~And here we are! Can hardly believe this is the end; it's been my baby for months. I guess I'll get to work on finishing The Princess and the Dragon now. 'Bout time, huh?

Major thanks to everyone who read and double-thanks to those who reviewed. I hope you find this a good ending, and I'll see you next time. :D

The occasional grammatical and/or that's-not-a-real-word error is meant to capture Drakken's voice.~

Chapter Twelve
The Aftermath

Heaters. He's thankful for heaters.

As soon as he and Senior enter the house, the air they're exhaling cushions him like the floor mats they use in school gymnasiums. (The memory of how many times he's fallen from a chin-up bar onto one of them doesn't sting as badly anymore.) The cheeks and chin and ears he didn't even realize were freezing are practically melting off his face. His fingers and toes tingle-throb inside their respective gloves and boots.

And there's the rest of his family, clumped together in the kitchen doorway in concern for him. His dopey but loyal henchmen. Snarky yet steadfast Shego. Mother, with her pinching hands and loving arms. And Junior, giant and immature and being guided by the very best. He can't get over how much he loves them.

It occurs to him that he probably couldn't go back to being a villain again even if he wanted to. They had limits as to how big your heart could get, and his has outgrown the maximum size. (Not your physical heart, naturally, because you have no control over how big that is. It's a similephor.)

Even Commodore Puddles comes up and starts licking the knees of his lab coat. He scoops the poodle into a one-armed hold and nestles his nose into his curly fur with the comfortably doggy smell.

Mother bustles over to the door, wringing her little doll-hands together. "Are you all right, Drewbie?" she fusses. His goodness meter's force field deflects the baby name entirely. It's not worth climbing down from his emotional mountaintop to hike up his neck hairs.

He stares at her in a daze. How can he possibly communicate that he's so much better than all right?

"Everything is fine," Senior says, not a ruffle in his incomparable composure. He squeezes his elbow to signal that they're in this together. "We just needed to have a little chat. Man-to-man."

His goodness meter goes ahead and explodes.

"It is good to be alive!" he cries. His voice is deep and loud and echoes off the walls in confident currents. Mother and Senior exchange smiles again.

"That's a different tune than you were singin' earlier," someone comments with a familiar snort.

Shego has, of course, noiselessly slipped up to him. She has her cell phone pressed to her ear - on Thanksgiving? Really? - and that gleam in her eyes that gets less and less sadistic by the day. She curls her long, sharp nails around his wrist and pries him away from Senior, silencing his protests with a just-give-me-a-minute finger.

Once they're tucked into an obscure niche in the living room, Shego removes the phone from under all that hair and claps a hand over the mouthpiece. "There's somebody who wants to talk to you, Doc. It's important." And then she can't resist impishly poking him with the slide-up antenna.

He sets Commodore Puddles down and lifts the phone to his own ear. "Hello?" he booms boldly, because he doesn't care who this is, he's so happy and he wants to share it! "This is Dr. Drakken speaking!"

"Dr. Drakken?" Whoever's speaking is obviously male yet sounds like he's barely reached puberty. "This is Wade."

Wade. Wade. Wade. He knows that name, he knows it, it's someone he's met, but not in person. . .

"Oh!" he bursts out. "You're Kim Possible's computer friend, aren't you?" He neglects to mention that for the first six months he thought the kid was just a function of her walkie-talkie thing, like a really smart GPS that could talk back. Hey, technology can do amazing things! Especially his technology. . .

Something clicks into place and makes sense. "Is this your legit tech guy?" he hisses to Shego.

Shego nods, out-and-out grinning. It's a sight that makes his day all over again.

"I've been doing a scan of her phone to check for any disturbances," Wade reports.

The tech-speak ripples up his backbone, and he shivers in delight. "Yes, I was going to do that myself," he points out, "but I didn't have access to the appropriate equipment yet." His eyes narrow. "How do you?"

He can almost hear Wade shrug. "Well, I am a college graduate." It might seem like bragging if not for the sheepish little-kid-ness still evident in his voice. Brilliant, but still a boy with so many questions and fears.

He feels himself being tugged toward this kid. "You're doing better than me, then," he says, and it doesn't bite on the way out this time. Wade knows about his dropping-out, both batches of Bebes, his revenge plan. . . Wade knows about everything.

So just the fact that he's still willing to help is magical and shiny all on its own.

He throws back his head and laughs from the sheer goodness of today and everything before him, and Wade adds a husky giggle. And he discovers anew that there's no feeling better than laughing with someone.

It takes him a moment to remember they're discussing the video that nearly wrecked his life. "So, what have you found?" he asks, shifting over into somber-scientist mode.

There's the sound of fingers clacking away at computer keys. "It's pretty interesting," Wade begins - cautiously. It dawns on him that the kid can't be sure how he'll respond to this information; he's seen his temper at work and remembers it's not pretty. It's a sinking squirm in his gut. "My data indicates her phone was hacked."

Hacked. The word has an ugly quality, and he imagines the phone being chopped to pieces with a hatchet. "By someone other than you?" he says, just in case the little whiz-kid accidentally detected his own activity. He's done that before. . .

Wade sighs, too heavily for a preteen. "Yes," he answers patiently.

"Oh." He blinks, heartbeat now alive in his forehead veins. "That's a bad thing."

"Yeah, it is," Wade agrees. More clacking, and then he adds, "My scans were able to pick up the sort of device used. It's called a Cell Patcher."

Every now and then, "cell" reminds him of prison rather than phones, and now he squinches up his cheeks to keep the panic inside. "Yes, and?" he prods.

"It's a little black disc, about the size of a bottle cap. When someone puts it on a cell phone, it downloads all of the phone's information onto the Cell Patcher. Their contacts, their pictures, their apps, their videos." Wade's voice all but waters with the fascination of such a device, but disgust waits below the surface. "It only takes a few minutes."

He goes hollow, except for a raging fire in his midsection. For once, he doesn't think it's the ulcer. Everything is starting to come together now - and maybe he would have rather stayed confused.

"GHHRGH!" he roars. It's such a low-down, dirty trick that he can't see straight. Seriously, the room is bending before his crossing eyes.

Wade interprets the noise correctly. "Wait, it gets better," he says, the disgust even more apparent. "There's only one company that manufactures them."

He sinks to the couch, because the I-think-I-know-what's-coming is making him wobbly, and the sling isn't helping. If he could move his lips, he might croak "Yes?", but he can't.

"HenchCo."

There's a surge in bile production. He plants his forearm over his mouth and chokes on the fury rushing in from all sides.

Jack Hench, the scum! Is there nothing the man won't stoop to? All those years, profiting off villains, feeding their fear and their pain and their anger when he was obviously smart enough to help fix them.

There's a frightening second where his vision turns completely red and he worries he might be morphing into Darth Vader. It passes, though, and he's left drained and shivering. "But Hench was talking to - well, fighting with - Shego the whole time her phone was out of her sight," he says. "He couldn't have hacked it."

"Nope, wasn't Hench." Wade's words are now edged with pride, as if he's a rookie policeman who's solved his first crime. "It was one of his clients."

"Oh." He rolls his eyes until eyebrow hairs are visible. "Well, that just narrows it down to EVERYONE!"

Shego muffles a snicker with her hand. He doesn't appreciate it.

"Actually, no," Wade corrects him. "I don't know if you keep tabs on it anymore, but the supervillain community has dropped by almost fifty percent since you reformed."

No, he didn't keep tabs. He wanted to put that part of his life behind him, never look back. Did - did others want the same thing?

You're the reason I reformed, ya know. Lucre's voice, obnoxious and adoring, loops through his brain.

"Did other villains - reform?" he squeaks. "Because I did?"

"Yeah, a lot of them. DNAmy, Frugal Lucre, Motor Ed - well, I'm sure you knew that one." He can picture Wade smiling in triumph. "The Seniors had kind of gotten bored with villainy a couple months before that, but they didn't make an official reformation statement until after you did. Hench was really tweaked about that, because Senior was his best customer."

Wade goes on to say something about even the villains who stayed villains laying low because it was as if the whole community's slate was wiped clean, but he can't focus on it. All he can see is Senior, the day he announced he was giving up villainy, his hands gripping the podium, a glint of determination on his face.

Because of him. He helped Senior!

Good. It's the least he can do.

