Disclaimer: I do not own the Kim Possible series or any other Disney Properties.
"No, he'll ruin everything!" Dr. Drakken yelled in panic as Ron set his hand on the big red button that the blue skinned doctor seemed compelled to build into everything he created.
Ron paused. "What would you even do if you took over the world?" he asked.
"Get revenge on my enemies," Drakken offered lamely.
"Dude, you'd be in control over everything, responsible for every man, woman, and child on Earth... Why would you even bother with them?"
"I'm still deeply angry and hurt by what I was put through," Drakken admitted. "A measure of revenge would help heal that."
"Alright, so what kind of revenge?" Ron asked, keeping track of the countdown to midnight while they talked, making sure to keep the injured Shego in sight.
"I'd probably just make them wear chicken suits for the rest of their lives," Drakken admitted.
"Really?" Ron asked, narrowing his eyes at Shego, causing her to move back towards Drakken when she realized he was watching her.
"Do you have any idea how humiliating it would be?" Drakken asked with an evil grin. "Imagine being forced, no matter what you achieved, even a Nobel prize, to accept it clad in feathers!"
"Alright, that's pretty solid," Ron admitted.
"Solid?" Shego asked, confused as to why the doofus was being so agreeable.
"It's not murder or torture or anything, it's just a kick in the ego to those who deserve it," he replied.
"Exactly!" Drakken crowed. "Just one solid blow to their ego to always remind them of what they'd done."
"And what would you do after that?" Ron asked. "You'd have the world's entire resources at your disposal."
"Do you have any idea how much of mankind's resources are wasted on war?!" Drakken demanded. "Just eliminating most armed forces would create prosperity the likes of which mankind has never known! Then maybe we could get back on track and start moving into outer space!"
"Fine," Ron said and removed his hand from the button. "All hail Dr. Drakken, ruler of Earth."
The two villains just stared at him in disbelief as he stepped away from the control panel.
"Really?" Drakken asked in disbelief.
"Really," Ron said, collapsing into a chair. "If you think you can lead mankind into a golden age, which truthfully... you're one of the few people on Earth I believe can, then if I stopped you I'd be the villain."
"But... you fought so hard to get up here and stop us," Shego said, shocked.
"I did, despite no one believing in me and several outright betrayals," Ron agreed, "but... I find myself believing in him. I truly believe Drakken can do what he's set out to do, stop war, lead mankind into a golden age, and take mankind to the stars. You trust him and... I find I trust him to do what he says he will as well."
"And the chicken suits?" Drakken asked.
"Even if I have to wear a chicken suit the rest of my life it'll be worth it," Ron said. "Apparently I've trusted the wrong people for most of my life, so I can't say I've got a great track record, but you've got to trust someone, so I'm putting my trust in you."
"I... I don't know what to say," Drakken said, "I'm touched."
"Do you really think you can take mankind to the stars?" Ron asked.
Drakken laughed. "It's so easy, we don't even have to invent any new technologies. We have everything we need just buried in red tape and secret projects. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to know that man placed his footprints on the Moon over a quarter century ago and then nothing?"
Ron nodded. "I know, it makes no sense. We should have a moonbase up and running and already started a colony on Mars."
"Ten seconds," Drakken said nervously, "if you're going to push the button this is your last chance."
"You can do this," Ron told him. "Take a deep breath, focus on your goals: unite mankind, end war, uplift humanity."
Drakken closed his eyes and nodded, taking a deep breath as the program went active and the countless robots seeded throughout the globe were activated, growing from tiny harmless toys into massive unstoppable enforcers. "Shego, start the broadcast," he ordered, sounding determined.
"On it Doctor D," she said with a grin.
Six Months Later
"There you are," a female voice said.
Ron opened his eyes and glanced over to see a familiar looking redhead in a blue swimsuit wearing a white feathered cape. "Kim," he said and returned to soaking up the sun's rays on the tropical beach.
"That's all you're going to say?" she asked.
"No," he replied and fell silent once more.
"I think the 'no' was the additional part," another voice said.
"Wade?" Ron asked in disbelief, actually turning to see the chubby teen out of his basement and in sunlight for the first time ever and also wearing a feathered cape.
"Yeah, hi," Wade said.
Ron nodded and laid back down on his lounge chair.
"I thought he'd at least yell at me or something," Kim said, sounding upset.
"Son?" another familiar voice spoke up.
Ron sighed heavily and sat up, turning around to see a large group of people standing behind him. "Seriously?" he asked in disbelief.
"You didn't even say goodbye," Ron's mother said.
"As you told me many times before, 'leaving is our way of telling you goodbye," he quoted, getting a strangled sob in response.
"That was cruel," his father admonished him.
"You're both adults and you said that often to me when I was little more than a child," Ron replied, "so if it is cruel to say that to an adult, what does it make saying that to a child?"
"Harsh, but probably fair," Bonnie offered dryly.
"How is it my entire senior class, the Possibles, Stoppables, and just about everyone I know is here?" Ron asked in disbelief.
"Senior trip," Bonnie replied. "We were kinda shocked to see you here to be honest."
