Disclaimer: Don't own KP, any of the associated characters or any of Disney's creations. This work is purely for the enjoyment of writing.
Alright, this time my update was a little more reasonable, yes? More of Drakken, Ed and Shego here, we will catch up with the hero's in the next chapter. Drakken and Ed's bit is a little bit of comic relief, I'll try to intersperse some into each chapter, cause so far the story is rather gloomy. Shego's introduces a little bit of character development I'm fairly proud of, so please tell me what you think.
Chapter 3: Dealing With The Pain
"OWW!" Drakken screamed as Ed removed the last of the melted fabric from his back. He squirmed under his cousin's firm grip as the larger man applied disinfectant and the last strip of gauze. He finally allowed Drakken to stand, taking a moment to admire his work. Drakken's back looked like a bad modern art reinterpretation of the American Flag, but being no surgeon, Ed was quite pleased with the result. He tossed Drew relatively clean polo shirt from his duffle bag, and threw it, along with the first aid kit, back into the trunk of the car. Drakken put on the shirt, and whimpered as is slid over his tender wounds.
"If this is part of your plan to convince me life is worth living, it's not working Ed."
"Stop whining Drew. You were seriously, like, bleeding all over the seat." Eddy complained as he slammed the trunk-lid down. "Now wait in the car, I have to go pick up a few things." He took off towards the convenience store they were parked beside before Drakken could protest, so he quietly opened the passenger door and settled back into his blood-stained seat. He tried not to think about the turn his life had taken in the hours before, looking aimlessly about the vehicle for something to occupy himself with. His eyes settled on the digital clock on the stereo deck, which read 11:42 PM.
Almost three hours since Shego stopped only threatening to kill me.He thought. Drakken cursed himself. His mind simply refused to leave his emotional wounds alone, pursuing an analysis of the cause and effect of his now Shego-lite existence in the silence of the vehicle.
You know it's your fault, Drew. You pushed and pushed, and now you're moaning that it broke. How can you blame her for cutting and running, even before you factor in your inability to do anything right? He sighed, completely lacking the will to argue with himself. Before he could continue not defending himself from his own sharp barbs, Ed climbed back into the car, dropping a large cardboard box onto Drakken's lap. The action drew a gasp from the blue madman, but Ed paid him no attention, as he opened the box and handed his still shell shocked relative a beer. Ed then promptly turned the key in the ignition, and tore out of the parking lot, heading back to the interstate. He accelerated up to 20 over the speed limit, what he liked to call "cruising speed," and had left the small town far behind before he turned to his brother. He rolled his eyes, finding Drakken in the exact same pose that he had left him in moments before. The beer wasn't even open.
"Here, let me get that Drewbie." Ed sniggered, reaching over and cracking the top on the can. It seemed to bring his cousin out of his trance.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" He asked, indignantly.
"It's a beer cuz. Ya' drink it."
"I know I'm supposed to drink it!" Drakken replied, a little anger sparking in his voice. "This is your plan? Drink a beer and feel better? And Shego said my ideas were stupid."
"Actually, Drew, my plan is to have you drink that case of beers, then let you get some stress relief, then get the other case of beers out of the back and have a little man-to-man."
"Fantastic. My cousin's solution to my suicidal tendencies is to get drunk! This isn't high school, Eddy. I think you can just drop me off at the nearest police station, because there's no way this is going to work."
Frustration boiled over in the car, and as Drakken continued to rant, Ed slammed his foot on the accelerator. The sudden increase in speed stopped Drakken, and drew a squeal of fear as he saw the tail-lights of the car ahead quickly coming within spitting distance. Ed deftly manipulated the steering wheel, dodging out from behind the other car, sliding into oncoming traffic. The grille of a semi rushed to meet them, and Drakken threw up his hands, as if he could stop the 7 tonnes of steel racing towards him. Ed pushed his car harder, letting all its horses rumble onto the pavement in a mad gamble to overcome the other car before windshield met bumper. At the last moment, Ed swung them back into their proper lane, leaving inches between his door and the trucker's front tire. He smiled, patting the dash in admiration of his one true love, as Drakken continued to hyperventilate.
"Slow down Ed! You're going to kill us both!" He half growled, half pleaded between ragged breaths.
