Kim was worried that night. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Shego refused to talk to her and was curled up in a ball on one side of the bed, making it impossible to cuddle with her.
She padded out of her room and into the kitchen. She wasn’t sure why she was there, but it was better than getting caught sobbing in her room. She put her head on her arms and let it loose.
A gentle hand on her shoulder broke her sobs, and she looked up, tears still on her cheeks.
“What’s wrong Kim…?”
Kim looked away. Things had already been uncomfortable enough as is with her mother; she didn’t need things to get worse. She had noticed the tension between her mother and Shego during dinner, not to mention Shego’s avoidance of both her and her mother. “Nothing mom.”
“Don’t lie to me. You wouldn’t be down here crying if it was nothing.”
“Like you care.”
“I do care. I care a lot. I’m your mother for crying out loud!”
“Then why do you hate Shego so much?”
Anne bit her lip. This wasn’t a subject she was ready to handle.
Kim turned, her eyes glistening fiercely in the dark, “Well Mom? What is it about her that you hate so much?”
“I…that is…” Anne’s mind couldn’t find a reason. There was nothing there but her selfishness. “Fuck.”
Kim’s eyes grew wide. In her entire life she had never heard her mother swear once.
“I…I…was caught up in myself….Not in what was best for you, but for me.” The older Possible sighed and looked at the floor, “It’s my fault…all my fucking fault…”
“That really doesn’t matter now.”
“Ron?” Both Possibles spoke at once.
“No, not Ron. Ron is dead. He died when you” a pale gauzed wrapped hand pointed from the shadows, glowing in the moonlight from the window, “decided to love a harlot.”
Anne’s heart skipped a beat. Kim…loved Shego? No…that couldn’t be true, could it?
“Ron…what are you talking about?”
“I told you I’m not Ron!” The voice snarled as it stepped out of the shadows. What used to be Ron’s mission long sleeve shirt and cargo pants, where now slashed. Blood stains were on them. White gauze showed through from under the slits. “I’m what’s left of him. You can call me Billy.”
He made a polite little bow as Kim let out a distressed squeak. “And you, KP, are going to come with me…and live a happy life…somewhere happy, like Canada.”
Anne wrapped her arms protectively around her daughter, “Ron…I’m warning you…don’t even think about it.”
Ron, or Billy as he insisted on being called, backhanded the older Possible. “Shut-up. What you fail to understand it I have a knife in the back of my pant line. I can gut you in a heartbeat, and you won’t even make a sound.”
“I’m not letting you take her.”
Billy sighed, and jabbed the vein in the woman’s neck, it only took a second of pressure, and the woman dropped like a bag filled with wet sand. Kim wanted to scream, to cry, to hit him, to do something, but she couldn’t convince her voice to work.
“Good-night KP.”
It was as if she was frozen in fear. She was actually afraid as he loomed nearer, then the pressure against her neck was the last thing she felt as the world grew dark.
Shego woke feeling like crap. She had ignored Kim to avoid the threat of the elder Possible, and now she felt like crap because of it. Risking the wrath of the elder woman would have been better, or at least it seemed like it would have.
She slowly rolled out of the bed. The red numbers of the clock cut through the darkness and told her that it was too early for sane people to be up and moving about. She ignored the impulse to go to bed and wandered down to the kitchen. That’s when she saw it.
A body on the floor.
She tiptoed up to it and looked at it, straining to make out who it was in the darkness. She felt herself unable to breathe as she recognized the face and hair cut of the older Possible woman.
Gingerly, as if drawn by an imaginary force her hand stretched out, and nudged the woman. A gentle grunt assured the raven haired observer that the woman was alive.
She nudged again, harder.
Anne groaned and opened her eyes. She didn’t normally sleep on the kitchen floor, which set off alarms in her head. She tried to work through the fog, until a single thought struck home. “Where’s Kim?”
“Shhh…I’m guessing that you don’t sleep here, which means someone knocked you out.”
Anne pushed Shego’s reassuring hand away, “Billy….I mean…Ron did it…Bastard took my daughter.” She tried to get up, but Shego held her in a sitting position.
“Don’t get up…not good for you. Take it from someone who’s made that mistake.”
Anne forced her way out of the other woman’s grasp and got half-way up before she collapsed onto her knees.
“I tried to warn you. Your brain got a small reboot, takes a few minutes to readjust again.”
