Aries Chapter 1: Breaking Out, a kim possible fanfic

Okay, this will follow cannon, but for those of you sticklers, I am having a few of the episodes out of order just so that I can make events work the way I need them in the story. Set approx 3 years after "Graduation." Contains frank discussions of sexuality, language, etc; reader discretion is advised.

Aries
A Kim Possible fan fiction
By Eoraptor
"Breaking Out"

"You're silly! I'm silly! This whole sitch is silly!"

She shuddered at the unbidden memory, setting her dinner fork aside and chewing her lower lip. Every once in a while things like that just bobbed to the surface of her mind. The day it had all started changing, her life. If she were ever to find herself alone in a room with that zinc-haired freak… Well, there would go her record of being on the side of justice. The felony assault charge would be so worth it to exact a little revenge on the electro-witch for permanently altering her mind.

Saying Shego was a little ambivalent about her new life would be like saying that things in Go City got a little hectic on Friday Fight Nights. Had she never been exposed to that freaking Reverse Polarizer, she'd probably still be a happy, malcontent, highly evil mercenary. She could still remember the old days; quite well in fact. Sadly, she couldn't work up the same zeal for felony that she felt in those memories any longer.

She really couldn't remember much from her escapades as "Miss Go" aside from those occasional flashes; which was probably for the best. Still, she knew that that was when it had changed. Her first clue was when she had found herself holding a picture series of herself and… …her.

Strangely, the malachite malcontent felt not disgusted, but… wistful… over the string of images showing the teen nemesis and her own alter-ego palling around.

Her hand involuntarily flared again at the reminiscence, as it had that day she caught herself feeling that way. A few deep breaths had the burst of emerald starfire under control and she sighed deeply. The one wistful emo moment she could have written off as having recently had her brain flip-flopped a dozen times. Much to her chagrin, however, it wasn't the last such moment of indiscretion.

Only a few hours later, she actually stilled Drakken's hand when he was about to unleash sweet canine vengeance on "Stevie." Again, she caught herself and forced her own finger on the "Unleash the Hounds" button; but it disturbed her that she was so badly afflicted still. A few weeks in Greece under the tender mercies of Midas, though, and she was back to her old snarky self.

Or so the evil lieutenant had believed; until the heroes had confronted her and Drakken at this fake college he'd set up as a cover operation. Not only did she not try to kill the sidekick/boyfriend immediately, but she'd actually complimented Possible on her new outfit. Not that she hadn't gotten in some good digs along the way… but come on!

After Cousin Eddie broke her out, and that had flopped, she took another sojourn to her fave spa to unwind. Unfortunately for the malachite mercenary, there were few heroes of caliber in the world, so it was her lot in life to run up against the same one again and again. Of course the Princess had other-

"Beep beep beep boooooop"

"What the hell?" Clawing a hand through her hair at further interruption of her night, Shego growled and lifted her other wrist, eyeing the blinking green light attached to her silver bracelet. She listened to 'Beethoven's Fifth' as played by a tiny electronic speaker set in the disguised pager and shook her head, "No way could one of those guard goons set the security system off… I designed to be moron proof. Hmmmm… So that probably means…"

Electric jade eyes flashed with excitement. Anyone who could even open the doors to the museum after hours should be good for a few minutes of fun. Exiting the restaurant's bistro-style patio, Shego held up her claims ticket, as well as a fifty dollar bill if the valet could get her vehicle to the front door with some speed. As usual, money talked and she had her Bugatti within twenty seconds.

With city traffic, even her thousand horsepower Veyron was going to take several minutes to get back to the Field Museum. She sighed softly, being left alone in her exotic super car only invited more of this introspective mood she'd been in all evening.

"Yeah, so after Possible showed up at the spa, accused me of breaking Drakken out, while I was on vacation! …I actually go back to see what is going on, and end up saving her life? Yeah, definitely soft going there… And now I'm talking to myself?!"

Tightening her already stiff fingers around the luxurious leather of the wheel, she grumbled and chewed her lower lip. She'd seen that big green Amazonian cliché about to clobber the senseless Kim and had just… gone nuclear. Melted the nigh indestructible alien manacles, nearly clobbered the monstrous woman again, and then actually called Kimmie's friends for… gasp… help.

Her criminal life had only gone downhill from there… Drakken had been abandoned again after Kimmie lost her memory and he concocted that asinine "army train" plan of his, and had nearly blown her up along with the locomotive. Then she openly defied Drakken when he was taken over by the ghost of a pirate. Sure he had her locked in the stocks for trying to take Kimmie down herself instead of allowing him the honor, but she'd never actually gone against him before that.

