Disclaimer: To my dismay, I have not come into possession of Kim Possible over the duration of my absence from though I'm holding out for it being a Christmas gift, St. Nick be willing. On another note, hopefully I'll be able to start maintaining a schedule for this fanfic as it is one I greatly desire to write.
Chapter 2: Overcast
It was late when Kim finally returned home. After being dismissed by the Chief she found that she had nothing to fill the sudden gap in her schedule, so she made her way to the nearest bar.
Now, standing before the rundown door to her apartment, the suspended officer thought that that hadn't been such a good idea. The flaking door with its faux-brass knob was wavering smugly in her vision as testimony to her almost day-long drinking binge. She couldn't even make out the number on the brass plate at even height to her eyes. It was a struggle to remember how to even open the damned thing and she wondered fleetingly why she had deemed it so necessary to get completely smashed. But then in an extremely brief moment of clarity she remembered why and promptly decided that she hadn't drank enough of the vodka the "He's Not Here," Bar and Lounge offered. But that was a problem to be resolved later.
Right now, she had to remember how to open the damned door.
Kim had just managed to rest a hand on the doorknob in what she fuzzily remembered being one of the first steps when two things happened in rapid succession: she dropped her keys with what seemed an inordinately loud clatter. And when she leaned over to pick them up, leaning heavily on the cool metal doorknob, the door that had so mocked her for the last thirty minutes swung open. Kim assumed that she had toppled over quite easily due to that seeing as she was now face to floorboards, but she couldn't quite remember the fall.
A heavy sigh came from somewhere above her before she felt herself being lifted by two pairs of arms. "You've got to stop doing this, sis." Kim frowned slightly, aware even in her drunken state that arms could not speak, before woozily lifting her head to look to her left. Her bloodshot eyes met the clear brown of one of her three most favorite people.
"Jim!" She slurred happily, doing her best to grin at him and draw him into a hug only to realize her right side was being strangely unresponsive. She looked to her right and saw the second half to the only pair on her 'Like' list. "Tim!"
Tim glanced at his twin, matching frowns on their handsome teenage visages, before gazing back at the redhead slumped between the two of them. "Do you know what time it is?" He asked his big sister wearily.
"Um…it's…um…" It occurred to Kim that no, in fact, she didn't know what time it was.
Jim answered for her. "Eleven-thirty, Kim."
Kim brightened slightly. "Oh! Tha's not s' bad!"
"At night."
"Betty called us when you left work this morning and filled us in." Tim's tired expression didn't change as he spoke, the two brothers carefully maneuvering through the somewhat cluttered apartment with each of Kim's arms draped over them, door clicking shut behind them as one of them kicked it closed.
"Oh." Kim fought through the haze of alcohol to understand the meaning of the twins' words but was largely unsuccessful as fatigue began to weigh on her. She just knew it was bad and felt a vague mix of shame and defensiveness rise up in her. "S'rry. Won't happen ag'n. J'st…tired…"
What seemed only a moment later, Kim roused enough to register her little brothers tucking her into her own bed not having even bothered to turn on the bedroom light. She could just barely make out the outlines of their bodies as they turned to leave, silhouetted by the dim light of the living room down the hall. "Wait." Somehow she managed to sit up, a little bit of her mental fog seeming to have cleared up slightly in the few seconds she had fallen asleep.
Jim and Tim stopped, returning to her bedside at her gesture. Gingerly, Kim reached out and pulled the two of them to her in a hug. She was relieved to feel them return it before pulling back a moment later.
"Go—"
"—to sleep, sis."
"We'll talk in the morning."
Kim nodded, already sinking back into her pillow. Tim reached out and pulled the quilt back up to her chin. She looked at them sadly, feeling like somehow she had once again failed the two of them. She was almost asleep by the time the two teenage boys made it to her bedroom door.
"I'm sorry," she managed to whisper before they closed the door completely. Her last thought before falling into slumber was to wonder if they had even heard her.
