Shego kissed her hard and Kim forgot if she was going to say anything else.
They walked out the door of the cathedral hand-in-hand, and stood on the front steps. Shego had stopped, so Kim looked over at her to see what was the matter. Shego was just standing there looking out, around, up and down… Everything seemed different to her. Shego was facing the world as half of a couple now, and it was… just different.
Shego herself was different, too. She held up her left hand and inspected the white-gold wedding ring Kim had placed on her finger. Simple, plain, and permanent, it shown against her hand. Her wedding-ring. The one her wife had picked out.
Amazing.
“Uh, Red… this is going to melt off first time I light up, y'know…” She didn't want that to happen. That simple, plain ring meant more to her than… than a new Learjet.
“I got you a necklace to go with it. I thought you could wear it that way instead” Kim replied, touched that Shego had thought about it. Kim had never thought that Shego would take any of this so seriously.
Neither had Shego herself. “You – you did?”
“Yeah. Uhm… but I left it at the Lab. I'll get it tomorrow.”
Shego was impressed that Kim had planned around her plasma, but couldn't figure out why she was impressed. It wasn't like she'd been hiding her comet-powers or anything. Of course Kim would know that it would melt off. It was just… cool… that she'd thought about it already. It made Shego feel like Kim… knew her.
“So…” Kim said, “You never said any vows to me…”
That was true, she hadn't. After the kiss, Shego had simply stared into Kim's eyes a long time with that funny, earnest-loving-serious-frightened look, and then proceeded to put the ring on Kim's finger. Kim then did the same, and before anything else could be said, Shego had taken her hand and began walking out of the cathedral.
Shego sighed, “Kim… Pumpkin…” and sighed again, “I… I love you, but… I'm not… I…” and yet another sigh as she stammered, “I can't…”
“It's okay, Doc” Kim smiled at her, and saw the relief in Shego's whole body, “I'll let you off the hook.”
A final, heavy sigh, “Thank you.”
Kim tried to do her best “Godfather” impersonation, “Perhaps, the day may come, when I will ask a favor of you…”
That made Shego smile. “That is the worst Marlon Brando I've ever heard, Red.”
“Yeah, well… Hey! I know! There's something I've been dying to ask you.”
“Why am I getting a bad feeling about this…”
“Shego? What's your real name?”
Oh, shit. “Uh… this isn't the time, Red…”
“No, c'mon. I think I deserve to know my wife's real name. You said Hego's was 'Henry'… so what's yours? And what's the big deal?”
It would completely break the mood, is what the big deal was. Shego wasn't ready to have her mood broken like that – yet.
“I'll tell ya later, Kim.”
Kim became insistent, “Shego! What is your name!”
After another glance at her simple white-gold wedding-ring, Shego said, “All right, Pumpkin. So be it. 'Kimberly Anne van Gogh'. No relation.”
The same as Kim's own first and middle name. After a moment of shocked silence, Kim said, “K - Kimberly?”
“Shut-up, Kim.”
“Kimberly Anne?”
“Shut-up, Kim!”
“You're real name is-”
Shego whirled on her, “Which part of 'shut-up' didn't you understand, Red!”
But, after all, it was hard to pretend to be too mad with Kim grinning at her like that.
“Oh… Doy!” was about the best she could do. When Kim began to chuckle and snort, Shego had to grin, too.
They'd been in Boston two years now, and when Shego asked, Kim told her they would probably be staying until next summer, at least. There were hints, she said, that she was onto something, but so far, it was only hints – she had nothing new to say.
That winter, Kim had sheepishly asked her “Doc? Could… could you take my chores today? I hate to ask, but -”
“You onto something?”
“Maybe. I'm close to something. I… I don't know if it's a good thing or not, Doc… or maybe it's all just smoke and mirrors. The calculations are really long – about four pages on either side of the equals sign. I'd really like to work them down to where I can understand them. It seems like it might be important…”
“Okay, Red, I gotcha covered.”
“Heh. That's what Ron used to say. Except for the 'Red' part.”
Half a dozen smart replies went through Shego's mind, but finally she just said, “Doy!” and left Kim to her equations. Shego had reached the point where she no longer needed to match wits in every conversation.
It took Kim a week to par the equations down to an understandable size. And after she'd done it, she did it again. And again. After the third time, she was pretty sure of the conclusion, even if it wasn't exactly clear what it meant. She was concerned about Time. The terms that described it kept canceling out…
“Which means?” Shego asked.
