Gary awoke to someone lightly slapping him on the cheek. The slapping was quite annoying so he grabbed at the hand and missed. His reflexes weren't what they used to be. He opened a blurry eye and saw Dr. Thaddeus Venture, short, bald, hunched, leaning over him, preparing to slap him on the cheek some more. "Go to hell," Gary told him and closed his eyes.
"I'm waiting for my breakfast," the doctor told him crossly. "I've been waiting for half an hour."
"I'm your body guard, not your cook," Gary said, rolling over. Recliners are not designed to be slept in on one's side so this wasn't particularly comfortable.
"And you're not doing a very good job of that either." Gary didn't argue the point. "I expect you in the house in fifteen minutes. I want two eggs over easy and don't break the yolks this time. Two pieces of toast - use the white bread - and cut the crusts off. And some of that peach preserve on the side."
"Don't you think it's time you learned to cook for yourself?" Gary asked from his huddle.
"Don't you think it's time your got over your girlfriend trying to kill us all and get back to your job?" Dr. Venture countered.
"I'm on disability?"
"You had some minor cuts and scraps. Dr. Billy fixed you up at the time. That was a month ago. How long do you plan to nurse this out?"
"I've got six weeks medical leave."
Dr. Venture poked Gary in the side. "If you don't get out of that chair soon it's going to take a forklift to get you got of it!"
Gary rolled on his back and took stock of himself. True the buttons on his shirt were straining to hold in his guts. He had three day's stubble on his chin - and it wasn't a good look for him! And his teeth tasted of rotting food.
"I need you to get up and take charge of the boys. Hank has become insufferable about his 'Super-Hot Nemesis.' It doesn't seem to sink in that his 'Super-Hot Nemesis' is trying to kill him. He also seems to think that he's the first boy adventurer with his own nemesis."
Kim. Kim Kim. Gary had spent a lot of time while recovering from his injuries thinking about the girl who had given them to him. Kim Duquesne. Tall, buxom, smart, funny. A hell of a lot younger than him. Good in bed. The first girl who had ever looked back at him and smiled. And she had to have decided to become a super-villain. As a reformed former henchman Gary wasn't particularly bothered by that. What was an issue was that because of one - one! - bad date with Hank Venture she had decided that he would be her arch enemy. And as the Venture's newest body guard it was his duty to keep Hank alive from super-villains - like his girlfriend.
He felt something settle on his chest. "Consider it a performance review," Dr. Venture said and walked out.
Gary picked up the folded sheet of paper and opened it. It read "Notice of Termination" It was dated today and bore his name. It listed ten things he should have been doing and hadn't gotten around to. At the bottom there was a line for Dr. Venture to sign. He hadn't - yet. But the day was early.
Gary set the recliner n its upright position.
"Man, you have been letting yourself go," said the ghost of his old friend, Henchman 24.
"Are you real or a psychotic projection of my Id?" Gary asked.
"Isn't that something you have to work out? I mean how can I prove that I'm real?"
"You could tell me something I don't know?"
"But how would you know that I'm telling you something you really don't know and not something you're just making up or were wishing it were true."
"You could tell me Kim's current phone number so I could call her up and see if she's OK?"
"I doesn't work that way."
"Because you're not allowed to interfere?"
"No, because I have no more of an idea where she is then you do. I'm a ghost not a fortune teller."
Gary got up and stumbled into the restroom in his little guard shack. He filled the sink with hot water and washed his face, neck and arms. He held the hot washcloth to his face for a full minutes and when he took it away his face was pinkish and somewhat more alive then it had been. He rooted around in the pile of containers on the side of the sink till he found the shaving cream. The razer blade looked kind of rusty but he didn't have another one handy so he shaved with that. In view of the numerous cuts he was stickering up with toilet paper, he decided to forgo the aftershave.
"So what have you been up to all this time?" Gary asked the ghost of his friend.
"Not moping over the fact that my girlfriend tried to kill me."
"It's kind of hard to care about anything when there'll never be a change for happiness again in my life."
"What! You're not stoked about the 3D release of the Star War movies?"
"Compared to losing Kim? I guess not."
"Come on, you can't let a little thing like that get you down? Whatever happened to the General 21 I used to know?"
"You never knew me during my General 21 days. You were dead, remember?"
"How can I forget? You keep reminding me."
"And besides, after you died I kind of fell apart, then, too."
"I never knew you cared so much for me until then. But - you know, you did finally turn it around and made something of yourself. Maybe it's time you got back up on that bike and win one for the gipper."
"OK, 24. That didn't even make any sense."
"I'm not good at motivational speaking. I'm just saying you're a henchman at heart and henchmen aren't allowed to have feelings. They have to go do the job, no matter what it is, no matter if it breaks their heart!"
"That's a load of crap."
"I was quoting you, dumbass. That was from one of your introductions to the Cocoon speeches."
"It's still a load of crap."
"Is it, Gary. Is it?"
