“Ron Stoppable, will you have my children?”
Ron laughed so hard that he actually fell down.
Shego finally woke up for real at four in the afternoon. Ron and Kim had been running errands in the meanwhile – always leaving one of them behind at the apartment just in case. Ron bought groceries, and in another trip, a few changes of clothes. Kim went and picked up clothes for herself as well as for Shego. She'd bought Shego a new six-pack of panties, because the thought of sharing those with her was just too… weird.
Shego agreed with the blushing Kim that it had been the right thing to do, even though she would've have been thrilled – thrilled! – to have worn Kim's underwear. Down girl. Try to keep your mind off it. But it was hard to do, especially with her blushing like that. Oh GAWD Kim stop that! It's bad enough I'll be wearing your clothes… You're killing me here! Shego had to keep looking the other way, most of the time.
The way Shego kept avoiding looking at her made Kim wonder what she'd done wrong. Probably thinks green and black are the ONLY two colors, she mentally sniped.
Finally, Shego had showered (yes, again) and changed, Ron had fed her (yes, again, chicken soup, this time, and crackers with cream cheese) and put the groceries away. Kim had put all the clothes away (Shego's had been thrown away, too filthy and ragged to bother with. Fragrant, too… in an un-perfumed, animal-smell way, leading to more blushing from Kim), and made the bed. She had sighed a lot while doing that.
Shego looked a thousand percent better by the time she sat down at the cleared table. The bags under he eyes were fading, the puffiness subsiding. Her hair was almost as beautiful as it had been, but her cheekbones still stuck out noticeably. Clearing her throat, she took the tone of a college lecturer:
“Okay, Ron. Kim. Let's do this.”
They assumed what had come to be their usual positions – Kim and Shego on one side, Ron on the other. The fact that they had fallen into this arrangement did not escape the notice of any of them, but no one mentioned it.
“Wait, lemme get a notebook.”, Ron said. When he sat down again, pen ready, Shego began:
First off, I want you both to know how… grateful… I am for everything. I mean it. I know I've been acting like an, uh, an asshole, for these… well, for a long time. I realize that now. I realize a lot of things, actually… and one of them is that I am a World Class Idiot. Having said that, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't remind me of it as I go through this. Because it would take too much time, frankly.
So. There I was, after the Bueno Nacho incident fell through, throughly disgusted with always failing, failing, failing… go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200… I blamed it all on Drakken. I mean, he's a brilliant scientist, for a mad one and all… but a disastrous engineer! Y'know, I've thought about that a lot this last year. I'm beginning to wonder if he really was such a…
Anyway, I wanted to SUCCEED, for once. So I began looking around for someone else to work for. I let the word get around. As far as I know (sigh), Dr. D never found out I was looking for another job. Poor Dr. D… (ahem), Anyway, I get this voice-mail…
Missions: perhaps 2 a week. Pay: truly excellent. Difficulty: moderate to nil. Success ratio achieved: 99.9. But it still wasn't the job Shego wanted. For one thing, Lee-Jinn seemed to have no goal. He didn't want to take over the world. He didn't want (or indeed, need) to amass great wealth. He didn't seem to be interested in Power. He never would say what he was planning, if he was planning anything. So there was never a sense of… accomplishment. Shego eventually decided to find someone else, and declared she wouldn't do the “Vaccine Mission”. Punishment: Kim's cancer.
More missions, absurdly easy. Blow up a tank of jet fuel in Panama. Steal the ignition wires on a fleet of unguarded trucks in Nigeria. Steal a truckload of ivory in Kenya - and Lee didn't even want the ivory, her instructions were to bury it where it would never be found. Bomb a graveyard (“a graveyard!”)in Quatar. Shego's “no killing” rule never broken, and not a problem for Jinn. He didn't need an assassin. He needed stealth. A pallet of machine-parts. A DVD of financial data. Almost humorously, steal the final cut of Star Wars: Episode Three before distribution, and put it in the hands of the underground hacker community. (“ooooh, I thought, the MPAA's going to be really pissed…”) Stupid jobs. Yes, yes, well-paid… very well-paid. But… just ridiculous!
Then, she'd messed one up. Her skills were getting lax, atrophying. In order to blow up a launch-pad, just a launch-pad, mind you, but at an exact time specified by Jinn, she'd had to arrange a distraction to get the technicians away. Well, long story short, the distraction didn't distract, a single tech stayed behind, and the pad didn't get blown up. Because Shego would not kill. Punishment: Kim's father, dead.
