Day 102
Shego walked into the lab followed by a trail of henchmen pushing pallets loaded with glass cages, construction materials, and biomechanical equipment.
"Yo, Dr. D.?" she called out to get his attention.
He was standing in front of the computer with his hands on his hips. Added to the usual graphs and computation programs was a small square in the top left corner playing a newscast. The line on the graph in the bottom lower corner—the one Shego had learned weeks ago to pay attention to—was not climbing quite as sharply as it had been.
"It's mind-boggling how many countries claim that others are overreacting, until suddenly their own infection rate is in the thousands," he muttered.
"Dr. D.?"
"Why can't they just learn from other people's mistakes!?"
Shego pointed the henchmen toward a corner that was void of equipment or experiments and then crossed the room to stand at Drakken's side.
"What's that say?" she squinted at the graph. "Over 100,000?"
"Closing in on one hundred twenty..." he scowled. He finally turned to her and looked over her appearance critically. "Why are you wearing that?"
Drakken was in his lab coat, and while the lost weight aged his appearance he had regained enough strength to be working his 'regular' hours again. And his 'overtime' hours. She had tried to put a stop to the latter but more often than not she went to bed alone and woke up alone, determined as he had become to stop the virus.
As for Shego's attire, she never went in for casual Friday or casual-any-day if they were seriously working on something. But that day she wore stretch pants, a t-shirt, and a light jacket.
"My suit is too tight," she explained quietly with a slight frown.
"What do you—?"
She had placed her hands over her belly, and Drakken halted his question. He pursed his lips slightly before turning back to the computer.
The baby was the last thing they seemed to be failing to communicate about. Shego hadn't felt the pain again that had occurred almost a week prior, but it hadn't stopped her worrying day and night. She knew Drakken was worried too, but the combined factors of crime increasing worldwide, governments locking down and forcing citizens to stay in their homes, and the hospitals turning them away seemed to have him at a loss as to what to do.
And Drakken feeling hopeless was Drakken not communicating. Or else, he was whining non-stop. But this wasn't a failed world-domination plan...
It had been another night and morning alone. Whether he had gone to bed at all or stayed in the lab all night, Shego didn't know. She wanted to lean into him, but she also didn't want to risk him just walking away. Instead, she talked about work.
"We've got the next load of stuff for your experiments. Where do you want it all set up?"
Drakken turned and looked for the first time at all the equipment being brought in. "Oh...yes, against that wall is fine. I'll get the blueprints..."
Drakken walked over to his workbench and Shego sat in the chair and stared up at the computer. Over 100,000 deaths...while devastating, wasn't as bad as what she remembered him originally predicting by that point. She looked at the chart that was largest on the screen that he had been staring at when she walked in.
That chart had too many lines on it that all started and ended in different places, and they were all in bi-colored pairs. Each pair had a flag of a country as identification. Most of the lines were rising in a curve that she knew represented an exponential formula, but about four pairs had the curve changing angle and not rising so steeply near the very tops of the lines.
"Dr. D., what does this mean?" she asked, glancing back over her shoulder.
He was standing near the far wall pointing at an empty space on the floor, while two of the henchmen were holding a large blueprint in front of them. Others were bringing in more equipment and removing it from the pallets.
"Hey, Doc?"
He didn't hear her, so she rose and headed back toward the corner of the lab. The workbench was covered in various papers, Petri dishes, and test tubes lined up in racks. She knew he was preparing to test a vaccine, hence the arrival of the glass cages; the monkeys and mice that the henchmen had been tending since they returned were going to be moved into the lab for the trials.
Shego wondered how one person could possibly do it. She would need to convince Drakken to let some of the henchmen prove they were more than just muscles, or else he might literally work himself to death. And given his diminished state, she didn't think that would take very long.
"...And label them A through K," Drakken said to the man holding the blueprints. Another man who looked far too scrawny for the profession he'd chosen approached Drakken nervously.
