KP – One Oh One : Part XX – The House of Drakken
Drew Lipsky, better known as Doctor Drakken, did not like going to the store. Actually, unless it was Karaoke night, he didn't like going out at all. That meant being around people and when you got right down to it, he didn't like being around most people. Sure, he craved recognition and respect but that didn't mean having to be surrounded by the people who would give him that, at least not up close. Once upon a time he relied on his henchmen to do that. There, he called them henchmen! Let that overpriced pompous piece of work Jack Hench sue him now! The roll of bills in his pocket was all the money he had to his name. What good is suing somebody who really didn't have anything to take? With the majority of his equipment now long gone, there was little, if anything they could take from him any more. Even that small wad of cash he had with him wasn't really his. It had been handed to him so he could go buy groceries and a few other odds and ends.
Those odds and ends utterly gave him the creeps.
At least relatively few people paid him any attention. It took him half an hour to cover up all his blue skin with makeup, and even then it made his face itch, more so than it did regularly anyway. He still didn't know what he was going to do when it got warmer. It was the middle of November and there was already snow on the ground. He'd have to ask why it was they had to live so close to that thrice-cursed Middleton. Why couldn't they live somewhere warmer? (and a tad further away from his mother!)
Why couldn't they live where they didn't run the chance of running into Kim Possible? Granted, he had no idea that his nemesis avoided Smarty Mart and Bullseye like the Plague, so he managed to look over his shoulder every so often, expecting to see those glittering green eyes and that shining auburn hair, along with a cadre of Global Justice agents ready to haul him in.
Even though he hated going out shopping he felt relatively safe in the gigantic discount store. With his blue skin under wraps, his ponytail tucked into his collar and a baseball hat on, nobody paid him any mind. With shabby jeans (bad shabby, not stylish shabby) and a flannel shirt all wrapped up in a light autumn jacket he didn't exactly cut an imposing figure as he would have in his dark blue lab gear. Then again, that was the point, wasn't it? What good would it do him or the one who had sent him on this errand if the authorities were aware Doctor Drakken, Mad Genius and near ruler of the world was doing some light grocery shopping at the local discount retailer?
Wandering through the frozen foods section he checked the list. He wasn't about to screw this up. It was bring home the right things or don't come home…period. He looked at the immaculately printed list and scowled.
"Bueno Nacho-To-Go frozen Chimiritos? Arrgh! You'd think that's the last thing we would have in our freezer!" He growled, scanning the brightly colored boxes. Finding the right section, he reached in and grabbed a box. His scowl grew deeper when he saw the graphics printed on it. There, grinning like a dad-gummed fool was Possible's buffoon sidekick, dressed in faux Mexican clothes, a floppy sombrero and a cheap fake mustache. Grumbling he threw the box into his cart.
"Say my name." He mumbled to himself a couple times. Then he stopped and thought about it. What was the little buffoon's name anyway? Little? No, not so little any more. He'd seen his picture on one of the tabloids the last time he'd been in here. Something about Kim Possible getting engaged to him. (Drakken wasn't aware they had been engaged since summer, it was only recently they'd sent out a press-release after becoming aware another tabloid was about to break the story anyway.) The kid was half a head taller than Kimberly Anne now, probably as tall as he was if he'd ever stand up straight. It was also a lot harder to call him a kid, though Drakken was quite old enough to be his father. He was still skinny but somehow he looked like a man instead of the child he always thought of him as.
He grumbled quietly to himself. The world outside was passing him by. The buffoon was growing up and was actually going to marry Possible. All the while he was no closer to his dream of taking over the world.
No. That was not going to be happening now. Priorities had shifted. All take-over-the-world ventures had been put on hold, though whether that was temporary or permanent, he still didn't have a clue.
