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Description
Crumbs

Author: The Humbug

Disclaimer: “Kim Possible” and all characters within © The Walt Disney Company and its related entities. Kim Possible created by Mark McCorkle & Bob Schooley. All rights reserved. No profit is being collected from the fiction contained within. You can blame the rest of this on me.
Rating: PG-13 for combat violence and intimations of a physical relationship and intimate contact between consenting adult females. This should also cover a little harsh language now and then. If this will offend you, please read something else and then seek some professional help.
Summary: This is a Kim/Shego pairing fan fiction and is set in my ‘Who’s Writing This Crap?’ storyline. It is a sequel to ‘A Cookie For Ecclesiastes’ and you really, REALLY need to read that story first. Kasy Ann and Sheki Go Possible are the creations of NoDrogs. The KP version of The Supreme One as well as the ruined Shego is my idea. WARNING: Some parts are a little dark.

Crumbs / Six

“Kasy, you’ve just got to pick that lock!”

“I’m trying to!” The girl wiped the sweat from her face. “You’re not helping!” The diminutive redhead had been hunkered down before the latch of the storage closet door for almost an hour, insufficient light and just a little stress making the task of rotating the tumblers a bit difficult.

“Sorry.”

“S’kay.” Kasy risked a break in her concentration to glance at her twin, the raven-haired girl sitting a few feet away and rubbing her neck. “Still hurts, huh?”

“Yeah.” Sheki rubbed at the enflamed skin and resisted the urge to scratch at it with her nails but the welts were far too painful for that. “Do you think that we’ve been poisoned?”

“I don’t know. I thought that normal poisons wouldn’t affect us.” Kasy lifted her shoulder, hoping that the movement would alleviate the cramping along the side of her head from her own set of five tiny wounds. “Can you light up, yet?”

“Nope.” Sheki was already holding out her arms and clenching her fists tight; neither girl had been able to generate more than a pale glow and a meager warmth around their hands since they had awakened, yet another sign that they had been given a drug that was both powerful and especially tailored to inhibit their particular physical makeup.

“Me, neither.” Kasy stopped her work at the latch for a moment. “I hate feeling weak and powerless like this.” She huffed in frustration. “I guess that’s why Momma gets so mad when she’s feeling vulnerable and stuff.”

“I just hope that our special metabolism can burn through this.” Sheki felt a little scared. “It’s kind of like that time Alexander got stung by that bee and his hand swelled up.”

“I remember.” Kasy could feel a little of that fear herself, creeping along her spine. “We don’t get sick like Mom and Grandma and Grandpa do. It sucks.”

“Yeah…” Sheki had drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them while Kasy returned to her work on the lock, neither girl wanting to talk too much lest one of them accidentally mention their mothers and begin sobbing again.

After the initial shock of their second encounter with the warped, alternate-future versions of their parents, the girls had weathered the meeting in silence until the two adults had left the storage room and secured the children inside. Feigning exhaustion and feeling ill to avoid having to speak much, not too far from the truth considering the toxin that they had been injected with, the twins managed to hold themselves together until they were alone. Promising to check on them later, the Supreme One had kissed them and hugged them and left with her ghastly cohort for the central chamber, at which point the girls had grasped each other and wept in terror.

These were murderers, these twisted and psychotic reflections of the Mom and Momma that they loved and revered. Just a few months previous, a mysterious stranger from the future, a genetically naked mole rat claiming to be a descendant of Rufus, had proven to the twins that they were not yet ready to accompany their parents on missions, and had done so in a way that had given them nightmares for days. He had shown them a future in which they had not survived; a world where they had died years before and their parents had been severely traumatized by their deaths. Their Mommy had become a tyrant calling herself ‘The Supreme One’ and their Momma had degenerated into a creeping thing that lived to be brutalized by her spouse, both of them hating themselves and each other for what had happened to their daughters but so dependent upon their being together that they could not stand to be apart.