"Wade finally located you while arranging the tickets for our class," Kim offered. "Naturally I brought my parents and yours."
"My life is one big teen drama," Ron complained.
"Can we apologize?" Anne Possible asked.
"You can always apologize," Ron replied, "I just don't care. What's done is done and I don't feel the need to go through any huge emotional drama over it. I'm very happy with how things turned out, the world has been permanently saved by Dr. Drakken so there's no more need for Team Possible. Which means I don't have to deal with Dr. Possible looking down on me and his threat to shoot me into a blackhole if his Kimmy Cub got hurt on a mission."
"You didn't?!" Anne demanded of her husband who winced.
"I also don't feel like dealing with parents who I've seen less of than the villains we routinely fight," Ron said. "You were both well rid of me for most of my life and I intend to continue the trend. Anne Possible has been the closest thing I had to a parent, but her family always took priority, as they should. While not mad I am disappointed, but I have no intention of continuing unhealthy relationships."
"You should at least finish high school," Barkin said.
"Took a GED and some online courses, I actually have several PHD's now," Ron replied. "High school was just state mandated boredom and torture to me."
"In six months?" Barkin asked in disbelief.
"Do you recall everything I did as Zorpox?" Ron asked. "I already had all the knowledge and skills, there was just no way to apply it in school that wouldn't bore me to tears. Just be glad I was content to be lazy and not act out by turning the school's soda machines into fighting robots to relieve the boredom."
"I always knew you had potential you weren't living up to," Barkin said, "though I am grateful you didn't apply it in that manner."
"You sound like a completely different person," Tara said.
I'm really not," Ron replied, "I'm just no longer surrounded by people who put me down or require me to act in certain ways to protect their egos to avoid drama."
"Act certain ways?" Tara asked.
"I had to put up with being bullied to avoid getting in trouble with a number of people for fighting. I regularly fought villains, do you really think I couldn't have hospitalized your average teenage jock without breaking a sweat?" he asked. "Not to mention avoiding the social experiment you call a food chain. On missions I had to play things up to an insane degree so the villains would ignore me. I still have no idea how they could buy it so often, but it worked, they would concentrate on Kim while I was allowed to 'accidentally' foil their plans over and over, though if I was to guess I'd say that if they had decent pattern recognition skills they wouldn't have become villains in the first place."
"Who are you?" Monique asked, confused.
"Ronald Dean Stoppable, genius, billionaire, philanthropist," he replied smugly.
"Really, quoting Tony Stark?" Bonnie asked.
"If the shoe fits," he replied and relaxed back in his lounge chair. "Why are some of you wearing feathered capes?"
"Drakken decided having his enemies wearing a chicken suit was a bit much," Kim replied. "He said a feathered cape would get the point across and be a bit more snazzy."
"He's got good tastes," Ron decided.
"I expected a bit more of an emotional scene," Bonnie said with a frown.
"No thanks, I've decided I'm allergic to drama," he replied.
"So... that's it, you fail one mission and decide to cut all your friends out of your life?!" Kim demanded.
Ron sighed. "I didn't fail, I defeated everything in my path, but when I had my hand on the big red button, I stopped and questioned what I was doing. I'd apparently been trusting the wrong people all my life so I questioned Drakken and decided to trust him instead."
"You're the reason Drakken is ruling the world?!" Kim exclaimed in shocked disbelief.
"No, Drakken is the reason he's ruling the world," Ron replied, "it was his genius and effort that made it possible. I simply decided not to stop him."
"Which turned out to be a good decision," Tara said. "No more wars, the starving children in Africa are actually being fed, and quality of life has gone up for everyone."
"He really came through on what he promised," Ron agreed with a grin.
"And your friends?" Kim asked.
"What friends?" Ron replied. "I figured out what was going on and provided evidence, which would have taken about a minute to verify, and they decided I wasn't worth listening to for even that single minute. Does that sound like friendship to you? It doesn't to me and as I said, I'm no longer continuing unhealthy relationships."
"That's a bit harsh, it was just a single mistake," Wade said.
"Like everyone believed me about the gillman?" Ron asked dryly. "No, it's a pattern of behavior and unlike the villains we fought I do have decent pattern recognition skills."
"A life without friends is hardly a life at all," Kim tried.
"Without friends? You do know I have a lot more friends than just you people, right?" he asked with a snicker.
"Then why are you here all alone?" Bonnie asked dryly.
"Because I've spent the last six months working my ass off to earn my degrees," he replied in the same tone. "Sixteen to nineteen hour days can really take it out of you. I came here to relax and shut off my brain for a while."
"This isn't how I thought things would go," Kim said to herself.
"Yeah, you think you know people and then they act completely differently than you expected and you realize you've gotta take a step back and re-evaluate what you know," Ron said. "The only constant in life is change. Forget that and you'll find yourself unpleasantly surprised quite a lot."
"When did you get so philosophical?" Bonnie asked in disbelief.
"Around his third banana daiquiri," a beautiful young Asian woman in a small red bikini said, as she handed Ron a drink before laying down in the lounge chair next to his and sipping her own.
"Thanks Yuri," Ron said with a smile.
