breath. "How much do you know already?" He asked. "Anything?"
"We know that Drew and Shego attacked your school," Mr. Dr. Possible said. "But that doesn't explain what went wrong, why Kim got so badly hurt when she never has before."
Ron took a third deep breath. Count three before the plunge.
"I'm what went wrong, Mr. Dr. P."
----
Both Doctors Possible stared at him, wide-eyed.
"Oh, Ron," Mrs. Dr. Possible whispered. "What do you mean?"
"I think you'd better explain yourself. Quickly." Mr. Dr. – no, James Timothy – Possible said. His voice was stern. The sudden, terrible rage in his eyes hadn't made it to his voice. Yet.
Ron told the story of the invasion of Middleton High. He told of the battle with the syntho-drones: "Dr. D finally grew enough of a brain to use actual troops – he must've brought in every one Global Justice didn't find." He told of Shego's prodigiously increased power: "She was breaking landscape features every time she took a swing!" And he told of the final moments, when Shego had taken advantage of Kim's reduced mobility to target her with that power.
"So I realized that I needed to do the usual sidekick thing and distract Shego, so I grabbed the first thing that came to hand: a tub of mystery meat that got thrown across the room when she blew up the serving line. It still had a ladle in it, so I grabbed that and started throwing hot slop at her."
"Not a bad idea," James said.
"Right," Colleen agreed. "Grease burns are no joke."
"Well, as a distraction, it worked pretty well," Ron said. "She turned away from Kim, and toward me, and she was pissed. She was lit up like your house at Christmas time, and she was roaring. I was about a second away from being sidekick flambe' when something hit me."
"Kim," James said tonelessly.
"That's right, Dr. P. She hit me hard, so I don't remember a lot of the next minute or two, but Monique tells me that Kim somehow managed to get across the room from where she was fighting the syntho-drones and knock me out of the way…but that meant that suddenly she was in front of Shego instead of me."
He stopped in front of them, gave a shuddering sigh, and dropped his head, as if awaiting their judgment. "Kim rescued me, just like she always does. Just like I always depend on her to. I even – I even called for her, I said: 'KP, help, sidekick in trouble'. I don't know if she even heard me, I don't think she did, but I said it, and she saved me, but this time she couldn't save herself, so now she's…she's…" He swallowed hard. "I'll go now," he said. "You probably don't want me here."
He turned and started to walk away.
"Ronald."
Ron turned back, wondering what they could possibly want from him.
Both Doctors Possible were looking intently at the floor, both apparently pondering what he'd said. They glanced at him, then each other as he turned back to them.
"You'd better do it, dear," Mr. Dr. Possible said dully, turning his eyes back to the floor.
Mrs. Dr. Possible nodded and sighed, then got to her feet. She crossed to Ron, reached out –
And slapped him. Hard. Like punch-from-a moodulated-Kim hard. It lit up his entire jaw like the flashing lights on a test-your-strength carnival game and sent fireworks rocketing through his head. Ron staggered and almost fell. He pressed a hand to his wounded cheek and stared at blankly at the woman who'd always seemed like an endless font of patience to him, his eyes and mouth hanging open. He'd expected her to be angry, maybe even hate him. But violence? That seemed kinda OOC.
"Huh. Maybe I should've done it," Mr. Dr. Possible said, still seated on the bench. "You might've put a bit too much English on that one, honey."
Mrs. Dr. Possible didn't answer. Instead, she addressed Ron: "There," she said. "Now you've been punished. Did it make you feel any better?"
Ron, still staring in mute shock, shook his head.
"Did it accomplish anything?"
He shook his head again.
"Good. Remember that. We don't want you doing anything stupid. Like punishing yourself."
He tried to answer, but his brain seemed frozen by shock and amazement. His language centers seemed to have locked up or something.
"Kim – " Suddenly, her calm cracked and her voice broke. "Kim saved you for a reason," She said. "She felt that you were worth risking her own life for. She valued – values – you that highly. You don't get to turn around and prove her wrong by giving up."