In this there was an irony; neither woman believed that their daughters were truly dead. The Kasy and Sheki of that world had apparently been vaporized by an explosion, their bodies destroyed without a trace, but in their grief their parents chose to believe that the girls had been kidnapped, their deaths staged, and that a ransom would eventually be demanded. Kim and Shego had never ceased to scour the planet for their children or the ‘enemy’ who stole their girls from them, their attacks upon the free world as deadly as those they visited upon their enemies.

Thousands of people died as a result of their madness.

The twins now realized how lucky they had been the last time. Then, in the company of Rufus 3000, they had been invisible, a trick of the manipulation of time. Now they were in the spotlight as ‘proof’ to their ‘parents’ that they had been alive all this time.

“One thing, Shek…”

“Yes?”

“Aren’t we too young to be their daughters?”

“I guess so, yeah.” Sheki’s brow furrowed. “We… they… died when they were our age now, and these two come from fifteen years into that world’s future, so we’d… they’d… be almost Mommy’s age if we… they… had just been held hostage all this time.”

“And they don’t notice this?”

“Doy! Do they look like they’d care?”

“I guess not…” Kasy wiped her brow; there was one last tumbler left and it was a doozy. “How’d they get here, anyway? Didn’t Rufus 3000 say that it was a future that would never come to pass, or something?”

“I got nothing. It doesn’t…” Something beyond the door caught Sheki’s attention, a sound barely on the edge of audibility. “Kasy, get back!”

“What…?”

“Outside! Someone’s coming!” Sheki moved over to give her sister room to join her on the mattress. There were a few seconds of absolute silence, punctuated with the staccato beating of their hearts, before the latch shifted and the storage room door creaked open.

“… my babies…”

It was the spectral Shego, her white shroud transparent as she stood in the doorway with the light behind her. The girls winced at the sight of the pronounced ribs and hip bones due to lack of meat on the frame, and the deformations caused by more than a decade of abuse and self-mutilation. Only the eyes burned with their own light, an emerald fire that blazed from the open folds of the sheet where it framed the woman’s gaunt face.

“… you do not sleep…” It was several seconds before the girls realized that this was a question.

“Um… no… Ma’am.”

The girls watched as the woman lurched into the room, one thin arm carrying a bundle of something. The primary feature that made this apparition seem so sick and wrong for being an alternate version of their Momma was the lack of grace and power; age and lifestyle had changed the mindset and attitude of their real Momma but she was always the epitome of strength and she could move like a dancer when she wanted to. This stranger seemed barely able to walk.

The figure gimped closer and closed the door behind her, the feeble light from the single fluorescent lamp above bleaching her pale skin of its green tones. Her eyes never left the children as she wandered over towards the back wall and gently set down her bundle.

“… food for your hunger… water for your thirst… “ The bundle unfolded, a simple bath towel that divulged a varied collection of energy bars and packets of beef jerky, along with a brand of bottled water that the twins knew to be stocked in their own home. The girls looked to the hunched shape and looked up into her face, its countenance looking almost unfinished in the poor light.

“Th… thank you.” Kasy had started to speak without thinking, startling her sister as much as she had startled herself. Sheki needed a breath before she could support the unexpected gesture.

“Yes, thank you.” The figure straightened a little from its ruined posture and blinked at them; there was no other reaction.

While her eyes seemed to have condensed every single shred of life and color, the rest of her body was almost faded; lips that normally glistened with black gloss were bloodless and the hair that bristled atop the shorn scalp was stark white and chalky. Even the skin carried a tinge that bespoke jaundice rather than the familiar green. The sheet exposed little of the naked flesh but it did nothing to hide the fact that there was little or no meat left on those bones; a slower pace of life and their Mommy’s cooking often wreaking havoc on their Momma’s weight over the years, but it was never more than a thin layer of softness across rock-hard muscle.

The silent woman was suddenly right in her face.

“Sheki, look out!”

“Ghaa!” Quick for all her apparent infirmity, the figure leaned in fast and extended an open palm towards the face of Sheki, the closest to her, the girl’s eyes wide with freight at the advance. Kasy felt the feeble warmth of her failed attempt to emit a plasma field and it was this instinctual reaction that kept her from actually throwing herself between the older woman and her twin.