"I thought that was your plan Drewbie." Ed prodded. An instant later, the grease's monkey's deceptively sharp mind was re-aligning his plan of attack, realising he could utilize this.
"I was hoping for something quick and painless, not splattered over the hood of a big rig! Why aren't you slowing down!?"
"I'll slow down when you finish that beer."
"Ed, I don't have time for silly games..."
"I'm not playing Drewbie." Ed replied, rocking the accelerator just slightly, pushing the already wrapped speedometer further out of the increments. The action had the desired effect. When given a choice between drinking a beer and facing the likelihood of a bloody road-rashed end, Drakken put bottoms up.
"That's better Drew." Ed encouraged as his cousin drained the can. He allowed the speed to drop 10 mph, enough for Drew to notice but not so much that he lost his leverage. "Now, have another." He drew another can from the flat, and handed it to Drakken. He opened it on his own this time, and threw it back. Ed slowed another 10 mph, and Drakken caught on to the other element of the game. He grabbed another beer himself, and proceeded to drive the speedo down towards more legal levels.
By the time they were back at "cruising speed", Drew was more than half way through the flat, and three sheets to the wind. Seeing that his cousin was "primed" for a little bit of delinquent fun, Ed turned off the interstate onto a dirt country road. Drakken was so engrossed in extracting another beer that he hardly noticed the un-earned decrease in speed. In fact, he had stopped caring about the game 4 or 5 cans back, and was actually beginning to feel the gloom that had weighed on him for most of the night begin to shed.
"Yooo gnow, Edeee? This izn't ass bad un ideah as I thoughot." Drakken slurred. Ed didn't respond immediately, as he was reaching to the back seat, grabbing at something.
"Where are you? I didn't break you the last time I... there we go!" He retracted his arm, grasping a Louisville Slugger. He passed it to Drakken, who took it and stared at it as if it were the single most captivating object he had ever possessed. He snapped out of his reprieve when Ed began to remove the case of beer from his lap, and wrapped himself around it like it was a life preserver.
"No Eed. Myne!"
"Whoa there, bro. I'll give it back. I just don't want you spilling any while we proceed into phase two."
"Faz twoo?" Drakken asked, relinquishing his grip on the case. Ed nodded and grinned.
"Stress relief. See that bat?" He said, gesturing to the wooden shaft still in his brother's hand. Drakken nodded vigorously in response, so vigorously in fact that he had to take a moment to steady himself afterwards. "I want you to hang out the window and smash one of the mail boxes coming up on your side." Drakken looked at him with a face that Ed could only guess was his version of confusion while he was under the influence. "Trust me. Just visualize someone's head on that mailbox, and give it a good swing. As good as a month in therapy, I know this for a fact. And make it someone you really hate. I have at least one suggestion, but I'll leave it up to you." To confirm his seriousness, Ed hit the power windows.
The cold blast of night air seemed to drive some of the stupor from Drakken, and he readjusted his grip on the staff, throttling up on it. He climbed out of the passenger window as far as his seatbelt allowed. A line of mail boxes appeared, and Drakken selected his target, a classic white horseshoe shaped one with a red flag. Ed pulled over onto the shoulder, and slowed down to 25 so his cousin wouldn't be pulled from the car when he hit his mark. The unsuspecting tin structure rushed up, Drakken swung, and a loud crunch signalled the truth of his aim. What had morphed into the face of Kim Possible was reduced into an unrecognisable ball of steel that slowly receded into the distance behind them. Ed pounded on the steering wheel in satisfaction.
"How'd that feel, Drew?"
"It felt... good, Ed. It felt really good." Drakken replied, his tone belying his surprise.
"Go for another one." Drakken nodded, this time superimposing Betty Director's face over a plastic box shaped like a miniature barn. This one shattered on contact, producing an even stronger feeling of satisfaction.
Wow, when something that isn't yours breaks into a million pieces, it feels great! Drakken thought. He continued the procedure without further prompting, bashing Professor Dementor, James Possible, and many more from his long unwritten shit list into deformed metallic hunks, Ed cheering him on all the way.