"Excuse me, Dr. Drakken?" The man's speech sounded like he'd been hit in the head too many times. "You really think you're gonna find a cure for this thing?"
Drakken grimaced. "Not a cure, but...a vaccine. To prevent others from getting it."
The henchman looked up at him with surprising earnest. "My kid sister died."
Drakken's brow rose, and Shego moved past them and toward the opposite corner. The mice had already been moved in and the cage was sitting against the wall by the back door.
"But...the disease isn't as harmful to youth?" Drakken asked.
"Yeah... But Katie had diabetes, same as me."
"Nn... What was your name again?"
"It's Phil, Dr. Drakken."
Drakken set a hand on the man's shoulder, causing all activity in the room to stop.
"I'm sorry for your loss, Phil."
The henchman looked down sadly, but then up with hope in his eyes. "It would have been me too, if you hadn't ordered us to stay in our rooms. I knew she was sick and I wanted to go home, but...you told us to stay locked up. You saved my life."
Shego leaned against the wall near the mouse cage and watched the odd exchange.
"Mm. Well..." Drakken said, drawing his hand back and fidgeting a bit. "Together we shall stop this evil and give hope back to the world."
'Together? Hope? Stop evil?'
Drakken had raised a fist in triumph and had a weak smile on his face. The henchmen looked at each other uncomfortably, and then resumed their work. The one Shego now knew was Phil headed toward the back door with a much larger Italian man whose name she didn't know. They nodded at her as they passed.
"Phil, I didn't know you had a sister?" the larger man said.
"I never mentioned her 'cause she went to school with Kim Possible, and I thought the boss would get mad. But I guess he wants to save the world now too..."
Shego peered after the men for a moment as they exited the lab. She glanced at Drakken who had a definite look of disquiet on his face as he continued telling the henchmen what to do.
Beyond wanting to stop the virus, he still hadn't defined himself.
Shego sighed and glanced down...and then saw something odd.
"Hey Dr. D.? One of your mice is dead."
This, of all things, finally got his attention. He left the mass of glass cages and equipment, glancing at her with a frown before peering down to where she pointed into the large cage.
Right in the center of the wood shavings lay a dead white mouse that had clearly been dead for some time. It was little more than fur, a tail, and eye-sockets. Its form was semi-collapsed in on itself as it had been left to decompose naturally and none of its liquids remained.
The other mice didn't seem to bother about it, one of them running atop it as if it was just part of the environment. Shego opened the cage and reached in, scooping up the near-weightless thing into her hand along with a few shavings.
"I'll go flush it," she said. "This one was probably dead when I bought these. Sorry about tha—"
"No!"
Shego almost dropped the dead mouse as Drakken grabbed her shoulders harshly, staring at the dead rodent in her hand in horror. She narrowed her eyes at him and jerked out of his hold.
"What's got into you?"
"You can't just flush it! It needs a...a proper burial," he declared, raising a finger in the air and looking solemn.
Shego blinked. "It's a test mouse."
"It was a living thing, Shego! It can't be ignored, or forgotten just because it was...because it was one of many!"
Shego kept blinking at him as he paced now in a small circle in front of her.
"It's a mouse."
Drakken turned and folded his hands behind his back, walking away from her. "You give the eulogy, and I can..."
Shego stopped listening. She left through the back door and headed down the stairs to the henchmen's quarters.
'One... Two... Three...'
These were the things about him that she wasn't terribly attracted to. When he did things that literally made no sense, and then kept at them even when presented with every logical argument against them.
'Seven... Eight...'
A door slammed above her.
"Shego!"
'What took him so long?'
She had reached the bottom of the stairs and begun crossing the very small living space that belonged to the henchmen, heading toward their public restroom. The off-duty men stared at her in a mixture of fear and fascination as she moved across the room at a brisk pace, Drakken's light and inelegant step growing closer on the stairs behind her.
"Shego! Don't you dare—"
She stepped into the restroom just as he reached the landing, the door swinging closed behind her. He ran inside just in time to hear the flush, and she was knocked against the wall of the narrow stall as he pushed in with her and stared in dismay at the swirling waters inside the toilet bowl.
