Re-enter the Dragon

By Eoraptor

Kim Possible and all related characters © Walt Disney Corporation 2002-2007.

A/N: All right, right off the bat, expect Kim and Shego and pretty much everyone to be very OOC in this fic. It also ignores most of season 4.

Special thanks for everyone who is leaving reviews, both here and at KPslashHaven. I know that the warping of the characters here is not everyone's cup of tea, so I am glad some of you are enjoying it. Remember, the only way any of us fanfiction(DOT)net authors know if our stuff is being read is if you, the reader, take a moment to leave your thoughts. Thanks in advance. :)

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"Hypervigilance"

Olive eyes flashed open in the darkness of the seventh floor hotel suite. Something was not right. Kim lay absolutely still, not ready to give away that she was awake until she had more information; and better yet, a plan of action.

Grunt, phew. Grunt, phew. Grunt, phew.

What was that? That wasn't the sound an intruder usually made, even if she was in an expensive hotel in SOHO. Intruders usually wentscrurry, scramble, scurry, yank yank yank.

Moving as if in sleep, Kim angled herself to leap out of bed when the time came. Her movements didn't seem to disturb whoever was moving about in the suite though, as the noises continued.

Grunt, phew. Grunt, phew. Grunt, phew. Scurry scurry. Grunt, phew.

The sounds of hands and feet scrabbling about at the foot of the other bed helped Kim narrow down the location of the intruder. The hotel suite was absolutely dark though, so she had only sound to guide her. Even the alarm clock was an old wind-up job. As though tossing in her sleep again, Possible worked free of the sheets and comforter.

Grunt grunt grunt, phew. Grunt grunt grunt, phew.

The rhythm of the noises changed, picking up speed. Listening closely, Kim realized the sound was of someone breathing hard, exerting themselves. A shudder of disgust ran through her as her mind leapt to the first reason why such noises would be heard in the darkened room of a single young woman on vacation in a strange city. Visions of a hairy, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing "perpetrator" with his pants already down filled her mind's eye in the lack of any visual stimulus in the darkened room.

Grunt grunt grunt, phew. Grunt grunt grunt, phew.

Well, Kim Possible, Agent of Global Justice, wasn't anyone's perverted fantasy. Nor was she going to lay there and let this guy attack in the darkness.

Grunt grunt grunt, phew. Grunt grunt grunt, phew. Grunt grunt grunt, phew.

"Aiyeeeeee!"

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Shego's electric green eyes rocketed open and she sat upright in bed. Already, though, the terror of her dream was fading into the mist. Wait, she didn't have a bed? She had a cold steel slab with a thin mattress, not an actual bed. Where was-? Oh yeah…

"Kimmie…" She whispered quietly in the darkness, a sigh of profound relief accompanying the whispered name.

Kimmie, Princess, Kitten, Cheer-leader, Kimmie-cub; these had been Shego's magic words for most of the last four years. When she was beaten down, when she was battered, when she'd been… These were the words that brought her back, kept her sane, reminded her she was still a human being, and that there was an outside world.

Kim Possible had become a symbol for her after the second dark week at "The Facility." She was all that was right in the world. She was above words like "law" and "Quid Pro Quo." Kimmie existed in a rarified place where justice was a real and pure thing, and not a term printed on a piece of paper by bureaucrats. A shining beacon proving that security was something that someone gave, not something which faceless thugs in blue jumpsuits enforced.

Shego tried to lay back down and close her eyes, relishing the feel of an actual mattress beneath her, and not a shallow cloth-wrapped foam pad merely 'called' a mattress. Still, after a few minutes, she realized that the adrenaline rush inspired by the now-vanished nightmare was not going to let her sleep.

Well, there was one thing she did at night, no matter what. It was her small defiance. It was the one thing she could do, alone in the darkness, to thwart the rules of "The Facility."

Slipping silently from the bed, as though she was still afraid of being caught out by a passing guard, Shego moved to the foot of this generous bed, laid down on her belly against the luxurious carpet, and began to push herself upwards with just her left arm.

