"No!" Monique screamed as she saw an explosion erupt between Wade and Ron, followed by Ron's red and gold suit of armor flying away with great force, head first into the already damaged wall of the laboratory. Standing out from behind the car, she raised her hands to her mouth in disbelief as the pale blue glow in Ron's chest flickered feebly before giving way to darkness.

"Ron!" Kim screamed out his name, as she stood next to Monique. "Ron, get up, damn you!" The dust had barely settled, yet it looked like Ron was down and never getting up. With Wade's wicked laughter echoing around them, tears sprang to her eyes as she screamed his name again. "Ron! Please..."

Turning to face the two women, Wade grinned triumphantly. "I've done it! I've destroyed Ron Stoppable!"

"Why, Wade?" Kim screamed shrilly at the man who used to be an integral part of Team Possible. "Why?" she fell sobbing to her knees, as her voice surrendered to sobs. "Ron…"

"Now that he's out of the way, the company belongs to me!" Wade gloated as he marched towards Kim and Monique. "All I need to do now, is get rid of the witnesses…"

Monique tugged at Kim's shoulders as she tried to pull Kim away with her. But in her sobbing distress, the red-head was clearly unreceptive to the danger that was approaching. "Kim! We gotta run!" Monique hissed in fear as she grabbed her arm. "Let's go!"

Kim pulled away from her friend as she cried on her knees, uncaring of the hulking ten-foot giant lifting its massive fists above the two of them, ready to smash them into the ground. She could only call to Ron weakly, "Ron… Please, Ron… Please"

"Kim," Wade called to her, with a sneer evident in his voice. "You have no idea how long I've waited for this day."

"Why, Wade?" Monique screamed, as she held a catatonic Kim in her arms. "They're your friends! Why? What's this about? Money? Power?"

"At first, no, but now that's a small part of many other things!" Wade roared out in anger. "Have you forgotten what your friends did to me?"

"What friends?" Kim asked, her eyes flashing with confusion as Wade stared down at her in his rage.

"GJ, who else?" Wade sneered at the shocked woman. "It was so easy for you to give up my secrets to them, wasn't it? Just so that they'd let you into Global Justice. It was your dream, after all, wasn't it, Kim?"

"I don't understa-…"

"Can it, Kim!" Wade yelled at her. "Why do you think Ron failed the GJ exams? Why do you think I first started working with Drew and dropped all contact with Team Possible? It was all because of you!"

"You made Ron fail?" Kim gasped as she shook her head, anger briefly flashing in her eyes. "But... How can you say I had anything to do with Ron failing?"

"Oh, the 'how' was easy enough, Kim, but I'll get to that in a minute..." Wade sneered. "As for the 'why', don't you remember Kim? Don't you remember giving them my Kimmunicator?"

"What? No… I didn't… No…" Kim shook her head as tears streamed down her face, her heart searching for a denial. "No… It's not true… Wade, you're wrong… I didn't… They just wanted to look at it for a moment… They gave it back to me right away!"

"Right away? Right away?" Wade roared out angrily. "Are you stupid, or just disgustingly naive, Kim? Don't you know? It didn't matter how long they had it! You just as well have left it with them for a week, which you probably did!"

"No! I had it back within a few minutes, 'cause you called me on a mission! I wasn't in GJ yet, after all..." Kim cried back, "Betty... She asked me if you'd be interested in a contract to make more Kimmunicators for them! She had the paperwork all written up, but you'd disappeared, gone completely off the grid!"

"You're wrong, Kim..." Wade grated dangerously, "You may have kept it that night, but they got it from you for long enough, didn't they?"

Kim shook her head in confusion, "Long enough for what, Wade? You're not making any sense!"

"They hacked into it or something, Kim... They used it to find me!" Wade screamed, pain in his eyes, "You remember, when I lost contact with you later that day? They came to my house with CIA and NSA agents in tow... You had to know about it!" Wade paused, watching Kim's shocked, tearful expression, the pain and confusion in her eyes telling of her ignorance. He took a breath, continuing in a quieter, far deadlier voice, "No, I'll bet you didn't know a thing, you naïve bitch... But they 'offered' me a chance to 'redeem' myself, Kim..."