"So HenchCo's clientele has shrunk dramatically in the last few months," Wade summarizes. "And - oh, yeah - the YouTube account?"

Is he ever going to stop nodding into phones?

"It was based in Germany."

A rash of angry blotches breaks out on his cheeks. "Dementor!" he spits. His body reacts the way pioneers' bodies must have to the word "cholera" - violent, soul-quaking shudders.

Mysterious YouTube Person was his worst enemy all along. The one who could afford HenchCo technology. And who would do anything to hurt him. The spiteful side of him he thought he quashed reawakens, and he wants Dementor's head on a pole.

Maybe he could be a villain again, after all. He hates the man with a passion his conscience has yet to eradicate.

He clenches his teeth around a scream. Tears poke at his eyes, probably staining them red already. He'll have to be careful, then. He'll have to be very careful. Revenge on a few people was what turned him to the dark side in the first place, and he can't go back. The wrong wolf will eat him alive.

The nasty point of Shego's jaw tells him she's known the results for a while now. "You know," she says, "there are these things in Harry Potter called dementors." She gives her leggings a sharp tug like their folds are annoying her. "They suck out your soul."

"Appropriate," he mutters. He pretends to readjust his sling so that no one will see how fast he's batting his eyes. Leave it to Dementor to bring him down, yo.

He swallows the thickness that comes from looking his pain in the face. "Isn't this illegal or something?" he pleads into the phone. "Posting a video of someone - without their permission - just to humiliate them?" He may be new at this whole hero-thing, but if Dementor hurts him, then he should be punished. That's how justice works, right?

Wade's fingers clack away. "It could fall under cyber-bullying," he muses. He can hear the frown in the kid's voice. "But the laws about that are still pretty up in the air."

Frustration stabs him down to the core. Even the "GGHHK" he releases from his chest doesn't do anything to alleviate it.

"We can get him on hacking the phone, though, right?" Shego demands, hands stabbed savagely onto her hips.

Good old Shego. Always so practical.

"Absolutely," Wade says. His tone softens, as if soothing a skittish puppy. "And then the video will be taken down."

His shoulders sag toward each other, a tremendous burden lifted from them. "And the comments will be erased from history forever?" he dares to ask.

"Pretty much, yeah," is Wade's reply. "Did you read them?"

"Y-y-yes." He glances around the room, at the cream-colored walls with the pictures hanging on them, at the fireplace waiting to be lit, for a place to land that can't trigger the flashback and the accompanying tears. "They were mean to me."

"A lot of them were," Wade agrees. "But most of them said stuff like, 'This is Dr. Drakken, the guy who saved the world! My kids would be dead if not for him! Who cares if he eats too many cupcakes?'"

His breath trips over a lump. "Really?" he croaks. The hope Senior instilled in him is spreading through his bloodstream.

"Really." There's undoubtedly a twinkle in Wade's eye. "My personal favorite was: '"The biggest loser" is the guy who uploaded this. For Pete's sake, guys, leave Drakken alone. He has enough problems already.' Signed, KP2002."

That doesn't stand for "kitchen patrol" in this instance. The pair of letters pound into his mind, spoken by that kid - who's his friend - and who has a name he can't remember. Spoken like they were a great treasure, the way he used Shego's name.

"Kim Possible!" he hollers, the way he's done so often, only now it's in joy rather than anguish. The girl he tried countless times to destroy standing up for him? Thanksgiving can't even begin to describe what that brings on.

Looks like he's not the only one working to shove the past back where it belongs.

Wade talks quietly now, confidentially. "And for what it's worth, I know what it's like to have people tell you to lay off the sweets. And I don't even have to be eating any."

Oh. Right. He blinks a good six times. He can't see the kid through the phone the way he could on Kim Possible's walkie-talkie-that-she's-since-exchanged-for-what-appears-to-be-a-wristwatch - what is that thing called, anyway? But he remembers him as pudgy and rounder-faced than himself.

A pang of sympathy shoots through him. Adolescence - it's such a hard age, and he wants to make it better, pass down the wisdom Senior gave to him. "You know what?" he says without even beginning to consider where he's going with this. "You'll make a great man someday."

It's Wade's turn to blink, almost audibly. "Ooohhhkay," he finally says. "Um, thanks?" He sounds confused - yet pleased. Here's hoping that helped somehow.

"No, thank you," he corrects. "For helping me." His own grin is stretching nearly off his cheeks.

"You're welcome. Listen, I've got to get off. If I don't come eat dinner with the family in the next two minutes, my mom's gonna have my head." Wade makes the "ghhhk" noise that usually goes along with drawing your finger across your throat.

"Well, 'bye then," he says agreeably. "Happy Thanksgiving."

There's a silence that seems to wonder, When did you get so pleasant?

When I realized I was loved, he answers. And he beams with man-pride. It's the only thing that can overpower his hatred for Dementor and Jack Hench and all those people on YouTube.

All Wade says is, "Same to you." Then the dial tone drones in his ear. It's a lonely sound, but he's not alone. Shego's parked right in front of him, hand out to request the return of her phone.

He hands it over and heaves a sigh of his own, one that splits on the way out. He's weary and droopy-lidded, and he doesn't think it's from the turkey.

Shego's next words, though, spike his heartbeat to double-speed. "So," she says, all deceptively casual, "I did some research of my own on this Julie girl."

Stammering. Turning red. Jerking his neck. He wants to say, "Julie who?", but that'll get him laughed into next week. "Oh?" he lofts at her instead. Means to loft. It comes out in a squeak that would do his mother's shrillness proud.

"Julie Reiger, formerly Julie Wells, lives at 10060 Mableton Drive, forty-three years old," Shego recites.

That's right. Her birthday's in the winter, his in spring.

How did he remember that?

"Annnnnd," Shego waggles her brows, "turns out she's divorced. So she's avail-a-ble." She places special stress on every syllable of that last word, speaking a mysterious female language that means nothing to him.

He scowls at her, feeling like he's being left out of his own life. "Available for what?" he asks.

Shego bonks her forehead with the palm of her hand. That's usually a sign that it's a topic that should be very, very basic, but just doesn't come to him naturally.

Okay - so what does he not understand that everyone else seems to? Sports. Dishonesty. Romance -

"Ohhhhhhhh!" he blurts. "You mean available to be my girlfriend!" Ooh, his tummy just did a flip. Is that good?

Shego gives him a now-you're-getting-it nod. And then she can't resist poking in, "Drakken and Julie, sittin' in a tree -"

"Stop it, Shego!" he barks. This is familiar, and it's safer, and he doesn't have to test every step before he takes it. "We won't be sitting in any trees."

Shego totally ignores him. "Actually, you're lucky," she says. Her cat-like eyes betray a flash of sadness for an instant. "Junior has a girlfriend now," she reminds him.

"I'm sorry," he says, out of reflex. What else are you supposed to say when someone's mouth is turned down like that, someone whose lips are always in parallel lines?

Shego snorts. "No, you're not."

No, he's not, but he doesn't want her to be sad. He wanders over to the window and peers out for some form of assistance.

The moon's out, round and full as a Thanksgiving-stuffed belly, and he gazes at it happily. Right now he might as well be standing on its surface - only with oxygen. And plenty of food. And an odd little family who all love him in odd little ways. It's imprinted on his heart forever, like footprints on the moon, with no wind to disturb it.

Which is why he turns back to Shego and sighs yet again. "Can I tell you something?" he asks. "Something important?" The words fall somber and sullen from his lips, and Shego better take them seriously.

Shego pulls the veil down over her face again. "Sure, I guess," she says with a shrug.

It hurts that she's got so much inside that she won't share with him. But if he wants her to open up to him, he can't keep secrets from her, either.

He gives her the shortened version of this week, starting with Macho's claims and ending with Senior's dismissal of them. She nods throughout, snickering and twitching, but not breaking into the meanness that was always second nature to her.

"I thought Senior wouldn't want to be related to me," he says to wrap up. "Senior or any real man."

Shego's gazing at him in what appears to be disbelief. "Why not?"

"Because I always eat too much. And that's gross." Out in the air like that, it seems pretty flimsy. He cradles his sling in his other arm and wonders why he even brought this up.

"And you think that would get you on every man's 'Do Not Contact' list?" Shego sniffs. She's got the same look she wore when he announced that smothering the planet in cookie dough that expanded when the sun came out was the secret to world domination.