Noting that he only had two possible targets left before the row of mailboxes ended, Drakken first selected the buffoon, who, despite his inability to remember his name, Drew Lipski bore an especially strong distaste for. Because while Kim Possible's sidekick's ineptitude often matched his own, the results of each man's bumbling could not have been more vastly disparate. Drakken's clumsiness and inattention to detail resulted in devastating failure, but much the buffoon's success was a direct effect of his inability to coordinate his actions. And it went beyond the boy's uncanny ability to press the wrong button at the right time, but invaded several parallels that existed between both himself and the blonde. The same divergence of outcomes was found in the buffoon's personal relationships, where his highly unconventional outlook on life, while certainly not earning him popular status, had granted him several strong friendships and even romantic interest. The same could not be said for the teenaged Drew, where the few friends he had acquired seemed to only tolerate his quirks, rather than embrace them as endearing attributes, and had eventually judged them were too strange to allow for continued association. Drakken chose not to even delve into his former romantic life, or lack thereof. The blue skinned doctor had dedicated his entire life to making some contribution to science or villainy worth mentioning; in the few years that the Buffoon was internationally active he had been the subject of a highly secretive Global Justice study on chaos, and come closer to accomplishing what so many much more deserving villains (namely himself) had failed as Zorpox The Conqueror. The unfairness of it all seemed to invigorate the doctor's tiring arm muscles, and he swung with such force that the box, with the shriek of sheering metal, was torn from its post, and sent flying forward for a few moments, before hitting the ground and flying apart.
Wow Drew. Ed mused, whistling. If you could tap into this at will, you would make a decent deep hitter. I wonder who was the unlucky recipient of that little bit of emotional exorcisingA resounding crack interrupted Ed's thoughts, and he looked over in time to see the bat splinter against the last mailbox in the row, and the box, along with the post holding it into the ground, dislodge itself and crash into the ditch. Note to self. Ed amended When helping veteran head case relieve 20 years worth of stress and undiagnosed emotional disorders, use aluminum bat. Or titanium. As his cousin withdrew back into the cab of the car, Ed swiped the fragmented handle of his once beautiful Louisville classic.
"I guess this means phase two is over..." Drakken observed dumbly, his voice regaining some of the mirthlessness it had shed.
"How many mailboxes do you think you need to destroy, Drewbie?" Ed laughed, worried that his cousin's recovery was being hindered from concern over his damaged property. "The bat is no big deal, seriously. I think you're ready to talk now anyway." Drakken did not respond, slumping back into his seat as Ed revved the tachometer up again and took off down the road, searching for a suitable place to begin phase three.
(-) (-) (-)
Shego simply lay on the cool tiles of the motel bathroom for what seemed like several hours, moving only when her private thoughts became too strong for her stomach, and she was forced to again hang her head over the toilet bowl and retch. By now she was long out of solid food to bring up, and the taste of raw bile was engrained in her mouth.
And you wanted to show Drakken how useless HE would be without YOU. He's been gone for less than half a day and all you've managed to do without him around is develop Bulimia. Funny how irony works, eh princess? The condescending, self-defaming voice, a result of her criminal career, continued to torment her. It did an excellent job of representing her when turned outward, as it did most of the talking while she "had her villain face on", but it was just as talented and happy berating it's owner at moments of weakness or stupidity as it was verbally sparring with Kimmie. The other voice, the one Shego outwardly denied existed and kept silent, but could not, or would not (it depended upon her mood) destroy entirely, did not answer. The girl and hero that had disappeared when Shego turned filled that role in her internal duologue, and rather poorly it would seem.
The disembodied forms of the current villainous woman and the former heroic girl served as the proverbial devil and angel (contemptuous of cliché, Shego preferred to refer to them as Desire and Reticence) on her shoulders and at the same time composed the single mind which those forces tried to sway. As her environment dictated, the darker version of herself had outward control most of the time, but they collated for all decisions, granted sometimes violently. However, her softer side undeniably held sway in her actions and thoughts. Each also laid claim to certain tendencies. As might be expected, the villainous side was dedicated to action, all of it rash and headlong, the basic drives, and held her calculative mind while the fragment of her youth comprised her reflective, creative and empathetic capabilities (hence their names). Thusly, while both would deny it, they required each other to function, and in fact worked best when collaborating.