Gary had stripped off his clothes and was fumbling through a drawers under a countertop looking for something fresh. And then for something not quite as ripe as what he'd taken off. The only thing left that was clean and fit was someone's old jumpsuit with "Hatred" stitched over the pocket.
"So what have you been up to?" he asked the ghost as he piled up his clothes in a empty box to take to the laundry room .
"I've been hanging around the showers in this old convent."
"Isn't that kind of pervy, even for you?"
"What do you want me to do. It gets boring waiting for you to talk to me. And besides, I'm a ghost! What can I do? I'm just looking. Lots of nice ladies were there, though from their language I don't think they were nuns. But they left recently."
"That was a secret Blackhearts training center," Gary interrupted. "I mentioned the presence of a school somewhere in town and the OSI sent out a swat team to find it. They tracked it to that old Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows convent but the Blackhearts had already pulled out by the time they got there."
"So I should blame you for not having anything more interesting to watch then TV?" 24 groused.
Gary sat down on a stool by the countertop and put his head on his arms.
"You're not going to sleep again?" 24 asked.
"I'm trying to get up the nerve to walk out that door. Today's the first day of the rest of your life - blah blah blah. Frankly I'm not sure I'm ready for that."
"What you need to do, my friend, is go out there and find another girlfriend. You've had rotten luck with then so far - Dr. Girlfriend, Kim - but who's to say your luck won't change. That Triana Orpheus is kind of cute, and she's not dating anyone."
"She Kim's best friend. Every time I look at her I think about Kim. Besides she's like family. The sister I never had."
The ghost of 24 threw up his hands. "You're impossible, you know!"
"I know. Well, I'd better get over to the residence before Dr. Venture tries to do his own cooking. You'd think a super-scientist could at least boil water without burning the pan!"
[]
Gary had intended to have just a cup of coffee and a slice of toast for breakfast. Then had another slice. Then fried up an egg. By the time he went out for his morning's exercise he was feeling a little bloated. Since he hadn't run in a while he took a easy slow pace. He had only gotten half way to the back of the Venture Compound when he throw himself to the ground, panting like a dog and trying hard not to be as sick as one as well.
The ground was soft, the sun was warm and he soon found himself pleasantly relaxed and in a better frame of mind than he'd been in since the fight with Kim. As the visit from his old friend, the ghost of 24, had reminded him, henchmen do not have the luxury of feeling sorry for themselves. And as long as Kim stayed away from the Ventures he could continue to love her - in an abstract sort of way. And if she did show up trying to kill Hank, he'd just have to deal with it then. But for now he didn't have to worry about those things. And he should think about doing some of the stuff he'd been hired to take care of around here.
There was the door to the panic room that needed replacing. He was going to call in a contractor but Dr. Venture had objected to the cost. He knew enough carpentry and welding to do the job, so no problem. Working on the panic room, though, reminded him of Kim. Clearing out the broken equipment from the workroom outside the panic room where he and Kim had fought likewise reminded him too much of Kim, as did scrubbing away all the blood in the room, much of which was Kim's blood.
There was a lobby to Venture Enterprises - which Kim had shot up. The brush pile Kim had set afire. Did everything have to remind him of Kim? He caught sight of the woods at the back of the Venture Compound. That reminded him of the walking tree Dr. Orpheus's daughter had claimed to have seen. 'Claimed' wasn't the right word since there had been evidence - inconclusive evidence - that something had entered the empty manufacturing building like she'd said, and it didn't leave footprints like a man or an animal. And that brush pile Kim had set on fire - something had tried to put it out by pulling the pile apart.
Could someone or something be possibly hiding in the woods on the Venture Compound? As head of security (the entirety of security for that matter) he ought to look into that. And since nothing about it reminded him of Kim it seemed like the perfect first item on his to-do list. A walking tree, though, seemed pretty ludicrous. True, the Venture Compound was, like, the center of weirdness in the tri-state area. A walking tree? It can't be weirder than some of the other things he'd seen. Still it might be a good idea to find out exactly what he was up against, maybe get some pictures of it first. How to do that, he wondered. Rigging up anight-vision camera would be no trouble but how to get the tree or whatever in front of the camera? What would a walking tree most desire? Water! So if he dug a little pond, maybe, and set up a night-vision camera... Yeah, that sounded like a plan. A nice project for the afternoon. Get the boys involved and out of their father's hair. Yeah. With the sun shining down warmly and at peace for the moment, Gary fell asleep.
"A Day in the Life of a Re-formed Henchman" was a 'what-if' story set between the end of the fourth season of The Ventures and the upcoming start of the fifth season. "Day" was a first story arc based on the idea that Gary, Henchman 21, having quit the Monarch, is recruited by OSI and becomes the Ventures Bodyguards when their current bodyguard, Sgt. Hatred goes AWOL. I started stories that pick up Kim's life where "Day" left off, and also what happened to Gary in the aftermath of "Day." I'd gotten part ways into both stories when I got distracted and started on another Danny Phantom story. Recently I realized that season five is steadily approaching and I ought to get these stories posted before my whole premise gets shot down by VB canon. This story begins before Kim resurfaces so I'm posting it first.