A/N: Featuring toddler Drew. Enjoy!

3. Better-half

Flashback - December, 1966

Three-year-old Drew Lipsky's hands were not on the Christmas tree topper as they were supposed to be. Instead, his small fingers were playing with the ends of his father's hair that was in need of a trim. His own slicked-back and neatly combed hair was in contrast to the more relaxed look his father was sporting on the weekend, though his hair was still tidy of course. His mother wouldn't allow otherwise.

She herself had pearls around her neck, as she nearly always did—something else that young Drew liked to get his curious fingers on, and would be reprimanded for.

"All right Drew, hold the angel. Up we go!"

Drew was lifted by his father's strong hands to place the angel atop the Christmas tree. As he did so, wrinkling his forehead as he tried to get it positioned just right, the oven timer went off in the kitchen.

"Oh, Dear, I have batter on my hands. Can you get that?" Drew's mother called.

Drew watched the ornaments and boughs seem to move rapidly in front of him as he was set on his feet before the tree, and then turned to toddle after his father into the kitchen. When he reached the doorway the heat stopped him, and he simply watched as his father put on his mother's large floral oven mitts and made the room even hotter as he brought the large ham out from its scorching confinement.

He had just barely set it on the stove top to rest when the telephone rang. Drew looked over at the device on wall, painfully out of reach, and then glanced back as his father closed the oven with his foot as he took off one oven mitt and leaned across the small kitchen to answer the phone.

"Hello?" he said, but Drew lost interest at that moment as he saw his mother portioning out cookie batter onto a tray. Behind her on the stove, the kettle started to whistle, and Drew watched her look briefly distressed as she glanced between her husband on the phone and the source of the disrupting noise.

She started trying to wipe batter from her hands, but Drew watched as his father then hopped back toward the stove, telephone still at his ear, and removed the kettle and set it aside on a trivet. He watched the smile of thanks from his mother followed by a playful wink from his father as the tall man returned to the phone call. And then Drew's young eyes returned to the batter being formed into cookies on the tray.

Present - November, 2005

Shego watched Mama Lipsky pull the turkey out of the oven moments before the timer went off, and slide the scalloped potatoes in and close the door moments after. She returned to her stand mixer to check the status of the dough, and when the kettle whistled a moment later she spun around to turn the burner off and began pouring the promised tea.

Shego's eyes drifted to the Christmas tree that had been set up and decorated early—all by Mama Lipsky herself—and then she looked back down at the photo album Drakken was showing her. She looked at the image of a very young Drew, grinning broadly as he was flanked by his flame-haired mother and handsome father, in front of a Christmas tree decorated the very same as the one in the room in front of her. She looked up at the angel tree-topper and then back to the photo, and again to Mama Lipsky as she approached them with cups of tea and a plate of cookies.

"Oh, thank you Mother!" Drakken said happily before biting into a cookie.

"I'm so glad you two arrived early so we can chat more!" Mama Lipsky said. "I won't be much longer."

Shego looked back at the photograph and felt a swirling feeling in the pit of her stomach. She bit her lip.

"Are you sure you don't want help?" she asked, her eyes lingering on the image of Drakken's father.

Drakken looked over at her in surprise.

"Oh no dear, I'm fine!" Mama Lipsky assured her as she began pulling the dough out of the mixing bowl to work it by hand.

Shego watched her for a moment and then picked up her tea. When she turned back she nearly spilled it, startled to find Drakken still staring at her in astonishment. She swallowed slowly and then cleared her throat.

"You were saying?" she said quietly.

Drakken looked a bit uncertain, but then continued on with more stories of his childhood as he gestured to the album.

"Yes, hmm. As I was saying... It wasn't long after that Christmas that my father passed, and..."

Shego listened to him as he talked, but looked again at the singular photo in the album and then glanced surreptitiously to the kitchen where Drakken's mother was hard at work to prepare the grand meal. Having heard some of Drakken's memories and stories, she was suddenly deeply and humbly impressed with how the woman had managed to raise a son and maintain a house—and still did—without her better-half in a time when it was far less common.

'Or maybe...' Shego thought, watching the woman skillfully manage several pots on the stove at once, '...she was his.'