KP – One Oh One: Part XLVI

"I am certainly glad we are using the new internal scanning technology and not old fashioned x-rays, or I would start to be worried about whether Ron would even be able to father children."

Kim hid behind her hand, blushing mightily. "Mother…" she hoped using the rare, formal title would get her attention, or at least take it away from discussing any future procreation between the two of them.

"Now Kimmie, just think of the number of times the two of you have had to be examined after a mission. At any rate, Ron is just fine. He's going to be sore since some of those bruises go down into the muscle, but nothing is broken or even cracked. I don't know how he managed that, falling as far as you said he did, but I think all he needs is some good hands on care, if you know what I mean." Anne shut down the monitor and motioned for the technicians to pull Ron out of the scanning tube. "Okay, you know what's coming next."

"No, Mom. I'm perfectly fine. The only thing I got out of the whole ordeal was a foot going to sleep while crammed into that flyer on the way back."

Anne arched an eyebrow. Kim saying she was fine really didn't hold all that much water with her, considering her daughter could have both arms and both legs broken, be bleeding from several places while having all kinds of poison darts hanging all over her body and still say she was fine. Despite having a medical doctor for a mother, she hated being examined, even if it was something non-invasive like the molecular scanning tube. For an intelligent, educated young woman, she had this peculiar notion of what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her when it came to her health.

Kim held up both hands in front of her. "I am so not getting in that thing. The only lasting thing I got from this mission is a pair of sore shoulders, and In my not so humble opinion, the only person her who is qualified to do something about that is Ron. That, and the slight headache I'm having considering just how much Global Justice is keeping us in the dark."

Anne wasn't quite done. "Well, since you are so grown up now and I can't order you to be examined, I guess I'll just have to let the matter pass. Ron, on the other hand, is still in my care and maybe I did see some things that need my attention. Sure would be a shame to have to order his head shaved."

"MOM!" Kim shrieked, not knowing whether to take her seriously or not.

"Kim, at least let's go to an exam room and do this the old fashioned way. I'll do it myself, that way you don't have a stranger, or worse somebody you know here at the Medical Center doing it."

She followed her mother to one of the nearby rooms and slipped off her sweater and top. Her mother had a way of transforming into just a doctor in that particular situation and it didn't help that she didn't like being examined by any kind of doctor.

Anne didn't completely shift into doctor mode. She shot her daughter a little bit of a glare, but the newer black top had its own built in support and was designed to be worn without underwear. She made her shuck off the pants, thankful they didn't have the same feature and wrapped things up as quickly as possible.

"Well, for somebody who doesn't think she's hurt, you do have your own fair share of bruises, though a couple of them look a whole lot more like hickeys." She smiled warmly as Kim got dressed.

"Mom, we outgrew that a long time ago." Kim pulled her commando sweater back over her head, once again feeling whole.

"Oh, I'm sure you outgrew getting them where they would show."

Kim's hands came up again, this time curling into claws. With an effort she dropped them back down to her sides. "Are you satisfied? I'm okay. Ron's the one who fell and got into the real fight. For that matter, I really think we need to get out of here and see a vet. Rufus was in his pocket when we crashed.

Anne went back to the monitor and pulled up the scan of Ron. She zoomed in on the portion showing his leg. There, right beside it was a familiar image. "I don't know too much about mole rat physiology, but at least his bone structure is intact. Happy now."

"A little."

"So, how did your date go last night?"

"Date? We just ended up getting a late dinner after that other mission."

Anne shook her head, sitting down on the swivel stool at the work station. "I would think getting a hotel room would qualify as a date." She pantomimed taking a hat off. "Okay, no more doctor hat, just daughter to Mom. Is there anything you'd like to talk about."

Kim flushed slightly. "You know that's private."

"Oh, come on, Kimmie, I just want to dish with you. Besides, I really want to know how you got those hickeys."

"They're not hickeys!" She growled, frustrated. "Besides, we were tired and all we did was sleep. We didn't even do all that much making out. It was nice…not as nice as Valentine's day last year, but nice." The previous year Ron surprised her with a trip to see a ballet in Go City, bracketed by two very nice cross-country train rides. Then on Valentine's day itself he gave her the first of three rings, an emerald promise ring she often wore on her left hand. Since they had been on a mission, she was only wearing the smaller, less expensive of the two engagement rings. The newer one, from when he formally proposed in front of the family was nice, but she considered the first one the real one. He tried proposing over dinner, but the power went off in the restaurant. Then, on their way to another, cheaper place he stopped and went to one knee in the park. He not so much as got the words out of his mouth as the sprinklers went off, soaking both of them, but the moment remained one of the most magical of her life.

"Well, maybe this weekend the two of you can have a better night out. If that danged thing of yours can keep from going off that long. Maybe you need to have Wade install another button on it, a sort of electronic 'do not disturb' sign.

Kim smiled weakly at her mother, not wanting to mention it already had that sort of functionality. Not that it mattered, when there was a big enough emergency, she would be beeped anyway.

