A/N: No, I wasn't taking a break. I was trying to update Canadian Wedding, which turned into a rather bad case of writer's block. I also ended up writing the beginning of three different stories, but decided not to keep them. I already have enough on my plate as is. is being rather odd, too, since I can't change the first part of this chapter to not be bold or italic. Most of this was written rather mindlessly, actually, which doesn't all bode well with me. In fact, I'm not exactly sure what I wrote here... But feel free to read and review, and tell me what you think of what I wrote. The next update will come sooner than this one did. ~VLU
Standard Disclaimer: I do not claim to own Kim Possible, the character, or any characters from the series. All is copyrighted by Disney, I'm writing this without express permission, but am not making a profit at all.
Cold couldn't begin to describe what Kim and Shego felt, like a sudden chill passing down their spines in the course of a millisecond, only so quick it seemed ten times worse. It rushed through their nerves, so powerful that their bodies locked, muscles contracting in short spasms. The sudden rush bordered on erotic, almost orgasmic, but lasted no longer than the fraction of a second it took for Kim to run into Shego.
The two bounced off each other, Kim's awkward kick jabbing hard into Shego's side, nothing spectacular of itself. The sudden power that flowed behind it, as time sprung back like a rubber band, was surprising though. They didn't so much bounce off each other, as shoot across the room like a red and black bullet, Kim hitting the airlock at her back, and Shego crumpling into the wall on the far side.
The lights came to first, the red emergency lighting returning, dimmed by half, to illuminate just the barest fraction of the mist that rose from the vents around them. Finally, after several minutes, Kim stirred with a groan.
She gripped the back of her head and moaned, finding her hair matted with a familiar stickiness. Blood, she figured. It was impossible to tell if it followed a concussion though, or if she'd just hit a corner and split the skin.
Okay… What the hell was that? With the fog clearing from her mind, she quickly repeated their short fight over in her mind. Everything had started off fine, they traded jabs and kicks, danced around each other, and launched at each other for opposing jump-kicks- Then it got weird. She could recall the chill, still too fresh on her mind to forget, and recall hitting Shego. But the force behind that simple kick had been astounding.
She quickly put together the last part of the puzzle, the part that had chimed in the midst of their fight. Zero… It had something to do with the 'slipstream', obviously, which meant that it was Drakken's fault, and Shego's too.
Shego… She thought with a growl. She rubbed her head once more, taking to her feet, and peered through the dim red mist for her rival. Not there.
A quick scan told her that she was alone, and the woman in question wasn't in the pilot's seat, or any of the upper consoles. But without sticking her face out far enough for Kim to see, the redhead figured she could easily slip out of sight.
With that in mind, she slipped back into the shadows, ducking out of the main room and heading through the odd circular hatch that Harper had mentioned leading to the crew quarters. Glancing at the door as she passed through it told her that it had an odd little portico canopy, which was a very odd addition to a state of the art spacecraft.
"Warning: Primary core power critical, secondary core power routed to life systems." Janice called over the intercom.
I am so going to kill you for this one, Shego, Kim thought, hardly glancing up as Janice spoke. The computer didn't sound particularly worried, so she put it off as a secondary concern, behind throttling Shego, and continued stalking quietly up the corridor.
The hallway wasn't odd of itself, one door on the left that she figured would lead to the mess, and three on the right. But the rooms on the right, which she quickly poked through, were definitely built differently. Each one was a simple lounge, with a small room above and below it set up as bunks, or personal space. Probably as long and wide as the length of a coffin, with just four feet of clearance to move around.
Interesting, not helpful though, she told herself. At the end of the hallway was another room, long, wide, and built curved to fit in the back of the top of the ship. It, unlike the sparse other compartments, was filled to the top with boxes. Some of the crates looked far to heavy to lift by hand, even. More importantly, it was lighted by the barest emergency lights, and filled with hiding places.
She hadn't yet raised the question as to why Shego was running or hiding in the first place, but if this room was at the end of both hallways, both of which connected to the mess…
Kim dropped closer to the ground, slinking quietly, with the grace of a woman who'd not only aced gymnastics and cheerleading, but had quietly entered hundreds of evil lairs. Entering a room unnoticed was nothing-
Shego's feet caught her hard in the side, before she even heard the whish of displaced air. The villain was hanging from a rail on the roof as Kim fell back, taking a stack of boxes out where she crashed. She recovered before the boxes even hit the ground, but was still surprised that Shego had been waiting right above her the entire time. Above her! And of all the times she'd watched a movie and laughed at the antagonist for not looking up…
"Now," Shego started, stalking around Kim, "I don't know what you're trying to pull here, Pumpkin, but I do know this: They're going to be taking you down to Earth on a stretcher."
