Shego thought, You don’t know! You just don’t know!She looked into Kim’s green-crystal eyes, and saw compassion, empathy, maybe a pinch of pity. And maybe something else. Then she looked over at Ron’s puppy-dog-brown eyes and saw…
Understanding?
Shego allowed herself to be lead to Ron’s car, and climbed into the backseat with Kim following. They left the parking lot in silence. Kim was still too flustered by her former outbreak to speak, and Ron was lost in his own thoughts. To Shego, it was all bad. She felt there was nothing to look forward to, not now. Not even the bittersweet release she’d planned. She stared at the seat-back in front of her, trying to will away the panic she felt.
Poor Stoppable!, Shego thought, he’ll probably be the one who pays for this. Which in turn will hurt Kim. Which in turn will kill me. I should never have come. I should never have come.
Meanwhile, in the silence, Kim’s anger fumed, When I find out who’s done this to her, I’ll killhim… I mean it too. I WILL kill. I just don’t understand how any one could… defeat… her like this. So what could… how could she have ended up like this?
“Shego… what do you mean by ‘new boss’?”, Kim asked quietly, hoping it was a safe question.
The other girl answered without turning to look, “Calls himself Lee-Jinn. He… god I was so stupid! … I’m in way over my head, Kim. Way over. I don’t really see…”.
“What does he do to you? “, Kim interrupted abruptly, “How did you… come to be…?” But she couldn’t finish the sentence. “I’m sorry, Shego. It’s just that -”
“I know how I look.”, Shego answered simply.
Silence.
Shego thought, what have I got to lose? Absolutely nothing. I’ve got absolutely NOTHING to lose. She took a deep breath.
“Kim, he doesn’t do anything to me,”, she paused, gathering the last of her will “… he does them to you.” There. Finally. Shego turned to look out the window. Middleton passed in the night outside.
Ron was thinking, Oh, god. What a way to find out someone loves you.
Kim was shaken. “Wh – What do you mean ‘does them to me’?”
Shego continued staring out the window into the night. She’d never be able to face Kim again anyway, so what did it matter? “If I don’t perform my… missions… satisfactorily, he makes something happen to you. Usually… usuallynot directly to you, but to someone you… care about…” Which explains why he doesn’t bother with me, Shego thought.
Kim swallowed. “Like what?”, she asked softly, not sure she really wanted to hear.
“Like your cancer.”
Shego had simply walked in the hospital’s front door, free as you please, not the least bit stealthy. People in hospitals don’t look at stranger’s faces much, she thought. Afraid of what they might see. She took the elevator up to 433, Kim’s room. While the depressingly cheerful muzak played, she wondered how Lee had done it. “It will be bad for her if you don’t perform this mission”, he’d said. And he had done something to the teen hero. But what? And how? Shego was there to find out. All she knew was that Kim had been taken to the hospital. Maybe there was something she’d see, some mysterious device or something. With Drakken, there’d always been a short-circuit at the critical time, a malfunction, an obvious self-destruct button. Something to end – or at least change – the situation. But… Lee was different.
Shego listened at the door and heard nothing but the breathing of machines. She quietly opened the door and stepped in, instinctively looking for a dark corner, in case Kim awoke. Then she looked. She was in the wrong room.
The girl – if it was a girl – in the bed had a respirator tube down her throat, breathing for her. A dozen other tubes snaked around her body, leading to various machines that blinked and beeped and whirred. She was bald. Shaved? Her eyebrows were gone too. Chemo? Radiation? Her face was… wasted. So were her hands, the only two parts of her above the hospital sheets. Poor girl, Shego thought. But not the one I’m looking for.
Then she saw Ron curled up asleep on the couch.
Back on the street Shego staggered back toward the alley where she had parked. Too stunned to think, almost too shocked to breathe. “Oh God Oh God Oh God” echoed through her brain, over and over. As she passed a bag-lady with a shopping-cart full of junk, she heard a voice say “Do your job, and she’ll be good as new.” Shego looked around for the speaker, and saw the bag-lady staring intently back at her. “Consider this an example”, the bag-lady said, and then pushed her cart back the other way, shuffling as she went.
The mission was simple: steal a particular bag of vaccine from the Center for Disease Control. A vaccine, not a live virus. What could Lee do with a vaccine? Still, Shego didn’t like to be involved with things like… diseases. They were too insidious, too subtle. And they attacked you at a level you couldn’t defend. Disease frightened her. The CDC, rumored to be a haven for rare biological warfare leftovers from the Cold War, frightened her even more. But Kim…
And the day after the mission, Kim was in miraculous and full remission. No one could understand it. And Shego had learned her lesson. Lee was not like Drakken. Lee was Serious Evil. Drakken had been… harmless. Shego had fun with Drakken. Fun! Well, you wanted Real Evil, Shego. Youwanted it! Wentlooking for it!You got it. Happy? You stupid, stupidbitch!