This was why all the harsh voice could do was taunt Shego. If life was to go on, she needed the assistance of her mental counterpart, and unfortunately that half had fallen into a state of near catatonia soon after the reality of Drakken's demise had sunk in. Despite the indications of differing involvement in Desire's continuing outburst and Reticence's coma-like state, both were equal partners in Shego's actions earlier that evening. Their reactions were simply the quite different way that they dealt with the guilt. Drakken's parting comment had hurt both of them, Desire in the assertion of her unimportance to the operation and questioning of her abilities, and Reticence in the associated unvoiced questioning of her importance to him. His resulting death crushed both of them, but being pragmatic Desire knew how to operate in situations without hope. Reticence, bearing the requisite optimistic attitude of a hero, did not.
Come on now, guilt over killing Dr. D shouldn't be getting you this bad. Sure, he was our boss, but we are criminals. I mean, it's almost as if you miss him or something. Desire prodded, trying to get a response out her companion. She received something significantly more rattling.
Don't pretend that you won't miss him! Don't even try! He's the only one who's accepted you in any way beside a bed-mate The only one who's trusted you to any degree, the only one who cared enough to try and spring you from jail simply because you were there, not just to help out in a heist or be an accessory in a retarded plan to drive across country. He even came chasing after you when Avitarus tried to exact his revenge. Try and be a heartless bitch, fine, but you can't tell me that he meant nothing to you. You may be many things, but a sociopath isn't one of them. Now SHUT UP,leave me alone, and if you're so sure he's dead, let him rest! It's the least we could do for him, considering we just killed the only person who's tolerated what we've become since you showed. Desire was shocked at Reticence's reply. Optimism, it seemed, was only one step away from pessimism. But Desire hadn't turned Shego into one of the world's greatest mercenaries by not being able to adapting to the unexpected.
So what are you doing about it down here, princess? If you think he's still alive, get up off your ass and start looking for him. Like you said, he could be buried under a pile of rubble, while you're lying here wallowing in your own sorrowDesire did not truly believe this, but was surprised at the warmth that admitting to such a possibility, however remote, brought. And if she was to get Reticence moving, and with her Shego, she needed to establish hope again, flimsy though it might be. Mercifully, it seemed Reticence was more than willing to grasp at something, anything to fill the void that the guilt had carved out of her.
With the two forces aligned with new purpose, Shego rose from her self-induced paralysis, taking only enough time to wash the horrid taste from her mouth before running to the hover car parked outside. Whatever the result, Shego would not simply sit inactive while her reality was dictated by other forces. This was something both Desire and Reticence could agree on. And, given the overwhelming bleakness of her emotional plight, futile and yet nobly motivated action was the only way to soothe the guilt that burned hot within the mind(s) of the green skinned villainess. It was almost assuredly physically meaningless, but in the same moment no other act she had committed or expected she would commit approached the importance of this undertaking.
(-) (-) (-)
After several minutes of high-speed transit (Shego oddly wondered for the first time if there was a speed limit for vehicles that weren't wheeled but didn't quite qualify as aircraft) the distraught but galvanized young woman stood outside the now silent and soggy remains of Drakken's shattered lair. It was of course quardend-off with yellow police tape, which flipped lazily in the wind, but the buzz of activity that had filled the area was now absent. She was not surprised that the local emergency response forces had vacated the scene. To them this was nothing more than some kind of accident, and once they had put out the blaze, confirmed that no one was hurt, or to their knowledge even present, and nothing hazardous was released, the volunteer firefighters had packed up and went home to their families. They had no reason to go into the wee hours of the morning on a fire investigation that was not going anywhere, or had any reason to be disturbed. Without the need for medical care, the ambulance was long gone, and the under equipped highway patrol had to attend to more pressing matters than to guard a fairly innocent, if extraordinarily destructive disaster site. These regular populace had no idea that a super-villain had been living in their midst, and until the proper team of inspectors was assembled and they realised that the building had been deliberately levelled by military grade explosives, civilian authorities would have little more than mild annoyance in the activities she was about to engage in . What did shock her when she did her sweep of the area from within her cloaked hover car was the complete lack of surveillance of any kind.
GJ decided they had to monitor this lair before... why aren't they here sifting through the wreckage? Shego pondered.