Kim awoke slowly, fighting consciousness with the same tenacity that the criminal world feared, unwilling to leave the tranquility of a dreamless sleep for the biting reality brazenly taking form as a brash light creeping across her closed eyelids.
With a groan, she recognized the waking world to be the greater combatant and willed her eyes open only to squeeze them closed with another, much more heartfelt groan. Keeping her eyes glued shut, Kim sat up and clutched her head.
"Damn it… I hope someone got the number of that train…" she rasped, voice thick with what felt like a bag of cotton. "And a glass of water."
A voice came from her right, startling her. "Actually, it was a Mack truck."
The redhead whipped her attention to the speaker, eyes snapping open, only to grimace as her head throbbed painfully.
"Here." Kim felt Jim gently place a cool glass of water in the hand not occupied with massaging her throbbing temple, not letting go until he was sure of her grip on it. "There's asprin next to the lamp. Take it, then meet us in the living room." Having said all that he apparently wanted to say at the moment, Jim quickly stood up and left, leaving the door open behind him.
Kim wanted to call out to him, but knew it wouldn't do any good. Her mouth was so dry that she doubted she'd actually be able to say anything, and she knew better than to think that either he or his twin would listen to her right now. What would I even say if they would? Sorry for fucking up? Yeah, that'd go over well.
With a hollow groan she resigned herself to having what was no doubt going to be an unpleasant conversation with her brothers and sat up, squinting as she reached for the pills on her bedside table.
Half an hour later, feeling only marginally more human after draining the glass along with the asprin, Kim gingerly stepped into the small room they had designated as their living room, pausing in the doorway as Jim and Tim turned from their soft conversation to look solemnly at her. With a twitch of her lips of something that if allowed to grow might have been a wry smile, she flopped onto one of the three beanbag chairs in the room. The redhead immediately regretted the action as it brought a fresh bout of throbbing in her head. Who would have guessed that these two, of all people, would be mother hens when they grew up? It was an amusing thought.
"Kim." Tim's voice brought her out of her reverie, and any amusement she had felt, faint though it was, vanished at the sight of the hard set in her brothers' eyes. Hoping to at least shorten the length of the impending conversation, Kim cut them off from saying anything more.
"Look. I'm sorry I came home trashed, alright? I'd just had a terrible day at work and went to the bar for a couple drinks and it got out of hand. I'm sorry. I fucked up. But that doesn't mean you can treat me like a child. I'm an adult. I'm your legal guardian, not the other way around. So can we just call this good and get on with our lives?" She was faintly out of breath from speaking so fast to head off her brothers' argument, but Kim felt it was well worth the effort.
Jim's posture had relaxed minutely and Tim had leaned back into his own beanbag chair. They glanced at each other then looked back at her, worry in their eyes.
"That's only part—" Jim began.
"—of what we wanted to talk to you about," Tim finished. "Betty called us after you left the office and let us know what was going on."
Jim stood up and began to pace. "She told us what happened. Most of what happened, at least. Kim—"
"—it wasn't good. You can't keep doing this! Beating a criminal bloody is not something police do! What—"
"Whoa. Stop. Right there!" Kim stood, pointing at her brothers, pulse pounding in her head and anger zinging in her veins. "I didn't do any such thing! And I don't know where you get off telling me what to do! Police shouldn't be expected to coddle," Kim sneered, nearly spitting out the word, "criminals. So what if we're a little rough? That's nothing—"
"No! It's not nothing!" Tim yelled at her, practically exploding up from his seated position. "What you did is not nothing, Kim!"
Kim drew herself up to her full height, a full four inches shorter than him, and snarled at him. "Oh yeah? Who says so? You? Ha, don't make me laugh! You weren't there! How would you know that it wasn't nothing, huh?" By this point Kim had grabbed the front of Tim's shirt and yanked him down to eye level, baring her teeth at him. There was a flash of hesitation in his eyes as he watched his sister transform almost instantly from Kim the Hungover to Kim the Police Officer reputed to have cold-fire running through her veins instead of blood.
