I do not own any Disney characters named herein and am only borrowing them to tell a nonprofit tale meant for entertainment purposes only.

Kim Possible: Memories

By LJ58

She still remembered the soft touch.

The warm breath on her skin as words of love was whispered in long-ago moments that seemed a dream now.

So long ago.

Before she lost the sun. Before she lost everything.

She sighed and moved slowly through the shadowed manor built out of a crumbling castle she had found in those first fearful days while fleeing all she had known for her own sake. As well as for the sake of others.

She remembered the burning hunger. The raw need. The unrelenting fear.

Yet even more than anything, she remembered the utter loathing of what she had become. The hate of others who judged her without cause was nothing compared to the absolute self-loathing that led her to take fantastic risks. Risks that led her to this…limbo.

She moved through the darkened room toward a heavily draped window, sensing the sun was gone now and it was safe to peer out the window. She turned from the drapery without looking outside. She already knew what was outside.

What did it matter?

She knew what was outside would never change no matter how many times she might look out with a yearning that never faded. Never died.

She knew what wasn't outside, too.

She sighed and walked over to a familiar chair she favored before the old-fashioned hearth. There was no fire just now but there could be if she only will it. Not because she had wood or needed warmth. Only because she willed it.

Because she was far from the woman she once been.

She was far from human.

That, she knew well by now, was the bitterest truth. She was far from normal.

Sometimes, she could almost forget how it began. Or rather, how it ended. Back when she was still the woman she remembered in her dreams. Back when she could still call herself a basic, average girl. Back when she was still human.

When she sat here, all too often she would remember.

Her peace would shatter then as she remembered what had happened. How everything had changed. She remembered the mission that led her straight to death and a far more ignoble ending than any she could have ever imagined possible even for her.

She remembered the confident, inspiring partner at her side, and the belief she would set things right once again before returning home, rejoining those that loved her. Those she had loved.

She sighed as she remembered the dead. The victims that lured her to end a wrong. To make something evil right. Things had been so simple then. Things had been….normal.

They investigated. Wade leading the charge. He was good at that. Learning things. Guiding them. Only he could make no sense of that final mission. He was a genius, but not one that understood the supernatural, or the genuinely evil motivations of such elements. In fact, despite their experiences, he still often denied the supernatural was real.

Only that mission let her and Ron right into the heart of such an evil.

A small town in Europe was being haunted by an unseen serial killer, and the three agents already sent out to stop him had vanished without a trace. Like all the victims to date, most of whom were women and children. That, whatever the cause, was something Kim Possible could not ignore.

They flew over to the region without waiting on clues to lead them and chose to track the path by past attacks. The trail led them to a low, broken plateau in the region, and they scanned the old mountains until they found a dilapidated castle they approached that looked as if it had been shelled during one of the many wars in the region and never rebuilt.

Still, part of the structure remained, and they landed to find over a dozen dead bodies, one of them a member of the GJ team lost in the past week. Others were only skeletal remains left discarded like broken toys.

She remembered being sick of the careless and casual display of cruelty and death, and they disregarded the obvious warning to enter the damaged castle.

Ron had been hesitant, but ready, and she charged ahead as ever, determined to find whoever or whatever was responsible for such rampant cruelty and death. They moved through the crumbling walls, finding little to lead them up, but a path of dark blood that led them down into a lower level that suggested basement.

Ron grew more uneasy, but even with his normal cautious hesitation, they were both caught off-guard in the end. A shapeless shadow came out of the darkness below, saving her like a child while Ron used all his mystic might to barely hold the creature back until he could summon the mystic Lotus Blade, and finally end the thing that fed on death and misery as much as blood.

Kim, all but dead by then, gave Ron a weak smile to show her gratitude that he had ended the threat even as she succumbed to darkness. She had no idea what had happened afterward, but she knew what came next.

She woke up with her body screaming as if every nerve in her body had been exposed and salted down, and she realized she was locked in an isolation chamber deep inside Global Justice. She knew because she had brought in other risks that had to be tested, or even contained.