There were other, further slips of course. When she was in Naples, shoe shopping, and Vesuvius had decided to get lippy? She could have just got in a little looting and then high-tailed it out of there. Instead, she found herself slipping into gah… hero mode, just as she'd done back in the day with her brothers. She used her ultra-high temperature species of plasma to carve a channel for the lava to flow down, and then stood around blasting plumes of toxic gas into nothingness for nearly an hour. This time she was the hero. No Global Justice or Team Possible in sight. She learned later that Kitten had been up the road in Milan on a mission of her own; so it had pretty much been only her, Shego, between the might of a mountain and the bay of Naples.

She had no explanation for the heroic slip up at the time, and chalked it up to a random impulsive act of showiness and bravado. Drakken was still her evil family, and she was avowed evil. Badness in its distilled form, right…? Yeah… right. When Warmonga had kidnapped him and Kim and threatened the Earth…

She grit her teeth as she approached the off-ramp for the Field Museum. That had been her chance to be rid of both Drakken and Possible. The old, hard core Shego would have gladly taken it, drained Dr. Dork's bank accounts and hidden out till the alien heat was off. Instead, she had fought her way to Downtown Middleton, to the one place she knew had a rocket ship, and had even relented in letting the buffoon Stoppable tag along.

Well, at least all her warrants had been cancelled. But the truth was, through all of the intervening evil, she had been bored. Not the usual nail-filing bored. No, that was average with a lack of things to do twenty-five days out of every thirty. No, she'd been bored with the whole "evil" thing, ever since that damned Reverse Polarizer. It just wasn't as rewarding all of the sudden, as though she'd milked evil for all it was worth. So, after Drakken went legit, she pulled some mercenary work, just to see if maybe it was him and not her. Unfortunately, it turned out to be her.

It wasn't Drakken's incompetence as a villain, although that surely helped. She was just no longer being rewarded by being bad. She no longer got an impure thrill out of kicking people when they were down, or a sexual tingle at the thought of world domination, even those sorts of things used to make her positively wet with anticipation. Now it was all just… meh.

As Shego slid up the gull-wing door of the Veyron and slipped out of the deep racing seat, pausing to adjust her dress, she sighed. The door to the museum had not been tampered with. Arching a raven brow, she looked up, almost by instinct. She had armed all the air vents, but…

After a few minutes, Shego could find no evidence of the break in around the perimeter, so the security expert made her way inside. Sue the T-rex was back on public display after a three year tour, and the Field Museum of Chicago had asked her to redesign the defense systems for her return. It paid good money, and the emerald woman had found that designing security systems that she herself could not evade proved to be enough of a challenge to keep her mildly entertained.

"Hmmmm, I wonder… do you think it could be Him?" She asked one of the guards as she came into the security room.

"Him? Aries? Here?!"

Aries was rapidly becoming something of a bogeyman, a wraith and legend in the criminal world. On the scene only a little over two years, and already his name was only whispered, never spoken aloud. A criminal never seen, never heard, and never caught. Shego had only encountered any evidence of the rising super-thief once; on one of her first legitimate jobs, about a year ago. When she had arrived, she had been presented with a black business card… honestly, who used something that corny? …a black business card with a stylized red astrological sign on it, the vaguely V-shaped ram's head of Aries. Her instructions from her employer were to prevent any more of those cards showing up.

Since no one had ever seen or heard Aries, no one could say anything about them. Was Aries a man or a woman? A single person or a team, or even an entire secret society? Shego had her own theories, tied to all the things she had learned as a villainess herself, combined with her Child Psychology and Development degree.

Aries was a man all right… an arrogant one. After all, he was naming himself after the very masculine God of War. He worked alone, but had a very effective network, since the things he stole were never seen again. He was supremely confident, especially since he only took on the biggest jobs and went up against the most impregnable of security setups. There was rarely even trace physical evidence left behind at the scenes of his crimes; a mark from a grappling hook here, the scratch of a glass cutter or knife there, and always those inscrutable cards, but never more than that; and usually substantially less. Yes… if anyone would dare break in to the most famous museum in the region, perhaps all of North America, probably to steal part or all of an entire Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, it would definitely be the quietly cocky Aries.

"If it is him… we're all about to earn our bonuses. Tonight is the night Aries goes down."

"But… no one has every even seen Aries. No video camera has ever remained on line long enough to-," As if obeying Murphy's Law, three camera's faded out to pixilated static at that moment. "…capture him on tape."

As the guard sighed and cradled his forehead in his fingers in an expression of dawning defeat, Shego stepped behind the partition. A few zips and a lot of rustling were heard, and a moment later, she stepped back into the main room, transformed. Gone was the slinky black evening gown of her night out. It had been replaced by her long disused black and green catsuit. She yanked at her seat in a rather unladylike display, grumbling, "It must have shrunk in the wash… damn it!"

