What the Other Doesn't Know
Unsticky
"So...how was your day?" Kim asked to break the silence and uncomfortable tension between her and Shego.
"Are you serious right now?" Shego asked with an amount of derision to the quality of her voice.
"What?" Kim said, not understanding what had Shego so offended.
"You're trying to have small talk with me, Princess? Me, a villain?"
"And?" Kim shrugged- or tried to, the gum preventing her from doing so. She didn't see why this should bother Shego so much.
"Heroes don't talk to villains. Don't ask them how they feel or how their day was," Shego explained. "They just kick their butt," she added with a note of bitterness.
"Well, maybe I want to."
"Uh uh," Shego shook her head. The gum had receded from their heads, leaving them free, but it was still taking a long time to melt off of their other parts. "That's not how it works."
"And why can't I break the quo for once? Why can't we just pretend to get along for however long it takes to make this gum dissolve? Than we can go back to hating each other's guts," Kim said, aware she might sound a bit whiny.
When Shego didn't say anything, Kim continued on. "Fine, you don't have to take part in it. I'll talk and you can just listen." And that was exactly what Kim did. She started deliberately talking nonstop about boring topics- mundane details no one would really care about. And it was beginning to have an affect on Shego.
"Argh!" she screamed out, wishing her hands were free so she could cover her ears. "Will you stop that already? I don't care about how your blue ink pen ran out right in the middle of your diary entry!"
"Well then maybe if someone else," she pointedly said, "had something to add to the conversation than we could talk about something mutually interesting."
"No way," Shego stubbornly said.
"Then I guess I'll have to continue talking," Kim was able to shrug now which meant the gum was receding even more. Meanwhile, Shego wished gum had gotten into her ears so she wouldn't have to listen to Kim talking about nonsense. However, by the time hour two struck, Kim had run out of things to say. There was only so much she could go on about.
And so they lapsed into a silence, only the shouts and cries of Drakken and Ron fighting from deep within the gum factory filling the air.
"Why are they taking so long?" Shego asked, more to herself than Kim, but the teen was glad to latch onto that, thinking Shego was finally talking to her.
"I don't know. Usually when we're around it takes less time, because we'll have destroyed something or another and the place is about to blow and we've got to vacate the area."
Shego forgot all about how she wasn't supposed to talk to Kim and chuckled in remembrance of all their fights. "Yea, we sure get wild, don't we. Remember the time we broke the aquarium tank and accidentally released all those sharks on the visitors?"
"I smelled like fish for weeks! And remember the time we fought in a makeup factory and busted open the containers of makeup there?" Kim said eagerly, eyes shining with past escapades."I came out looking like a clown and you came out looking like a goddess-like someone had done your makeup professionally." Kim could still recall wiping the white makeup from her eyes and seeing Shego, who had somehow magically gotten a splendid make over. Eyes shadowed, cheeks contoured, and lips red. Even her hair looked like it came from a L'oreal commercial.
Kim had been struck by her beauty, before she was struck by her fist and they had recommenced fighting once more.
Shego was thinking back on the same memory, but with amusement because Kim had looked so silly with blue around her eyes, a typical clown grin painted on, and those high brows. But her amusement was cut short when she recalled she wasn't supposed to be talking to Kim. "Hey, stop trying to get me to talk to you. We're enemies right now and not friends," she said with a downturn of her lips.
"But we're not even fighting. We're in the middle of a truce!" Kim pointed out but Shego squared her shoulders and sat there, lips tight.
Kim rolled her eyes. Really, why was Shego so annoying and stubborn sometimes? They chatted all the time while they fought- snappy retorts, a comment here, a comment there. But when they weren't fighting, they couldn't talk at all? This made no sense. Why was Shego being tight lipped? Was she afraid of saying something she shouldn't?
They sat in silence for another thirty minutes- Kim brainstorming on Shego's unusually reticent quality, and Shego thinking about how she wasn't going to talk to Kim as friends because she was going to like the hero even more and they were supposed to be enemies, damn it!- before Kim realized something. "Uh," she hesitantly voiced but needing Shego to know this. "I kinda...needa use the restroom."
"Are you serious?" Shego sighed out, closing her eyes in brief annoyance.
"I drank a lot of water before I got here, cause our fights always make us real sweaty. But we didn't get to fight a lot today and so...um, well you get the picture," Kim said, knowing this would irritate the taller woman and it did. But certainly Shego wasn't cruel enough to make her wait.