“… no fear, no fear…”

“What are you… what…?” Sheki went stock-still as the hand touched her neck and a cooling sensation replaced the burning from her wounds. The hand beneath was warm, even if there didn’t seem to be an ounce of blood in those fingers, and the touch was as gentle as she ever remembered being handled by her real parents. The pungent scent of something medicinal reached her nose and she calmed a little as the steady hand continued to rub the unguent on her neck.

“Sheki!”

“It’s… it’s Ok, Kasy. It’s medicine or something.” The hand withdrew and there was no more pain, the figure sitting back and looking at the girls with all of the attention of a bird of prey. Sheki raised her own hand slowly to poke and prod at her neck, feeling the thick layer of a viscous substance coating her skin. The welts were still there but the burning was gone and she suspected that the deeper pain and the inflammation would disappear soon enough. She looked at her benefactor with a guarded expression.

“Thank you. That feels better.” There was no reaction or change of the face or posture to indicate that the gratitude was accepted or even heard, but the woman shifted to better attend to Kasy, who shook slightly under the touch. The little redhead’s pain vanished just as fast and she was just as careful in the way that she offered her appreciation.

“Yes, thanks.”

After their wounds had been attended to, the woman remained slumped against the wall until the children thought to gather the items of food closer to them and had each taken a few sips from the sealed bottles of drinking water. She kept her gaze locked upon them for a few more moments and then straightened, at least as much as she was able, before backing towards the door and opening it. She withdrew from the room, her parting words little different from the first.

“… sleep, my loves…”

And then she was gone, leaving the girls to slake their thirsts and quench their hunger with the items that had been given to them. Emotionally spent and physically drained, the nourishment prompted their bodies to begin the healing cycle that all those who are worn and weary must endure when faced with hardship, and that cycle includes sleep.

The twins used a little of the water and a corner of the bath towel to wipe their faces and hands clean before using the dry portion of the towel to brush away the grit from their mattress; they hoped that they might be allowed to use a bathroom before too much longer but there was no drama yet in that regard. They huddled against each other and let the numbness of their anxieties lull them to sleep, reflecting privately on their visitor even as they nodded off.

This was not the same woman who trained with them and drilled them in the finer skills of stealth and combat, nor was this the same woman who laughed and played with them or cried with them when they got hurt or shared her old books with them or poured over Sheki’s stories or marveled over Kasy’s paintings. The girls could not bring themselves to see this woman as being anything like their Momma, and they did not feel even a shadow of affection or affiliation with her. They did feel something for this ruined woman, however, an emotion that they would never have associated with their Momma in a million years.

They felt pity.

88888888

“So let me see if I have this right…” Shego kept her voice low as she traded whispers inside the ventilation shaft. “If they know what we know and we didn’t know this air shaft was there then they don’t know that we’d use it to get in?”

“Mmm. Pretty much, yeah.” Kim shuffled beside her in the gloom, the feeble light from the glow stick barely able to hit the metal walls of the shaft.

“Why did that make so much more sense ten minutes ago?”

The rusted grill had been covered in caked dirt and bushes. They had secured their excess equipment, cracked open the vent and had been crawling through cobwebs and mouse turds for almost seventy twisted yards. Shego had overcome her previous meltdown and was as criminally efficient as always… but there was still some pent up emotion their and Kim kept alert for a repeat. Stress wasn’t the sitch; it was because their daughters were in danger that made Shego unpredictable.

“I’ll never understand why the Doc always made these things so wide.” Shego was able to easily draw up her legs to circumvent a bend in the system, an action that would have been impossible in any other structure in the world.

“Sure, you don’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shego stopped and looked back to see Kim grinning.

“Are you telling me that you didn’t have a hand in this design?”

“I’m a little preoccupied here, Pumpkin. Would you care to spell that out for me?”

“You know,” Kim shrugged. “To make it easier for me to sneak in.”

“Judas Priest, Possible! I had more on my damn plate back then than designing the frelling air vents!” Black hair shifted as she shook her head. “How long did you believe that?”