Only GJ had no idea what she had become.

She burst out of that alleged secure seal, all but tearing her way through a wall of agents as the strong, hardened agents proved no match for a vampiric Kim Possible with all her skills and the strength of a blood-mad demon. She escaped into the night, and fled into shadows, knowing Ron would come for her next. It was what he did, after all. Find and end supernatural threats against their world.

Only Kimberly remained enough of her own true self to know what was coming. What she would become if she remained as she were.

She knew Wade was not going to help. Not this time. She knew he still denied anything but logic and reason despite all the preternatural forces they had encountered over the years. Everything had an explanation to him, and she couldn't risk his life why he tried to stubbornly scan and run tests on her when she might succumb to the same madness as that thing that had recreated her.

So she fled.

She hunted old places. Odd places. Just as she hunted any help that might show her a way to control, or cure the thing she had become. Just six months later, using a yellowing journal she had dug out of some arcane collector's library one night, she reached the remote Urals, and found a likely shelter in an ancient and thankfully abandoned manor house that ironically reminded her of the castle back where they had met that demon.

Here Kim hides, and gradually learns her own powers and new abilities. Only she also seeks a cure, and finally learns there is a way to dampen the hunger for blood, but it will cost her as her own will forged a barrier between the world and herself. She imprisoned herself in the manor to live out her days, however long they will be, and locked the door to seal herself in forever.

The hunger slowly fades, and yet she lives on, alone, and isolated from anyone and everyone beyond her remote sanctuary. Stays there for many years.

Kim sighed, staring at the dark hearth where firewood waited to burn without burning at her will, and she wondered how much longer she could live as she was without eventually going mad. Or fleeing to the world to find her own true death.

Using the old journal, she worked out a spell that would make the manor her own sanctuary, and force her to remain inside its walls so long as she existed. The spell, the journal claimed, would keep her from needing blood so long as she stayed sheltered inside the refuge she created with the ancient magic of the journal according to the author.

She could always leave again, but she knew from the start she couldn't take the risk. Not because she feared to die, again, but because she feared killing someone if she went back out there as she was now. That had been close over the long months of her near mad flight as she tried to hide but stay out of the authorities' sight.

Now, sitting alone as she had been for more years than she could count, Kim sighed, feeling again the grief of losing all she had been, and all she had known more than anything else.

She had been close to her family. She had a lot of great friends. She had finally fallen in love with the most unlikely person in the world. Only she had been a partner she could not imagine being without at the time. Except she had little choice left in the end. In the end, she had to leave everyone.

Even her.

"Kimberly," the familiar voice whispered as her mind continued to torment her.

Kim shook her head violently.

"I guess it's time for me to start going nuts," she moaned ruefully and shook her head again.

"You're not nuts, Kimberly," she heard, and the weary redhead frowned as she leaped to her feet and turned around to see her standing there behind her old, worn chair.

"Shego," she gasped, staring at the woman that looked virtually if not literally the same as she had last seen her. "How?"

"It's been a while," Shego smiled sardonically. "Want to explain what you mean since you're looking pretty good yourself for a dead woman. A dead woman that is almost two hundred years old?"

"Two….hundred," Kim echoed. "It's been so long," she frowned. "Then how are you still here," she cried, still not approaching Shego, and yet not sensing anything that would draw her to the woman. "You're a hallucination, aren't you? I am finally going crazy. I am," she moaned, and dropped her head, and covered her ears.

"You're not crazy, Princess," Shego said quietly as she embraced her slender frame, and Kim gasped, staring up at her in genuine shock. "Whatever else, you're not crazy."

"Shego," she gasped, looking torn just then. "But how…? You weren't….cursed, too," she cried.

"I was. By a comet. Remember? Turns out I was not quite human in the end. Too much plasma in the blood and cells. Too much cosmic energy to let me fade and die like any other human on the planet."

"You… You… You're real," Kim asked, lifting a skeletal hand to touch one green cheek that felt so soft and so warm beneath her cold hand.