"Can't you hold it?"
"Nope," Kim shook her head.
"Fineeeeeee," Shego whined out. "Let's find a bathroom."
How they would manage to use it in this state would be a mystery and perhaps the most challenging thing Shego's done in her entire life. Breaking into places was easy compared to this.
Slowly, they got up, finding that the gum holding them together was already weakening. It had fallen away in chunks and only held them glued together by the leg and arm. Kim felt hopeful that they could manage this.
They were forced to walk together, stepping forward at the same time so they could progress smoothly. "I think the bathroom's this way," Kim pointed to the left.
"No, I swear I saw it this way," Shego pointed to the right.
Kim shook her head. "No, the boiler room is that way."
"The boiler room is to the left!" Shego argued.
"The bathroom is to the left."
"Right."
"Left," Kim shot back.
"You're wrong and I'm going to my way," Shego determined and began to walk off to the right.
"And I think you're wrong and I'm going my way," Kim jabbed a thumb into her chest with her free hand and headed left. Predictably, as they moved farther and farther away from each other the tension in the gum arose and moving became really hard, so much so that they were basically moving in place, teeth clenched and bodies strained until at last the tension snapped and they were forced together with a resounding snap.
They smashed face first into each other, nearly kissing while it happened, before collapsing into a pile of human and pink gum.
They groaned in unison and Shego pushed Kim off of her, for the teen was lying spread on her body. They rubbed their foreheads were the most painful collision had been and sat up.
"Were you just trying to get a kiss from me, Cupcake?" suddenly Shego felt mischievous. They had kissed several times now, and most of it was to annoy Kim in the heat of battle, (the rest unknowingly done by Kim as an accident when she had been trying to save Shego's life) but Shego found she didn't mind kissing the hero so much.
Kim, flushed red. "No, I wasn't!" and then she ran off from Shego, the gum causing the villainess to be pulled along with a startled yelp.
In the end, Kim was able to use the bathroom, with Shego forced to stand outside the door as far as the gum would let them. But now it was Shego who wouldn't stop talking, flustering Kim with almost coy language and suggestions about those kisses. And Kim wished she hadn't pushed Shego so hard to talk because she had gotten her wish but not at all how she envisioned.
Omake: A Not So Sticky Conclusion
"So, how's the latest plan on getting Kim and Shego to realize their feelings proceeding?" Monique asked, talking to Wade through a computer as per norm.
He slurped largely on his drink before answering. "During a mission the both of them got stuck together in gum and I gave them something to free them from that. But, I purposefully gave them a slow acting one so that they bond over the course of time. I think it worked with moderate success. They've been kind of flirting," he said, replaying the footage he had from the factory and allowing Monique to watch it with eagle eyes.
"A small step," Monique said, shaking her head sadly in conclusion. "How long will it take these two to get it together? It feels like we've been waiting years!"
"They're not exactly in an ideal situation. Their roles are so black and white- villainess and hero- it makes things more complicated because this is a child's cartoon and there aren't many gray areas to work with. We might need more drastic measures. I think we should focus on Shego first. She's more likely to be open to this."
"She's the villain- wouldn't she not be open to feelings of love?"
"Exactly because she's a villain, she's more likely to use her own feelings to fluster Kim as a tactic to win. Kim's the hero- and she's supposed to be oblivious to this, to try and fight the advances as she's been doing so far. But Shego will win her over. It's the perfect trope. Villain seduces the innocent Hero to win in battle, but accidentally falls in love with the hero in the meantime. But," and here he paused a bit dramatically. "I don't think she'll make an actual move on Kim until Kim's 18."
"That's gives us four more months to get them to realize their feelings before Shego can act on them and make Kim aware of her own." Monique nodded her head as she calculated the dates. Who knew that playing Cupid could be so hard?
"So even if things are moving slowly, it's actually the best for them."
"Yea," Monique rolled her eyes, "and the rest of us are stuck suffocating under all the unresolved tension between them."
"The hardest part is almost over. We're almost at the end. Stay strong," Wade advised and then cut off communications.
A/N: So, next chapter I'm going to try and finish up the anime arc (at long last!) and then I can get back to the main plotline. I've had their confession scene planned out for months now and I wanna get to it. There will be two more arcs before that, however, but they'll be feeling heavy to build up to the confession scene.