Kim shuddered, knowing what that meant. She had worked with some of those very agencies in her time with GJ, and knew that their offers of redemption were far from pleasant. "Wade, I didn't kno-...

"I lost my entire system," Wade continued with his cold voice, "I lost all my homebrew programs, and my mother was jailed for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and collusion with a terrorist and espionage against a sovereign nation! They had me, Kim, just the way they wanted me…"

He paused, watching with a grim, satisfied smile on his face at the pain he was inflicting. And he was not even close to finished yet. "Ever since then, GJ and anyone they work with have been trying to track me... And while they were only partially successful, it was enough! They ruined every chance I had to get into good universities, get good jobs, everything... The only reason I had a job at all was because Drew, of all people, trusted me! And all because you gave them the Kimmunicator! Ten minutes or ten days, it didn't matter! Until Stoppable Enterprises became too valuable to the government, I was barely able to do anything without some agent or another visiting me! But I did enough..."

"I didn't know!" Kim protested in vain, interrupting his rant again much to Wade's annoyance. "I didn't mean for that to happen! They said they just wanted to to have a look! You have to believe me…"

"Enough!" Wade roared. "I've had enough of your petty excuses! You're so wrapped up in your own perfect little world that you think GJ is an upstanding organization that won't stoop to blackmail!"

"But, Wade... How?" Kim begged, "How did you do this, if they really did all that to you?"

"Oh, easily, Kim..." Wade said softly, leaning forward, "It all started with an anonymous email sent from Japan..." Kim stared at him in confusion, "Oh, really, Kim, you don't know about Yamanouchi? The ninja school Ron went to? The email was ostensibly one of them requesting GJ to get ahold of 'Stoppable-sama'! According to the email, it was because his Mystical Monkey Powers were of unprecedented power and that they should send him back to further his training… It was a simple matter of changing certain words to make Ron an unviable candidate… Though knowing that you were going to break up with him thanks to your chats with Monique helped form the plan, so I should thank you both..."

"Wha-..." Monique and Kim muttered, staring at him in shock. Monique stood up, shaking with rage as she mustered enough courage to raise her shaking voice, ignoring a frantic Kim trying to hush her, "How dare you do that to Ron! And our conversations were private!"

"I dared because I wanted revenge for what she put me and my mother through!" Wade bellowed, his rage renewed, "And if it's private conversations you want, dear Monique, maybe you should turn your cell phone off, hmmm? It was a simple matter to hack your phone and use it to listen to, as I said just a moment ago, Kim ranting about how Ron could always be something better, and how it was over if he didn't do just that?"

"You bastard..." Kim whispered hoarsely, trying to speak around the lump in her throat. She hung her head, tears dropping with small patters against the blacktop of the parking lot.

"Yes, I know, Kim, and you can blame yourself... For failing your partner and one of your best friends, all for the glamour of a job with Global Justice." Wade's tone was conciliatory, but his eyes were hard and cold. "GJ had some good laughs at my expense, but I get the last laugh now!"

Wade's smile turned predatory as he flexed his fingers within the waldos controlling the beast's arms, the suit's fingers flexing in the same manner adding to the menacing appearance. "I've done what all your enemies have failed to do. I've destroyed Team Possible!"

"Not yet!" Monique barked, interposing herself between Wade and Kim. "You're all talk and nothing else! Just whining about how you got dealt a bad hand. Truth is you never came to Kim for help, and she would have done anything for you, Wade! In the end, you're just an immature little mommy's boy… You were nothing before Kim! And you'd still be some hacker sitting in your room without her!"

"Am I, now? Nothing, Monique, really?" Wade sneered with disgust. Turning his head to gesture at the office complex behind him, he continued, "Look at where we are right now! We have gone from nothing to becoming the richest entrepreneurs in the world! Look what we could have achieved without Kim; she was actually holding Ron back from our greatness!"