“Which means that the times in the various universes aren't locked. At all. They're entirely independent. Each one exists in it's own set of dimensions, and… well, basically, they have nothing to do with each other. What it means is that – if we were to get back to our own universe somehow – it won't be a decade later there like is was here. It might be more, it might be less… I don't think we could go back and end up before we left – and I don't want to even THINK about working that out, either – but whatever, they're not the same. We might go back and any random amount of time has passed there, from nano-seconds to a billion years. As far as I can see, there's no way to tell.”
After thinking about it a minute, Shego said, “But, when we got here, no time – or at least not much – had passed from when we left there. How do you -”
“The mechanics of jumping from one to the other are still way over my head, Doc. I'm just telling you what I'm pretty sure of so far.”
“Pretty sure of?”
“Well, it's not like I read this anywhere, or anyone else had worked it out before, Doc. As far as I know anyway, this is sort of… my own discovery.”
“Wow…”
Kim didn't know how to take that, and waited for elaboration. Was Shego mocking her or was she actually impressed? She'd been pulling double-duty for a month now while Kim had worked it out. A month in the dead of a Boston winter. She was usually gone for the entire day, and sometimes even spent the night away at the “downtown home”, if the weather was too bad for her to make it back to Lexington. And all Kim had to say, after all that, was that the times didn't line up? Okay, so “mocking” was probably the right answer to -
“I should start calling you 'Doctor'… That's cool, Red! I'm impressed!”
Kim blushed. Apparently, Shego hadn't been “mocking” her after all.
“I did good?” she asked, just to hear it again.
“You did good!” Shego was smiling broadly at her, and Kim blushed more.
I did good!
Just like old times… Shego thought, but not really.
She walked through the front door of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, lifted Girl with a Pearl Earring - on loan from the Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague - off the wall, and walked back out the front door with it, frame and all. Not a single siren was to be heard.
Shego was not just going to leave it there. That would have just been unthinkable. And she didn't take it because it was valuable, or because it was easy to take, or because it was just a pretty picture.
She “stole” the painting because it took her breath away. The more she stared at it, the more she saw, and she'd been staring it off and on for a year. The colors, the composition, the way Vermeer had portrayed the expression on the girl's face – not to mention the sublime and gentle power of that expression itself – the design of the whole painting… all of it absolutely perfect, like everything about it had to be that way. If anything had been different, it just wouldn't have worked. It was genius, and Shego could recognize that. It was Beauty, expressed through the brush-strokes of Johannes, and Shego was absolutely in awe of it.
Yeah, the girl was pretty too.
Shego could see that, and appreciate it, but that wasn't really the point. It was how that beauty was expressed, how Vermeer saw it, that made the experience what it was. Had there been anyone else had been there to see it, she wouldn't have taken the painting and denied them the pleasure – it was that important. But, no one else was, so what the hell.
She brought it back to The Tube and hung it on the dividing wall between the “bedroom” and the “bathroom”.
“You're kidding me”, Kim said, watching her.
“I kid you not” Shego replied, all seriousness.
“I'm not sure I like you putting up pictures of other women…”
“Philistine.”
Kim snorted, “Okay, you win.” She sharpened her pencil and went back to work in her notebook.
Satisfied with the way it was hung – and admiring it just one more time for the day – Shego said, “Well, ready to say goodbye to Boston?”
“Yeah. I got all I'm gonna get here. Sorry it took so long… Anyway, at least I have something I can compare to Drakken's drawings. Not a total loss. And some good notes. There was a Dr. Janet Li who was an absolute genius with tensor-space applications – I mean… just genius… but it didn't do me much good. She was into thermodynamics and turbulence.”
“Uh-huh. Okay, well, we're ready to roll then. You gonna stay back here?”
Kim looked up at her, “Do you mind? I'm really into this thing right now, on a roll, you might say, and -”
“It's good to see ya back in action, Red. You carry on. I got it.”
In the privacy of the Humvee, Shego indulged in her last remaining secret from her wife: Reba McIntyre. “Just call me angel… of the mornin'…(an-gel), just touch my cheek before you leeeeave me, dar-lin'…”
Going was easy, because they were re-tracing a route they'd already cleared, so they could make a hundred miles a day, most of the time. As a result, it was a short two weeks to get to St. Louis.
