Anne sagged on the couch and looked at the remains of her drink. She was growing more and more frustrated as time wore on. It was completely obvious to her that nothing short of death was going to pry Kim from Shego and vice versa. Just as obvious…Kim was slowly leading her somewhere she really didn't want to go…she could just feel it.
Kim looked sidelong at Shego, gaging her reaction to her mother's non-reaction. Shego just shrugged and made a keep-going motion with her hands.
Kim rolled her eyes and cleared her throat.
“You okay Mom?”
Dr. Possible looked up at her daughter and grimaced. Not.
“When did you get so old? You let yourself be shot by a villain for her? What happened? How did you survive? How did you keep all of this a secret?”
Kim stood up and arched her back, smiling when she felt her muscles relax. She pulled Shego up and pushed her towards the kitchen.
“Come out here and have a seat. I'll explain more while I whip something up. I don't know about you, but if I have another drink on an empty stomach, there'll be no living with it.”
Shego took a seat facing the cooking area as the doctor took one almost next to her. Both were positioned to watch Kim and each other. Kim watched the interplay out of the corner of her eyes as she started cooking.
Grinning, she got the ball rolling again.
“I don't remember much after the second bullet…just pain and darkness. Shego's going to have to fill in the next part.”
Shego glared daggers at Kim's back, fuming. Anne bit back a bark of laughter and schooled her expression.
Mumbling something under her breath, Shego started the story where she and Kim had left off a few minutes earlier.
Shego opened her eyes on a familiar ceiling and feeling dead inside. She could still smell Kim on the pillow behind her head as tears slid silently down her cheeks.
Her hand automatically rose and wiped her face. Shego stared in horror at her tear slicked fingers. She felt like she was hollow and looking at herself from just outside her body.
I haven't cried once since the day the comet ruined my life. Not even one time. Why do I cry over her? She was to be my conquest, my prize, my escape from the boredom.
Why? Why do I cry over her? Why? What does she mean to me?
Her ceiling would not give her answers.
She curled into a ball as she realized what Kim's sacrifice meant to her, what it was forcing her to see.
She's made me look back into my soul, into the darkness.
And I no longer care for what I see.
Shego stopped rocking and sat up in bed. Ripping off the remainder of the catsuit, she threw on the first thing in her closet and stepped out of her rooms.
Got to find her and tell her.
Shego was more than a little surprised to find Marsten slumped against the wall opposite her door, still looking pretty beat up.
Exactly how long was I out?
She carefully toed the dozing henchman, who twitched, but didn't look up.
“To answer your questions…I'm here because I volunteered…no, Drakken isn't conscious yet…yes, Dr. Kay gave you a clean bill of health while you were out…”
Shego growled. “And?”
Marsten twitched again. “And…yes, she's alive, or was before I went on shift out here.”
Shego barely heard Marsten after hearing the word “alive”. She was running down the corridor, headed for Theo's lab.
Theo was trying to rest on a cot she kept in the back after six hours of working on Kim Possible and the odd henchman wandering in for scrapes and bruises. She needed to be fresh when, not if, Shego came tearing into the medical lab looking for her and for answers. Answers were not going to make the green-skinned woman very happy.
She had just achieved a comfortable position when the door was literally ripped from its track and tossed into the corridor by an angry Shego.
Theo closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, hoping that Shego would calm down before wrecking anything else.
She was wrong.
Shego moved like a woman possessed, stools and trays flying away from her as she advanced through the lab. She was glowing a lurid green, something Theo had never seen her do before. She palmed the sedative and slowly rose from the cot.
“Shego! You need to calm down immediately!”
Shego's face twisted.
“Calm down? You think I need to calm down? If I don't get to see Kimmie right now, no one will have to worry about me begin CALMED DOWN…I'll take the top of the fucking mountain off! WHERE. IS. KIMMIE?” Each of her last words were punctuated by her glow growing noticeably each time.
Theo threw out her left arm, pointing towards the door to the ICU. When Shego turned to lope into the next room, she raised the small gun and pulled the trigger.
Shego spun, hands flashing as she caught the injector dart millimeters from her shoulder. Sneering, she incinerated it and dropped the residue to the floor.
“Nice try Dr. Next time you might get lucky. You better tell your GJ pals what's going on before they hear it from another source.” She turned again, and pushed through the doors leading to the critical care unit.
Theo dropped to the floor in shock staring numbly at the swinging doors. When Shego did not come back through for several minutes, she stumbled over to her comm gear and opened a channel.
