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Ron Stoppable woke up with the smell of food… Bacon, mostly, hard to miss. That was unusual, he did most of the cooking, especially as far as breakfast was concerned. Not that his wife was an incompetent cook or anything, that had long ago been fixed, but bacon and eggs or whatever was producing the divine scent was not her style.
The alarm clock read 08:17. He got out of bed and followed the smell to the kitchen. The only fire to be found was safely contained in the stove, the only red he saw was his wife’s glorious mane.
“Just a minute, Ron, I’m almost ready for you. You know, if I’d realized it was this easy to get you out of bed early, I’d have done this more often.”
“You know me, slave to the snackage. Especially when it’s made by my bon-diggity wife!”
“Oh, who else has been feeding you behind my back?” Her tone was playful, it was hardly a secret that she was the jealous type, but she had learned to poke fun at herself over the years.
“Oh, is my secret out?” He played along, “Is that why I’m getting a last meal while the kids are off at your folks?”
“No, Ronnie…”
Ronnie? Long time since I heard that one.
She continued, “It’s a very special anniversary today…”
Though the gears were turning in Ron’s head, he was not coming up with answers for big anniversaries in April.
Brain switch sitch? Hardly worth celebrating.
Proposal? That was May. Wedding in June…
Bueno Nacho 582 grand opening? That was April, but not even I celebrate that.
The panic was slowly building, he was not any closer to an answer and it was beginning to show.
“Our first kiss,” she answered, her smile unaffected by Ron’s inability to guess the event.
“But… KP, prom was in late May or something like that?”
“Well, as you might recall – if you didn’t hit your head too hard at the time – we kissed a few weeks before that.”
“The moodulator sitch? But that’s… You think of that as our first kiss?”
Kim’s smile faded a bit, unsurprisingly given how complicated those few weeks had been 20 years prior. “Well, in hindsight and with the benefit of time to reflect… yeah. You’re right, it was ferociously confusing, and… I don’t know, I’m still not sure what exactly went on in my mind while that thing was on. You know when there’s a mob of henchmen headed your way, and you’re like on autopilot until you’ve knocked out the last one?”
“I know exactly what you mean, KP. Doesn’t happen to me much with henchmen, but monkey ninjas, definitely.”
“Right, it’s like you’re in the zone… Well, the moodulator felt much the same, at the end of the day everything just came crashing down at once. Took me a minute to get my bearings, but I knew that some things I’d done were wrong, and I also knew that others were so right.”
“Was chasing me down the halls good or bad?”
“Bad. The kiss could have gone either way, but when you kissed me back… Well, that put it firmly in the ferociously good camp.”
“You know, KP, I kinda wish you’d told me that at the time. It was confusing for me too, you know? Especially when the whole thing was over, I was already regretting my grand plan to break up with you – but then you pointed to the sky.”
“Huh?” Kim had obviously forgotten some of the details that stuck in Ron’s mind.
“I’m talking of that line you gave me, ‘there’s still fireworks’, then I answered something like ‘you mean it’, and you answered by pointing upwards. No extreme ride, not even the Disorienter, could leave me as disoriented as you did, that day. No pun intended.”
Her smile gave way to a pensive expression. What felt like a minute passed before she commented, “I guess we shouldn’t have waited twenty years to talk about it, huh?”
“To be fair to ourselves, we had the Bondo Ball thing, the Zorpox sitch, that time we got stuck in cable TV, Drakken’s mind control shampoo, and the movie – not to mention the prom-slash-Diablo invasion all in like two months’ time! And I’m probably missing something.”
“I can’t help but notice that you skipped over the Yori sitch…”
Ron had genuinely forgotten that DNAmy’s convoluted plot to essentially kidnap Monkeyfist had taken place during said period, but the whole deal with Yori was a longstanding sore spot.
“Still, things… Kinda worked themselves out after that wild ride, didn’t they?” Much to Ron’s relief, it was not a topic Kim was keen on digging up, for now.
“Yup,” he said. “But I’m still curious – why did you point at the fireworks at the festival?”
“Well… I was scared. I meant the fireworks thing, but I panicked, thinking that I was making things weird. I… thought you didn’t have feelings for me, since you’d broken up with me a few minutes earlier. So… I pointed to the fireworks and told myself that it was just a rebound thing, that it was just the moodulator or hormones or something. That I’d get over you.”
“Well, KP, I was scared, too. I spent a while at Barkin’s place planning what I was going to do.”
“Woah, timeout! Barkin was involved when you decided to break up with me?”
“I mean, he was in the room, but I wouldn’t say he was involved. He mostly just sat there and then asked me how the hell I’d gotten into his house. The break-up idea was all me, I’m sorry to say.”
“Consider yourself lucky, because your wife was about to become a fugitive after murdering the vice-president. I so would not put it past him to mess with your mind like that.”
“Ah, but you wouldn’t do that because of the kids. Can you imagine them telling their friends ‘mommy is on the run for killing that mean old Mr. Barkin who used to be on TV’?”
The ridiculousness of the premise caught up with Kim, who started laughing out loud. Ron soon joined her.