"You're wrong!" Monique shot back as courageously as she could against the huge metal behemoth before her. "Ron would never be where he is today if not for Kim…"

"Oh really?" Wade's lips curled viciously and glanced back at Ron's crumpled suit, the black spot where the arc reactor resided telling of the blond's imminent death. "Well, you may have a point. I mean, look what happened: Kim left Ron, and he did start to improve, right?"

He glanced back at Kim, seeing a grudging admittance of that truth written on her face. "Yes, exactly... By the end of that year, he'd have probably been a self made millionaire, and you two could have been together... But he was stagnating, pining away for his 'KP', but I already saw the potential... If only I could get him to work for it! So I took the initiative... And when I did, it took me a good twenty days of programming and hundreds of hours of footage to give Ron that final push to leave you behind!"

"You mean…" Kim blinked hard. "That video…"

"Kim, Kim, Kim..." Wade shook his head patronizingly. "You mean you couldn't even recognize my own handiwork? I'm surprised…" Wade paused, laughing as if at some cosmic joke. "Nah, actually, I'm not... Hell, I made millions off of selling my first four revisions of that software to Hollywood... The same software that CG experts claim has gone beyond the so called Uncanny Valley and just shy of one hundred percent realism!"

Monique squeezed her eyes shut as she clutched Kim's head tightly to her chest, not wanting to abandon her broken friend. Tears sprang to her eyes as she realized that this time, no one was going to save her.

"Dr. Load!" a voice screeched over from the laboratory, a solitary figure stepping out through a hole in the wall. The man was dressed in a blue lab coat with black boots and gloves, and he bore had a pony tail much longer than it had been during the early days of Team Possible, as well as a scar over his left eye. Dr. Drew P 'Drakken' Lipsky walked closer towards the scene with the confident, almost arrogant swagger he had always used.

"Dr. Lipsky," Wade beamed as he watched the inventor and head of the research division of Stoppable Enterprises step into view.

"Did you just kill Mr. Stoppable?" Drakken asked nonchalantly as though engaging in a typical comment about the weather.

"The fool will bother us no more!" Wade crowed gleefully. "I will take over the company, and you will get a promotion! Together, nothing can stop us from marketing more of these suits and owning the world market in weapons research, development, and sales!"

"Right," Drakken pursed his lips as though contemplating in deep thought. "And you're going to kill Kim Possible and her friend too?"

"Collateral damage," Wade shrugged. "It's all Ron's fault anyway! If he hadn't tried to shut down the primary aspect of Stoppable Enterprises…"

"When you said that you will get Mr. Stoppable to see your side of things, I didn't think that this is what you meant," Drakken replied evenly, as he surveyed the damage caused by the battle. "I merely thought you were going to show him the suit and talk reason into him, not..." Drakken waved casually over to Ron's suit where it lay crumpled to the ground, "That..."

"If he wasn't so stubborn, we could have avoided all of this!" Wade raised his voice angrily. "He's long outlived his usefulness! I'm just doing what those damned terrorists failed to do!"

"I was wondering about that…" Drakken mused to himself. "How did Ron's convoy get ambushed exactly?"

"Listen, Drew," Wade shook his head. "Ron was becoming a liability and you know it! He hasn't invented anything except for this suit in almost six months! It was bad enough when he drank himself silly with all those whores, but no... His affairs had dropped, he'd even cut back on drinking! He didn't give a damn about the company anymore, Drew... That bitch..." he pointed at Monique, his tone accusing in its rage, "Was getting to him... She was not too far at all from making him reconcile with Kim, and you know as well as I do that the company would have gone to Hell if that happened!"

"Well, in Ron's defense," Drakken said in his still neutral tone, "Ron was kidnapped for three of those six months, and he had been too busy with interviews, promotional events, and the like before that..."