“Base this is green ghost. Code blue blue blue. I repeat, blue blue blue. Location confirmed. Green ghost out.” She dropped the transmitter on the floor and followed Shego.
Shego had found Drakken in a bed, drugged up to his eyeballs and unconscious. Not seeing Kim led her to the very back of the medical facilities…to the room only used in the most dire of need…the bio-immersion chamber. Kim would be here, immersed in bio-regenerative fluid and medical nanomachines.
She waved her hand at the sensor and was shocked when the doors failed to open. She snarled once again, glow brightening as she prepared to rip the control box from the wall. A voice from the silence behind her caused her to pause.
“Shego, if you do that, you might damage the power systems and we might lose her.”
Her glow was instantly extinguished as she collapsed and put her head on the door. The voice continued.
“I spent six hours fishing around for the fragments. Whoever did this was a sadist. Those bullets exploded after entering her body leaving dozens of shrapnel trails and some pretty hideous damage in their wake. I had to remove part of her spleen and sections of both intestines, and patch a hole in her left lung. One fragment pierced the myocardial wall, but did not penetrate the heart muscle. When I finished sewing her up, she wasn't coming out of it…she was gradually slipping away. I put her in here awhile ago and she stabilized. But she isn't getting any better. If you know of anything else…” Theo trailed off as Shego stood once again.
“Theo, please open the door. I am going to try something. It might work, it might not. It's the only way I can think to help her now. Please?”
At please, she looked back a Theo, who blanched at the despair she saw in her eyes. Reaching into her pocket, she depressed a button. The doors unlocked loudly.
“Go.” was all she said.
The green-skinned woman nodded and pushed through the doors.
Shego bit back a shout when she saw Kim floating in the water-like fluid, breathing hose attached to her head…not moving except for the gentle rippling of her hair in the small circulatory current maintained by the unit. Four incisions were visible on her stomach.
Stripping quickly, she clambered up the walkway to the catwalk surrounding the pool and placed one of the hanging oxygen masks over her mouth before sliding in.
Forcing her way through the thick liquid, she wrapped her arms and legs around Kim, holding her close. She began to concentrate and her body began to glow a soft jade color.
The glow intensified, engulfing both Kim and Shego, getting brighter and brighter as the medical equipment began to beep and shriek. So bright that Theo burst into the room in fear and was nearly blinded as the green turned a greenish white and got even brighter.
Theo had to duck behind a console as sparks began to come from the equipment and the light whited out all vision…knocking Theo into unconsciousness.
Kim was alone on an empty plateau of white sand. Nothing for as far as she could see. She knew she had stepped in front of Senior and taken the bullets meant for Shego, but she had no idea what she was doing here.
Nothing for it, better pick a direction and start walking.
She had walked for, what seemed to her, several hours when the sky began to darken. She started hearing sounds coming from a great distance behind her. Looking back, all she could see was a wall of darkness moving closer to her.
Slightly panicked, she began to jog, frantically searching for somewhere to hide, somewhere to shelter. The noise grew louder. Glancing behind again, she found the darkness moving faster. She picked up the pace, running now for a landmark she had seen some time ago…a bump on the horizon.
Kim ran for another, seeming, few hours…the hill growing larger on the horizon. But the darkness had grown faster and larger, now beginning to close on her from all sides. She knew she had to make the hill or all was lost. Putting all of her remaining energy into it, she started sprinting towards the hill.
She could see a doorway, outlined by a welcoming brightness, and pushed her legs to carry her the last distance. She was perhaps a half a mile from the hill when the onrushing wall of darkness consumed the hill and her escape.
A wailing moan escaped her as she collapsed to the ground. She knew it was over. She lay down on her back, looking at the sky going from gray to black and began to wait for the end.
The noise became a loud whirring as the darkness finally made it to where she lay. Just as she was about to close her eyes, the sky changed color, slowly gaining a green cast. The noise stopped as the green shot lightning streaks through the black. Wherever a green streak went, it grew until the hundreds of little ones met, growing larger and larger, until the sky glowed green.
She stood up and yelled at the sky, throwing a fist towards the heavens. As she did this, a white spark jumped from the ground to her hand and began a streamer towards the sky. A similar green one was headed down on a similar path.
When the two met, there was a soundless explosion and Kim's world went white.
When she opened her eyes again, she felt Shego's embrace. She tightened her arms around Shego's neck and let herself be held.