After a few dozen reps on each arm, she slowly and quietly crawled around and wedged her feet under the foot of the bed. She used her abdominals to sit up, touch each elbow to the opposite knee, and then back down in a sinuous movement. The action was fluid, more like a snake coiling about itself than a human doing situps.

She had gotten through a few of these when a piercing scream rolled through the air. The scream was hauntingly similar to others she had heard, and it threw her mind back to a dark place and time, even as her body was also thrown.

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As soon as Kim's shoulder made contact with the chest of the intruder, or rather the breasts of the intruder, she realized her horrible mistake. In her vigilant state, she had forgotten that Shego had been passed out in the bed next to her own for the last several hours.

Even as her momentum carried her and the emerald malcontent across the carpet, she realized that Shego's feet had been wedged beneath her bed. The sounds Kim had heard must have been Shego working out, not some pervert masturbating to the vision of her sleeping. Explained her new physique well enough.

Kim's mortification at her error blinded her to the counter-attack. A pair of bare feet mule kicked her in the gut, knocking the wind out of her and catapulting her over her roommate. She landed, almost breaking her back against the dresser when she collided with it, and groaned breathlessly. Before she could even move to right herself, having landed upside-down, she felt a pair of iron bands seize her about the throat.

The iron bands were actually the thickly-tendoned hands of Shego, and although Kim could not see her face, the feral snarl the other woman let loose put the fear of God into the redhead. The sound was inhuman to her ears, and even as spots started forming at the edges of her vision, Kim knew the malachite mercenary was not in control of herself.

"Mulmar!!! I told you if you ever tried to-,"

Whatever Shego was screaming about was cut off when Kim used her long legs to seize the woman about the head and slam her into the vanity mirror of the dresser that she was pinned against.

Gasping for breath as she was released, Kim rolled away, clutching at her ragged throat and trying to protect herself. Being dropped on her head had been the least of her concerns as she fought desperately for air. She waved her hands frantically as Shego turned, even though the movement was futile in the darkness.

Finally she managed to croak out, "Shego! Stop! It's Me! Kim! SHEGO!"

The muscular woman hadn't made another move towards Kim, but after a shambling moment, the emerald woman dropped to her knees.

Rubbing her throat; Kim gasped more, flinching backwards at the thump of Shego dropping. When no further attack came, Kim inclined her head, listening intently. She heard… sobbing. Coughing softly, her throat seriously injured, the redhead reached around on the aggrieved dresser until she found the lamp. It was still miraculously intact and she flicked it on, needing to see if Shego was that badly hurt.

Shego was staring at her hands now, which were still clawed as though they had been when around Kim's throat. Entwined in her fingers were two strands of long cinnamon hair. She sobbed again, her green body shuddering as she flexed her fingers. She watched them incredulously, as though they were things with a mind of their own which might leap for her own throat at any second.

Kim coughed again harshly, and rubbed her neck round and round. She felt suddenly fortunate that Shego hadn't flared up, or a sore throat would be the last of the then-decapitated agent's problems. Ignoring Shego's seeming catatonia, she moved next to her, carefully checking her face and forehead. There was a lot of blood there, but as Kim wiped it away, she found no laceration. Apparently Shego had already healed from having her face slammed into the vanity. More of those bizarre powers she and her brothers shared.

The redheaded GJ agent was caressing her neck still, and the small of her back where she had been inverted and pinned, and wishing for a similar mutation. Finally though, she returned her attention to the emerald beauty before her. She was still staring at her clawed fingers in disbelief, and it was not something Kim liked. Once again she was painfully reminded that something had happened to her arch nemesis.

Again, and even more keenly in the dim light of the desk-lamp, she was confronted by the way Shego's body was now that of a Miss Olympia contestant. The shadows thrown out by the soft yellow light of the desk lamp accentuated every muscle in the woman's arms. However, when Kim moved to touch her mint-hued skin in a more soothing manner than her cursory examination, Shego came out of her catatonia a bit, shying away from the contact.

"Kimmie… I'm… I…" it was a shamed, timid whisper, and the more slender of the pair sighed, moving to sit next to the dark woman in the light of the lamp.

