"ÜberKim"

By Eoraptor

Fan-authored work, not for profit. Kim Possible and all related characters property the Walt Disney Company ©2002-2007. Rated T for subject matter.

The nineteen year old heroine frowned and looked at the drain pipe. Ants once again. This far underground she supposed they couldn't be avoided. The underground structure was so far down that it had to be artificially cooled, and that coolness brought in condensation, which brought the ants. Still, she figured a Class Omega facility would not want bugs around, real or otherwise.

"So, have you always been an idiot? Or is it all the blows to the head and exposure to death rays?"

Kim went mentally off the rails. Physically she very nearly fell backwards and split her head open on the extruded concrete bench. She recognized the voice as though it were her own, and that was what brought her up short. There was no way she could be here.

This was one of the most secure facilities anywhere on, or under, the face of the Earth. Kim herself would have been very hard pressed to find it with all her friends' resources, let alone get inside. That her malcontent doppelganger not only found it, but got this deep inside was…

"Impressive, I know… but you shouldn't really be stunned into silence like this." Shego read the trepidation on her counterpart's face. "Now, answer my question. You, stupid or not?"

"Wha…?" Kim shook her head hard again, and pulled up the body stocking she had been half-into when Shego had announced herself in her inimitable fashion. "Wait… hold up, just a sitching second… how are you even here?"

"Well if I told you, then I'd just have to find another route next time, wouldn't I?" Shego blew out a haughty breath and leaned up against one of the clothing alcoves molded into the bunker-like walls. "But, if this is how you'd like to play out this conversation, fine, I'll play along. Hi, it's me, Shego. How was your summer? Because mine sucked. I found out this interesting person fell off the face of the Earth and into a quasi-governmental research facility."

The redhead blew an irritated breath through her nose. Clearly Shego was not going to tell her how she'd got in; and Kim didn't have the time or the resources to find out. Worse, if she told anyone without already having a solution to the problem, then the whole project would be set back weeks while others looked into it.

Better just to find out what Shego wanted and get rid of her, or disable her and lock her away if need be. "I see. So, going to share how much you know? Or is that like your entry and egress plans?"

"Egress? You think I'm planning on leaving?"

"You obviously didn't volunteer to be let in on the project, so no, I doubt you showed up to just lend a helpful hand and volunteer your resources. You plan to say whatever it is you want to say and leave."

Shego arched a brow, then snorted, "You wound me. You honestly think I'm here to talk to you?"

"Considering you came out of a shadow to talk to me instead of punching me in the back of the head on your way to stealing something? Plus, you just said you don't plan on leaving. Not much point in stealing something if you're not planning on getting away with it."

Then Kim stopped and growled, pinching the bridge of her nose, "Why am I even having this debate with you? Why are you here Shego?"

"Ah, so obviously you're not stupid… just deluded, answers that." The villainess resumed her languidly reclining pose against the locker spaces. "I'm here to talk you out of it."

"Out of what?" Kim led, rather obviously.

"This cockamamie plan of whoever cooks up such cockamamie plans." Shego nearly rose to the bait, and Kim read the change in her posture, noting how the villainess made an effort to maintain her casual pose.

"I have a choice?"

"You do."

Kim growled. This was certainly different from their usual, much more physical, debates. It was frustrating her. "Shego. Let's cut the bull. Tell me what you know, and I will… consider your words."

"Why?"

That brought Kim up and she blinked before shaking her head. "Obviously it's important enough to bring you here, and in here, and down here, and through there… all the way to the one time and place I am not recorded."

"So your overlords tell you," Shego snapped her finger.

Kim yelped, and then looked at the collar of her body stocking. What had seemed like just a seemed fold of the fabric had sparked against her otherwise bare flesh. Narrowing her eyes, she processed that for a moment.

Finally she looked up. "So they know you're here then?"

"No… if that thing was transmitting, you or I would notice the antennas set up around all this concrete and metal to pick it up. It's just recording and someone is picking it up when they get your laundry." The villainess clarified. "Slick unit though, frankly, even I wouldn't have noticed it…. If I didn't already know what to look for."

Kim frowned, chewing her lip, "Alright… so how did you know what to look for?"

"You really think you're the only young women ever to volunteer for experimental medical procedures and later find out that they were not all they were promised?" the green woman finally gave up her nonchalant pose and rose from her slouch, crossing the floor.

Before Kim thought to stop her, a titanium claw incised the collar of her black body stocking. What could easily be confused for a bit of black plastic reinforcement sprung free. Kim recognized it as the sort of flexible plastic circuitry that made up her own battle-suit, albeit of a slightly different manufacture.

Shego melted it with extreme prejudice, a foul and loathsome look marring her face for a moment. "Well, they'll know I was here now, either way."

Shego wiped the smear of carbonized matter off on a black panel of her suit and sniffed indignantly. "These are the kind of people you're dealing with, Princess. They'll tell you one thing, and then do the other, simply because they can. It's coded in their DNA. We call them enabled sociopaths. You call them politicians."