Wade ground his teeth with a seething glare before dropping his voice dangerously, "Drew... It's time for Stoppable Enterprises to benefit from new leadership... And it will only work out for us if we raisethis company up from the ashes of its founder's tragic death!" Wade paused as Drakken pursed his lips again, then he pressed on to the older scientist, his tone becoming almost desperate, "Drew, you know, you know that we can reach new heights! Ron wouldn't listen because he just didn't understand… But you and I, we know what needs to be done…"

"So if I were to oppose you, would you kill me too?" Drakken raised an eyebrow defiantly.

"Drew! We built this company together!" Wade screamed out at the mad scientist. "What about your dreams of creating a better world? Would it be possible if Stoppable screwed us over by shutting down this company? All your genius would have gone to waste!"

"I didn't think you would go this far," Drakken replied dryly.

"Goddammit, Drew, I'm serious!" Wade shouted almost incoherently. "He's going to destroy us all! I'm sick of playing second fiddle to his work... That's all he does: hoard the glory while we do all the hard work! In fact, this company should be named Stoppable, Load and Lipsky Enterprises! I'm merely taking back what's mine!"

"I'm not going to let you kill anyone," Drakken remarked, ignoring his partner's rant.

"Oh yeah?" Wade's face instantly contorted into a gleaming smirk. "How are you going to stop me?"

"With this..." Drakken replied as he reached into his right coat pocket and removed a recording device. Replacing the device, he carefully pulled out a different, smaller device from his inside left breast pocket, barely holding it out from his coat while holding the left flap tightly closed. "And this..."

Wade instantly doubled over with laughter as he saw the object. "One of your little Diablo robots from back in the old days?" Wade laughed as he turned, stalking slowly over towards Drakken. "You have got to be kidding! Those things have all been disabled and their power generators removed! That is nothing more than an undersized paperweight! And even if you had an arc reactor, there wouldn't be any way for you to surge enough power to the damn thing to work!"

"I suppose you're right," Drakken shrugged evenly, before a knowing smile slipped to his face. "After all, the Li'l Diablo's main bulk was stored in a small pocket dimension, so they weren't too heavy for children to carry, but once activated, they need that power to once again be folded back into that dimension..."

Wade stopped for a moment, slightly shaken by Drakken's slow, even speech and seemingly confident tone. Drakken breathed an inaudible sigh of relief, hiding it by chuckling briefly before continuing, "Now, if memory serves, one of these things weighs ten tons when activated, and due to the strange nature of the pocket dimension, they keep their speed when someone throws them, but gain the mass and inertia of a ten ton object..." Drakken smiled as Wade gave him a confused, frustrated glare, and the scientist smiled dangerously. "And as for a way to power it without my radio tower? Well, you seem to have missed one of my notes to the board..."

With those words, Drakken revealed what he had been hiding underneath the left flap of his coat. Two small, dark colored wires were secured to the Li'l Diablo's power conversion and supply circuit."High temperature superconductors!" Drakken called out gleefully, hurling the little toy at Wade with his right hand while whipping a remote from his pocket with the other. He thumbed the activation button on the remote before a surge of energy made the superconducting wires dance and sing in protest of the demands being put on them. But even as they slagged into expensive droplets of molten material, the little toy seemed to grow in size, before becoming a huge, full scale Diablo Robot.

Wade's eyes grew wide with surprise, and he barely at time to react and reseal his armor before ten tons of solid steel robot smashed right into him and toppled him over, pinning him to the ground. The sound of twisting metal from the Li'l Diablo and the scrape of the Iron Monger's energized plates resounded deafeningly through the parking lot, as Monique drug Kim out of the way of several pieces of Li'l Diablo flew in their direction. Screaming curses at Drakken, Wade struggled to get out from under the robot, slamming the arms and legs of his Iron Monger into the Li'l Diablo like a jackhammer.

Drakken took the opportunity to run over to Ron, crouching down by the fallen gold and red suit of armor. "Mr. Stoppable? Are you alright?" Drakken called as he rapped his knuckles on the forehead of the construct.

"Still alive," Ron's pained voice came through, sounding muffled by the suit. "No power, thing is dead, you need to get me out of this."