Six interstate highways intersect in St. Louis, Missouri. The middle of the country, the Gateway to the West, in territorial times. It still was. Almost everything from both east and west goes through St. Louis to be divided up, re-packed, and then sent on. It's a trucking mecca. For foragers, it's a wonderland of warehouses.
Geologically, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
The New Madrid fault pretty much follows the path of the Mississippi River through the middle of the continent. That's why the river is where it is, some theorize. It lies deep under the muddy sand deposits left by the Mississippi river over millions of years, building up stress as the tectonic plates bump and grind slowly against each other. Alarmists like to insist that the scale of the disaster - when it eventually slips - will be of Biblical proportions.
They were right.
Kim was in a Shexnayder trucking warehouse when it happened, Shego was ten miles away looking for new fuel-injectors for the Humvee. They hadn't thought to tell each other where they were going. Since they were both armed, and Shego doubly so with her comet, it seemed safe enough. They would keep in touch with little rechargeable FRS radios, as usual, and also as usual, they seldom used them. They hadn't ever bothered to test the range of the walkie-talkies. If they had, they would've found it to be about 3 miles, max. Less, if anything was between them.
Shego felt the floor move and ran for the door. She stood outside in the street while the ground rolled beneath her like waves on an ocean. It was hard to stand. It was dis-orienting too – the mind isn't used to the ground moving like that.
Kim, however, was a hundred yards from the entrance to the cavernous warehouse, and as she watched the racks and pallets wobble and fall around her, it was clear she'd never make it outside. The best she'd be able to do would be to take shelter inside somehow, amongst the twenty-foot high shelves collapsing around her. Ten yards down the aisle she was currently “shopping” in, there was an over-turned rack with a little cave made by pallets that had piled up helter-skelter on top of each other. She could barely see it in the light from the translucent panels in the roof. She ran and dove.
Then, as the ground continued to crack and roll, it occurred to her that her little cave might shift and fall in on her any second. Then again, looking outside at the falling racks and flying pallets of canned-goods… well, best to stick with the devil you know, and she stayed put.
Elsewhere, the incredibly fertile valley known as “The Delta”, from Missouri, through Arkansas, and down to Louisiana, liquefied in seconds. Buildings and houses sank out of sight in mud two-hundred feet deep, pieces of highway floated downstream, like so many ice-floes in an arctic ocean. Every tree fell over, and the ditches dug by the WPA to drain the Delta and make it arable land collapsed, filled in, and over-flowed. Millions of acres of cotton and rice country became instant swamp.
A five-gallon tin of textured vegetable protein fell onto Kim's foot, breaking her ankle. A pallet of Sno-Balls – of all things – fell over the opening to her “cave”, and Kim waited in the dark for whatever else might happen; terrified, in excruciating pain, and trapped.
Two weeks later, Shego was still going nuts. In the whole time since the earthquake, she'd slept maybe sixteen hours. She looked for Kim day and night, she screamed herself hoarse, she went as far as she dared into every building that seemed promising. She lit signal-fires, she left trail-markers - cairns of stacked rubble - in case Kim was looking for her. She left notes sealed in bottles at each one, detailing her search plan; where she intended to be and when.
Several times, she'd see a cairn in the distance and run to it filled with hope only to find that it was one of her own.
Kim, meanwhile, had tunneled out of her cave after the third day trapped, and was painfully trying to make her way to the exit over the mounds of merchandise, steel-shelving, and girders from the warehouse's ceiling. She dragged her useless right foot behind her as she crawled. Her radio had been crushed. She'd been living on Sno-Balls and soup, but on the fifth day found bottled water and spent two days there, rehydrating. The soup was liquid, but it was almost like drinking sea-water, the salt content was so high.
She, too, screamed herself hoarse. And like Shego, she cursed her stupidity for not following a plan – Shego would have absolutely no idea where she'd gone. Stupid stupid STUPID!
If only she could signal, somehow… but she dared not light a fire inside the warehouse when she couldn't get out. She had to get out! She didn't even know which way she'd come in anymore! The best she could do was head for light – but she had no way of knowing whether that light came from a hole in the ceiling or wall.
At least she had water and food. On the other hand, she really couldn't carry anything with her.
By her second week, she'd duck-taped together a crude crutch, and could at least stumble through the rubble. It was a little better than crawling, anyway. She wished she could find some aspirin or something… the pain from her ankle was just… constant and exhausting.
It took her a month to get out of the warehouse. Then she went right back in, for food and water. She built herself a little stockpile outside, in the street - or what was left of the “street”.