"Giving up?" Ron stammered. "No, that's not what – "
"It had better not be!" Colleen Possible shouted. "Because my baby chose you over herself, and I'm not going to let you or anybody else act like that was an accident or a mistake! She chose you because she loves you – just like I would do for James, or my sons, or for her! I can't tell you how much I wish it was me in that bed right now, but it's not. It's her. And she's going to need you, if and when she wakes up, and you are going to be here."
The last six words were punctuated by hard jabs of her finger into Ron's chest. He shied from the pokes, then turned back to her. "Of course I am," He said. "I always wanted to be. I just didn't think – "
"No," She interrupted. "You didn't think at all, did you?"
With that, she turned and stormed off down the hall, wiping furiously at her eyes. Ron watched her go, stunned, then looked over at Mr. Dr. Possible, who was looking up at him mildly.
"What just happened?" He asked plaintively.
"She's angry at you," The older man answered. "I'm angry at you."
A harsh chattering came from the pocket of Ron's cargo pants, along with several hard pokes. He looked down to see Rufus glaring up at him.
"Looks like Rufus is angry at you, too," James Possible observed. "Doesn't mean any of us love you any less."
Ron blinked and stared down at James Timothy Possible, who was still too tired for anything but truth. Then his legs unlocked and he sat down hard on the floor.
"Love?" He asked blankly.
"You've been part of our family for a long time, Ronald. What was going on between you and Kimmie just solidified that."
"But…then…why?"
"Because of what you said, Ronald. Not what you did."
"But I didn't mean…"
"I know, Ronald. And in a few minutes, she'll be back to apologize. But I – and probably she – will still be pretty insulted that you'd think we'd actually be stupid enough to blame you for this."
"Wha – huh?"
"Anybody who lays any blame on you for what happened today is an idiot. Which is what you're being, which is part of the reason we're angry at you."
Ron's head hurt from more than just the slap now. "Uh, Cliff's Notes? Please? Not getting all the references."
James Possible sighed and leaned forward, looking the younger man square in the eye. "You and Kim lead very dangerous lives. Maybe we should have put a stop to that when you started fighting crime instead of rescuing cats from trees. Believe me, that's something we're blaming ourselves for right now. Sometimes. But then, Kim could have gotten this hurt in a car accident, or she could have broken her neck just as easily falling from a pyramid in cheerleading. And she wouldn't have done near as much good in the world." He paused. "I don't think either we or your parents have told you two nearly often enough how proud we are of you." The last words were choked, and his eyes were glistening. Ron said nothing, and after a moment, James continued:
"And during all of this time, all of your missions, you've rescued each other back and forth until you've probably both lost count. Haven't you?"
Ron nodded.
"Then this could have happened to either one of you at any time. In fact, it has. Did you think that we never noticed you limping, the day after a mission? Or reaching for things with your left arm, or wincing when you laughed?"
Ron shifted uncomfortably. It seemed that all of that effort he'd gone to to keep the 'rents from worrying had been pretty much wasted. "Well, I kinda hoped so."
James Possible raised an eyebrow at him.
"Which was another insult to your intelligence."
"That's right. So Kih – " He choked, and took a moment to regain his voice. When it came back, it was very strained. "So Kimmie was the one of you who finally ran out of luck and got seriously hurt rescuing you. All the more reason for you to be here when she wakes up, so she'll know that she succeeded."
He seemed to be finished. Ron slowly dropped his eyes to the floor.
Possibles. Just when you thought you knew them. He took a deep breath, tried to put on his widest, brightest, can-do smile; failed, had to settle for bleak certainty; looked back up into James Possible's eyes.
"Sounds like a plan," He said.
"Glad to hear it, son. But we need your head in the game."
Ron didn't even think about the fact that James Possible had just called him "son". It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
"It will be," he promised.
"Good," A warm, rich, weary voice said behind him.
Ron was on his feet in an instant, spun about to face the returning Colleen Possible.
"Is it out of the way, then? Do you have it out of your system?"
"Yes, ma'am, Mrs. Dr. Possible," Ron said, holding up his hands in exaggerated defensiveness. "No more need to be punished here."