Probably because they figure Dr. D isn't smart enough to have actually escaped. Desire piped up, her intention to actually answer the question. Reticence injected a note of sarcasm into the statement, enforcing her support of Drakken, despite the evidence stacked in favour of that assessment. Quickly disregarding the legal boundaries that impeded her access to her goal, not that they had ever mattered before, Shego began her search of the fragmented steel I-beams and charred building material that littered the crater that her rage made real had left in its wake. Her first step into "ground zero" brought forth a renewed wave of nausea inducing guilt, standing in the midst of the physical amalgamation of what she had done increasing the realism of her act by ten times. She was halted for an instant, and she reviewed the scene from a new, much more personal level.
Before, she had seen the blackened ground as any individual trained as highly in espionage as she was would, as a grid work of possible hiding places, foxholes and other likely aspects of a trap. However, in her well established security from such worries, Reticence was able to escape the bunker Desire routinely encased her in during such dangerous situations, and establish the tactically destabilising effect of sentimentality that made her such a hazard in such less-than-certain situations. Her carefully set out plan of investigation was set aside as individual concern and weakness intervened, and Shego saw one pile of decimated cement as Drakken's quarters, the next where Drakken had laid out breakfast for so many days without comment, another as the room he had said something stupid and she had hit him (basically what qualified as a friendly moment for them). Neither mind had any delusions about physical attraction, but it was as if Drakken had filled the slot left by her less than endearing father, or her obliviously inconsiderate brothers. He was, is, Reticence demanded, the emotional foundation that she had lacked in her childhood, and even his hardly ideal self-sacrificial tendencies could not overcome the fact that she had had no closer male influence in her life than his.
\Well, less one. Shego conceded, considering the personal loss that was the direct cause of the turn in her life, the greatest and only supersedently pure influence lost to her in the days preceding her fall into villainy. But she was violently opposed to such thoughts, and both of her highly divergent camps of memory engrams united in the elimination of those precariously ruinous deliberations. This drove her from her reprieve, allowing Desire to re-assert herself and slip the raven-haired woman into a more business-like mood as she drew a scanning device from the case slung over her shoulder.
Keying it to search for life-signs, she began sweeping the area using the high-tech gadget. Had it been any other example of Drakken's technology, pilfered or otherwise, Shego would have found any readings it offered highly suspect. However she had it on good authority that her employer had sniped this particular device's design from one Wade Load, Kim Possible's hacker extraordinaire and one of the most reliably certifiable geniuses Shego dealt with. And that could mean a lot, or very little, depending on which group of geniuses she was calling into question; those on her side were less than inspiring company to place the prodigy amongst. Her victims were more appropriate; though "dealing with" most of them meant stealing only one or two pieces of their technology, not coming up against it on a bi-monthly basis. There were certainly friendlier ways to gain an appreciation for someone's technical wizardry than constantly finding yourself on the receiving end of a device's capabilities, but even Shego normally unassailable ego could not deny a fair amount of respect to the young boy's overwhelmingly bright track record when it came to the effectiveness of his mechanisms.
Drakken will never be able to live it down if Kim's tech boy's designturns out to provide his lifeline. She thought to herself. Then again, if anyone finds out about how attached I've gotten to this Kimmunicat... Green-n-Blackberry, I won't hear the end of it either. Irony strikes again. Who would have ever thought Kim Possible would have anything to do with saving Dr. Drakken's life. Her musings were positive, if only due to an artificially powerful sense of hope, partly from the protracted difference in her state of mind when compared to earlier in the evening, partly from the overtime Desire was putting in to keeping the volatile Reticence in the game. However, even better-than-best-case scenario that was being presented was becoming tainted with the results of the scan.
Thermal imaging showed no hot spots which might indicate a living form, a hyper-sensitive atmospheric gas content sensor detected no unexplained oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange, auditory scans which focused in on the sonic bands where breathing and a heartbeat could be discerned over the white noise that was present even in the eerie silence of the crater picked up only the shallow breathes issued from the green skinned villainess. Even an induction coil which was designed to detect the electrical impulses of the central nerves' system, which would only be absent in a corpse, was unresponsive. Shego tip-toed around the entire site, holding the device as close to the piles of rubble as possible to ensure the sensors would not overlook something due to the limitations of range. On her third circuit, with no change in result, she deactivated the seemingly useless device in disgust.