Late summer now, and Kim was ready to light her fire. She doused tires in gasoline – that ought to make a nice smoke-pillar. And the fire would be small enough that she needn't worry about setting the whole city alight.
Maybe Shego would see it. Maybe Shego would come. Maybe Shego was… ok, in the first place. Or, maybe Shego was dead already. Kim tried not to think about that. She had too much to do. She lit the fire.
And Shego saw it. Along with several dozen others, all over the city, and a wall of smoke coming from the west. Fire was everywhere, but not like the firestorm she'd started in Colorado Springs. This one was sporadic, jumping from one building to another, leaving large swaths of the city untouched, while right across the street there might be five blocks of ashes. Nonetheless, Shego was not about to leave, not without Kim. She continued her search until she collapsed from exhaustion, her body forcing her to rest. Then, upon waking again, the search would resume. Over and over and over.
In late September, the rains came with a vengeance, putting out the smoldering remains of St. Louis. The river rose, with the rains. Within a week, the water was waist-deep in the lower parts of the city. Shego hadn't counted on that… more stupidity.
She kept thinking that Kim might have been trapped. The idea wore on her. If she were, and the fire didn't get her, then the flood surely would.
Two months after the earthquake, Shego finally gave up. She didn't cry – she was too exhausted for that – she just turned around and went home, packed up, and left, her mind a blank. She tried her best to keep it that way. Alcohol helped.
The trailer had to be left behind. And that was okay with Shego – there was an awful lot of Kim in there, she was glad not to have to deal with it. She didn't even go in to retrieve clothes, books, or Vermeer's painting – it was time to leave all that behind. Shego had no use for joy in her life. That part was over, apparently. There was really nothing to look forward to, and she didn't need to be reminded of a time when there was.
As Shego drove away over the cracked, ruined streets, Kim was half a mile away, limping painfully in her direction.
Winter was on the way before Kim managed to get the Jeep to run. She's had to replace all the spark-plugs, the injectors, the radiator, drain the transmission and re-fill it, bleed the brakes, and replace the serpentine belt. It still sounded funny, but at least it ran, and it could drive over the severely buckled pavement. She wished she'd had more automotive lessons from Shego, when she'd had the chance. So much time wasted. She loaded up her books and notes from the Tube – and Shego's painting besides - and took the interstate west, following in Shego's footsteps.
Her ankle had heeled – badly. Kim walked with a permanent limp now. She didn't think about it. What she thought about was her wife, who had given up looking for her. Probably thought she was dead. Sometimes, before going to sleep, that train of thoughts would enter her head un-bidden, and the pain in her heart would be debilitating. They should have had a plan. They should have agreed to something, some way they could… communicate. Kim imagined intricate methods and scenarios – but they all depended on communication ahead of time; there was nothing she could do now.
She wound her way through the traffic jams that Shego had cleared months earlier, so her travel was relatively easy, but for the condition of the buckled asphalt. On her second say, she saw, painted over “Now leaving St. Louis - Come back again!”, in blaze-orange, “KIM”. She stopped to look at it, her heart in her throat.
Something was taped to one of the legs holding the sign – another one of Shego's message bottles. Kim cut the tape away, took out the sheet of paper, swallowed, and read:
“Kim
Kimmie, Pumpkin, Red, Princess. You never liked Princess. I kind of did. I wish I had called you Princess more. I wish a lot of things.
I don't know why I'm writing this. I don't know what I'm supposed to say. I don't LIKE writing this. I should just fucking stop.
I never gave you any wedding vows. I
I loved you. I didn't want to at first. Just like you, I guess, but for different reasons. You were so scared because we were both women. That never mattered to me. Well, much. I was mostly scared of how you made me feel, Kim. About you, about myself, about my past, present, and future. I guess I knew that if I fell for you I'd never be able to get out of it, and I've spent a lot of my life mastering the art of getting out of things.
Then all of a sudden it didn't matter. I didn't WANT out. Ever. All I really wanted was further in.
I should have said that.
I'm saying it now.
As if it matters.
I hate this.
Kimberly Anne Van Gogh”
She read it five times, then folded it up and put it in the breast pocket of her denim jacket. She got back into the Jeep and started the engine.
Then she turned it off and cried for the rest of the evening.
