Kim haphazardly slapped her alarm clock, but the beeping continued to disturb her sleep regardless. Forced to wake up enough to figure out the problem, she recognised the sound of her kimmunicator and slapped the device instead.
Wade's image lit the immediate vicinity, but all he could see was the ceiling. "Kim?"
"Sleeping, Wade," the teen hero yawned.
"So was I, until the failsafe alarm kicked in."
A disinterested sniff. "What failsafe..."
"Shego stole the sloth."
Kim's eyes opened again, then blinked in confusion. "Huh?"
"Shego. Stole. The sloth."
More blinking as her thought process struggled through the metaphorical mud. "Is Drakken still locked up?"
"Yeah. Motor Ed too. I don't know who she's stealing it for, maybe Professor Dementor, but..."
Kim turned her face into her pillow and groaned. "Let her have her joyride. Tell me where she leaves it in the morning, and I'll go pick it up after breakfast."
This time it was Wade who was speechless for a moment. "But... what if she-"
"Can you get remote control of the car?" Kim interrupted.
"No! I don't know how, but sh-"
"Do you have anything that can catch it?"
"Well, uh..."
"Then leave it for the morning, Wade."
"But what if-"
Kim jabbed at the kimmunicator, cutting the transmission. It was that or snap at the boy, and if she let herself get angry enough for that, she'd have a harder time getting back to sleep.
The teen hero had to admit to some nervousness as she walked into the Lowerton junkyard. The last few encounters with Shego had been confusing, to say the least. Their fight on the streets of San Francisco had been their first real confrontation since the whole diablo drama. Kim had only managed to land one blow on the thief at the start of the fight, and it hadn't even slowed her down. Shego, on the other hand, had nailed her with a kinetic blast at the end of the fight before making her escape with Señor Senior Junior.
No heat in the glow, just force. After the display at Bueno Nacho headquarters, it surprised Kim that the villainess hadn't lit up straight away, especially since she wasn't pleased to see her. But between the punch to Shego's gut and the blast that sent her tumbling down the sidewalk, they had each managed to block or dodge every attack the other made. As if each knew too well how the other moved. Like a dance.
And then there had been the pause when Ron had circled around in the sloth. That moment of friendly banter had been... well, Kim missed it. It was familiar. Almost comforting.
But a moment was all it had been. Apparently it hadn't counted for anything during their next fight, up a mountain in South America. The only positive note during that one was Shego's smile when she quicky gained (and held) the upper hand. It reminded the redhead how their relationship had really started. Perhaps it had been the same for Shego.
Getting back from that trip would have been a nightmare without Wade. The tweebs could pack all kinds of gadgets into the sloth, but it never crossed their mind to set aside room for a spare tyre?
"What's the matter, Kimmie?" Shego's voice surprised the teenager, "Skip your morning coffee?"
"I drink orange juice with breakfast," Kim answered, turning to look up at the villainess as she stood proudly atop a pile of pancaked cars. "In fact I only had time for orange juice this morning, thanks to you."
"Where's your superhero outfit?"
"Professor Dementor kinda hacked it."
"Huh..."
The teen hero wasn't sure what to make of the older girl's thoughtful frown. "Don't get any ideas, Shego; Wade's been working on it ever since. It won't happen again."
"Actually, I was hoping you'd wear it to the rematch... but I'll take what I can get."
"Rematch?" Kim repeated, resisting the urge to gulp nervously.
"I had plenty of time to think, in prison, and on the Seniors' island. I've found something new to really hate."
The redhead managed to work some defiance into her voice. "What's that?"
"Kim Possible with her own wheels." The green girl lit up and shot a double-handed blast almost directly at the teen hero. The cheerleader leapt aside, but Shego's target was actually the bottom of the 'tower' of flattened chassis across the corridor formed by walls of vehicular wreckage. Metal crumpled and the tower fell, blocking the way Kim had just come.
Kim looked around and realised she was now completely surrounded by the corpses of cars, and in the center of the square... was the sloth. In the car crusher. And probably one big red button away from being flattened.
"You're going to crush my car?"
"Only if you lose, Possible!"
Pure instinct made the teenager roll away from her current position at the sound of Shego's shifting voice. She felt more than heard the impact of a boot to the spot where she'd just been crouched, and immediately spun with a rising roundhouse kick that the villainess naturally dodged, knowing it was just to keep her off-balance until Kim had regained her own equilibrium.
Kim didn't begrudge the villainess her sneak attack. That was just Shego being Shego. Now came the actual dance.
It went on for much longer than either of them expected. Despite the fact that Shego had been up all night, she didn't seem to be tiring as Kim hoped she would. Instead, it was a replay of their earlier confrontations since Junior busted her out of prison. What few solid hits they scored on each other never counted for much, and they both refused to quit.
Kim's energy and talent, perfectly matched by Shego's stamina combined with the advantage of her glow, in an arena mostly void of distractions, and enough stubbornness between the two of them to ensure that the fight would not end until they collapsed together, wrestling and rolling in the dirt until one managed to throw the other off.
They lay beside each other, gulping down air before their bodies forced them to pass out from such prolonged exertion.
Shego managed to recover her ability to speak first. "Are you sure you're not some sort of mutant, Kimmie? Both your parents might have worked around radiation in the past, at least one of them must've got crapped up before they made you."
Kim only shook her head, unable to to form a verbal riposte as she took the opportunity to catch her breath. "Do you think we've... plateaud?" she finally managed to ask.
"We've gotten too used to fighting each other, is all. Need some new tricks."
"New enemies."
"At least you've got Monkey Fist for variation," Shego grumbled as she rolled over and levered herself up onto her knees. "You're still the only one that can fight me to a standstill."
"And we're not even standing."
The green girl huffed, refusing to share the humour in Kim's observation. The conversation was already too close to the comfortable banter of the past, and Kimmie might get the wrong idea. "Maybe I should just leave the rematch for the next time we cross paths."
The teen hero managed to raise herself up on her elbows to look directly at Shego. "What about my battle suit?"
"It's not the advantage you think it is, Possible. All it does is even the playing field, lets me cut loose with the glow. Nah, I'm not worried about your super-suit."
"But you're afraid of alligators?"
"It's not a phobia, it's common sense," the villainess growled. "They're at least eight hundred pounds before mutation and have the most powerful bite on Earth. It's the same as having a sedan dropped on you. Plus they've barely had to evolve since surviving the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs." Shego struggled to her feet. "And the only way I can hurt them is to barbecue them outright, which isn't really fair. Not their fault they've been trained to eat people."
Kim watched as Shego stared down at her a moment. The villainess could blast her right now, they both knew, but the redhead didn't even attempt to get to her feet. "I knew you still cared," she said quietly, instead.
Then she scrambled away as Shego raised a hand and ignited it.
Instead of blasting the teenager, however, the green girl sent the energy in the direction of the car crusher's control panel. Kim tried to jump up and chase after it, but her knees were having difficulty responding to the signals from her brain. So she pulled out her hairdryer and grappled the railing beside the controls, yanking her off the ground and towards the panel as Shego made her exit.
The sound of bending metal and shattering glass seemed to echo after Kim hit the emergency stop. Hobbling around the machine to see the damage, the sloth seemed mostly fine... from the dashboard down. A single strip of metal was lodged between the seats, all that remained intact of the car's roof. The curved doorframes now gave the impression of wings, forced to stick out sideways as much as the machinery would allow.
"Well," Kim sighed, "Now's as good a time as any to get the tweebs to make it a convertible." As she fished out her kimmunicator, she could tell she was going to be sore for days after that fight. Just like after she and Shego...
Kim tried not to think about it.