"I'm real," she said. "And I've been hunting you all these years. Who knew I would finally find you here of all places."

"Here," she frowned. "How did you find me?"

"Ironically, this is my land, Kimberly," Shego told her. "I bought it years ago when I was investing all my money in real estate to keep the harpy from tracing it. Or me. Lately, I've been getting rid of all the old estate and turning it to gold. Only no one would buy this land. It was supposedly haunted according to certain locals. Now I know why they said that," the comet-powered woman remarked as she just stared down at the redhead.

"Haunted? No one ever comes here," Kim frowned, content to stand there being held by the one woman in the world she had missed more than anyone.

"Because you set up something that scares anyone from the area. I felt it, too. Only I don't scare," Shego smiled back down at her.

"I remember. I remember," Kim echoed and sighed as she rested her head on Shego's shoulder. "I've missed you, Emmie. God, I've missed you so much."

"I have to ask, Kimberly," Shego said as she held the slender redhead that was pale as fresh snow. "How many have you killed? How many died to keep you alive this long?"

"No one, Shego. No one. I swear. I sealed myself in here once I found a spell to hold back the hunger. So long as I stay inside, I don't have to drink….that," she said. "But it's been so….so hard. I really have thought I was going to go mad at times," she said, tears brimming in earnest now. "I've been so afraid I would weaken and run back to the world, and….turn into a real monster. You can stop that, though," she said quietly. "I know you can," she said, looking up into Shego's eyes. "You can help, can't you," she pleaded as her once green eyes glowed crimson in the half-light from the moon.

Shego stared back down at her, sighing as she knew there was no such spell. No way to stop a creature like Kim. Unless the creature stopped itself. Kim, she guessed, must have somehow turned her own preternatural will on herself, and locked herself in some kind of delusion that kept her chained here. Shego couldn't begin to imagine how much the little idealist must have suffered all this time. She had a good idea, though. She did know the woman, after all. She had always known her quite well.

"You really did that to yourself? You really imprisoned yourself here?"

"I had to, Shego. I couldn't… I didn't want to hurt anyone. What kind of hero would I be remembered as if I gave in and killed to save myself? I couldn't… I wouldn't….be that. Only you're here now. You…."

"Yeah?"

Kim released her and stepped back to lift one of Shego's hands. She put it to her chest and smiled.

"I remember you were always so smart. But more, I know your plasma is pure UV. One burst," she said and moved one of Shego's hands to her chest. "You could finally end it. I'm ready to end it," the hollow-eyed creature that had been Kim told her. "Please."

Shego stared at her, her own expression torn.

"Kimberly," she choked.

"It'd be a mercy. You know it. Besides, I'm not her any longer. I'm just a shell. A monster. You'd be justified. And…this torment…would finally end, and the danger I pose with it," she said, looking up at Shego again.

"I hunted you for decades," Shego admitted. "And at one point, I really thought you were killing and was ready to put you down for your own sake. Only we always found another monster. Another at fault. Yet you say…. You've been here. All this time. Hiding from the world. Saving the world by locking yourself in this….bubble you created?"

Kim looked down and away.

"I had no choice, Emmie. I had to save the world….from me," she said. "Thankfully, I found that old book with that spell in it to seal me in this place," she said, gesturing around her.

Shego sighed, knowing Kim was seeing something only she could see because the ruined manor around her remained a broken pile of stone and rotting wood, and nothing more.

"Oh, Kimberly," she said and hugged her again. "That you even tried to stop yourself says you're not a monster. You never were."

"I hurt people, though," she said. "I rose from the dead, and I hurt people. Even if I was only running away, I still hurt a lot of people. Maybe killed them, and…."

"No one died that day, Kimberly. Yeah, some of them spent time in hospitals for a while. Only that was two centuries ago, and you have proven you're no monster. You have proven you're still a hero. So why would I kill an innocent woman? A woman…I still love," Shego said and leaned down to gently kiss her.