"You're underage," Kim pointed out, shocked that her ex-partner was drinking and wondering why Yuri was there.
"Drinking age on the island is eighteen," Ron offered, causing most of the senior class to quickly head for the various beachside bars, Barkin quickly following trying to figure out how to keep control of the situation.
"Maybe we could have gotten through to you if you were sober," Kim said with a groan.
Ron sighed and closed his eyes, a blue glow surrounding his body for a moment, startling nearly everyone there. "Kim, you are literally a buzz kill," he said, making Bonnie laugh, "and now I am stone cold sober. Guess what? My opinion remains exactly the same though I'm a bit less mellow about it. What exactly are you trying to get through to me?"
"That we're your friends and we care about you," Kim said.
"We were friends at some point, on and off, when you weren't looking down on me or ignoring me in favor of the flavor of the week or some new sex toy," Ron said a bit bitterly.
"Ron?!" Kim exclaimed, red faced. "I don't own any of those!"
"I was referring to Eric," Ron said dryly.
"His family moved away about a week after Drakken took over," Kim said with a frown. "And we never..."
Ron exchanged glances with Yuri and realized that Shego and Drakken hadn't revealed that Eric was a synth, not even to gloat, which was probably better for Kim.
"As I was saying, we were friends most of the time, heck even Bonnie was a friend a time or two, but that requires trust and you broke mine," Ron said. "Friendships don't last forever, that's just a fact of life."
"It was one time!" Kim defended herself.
"No, this was just the latest," Ron said. "There was the time you locked me in a janitor's closet for an entire weekend, forgetting I existed, or how about when I had to risk my life searching for a mystical flower in a dangerous jungle because you decided a date was more important than both our lives? And those two incidents were just over Josh Mankey."
Kim winced.
"This final one with Eric where I needed you to help me save the world?" Ron shrugged. "It was just the final one in both senses of the word."
"I thought you were just being jealous," Kim admitted.
"I've literally risked my life so you could go on a date before," Ron reminded her.
"But you won't be risking your life anymore," Anne spoke up in her daughter's defense. "That part of your life is over now."
"You have no idea the number of times she flaked on me for some guy she thought looked cute," Ron said dryly. "I rate below some guy she doesn't know in tight jeans without even the courtesy of a call to cancel plans."
"I only did that once... twice... a couple of times," Kim said, feeling smaller with each admission.
"If I flaked on you every time I ran into a girl with a low cut top..." Ron shook his head. "I'm not rehashing any old arguments here, have a nice life Kim, I wish you the best."
"But not your friendship?" Kim asked.
"Being friends requires time and effort you aren't willing to spend," Ron said. "This is probably just a sap for your ego where you'll spend the next two weeks pretending things haven't changed so you haven't 'lost' anything before you leave and we casually drift apart. I have no intention of being used to prop up your ego anymore. We aren't going to be attending college together, we no longer live next to each other, and we no longer have any common interests. Make a clean break of things and move on to the next stage of your life, stop trying to make your life a perfect Hallmark movie."
"I think you pissed him off," Bonnie said as Ron and Yuri got up and left, heading further down the beach to a section that was marked off with signs that required people to remove all their clothes.
"I made a mistake, a lot of them," Kim admitted, "but Ron's still important to me. I'm not letting him go that easy. If I destroyed our friendship… fine, I'll just make a new one with him." She quickly hurried after the pair who were already stripping.
"Where did we go wrong?" Mr. Stoppable asked.
"You stopped trying to raise him when he was still a child who needed parents," Anne Possible said sharply. "Of course... I apparently did much the same recently, so I have no room to point fingers."
"Where are you going?" Bonnie asked Tara. "You two weren't exactly close."
Tara nodded. "I know, but I want to see him naked and see if I can get a rise out of him. He never seemed to really notice me in school, but I'm pretty sure I'm harder to ignore on a nude beach."
Bonnie laughed. "I'll come along just to watch that."
"For someone allergic to drama he sure attracts a lot of it," Wade said, shaking his head. "Well, that's enough sun for me for the year."
"And like that we've lost our son," Mr. Stoppable said sadly as he held his wife.
"Only if you refuse to put in the effort," Anne told him.
"What?" he asked, confused.
"He said quite clearly that to maintain any type of relationship, be it friend or family, you have to be willing to put in the effort. Right now, no matter how standoffish and unconcerned he seems, he's still hurt and doesn't believe we think he's worth the effort. So... now we start over and show we do believe he is," Anne explained.
"I haven't lost my son?" Mrs. Stoppable asked hopefully.
"You haven't lost him, he's simply treating you the way he feels you've treated him for most of his life," Anne said. "Treat him the way you should have, like a son, and eventually he'll respond."
"How do you know?" Mrs. Stoppable asked.
"Because I raised him right, even if I did let other people sway my opinion too much recently," Anne said, making James wince once more.
AN: In all the So The Drama stories with a cooler edgier Ron they all pretty much turn out the same so I asked myself 'What could change everything?' and avoid him going full Batman.
Typing By: Abyssal Angel
Beta By: Abyssal Angel and Mist of Shadows