The guard looked up, but any lecherous intent at the skintight cloth was far outweighed by his depression at a battle he already considered lost. "Yeah… shrunk, sure. You'll never catch him, you're just gonna look silly when the board of trustees asks what happened."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Chuck. Just tell me where those three cameras are." She hadn't been paying attention when they blinked out, and since the monitors cycled through, they were randomly shifting around the board, making it hard to tell at a glance.

"Right where you'd expect Aries to strike… Main Hall."

"Good, don't trigger any of the silent alarms, and stay here. I don't want to be scraping your carbonized ass off the wall if you get in my way."

Shego was gone before he could even respond. He hadn't even heard her leave, or heard the door latch closed. "Well, she did help save the world… maybe we've got a chance after all? Go get him Boss."

Shego had located her quarry within minutes. Pursing her lips in thought, 'well, guess it's a good thing I didn't rely on that psych degree after all, huh?'

Before her was Aries all right, clad in a skin tight bodysuit, all black, save for the red Ram's head symbol on the back and a pair of similarly blood red boots and gloves. The flaw in her profile of Aries? He was a She. A damned tall She in fact. Shego was no dwarf, coming in at a comfy five foot eleven inches, but she could tell that Aries was at least that tall, perhaps even a scosh taller.

Shego moved with utter silence, her trademark as a super-thief from long before the age of "Aries." She sat and watched the thief as Aries worked her way slowly around the utterly invisible ultraviolet laser grid. Well, obviously not too invisible giving the way that Amazonia here was slinking around it. God, and look at her! All that hair, dyed blood red to match her stupid outfit? Tacky much? Had to give her props for not tying it back or lopping it off though; that was very gusty and right in line with the theories on the thief's cocky nature.

The Mistress of Security, as she identified herself in all her contracts, studied the movements of her nigh-legendary foe and shook her head faintly. The intruder had made it to her target. Yup, she was after Sue all right. Aries crouched and pulled something out of a pouch on her thigh, a black pouch, strapped on by a band over her thigh, and a loop to the belt she wore, also black. Shego smirked as she watched Aries reach out for the nearest heavy toe bone of Sue with what appeared to be a drill. Wouldn't she be in for a surprise when the force field chose to spring to life… Old Professor Lipsky was still good for something after all.

A deep chuckle rolled through the heavy air as Aries paused just short of the activation point, withdrawing her drill and shaking her head. "Hmmmm, now this is a new touch…"

The malachite mercenary had to strain to hear the whisper. The voice was smooth, rich, and silky, and it sent a shiver up Shego's spine, raising the hair on the back of her neck. She shook the feeling off after a moment, gritting her teeth and standing there, still as a gargoyle.

Pausing in her deathly approach, she waited to see how this wraith chose to deal with the field. Probably to give up. Drew had designed the field with no emitters which could be tampered with after all, and no power cables that could be easily cut or redirected.

As she watched the intruder, Shego had to marvel at her just a bit. Despite being tall, and of what her male subordinates would call "an athletic build," a chauvinistic term for not having big tits and hips; the way Aries was perched before Sue was impressive and demonstrated a lot of power and endurance. She was crouched down low, balanced on the balls of her feet like a baseball catcher, with her thighs spread widely as she sat and thought about her next move. The emerald woman knew from personal experience how that pose got old real fast. Her own thighs and calves burned slightly in sympathy, yet Aries seemed to be completely untroubled after having been in the crouch for at least a full minute now.

Even from the back she could tell that not a single muscle in the other woman's body had twitched or moves since she re-sheathed the drill tool. So, she was damned strong apparently, or had the patience of a Shao Lin monk, maybe both. Would be fitting based on what precious little was known about Aries. Well, after tonight, a hell of a lot more would be known about Aries; such as her height, her weight, her fingerprints, her DNA, all the standard Metro PD booking routines.

Shego was drawn out of her inner checklist when Aries moved again. The verdant security supervisor watched as Aries pulled out another device, which resembled a screwdriver with a twisted and curled end on it. Electric jade eyes watched as she held it out to the same spot where the field should have cut on. It did, bit immediately started to melt back, an elliptical hole opening in the shimmering red field. And then all hell broke loose.

Shego grinned; the field was designed to set off every alarm in the building if its power flow changed for more than five seconds… Long enough to tolerate casual brushes, but short enough to trigger on any real attempted breach. Aries froze, and then, to Shego's shock, vaulted straight up into the air a good fifteen feet from her crouch, seizing the hook holding Sue's skull up and perching atop the great predator's head.

"No fucking way…" she whispered harshly, stunned at the impossible feat, especially with the way Aries had already been crouching for a good minute and a half before executing it.