“No, but seriously, KP,” Ron continued after regaining his breath, “everything was so sudden, and you were jumping between anger and love and sadness and whatever. It’s not like I hadn’t ever thought of us as a couple before, but I never imagined I’d even have a chance…”
“I sense there’s more to it…”
“I might as well tell you, if I don’t you’ll pull out the big guns and I’ll spill anyway… I figured you were trying to make a statement… To Josh, I mean.”
“Ron, I wouldn’t… Well, I mean, not consciously… I wouldn’t dream of using you like that.”
“But that’s the thing, you were so emotional that day, you were obviously not thinking, just being dragged along by your emotions. I figured we’d both end up hurt, that’s why I began to regret things after the moodulator came off, I knew you were literally out of control because of that thing, not because of your break-up with Josh. So, when I asked you about the crush, you really got my hopes up for a second, then – “
“Then I kicked them to the ground, stabbed them, and twisted the knife.”
“I was going to say you shut them down, but I guess your version is more visceral.”
Silence reigned. Though their breakfast remained untouched, neither Kim nor Ron wanted to just pretend nothing was going on and start eating.
Finally, it was Kim who broke the silence, “So, the conclusion is that we could have gotten together a few weeks earlier, with a bit less drama than the Diablos sitch.”
“Honestly, Kim, I don’t think it could’ve worked like that. But a second date would have been nice.”
“Like your cousin’s wedding… I kinda, sorta was fishing for you to invite me as your date. Well, date date. But I guess I chickened out when I got an answer I hadn’t expected.”
“Wait, when did that happen?”
“After we blew up Drakken’s lair, watching TV at my place…”
“Hmm… Sorry, KP, that doesn’t really narrow things down much.”
“We were talking about you evading your cousin Sean.”
“Oh, that conversation. You said, quote: ‘What if you brought a date?’ I said something to the effect of ‘Not that I’m asking you…’ and you answered ‘No. ‘Cause we’re friends, uh, and, um...’, I offered ‘It would be awkweird’, and you said, ‘Yeah. That’s the word I was looking for. Awkweird.’ Then you changed the subject to Agony County, so I took the whole thing as a ‘no’ and oh my God you were totally trying to get me to ask you out!”
“And they say you don’t understand girls…”
“Only took me twenty years,” he answered sarcastically.
“What’s far more impressive is that you still remember that conversation word-for-word.”
“It was a memorable one. It’s not like I remember every word you’ve ever said to me. So… You panicked and I didn’t have the guts to ask you outright.” Ron paused to contemplate the conversation so far, he concluded, “Man, how awkweird were we?”
“Right?”
Silence again.
“Guess we haven’t quite fixed that,” Ron said to lighten the mood.
Kim answered with a hesitant smile, “We’ll get there, I can do anything and all that!”
“Yeah… So, at the wedding – the second time around – you weren’t too happy when I used the word ‘date’…”
“Look at it this way, you set things up as a ‘just a friend’ thing, you can’t just spring the date thing onto a girl, out in public, at someone’s party. It’s a pressure thing, you know? Or like a trap, ‘hah, it was a date all along!’”
“Somehow, that both makes sense and sounds like something Drakken would try.”
“The guy who tried to set up my dad with a robot date? Surely not.”
The couple had a good laugh at the mad scientist’s expense.
“Oh, man,” Ron said while trying to catch his breath, “I feel kinda bad for him, he did push us together.”
“Too bad he was trying to push us over the edge. Ron… You ever wonder what would have happened if it weren’t for his synthodrone plot?”
“Honestly, no. I was far too busy daydreaming about my badical girlfriend. Or worrying about reasons she might break up with me. Or planning daring escapes from black hole-bound probes. I mean, sooner or later the voices inside my head would have pushed me to say something, though probably not while tied to a giant cactus.”
“Voices…?” Kim asked in a concerned tone.
“Well, not voices, maybe thoughts? That day, the thought that you needed me to be there for you won out over ‘don’t make a fool out of yourself’.”
“Sounds kinda like the moodulator, now that I think about it.”
“I guess, but I’d much rather think of it like this: Kim Possible can do anything, even get me to confess my feelings.”
“Guess you should name that one voice ‘Kim’.”
“I would, but I’d much prefer to not be put in a looney bin, when I could be with my beautiful wife and kids.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t dare try to separate us, not after the Lowardians gave it a good try.”
“Maybe that’s why it was so hard,” Ron mused.
“What do you mean?”
“We had to be absolutely sure, we’re like two atoms colliding, we’ll either stick together forever or violently decay in a spectacular release of energy.” Seeing Kim’s blank stare, Ron added, “Beers with your dad, he was telling me about his ideas for the fancy new particle accelerator they installed at the space center. Anyway, my point is that I don’t regret how things went down.”
“You don’t regret any of it?”
“I mean, sure, I regret this or that detail. But in the end, I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. Maybe I’d make it so that your childhood home wouldn’t be destroyed. And I guess I really wouldn’t have stolen the battlesuit. And the coupons, definitely no coupons. But that’s beside the point. We got here, together, and we will be together till the end.”
“Sounds like a spankin’ plan to me. But promise me one thing, Ron.”
“Anything, KP.”
“Let’s not wait twenty years to discuss something ever again. We’ll end up eating breakfast cold.”