"Nnghh! Why did you do that!?" he shouted into her face.
She glared at him. "It was a dead mouse."
He had no response, and after a moment she pushed against his chest.
"Can you move? It smells in here."
He backed out of the stall and she left the restroom with him fuming and following close behind her. She re-crossed the small living space without a glance at the henchmen and began climbing the stairs.
"It was a living thing!" Drakken finally said.
"It was a dead thing."
"Ngh...it used to be living! Living things are important, Shego!"
"Suddenly that matters to you? You didn't care when it was all the fish in the Great Lakes."
He paused, caught. "That was... Nyeh... None of them died!"
Shego scoffed. "Just your luck the weather machine had a built-in system for protecting them. You didn't actually care," she tossed over her shoulder as she reached a turn in the stairwell.
"Nnh... Well...things are different now!"
Scowling, Shego turned abruptly as he stomped up the stairs. "Would you stop shouting at me?"
The irritation in his eyes vanished as his jaw worked silently for a moment before stammering a few random syllables of excuse.
Shego frowned and turned back up the stairs. She was so tired.
"You're gonna kill most of them during your experiments," she said. "All those monkeys too. I don't see what the big deal is."
She heard Drakken's step slowing behind her. When she reached the lab she glanced at where the henchmen were trying to decipher Drakken's blueprints, and then headed back to the computer. She dropped into the chair and leaned back and stared at the over-bright screen. Drakken had caught up and was behind her again.
"I'll concede that for the greater goo— For the greater cause some sacrifices will be necessary."
Shego spun the chair half-around to smirk at him. "Pretty evil of you Doc."
He frowned. "But living things do matter, Shego! Like...what's-his-name's sister, and...your young friend Junior's father, and..."
Shego turned fully around. "We weren't talking about them. We were talking about a mouse. You wanted to have a funeral for a mouse."
He turned and stormed toward the workbench as he shouted. "I just don't think the dead should be discarded!"
Shego watched his retreating back as understanding started to come. It had nothing to do with the mouse, or with Senior or even the henchman's sister. It had to do with his mother, and the funeral that never was.
She had made the call to the police once they were safely back in the hover-car. She'd said she was a burglar who found someone she thought died of the disease and so was too scared to stick around. And then they had hovered far overhead, waiting until the police arrived. She watched through binoculars and confirmed for Drakken that everything was being taken care of while he cried inconsolably.
The phone rang later that day in the lair, with the call for Drew Lipsky because he was identified as 'next of kin.' With more composure than she thought he could have managed he told them that he had the disease too and was self-isolating, and to go ahead and bury her. That she shouldn't have to wait for him.
The real reason of course, was that super-villains at large couldn't go to funerals. Especially when they were the chief mourners and couldn't hide in a crowd.
Then the coroner had asked if he just wanted her cremated, since there wouldn't be a funeral. He managed to say 'buried' before breaking down in tears again, and Shego had had to give his apologies and make the rest of the arrangements. And so Mama Lipsky was buried next to her late husband alone on a cold day in March, with no mourners and no obituary, just another statistic lost to the disease.
Shego looked at Drakken bending over the workbench and scribbling notes about something in a test tube before loading the small vessel into a centrifuge with several others. She considered bringing the topic up... But she was tired of playing psychiatrist. She would if she really needed to, however...
She had her own problems.
"Dr. D.?" she called out after a minute, absently laying her hands on her belly. He turned and looked at her suspiciously, and she lifted one hand to point to the screen. "What does this mean?"
He walked over and looked up to where she pointed, hands on his hips.
"That charts the number of cases identified with the number of deaths for each country, all tracked in real time."
He typed a few commands on the keyboard and the graph then took up the entire screen. Shego leaned back to take it in and looked at the similarities of each curve.
"They're all pretty much the same, except for the starting dates," she commented.