“… for a long time…” Kim felt embarrassed and was glad that the darkness hid her blush.

“And another thing… and Kimmie, don’t take this personally… but up until you had the twins and filled out a little, the last thing that you needed was more room in the air vents.” Shego paused as a familiar sensation started to burn at the back of her neck. “And don’t bother using ‘The Pout’ on me because I can’t see it and am not in the mood.”

Shego cut her sentence short because her tongue felt suddenly thick.

“Yeah… I suppose you’re right.” Kim signed and retracted her pout; it had been more of a defense reaction to her embarrassment than anything else. “Ron and I usually had enough room to move side by side, so I thought that you might’ve… might’ve made them bigger just for me.”

“Whatever.” The pale green woman’s eyes were burning and it wasn’t from dust in the shaft. “Now here’s the part of the plan where… I’ve… we’ve got to… find…”

Oh, shit, I’m going to bawl, thought Shego. She bit he lip until she tasted blood.

Uh, oh… she’s going to bawl, thought Kim. The redhead thought fast for some preventative action.

“It would make much more sense to build these wide enough for your fat ass to sneak out. I mean, those thunder thighs of yours are bad enough, but your ass…”

No sooner did the petite hero speak the words than a powerful arm reached back and grabbed the loose waist of her cargo pants. She was quickly dragged forward and brought to rest beside the former villain.

“Damn you, Possible…”

The arm moved again and a strong hand found the back of Kim’s head, forcing her into a kiss. Kim felt movement along her chest and down her abdomen as Shego’s other hand made its presence known.

“Nggg… hooo, boy… Sh-Shego… not… now… ghaa…!”

“Thank you.” The larger women shifted closer to punctuate her gratitude with another quick kiss on the lips.

“Y-y-you’re welcome… whoa…” Kim shuddered in the confined space as warmth suffused her entire body. “I’d have settled for just the ‘thank you’.” The slender redhead heard her wife chuckle and knew that another episode had been avoided for now. “You started to say something about a plan?”

“Yeah, now we really need to be quiet, here.” Together they sidled up to a grate in the shaft; this was the final junction before the system joined with the lair proper and their movements, no matter how stealthy, would be clearly audible. “Now you’re not going to like this, but I’m going the rest of the way alone.”

“Bullsh…” Kim kept talking but Shego’s gloved hand had already moved to cover the hero’s mouth. She let Kim rant to let her get the muffled arguments out of her system and only lifted the hand away when Kim was still and glowering in silence.

“You finished?”

“Yes.”

“Once again, I am going the rest of the way alone. You wait three minutes and then leave the shaft. Don’t look for me because I’ll be committing acts of chaos to draw out the bad guys.” Shego waited until sh saw the spark of comprehension. “In other words…”

“You’re the distraction.” Kim’s tone was one of incredulity.

“Exacta-mundo.” The former villain checked her phosphorus grenades. “I’ll stir up some shit and see what floats to the surface.”

“Ewww.”

“Meanwhile, you keep your nose in the air and see if you can pick out a couple of little greenies.”

“Enough with the biological function humor.” Kim had to smile, just a little.

“Spoilsport.”

“And I don’t appreciate our babies being compared to boogers, thank you.”

“Ain’t I something?” Shego swung her long legs around and proceeded to climb down the seams of the airshaft, using the edges like rungs under her strong fingers. “And if it matters… I was the one that told the Doc where to position the surveillance cameras.”

“Huh?”

“In the lairs. I had nothing to do with the ventilation system but I made sure that the cameras were always in the worst possible location.”

“… ensuring my entry unseen.” Kim’s tone was soft and loving.

“Yep.” Shego only had eyes for the last few yards of ventilation shaft and could not bring herself to look at her mate. She slid closer and prepared to climb down.

“How long did you do that?”

“For a long time.”

Shego dropped out of sight without another word.

To Be Continued…

Author’s Notes: Take my word for it, folks… we are definitely NOT on a collision course for wackiness.