Theo groaned and rolled over just in time to watch as Shego, still glowing a light green, stepped down from the now-shattered tank and carried Kim towards the outer medical lab.
Theo stared at the glowing footprints left behind in the concrete floor, fading with short hisses into green foot-sized stains.
She numbly followed her, horror written into her face, as she realized that a similarity between the women had manifested.
Kim was glowing back at Shego, white to her green, the two colors sliding around one another, where they met, greenish white or white-ish green.
She caught a glimpse of Kim's sightless white eyes as she opened them briefly to look into Shego's equally sightless green ones.
Shuddering, she couldn't bring herself to follow the pair out of the ruined room and was left staring at the slowing swinging doors in silence…when she didn't hear Shego stop, she strode quickly to the comm on the wall, hoping that it still worked.
Both Shego's and Kim's fire waned as they approached Shego's rooms. Shego shifted slightly and waved her hand over the sensor, gaining them access. Starting to wobble, she barely made it over to her bed and put Kim down before she collapsed to her knees.
She had gone deeper, drawn on more, than she had ever in the past. Ever.
Now she could feel the darkness coming. She struggled to rise, to put herself on the bed beside Kim. She failed.
She never felt the hands catching her when she fell.
Theo and Adam managed to get Shego's unconscious form back to the medical unit. While Theo began hooking Shego into her CCU, Adam retrieved Kim from Shego's room. Theo missed the terrified expression on the young henchman's face as he deposited Kim into the only other working CCU.
Theo turned around when Adam mumbled something.
“What was that you said?”
Adam looked at the floor. “Is the rumor true?” he whispered.
Theo frowned. “What rumor?”
Adam glanced at Kim then at Shego. “A couple of the guys who were on duty down in security said that they were watching the cameras in here and they say that Shego went into bio-immersion and brought Kim back from the dead. Did she do that? Were they both glowing like Shego?”
Theo stripped off her gloves and glanced at the door to her office. She could see five or six heads and assumed that nearly all of the off-duty henchman were gathered outside.
She pulled a stool upright and sat down before answering.
“Yes. Kim was dying. Not even a full trauma center would've been able to stabilize her. Even my bio fluid was losing the battle. I can't explain what she did, but whatever it was, you can see the results over there.” She waved at Kim's readouts…normal and asleep. “And yes, they were both glowing…only Kim was glowing white, not green. Just the memory of their eyes give me the shivers.”
A murmur was spreading outside in the hall at Theo's affirmation of the rumors. There was a slight commotion as Donovan, the senior henchman, was pushed into the lab. Adam cringed and backed away into a corner.
“Dr. Kay, what has happened to Drakken?”
Theo fidgeted. She really didn't want to answer this one either. When it didn't look like Donovan was going away, she answered him.
“Coma. He went into convulsions and I had to sedate him heavily. I've taken most of them away, but he isn't…recovering. Can't say when he will either.”
Donovan nodded. “Shego then?”
Theo shook her head again. “No telling. I can't recall her ever telling me another time where she drained herself like this.”
Donovan nodded again. “Was Kim Possible Shego's prisoner or partner? We know she came here as prisoner, but now…” he trailed off and nodded at the two beds again.
Theo was looking confused but answered. “Not prisoner, no. Right before the attack, Kim and Shego both indicated that Kim was with Shego of her own free will now. Partner? I don't know. Why?”
Donovan reached into his uniform and brought out a small black and red book with the word “UNION RULEBOOK” written in silver on the spine.
Theo nodded at once. “Now I understand. You're wondering about your next course of action per Section 13 of your contracts. What have you concluded then?”
Donovan opened the book and flipped a few pages. “Well, according to Section 13, if the evil mastermind is either incapacitated or dead, command devolves to the co-mastermind, then to the sidekick or any remaining partners. If no one in the chain of command is viable, we are to return to the nearest union pickup points and await further instructions. Drakken is no longer viable, nor is Shego. That leaves Kim Possible, if she is truly Shego's partner and not prisoner.”
Theo knew what she had to do and hoped she could explain to Kim before the younger woman clubbed her unconscious.
“Partner. Subordinate maybe. Does that help?”
Donovan looked relieved. “Yes ma'am. I'll inform the union rep at once that we have a new boss. Call me when she's awake, we have to go over a few things she needs to know…I imagine she hasn't had the minimum classes yet. Gods, the paperwork is going to be so much fun”
As he passed down the hall, he took the crowd with him.
Theo shook her head and muttered “Kim is going kill me when she wakes up.”