"Mm. You'd think they'd learn," he muttered.
She pressed forward with the seemingly-neutral topic. "What do you mean?"
He stepped closer to point at the screen. "Well, you see these countries here that didn't reach a point of crisis until recently? They had the examples of all these others," he gestured toward the back of the graph and the earlier dates, "showing what happens if you don't take this seriously, so what do they do?"
"...They..."
"They aren't taking it seriously! Just these few here," he pointed to some very shallow curves, "have shown any common sense at all."
"...I thought you were studying robotics in college, Doc?"
"Robotics and chemistry. Double-major."
Her brow rose and she nodded. Not that it explained his sudden actuarial bent and apparent medical and biomechanical knowledge.
"They saw that the virus had entered their ranks," he continued, "and imposed a quarantine. And it's no surprise whatsoever that their rate of spread is far slower than everyone else who thought that one or two cases didn't matter. They'll still suffer like the rest of the world, but with potentially far less death."
Shego wondered where he was getting his information, but decided not to ask. The explanation of the chart was already a bit more than she wanted to be thinking about. She moved on to a different distraction.
"Okay. So how about this vaccine test?" she asked, slowly spinning around toward where the henchmen were building everything according to Drakken's blueprints.
Drakken rubbed his hands together and started toward the workbench.
"Ah! I have one viable candidate now with three more possibilities based on what I assume might happen. But it's all in theory only."
"Assuming, Doc? You know what happens when you assume—"
He turned to her with an expectant but anxious look that halted her words.
"But, what I really need for better results...are more tissue samples."
Her brow rose.
"All of the henchmen will volunteer, of course—"
"Capitalizing on the 'mad scientist' bit of this to save the world," she interrupted.
He scowled and rubbed his forehead for a moment before looking back. "Yes, well. It's not the first time my sanity has been questioned."
Her brow shot up again.
"So..." he cautiously beckoned her toward him, "if I could just...get a few samples?"
Something in his eyes gave her pause as he spoke. And in a flash she made the mental leap from the surface of what he saying to what he might actually be asking of her.
"You're not hurting the baby!" she cried, jumping out of the chair and backing away from him.
His eyes widened in horror. "No! No, I wouldn't! ...I mean...it would be useful, but I—"
She lit up her hands and backed away in fright. The idea that he would invade her womb and use their unborn child as a test subject for his obsession, when who knew if he had any real medical knowledge at all...
"Stay back!"
"Shego, I wasn't going to—!"
"Get away from me!" she hissed, backing toward the door and holding her hands up in warning. "You don't...you don't care about protecting life at all!"
"Shego—!"
He had started toward her more quickly, and she did a back handspring well out of his reach and landed near the door. She peripherally took in the stunned and unmoving henchmen as they watched the exchange between their boss and his side-kick. Drakken stopped his advance and stared at her in shock, his eyes pleading. Shego swallowed nervously as she stared at him. Her eyes flew to the corner as she heard the henchmen begin murmuring amongst themselves.
"Whoa... Shego's knocked up?"
"I thought she and the boss hated each other?"
"Who says it's his?"
Shego looked back at Drakken who looked utterly dismayed. She took a breath. Maybe...she had jumped to conclusions... Maybe—
A sudden sharp pain on the lower-right side of her abdomen had her gripping the door frame for support as a soft cry escaped her lips.
"Shego!" Drakken said in panic, starting toward her.
Lips trembling and tears filling her eyes, she turned and fled the lab.
'This can't happen... It can't!'
"Shego!"
She ran past the kitchen and down the hall toward her room, but then stopped abruptly outside his door. She had been spending all her nights there again. She needed somewhere to hide, to process everything, but...he would find her no matter where she went.
"Shego!"
She froze as he rounded the corner and stopped, staring at her as he took a second to cough and catch his breath.
"Get away!" she growled, lighting her hands again.
He shook his head fiercely, his eyes filled with fear. "Shego, I wouldn't...I would never use the baby."