Kim continued to look from the exposed listening device's remains to her apparent guest and finally sighed. "Alright. Tell me what you know… or I'll walk over to the wall and push the big red button, sociopaths or not."

"Because you're that good and naïve?"

"No, because given the choice, I'll take the sociopaths who hired me to the one who's tried to kill me… multiple times." Kim answered with swift ease.

Shego huffed and crossed her arms over her chest, "Oh, is that what this is about? What's a few attempted herocides between colleagues?"

"You see this?" Kim turned her back on the villainess and walked away, "This is me going to press the button."

"Fine…!" the mercenary woman sneered as if disgusted by the whole thing. "I know you've somehow been convinced to volunteer to be resequenced with extraterrestrial genetic material. And believe me, if you ever tell Drakken I know words like that; you won't live long enough to complete your mission."

The threat brought Kim up more than the confession did. She paused in her theatrical procession towards the angry red button and turned her head to look at Shego over her shoulder, "Okay, you have my attention."

Shego waited for the redhead to make more demands of her, but none came. She growled when she realized this was exactly how her nemesis wanted it, to force her to talk on her own rather than to command it.

Well Shego didn't play that way. She looked around the moodily lit concrete installation and then perched herself on one of the locker-room benches. She proceeded to match the heroine's silence.

After a good five minutes, the elder woman proved to have the better patience. Kim huffed, moved, and sat down across from her counterpart. "Yes… alien DNA. Care to tell me how you know that?"

"Because Drakken knows it."

"And how does he know it?"

"You know Princess… if there's one thing life as a mercenary has taught me," Shego took out a file and began to work on her taloned gloves, "It's that there's a difference between need-to-know and want-to-know. And with Drakken, very rarely do I want to know. He has his way of finding these things out. Evil Google or something."

Kim sighed, but decided to leave it at that. Much like Shego's entrance route if she didn't know how, there was little point, at this stage of the game, to investigating.

"So he wants the tech?" She carefully probed around the edge of Shego's purpose.

"Hell no. He has files full of these random leads." She shrugged rather nonchalantly. "Looks through them for unplanned ideas. I doubt he even made the connection when he snagged the info."

"And you did?"

"I did."

Kim sat and considered that idea. "Why and how? Last time I checked, you weren't the results of an unscrupulous medical experiment."

Shego scowled at that, "The powers? No, that happened exactly the way I'm sure Hego told you and your boy toy. But what came after? Did you think they just let little girls who turn green and survive being hit with a kilocochrane of radiation walk around without tests?"

Frowning, the redhead considered Shego closely. She certainly didn't fidget or squirm the way the heroine would expect of someone who had experienced what Shego was alluding to. "So what, you're here to stop me being taken advantage of? Shego, I know what I'm in for here. Do I like the recordings? No, but I was prepared for it at least. Like you said, people like us know what to watch for."

"No, I'm not here to stop you being taken advantage of, Pumpkin" Shego snorted derisively. "If you want to be science-raped, that's your kink. I'm here to stop you making a big mistake about the course of your life."

"The course of my… Shego what are you so ferociously tweaked about?" Kim rubbed the bridge of her nose again, she was expected in the stress testing wing soon. People were going to come looking for her eventually and she didn't have time to play O-boyz Backstep here with her nemesis.

"Kimmie, let me give you some perspective that no one was around to give me. What they want to do to you…? The magnesium skeleton… the night vision… the enhanced neuropeptides that make you think thirty percent faster… whatever else that wasn't in the surface proposal that Drakken got hold of? Don't."

"Don't? Why not? Shego, They're coming back."

"We know they'll be back, Kimmie," Shego shook her head, "But giving up your humanity is no way to deal with them."

"No, Shego," Kim shook her head and stood up, beginning to pace the short length of the reinforced locker-room, "I don't mean they're coming back in the freaky question-marked bad horror movie end-card sense… I mean… We've detected them. A deep space scan of the signals from the original American Starmaker program that brought the Lorwardians here in the first place. It picked up five of those cruisers headed this way, plus a scattering of other signals that are probably smaller ships. Five Shego! It took everything we had to stop just the one and a lot of that was dumb luck that they were stupid enough to bring me onto their ship to mess with its controls. Unlike Drakken, Warmonga was not so stupid that she didn't learn from her mistakes the first time she was on Earth. She didn't bring down any of her self-expanding tech the second time round."

Shego paused at that. This time it was her turn to chew her lip in uncertainty for a moment. Finally she shook her head, "Nope, still not worth it. We're humans, figuring out crap like this is what we do. And you don't want to give that up for a temporary competitive edge."

"What exactly would I be giving up, Shego?" The heroine frowned, resuming her pacing after a moment. "They're not rewiring my brain, just... speeding it up."

"First, I call bullshit on that. They put a bug on you, who's to say they won't slip in some Manchurian Candidate stuff while they've got the hood up on your brain?" The mercenary glowered at the optimistic disbelief her counterpart was expressing. "Secondly, even if that's all true, you have no idea on how it will fuck your perspective."

"Oh, and you do?"