Aries apparently heard her, despite all the whooping and whining of klaxons. From this distance, the emerald woman could see that Aries was wearing a mask, black, in the same stylized V of a ram's head astrological sign. Shego was hard pressed to make out any facial details, between the mask, the flashing red lights, and the distance, but she was sure Aries narrowed her eyes. Then she leapt again, from the skull, across the display area, and to the second floor of the museum.

Shego couldn't replicate the one hundred and eighty inch vertical leap; so instead she ran, coming around the exhibit, darting up Sue's spine, and leaping from the great carnivore's fossilized snout to the balcony. Within a few seconds she had caught sight of Aries as the neo-legend darted around a corner. The Mistress of Security knew where Aries was heading though, because it's where she would be headed if she'd been caught.

She got to the second floor window and her now glowing eyes darted around. The steel grating that came down with the alarm's sounding was already in place. Aries was nowhere to be seen. Shego ignited her hands and growled, the green light mingling with red to further illuminate the area.

Before a normal woman's brain could even have registered it, the super-heroine had reacted to a glance of movement out of the corner of her eye, and flung a ball of plasma in the proper direction.

When she turned her head, she was rewarded with the sight of Aries having screeched to a halt just short of the smoldering scorch mark. She grinned a predatory grin and launched another blast to the opposite side of the thief when she saw a thigh muscle twitch, indicating the super-thief was going to try to escape back the way she came.

"Ah-bu-bu-bu… not so fast there Red! You haven't even introduced yourself properly." she smirked and flicked her fingers back and forth, throwing off sparks of green star fire as she awaited a response.

Shego moved to close the distance between the two of them, but stopped after just a few paces. Something about Aries' eyes made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, again. The thief took advantage of the pause to flick her wrist. Shego didn't respond fast enough, and what turned out to be another of those black cards was flung at her face. It slashed across her cheek as she reared back, the card cutting her and momentarily distracting all of her attention with the sting and motion so close to her eye.

When the verdant one looked back, Aries was gone. Fortunately, once again Shego knew where she would probably go. Hands still blazing, she took off after the bandit, knowing she would be going for a fire exit now, as even Shego, Mistress of Security wasn't allowed to lock those, at least not while she was obeying the law.

The klaxons were really starting to grate her nerves as she arrived at the nearest escape. It was untouched. Aries had a head start on her, and should be here already if she had been scouting the place. That meant she wasn't going for the obvious choice. She growled and headed for the next one she would have chosen; which would be back at the first floor near the back of the building.

This time, though Shego was not in a mood to give chase. She ran to the back of the second floor hallway, and with a potent blast, eliminated the steel grating obstructing that window. She exploded through the few surviving bits of glass and steel, and plummeted to the ground, eyes already darting around.

She heard the faintest of thuds behind her and spun, already cursing herself. Aries had waited for her to make an exit, and then had followed her out. The super-jumper had no more problem covering the drop than Shego had. Yet, instead of running, as she easily could have in the relatively open alleyway, Aries simply stared at Shego.

It unnerved the thief-turned-consultant on a deep and profound level. She bit her lip and studied her foe intently. Apparently the front of Aries costume had the same sort of astro-sign that the back had. It was very strategically placed as well, the point at the bottom directing the eyes downward towards slender thighs as the back had done for her buttocks, and the horns of the sign coiled around her breasts provocatively. The mask mimicked the symbol, breaking up the shape of her face, covering her nose, eyes, and brows completely. The skin immediately around her eyes was even painted black to match the mask, Shego could now see.

Those eyes, those deep, leaf-green eyes staring at her. It hit her all at once; a wave of recognition, vertigo, familiarity, and most of all, utter shock.

Her hair was too dark; blood red rather than carrot… She was definitely too tall… and her body was slightly more curvaceous… She was too fast, way too strong… Her voice, at least the few words she had spoken, was too deep… And yet, this had to be… But no, she'd been gone three years. She would never become something as… bad… as a thief, especially one with the reputation that Aries had garnered in just over… just over two years.

"Kimmie?"

Between the shock, and the inhuman speed with which Aries moved, Shego never had time to react to the fist across her jaw. The force with which it impacted her jaw would probably have killed a normal woman, and Shego wasn't exactly bouncing back up from it either. Still, she had survived worse, including being thrown into the solid concrete support of a charge microwave transmission antenna and having it collapse atop her.

It took her a few seconds to pick herself up off the ground.

When she looked around, Aries was long gone.

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Author's notes: Okay, this story was actually inspired by a piece done by the immeasurable Hobnobrev of "Mind, Body & Soul" fame, and also in some small part by Apoptosis, who wrote the great "Mutation" and "The Box." At this time I have far too many fics rolling around my head, including this one, so I reserve the right to take it down later and not repost it until I have more time to dedicate to it… I also reserve the right to up the rating from T to M if I put in more adult content. (which is probably what will happen) Until then, let me know, what you think, huh?