"Shego," Kim shuddered with emotion. "Will you….stay with me?"

"I can't, Kim…."

"Oh, God," Kim cried, and clung to her as if in desperation.

"Kim….you can't stay like this. It can't last."

"I know. I know. I've been so worried the spell might end. Or I might weaken, and go hunting. Just end it, Shego. I am ready to end it."

"You haven't missed anything in the world," Shego asked. "Nothing that made you want to leave before now?"

"Just you," Kim sighed and held onto her. "I've been so lonely. God, I've missed you, Shego. I've missed my family and my friends. But you… I've missed you the most. I loved you so much. I….. I don't want to be alone again," she said, and finally began to cry.

"Oh, Kimberly," Shego sighed, and stroked that dark, red hair as Kim held onto her again. "I can't imagine how bad it's been for you, Princess. Don't worry, no one will bother you. Seeing this pile of crumbling rock, I doubt anyone will bother coming here again anyway."

"Crumbling….rock," Kim frowned, looking around her cheerless manor house, and wondering why Shego couldn't see her home.

"Never mind," Shego said and kissed her again. "Just know, you'll never be alone again," she told Kim.

Kim relaxed against her, smiling happily, and then gasped in the next instant as a suddenly glowing hand flared, and shot a bolt of pure plasma through her thin chest, scorching the ragged, tattered blouse the pale, skeletal caricature of a once-famous heroine wore.

She staggered back, staring at Shego in confusion, and then seemed to evaporate as she fell to dust, and Shego bowed her head, her own tears finally falling.

"Goodbye, Princess," she sniffed quietly. "Rest in peace, my love. May you finally rest in peace?"

Leaving the crumbling ruins of some long-ago mansion behind after a moment, she climbed into the jet with the Global Justice logo on it and walked to the video communications center first.

"This is Eve. I investigated the rumors of an entity here. All I found was an old ghost I managed to convince to move on," she reported blandly, hiding her own emotions as tears still brimmed in her eyes.

"Nothing else," the grim man on the monitor asked.

"No. The poor thing didn't even realize it was already dead. It thought it was still alive, and didn't realize that rubble was all that left of its home."

"At least it was no true demon this time," the man declared. "Maybe we're finally driving them back into the shadows. We can hope."

"We can hope," Shego agreed.

"You okay, Agent Garrick?"

"I'm a walking comet, you ass. How can I ever be okay," she spat.

"Just come in, and make sure you file your report. I guess you can finally sell that land, though."

"Maybe. I had forgotten why I brought it. Maybe it's why the ghost stayed. It's beautiful up here, you old fossil," she called the man. "I might just move back here myself."

"You'd never last a week."

Shego said nothing to that.

"Never guess my plans, Deakes. You'll fail every time."

"So I've learned," the man grumbled. "And don't call me Deakes. It's Dr. Director. Deacon Director. Remember?"

"Whatever. Later, Deakes."

The man grumbled about respect, but she cut him off with the video.

She moved to the pilot's seat, and stared out at the nearby mound left of the old manor, and gave a sad smile.

"At least I could save you, Kimmie," she said. "Goodbye, Princess," she said, and then forced herself to look away as she started her jet's engines, and headed for the next mission as GJ's top agent against all things supernatural.

After all, who better to face unstoppable threats than a woman who had gained true immortality through the plasma powers that infused her and made her a virtual walking star? It took a lot to even slow her these days, and no one had found anything that really stopped her. She could cope with that. Especially knowing she had finally helped her onetime lover finally find her own peace.

She owed Kim that much. And she had finally kept her word to Ann.

After all, she had long-ago promised Ann she would find Kim and help her find rest once Ron told them what had happened to her. The woman had known Shego always kept her promises, too.

Always.

She would keep this place safe. And put up a proper grave and marker to honor Kim Possible's last stand. She deserved it.

Her small jet rose into the air to speed across the sky as the wind blew through the old ruins, making a mournful sound. Only there was no one left to hear.

End….?