Across from her, Kim had matched Shego's feet, like to hunters stalking their prey, forming a tight circle between the pillars of crates. "What I'm trying to pull?" She scoffed, "I was trying to stop this-"
"Stop what?" Shego growled.
It was true, Kim mused, that nothing had really happened that was easily noticeable. Besides a bit of cold, and something that could've well come from the gravity plating acting up. "This…" She growled in frustration, at her failure for remembering the word 'slipstream', and for not knowing what it was in the first place.
Now it was Kim's turn to scowl in frustration, while Shego smirked. She was still frustrated from Shego's interference, and from failing to stop whatever the countdown was, but Shego had learned long ago that she could judge a situation from Kim's expressions. Nothing to it, beat Kimmie around some, be back in time for dinner.
Shego launched at her rival with a satisfied smirk plastered to her face, coming up just inches short as Kim backpedaled. There was no plasma, but Kim's style had always been more gymnastic, relying heavily on her school training, and both of them knew that Shego could easily overpower her when there was no room to maneuver. As she backed up through the lane between the crates, she caught two punches and a kick from Shego, deflecting them away and trying for a quick strike of her own.
By several more feet, Kim was sporting two thick scratches on her jaw, blood dripping from where Shego's claws had got her, and Shego had the urge to rub a deep bruise Kim had given her shoulder. It felt like it hit all the way down to the bone. But, much to Shego's dismay, neither of them had counted on Kim's suit being so resilient. Her suit was designed to take debris, shooting through space, while Shego had dressed for the indoors.
They broke several minutes into their fight, where Kim limped back into a smaller lane, splitting the crates on either side of the walkway. Shego backed up to take stock of her options, most of which counted on taking advantage of Kim's leg, which had been jarred earlier, but was quickly growing worse with every kick she attempted. The suit was too thick to cut through with her claws alone, but she was uneasy about taking advantage of her like that. Something about it seemed cheap, more so than normal.
"Just where do you think you're going?" Shego called, peering between the crates to find Kim limping off behind them, down another walkway. "Not many places to run on a spaceship, you know."
"I'm not running," Kim called back. From what Shego could hear, she was resting behind a stack of smaller crates.
"Well I see that." She smirked. Annoying Kim was one of her precious few past times, and by far her favorite. "What's wrong, Kimmie, hurt yourself on my ribs?" She whirled around the boxes, claws raised to strike, but found no sign of the girl. "That did hurt, y'know. I think you cracked one of them."
"Boohoo," Kim cried sarcastically. Checkmate.
In the half second that Kim called out from behind Shego, she got one arm around her neck, and was promptly flipped over Shego's shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She landed several feet away, between another stack of crates, with the painful feeling that her shoulder had nearly been wrenched out of it's socket. More importantly, she'd underestimated the woman's strength, and that, plus a possible several head injuries, was enough to leave her dazed, upside down, against a crate.
"You didn't actually think I would fall for that?" Shego laughed. She took a few steps forward, leaning down to peer into the upside-down hero's eyes. "Look, Princess, you can fight me to a deadlock all you want in the big wide somewhere. But you try to fight me with this-" She paused, grabbing hold of Kim's leg. The redhead let out a hiss of pained breath. "And you're asking to lose."
The expression on Kim's face told Shego all she needed to know; grating teeth and frustrated tears that refused to admit defeat. "You know, you're a real bad loser, Kimmie. Give it up, I won, congratulate me."
She smiled down at the frustrated scowl Kim was still giving her. "What's wrong, cat got your tongue?" With a grunt, Kim swung her good foot down, connecting right on the bridge of Shego's nose, who reeled back, holding it with both hands. "Ah fu-" Movement out of the corner of her eye paused her swear, and she threw a hasty bolt of plasma at where Kim was attempting to run off to.
The clatter of crates toppling filled the room after the miniature explosion. The entire pathway Kim had tried ducking through caved in around her, pouring heavy metal crates, filled to the brim with nameless items, over the hero before she could escape.