"You want tissue samples, then use your own body!"
"I have," he said.
Another sharp pain, not quite as intense, erupted in her abdomen and she leaned back against the wall as tears fell down her face.
'No, no, no!'
"It's not invasive. Just some blood samples, and cell samples from the cheek, and skin and hair... It...would be useful to have cells from inside your...your..."
She glanced at him in anger as he gestured toward his own abdomen with his face flushing lightly. He took a cautious step forward.
"But I don't...know how to do that safely. And even if I did, I wouldn't touch the baby!"
"You don't even care about it!" she spat as she sank lower on the wall and held her abdomen where the pain was. It wasn't subsiding as quickly this time.
"What?" Drakken said as he slowly came closer.
"You don't care about the baby! You never ask, and you never want to talk about it when I do, and you never...you hardly even acknowledge it! It's like you forget it exists until I say something! And now, you're still just talking about your idiotic experiments!"
He looked appropriately reproached as she glared at him, stopping about six feet away from her. He hung his head.
Tears still fell down her cheeks as she stared at him in anger. Didn't he know how much his inattention...hurt? After several seconds she saw his shoulders shake once...and then again as his breaths became more halted.
"Oh sure, start crying now like you did about a dead mouse."
"I did not cry about a dead mouse!" He looked up briefly, revealing the tears in his eyes. "I..."
She closed her eyes and slid lower against the wall, feeling the pressure of everything coming over her. It was too much, too fast. And why wouldn't he help her?
"If I love it too much..." Drakken began. Shego turned and peered at him. "If I love it too much," he repeated, "and then...if we lose it..."
He took one of his gloves off and set his face in his hand as he began to sniffle. It was too much for Shego. She slid the rest of the way down to the hall floor and set her face on her knees and cried.
He was right. The baby was all she could think about, and yet she couldn't bear to think about it for fear of the unknown. What was the pain she felt? Why did it happen when it did? What did it mean?
And there was nothing she could do to answer any of the questions. She was trapped. Trapped inside the lair by a disease that had enslaved the entire world, and trapped inside her mind with nothing but increasingly tragic reports about the failing state of life as she knew it.
Her steady life had been ripped from her months ago and any hold she had on its tattered pieces was slipping farther and farther out of reach with each passing day. The slivers of hope and joy she had found that might lend to weaving a new life were still constantly threatened by the disease, and even as they seemed to grow closer—
The pain erupted in her side again.
—she was losing sight of them.
She startled suddenly as a hand rested heavily on her shoulder, and another gently pushed her hair back from her face. She looked up into Drakken's red-rimmed eyes, his gaze woeful but determined. He reached for her face to wipe her tears, but she jerked away from him.
"...You're going to the hospital. They'll see you whether they like it or not," he said.
She dropped her gaze and nodded slowly. She couldn't do it anymore. She couldn't pretend and distract herself with his embrace, or with his work, and she couldn't hold him up when her own recesses of strength were failing.
"You...get in the hover-car, and I'll go tell the henchmen we'll be out."
Shego slowly stood, his arm supporting her as she gripped her abdomen. The pain was starting to fade...
A patter of footsteps drew their eyes toward the end of the hall where a plainclothes henchman suddenly appeared, grinning brightly as he held two greatly oversized shopping bags in each hand.
"Hey Boss! I found toilet paper!"
The pain had gone almost as quickly as it had come, just like the last time. But that did nothing to ease Shego's worries. The hover-car ride was spent in near silence as she sank deeper into her fear, now that they would finally know. Knowing was more terrifying than not knowing, she discovered... Because if something really was wrong...
Drakken had fed into the silence with ease. Whenever Shego glanced at him, his eyes were sinking into that same haunted horror that had overtaken him after his mother's death. And she sympathized. It was still just two weeks since they had found her, after all.
She ached for his comfort even while being furious at him for his disregard of her and the baby. But he was already suffering the loss of one love of his life. She didn't know and wouldn't pretend to understand what it must feel like. But to face the fear of losing another love, so soon...