Description
Crumbs

Author: The Humbug

Disclaimer: “Kim Possible” and all characters within © The Walt Disney Company and its related entities. Kim Possible created by Mark McCorkle & Bob Schooley. All rights reserved. No profit is being collected from the fiction contained within. You can blame the rest of this on me.
Rating: PG-13 for combat violence and intimations of a physical relationship and intimate contact between consenting adult females. This should also cover a little harsh language now and then. If this will offend you, please read something else and then seek some professional help.
Summary: This is a Kim/Shego pairing fan fiction and is set in my ‘Who’s Writing This Crap?’ storyline. It is a sequel to ‘A Cookie For Ecclesiastes’ and you really, REALLY need to read that story first. Kasy Ann and Sheki Go Possible are the creations of NoDrogs. The KP version of The Supreme One as well as the ruined Shego is my idea. WARNING: Some parts are a little dark.

Crumbs / Six

“Kasy, you’ve just got to pick that lock!”

“I’m trying to!” The girl wiped the sweat from her face. “You’re not helping!” The diminutive redhead had been hunkered down before the latch of the storage closet door for almost an hour, insufficient light and just a little stress making the task of rotating the tumblers a bit difficult.

“Sorry.”

“S’kay.” Kasy risked a break in her concentration to glance at her twin, the raven-haired girl sitting a few feet away and rubbing her neck. “Still hurts, huh?”

“Yeah.” Sheki rubbed at the enflamed skin and resisted the urge to scratch at it with her nails but the welts were far too painful for that. “Do you think that we’ve been poisoned?”

“I don’t know. I thought that normal poisons wouldn’t affect us.” Kasy lifted her shoulder, hoping that the movement would alleviate the cramping along the side of her head from her own set of five tiny wounds. “Can you light up, yet?”

“Nope.” Sheki was already holding out her arms and clenching her fists tight; neither girl had been able to generate more than a pale glow and a meager warmth around their hands since they had awakened, yet another sign that they had been given a drug that was both powerful and especially tailored to inhibit their particular physical makeup.

“Me, neither.” Kasy stopped her work at the latch for a moment. “I hate feeling weak and powerless like this.” She huffed in frustration. “I guess that’s why Momma gets so mad when she’s feeling vulnerable and stuff.”

“I just hope that our special metabolism can burn through this.” Sheki felt a little scared. “It’s kind of like that time Alexander got stung by that bee and his hand swelled up.”

“I remember.” Kasy could feel a little of that fear herself, creeping along her spine. “We don’t get sick like Mom and Grandma and Grandpa do. It sucks.”

“Yeah…” Sheki had drawn up her knees and wrapped her arms around them while Kasy returned to her work on the lock, neither girl wanting to talk too much lest one of them accidentally mention their mothers and begin sobbing again.

After the initial shock of their second encounter with the warped, alternate-future versions of their parents, the girls had weathered the meeting in silence until the two adults had left the storage room and secured the children inside. Feigning exhaustion and feeling ill to avoid having to speak much, not too far from the truth considering the toxin that they had been injected with, the twins managed to hold themselves together until they were alone. Promising to check on them later, the Supreme One had kissed them and hugged them and left with her ghastly cohort for the central chamber, at which point the girls had grasped each other and wept in terror.

These were murderers, these twisted and psychotic reflections of the Mom and Momma that they loved and revered. Just a few months previous, a mysterious stranger from the future, a genetically naked mole rat claiming to be a descendant of Rufus, had proven to the twins that they were not yet ready to accompany their parents on missions, and had done so in a way that had given them nightmares for days. He had shown them a future in which they had not survived; a world where they had died years before and their parents had been severely traumatized by their deaths. Their Mommy had become a tyrant calling herself ‘The Supreme One’ and their Momma had degenerated into a creeping thing that lived to be brutalized by her spouse, both of them hating themselves and each other for what had happened to their daughters but so dependent upon their being together that they could not stand to be apart.