"Well - yes," he grunts. Shego always pokes holes in everything; why didn't he come to her with this sooner? "That and -" The pain blurs his eyes again. " - my fath - this - he - "

Shego cuts in before he can overwhelm himself. "Your dad split, I know." It's the softest he's ever heard her voice.

He refuses to respond. Even his thoughts are wavering, removing all logic. He can barely recall the Pythagorean Theorum.

"And you think if you did something different, he'd still be here?"

This time he nods.

Shego shakes her head. "Yeah, well, join the club," she mutters. Her voice doesn't sound sad exactly, but it doesn't quite have its usual spunkiness. Another question he'll never be able to ask weighs down his tongue.

"What could you have done?" Shego crosses her arms with a snap. Her breathing is stirred by anger, but her eyes are sorry for him.

He lifts his shoulders to his earlobes. "Been more of a man," he confesses. A raw spot forms, like the throbbing holes left behind when you lost a tooth. The thing that's been twisting and rattling and causing you so much pain is gone, and there's relief, but there's still a recess in your gum that needs to be tended to.

Shego's whole face does a hike toward her hairline. "How old were you?" she asks.

He stands up, sits back down, jiggles around as though he has to use the bathroom bad. "Eight."

Shego lets out the hard laugh that inspires terror in the general populace. He's not part of the general populace, but it's still pretty intimidating, so he jitters faster. "Dr. D!" she scoffs. "Nobody's a man when they're eight!"

He gets to his feet and doubles his one operational fist. It's stupid, but he thought it, and he has to explain why so he won't go down with it. "But you didn't see me when I was eight!" he protests. "I was this skinny little wimpy kid with these huge glasses and these oddball teeth and I just tripped over everything!"

"Yeah, that's about how I pictured you," Shego replies, perfectly calmly. This is the perfect opportunity to mock him, but the closest she gets is a glitter in her eyes. "Look, Doc," she says, and he recognizes her tone. It's the one she takes on whenever she's talking him down from the peak of hysteria. "Anybody who cuts out on an eight-year-old has issues."

He's heard those words trillions of times - from himself and his psychology books and his therapist. But this time he actually allows himself to believe them, just as a smidgen, because they come from Shego, and Shego's always right.

Her glare burns straight through him, across the country, to wherever Richard Lipsky is. "He's the wimp, not you." She jerks her chin sharply to the right, as if finishing off an enemy.

Sure enough, the last of what's preying on him curls up and dies. "So - you think I'm a man?" he ventures. The only thumb he can move twiddles back and forth, back and forth.

Please, please, please.

Shego twitches him an almost-smile. "Well, you'd make a heck of a funny-looking woman."

Ohh, Shego. What would he do without her?

Gratitude bubbles inside, lifts and warms him like an unexpected hot spring. On an emotional impulse, he wraps her into a hug.

Shego doesn't hug him back, but she doesn't shove herself away either. Or set fire to his clothing.

That's all he needs to send his happiness level up through the roof. Can you blow up from being too happy?

If so, that's the way he wants to go.

"Who wants pie?" Mother chirps from the kitchen.

Does she even have to ask? "Me!" he hollers. He releases Shego from his embrace and virtually falls over her.

She snags his sleeve again and pulls him down close to her hissing mouth. "When you ran out of the house earlier - was it because of what I said?"

He nods as evenly as he can. "I - I was worried Senior would think I was some kind of pig," he admits.

Shego tilts her massive head of hair to the side. "Nah, a pig would have wanted the whole meal to himself," she says. "You just get really excited about food. A little too excited," she seems to feel the need to add, "but, eh, that's just you."

All he can do is glow. He's won Shego's approval, and he's not sure anyone in the whole of history has ever done that.

In the kitchen, he serves himself a healthy-sized slice of pie and heaps a dollop of Cool Whip on top, taking great care not to lick the spoon. Even through the thick, luscious scent of the topping, he can smell Mother's secret blend of spices, a chemical concoction that equals pure yumminess.

And things couldn't be more perfect if he were ruler of the world.

He eats it happily - the pie, not the world - with only brief digressions toward Senior's chair to reassure himself he's still there. He doesn't even look longingly at Junior's hefty shoulders.

After dessert, they move to the living room to watch one of those football games. The incessant head-butting still doesn't appeal to him, but he'd watch grass grow with Senior. He sits as close to the old man as possible without actually climbing into his lap. (Which he is tempted to do, but Junior's looking at him strangely enough already.)

Shego keeps a sarcastic commentary going on the games. Mother lights a fire in the fireplace. He wiggles inside his wonderful old lab coat, right shoulder wrapped in a one-arm hug, too content to stay still.

This is what he'll forever be thankful for. That he's surrounded by people who decided long ago that they love him, despite his blue-tinted skin, his raggedy scar, and his weird proportions.

He delays the Seniors' departure as long as he can. But it's dark out, and they need to get home. He knows it's nothing personal - he knows it, he knows it - but as he's showing them to the door, he can't help but whimper.

Senior hears and folds him into his majestic arms. A powerful, soothing presence seems to linger, casting him in a role he'd never been able to play before.

A son, safe in the arms of a loving father.

Behind him, he can imagine Shego's lower mandible all but fracturing in surprise. Is Dr. D letting someone hug him? she must be thinking.

Yup. Today is just full of surprises.

Shego, never one to be stunned for long, gets it together enough to say, "You have to let go eventually, Doc. Europe's more than just a hop, skip, and a jump away."

Oh.

He slowly pulls away, almost missing the ease of recoil. His eyes stare into Senior's with what has to be the same look Commodore Puddles gets when he's afraid of being left outside in the cold.

Senior treats him to the smile that was previously reserved for Junior. "If you ever need to chat again, you can call me," he murmurs. "I cannot promise I will be able to talk at the time, but I will get back to you." He pats his arm in a good-buddy way. "Those of us recovering from a life of evil must stick together, no?"

"Indeed!" he spurts - it's his makeshift I've-forgotten-all-other-words placeholder. He squeezes his giddy fingers into a sweaty fist, squares his shoulders and holds them stiff. "Take care, Senior," he coughs.

Senior dips his head politely. "And you as well, Dr. Drakken," he replies.

Watching his exit is one of the hardest things he's ever done. But this isn't like what happened to him thirty-four years ago, he tells his traumatized, eight-year-old self. Senior keeps his word. Always has, always will.

The henchmen trickle away in streams, bidding him good-bye with knuckle bumps and high-fives. It occurs to him that these huge hulking guys have recognized him as a fellow man from day one. Makes him wish he wasn't so harsh on them.

When Shego leaves, he doesn't chance hugging her again. Twice in the same month, let alone the same day, is pushing it with her. But they do their best-friend pinky-linking and grin at each other, and he marvels once again at how much nicer she looks with a smile.

Finally, it's just him and his mother. Just the two of them, as it was for so many years. Now, though, it's not a lonely void anymore. Senior's potato-chip-crackly chuckle, Junior's squeal, Shego's surprisingly uninhibited laugh, the henchmen's dopey roars, and Mother's tinkling giggle still hang in the air, so he's not alone.

He collapses onto the couch and lets out a sigh that purges any remaining Macho poison.

"You sound like you've been holding that one back for a week, Drewbie," Mother comments, locking the leftover pieces of turkey into a Tupperware container, busy as ever.

Irony. He plucks at an afghan thread and waits for his voice not to squeak like a ten-year-old's before he answers her. "You don't know the half of it."

Mother's forehead immediately puckers. "What is the half of it?"

"I've been trying all week to be more of a man," he says.

"A man?" Mother glances up from the cupboard she's tucking stray potholders into. "What on earth. . . "

"I thought I wasn't really one," he clarifies. "Since I never had - never had anyone to teach me how."

A camel hump sticks in his throat, and he steers himself away from that issue, only partially selfishly. Richard hurt his mother, too, and he doesn't want to do the emotional equivalent of ripping off her scabs.

So he takes another approach. "See, I'm too thin. . ."

She can't argue that. She's been harping on him about that ever since he can remember. Especially in his post-prison days.

". . . and I read in a magazine that women like their men all big and buff with strong muscles and tight shoulders and - stuff." Wow, this is an awkward conversation.

Mother's eyes take on a gleam of playfulness that reminds him she was once Shego's age. "Well, we do appreciate it," she agrees. "But, sweetheart, that's nothing more than a nice bonus."