She couldn't be too mad at him for his distance, or his apparent lack of interest. She understood. And she believed what he'd said, about the tests and the tissue samples. He was...he was smarter than that.
He did care about other people now.
She wondered if it was like she had said before, if he wasn't in fact as 'mad scientist' and 'evil dictator' as he'd been pretending to be. If this hero-Drakken who had thrown himself into a one-man war against a deadly, world-ending disease turned out to be the person he truly was...
Would it matter?
But, there wasn't time to think about that. They were landing at the hospital.
Several threats backed by green burning plasma later found them inside an exam room, Drakken pacing worriedly and Shego lying on a slightly inclined exam table. She was trying to lock up the fear—ready to think rationally, practically, and prepare for whatever eventuality when the doctor returned from delivering her blood tests and could give some answers. But Drakken's now very-apparent worry wasn't helping.
"Would you hold still?" she whispered, as if they could be heard through the walls.
"What?" he asked, his eyes coming into focus.
She opened her mouth to speak again, but then there was a soft knock at the door. It opened to reveal the very anxious-looking but kind-eyed and clean-cut doctor who had been attending to her.
"Well," the man cleared his throat, "by the time we're done here we should have an analysis of your blood work."
"No you won't," Shego said with a small grimace. The doctor looked confused, and Shego lifted a hand and ignited it. "You'll never figure it out. Just find out what you need to know about...the baby."
She let the glow diminish and set her hand back on her abdomen. The doctor pulled at his collar nervously.
"Ah. Well...let's do your ultrasound now and see what's inside."
Shego felt her heartbeat quicken. The taking of various fluid samples had been tedious, the answering of questions routine... Now...they would finally know something.
"You really should have come in sooner, with a baby this old," the doctor continued, some of his fear fading as he focused on his task, spreading the warm gel low across her abdomen.
"How old is it?"
The doctor gestured toward her tiny bump. "At least twelve weeks, considering we can see the little one. But we can probably narrow it down. Can you remember when your last period was?"
Shego shook her head. "No, but...I've got the conception down to two possible dates."
The doctor's brow rose. Shego glanced briefly at Drakken, who was standing almost in the corner of the small exam room and watching from behind the doctor. He seemed to perk up slightly from his worry and started really listening.
"It was either New Year's...or else...January 11th," she said giving Drakken a longer glance. She saw his cheeks turn pink.
She startled slightly as the ultrasound probe made contact, and she let out a breath. Her shoulders were tense. Everything was tense.
"Relax," the doctor said.
Drakken gasped. Shego looked at his wide-eyes and slackened jaw as he stared over her shoulder. Her jaw tensed.
"Take a look," the doctor said.
Shego looked up at the doctor. His anxiety from meeting the two villains had faded, and a tiny hint of a smile was on his face. She held her breath and turned her head to see over her shoulder.
On the computer screen was a black and white moving and fluid image of...a baby.
Shego gasped at the sudden feeling of a familiar, soft flicking in her belly. On the screen, the baby stretched, pushed its foot up into the uterine wall, and then opened its mouth and yawned. Shego's hands flew to cover her mouth as her jaw fell open.
"Lively little one," the doctor commented. "Based on those dates, if you're sure...?"
He paused, and Shego took her wide eyes from the screen to where he was looking at her for confirmation. She nodded.
"Then it's definitely the earlier date based on the size and development. Which would put this little one at...fourteen and a half weeks."
'It was the first time...'
"Now it's just a bit too soon to know the gender..." the doctor continued, "but if you come back in a few weeks we can probably get a good idea."
Shego continued staring as the tiny movements she felt within her corresponded to the movements in the image onscreen.
"Would you like a picture to take home?"
Shego glanced back at the doctor again and nodded. His anxiety had left entirely and his smile had grown. He turned and looked at Drakken, and Shego followed his gaze. The blue man had sunk into a chair and his jaw had closed, but his eyes were still wide and his expression just a bit anxious.