"That wasn't nice," Shego scowled, sounding far more nasally with her swollen nose in one hand. She glared at the hero, her injured form sticking half out on the main walkway, but refused to show any pain over the injury.
There was a trickle of blood where Kim had face-planted, knocking the redhead out cold, and kicking the boxes showed them to be far to heavy for the teen to lift. They did a pretty good job of trapping her back too, which would be quite painful when the girl awoke.
"Now, I really don't like just leaving you here," Shego said, dropping down beside Kim and pulling a handkerchief from beneath the zipper of her catsuit. She silently dabbed the blood that dripped down from Kim's nose and mouth. "I just can't trust you not to kick me in the nose, apparently. So here you stay."
The villain stood, leaving the heroine trapped behind the boxes behind her. She made it to the end of the hallway before she caught sight of a odd window from the corner of her eyes. The view of space, while beautiful and majestic in its own right, wasn't what caught her gaze though, it was the image inside it.
She had to do a double-take just to make sure she saw what she thought she did, at first passing it off as a trick of her mind. Next, she held a hand to her head just to make sure Kim hadn't knocked anything important around, then she checked behind her, to find Kim still passed out cold on the grates that served as a walkway.
She looked back at the window just to see the same image, a reflection of the redhead herself, looking far less beaten than the one left in her wake. Just was just standing there, stock-still, practically frozen, staring back at Shego with the olive-green eyes that Shego could liken to her own. She looked tired though, weary, and much older than the girl behind her. Having been a heroine before, Shego knew just how much saving the world could take out of her, how much of her soul it could destroy before she had enough. It was probably what Shego likened to her soul, a tired older woman.
But Kim, like a younger form of herself, had held up better than Shego had expected. That didn't mean she deserved any of this, though, not in the least, and it certainly didn't mean she didn't deserve some help once in a while.
"So, conscience, we meet again?" Shego greeted the reflection. A clatter to her side, between her and the door, shook her out of her staring contest. The boxes, in front of the door she'd been heading for, had toppled over, some looking heavy enough to crush her flat. She almost jumped, but settled with tensing slightly, and untensing when she saw nothing there.
She turned back to the window, only to find nothing there either, just herself, staring back where Kim had been. "I swear, it'd be so much easier if I didn't have to deal with you," She huffed at her conscience, before turning back to the sleeping heroine.
"Wow, I really have to stop passing out," Kim muttered sarcastically, cracking her eyes open. She could feel the lump on her forehead even without touching it, which went well with the bloodied mass of hair on the back of her head. She knew, without even looking, that she was tied up, and tied good too.
Her good arm was tied to her good leg, which went all the way under her seat. Above them, her bad arm was tied tightly to her chest, while her bad leg was tethered to one of the consoles above the pilot's seat. Another chord wrapped from her bad arm, under her to her other limbs.
All-in-all, if she attempted to fall out of her seat, she'd end up doing a very painful split on her jarred leg. Trying to cut through the chords binding her, with either of her good limbs, would wrench her shoulder out of its sling.
Weighing her options, and finding squat to work with, Kim decided to work on her captor instead. "You really know how to impress a lady. Do this often?"
"Only for you, Princess." Shego called back from beneath her. "Who knows? Maybe we can turn this into a special occasion."
Kim scoffed, and settled further into her seat. The way Shego had bound her did help, actually, serving as a makeshift sling for her leg and arm. Her other leg was going to get tired real fast though. "Really? How's that?"
"Well, by contract, I'm required to hand you off to Drakken." She explained, distracted by the pilot's controls. "But it doesn't state anywhere that I can't convince him to sell you off to Hench."
"Hench?" Kim practically choked on the shock of that.
Shego just nodded, still busy reviewing the controls. "Oh yeah. He'd pay big money for you, parade you in front of the other villains, try to sell you off to the next highest bidder…" She drifted off, then smirked wickedly. "Maybe even make you work for him."
Kim fervently shook her head at that, tousling her fiery red locks. She earned a laugh from Shego below her. "Never! Well, there was that one time, but never again."
"Don't you know, Kimmie? Hench is just a middleman. On one side he has the Hench Company, on another, the villains who hire him, and on the last, the mafia that owns him."
"Mafia?"
Shego nodded, just barely visible beneath the transparent flooring under the upper consoles. "Oh yeah, big name family on the east coast. They have ways of making you do things."
She looked positively appalled at that, gaping down at Shego. "You wouldn't!"