He pulls the afghan tighter around himself, needing its warmth. "Really?"

"Really. If it's the right kind of woman." Mother's face-just-like-his doesn't boast many wrinkles, but it suddenly seems as wise as Senior's. "She's more interested in a heart of gold than - " She trails off, searching for sufficiently delicate wording.

His tongue doesn't have a pause-when-tactful app, though. "Abs of steel," he blurts out.

"Really, Drewbie!" She pinks up, and then he's blushing, because did he really just say that in front of his mother?

He rests his head against the squishy arm of the couch and takes deep breaths. He hopes with everything in him - and that's a pretty big dinner - that Julie's the right kind of woman.

Thinking of his stomach gets him squirming on the cushions. "And they said there's nothing more unattractive than a man with a spare tire. And I am getting a little, you know, tummier." He pats his midsection and then curses himself for drawing attention to it.

But Mother's misty-eyed gaze doesn't stray. "Drew Theordore," she says, in that firm manner that immediately stands his vertebrae at attention, regardless of how sore they are. "I have seen far too many people hate themselves for a number they see on a scale. I never want that to be you."

He gazes down at his plump little mother and is abruptly overcome by fierce affection. She's soft and warm and perfect for hugging and if anyone ever mocks her for her weight, he'll rip them in half. Tiny hands and all.

And that's not even close to how deeply she cares for him. He folds his hands over his chest before it splits wide open. He's so loved - so cared for - so happy - he might just start screeching like a monkey and never stop.

"You are very much the best kind of man," Mother coos. Her expression softens, as if someone's holding a candle to it. "But that doesn't mean you won't always be my little baby boy."

With that, she reaches up and takes a hold of his cheek and squishes it between her fingers. His groan isn't as loud as usual, and he doesn't yank himself away for a good nine seconds. That's just Mother. She'll never stop babying him, but that won't keep him from being a man.

Mother pokes around in the enormous red purse she's taken to carrying lately. If anyone does try to mug her, she can clobber them with that. He snickers at the mental image.

"I was saving this for one of my friends who's going to be a grandma soon," she says, plucking a square book-type thing from the bowels of the purse.

Ooh. He adjusts his sling. This better not turn into Drewbie, why don't you settle down and give me some grandbabies?

She slides the something into his hands, and he glances down at it. It's a book, all right, with the words 4001 Baby Names written in fluid letters across the cover.

It's an old thing, pages frayed at the edges from years of being turned by his mother's strong, dainty hands. It's been hastily swiped of dust, but a few specks still cling to the cover's corners, undoubtedly from sitting on that knickknacky old bookshelf in the dining room for forty years. There's something practically surreal about holding it - the books were so much a part of the landscape when he was a kid that it's never occurred to him that they could come off the shelves.

A bookmark pokes out somewhere past the middle, no doubt holding something important. But what? He crumples his eyebrow at his mother, who pats his shoulder. "Take a look at this sometime," she says mysteriously.

Ohhh-kaaaay, as Shego would say.

He means to - honestly, he does - but he puts it down somewhere and then gets distracted by all the thoughts crowding into his head as though eager to join a great party. Chief among them is the decision to return Macho to the library on Saturday if it's open. Fat lot of good that magazine did him. (No pun intended.)

They claimed to have the antidote, but he'd been given a placebo instead. And he's getting the feeling he was never really sick in the first place.

Unless you count the bellyache he got from all those pork chops.

******
The next day brings with it nearly-sixty-degree weather that demands a return to the park. The sun's burning bright, but there's more than a bit of a breeze, and he can smell the promise of oncoming snow, the water molecules in the air transforming into ice crystals. He sniffs hopefully at the nippiness on the hovercraft ride to the park.

From his perch on his favorite swing, he can observe the last of the browning leaves bustling across the equally-brown soccer field, and the trees stripped down down to bare bark standing naked against the wind. Winter, he decides, is beautiful and ugly at the same time.

But inside him, everything is lush and green - literally; his flowers are as happy as he is. The crushing density of Macho's man-quirements has been replaced by a sense of pride in being Dr. Drakken.

This isn't his empty arrogance. This is self-confidence, and it's entirely uninterested in his pecs.

Pumping his feet against the gusting currents, he gets the swing to its apex and laughs into the wind with unbridled delight. Okay, so he's not in control of the world. Heck, he's not even in control of his own limbs. But he has a family. He has a job. He has a new reputation, one that goes far enough to let strangers on the Internet overlook his goof-ups.

What more could a man's goodness meter need?

He tilts his whole self back, falls out of the swing and lands hard on the rubber mat below. It doesn't hurt quite as much as it did a few months ago when he first started coming here - one of the advantages of having a little padding.

He smiles up at the sun. He's light now, light and free, the way he was when he first reformed. Only this time it's not hate and guilt he's been freed from, but forever trying to find his manliness in steaks and karate. Those things don't gnaw on your conscience or press on your soul as bad, but they were just as heavy, and he never really realized it until they disappeared. Now he feels like he could fly - which he knows he can't; the human arm wasn't meant for flight propulsion. But maybe if he found a big enough bunch of balloons. . .

Anyway, the weight's been lifted, and now he can enjoy life again. Now the world's a warm, safe place filled with friends, a lot of whom he hasn't even met yet.

He lifts his face up to the sun and lets it warm him, inside and out. And then he catapults himself back onto the swing, rocking it from side to side, because the happier you are, the harder it is to stay still.

And that's right when he hears someone call, "Drew?"

It's a woman's voice, although not until he converts it to a little girl's does he recognize it. The pitch is unremarkable, but the tone is warm and wide-open, the kind of voice that makes you want to daydream and throw pennies in wishing wells. The serious-scientist side of him disappears, and little Drew Lipsky is craning his neck to see.

QUERTYUIOP! He's saved from a nose-plant only by his quick-thinking pinkie finger hooking onto the chain.

Striding toward him from the direction of the twisty side where he saved that kid the other day is Julie. Her hair is the perfect blend of autumn-red-orange and winter-gray, and the green coat she's wearing reminds him of Christmas trees. And Jasmine's eyes. And Shego's. Winter just got a whole lot prettier.

And then there's him, in a fluffy blue coat zipped over a Gumby T-shirt and faded jeans.

He is Senor Senior, Senior's almost-son, though, and as such, he has class. He leaps from the swing and, with a humble dip at the waist, offers it to Julie. It seems silly as soon as he's done it - after all, there are nine other swings, empty ones, where she could sit.

Still, this is the very best swing, the one with the just-right amount of rubbery give, and therefore, it should go to the lady. And she accepts it graciously, sinking down into it with a sigh.

Somewhere, somehow, Senior is proud.

Several lobes of his brain go BANG, and his words go bye-bye. Knowing what to say, however, has never been a prerequisite for his mouth to start going.

"Julie!" he cries. "You came! And I remembered your name!" A facial tic twitches under the scar. ". . . and, in the process, I seem to have forgotten my own," he confesses.

Julie's lips part in that magical-woodlands-creature smile he remembers so well. "It's Drew," she says. "Drew Lipsky."

"Oh, right! I was kind of hoping it would be something else." He has another name, one he likes better, but his memory is working entirely in safe mode, no backup disks available. "Of course, it would make a nice secret identity, like 'Peter Parker', right? I mean, no one suspects him of secretly being a superhero, because he just blends right into the crowd. Which I, of course, can't do, being blue and all." He hauls in the first breath he's taken in thirty seconds. "I like your coat," he finishes.

There's no hint of eloquence in that jabber, but it's amusing to Julie, if he's reading her correctly. He drops with a decidedly uncoordinated plop into the swing next to her and grins goonily. "So, do you live around here?" he asks.

Ugh. That's a stalker question, isn't it?

Julie doesn't run away screaming for the police, though. She's pixie-smiling right at him. "Up closer to Upperton," she says. "You know, by the museum."

Good, good. That's not enough information to be creepy.

"And you?" Julie turns the question back around on him.

"I live on Looney Ward," he blurts out, and then his cheeks blush in one big blotch that connects across the bridge of his nose. "I mean - Ward Avenue! Just a few miles from here! In the polka-dotted house!"

Julie laughs in a way that sounds like she's about to cough. "I always wondered who lived there."