"You're...the father?" the doctor asked him.
This snapped Drakken out of whatever he was thinking, and he frowned. "Of course I am!" he said, though his voice was shaky.
The doctor had put a still image on the screen and removed the probe. He took a paper towel to wipe the gel off of Shego's belly.
"Would you like any extra printouts to give to family?"
Drakken's lips parted and he froze, eyes going vacant as he stared straight ahead.
"Sure," Shego said quietly. It couldn't hurt to have extras.
The doctor typed a command into the computer. "Then I'll be right back."
He left the room, and Shego pulled her shirt back down and smoothed it. Drakken's eyes moved to hers now they were alone, but there was nothing in them.
"It was the first time," she said quietly, hoping to distract him.
"What?" Drakken asked, his gaze coming back into focus.
"The baby. It happened the very first time we... On New Year's Eve, when we were fighting. Or day. It was after midnight by that time actually."
One corner of Drakken's mouth slowly curled into a smirk. He stepped over to the bedside and smiled at the image onscreen before looking down at her. "I did warn you. You're the one who didn't want to stop for me to get a—"
"Drakken," she interrupted, sitting up halfway. "When the doctor gets the test results... If something's wrong—"
"How can it be wrong," he interrupted as fear leapt back into his eyes. "Look at it," he gestured to the image onscreen. "It's perfect."
"I know," she said, reaching up and taking his hand. "But...no matter what happens... We're still going to find that cure, or the vaccine, or whatever. Whatever you need help with...you've got it. I want to help."
He looked at her curiously, fighting the fear in his eyes. He lifted his free hand and ran it back through his hair as his gaze returned to the image onscreen.
"Then no one else will have to go through this," she said.
A knock on the door signaled the doctor's return, and Drakken took a few steps back. The doctor was holding two printouts.
"Here you go. Here's ten wallet-sizes and one actual size."
"Actual size?" Shego asked, sitting up farther to reach for the pictures.
"Yes," the doctor answered.
Shego looked at the larger black-and-white photo and cupped her hand beneath the image. The baby was as long as her hand.
"Um," Drakken said, and Shego and the doctor turned to look at where he was fidgeting nervously. "Can you tell us anything yet...about the pain she's been having?"
"Well, we still need to look at the labs, but...from what you described it just sounds like muscle cramps," the doctor said, folding his hands. "Were you exercising when the pain occurred?"
Shego thought back to the outrageous number of hours she'd spent in the gym the days immediately before the first incident. Then she thought about the handspring she'd done that afternoon—a move she hadn't done in months.
"Yes," she said, starting to feel a strange mixture of irritation and relief rising within her.
"You're probably just over-exerting yourself. Your body is making a lot of changes and adaptations to accommodate the baby. Your abdominal muscles will be stretching and you won't be able to do...what you're used to." Shego looked up and saw the faintest anxiety returning to the doctor's eyes. "In fact, you could do damage to yourself with too much activity. You'll have to learn to slow down and take it easy."
Shego took it all in as both the relief and irritation grew.
"You're...sure that's all it is?" Drakken asked.
The doctor turned to him. "I will call you when we get the lab results back, but I don't think you have anything to worry about. The baby looks very healthy."
Ten minutes later they were back in the hover-car after having given the doctor the number for one of the lair's landlines. Shego was still distracted by her relief that the baby was all right and by her irritation that the pain was her own fault. And...there was still the hint of doubt that she knew would remain until the test results came back.
After all, what was normal for the offspring of a comet-powered woman and a who-knows-why-he's-blue man?
She was holding up the sonogram and staring at the blurred black-and-white image. The memory of seeing the baby move was still fresh, and she kept replaying it over and over as she stared at the picture.
'I... We... We're having a baby.'
Next to her in the driver's seat, Drakken sighed heavily.
"Hm? What is it?" she asked, surprised at the sadness in his eyes when she turned. His gaze stayed fixed ahead on the skies.
"Mother would have been so happy."