Shego awoke at 5 a.m., as usual, and brushed her teeth. She dressed in thermal underwear, jeans, and sweatshirt. All that would fit under the insulated cover-alls she'd put on before heading outside. She spent a lot of time outside, lately. It was early December, and she had to get things ready for winter at the farmhouse.
She glanced at the door to Kim's old office – she'd closed it the day she'd got back, and it hadn't been opened since. She ate cold cereal and milk. No raisins. No sounds from elsewhere in the house. She couldn't stand music anymore. She didn't want to feel happy. She didn't want to be made to feel sad, either. She didn't want to feel anything. This was her way of surviving. Day by day. To what end, didn't really matter. Apparently, she was supposed to live. God or whatever had decided. So be it.
She put on her insulated cover-alls and headed out. Today was the day to clean the glow-plugs on Generator #1 on the truck. That would be a dirty job. Since that was the case, might as well change the oil and air filters as well. She'd needed oil-filters, though – she'd run out last month. Time for a trip to town, then.
The Humvee was parked in a make-shift lean-to against the side of the barn. Shego had built it three weeks ago. She didn't trust the barn to hold up much longer. It's center-roof beam was broken in two, surprisingly rotted from the inside. She'd have thought a foot-thick piece of timber like that would be stronger – certainly strong enough to hang herself from. But it just broke, instead. But not before the rope had tightened quickly enough – and tight enough – to give her permanent burn-scars around her throat, and damage her larynx to the point that she hadn't been able to speak since. Not that she needed to anyway.
She hadn't been back in the barn since. Her wedding-ring, on the matching necklace, hung dusty on a nail inside. Something had decided that Shego should live, but that didn't mean she had to like it. And she didn't.
Kim had to force herself to keep her speed down. To fuck everything up by getting into an accident now would be… unimaginable. Sixty miles to Middleton. She was driving her third vehicle – a Subaru Forester this time. It was amazing what the small SUV could go through, and how nimbly. Since the way was already cleared for her, the Subaru did just fine.
40 miles to Middleton. Kim checked her speedometer – she was doing 70 again. She slowed it down to 45. The thought Get a grip, Kim! Almost there… I'm almost there, Doc… Hold on for me. I'll be there this evening. I'll be there, Doc. Hold on. And… please God, let her be there for me, too…
The noise of Generator #2 drowned everything else out as Shego bolted the valve-covers back into place. It was important to torque them just right, in order to compress the gasket properly, else they would warp and leak oil. Which would, in turn, lead to an ever dirtier job than this was.
After torquing the last one in the pattern down, she stepped down off the truck bed and wiped the sweat from her face, despite the near-freezing temperature. Whoever had designed the Cat engines must have thought it would be funny to make people assume those positions in order to perform simple maintenance. Her tail-bone hurt, and she'd banged her knuckles until they bled again. You'd really think that -
Wait.
What?
Movement out of the corner of her eye.
Kim. Limping towards her.
Shego looked away. Then she looked back. Kim? Limping towards her? She looked down.
It couldn't be. She'd said goodbye to Kim. To that part of her life.
“SHEGO!”, she heard faintly over the drone of the working generator. Kim was just coming around the front of the house, still a good fifty yards away.
Shego turned to face her – or whatever it was. Maybe she'd gone mad. Seeing and hearing things. Maybe -
“SHEGO!” Louder now.
She took a step – just one – forwards, then her knees collapsed. Kim?
Red?
Forgetting she had no voice, Shego tried to scream – KIM! - but nothing came out. She held out her arms, wide, unaware she was doing so. Unaware of anything. Something in her chest was threatening to burst, and she couldn't breath right. Some small rational part of her mind wondered if she was about to die, but the thought was ignored. That wasn't really important.
In fact, death had never been – and never would be – less important.
Ten steps away now, Shego looking up into Kim's teary eyes as she limped on. Shego's mouth still hanging open, her chest heaving, panting like an overheated cat.
Kim bending down to pick her up off her knees, squeezing her hard. Very hard. Kim's mouth next to her ear, saying “Shego… Shego… Shego…”
Shego looked past the stringy red hair in her face, out into space, seeing nothing. Having lost the habit of speaking, she'd also lost the habit of thinking with words. The image of the swinging rope and broken beam over her head appeared in her mind. When she'd been denied the relief of death, and someone or something had cursed her with life, against her own will.
And she felt now the same thing she'd thought then.
So be it.
Then she closed her eyes, inhaled the fragrance of Kim's three-week-old sweat – and her heart finally burst.
Silently, Shego cried.