She actually laughed then, a laugh that was soft and sad, but genuine. "I'm glad," she said. Then she reached out and – gently! – touched the cheek where a red impression of her hand still lingered. "Oh, Ron," she said. "I'm so sorry. You didn't deserve that."
"No," He said. "But I think I maybe kinda needed it."
She nodded, then pulled him into a hug. "Whatever happens," she whispered, "I don't want to ever hear you blaming yourself for this again."
There was so much in that statement. So much Colleen wanted to say, about how much Ron had meant to them over the years, how happy he'd made Kim, how many times he'd saved her and how brave he'd been, how he'd done everything right and they'd just run out of luck. But in the end, all that she could say was that one sentence.
They held each other like that, for a long moment, in silence. She was weeping again, softly, into his shoulder. He wished he could cry, too. Wanted to. Couldn't.
The hug felt wonderful anyway.
After the moment passed, they sat down beside Mr. Dr. Possible on the bench.
And they waited.
After a time, the exhaustion of the day began to claim Ron, and he found himself slipping sideways, leaning his head on Mrs. Dr. P's shoulder. Then he slid further down her arm as her head rested on Mr. Dr. P's shoulder.
Then the last thing he knew before a warm but troubled darkness settled over him was that her arm was around him, and maybe she wasn't Kim and maybe she wasn't his own mother, but she was close enough to being both that he fell asleep feeling safe and sheltered, and maybe that was what she wanted also, to be able to offer that comfor to someone if she couldn't offer it to the person she really wanted to.
So they sat that way, and finally fell asleep that way, waiting in the hallway outside the room where Kim was kept, holding onto her life with all of her broken but indomitable strength.
----
Drakken set the hover-saucer down in the lair's hangar, then heaved a sigh of relief. For the first time since breaking out of Global Justice that morning, he felt reasonably safe. This lair, unlike so many of his others, was truly secret. No sign posts, no magazine subscriptions. Just a tiny island – little more than the peak of a seamount poking above the water, really – far from any shipping lanes and barely a speck on the charts.
"Not a bad day's work, Shego," he said as he climbed out of the saucer and started to walk away, trying to cover his earlier panic with bravado. "With Kim Possible out of the way, we…Shego?"
He glanced back at the saucer. Shego hadn't gotten out. Shego hadn't moved. Shego, in fact, was still sitting in the same position, staring straight ahead.
With a sigh, Drakken returned to the saucer and – knowing that she would break his arms for such presumption if she was still sitting there because she wanted to – reached in and lifted her out.
He carried her to her quarters, marveling as he did so at how easy it was. Oh, she was heavier than she looked, being all muscle, but even that didn't add up to much. He'd benefited from the last few months in the prison gym, but that didn't change the simple, surprising fact that she was very light. Her strength and ferocity usually made Drakken forget just how small a woman she really was. Not quite as tiny as Kim Possible…as Kim Possible had been…but still…
A moment came to mind. He'd just received a rejection letter from one of the genius societies he was always applying to. He'd thrown it away, but Shego, curious, had grabbed it before it landed in the fire. He'd tried to grab it back from her, but she had held him away with her leg. Partly because it was a graceful, martial-artist thing to do…and partly because he could have reached easily if she'd tried to hold him away with an arm.
And the time that he'd tucked Nakasumi's Diablo-sketch into his coat pocket. She'd had to climb him to get to it.
He knew that, as a supervillain, such a difference should have made him feel more powerful. More dominant. Instead, it made him feel oddly…protective?
He banished the feeling as he tucked Shego into her bed (he pulled off her boots but left the rest of her outfit in place for fear of his own life). Not only was it bad supervillain form to feel that way, but if Shego ever found out about it, she'd show him just how little of his protection she needed.
He turned to walk away.
"I've been thinking."
"Ahh!" He jumped and spun, turning to see Shego sitting up in her bed. "What?"
"I've been thinking," She repeated.
"You've been catatonic," He retorted, forcing his breathing to return to normal.
"Have I?" She shrugged. "Well, I've also been thinking."
"About what?" He demanded, deciding that he was annoyed at being startled so.
"Have you ever noticed how bad we are at what we do?" She asked.
"You mean taking over the world?"