He giggles - an actual, non-masculine giggle - and stares out at his beloved playground. The slides with the bumps that flutter your stomach, the give-you-rope-burn poles you can slide all the way to the wood chips, the monkey bars a scary-good distance from the ground -

"Have you been here before?" he says.

Julie lifts one shoulder. "Not since Ron was little."

He frowns.

"My son," Julie explains. "He graduated this spring."

Gulp. He kicks several inches above the mat, feeling a lump taking shape in his throat. "It's weird," he says without planning to.

Julie squints. "What's weird?"

The lump slides down from his throat to push on his lungs. He grabs the first thoughts in his head and forcefully ejects them. "People my age having kids. . . who aren't even kids anymore." He peers at Julie, picturing her as a ten-year-old with ropy pigtails, and is flooded by a warm wash of something or other. "At the risk of sounding cliche, where has the time gone?"

Julie gives him a mildly-misty-eyed look. "And what about you?" she inquires gently.

What about him? He flips back through his recent accomplishments - winning Senior's affections, managing not to pig out on Thanksgiving, saving the world -

Ohhhhhhhh. She's talking kids and stuff. And now the air tastes funny. Too much nitrogen, not enough oxygen.

He taps the lips that have never been kissed - not really, not in the way that counts. "No, I never married. I guess I never. . . found the right woman." He shrugs up to his ears in what he's sincerely hoping is a casual fashion. "And I'm probably too old now." The soles of his boots beg to be inspected for mud, and he's happy to oblige.

"Hey," Julie says. He glances at her just long enough to catch a flicker of compassion. "It's never too late." Her voice doesn't suggest anything but friend-to-friend encouragement. He can't figure out whether that's a blessing or a bother.

Julie jerks her swing sideways toward him. He twists his, too, so they can face each other like congruent angles. His blood is roaring in his ears as if he's holding a seashell up to one. (That's actually what you hear in them, not the ocean, but his child-side chooses to ignore that for now.)

"So, um -" Julie's brows slant inward - "what happened to your arm?"

Oh, that. Funny how he completely forgot about it - and funny how the immobile arm is suddenly as heavy as it would be on Jupiter. He lays the sling across his lap and runs his fingers into its interior to soothe an itch. "Dislocation," he reports grandly. "Workout injury," he can't help adding. "But don't worry - I shall be fine!"

The boom booms, but he's blinking his contacts at the speed of sound. His tummy is jittering like he's gone down the slickest, twistiest, bumpiest slide in the universe.

"Oh." Julie sweeps a gaze over his skinniness, and miraculously, he resists the urge to poke out his chest. There's no assessment taking place behind those brown-and-gold eyes, either.

Silence starts to fall, and he can't let it. There's no way he's letting this become awkward. He stirs his thoughts with Mother's big wooden soup spoon in the hopes he'll find something sensible. "So. . . how was your Thanksgiving?" he gets out, surprising himself with the shyness that's creeping over him.

His nervous tic has crept into his jaw, and he squares it - well, as much as its rounded-out shape can square. He refuses to be self-conscious. This is Julie. They survived junior high together. Nothing can be worse than that, right?

"Oh, it was fine. Ron came home from college, and we spent it together. Turkey, pumpkin pie, and football, until we were totally sick of all three." Julie laughs in a light little way that doesn't quite ring true.

Just one parent and one kid? His chest pinches for her. For both of them.

"And he's celebrating with his father this weekend." He can hear Julie's backbone stiffening into a precise 180 degrees. "Nick can be a jerk, but he at least tries to stay involved in Ron's life."

What seems to be alligator jaws clamp into him and start sawing. Tears film over his eyes. "That's. . . great," he wavers. His ponytail droops to cover his shoulders, and he has to mentally restrain images of annihilation rays firing at will, spreading his misery.

Julie's face startles, flashing an oh-snap across it. "Oh, Drew," she breathes into the hand she raises to her mouth. "I'm completely forgot. I'm sorry."

Dr. Drakken focuses on the horizon so the Drew Lipsky in him can't break down sobbing. She knew. Of course she knew. Middleton's a small town, and it was even smaller then, and nothing stayed secret for long. Especially not with the way some ladies gossiped.

Bitterness curdles in his gut, and he fights to rise above it. The girl he watched from afar for so many years is here, and she's apologizing for the biggest hurt anyone has ever cast on him. No wonder there's nothing but a tangled snarl from one cranial wall to the other.

Thanks to Senior's influence, he remembers his manners. "It's not your fault," he tells her. His sinuses start to sting, but his full-to-the-brim goodness meter nudges the rest of the truth out of him. "And you know what?" He snuggles his elbows into the warmth of his coat and breathes, just breathes. "It wasn't mine, either."

The out-of-nowhere sound of a cardinal twittering from a leafless branch jolts his body forward, his nerves scrambling in six different directions and setting his right foot to tingling. Must have been a little on edge. He chuckles sheepishly and plays with a link on the swing's chain.

"So, how was your Thanksgiving?" He will be eternally grateful to Julie for changing the subject.

"Great!" he replies honestly, cheerful bubbles building inside him again. "The whole family came over - my mother, some guys I used to work with, my sister. . . "

Julie's forehead puckers. "Sister?"

Oh, right. Sometimes it completely slips his mind that Shego wasn't born to his mother. "Not technically my sister," he says. "We met at my. . . my old job." Which is true - he just doesn't want to get into the whole I-used-to-want-to-conquer-Earth thing right now. "She was so young. I think she was only twenty-one when I met her."

The image of Shego, so fresh-faced and pretty and yet so hard and cold, standing on his doorstep, a bag flung over one shoulder, flashes across his mind. Did he know, looking at her then, how special she'd become to him? Maybe not, but her youth touched him in a place that hadn't frozen over with evil yet.

"So - because of that - I always wanted to take care of her. Look out for her. But she usually wound up looking after me." He's not sure he's explaining this very well at all. And his voice is an entire key higher than it should be. "Anyway, she was. . . estrangered. . . or something from her family, and I always wanted a little sister, so - we sort of adopted each other."

That full feeling is back in his throat, but it doesn't ache as much. He's just so, so thankful for Shego, sharp tongue and sharp gloves and all. He'd never make it without her.

Julie appears slightly choked-up herself. "That's neat for you," she finally says. "You always seemed so lonely."

"I was," he agrees. He hugs his one good arm around himself and listens to the birds. Oooh, life is so good, he wants to chirp back at them! "But not anymore."

It's enough to call his courage and his quest for knowledge back to him. He sucks in moist particles of what will soon be snow and breathes out his question. "Can I ask you something - purely for research purposes, of course?"

Julie's eyes twinkle like the dust Tinkerbell leaves everywhere. "Absolutely," she replies.

He clears his throat and adopts his most professional tone. "Do you - as a woman, I mean - do you consider buff men to be the most attractive?"

As soon as he's voiced it, he gets blotches like scarlet fever all down his neck. And they only burn redder when Julie considers that for all of about thirty seconds and then says, "Yeah."

His heart waterlogs and plumps to his feet. He makes a valiant effort to keep from crumbling into ash and blowing away.

"I always thought some handsome knight on a white horse would come and whisk me away," she continues on the edge of a sigh. "Even after all this time, I guess I'm still waiting for my fairy tale."

She sounds sad, and he can't bear it. Wants to encourage her the way she did for him. He tips his body toward her, close enough to count her splotchy freckles. "Some things are better than fairy tales," he says in as quiet a whisper as he can produce.

He inhales, sucking in his lips, until they're practically plastered against the wall of his throat. Because if she replies "Like what?" he isn't sure he'll be able to keep from bursting out with "Like me!" Shego says he has the subtlety of a buffalo stampede.

She doesn't say anything, though. The just-barely-curving smile she gives him is of the soft, one-side-of-the-mouth variety. The way he always wished she would smile at him. He goes Pop-Rock-fizzly right down to his toes, and he needs to confide in her.

"Someone said I run like a girly-man," he says, without adding that "someone" was Carl. Not sure he can say the name without spitting. He might not be Julie's handsome knight - he's never even ridden a horse, of any color - but he IS her friend, so she won't mock him.

Right?

Sure enough, Julie laughs, but not in a mean way. "No, you're not a girly-man," she assures him. "You're more like a - a sprite."

His eyebrow furrows until he knows it bears a noted resemblance to a caterpillar bunching itself up to cross a branch. "You think I'm like pop?" he asks in disbelief.