Then the moment was over as Jim pulled Tim out of her grip and pushed her back a step, yelling the whole while. "No one says so! We saw the pictures! That's how we know!"
"P-pictures?" Just like that, Kim the Police Officer gave way into Kim the Sister. "What pictures?"
"These!" Jim snatched some photos off the living room table and shoved them into her chest. "These pictures!"
Gazing at the photos in her hands—copies, the analytical part of her normally reserved for police work noted distantly—the redhead wondered how she could have missed them on table even in her fogged over state. The colors of the pictures were clear and vibrant, heavy on the bright crimson of fresh spilled blood interspersed intermittently with the yellows, blues, blacks, and greens associated occasionally with major bruises but most often with broken and fractured bones.
Swollen from a broken nose along with various other bruises, split eyebrows and lips, bloodied ears, blackened eyes swollen shut, and cuts adorning cheeks and forehead, the face was nearly unrecognizable even as a face. The rest of the pictures were similar. In total there were sixteen—four of the man's head from the front, both sides, and the back, two of his deep-purple left hand clearly displaying the odd angles of his fingers, two of his right hand throwing into sharp relief the obvious bite mark on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, one of each of his bruised legs and right shattered kneecap, one of each of his bruised and scratched forearms, and two each of his severely bruised front and back.
Kim felt herself go pale and her stomach clench painfully. The twins saw these? She had flipped all the way through the sheaf of pictures and was now staring at the list of injuries that had come with them. Six broken ribs, four broken fingers, broken nose, fractured cheekbones and jaw, suspected brain-swelling, shattered kneecap; infected scratches and bite; severe bruising on approximately seventy percent of the body… Kim couldn't force the words out of her mouth, but when she finally looked up she suspected that her brothers knew exactly what she was thinking. I…why don't I remember this?
"Betty sent those to us this morning. She told us that he tried to use you as a hostage when you and five other officers interrupted him mid-theft and you went pretty much berserk on him. Said that it was self-defense in the end, even if it was overkill—"
"—way overkill," Tim added vehemently to his twin's statement. Jim shot him a sharp look and continued.
"But she also said it took all five of the other officers and a few civilians to pull you off him." Kim didn't have anything to say to that.
"That's what had us worried the most yesterday, sis," Tim said quietly. "We thought some of this guy's buddies had gotten to you. And then to have you stumbling home completely—" he cut himself off abruptly, looking hard at her. "Kim… how did you get home last night?"
Kim fidgeted for a moment before sighing resignedly. "I think I drove… but I don't remember." She cringed, waiting for the fallout that never came. Instead, she heard Jim and Tim burst out laughing hysterically after a long moment of stunned silence.
"Hahahaha, only—" Jim paused to take a gasp of air and Tim jumped in where he left off.
"—you would be able to—" Tim choked out.
"—get completely smashed—"
"—and have your driving improve!" The twins finished in sync before collapsing into an entirely new fit of laughter.
Kim huffed, mildly indignant, and crossed her arms. "C'mon you two, my driving's not that bad," she said, setting them off once again. She threw her arms up. "Oh, come on!"
Please R&R. Oh, and if you have any problems with how I'm portraying the characters so far, feel free to bring those issues to light with me. However, whether your comments will be taken into authitorial regard remains to be seen as I am portraying them in a way that should hopefully begin to make more sense as the story progresses. So if you absolutely must inform me of your issues with them, go ahead. But I ask that, if possible, you hold off until the plot develops a little more and you get to see the reasons behind why Kim and the rest are the way they are before judging.
For those of you eagerly awaiting Shego's grand entrance, don't worry. It's next chapter. And it's not necessarily going to be in any of the ways that you might think. As for those of you holding out for the Kigo...well, that'll take a little while longer. But it will get there, no worries.
Anyways, thanks for reading!
IM101