Wishing she could stop babying her wounded throat with her hand, Kim nodded and was a little surprised at the raspy sound of her aggrieved voicebox. "It's okay Shego. I'm sorry for attacking you. But obviously I'm off my game, you never would have caught me like that in the old days."

She tried to chuckle, but ended up merely coughing. Shego winced at the sound, but there was a faint smirk on her lips, a ghost of her old playfulness. "That how you justify it to yourself, princess? 'I ain't as good as I once was?' Well, whatever gets you through the night. But you were never that good, you just thought you were."

Kim's smirk matched Shego's, a ghost from days a few years passed, and she shook her head and croaked back. "Yeah, that's why I kept sending you to the klink, because I only thought I was good enough. Dream on green bean."

Shego stared at Kim in the dim light of the lamp incredulously. When had the perfect little princess stooped to nicknames? Come to think of it… when had the redhead gotten so tall?

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Across a continent, in Silicon Valley California, Wade Loade was passing a boring evening as his latest program compiled. Boring really didn't describe it… The young man was in his late teens now, and he was restless. It was eleven PM on the pacific coast, and he was sitting here, waiting for an artificially intelligent agent to finish being compiled by a less intelligent one. Once that was done, he could go home to his apartment and be restless there.

That was the strange thing about working in artificial intelligence programming. You didn't do so much actual code-writing as you monitored the output of other programs. It was more like breeding sheep than writing programs. This wasn't really what bored the chubby computer genius. The fact was Wade didn't know why he was bored and/or restless.

Which was why he couldn't seem to do anything about it; if he couldn't identify the root cause, he couldn't cure the mood.

"Well, okay. Maybe I do know why." Wade sighed and relented to himself. The feelings of drifting, listless boredom, and restlessness had been getting worse over the past few months. Work, even cutting edge research on artificial intelligence, was hardly a challenge to him most days.

"Not like I'm running support and intel for a certain teenage heroine anymore, is it?"

Groaning and rubbing his hands over his face, Wade lifted one finger to check the status of his compiler program. When Kim had gone pro two years ago, Wade had thought it would be a good thing for him. He'd never shared the reason for that feeling with anyone, but he thought that too was a good thing.

Kim had come to Wade when he was a ten-year-old uberhacker. She and Ron just couldn't keep up with her burgeoning website, which had gone from a simple babysitting advertisement to the front-end for the girl hero of Middleton. He had gladly accepted, because at that time, everyone else in the world still treated him as either a brainy freak or a ten year old little boy. Kim was the only one who treated him as an equal.

So they had grown up together, and grown in to Team Possible. Wade watched both Kim and Ron grow into capable heroes and crime fighters, and honed his own hacking capabilities and added to them with a new-found knack for invention. Then, for Wade at least, the problems had started.

By then Wade was fourteen. Like any fourteen year old boy, he was starting to think about girls. Now, this in and of itself was a perfectly normal and healthy thing. His mother certainly encouraged it, as she did anything that helped her boy be more normal and healthy. The problem came in a conflict of interests.

The problem was; the chunky hacker with the dark skin was smitten with one girl in particular. Who wouldn't be? She was gorgeous… a cheerleader, a championship one at that. And she was sweet, and caring, and always had a kind word for him. Perusing the net, Wade knew that others understood and shared his infatuation. Who couldn't love this girl? Cover-girl good looks, heart of gold, buns of steel? She had it all.

Yes, Wade fell hard for Kim. It made him do stupid things. Kim never asked why her prototype battle suit fit her like a glove, and he wasn't about to tell her about the in-depth body scans he had of her, since they weren't strictly professional. Likewise, she never asked where all the pictures of her fighting Shego, or Killigan, or an army of henchman, came from when they would show up on the net. She counted on him to handle the publicity, after all, and to keep it to a minimum.

The problem was, about the time Wade's crush was developing, Reality was conspiring against him. Through a combination of events, Kim also fell hard for someone; the other nerd in her life, Ron Stoppable.