That's good for another laugh, even more genuine than the first. "No - it's a creature in fantasy stories. A miniature, lively, troublesome sort of person, like a fairy. Where do you think we get the word 'sprightly' from?"

Oh. He's heard that word. Shego always tells him he's pretty sprightly for a "guy his age." All but the back that's even now complaining over the lack of a proper support on the swing. The little baby-swing nests have some, but even he's not small enough to slip into them anymore.

Julie tilts her head and puts him under scrutiny. "And that's what you're like," she says. "Just flitting from place to place, getting into mischief and making everyone happy. When you're not putting on your curmudgeon act."

Huh. She doesn't think his grumpy-old-man part is who he really is. And he loves the way she talks. She sounds so smart, but she's not rubbing it in his face. She's just being herself - the self that was always so good with words and left him in awe.

"Although," Julie playfully nudges his foot with her own, and he doesn't even scream, "you could be like the pop, too. Bubbly as you are."

It's odd - he feels like nothing more than froth at the moment. It turns him red again and sets him giggling as only a childhood crush can. And it keeps going right until Julie says, "So I saw this video of you on YouTube the other day."

It's a miracle he doesn't revert back to megalomania right then. Latent heat vaporizes the contents of his stomach. "Did it involve cupcakes?" he demands, hearing his voice heading up toward a squall.

"Yes." Julie isn't pinning him with a glare reserved for lowlifes. In fact, she still has that Tinkerbell sparkle on her face. Either she's a complete sadist - which he strongly doubts - or -

And then there is no "or," because Julie looks as him like she would the cover of a thick novel she hasn't read yet. "I thought it was pretty cute, actually," she says.

Cute never sounded like a compliment until now. And the breath he drags in is the first one to reach his lungs in the last minute. "Did you read the comments?" he asks, fingers digging into the chain, whose chill frosts through his gloves.

Julie wrinkles her freckles into crow's-feet that match his. "Ew, no. I never read the comments."

He punches a quaking fist up to his lips. "Well, they were mean. A bunch of people cussing me out and telling me I was a pig and I was fat and I was disgusting and they would whip me into shape." And now his pulse is pounding in his temples, because he's trusting her with this!

Julie gives that an instant's thought. "Well, that stinks." She frowns firmly. "And it's completely stupid. I mean, to go after you for making one mistake."

Hoo-boy. Here it is. "But it's not just one mistake," he confesses. "I eat too much - a lot."

Julie blinks those special eyes. She looks confused, no idea why he said that, but there's no disgust to curl up her mouth. "Oh," she says after a halfway-through-eternity pause. "Well, there are worse habits to have, I guess."

Hope flares in his chest. "Like what?" he ventures.

Most of the awkwardness vanishes. "Like going around cussing people out for eating too much," Julie responds, almost as smoothly as if she's been planning for this.

Oh, blessed day!

He guffaws from the depths of staring your fear right in the eye and watching it blink first. Even Dementor couldn't make Julie hate him. He's so happy, he just might burst into song.

"So" - he thrusts his feet forward again, pulling the swing into motion - "what's your very favorite holiday? Mine's Christmas." He grins at her, the wind smacking his teeth so that they sting. "The getting presents - and the giving them, of course!" he puts in before she can conclude he really is a greedy-pants. "And the cookies and the wearing my reindeer sweater and the hanging up stockings and the decorating the Christmas tree and even the not being able to fall asleep all night!"

And Christmas is coming so soon, too! He can't keep the joy inside any longer, and it bursts out in a squeal. "So - what's yours?" he remembers to ask Julie. "Christmas?"

Julie shakes her head. "No, Christmas is a little too stressful for me. I like Easter better. You still get the whole family together, have the big meal, only without so much of the pressure."

Well, he guesses Christmas can be stressful. For him, though, it's always been a good kind of stress. You live as though you're in an exercise ball for small rodents, you learn to distinguish between good pressure and bad.

"Easter's good, too," he says, putting his empathy skills into practice. "I still have egg hunts!" The grin cracks through sheepishly. "I'm just a big kid."

But still a man. This time, the realization doesn't even need to be prompted.

"Now, Shego's favorite holiday is Halloween," he announces. "She likes scaring trick-or-treaters." The memory of her showcasing her plasma glow to a group of particularly obnoxious kids dressed like rock stars at his suburban lair a couple years back gives him the giggles again.

Julie chuckles, too. "She sounds like a piece of work."

"She is," he agrees. And so holidays and Shego it is. Are. Whatever. Two of his favorite topics.

He feels his eyes go "dreamy" as Shego called it, and drift away to somewhere he wasn't even able to imagine for the first forty-two years and three months of his life. Somewhere warm and soft, with no need for world domination and truly nothing left to prove. Somewhere he's free.

There are things he hasn't disclosed, of course. For Pete's sake (and who's Pete?), the cupcake revelation was enough to spring on her for now. He has no idea how she'd react to knowing that he was responsible for some pretty devastating attacks on planet Earth. He doesn't want to put that kind of strain on a relationship whose blueprints aren't even completed yet.

He doesn't know when he'll feel comfortable doing that, or if this'll ever go anywhere other than the Land of Friendship. But when she smiles at him, it makes him not care if his belly's getting bigger and wonder what it would be like to hold her hand. And he decides even the Land of Friendship is a pretty magical place when you're there with a pixie.

************************
The day after that, he's got an appointment with his therapist. Well, actually, his licensed psychiatrist. When your issues are bad enough to drive you into seeking world conquest, not just any old counselor will do. Dr. Klein has diagnosed him with ADHD and PTSD and a bunch of other letters, though he assures him every session that he's not crazy.

One of these days, he'll remember to tell him that mad scientists take "crazy" as a compliment.

The waiting room welcomes him with its cozy, homey-smelling candles sitting on a high shelf, where no little kids - or clumsy five-foot-niners - can topple them to the ground. Magazines, everything from Highlights to Good Housekeeping, are scattered across every flat surface. He checks to make sure Macho's not among them.

It's not, and his newly-patched-up goodness meter gorges itself, because it learned from the best. Ugh. Which brings him to what he came here to talk about today.

Dr. Klein's office is a square with rounded corners, like the shape of Senior's marvelous face. A miniature fountain of fake stone gurgles on his desk. It's a safe, soothing sound, albeit one that makes you have to go to the bathroom after listening to it for an hour.

Klein holds out his arm for a handshake and then nods his permission to sprawl out on the red velveteen couch. Every good head shrink needs one. The plush lumbar support eases his thoughts back into place.

All right. He's told Senior. He's told Shego. He's told Julie. Now it's time to tell the person who's certified to help him. Dr. Klein's not Senior, but he is pretty wise for a guy only about his own age.

He commands himself not to be nervous. After all, nothing could possibly be worse than confessing to Mother he was a supervillain. But his shins are thudding against each other anyway, in time to the rhythm of his pumping heart.

Dr. Klein takes a seat across from him. Once they've gotten the how-are-you-did-you-enjoy-Thanksgiving bits out of the way, the man leans forward and studies him with a trained eye. "Well, Dr. Drakken, what do you want to talk about today?" he asks. He's got a voice like a tired old bloodhound on a cartoon, but he's bright and lively and always eager to help.

And this is up to him. He's in control. It's his choice to spill this. It ratchets his pulse down a few notches.

He grabs a pillow and hugs it to his torso for dear life. "There's something about me I haven't told you yet," he begins with a grand clearing of the throat. "But first you have to promise not to think I'm a girly man, cause it's kind of a woman thing."

The old skittishness is coming back, and drat the luck, he can't twiddle his fingertips together thanks to this stupid sling! Instead, his pupils dart across the room, back and forth, can't land on Klein's.

Out of the corner of his vision, though, he still sees Klein giving shape to abstract concepts with his hands. "I promise not to think you're a girly-man, Drakken," he vows. He spreads his arms, indicating the whole room, perhaps the entire building. "This is a judgment-free zone."

Of course it is. This is the place where he shared every last detail about the Diablos and wasn't saddled with any more guilt than he came in carrying. He squeezes a shoulder pad and sets his jaw at attention. If it were firm and square, would he feel stronger inside?

Maybe not.

"I'm a, uh, um, err. . ." He paws for a scientific term that will neutralize the sting. Afternoon-talk-show-host is the closest he can get. ". . . an emotional eater."