"Yeah."
"I actually think we're quite good at it," He said, a little hurt. "We've come closer to true global domination than any empire ever did. Especially last time. If it weren't for that Kim Possible – "
"That's just the thing," Shego said. "Why didn't we ever take her out? Before today, that is."
Drakken was a little bit puzzled about where this was going. "It's not for lack of trying," He said.
"No?" She said. "If we wanted to break her spirit, why go to all the trouble of Eric the syntho-hottie? We'd captured her before. Why not just turn her over to the henchmen?"
"What do you mean?" Drakken asked, knowing very well what she meant and hoping that the room's dim lighting (and his own blue pigment) would hide the fact that he blanched a little at the thought.
"One good gang rape would've pretty much done the job, don't you think?" She said bluntly. "She wouldn't have been much of a threat if she'd been afraid to leave her house, or so terrified of it happening again that she wouldn't come near us. Heck, if we'd made the Sidekick watch, maybe we could have even gotten the spirit-breaking twofer. If you'd done it that time you captured them all when you were handing out those stupidity hats, you could have had your revenge on Daddy Possible, too."
"Isn't that a little…gross, Shego?" Drakken asked. "I mean, she's so young."
Shego shrugged. "Hey, if there's grass on the field, she's old enough to play."
"What?"
"If she's old enough to bleed, she's old enough to breed," She said, her voice hard. "Look, do you think I'm the one who makes this stuff up?" The question was asked with such ferocity that Drakken didn't dare answer it, but he did wonder where the ferocity came from. "If she and the buffoon weren't screwing yet, they would've been soon. Does that make it any less 'gross'?"
"Well, uh…"
"Look," she pressed on. "If you don't have the nerve for real spirit-breaking, then we could've just killed her. Right? You tried to do that often enough."
"True."
"But if we'd really wanted her dead…even before I started powering up, I could blast holes through walls. One of those times she was out cold or tied up, I could have taken her pretty head clean off, or blown a hole the size of a basketball through her center of mass…which would pretty much cut her in two, come to think of it. Or you could've just put one of your rayguns to her temple, and zap!"
Drakken flinched, but Shego took no notice.
"Why didn't we just do that instead of all those stupid death traps with thirty-minute timers that she or her sidekick or his pet could get them out of in two?"
By now, Drakken's face had paled to the powder blue of a bad seventies prom tuxedo. The thought of Kim Possible in bloody chunks was less pleasing to him than he'd imagined it would be. The thought of Kim Possible with her spirit broken in the way that Shego had described was actually making him ill. But he couldn't let Shego know that. Besides, it was a moot point "Because that…uh…that would have been bad supervillain form, Shego," He said. "There are certain rules of engagement."
"So what? We're evil. I take candy from babies and you steal wheelchairs. When we run the world, we decide what's good form and what's not."
"Gang rapes and shooting prisoners is the way of common thugs and petty dictators, Shego, not world conquerors." He tried to sound as haughty and affronted as he could.
She just raised an eyebrow at him. "I just have to wonder how hard we were really trying."
"Well, if you're so smart," Drakken huffed, "You can come up with the next plan. Tomorrow." Glad of the excuse, he turned and started to stomp from the room.
"Dr. D."
Reluctantly, Drakken stopped in the doorway. "Yes, Shego?"
"Have you ever killed anybody?"
With a sigh, he turned back to her. He'd known what this was about all along, and he'd been trying to avoid it. "I honestly don't know," he said. "I've never been charged with murder, so I guess not. I've taken actions that would have resulted in people's deaths if I'd succeeded. I've certainly tried to kill Kim Possible often enough."
"So have I," she said. She wasn't looking at him anymore. Instead, she stared at her hands where they lay in her lap. "Be careful what you wish for, I guess."
Knowing that he was taking his life in his hands, Drakken sat down on the bed and patted her back. "You've had a very busy day, Shego. You're tired. Why don't I go make you a co-co moo, then you can get some sleep, and you'll feel much better in the morning."
"Please stop calling me that," She whispered.
"Calling you what?"
"Could you...could you use my real name? Please. Call me Sheila."