If you want something done right, you need to do it yourself. She thought in exasperation as she began to physically sift through the nearest pile of rubble. Finding nothing definitive, she moved on to the next one. It would take hours to go through the site like this, and would turn up nothing at best, a cadaver at worst, but some force, beyond even Desire's prodding, allowed Shego to do no less. Within less than 30 minutes the manicure that she had been so concerned about just hours before was reduced to a mangled set of cracked and bloodied nails, even beneath her clawed gloves, but she ignored the lancing pain that was numbing her hands with her every motion and pressed on. After some 3 hours of heaving the mauled rock from the piles where it had fallen into other piles where she had thrown them, Shego's search finally came to a bitterly predictable end.
Finished sorting through a pile of burned timber that had culminated in the general area of what had once been one of the henchmen's barracks, Shego set out across the barren expanse that roughly split the lair in half. This was where the explosion had been so powerful it had atomized the surrounding structural components, leaving only a raw patch of ground that resembled the aftermath of a volcanic pyroclastic flow. There was no point searching here, indeed, nothing to even to search, and she was merely cutting through it to start looking through the wreckage on the other side. As she crossed the exact point of the epicentre, she slipped on a section of ground that was completely devoid of traction, a noticeable difference from the bumpy and easily gripped underfoot consistency of the rest of the blast crater. Looking down at the offending square foot of ground, Shego was shocked to see the sheen of a glass like compound literally cast into the ground. Taking a moment to examine this strange result of the extreme heat created by the explosion, the green skinned woman knelt down beside it. She dragged a clawed finger over top, again disregarding the sting of contact with her abscessed digits, and was amazed by the flawless smoothness that the unintended formation possessed.
It's too perfect. She thought. It was not as if she was an expert in the creation of glass, but she had some basic understanding of how the stuff formed, from documentary she had watched during a stretch 'inside' on a bizarre form of art that involved placing metal rods into beaches during thunderstorms. When the lightning struck, extraordinary sculptures of perfect glass formed around the thermally conductive steel. However, it was the focused heat that the rod created that gave rise to the smooth glass, without the concentration of thermal energy any glass formation could not be uniformly flat. Flaring up her glow-power, Shego illuminated the interior of the translucent slab.
She blinked several times, not believing what she was seeing. The villainess lashed out with her plasma enshrouded fist, fragmenting the glass and extracted the object of her confusion. She had found her thermal focal point. It was a black glove, not one of hers, though she wished it was. Initially she had thought it was a hand, which was the reason for her bewilderment. As the civilian fire investigator had said, flesh and blood could not have survived the inferno that had ravaged this area. But closer analysis had dismissed that explanation, and produced an even more disturbing one. It was one of Drakken's laboratory gloves, half of the only set that he owned. Designed to be nearly indestructible, they had on their own cost more to create than half of his more impressive contraptions, and since unlike those other innovations these simple protective devices had worked so faultlessly, he had seen no need for another set. This was also why he almost never removed the gloves, wearing them constantly not only ensured he had a measure of protection from his numerous failures, but guaranteed that he would not lose them in his absent-mindedness. Having seen them resist destruction from even her own energised fists, Shego had no doubt that they could have survived the explosion and provided the heat with a point to converge upon to form the glass it which it had been encased, even as their wearers' body was incinerated within them.
For the second time in a single night, Shego fell to her knees. This was the confirmation that she had dreaded, that Drakken had been in the building at the time of the explosion, and he had not gotten out. Grasping what could quite possibly be the last scrap of physical evidence that the man known as Drew Lipski had ever existed closely to her face, Shego relinquished her last vestige of pride, and began to weep like the small frightened child that the finality of reality had turned her into.
A little post script here, I don't encourage drinking while in a motorized vehicle (this can lead to a lot of trouble for the driver, even if they aren't imbibing. stupid alcoholic leech friends...) nor do I endorse vandalism as a form of stress relief. It just seemed like the sort of thing Ed would do. And I know the whole glass sculpture thing kinda came out of no-where, but it had to be done.
Thanks, Drew