Unconsciously, her hand slipped down to the silver device clipped to her waist. Her own was presumed destroyed, since Wade couldn't make contact with it. Basically, from that point he wrote it off and transferred the cached data he had to a new one that would be waiting for her to pick up after they left the hospital. He did promise to build her another handheld, but the newly improved wrist unit would go a long way to replacing them all together. He was even working on one that looked more like a decorative bracelet with a small holographic emitter instead of the old flat screen. That one she was looking forward to. The current wrist design looked like a shrunken hand-held and was a little bulky for her tastes. Wade said it beat strapping the big one to her wrist, though for some reason she thought his exact words had been "beats strapping a monkey to your wrist." That didn't make a lick of sense, but she couldn't quite get the phrase out of her mind.

Her hand went right back to her hip when she heard a cell-phone go off. It took her a couple seconds to realize it was a much more conventional ring-tone than the four note emergency beep or the musical tone it played when it was just a simple incoming call.

It turned out it was her Mom's cell going off. Holding up a finger, she turned, answering the call.

"Dr. Possible. Yes, dear, I'm at the Medical center…what?...you have got to be kidding me…where is she?...no, take her to the guest room for the moment…how close are the…I don't…okay, put her on. Miss Godfrey? Okay…calm down. Just do what my husband says for the moment…go in there and lie down and don't get up for any reason…just do the breathing we talked about, I'll be there inside of twenty minutes." She closed the phone and turned back toward her daughter.

"You are not going to believe this."

Kim's mouth was hanging open. She caught enough of the conversation to get a pretty good idea what was going on. "Let me guess, Shego…"

Anne nodded. "Drew Lipsky just showed up at our house with her. She's having her baby."

Doctor Drakken paced back and forth in the Possible's family room. Every so often he heard a scream from the downstairs bedroom. Every fiber of his being should have been screaming out that he was in the home of what was perhaps his most hated enemy, but all of that was shoved aside in favor of a woman he had come to think of as a friend and probably so much more.

The sound of her agony cut right into his soul. He wanted nothing more than to go to her side and tell her everything was going to be okay. Yet, for some strange reason he couldn't make himself do it. He had known her for over seven years and in that whole time he had never heard her sound like that. She was Shego, one of the toughest human beings he had ever known. Even on the rare occasions when she was sick she didn't get that way. There had even been times when she was hurt, sometimes seriously and all that did was put her in a worse mood than usual. The thought of her in pain, with nothing either one of them could do about it was just so sick and wrong.

What had possessed him to bring her here? Even though they were both wanted criminals, she belonged in a hospital. He watched her final descent into misery the last few months of her pregnancy and it tore his heart apart, yet, now that the moment had come, he was terrified. He might have had no medical training whatsoever and in reality his 'doctorate' was nothing more than a piece of paper he had printed out from an online diploma mill, but he was still a trained scientist and knew just enough to know there were plenty of things that could go wrong. He had never been around a woman giving birth and he had no idea whether her screams were normal or an indication of something far more serious.

Another wail echoed through the house, this time lasting longer than the rest. How could the same woman he knew make such sounds, and why did they effect him so deeply. He started toward the bedroom, then stopped cold, running his hand over his face and back up over his hair, stopping to play absently with his short ponytail for a moment.

He started walking again, as if his feet had a mind of their own, but instead of heading toward her as he knew he should, he found himself walking out the glass door, out onto the deck. He leaned over the rail, on the verge of actually getting sick. A voice inside his head was screaming at him, telling him to go to her, but he couldn't. Clamping both hands over his ears, as if to cut of the sound of her pain and the voices in his head as well, he walked down the steps into the yard. Even though he wasn't walking in a straight line, he found himself on the edge of the woods bordering the property. He sat down heavily, looking up just in time to see a maroon mini-van pull up into the driveway, disgorging two red haired women and a blonde man. It seemed so peculiar to him that he was actually happy to see Kim Possible arrive.

Now maybe everything would be okay.

He sat there, rocking back and forth, muttering to himself. "I'm not that kind of doctor," he kept repeating.

"Doctor Drakken?"

He looked up, his eyes meeting those of the young man he had always thought of as just 'the Buffoon." For the first time in his life he realized just how caring those eyes could actually be.

Another set of eyes was focused on the house, hidden in a different part of the woods. Those eyes dropped to a small scanner gripped in his hands. His eyes narrowed as the vehicle pulled up. That young woman had cost him so much, so many times. She had literally done more damage than his sister had ever managed, even with the backup of her international crime-fighting organization. No matter. Soon he would have the key to his future plans in his grasp, making Kim Possible, Global Justice and all the others who stood in his way irrelevant.

Anne gently patted Sherry's sweat soaked forehead. The contractions were coming only seconds apart by that time, though she had no clue how long the labor might take. The last time she had gone through that herself was almost nineteen years earlier, taking over seven hours with Kim. Because of her own small frame, Jim and Tim had been delivered by c-section, a procedure she considered nothing short of a blessed miracle considering what she had gone through with a single child. Still, she felt for the young woman in her guest room. She might have been a doctor, but for too long she had been a specialist. This was going to happen mostly by the seat of her pants and already she had taken her cell-phone out twice, intent on calling for an ambulance. This was a job for doctors with the proper experience, not a brain surgeon working in a bedroom.