The boy-genius's logical side understood that his chances with someone like Kim were a long-shot a best. She was five years older than him, white, (that was an issue in Wade's family) popular, outgoing, and into athletic men; So most of the things about Kim that attracted Wade kept her out of his league as well. Still, the hormones and lonely heart of a fourteen year old boy kept him pining for her, and staying fiercely at her side for three more years.

It was hard on Wade, watching Kim and Ron be happy together. Then Wade had started detecting patterns of unhappiness between his two friends. Of course he recognized the pattern of Kim's 'moodiness,' patterns were his job after all. He feigned ignorance that night Ron called him and asked him to crunch calendar dates on Kim's mood swings, but he already had a good idea. When Ron had called him up on February fifteen to help him pack up some of Kim's stuff, Wade had been the solemn best male friend dutifully helping out; but a devious little voice in the back of his head had whispered over and over again that he now had his chance.

His chance never materialized though. When Kim stopped talking to Ron, she largely stopped talking to him socially as well. It became all business between them. Worse for the love-sick boy was yet to come, though. He'd finally managed to curtail most of his more stupid maneuvers, like snapping candid pictures of Kim on missions, or chatting up her qualities on the internet and rabidly defending her in flame-wars, but he still held out hope that she would get her act together and see her loyal techy in a new light. He was more mature now, and He hoped she could see that.

Then, he'd called her up at her apartment in Upperton to let her know she was needed. That was how he had been introduced to Kim's new lifestyle. Kelly, a pretty blonde girl with eyes the color of sapphire had picked up the Kimmunicator. This was the first alarm bell. Kim didn't let anyone else handle her Kim'com unless they were her partner and she trusted them. So far that was Ron, Wade, Rufus, and occasionally one of the tweebs if she was in a pinch.

Well, when Kim kissed her on the cheek and retrieved the device from her grasp, Wade understood that Kelly was her partner all right.

There are few faster ways to crush a fifteen year old boy's spirit than to tell him that the girl he holds above all others… …wasn't so much in to boys anymore. The suggestion that a boy Wade's age would be really into the idea of 'his girl' being into other girls was a myth, and a painful one to the hacker-genius. He had done his very best to keep it together while he gave Kim the specifics of the 'sitch, and begged off claiming allergies when questioned on his sniffles.

Even though Kim was more perfunctory with him these days, Wade still knew of her relationship woes. He watched her go back and forth between men and women over the next few months. Watching her trash her relationship with Josh Mankey a second time really stung, because it was the one time she broke down in front of him on the Kimmunicator. He watched how the broken hearts changed the once vivacious redhead of his life. How she became brusquer, more business-like, and started cursing on occasion. He hated it. Part of him again whispered that he had a chance; that he and he alone could bring Kim back. But it never happened.

When she graduated college and joined Global Justice full time, Kim asked him to finally close out her site and tell the world she was now out of the pro-bono world-saving Game. The hurt, now sixteen year old boy had briefly been tempted to lash out… to deface KimPossible(dot)com, and to tell the world how heartless she was. Fortunately though, the more mature and professional person in Wade won out, and decided that getting Kim out of his life would be the best thing for him.

For a while, it had been. He started leaving his room, now an apartment of his own, more often. He got a job in the public sector, and even had a few dates with some girls who were wowed by his reputation or his intelligence.

These last few weeks though, Wade was realizing that he missed it. Not so much that he missed and still wanted Kim, even though he damned well did; but he missed the excitement. Wade missed the pressure; the wild nights spent trying to hack a government spy satellite, the think-on-the-fly mentality and inventive solutions.

So here he was, thinking of calling up his old boss and asking if maybe she needed a civilian contractor. He didn't, of course, since it was two AM in New York; but he was almost convinced he would do so in the morning. It was a shame he didn't call, or he could have saved the object of his ardor a crushed voice box and a very big hotel cleaning bill.

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Please forgive how long this took to get out, and any typos you may come cross. I've only just gotten over a really bad case of the holiday blues that lasted from turkey day to new years and started writing again. In fact, things are kind of coming out in a rush now, and I'm working on four projects at once; This, A Blonde Moment, a new project that you'll see shortly, and a group author work on SlashHaven…

Gomen nasai.