"Blueberry and banana cheesecake ice cream?" he scratched his head under the cap. Maybe it was better if he was going to wear a hat to leave the toupee off. No, scratch that. There was only one person in his life who knew he wore a 'hair system' and that was a gracious plenty. "Do they even make such a flavor? Gross." He muttered as he searched out the ice-cream section. Normally she couldn't get enough of Edy's Fudge Ripple but lately her tastes had been running wild. Somehow he always imagined her as a mint chocolate chip type himself.
The flavor actually existed, which surprised him though it was one of those brands that came only in pints, so he had to get several of them to last at least a few days.
Drakken scanned the list, half expecting to see pickles there as well. Weren't pregnant women supposed to crave pickles and ice cream? Disgusting frozen Tex-Mex, freakish ice cream flavors and grotesque purple pop-tarts were bad enough.
He sighed slightly thinking about Shego. She was going pure nuts at home, virtually confined there despite her seeming good health, in the second trimester of her pregnancy. She had been told it was fine to go out by a here-to-fore unseen doctor she had been sneaking in to see her. How she managed to find a competent doctor without alerting the authorities looking for the two of them he had no idea.
Despite all his grumbling about the awful food on her list, thinking about her made him feel somewhat better. Sure, she was home, waiting to deliver a baby by a man she loved but who was now deceased but that didn't change the way he felt about her. Those feelings didn't become obvious to him until he nearly lost her.
In a way, he loved her.
It wasn't romantic love. He knew that was out of the question anyway. Not only was her just over twenty years older than her, he had no illusions about how the younger woman saw him. What he felt was somewhere between friend and family. There was a sense of protectiveness involved, especially now that she was in a her delicate condition.
All thoughts of being a sort of father figure to her aside, he did find himself looking at her a bit differently than he used to. For one thing, he noticed, probably for the first time, that she was actually a very beautiful woman. Even with the extra pounds she had put on recently he still felt that way. Sometimes she would notice him looking at her. Most of the time, she just glared at him. She may have turned her back on her criminal past as much as she could, but she was still Shego. Still, every now and then she would smile softly at him.
Probably just hormones, he told himself as he went down the list. Aside from his nearly undetectable false hair and his perfect teeth, he knew he was far from being an attractive man, and she liked hotties. Young hotties at that. The father of her unborn child had been only a few months older than her and judging from the few pictures she had of him, was a decent enough looking fellow, though a little soft around the middle. He had to count himself lucky that she now let him call her his friend.
He decided to risk Shego's ire by adding a bottle of Cocoa syrup and a jug of milk. He had to eat too, and that meant having a good supply of Cocoa Moo fixins. She was much more prone to drink diet soda and iced tea, since she wasn't allowed to drink the expensive imported beer or the Long-Island Iced Teas she normally liked. Maybe if he could just remember to call it simply chocolate milk she wouldn't go off on him.
For some reason, Shego getting on his case hurt worse than it used to. Maybe it was simply boredom on his part. Really, he had nothing to do but play handyman around the house. She wasn't about to let him tap into her resources to build any new doomsday devices, even if he had no intention of using them any more. It was what he did, and he was missing it. That, and he felt somehow defenseless without motion detecting pulse cannons, security beams and the like. The two of them living like semi-normal people in a non-descript little house halfway up Mount Middleton made him feel naked, like any one of his many enemies were about to break down the door and haul him back to that horrible place in Mississippi where they had been holding him.
He almost couldn't take another day of that. So far the best way they had come up with to determine if he was still the real Drew Lipsky was to literally draw blood every day. They didn't stop with piercing his skin either. They were constantly running checks on his DNA. Oh, if he had access to a real lab, he could quickly figure out ways to defeat such simple tests, but the closest thing he had to a lab was a table in his room where he would put model airplanes together.
At least there was some small benefit to having such tiny hands.