The woman who at one time was called simply Shego pretty much knew what was on the older woman's mind. The second time the phone appeared she gripped her wrist, a bit more forcefully than she meant to and shook her head.

For a moment she considered calling anyway. What did she owe this woman? After all, she had pretty much been trying to kill her daughter for years, or at least it looked that way. She belonged in prison, even if that meant the child she was about to have would end up growing up with another family. How could that be so bad? Sherry was adopted herself. Her parents might have been taken from her when she was a pre-teen, but up to that point she had been in a loving home with her four brothers. What kind of life could she offer the child anyway?

Going against her gut, she decided not to anyway, at least as long as things didn't go horribly wrong. She had given her word and unless one or both of their lives were in danger, she would abide by that.

"James, boys." She addressed the men in the room. "Outside now."

"Should I boil some water?" her husband asked, trying to be helpful.

The thought of her kitchen-impaired husband trying to do even that would normally have made her laugh out loud. "No. That is an old wive's tale. Just go up to our room and get me the tan bag out of the bottom of the closet, then wait outside this door for me to call." With that, she shooed the collected male Possibles out the door, leaving just the three women in the room.

Sherry locked eyes with Kim for a moment, something passing between the two women. Neither was quite sure what it was, but they both nodded to each other as the doctor went to work. Anne hoped it was simply the two of them finally burying the hatchet for good.

Using her laser scalpel on its lowest setting, she cut the jeans away. It was safer than using scissors, since it would slice through the cotton without affecting her skin. Kim propped up her back with a pile of pillows as her mother maneuvered Sherry into position. Every so often she would call out figures on just how much she was dilated.

"I sure wish you had considered having a c-section, Miss Godfrey."

"Believe me, Doc, if I had know it was going to be like this, I would have. Gah!"

"Just breath, Shego." Kim said, holding the older woman's hand.

"Where's Drew?" She looked past Anne at the closed door.

"I didn't see him when we came in. Okay, you're fully dilated, Miss Godfrey. It's time to push."

"Gah! I never imagined this could hurt so much, and would the two of you please call me Sherry."

"Sorry, it slipped out." Kim said.

Sherry started to say something else, but it only came out as another scream. She gritted her teeth and pushed with all her might.

At first, Kim thought Sherry was gripping her harder, then she realized her skin was slowly turning from its normal pale peach color to light green. She was losing control of her power. The hand clamped onto hers was surrounded by a light green glow. Kim said a little prayer that it didn't fully ignite, but she didn't let go either. Not that Sherry was about to let her.

"I can see the top of the head. Come on…Sherry. Push again."

She growled through her clenched teeth, pushing with all her might, her brown eyes slowly changing to bright green, brighter even than Kim's.

Ron looked down at the blue man huddled on the ground. Except for his unusual coloring, he looked so different than he used to, though that might have had much more to do with him wearing a faded flannel shirt and shabby jeans instead of his customary dark blue lab coat.

"Dude, don't you think you should be in there with them?" Ron asked, squatting down beside the former mad scientist.

"What for? I'm not the father. I don't have any place in there."

"Come on, Dr. D. Any idiot can tell you at least think of her as a friend. Look at it this way, you might not be the daddy, but he's no longer around. She needs everything she can get."

Drakken shook his head. "What good can I do. I'm not that kind of doctor."

"There's a doctor in there right now, one of the best ones I know, but that's not what she needs at the moment. You remember what you said to her when we showed up with her brothers?"

He looked up at the younger man, again meeting his brown eyes. "I remember quite well, Stoppable. I remember she nearly blasted me too. I might think of us as an evil family, but I'm nothing to her. Less than nothing. I can't even be with her in her time of need."

"You got her here, didn't you? That's got to count for something." Ron stopped for a moment. "Hey, you remembered my name."

"I did? Oh, wonderful, la de da. I can remember your name but I can't make myself be beside the woman I love."

Ron's eyes shot open. "Dude, did you just say…?"

"I said nothing, buffoon. Not…a…word." He shot to his feet, glaring at Ron.

"Listen, I don't care if she thinks of you just as her boss, as a father figure or as a friend, you're just about all she's got. Go in there. Look at it this way, right now the only people at her side are folks she's supposed to hate. Is that any way to treat her at a time like this?"

"Well, I can't." He sat back down on the cold ground again, resting his chin on his tiny fists.

"Why not?"

"Well…because I'm evil. It's what I do. Yes, she's like family to me, but it's evil family. We don't do all that lovey-dovey cuddly stuff like you and Kim Possible do. Okay?"

"Dude, you are so whack. You might be blue, and you might have this insane notion about taking over the world, but you're still human. Nobody's that evil, and I don't think that's it at all."

Drakken looked up at him, then past him, focusing on something beyond the young man. "Uh, I think we might have more to worry about than who is holding Shego's hand at the moment."

Ron turned, following Drakken's gaze. "Oh no, not him again!"

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