The villainess took a deep breath and leaned back, gripping the edges of the concrete bench as she steeled herself for this, "Yes... I do. Kimmie, you don't know crap about us before the comet. In fact, you didn't know crap about Team Go even after that till someone clued you in. The comet, it didn't just give us superpowers… It gave us a whole package deal. Hego? My idiot brother you and Ronniekins are so proud of? Before the comet hit us he was an idiot… erm I mean technically speaking. These days they call it profound autism. He could barely tie his shoes some days. Me? I was… I could be considered average if you were being generous. Trailer trash is the more accurate description, diminished capacity. My other brothers were not much better off."

Kim sat and listened. She hardly considered Shego to be the height of whit or sophistication now, but she wouldn't class her as diminished or stupid either. The redhead wondered how much of this account was colored by memories of a bad childhood.

"After the comet? Hego's apparent IQ doubled. Mine went from 95 to 125. It's probably actually higher, but I learned quick-like to hide my true capabilities." The emerald woman sneered, now talking more to herself than her test-subject audience. "At first it seemed like a blessing. Hego could take care of himself now instead of being on the verge of wearing a helmet to bed. I suddenly was able to understand why people hated us for being poor and dumb. My twin little brothers suddenly could talk to other human beings instead of just each other…"

With a sigh, Kim cleared her throat "Shego? Point please? I have places to go and people to turn in for breaking and entering a Class Omega facility."

The villainess looked up and jeered. "Look. The point is, our altering perspective didn't stop there. We didn't stop growing in our mental capabilities or our powers. We went straight from cousins to Lennie Small to being closer to Steinbeck. And for me, from there to Aynne Rand."

Kim blinked at the literary comparisons; until she reminded herself that Shego, for her evil ways, still had a background in education and psychology. With a huff, she listened, trying to be patient but not feeling overly so.

"As I became smarter and stranger, I began to question why I was being forced to play by the rules that the lesser beings were. Friedrich Nietzsche became my bible… übermensch and god-man concepts and the like. Why was I being asked to politely arrest the bank robber when I had personally seen him do the job? I had the power to simply break his legs and warn him in no uncertain terms not to do it again and make it stick. Or just to end him."

"Shego?" Kim looked up, interrupting the rambling before it turned to full rant again. "Not to discount your nihilist outlook, but you have a nihilist outlook. I'm not you. I wasn't raised with questionable morals, and I haven't broken any legs yet, have I?"

"Says the chick who threw me off a building?" Shego snorted, and smirked darkly when she saw the redhead wince before her. "And before you even start by claiming that was just the effects of stress or the suit. I said the exact same thing. It was always the mask, or the costume, or being too hot from my powers. Every time I slipped up and went beyond what others considered fair I had a ready excuse."

"Until finally," she sighed dramatically, "I stopped even making excuses. Hego says this is when I started to like doing evil. Me? I consider it when I finally gave up trying to hold myself to the moral constraints of others."

Kim again opened her mouth to balk at the idea that being granted new abilities would do the same to her. Her opposite cut her off before she began, "Oh, you might not decide to start taking the things you want the way I did, or to make active plans to conquer Greenland… but you'll eventually get tired of being held back by normals. Maybe you'll do like you did to me and just start dusting off anyone who won't stay down. Maybe you'll decide that you and your fellows here in the super-secret base are the Übermensch and that the world would be better off with you in charge. Be the next Wrath of Margh or the next Transverse Game…"

Shego stood and walked over to the drain set into the floor, the one the ants were creeping in through, "But sooner or later? People won't look like people to you anymore. They'll be slow, stupid, bothersome ants, just crawling all over the floor in your path. And eventually you'll get tired of trying to walk around them; and you'll just start stepping on them."

With a drastic swallow, Kim frowned at the powerful gesture of Shego toeing a few black specks into the concrete.

But after a moment, the gravitas of the moment wore off and she found flaw with Shego's argument, "If you can say all this to me, obviously you still have a little perspective. So why are you here?"

"Because, Kimmie… I don't want to be stepped on." She scowled and pointed at the smeared remains of the ants on the polished concrete, "Besides. Like I said, I went from below average to above average… You are starting out where I ended up, and only going skywards. I'm here to give you the perspective on the change now… because where you're heading for? There probably won't be anyone around to let you know what it's like on the other side."

After a moment, Shego elected to add to her argument, "You're already a rare breed and it took me more than a decade to find someone like me in you. How long will it take you to find someone who is like you after you change? Will you ever? Will there ever be a Kimmie to your Shego? Someone to stop you before you go too far?"

Again the redhead frowned. She wanted to instantly refute Shego's assertions, but then… as soon as she opened her mouth to do so her mind flashed back to that night almost two years ago at Bueno Nacho headquarters. She had easily bested Shego with the power of the battlesuit, but still kicked her into oblivion instead of doing the proper thing and arresting her.

Maybe she should think more on this beyond just the coming alien onslaught.

AN: Another oneshot cookie thing. This one is inspired by a fan-issued challenge on KP Slash and was written in march 2014 originally.