"No, listen," Drakken interrupted the man as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cylindrical object. "I have the pan-dimensional vortex inducer with me, and I converted it to draw and convert energy, instead of opening dimensional doors! Just tell me where I can hook this up and…"

"Wait a minute, you had the PDVI all this time?" Ron asked in surprise.

"Don't ask," Drakken shrugged. "I'll just say it was a souvenir from my villain days. I just claimed it was destroyed when Team Possible blew up my last lair."

"Right," Ron grumbled. "There's a slot on my left side, just push the panel there and let it slide open… Yeah, that's right. Then connect the PDVI to those wires; that should give me enough juice for a while."

"Uh huh," Drakken nodded as he followed the instructions. "Mr. Stoppable, I just want you know that I have nothing to do with this… Mr. Load just told me that you had a project for me to work on, and that he was going to consult with you about all this…"

"Right," Ron remarked sarcastically. "I did mention that I wanted to stop building weapons."

"Heh," Drakken let out a wry grin. "I didn't think too much into that? After all, the labor and heavy service industry would welcome the replacement of forklifts with something a man could wear, or am I wrong?"

Ron shook his head at Drakken's though process, them smiled, "You may be right, but we couldn't go making thousands of arc reactors or PDVIs to power them, y'know?"

"I hadn't thought of that, though I'm sure cabling at a worksite or a small gas or diesel generator would work just as well for a non-combat role. Besides," Drakken continued in a more speculative tone, "Didn't you originally intend this supposed to be for some sort of peace keeping force?"

"It was supposed to be private and confidential!" Ron growled. "Now are you done yet?"

"Yeah, almost, Ronald..." There were a few audible clicks and Drakken smiled, "I had to adjust this based on the telemetry I got from Wade's suit... I wouldn't want to cause an explosion from your arc reactor, after all..." After a few more clicks, Drakken sat back slightly on his haunches, smiling brightly at Ron, "And there we go!" A loud snap of static electricity, resounded as Drakken connected the final wire. The PDVI hummed as it sent energy surging into the suit.

The HUD inside Ron's suit lit up, and power levels skyrocketed to optimal levels. The arc reactor had come back online, brightening in intensity with its renewed energy. Doing a quick diagnostics check on his suit, Ron discovered a minor fracture in the outer shell, on the chest piece where the anti-tank projectile had hit him at point blank range, denting the armor more than a little bit, but was relieved when the suit's interior integrity was listed as still intact.

Monique could only nudge her best friend as she watched Ron rise to his feet, assisted by Drakken. "Kim…" she whispered in awe as the red and gold suit stretched out its limbs and got to its feet. "Kim…" she called for joy. "Ron's alive!"

"Ron…" Kim mournfully cried, as none of the words registered across her mind.

Monique tore her hands away from her tear-filled face, and pointed in Ron's direction. Screaming to her face, Monique said, "He's alive! Look, Kim! Ron's alright!"

"Ron?" Kim blinked away the tears as she gazed across the parking lot to see Ron standing tall from the rubble with Drakken standing next to him. A renewed hope flowed into her as she realized that he was alive. "Ron!" she shouted for joy, as she clutched onto Monique's arm tightly.

"Woah there," Monique laughed through her tears as she returned the embrace. "Our boy's alright now…"

"So, Drew," Ron growled as he watched Wade furiously hammering away with his arms and legs at what was left of the ten ton Diablo robot lying on top of him. "How do I destroy that thing?"

"Hit it hard," Drakken remarked coolly.

"What?" Ron turned to look at Drakken incredulously. "No weak spot? No remote failsafe? No self-destruct button?"

"Nope, nadda, zip," Drakken shook his head. "I learnt not to do that already after the last time you found that self-destruct button in my evil lair."

"Gee, thanks," Ron rolled his eyes. "What a time to learn that lesson."

"Well, if you do something like drop a forty ton semi on it, that might stop it," Drakken remarked. "But only if you drop it from a high enough spot. The impact would overload the circuits and cause the armor to shut down."