There's nary a sound from the man across the room, which means he should continue. "I - when - when I get upset - I get empty," he explains, gnawing on a gloved knuckle. "And when I'm empty, I think I'm hungry, so I eat." That's logical as can be, yet the gravel in his voice comes out unsteady. "And - sometimes - I have a hard time concentrating on more than one thing at once - so - when I'm concentrating on how good and delicious my mother's cookies are, I don't have room to think about - other stuff! Only I'm no good at knowing when enough is enough, so usually I - I guess you could say I binge."

The words taste ugly and shameful and his eyes are headed toward the floor when Dr. Klein crosses the room and tilts his chin up gently with his knuckles, peering right at him with iron-sharpness. "Hey, hey, I don't want to see you ducking your head," he says, in a tone that combines the kindly kindergarten teacher with the stern principal. "You haven't done anything wrong. What you've just shared is actually a very common problem, even among men."

Just like Senior said. His hands fold into excited little fists and bounce off his thighs. "Yes, I've heard that," he begins, trying not to stutter so. This would be so much easier if he were explaining molecular bondage. "But I'd always heard that men go for big old T-bone steaks and such things. I - I crave sweets!" He sucks his always-protruding lower lip in and chomps down on it.

There are two things "a drop of condensation on your face" can mean, he realizes, one scientific and one metaphoringcal. But the point is, this face doesn't show either one.

Klein returns to his chair and folds his fingers across the front of his maroon wool sweater. And, he realizes, it's the first time all week he's looked at a man - another man, he corrects himself - without automatically analyzing the construction of his abdominal muscles.

"It's not what you stereotypically think of men doing," Klein agrees. "But it's certainly not unusual."

Not unusual. Those aren't words you hear often when you're blue and built lopsided and a former supervillain.

And stereotypically - he couldn't give you a textbook definition of that, but he knows the gist of it. People with glasses are brainiacs. Redheads have bad tempers. Fat people are greedy. It can be true, but it's not a linear progression. All kinds of variables to factor in -

His cheeks come alive with flushes of hopeful color. He curls into a ball and flicks a pair of searching eyes at Dr. Klein. "So - can you fix me?" he has to ask.

Klein chuckles, somewhat wryly - he's glad he learned that word. "It's not quite as simple as 'fixing' you, Dr. Drakken. You're not a machine."

Doesn't he know it. No piece of machinery, no matter how complex, has ever given him fits the way even a cell of himself can. The dreams, the hopes, the fears, the hurts, the unclassified emotions. . . he took that psychology class once, but only to find out where Kim Possible hid her teenage vulnerability. He never turned his gaze inward and studied himself. Maybe if he had, he would have seen the darkness encroaching on his heart before it exploded and stained the whole world -

Dr. Klein cuts him off, and he's so grateful he could kiss him. On the cheek. "We need to take a look at what's causing the emotional eating and deal with that before we can go anywhere else." He tilts his head to one side, compassion creasing his face. "Do you have any idea what tends to trigger it?"

Boy, does he ever have an idea! He flattens his palms on his knees and fights back a lump. "Father's Day," he hisses. "Every single Father's Day, I stuff myself sick." Stomach acid kicks in at the mere memory.

"Ah." Dr. Klein steeples his fingers together, so completely professional, the way he used to do when he stood before his henchmen. The way he would do right now if not for the sling. "I sense that you are still suffering from your father's abandonment of the family."

It's like throwing a lit match on gasoline. A purely chemical reaction zips through him. "Of course I am!" he snarls. "Of COURSE I am - who WOULDN'T be?" He snaps his arms into a fold across his front and can't pace his ragged breathing.

Mother would be pursing her lips and saying, "Really, Drewbie - you can talk without yelling." Klein doesn't, maybe because he knows it's not true, at least right now. He simply reaches for a pad of paper on the table between them and passes it to him.

His fingers accept it, cautiously, as though it's a can of peanuts that might turn out to contain a snake. (How many times did Carl play that joke on him?) He picks up a pencil and poses it over the paper, blinking at Klein with his eyebrow up expectantly.

"I want you to draft a letter to your father," Klein says gently.

Grief wraps an icy grip around him. He stares down at the paper as moisture burns his contacts. "Really?" His voice wobbles somewhere between a solid and a liquid, like Jell-O. "And send it to him?"

"Not yet. This is a rough draft." Klein sounds so sympathetic it almost hurts. "You just write down whatever you have to say to him. Then later, if you want, we can go back and polish it up into something we could actually send to him."

It strikes him that he doesn't even have a mailing address for his father. But the guy's got to be in a phone book, some phone book. Lipsky isn't an especially common last name.

A sour taste invades his mouth, and it stretches his strength until it tears like an overstretched muscle. He sees his father leaving, he sees himself standing at the door waiting and waiting, he sees the world going from something to love to something to fear to something to hate to something to conquer -

I hate you! is what he scrawls, so hard he rips the sheet of paper and breaks the lead off the pencil. I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I HATE you!

And then his shoulders start to jerk, and hard sounds come out of him, and he can't hold back anymore. He puts his face down on the notepad and sobs all the hateful words into smudges.

Through the raspy whines of his own pain, he hears Klein speak. "All right," he mutters, and he can hear the sad smile. "Now we can begin."

The weird thing is, he thinks he knows what he means. The chiropractor's at work again - in his soul, turning things and twisting them so that the ache throbs with maximum intensity, then disappears.

*********
His alarm blares him awake in the wee hours of Monday morning. It's his first day back at work, and he's too pumped up about it to even consider rolling over and pulling the covers over his head. Especially not with the snow.

Yes, snow. You knew as soon as your eyes fluttered open and your nose twitched in the air and your skin felt the chill. The world was a magical, wondrous, whispery place.

He bounded out of bed, already grinning, and danced over to his closet, where he wiggled into the lab coat that's been with him through thick and thin. Mostly thin, with a little thick in the face and the toes. The person he saw in the mirror still had chubby feet and a big U-shaped chin, but he didn't mind nearly so much.

Then he skipped out to the kitchen to prepare his first culinary-masterpiece breakfast in over a week. He's had four pancakes and two strips of bacon and is just full enough to be comfortable. His stomach is cautiously warming back up to him.

Now he's lying on the living room rug, chin perched in his palms, watching the progress of the Winter Wonderland outside (even though it won't technically be winter for a few more weeks yet). Flakes are falling in heavy, exciting clumps, and icicles hang whimsically from the roof and the windowsills and the storm drain. The stones by the road seem softer dusted with snow, like powdered pastries. Which there are sure to be a lot of around Christmas. And he'll try not to eat twenty of them a day or anything, but other than that he's not going to worry about it.

After he finished weeping in Dr. Klein's office on Saturday, he returned Macho to the library, even though it wasn't open yet. He just couldn't stand the thought of that. . . thing infecting the now-happy atmosphere of his house any longer.

With clinical coolness, he slid the magazine into the slot of the red-metal returns box by the front door. It landed with a CLUNK! that sounded like finality. He strolled several steps away, glanced over both shoulders to make sure no one was looking, and then stuck his tongue out at the box, the magazine, and its editors. They think they're all that, but they're so not.

Free at last! It took twenty pounds of clamped-on weight off his middle, that much is for certain.

He didn't put it together until he was halfway home that the thought of tracking down Macho's staff and obliterating them never sauntered through his mind, not even once. That's now officially a retired tactic.

Now, blowing up the magazine itself, that's a different story. But he doesn't want to owe the library money for that piece of trash.

He rolls over onto his back and is poked in the nose with a bristly sprig. His Christmas tree - artificial so as not to be a fire hazard, but sprayed with Pine-Sol to smell like the real deal - went up after he got back from the library, just because he was an ornament-hanging mood. Now that Thanksgiving's over, it's time to prepare for Christmas, and it truly is the most wonderful time of the year!

That carried him through reading a passage in that new sci-fi thriller that talked about corpses. A little gruesome for him, and then they went on to say the dead people had turned blue, "a foul, unnatural color."

He knows they didn't write that specifically to insult him, but his flower petals wilted and fell off anyway.

But now he squints happily up through the tree's crooked branches, which are strung with golden balls and hooked with homemade paper-mache reindeer and festooned - he likes that word! - with multicolored lights. One bulb in particular catches his eye, draws him in for closer inspection.

It's a little runt of a thing that glows a barely-there blue, but it's plugging away with everything it's got. The tree wouldn't look right without it.