In this there was an irony; neither woman believed that their daughters were truly dead. The Kasy and Sheki of that world had apparently been vaporized by an explosion, their bodies destroyed without a trace, but in their grief their parents chose to believe that the girls had been kidnapped, their deaths staged, and that a ransom would eventually be demanded. Kim and Shego had never ceased to scour the planet for their children or the ‘enemy’ who stole their girls from them, their attacks upon the free world as deadly as those they visited upon their enemies.

Thousands of people died as a result of their madness.

The twins now realized how lucky they had been the last time. Then, in the company of Rufus 3000, they had been invisible, a trick of the manipulation of time. Now they were in the spotlight as ‘proof’ to their ‘parents’ that they had been alive all this time.

“One thing, Shek…”

“Yes?”

“Aren’t we too young to be their daughters?”

“I guess so, yeah.” Sheki’s brow furrowed. “We… they… died when they were our age now, and these two come from fifteen years into that world’s future, so we’d… they’d… be almost Mommy’s age if we… they… had just been held hostage all this time.”

“And they don’t notice this?”

“Doy! Do they look like they’d care?”

“I guess not…” Kasy wiped her brow; there was one last tumbler left and it was a doozy. “How’d they get here, anyway? Didn’t Rufus 3000 say that it was a future that would never come to pass, or something?”

“I got nothing. It doesn’t…” Something beyond the door caught Sheki’s attention, a sound barely on the edge of audibility. “Kasy, get back!”

“What…?”

“Outside! Someone’s coming!” Sheki moved over to give her sister room to join her on the mattress. There were a few seconds of absolute silence, punctuated with the staccato beating of their hearts, before the latch shifted and the storage room door creaked open.

“… my babies…”

It was the spectral Shego, her white shroud transparent as she stood in the doorway with the light behind her. The girls winced at the sight of the pronounced ribs and hip bones due to lack of meat on the frame, and the deformations caused by more than a decade of abuse and self-mutilation. Only the eyes burned with their own light, an emerald fire that blazed from the open folds of the sheet where it framed the woman’s gaunt face.

“… you do not sleep…” It was several seconds before the girls realized that this was a question.

“Um… no… Ma’am.”

The girls watched as the woman lurched into the room, one thin arm carrying a bundle of something. The primary feature that made this apparition seem so sick and wrong for being an alternate version of their Momma was the lack of grace and power; age and lifestyle had changed the mindset and attitude of their real Momma but she was always the epitome of strength and she could move like a dancer when she wanted to. This stranger seemed barely able to walk.

The figure gimped closer and closed the door behind her, the feeble light from the single fluorescent lamp above bleaching her pale skin of its green tones. Her eyes never left the children as she wandered over towards the back wall and gently set down her bundle.

“… food for your hunger… water for your thirst… “ The bundle unfolded, a simple bath towel that divulged a varied collection of energy bars and packets of beef jerky, along with a brand of bottled water that the twins knew to be stocked in their own home. The girls looked to the hunched shape and looked up into her face, its countenance looking almost unfinished in the poor light.

“Th… thank you.” Kasy had started to speak without thinking, startling her sister as much as she had startled herself. Sheki needed a breath before she could support the unexpected gesture.

“Yes, thank you.” The figure straightened a little from its ruined posture and blinked at them; there was no other reaction.

While her eyes seemed to have condensed every single shred of life and color, the rest of her body was almost faded; lips that normally glistened with black gloss were bloodless and the hair that bristled atop the shorn scalp was stark white and chalky. Even the skin carried a tinge that bespoke jaundice rather than the familiar green. The sheet exposed little of the naked flesh but it did nothing to hide the fact that there was little or no meat left on those bones; a slower pace of life and their Mommy’s cooking often wreaking havoc on their Momma’s weight over the years, but it was never more than a thin layer of softness across rock-hard muscle.

The silent woman was suddenly right in her face.

“Sheki, look out!”

“Ghaa!” Quick for all her apparent infirmity, the figure leaned in fast and extended an open palm towards the face of Sheki, the closest to her, the girl’s eyes wide with freight at the advance. Kasy felt the feeble warmth of her failed attempt to emit a plasma field and it was this instinctual reaction that kept her from actually throwing herself between the older woman and her twin.