“You’re kidding right? I’m a neurologist, and licensed surgeon, and the brain does not get ‘rebooted’.”
Shego shrugged, “Best comparison I could make to being knocked out.”
The other woman didn’t know how to respond. Despite how nastily she had acted, how rude she was, Shego was still trying to help. “Why are you being so nice?”
“Because we have a common goal. Different reasons for this goal, but we both want Kim back. And if I quit cowering in fear, and you quit manipulating me, we might get something done.”
Anne raised an eyebrow as she watched Shego get up and get some water. She wanted to say something cruel, something sarcastic, something to make the other woman understand her place on the local food-chain, but she couldn’t. Shego was right. Anne mumbled a small thank-you as she was handed the glass of water.
“So what are we going to do?”
Shego sighed, “We need a list of places he would take her. A kid in high school isn’t likely going to have that much money, but if they are crazed enough they can come up with some insane means of getting something accomplished.” She paused, “The problem is going to be tracking her. Then we need to figure out what exactly Ron is trying to do. Only then can we really be ready to rescue Kimmie.”
“Wow….” Anne was speechless. Shego had an air of confidence around her like rescuing someone from a lunatic was an everyday thing.
“It’s no big. Like I told you, and you found out, I used to be a super hero. I’m going to leave the list making to you on where you think Ron could be. I don’t know squat about him, so I’m useless in that respect. On the other hand, I can scour his room, and the house to see if there is anything that says what he’s up too.”
Anne nodded slowly, reaching up and setting the empty glass on the kitchen table. Here she was, planning a rescue of her daughter in the middle of the night, with a woman she barely knew, who quit being a super hero because some villain had died.
It was a lot to take in.
“Why are you up anyways?”
Shego sighed, and was glad the darkness hid her blush, “Not snuggling…Kimmie….let the nightmares in.”
Anne’s jaw drop was impossible to see in the dark, and she slowly managed to regain her composure. “Ron…Ron’s house is just down the street. It’s the yellow one at the bottom of the hill.”
Shego nodded and padded out of the kitchen. It was time to bring her rusty skills out of retirement, for at least one last time.
Dressed in the old cat suit Shego crept across the roof and to what she guessed was Ron’s window. It hadn’t been easy getting on the roof, thanks to the lack of any trees, and no chimney, but she had managed, namely thanks to a surprisingly strong drain pipe.
The window was unlocked and slid open easily. She slid into the room and look around, resisting the urge to let out a soft whistle.
Pictures of Kim where scattered across the bed and some were even on the floor, a pink heart drawn around Kim’s head. That really was only a little useful though. Shego browsed as carefully as she could, without disturbing anything. Habits from sneaking into lairs carried over now, as she looked through the teenager’s life.
She didn’t find anything useful other than a list of names. Most of them weren’t familiar, but two were.
“Drakken….Duff Killigan…Monkey Fist…DNA Amy…Gill…All of these have Xs next to them except for Drakken.”
Shego slid the paper into her tool pouch that was strapped to her ankle. Perhaps Kim’s mother knew who some of these other people were.
Shego slid back into the house without a sound, the door sliding shut behind her gently.
“You find anything?” Anne Possible was still up, sitting on the couch, a pillow tightly in her grip.
“A list of names…most of them are X’ed off save for this guy Drakken.” She took the list out and offered it to Anne, who took it slowly.
“Drew Lipsky…or as Kim calls him, Drakken was a college friend of my husbands. He’s also Kim’s biggest nuisance. He’s always trying to take over the world, and hasn’t worked an honest day in his life.”
Shego winced at the edge in the older woman’s voice.
“You know…if you hadn’t entered my daughter’s life…this wouldn’t have happened…?”
“And if she hadn’t entered mine I’d probably lying in the gutter somewhere. I owe her my life…and she doesn’t want it…she just wants my love right back…the love I’m not allowed to give her.”
Anne forced back the tears. Neither of them spoke, and after a time, Shego softly treaded out of the room.
Author’s Notes: No lynching please! Yes, things between Shego/Anne obviously are a little better, but not by much. The whole common enemy thing. Yes Kim getting carted off seems a little cliché…but then again most people aren’t trying to cart them off because they’re romantically obsessive mad men…or whatever Ron/Billy classifies as. Next chapter whenever.