If he were a real self-help doctor like his mother thought he was, he would have long ago told himself that he needed to get away. This wasn't a new life, it was just hiding out from his old one. That he stayed was just part of his denial. What good was he really doing except to be a step-and-fetch for her. Once the baby came and she was back on her feet full time, he would be stripped of even that. There was no way she was ever going to settle down in one place. It would be too dangerous. If there was any one thing he knew about her, it was that she would do almost anything to protect her child. She was going to be mother bear with a cub. That meant a life constantly on the go, staying one step ahead of Global Justice, the FBI, Mossad and any one of hundreds of organizations who would like to have the trophy of bringing her to justice.
He hated that for her. It really didn't matter he was in the same boat as her. The child would be born and he would be cast adrift, possibly never to see them ever again. What was holding him to her? He should simply load up the battered pickup truck he was using and disappear. Then she wouldn't be able to tell him not go build anything. She wouldn't be there to scream whenever he said the words 'cocoa moo.'
She wouldn't be able to break his heart when she left.
Still, he was as much a creature of habit as he ever was. He would finish the shopping, go home, put away the groceries and try to talk to her. More like talk at her, since her face was buried in a magazine constantly. At least she had switched from her usual fashion magazines to stuff about babies.
Then again, that's were she was getting the notion to buy all that stuff that was giving him the creeps.
Somehow she knew she was having a girl. Some amino-something or other test. Much as he was a high-tech genius inventor (when he wasn't 'outsourcing') he was a bit old-fashioned. It just seemed wrong to know exactly what sex the child would be before it came.
No, that wasn't quite right. He could just imagine being ordered to paint the nursery blue, then have to turn around and paint it pink. Still, he hedged his bets and painted the room light purple. That would be fitting, considering she already had the girl's name picked out.
Amethyst.
He rolled his eyes slightly at that one. The kid certainly wasn't going to be born in February, so that wouldn't be her birthstone. The only reason he could come up with for the name was because that was the stone set in the ring she wore on a chain. She never, ever took that necklace off. He was sure she even bathed with it, though he made certain he had no chance of accidentally walking in on her. He had seen firsthand how quickly she could fire up her powers and he knew quite well how much she missed using them.
Drakken almost had to close his eyes when he found himself in the baby section. Fortunately she had the exact brand and model picked out for him. If things got too bad, he'd just find somebody and ask for it by pointing it out on his list. He tried desperately not to think what a 'breast pump' really was. He breathed a sigh of relief when he spotted it right off the bat. He quickly dropped it into his basket as if he were handling a live electric eel.
Somehow he managed to get through the line without exploding. It was just one more time he wished he could simply walk up to somebody, demand an audience with the manager and ask why on Earth they bothered having over fifty registers if only four or five of them were going to be open at a time. At least he had the tabloids to keep him company. Well, except for the fact that on two of them there were grainy pictures of Kim Possible and the buffoon dressed to the nines on a date somewhere. Ever since the engagement hit the papers, they had at least some mention on the cover. Drakken couldn't escape those two even in the checkout lane.
He muttered and grumbled all the way back up the mountain. The battered Nissan was too small to haul much of anything and the heater didn't work well. At least it had heat, which was more than he could say for his open-topped flying cars. Still, what would have taken five minutes flying took over forty-five on the surface roads.
Even unlocking the door made him curse slightly. There was an electronic security pad, but he still had to use and old fashioned key to open the heavy wooden door, all the while trying to hold onto the flimsy plastic bags. The thought of making several trips to the truck never even occurred to him.
The house was quiet. Even her blasted fluffy black cat was sound asleep…in his chair, of course. There was no way he was going to risk throwing the temperamental feline out of his recliner. He liked his blood right where it was. That is, inside his skin.
And his one-time henchmen thought Commodore Puddles was evil! Field Marshall Furball would take that little pink fuzz ball down in one swipe of her mighty claws.
The house seemed too quiet to him. "Shego?" He tried a couple times calling her by her birth name, but that just didn't stick with him. He started checking the rest of the house. Finally, he even risked a look in her bathroom. The entire place was deserted.
He frowned, then shrugged as he went into the kitchen to fix a large glass of fresh Cocoa Moo.
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