“… no fear, no fear…”

“What are you… what…?” Sheki went stock-still as the hand touched her neck and a cooling sensation replaced the burning from her wounds. The hand beneath was warm, even if there didn’t seem to be an ounce of blood in those fingers, and the touch was as gentle as she ever remembered being handled by her real parents. The pungent scent of something medicinal reached her nose and she calmed a little as the steady hand continued to rub the unguent on her neck.

“Sheki!”

“It’s… it’s Ok, Kasy. It’s medicine or something.” The hand withdrew and there was no more pain, the figure sitting back and looking at the girls with all of the attention of a bird of prey. Sheki raised her own hand slowly to poke and prod at her neck, feeling the thick layer of a viscous substance coating her skin. The welts were still there but the burning was gone and she suspected that the deeper pain and the inflammation would disappear soon enough. She looked at her benefactor with a guarded expression.

“Thank you. That feels better.” There was no reaction or change of the face or posture to indicate that the gratitude was accepted or even heard, but the woman shifted to better attend to Kasy, who shook slightly under the touch. The little redhead’s pain vanished just as fast and she was just as careful in the way that she offered her appreciation.

“Yes, thanks.”

After their wounds had been attended to, the woman remained slumped against the wall until the children thought to gather the items of food closer to them and had each taken a few sips from the sealed bottles of drinking water. She kept her gaze locked upon them for a few more moments and then straightened, at least as much as she was able, before backing towards the door and opening it. She withdrew from the room, her parting words little different from the first.

“… sleep, my loves…”

And then she was gone, leaving the girls to slake their thirsts and quench their hunger with the items that had been given to them. Emotionally spent and physically drained, the nourishment prompted their bodies to begin the healing cycle that all those who are worn and weary must endure when faced with hardship, and that cycle includes sleep.

The twins used a little of the water and a corner of the bath towel to wipe their faces and hands clean before using the dry portion of the towel to brush away the grit from their mattress; they hoped that they might be allowed to use a bathroom before too much longer but there was no drama yet in that regard. They huddled against each other and let the numbness of their anxieties lull them to sleep, reflecting privately on their visitor even as they nodded off.

This was not the same woman who trained with them and drilled them in the finer skills of stealth and combat, nor was this the same woman who laughed and played with them or cried with them when they got hurt or shared her old books with them or poured over Sheki’s stories or marveled over Kasy’s paintings. The girls could not bring themselves to see this woman as being anything like their Momma, and they did not feel even a shadow of affection or affiliation with her. They did feel something for this ruined woman, however, an emotion that they would never have associated with their Momma in a million years.

They felt pity.

88888888

“So let me see if I have this right…” Shego kept her voice low as she traded whispers inside the ventilation shaft. “If they know what we know and we didn’t know this air shaft was there then they don’t know that we’d use it to get in?”

“Mmm. Pretty much, yeah.” Kim shuffled beside her in the gloom, the feeble light from the glow stick barely able to hit the metal walls of the shaft.

“Why did that make so much more sense ten minutes ago?”

The rusted grill had been covered in caked dirt and bushes. They had secured their excess equipment, cracked open the vent and had been crawling through cobwebs and mouse turds for almost seventy twisted yards. Shego had overcome her previous meltdown and was as criminally efficient as always… but there was still some pent up emotion their and Kim kept alert for a repeat. Stress wasn’t the sitch; it was because their daughters were in danger that made Shego unpredictable.

“I’ll never understand why the Doc always made these things so wide.” Shego was able to easily draw up her legs to circumvent a bend in the system, an action that would have been impossible in any other structure in the world.

“Sure, you don’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shego stopped and looked back to see Kim grinning.

“Are you telling me that you didn’t have a hand in this design?”

“I’m a little preoccupied here, Pumpkin. Would you care to spell that out for me?”

“You know,” Kim shrugged. “To make it easier for me to sneak in.”