He bops his way into the kitchen, where his computer is waiting faithfully in the corner. He boots it up, humming a tune he makes up as he goes along. As soon as he gets off work today, he's going to craft a snowman in the front lawn! Maybe one with arms twice as long as its legs.

Things have been returning to the new, wonderful version of normal that reformation introduced this spring. Clear place in his head guiding him. The spring back in his step. Three consecutive days without nightmares.

His goodness meter is groaning, it's so full.

Checking his e-mail early this morning brings many happy surprises - including a link from Shego to a media-awareness site about how to tell when a magazine or some such thing's survey is fake. Well, maybe not fake, since they usually do go out and talk to real people; "lopsided and biased" are the words the site used. Macho's had the warning signs: obviously taken with an agenda in mind, only a few people quoted, no diversity among the points of view cited. It's like science, how they figure that out, and it takes the place of the agony that's been clotting in him for a very long week.

She's also included the information she found on the average height of an American man. Anywhere from five-foot-eight to five-foot-ten, she reports. "So, Dr. D, you're not actually smaller than normal," she tells him. "You're just surrounded by enormous people."

He feels his back straighten a tad, as if its wrinkles have been ironed out, drawing him to a decent height. Anyone would seem puny next to Eddy - and his henchmen - and Dementor's henchmen.

What's likely only about the second flash of sympathy he's had for Dementor comes over him. Must be rough being five-foot-two. Maybe that's why he's such a jerk -

Oh, well, speak of the devil. His next unread message is from Wade, and the subject line reads, in exuberant Caps Lock, DEMENTOR CAUGHT!

His own enthusiasm explodes through him like seismic waves and pops out a fresh set of petals. He rakes a hand back through the spikes, every tendon taut. This is going to be good.

Sure enough, according to Wade, Professor Dementor has been arrested for hacking Shego's phone. He doesn't deny doing it - that's no surprise; Dementor has an ego problem almost as bad as the one he still struggles with.

What does surprise him is that Dementor claims he was hired by Jack Hench to do the dirty deed. Maybe not that one in particular, but to find some humiliating mud to sling in his former rival's face. To ruin his reputation and destroy his new life.

He lets out the grunt-growl of a taken-aback grizzly. Hench? Now Hench hates him? Enough to pay someone - when everyone knows how Jack Hench hates to part with money? Not to mention the fact that he was always so careful not to actually cross legal boundaries.

Why?

He isn't sure he truly wants to know, but a word problem with no answer throbs in his head, and his scientific curiosity takes over. He pinkie-scrolls down to the next paragraph and is slammed in the face with the real-life equivalent of those three CLUE cards tumbling out of the envelope, revealing all.

When he saved the world, so many other villains reformed, or at least decided to lay low for a while. Just like Wade told him on Thanksgiving. Hench's income is suffering a terrible blow because of that, especially since he inspired reformation in his best customer - the sinister, non-mechanically-inclined, ultra-rich Senior.

The sad thing is, once the initial nauseous shock wears off, he's not surprised. Hench the slimeball. Hench who never about people, only profits. He and Richard Lipsky would probably be great friends.

His grunts are transforming into hollow, hateful sounds, and he doesn't like where they're going. He turns his attention back to the e-mail, so stuffed with Dementor and Hench he has to strain his eyes to see the good in it.

He forms a swear word on his lips and then bites it back, only partially to avoid disappointing Mother. No profanity is dirty enough to do these two men justice.

Charges will be pressed against Dementor - pressed really hard, he hopes. And Jack Hench is going to be taken in for questioning.

He grits his teeth until his gums grow sore, and even then his jaw won't loosen. Good! Prison is where they belong! Let Dementor get lost in a sea of orange jumpsuits! Yank Jack Hench out of his own little world where he thinks he can act like a villain and not be treated like one! That doesn't seem like a good-guy thing to wish, but after they've hurt him so many times, it's only fair for them to go through half the anguish and terror he did in jail.

Maybe it'll push them into becoming better people, like it did me.

It's a whisper of a thought, and it makes him feel more like a hero, so he decides to go with it.

And the video will be taken down - or at least made unavailable to the general public - but, as evidence, it might still have to be shown to some lawyers and judges and juries. He comforts the squirmy place inside with the fact that it'll only be for the sake of putting those big bullies away.

A vine he didn't even realize he sprouted presses its scratchy-soft self against his cheek. Everything will be all right, Master, it assures him.

And he believes it. Flowers never lie.

Wade's mother has added a note at the end of her son's message. Apparently, she overheard him telling Wade he'd make a great man someday, and she's very grateful that he reached out to the kid "at this difficult age." She includes a quote from some man, presumably long-dead, that says, "No man stands taller than when he stoops to help a boy."

It's perfect. He needs to share it with Senior.

And she called him a man! She called him a man! She called him a man! She called him a man! It brings with it the rushing sensation that his own adolescence is finally in the past.

There's no way any of Macho's editors have ever been this giddy with joy. No, he imagines them to be miserable most of the time, stuck running on treadmills that don't really take them anywhere. They can keep experimenting with new ways to grow more chest hair and things like that. For the time being's he's happy to be part of the control group, to stay as he is.

He has reclaimed himself.

His mother's also sent him a picture she took. With her cell phone. Of the bottom of her purse. He's pretty sure that was an accident - she's only had the cell phone and the e-mail account for not quite three months.

Oh, Mother. He chuckles to himself and then jolts into a standing position that fells the chair behind him. She gave him a book and hinted something in it was important and he completely forgot!

He skitters back to his room and paws through a pile of floor junk until he unearths something he knows he didn't have at this point last week. It's a baby name book, at least four decades old, and he doesn't see how it could possibly relate to anything.

But he owes it to his mother to at least humor her. So he scoops the book up, cradling it awkwardly against his sling, and lets the pages fall open to their natural resting place, revealing a bookmark. Hand-crocheted, of course - everything his mother touches turns out beautiful.

Even him.

It's a list of boys' name, beginning with the letter "D." For no logical reason, his hands begin to tremble as he cuts his eyes up and down the page. One name in particular is singled out, smudged in dirty orange that was probably a yellow highlighter forty-two years ago.

Drew
"Manly"

His jaw scrapes his kneecaps. Drew means MANLY? Drew, of the long "ew" sound that bullies delighted in drawing out? Drew, with the derivative "Drewbie"? Drew, the name that belonged to the scrawniest, wimpiest college dropout Middleton has ever known?

He presses the book to his chest, which expands even through the pain. Thank you, Mother, he breathes soundlessly, wordlessly.

Thumbing back to the "T"s, he quickly locates the dreaded middle name. Theodore most likely means he-who-runs-like-a-little-girl -

But it doesn't. It means "gift of God."

Manly gift of God, huh? Well, they said it, he didn't.

I am never going to complain about my name ever again!

He squeals and lets himself fall backwards and wraps his good arm around his giggling belly. Commodore Puddles trots up to lick his face, and he folds said good arm around him and hugs him tight. Peace settles itself inside, and he doesn't think it'll be evicted this time.

Now he must report to work. Global Justice needs him to help make the world a better place. That's what real men do.

And he is a real man.

Of course, despite his sizable IQ, he's not half as wise as Senior. But he's getting there. Frugal Lucre, the little pest, worships the ground he walks on. Eddy admires him, too. To be a role model for his big, strong, hair-all-over-the-place cousin - it's a fascinating twist. He can only hope he's up to the task.

And Kim Possible, the girl whose very existence he rued for so many years, hustled herself on to YouTube to defend him. She found it somewhere in her annoyingly perky being to have mercy on the man who had been one of her nastiest foes.

Maybe she's close to forgiving him. Maybe once he's been around as long as Senior has, he'll be just as knowledge and well-spoked. Maybe Richard and Hench and Dementor will lose their power to hurt him. Maybe his life can become a stretch of tomorrows rather than a strand of yesterdays.

He stands up and lets his arms flop nearly down to his ankles, lanky and proud of it. The only way to know is to keep on going.

"Come on in, cause I know I can take it
You can throw those stones
Even though I may be fragile
You're not gonna see me shatter
Cause I know who I am and I won't fake it"
-Jaci Velasquez

THE END

~A/N: I know that Drakken did meet Wade in person on Odds Man In, but it was so brief an encounter I'm sure he's probably long since forgotten about it.~