There was a pause, a rather dramatic pause that Shego let last far too long. After what seemed like forever, Shego broke out laughing. "Oh, come on, Princess! You know me better than that," She smiled up at Kim, her mission temporarily forgotten, "We'll just take you back to our lair, play around with you for a while… Badda bing, badda boom."
Her sultry smile was met with an unamused glower. "Not funny, Shego. I know saving the world isn't all fun and games, but you bring those lowlifes in and they'll start making it personal."
"I know," Shego consented, "I know. Just remember, Kimmie, you're mine."
"Yours?"
Shego ignored the question better than Kim ignored the joke. "And I took your watch, ring, and other valuables, so don't think you can cut your way out of this one." She went back to the console with a smile, while Kim hissed in anger above her.
Kim grumbled a bit more, and leaned back to rest again. She would never say it, but she was grateful for the seat, especially after being throttled. That definitely irked her, but her suspended good leg was even more frustrating. The muscle in her calf was getting tired, and to let it rest for just a second would pull her shoulder.
Finally, she couldn't resist the need to take her mind off the situation. "So, how's it going?"
She received a weary look for the trouble. "Why do you want to know?"
"Because," She sighed, "The sooner you land this thing, the sooner I can get out and kick your butt."
"Ass, Kimmie. The correct term is 'Kick your ass'." She went over the controls one more time, before leaning back in the chair with her own sigh. "And, since you're wondering, it's not going."
"Not?"
"Well, as far as I can tell, we're drifting through space." She smacked herself in the head, "Doy, no-brainer there. But I can't find any planets. I can't find anything." There was frustration in her tone, and Kim attempted to fight back the worry that was plaguing her. "If I could find a big blue or red ball in space, I could find our way home. But, I think we've drifted in a complete circle, and I can't even see a sun."
"God, I could really use Ron right now," Kim groaned. It didn't help knowing that Shego would be no help here.
"Missing your boyfriend already?" She asked, her tone surprisingly calm, perhaps even comforting, for a second.
The redhead chuckled mirthlessly. "Yeah. But he watched so much T-V, so much Space Passage…" She murmured.
"Space Passage?" Shego looked up, but Kim had already drifted off to sleep.
She woke with a start just seconds later. "God!" Kim hissed, tears prickling at her eyes from the sudden pain as her leg tugged her shoulder down.
"You be a nice girl, and I might let you rest that leg." Shego promised. "Now what's this have to do with Space Passage?"
Kim grumbled, rolling her head slightly. She looked exhausted, but more than that, the pain was wearing on her mind. She felt like passing out again at any second. "Everything… Harper-"
"Harper?"
"The guy who flew us out here," Kim muttered. "He said a lot of this was made from ideas on the show. The gravity plating, the core, the slipstream. Slipstream!" She shouted, surprising Shego more than a little. "That's the word I was thinking of. I was trying to stop the slipstream, and you came in."
Shego's mouth was agape. She'd watched plenty of Space Passage in her time, Commander Kane was a fox after all, but she was hoping Kim was wrong about this. "Slipstream?"
"Yeah. Harper said…" She drifted out again.
"Kimmie! Stay awake!" That brought the girl back. "What did Harper say?"
"He said, he said… He said that the ship would make a wormhole around it." She looked down at Shego with a confused frown. "I should know that word, 'wormhole'. I've heard it before…"
Shego bit her lip and turned away from the suddenly drowsy girl above her. She glanced out as space, eyes scanning the unfamiliar lights it held. Not only did she have a redheaded teen with definite signs of a concussion above her, but somehow she'd managed to get herself tangled up with wormholes and slipstream, just looking for another easy job.
Steal the ship, Shego. It'll be a piece of cake. She frowned, mostly directed at the imaginary red figure sitting over her left shoulder. Yeah, right.
"Well, it'll at least be easier not having to drag your dead ass back home," She muttered, reluctantly sliding out of the pilot's seat. She headed through the alcove and up the ladder, stripping the chords away from Kim's good leg and arm when she reached her.
"Kim," She whispered, patting the redhead on the cheek. "Come on. Kimmie no sleepy." She groaned in response, flicking her eyes open for a half second, before passing out again.
"Great…" With a quick flick of her plasma, the chord suspending Kim's other leg snapped. She heaved the teen over her shoulders, starting back towards the ladder.
"Come on, let's get your lazy ass to whatever counts as the hospital here. Then we can focus on getting ourselves out of this mess."