“Judas Priest, Possible! I had more on my damn plate back then than designing the frelling air vents!” Black hair shifted as she shook her head. “How long did you believe that?”

“… for a long time…” Kim felt embarrassed and was glad that the darkness hid her blush.

“And another thing… and Kimmie, don’t take this personally… but up until you had the twins and filled out a little, the last thing that you needed was more room in the air vents.” Shego paused as a familiar sensation started to burn at the back of her neck. “And don’t bother using ‘The Pout’ on me because I can’t see it and am not in the mood.”

Shego cut her sentence short because her tongue felt suddenly thick.

“Yeah… I suppose you’re right.” Kim signed and retracted her pout; it had been more of a defense reaction to her embarrassment than anything else. “Ron and I usually had enough room to move side by side, so I thought that you might’ve… might’ve made them bigger just for me.”

“Whatever.” The pale green woman’s eyes were burning and it wasn’t from dust in the shaft. “Now here’s the part of the plan where… I’ve… we’ve got to… find…”

Oh, shit, I’m going to bawl, thought Shego. She bit he lip until she tasted blood.

Uh, oh… she’s going to bawl, thought Kim. The redhead thought fast for some preventative action.

“It would make much more sense to build these wide enough for your fat ass to sneak out. I mean, those thunder thighs of yours are bad enough, but your ass…”

No sooner did the petite hero speak the words than a powerful arm reached back and grabbed the loose waist of her cargo pants. She was quickly dragged forward and brought to rest beside the former villain.

“Damn you, Possible…”

The arm moved again and a strong hand found the back of Kim’s head, forcing her into a kiss. Kim felt movement along her chest and down her abdomen as Shego’s other hand made its presence known.

“Nggg… hooo, boy… Sh-Shego… not… now… ghaa…!”

“Thank you.” The larger women shifted closer to punctuate her gratitude with another quick kiss on the lips.

“Y-y-you’re welcome… whoa…” Kim shuddered in the confined space as warmth suffused her entire body. “I’d have settled for just the ‘thank you’.” The slender redhead heard her wife chuckle and knew that another episode had been avoided for now. “You started to say something about a plan?”

“Yeah, now we really need to be quiet, here.” Together they sidled up to a grate in the shaft; this was the final junction before the system joined with the lair proper and their movements, no matter how stealthy, would be clearly audible. “Now you’re not going to like this, but I’m going the rest of the way alone.”

“Bullsh…” Kim kept talking but Shego’s gloved hand had already moved to cover the hero’s mouth. She let Kim rant to let her get the muffled arguments out of her system and only lifted the hand away when Kim was still and glowering in silence.

“You finished?”

“Yes.”

“Once again, I am going the rest of the way alone. You wait three minutes and then leave the shaft. Don’t look for me because I’ll be committing acts of chaos to draw out the bad guys.” Shego waited until sh saw the spark of comprehension. “In other words…”

“You’re the distraction.” Kim’s tone was one of incredulity.

“Exacta-mundo.” The former villain checked her phosphorus grenades. “I’ll stir up some shit and see what floats to the surface.”

“Ewww.”

“Meanwhile, you keep your nose in the air and see if you can pick out a couple of little greenies.”

“Enough with the biological function humor.” Kim had to smile, just a little.

“Spoilsport.”

“And I don’t appreciate our babies being compared to boogers, thank you.”

“Ain’t I something?” Shego swung her long legs around and proceeded to climb down the seams of the airshaft, using the edges like rungs under her strong fingers. “And if it matters… I was the one that told the Doc where to position the surveillance cameras.”

“Huh?”

“In the lairs. I had nothing to do with the ventilation system but I made sure that the cameras were always in the worst possible location.”

“… ensuring my entry unseen.” Kim’s tone was soft and loving.

“Yep.” Shego only had eyes for the last few yards of ventilation shaft and could not bring herself to look at her mate. She slid closer and prepared to climb down.

“How long did you do that?”

“For a long time.”

Shego dropped out of sight without another word.

To Be Continued…

Author’s Notes: Take my word for it, folks… we are definitely NOT on a collision course for wackiness.