"Where am I going to get forty ton semi this late?" Ron asked not sounding amused.

"Hey, you asked me how to stop that thing!" Drakken exclaimed matter-of-factly, "It's not my fault I designed it with high impact survivability in mind..." he finished with an ironic twist of his lips as cocked his head to the side.

"Actually... That gives me an idea…" a sudden realization struck him. "You used my original designs and that thing flies, right?"

"Uh huh…" Drakken nodded his head, not quite knowing where he was going with this.

"Then if the mountain won't come to me, then I'll just have to go to the mountain!" Ron replied as he strode towards Wade.

"Damn you Drakken!" Wade gave one last enraged yell before he threw off the remains of the Diablo robot to the side. "I'll kill you!"

"Wrong, Wade," Ron declared grimly, as he stepped to face him. "This is just between the two of us and I'm going to settle it right now."

"Shouldn't you be dead already, Stoppable?" Wade remarked derisively. "You should stay dead!"

"Not this time," Ron mocked him, as he kicked in his repulsors and launched himself a few feet in the air. Aiming his two arms at the larger machine again, he fired multiple bursts at it. "Not so big without your targeting computers now, are you?"

Roaring in rage, Wade activated his own jets and the hulking beast of a machine slowly rose into the air. "You're not the only who can fly!" Wade sneered with contempt as he charged at Ron.

Easily sidestepping the cumbersome charge, Ron immediately shot skywards as he shouted at Wade, "You couldn't even invent anything to save your life! All you did was rip plans off the Internet and 

passed inventions like the grappling hair dryer off as yours! You may be one computer whiz, but you suck at everything else."

Snarling with rage, Wade adjusted course as he sped after Ron skywards. "At first I thought I would regret killing you," Wade roared over the radio. "But after this, I think I'm going to enjoy it!"

Ron turned in midair and fired a small salvo of repulsor bursts at the incoming giant. "C'mon, Wade!" Ron taunted. "I thought you had a better machine than me! You're barely catching up!"

Wade easily dodged the shots Ron had fired, and lifted his right arm to aim his minigun at Ron using manual controls. The wild spraying of bullets did little to slow the gold and red armor down as Ron seemed to speed on ahead of him. "Stop running and face me!" Wade screamed through the radio. "I will destroy you!"

"Oh yeah?" Ron's annoying smirk seems to be evident in his voice as he continued to mock the other man. "Like you could destroy me with that piece of junk anyway!"

"I'll show you! I'll show you that I'm better than you! I'll show you that I have the better machine, the better mind and the better vision! I'll…" Wade shouted angrily, his words devolving into an enraged shriek as he kicked in the afterburners, giving the suit one last jolt of speed forward.

"Just tell me one thing, Wade," Ron grinned as he just turned to hover in the air at seventy thousand feet above sea-level, looking down at the hulking behemoth approaching him. "How did you fix that icing problem?"

"What icing problem?" Wade snapped nastily. His eyes had been so fixated on the man before him that he didn't notice the warning signs. The sensors were starting to die and the feedback systems had stopped responding. The rocket propulsion boots were starting to splutter and a thin layer of ice and from across his cameras. Suddenly, the HUD flickered out and died, and Wade was left in darkness as his suit started to plummet downwards in a freefall. "No…" he screamed to himself as the only thing waiting for him below was the cold, hard earth…

Author's Notes

Okay, I know you guys expected something different from the end. But I decided to stick with the original ending of Iron Man because hey, it was a good story, and a good ending, and I'd not like to mess with that. You might read that as, "NoobFish is copping out." But yeah… It's true! I mean, I've got to have essential elements of the movie in here right? Otherwise, I could have always gone the comic route and have Stane blow his own brains out, which instantly ups the rating of the fic.

As for Wade deserving a fate worse than death, I guess it's not Ron's place to judge him. So yeah, maybe he should have, but I'd rather not go there.

And, yup, one more chapter to go… One more chapter to go…