Watching Kim's reaction had sliced into Shego's soul even more than Kim's cancer had. The thief kept trailing her, watching… Every time Kim cried Shego would burn with hatred and shame. Once, as Shego had perched in a tree at Mr. Possible's funeral, she found her hands aflame, setting the branch she was holding onto afire. She patted it out. Damn that Lee! God DAMN him! But all this she could still “deal” with. She'd just have to do her job better. Kim's life eventually returned to normal, and with it, Shego's. Shego's unhappy life, for she lived in perpetual fear of Lee, now. Or was it fear for Kim?
Then, two months ago: Shego, stuck at an airport awaiting fuel for her LearJet. Nothing to do but watch TV and manicure her nails. Big Story: food riots in Nigeria. Hundreds killed by the stampede of a crowd. Thousands killed by “police”. Cause: relief trucks delayed. Seems someone had stolen their ignition wires. Not a disaster in itself – trucks will move in a couple of days… but thousands of starving people had been told the trucks would be there today, and so…
And so she had at long last become a killer. Mass-murderer, even. Through stupidity. Through ignorance. Was ignorance an excuse? Her dreams seemed to indicate not, at least not to her. She saw other news. Stock market crash caused by corrupt accountancy, leaked to the media from an unknown source. Whole accountancy houses taken down. Rebels in Africa, raiding major cities because they suddenly had run low on cash. It went on. And on and on…
“Kill me if you want”, I told him. “No more. Not me. I don't care how simple the missions are, or how much you pay. I'm out!” That's when… Rufus… got ran over. I'm SO sorry, Ron! I don't know how he does it! I… I was there, I had been trailing you whenever I could, and I SAW it happen! It looked like an accident… but he said it would happen, and it did…
It was kind of backwards, wasn't it? Rufus’ death as punishment for a major thing like declaring her firm intention to quit, Kim's father's death for a minor problem with a single mission. As Shego had listened to Ron and Kim argue as their relationship broke down, she'd actually felt glad about it. Getting Ron out of the way. She'll be available… Now I can have her… But it wasn't a clean break. She heard Kim crying in her bedroom at night. It broke Shego's heart. And she'd been happy because of that! Shego began to despise herself. No, she already despised herself. She began to loathe herself.
But she kept going anyway, like an automaton. Pretending she was just an instrument, it wasn't her fault. Trying not to think about it, about her, about anything. It worked during the days. But during the nights…
Shego didn't mention her Final Out, the reason she'd been in the Bueno Nacho parking lot the night before. Everything had been prepared. But she had wanted to see… had to see -just see -Kim… one more time. Perhaps it had finally dawned on her, She could be the love of my life. If only.
When Shego had finished, over three hours had elapsed. Kim and Ron just sat there, apparently studying the pattern in the Formica of the table-top. Shego was mentally exhausted, and was glad to have the chance to wait, quietly, for their reaction, whatever it would be. Just this moment of peace… with them… was all she wanted, more than she'd ever wanted anything before.
Kim was letting it all sink in, without thinking anything. Well, anything except, poor Shego…
Ron's mind, on the other hand, was moving a mile a minute, but in no particular direction. A thousand thoughts at once vied for significance in his brain. Underneath them, thousands more feelings fought for his attention. It was all too much, and Ron was caught in the middle, frozen, transfixed, and stunned by what was happening to him, as much as what had happed to Shego.
Eventually, one of the thousands of feelings did break the surface-tension into his consciousness.
The name.
With something solid to calm his raging mind, Ron reached behind his chair for his backpack, and fished out the Kimmunicator. A few beeps later, “Wade”.
“'Sup Ron? Haven't heard from you -” Wade began.
“Wade, see what you can find on the name ‘Lee-Jinn’. Not sure of the spelling, so search phonetically. Oh, and… uh, never mind”, Ron trailed off. “I've got work to do before that. Just the name, Wade. See if you can correlate it with major headlines from the news. Beep me when you find anything. Anything.”
“Okay. What's the -” click. Ron hadn't waited. He was thinking out loud, whispering, “Lee-Jinn. Lee Jen. Li Jin. Li -”.
Ron suddenly froze and turned pale. The girls could tell something had happened, and looked at him expectantly. Ron had a wild-eyed look about him, as if he'd seen something horrible, terrible, on some distant horizon. He turned to Shego.
“He said… how did he tell you his name?” he asked.
Shego swallowed. “He said, ‘MY name is Lee-Jinn', like that. It did sound kind of odd, the way he said it…”
Ron took a deep breath, and laid his hands before him on the table, looking at them, interlacing his fingers and separating them again, doing something Kim has taught him, when they were both 7 years old. Here is the church, here is the steeple, open it up, and there are the people… So.
So so so…
He sighed. “I think what he probably said was, ‘MYname is legion'”.