Cold Fusion: Twelve Days, Ch 3
Pretty much all the fun road trippy things in this chapter are the result of people giving me ideas. Karen B Jones, especially. Thank you, seriously. I have had NO idea what to have them do on this trip. I mean, zero ideas. Chapter 4 has more fun road trippy things; I already had this one mostly drafted when I posted Chapter 2, so there wasn't a whole lot of room to insert fun road trippy things in here.
Still no word from DreamWorks re: my request that they gift me the rights to all things Megamind, so I'm going to assume that they haven't done that and I still own nothing.
Also, had to split this chapter in 2 parts because Lj is being a butt.
Chapter 3
York, Nebraska
8:34 AM Eastern Standard Time
7:34 AM Central Standard Time
"What are you thinking?"
He tears his gaze away from the blindingly white Nebraska landscape flying past outside and squints over at Roxanne. "Hm?"
"Penny for your thoughts."
"Which one?" He laughs. "I have so many."
She chuckles. "Tell me one of the background thoughts."
He grins. 'Background thoughts' is Roxanne's name for the trains of thought that run rampant in the back of his mind at all times. He usually doesn't direct them if he isn't working on a specific project; he finds that he's better able to brainstorm when he needs to if he lets the streams of low-level plotting wander where they will on his off days. "I'm cataloguing the caffeine-to-liquid ratios of various black teas and comparing them to different blends of coffee. So far, coffee's still ahead."
"You're just biased."
"That may be," he agrees affably.
There's a brief pause. Then Roxanne says, "Tell me a story."
"What?" He blinks at her. "I don't tell stories."
"I bet you know a lot of them, though. You read so much." She glances over and smiles. "Come on, tell me a story. A good one."
He shrugs. "O-okay. What kind of story?"
"Any kind."
It's been a long time since he's read anything that could be called a story, and he's at a loss. Flailing a little bit, he spits out the first thing that pops into his head without thinking: "Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato prof-"
"Okay, I'm going to stop you right there," Roxanne interrupts, sounding like she's trying not to laugh, "and remind you for the umpteenth time that I don't speak Latin."
"Oh," Megamind says, feeling very silly. "Right. Yes. S-so we'll just ignore the Aeneid, shall we?"
"Unless you can translate it into English on the fly, that's a good idea."
Megamind is not good at translating off the top of his head, which rules out most of his vast store of folklore in addition to the Aeneid and Oedipus Rex. As far as English goes, he's sure she doesn't want Shakespeare. "You're going to have to give me some kind of criteria or I'm going to tell you about string theory, and nobody wants that."
She laughs again. "What stories grabbed your attention as a kid? What did you like to read? Poetry, short stories? Novels?"
"No, you don't understand," he says, "that doesn't narrow it down." A good story, he thinks, a children's story-heroes and battles and swords? I don't know any little girls' stories. Would she even want one of those? He scowls in frustration at the realization that he doesn't even know what constitutes a normal little boy's story and decides to abandon that line of thought. "Look, just…give me a genre. Sad, happy? Anything."
She thinks for a minute, scrunching up her nose a little. "Oh, I don't know. A sad story. With love in it. I'm kind of a hopeless romantic, you may have noticed. I try to hide it, but-"
"Under your utterly humorless exterior, you mean?" He grins and settles back in the chair, nodding. "Okay. I think I know one. Uncle Dexter read it to me when I was small, and-well. Poetry isn't my usual, but…anyway…" He takes a deep breath and launches into it, feeling unbelievably stupid but resolved to do his best.
"On either side the river lie long fields of barley and of rye, that clothe the wold and meet the sky, and through the field the road runs by to many-towered Camelot." He closes his eyes, remembering the stammering voice, the thick spectacles, the shy smile, and focuses on the memory rather than the intense feeling that what he's doing is incredibly silly.
Roxanne is quiet. She hadn't expected this particular story, hadn't expected that he would choose Tennyson of all things, hadn't ever thought of this as a story instead of just a poem with a plot, hadn't expected that his voice would suit poetry at all-let alone so well. His broad inflection lends itself to the scenery, his enunciation is clear. He's obviously reciting, but still, he manages to make it flow.
He paints her the story of a woman cursed to live her life alone, watching the world pass by in a mirror aimed at the window behind her, weaving a tapestry of what little she sees in the glass, trapped on the inside looking out. Roxanne had forgotten this poem. She can't even remember now what class she'd needed to read it for, or whether it had been in university or high school, but she does remember that she had thought it was lonely.
"But in her web she still delights to weave the mirror's magic sights, for often through the silent nights a funeral with plumes and lights and music went to Camelot. Or when the moon was overhead, came two young lovers lately wed-'I am half-sick of shadows,' said the Lady of Shalott."
The story changes in her mind, and she can't help the wry smile that twists her mouth-when he had said 'poetry,' she'd half-expected him to start in on The Raven. It would have fit her criteria, but no-she had asked for a story, and Megamind had chosen The Lady of Shalott.
I am half-sick of shadows.
"It's a beautiful poem," she says when he finishes. "You tell it really well. I don't think I ever really understood it before." She means that she'd only ever thought it was sad and lonely, but she'd never really thought about it.
"What's not to understand?" he asks, astonished. "Pretty transparent, I think. She's trapped in this tower-she's stuck apart from the world, forced to content herself with only ever watching until she finally snaps. She sees Lancelot and she just-she wants that, so badly, and she just can't help herself, and she snaps."
"Like you?" The words are out before Roxanne can stop them. Megamind looks at her, surprised.
"Well," he says after a long moment, "I never snapped. Not quite."
"Never snapped?" She has to laugh. "You spent how many years as a supervillain?"
He colors. "That was me not snapping. That was me staying sane."
She glances over, frowning a little. She had meant her comments in jest, but he doesn't sound like he's joking. "Are you being serious?"
He hesitates, then gives a jerky, awkward nod. "Rebelling the way I did was…unconventional, I know, but it was the only thing I could think to do that would let me lash out and use my considerable intellect at the same time. I was going crazy in that school, forced to follow a curriculum aimed at lesser minds-no offense," he adds hastily, "but seriously, I was running circles around everybody else."
"Why did you stay in school?" she asks. "I've always wondered that."
"It was part of the warden's 'arrangement' with the PHED." His lip curls a little. "If they were going to treat me like an ordinary human, I had to be raised like one. No special allowances except for me staying at the prison-they wanted to minimize my potential for trouble as much as possible." He sighs and looks out the window. "Anyway, I got really good at being a villain. I enjoyed it. And it had been so long since I'd enjoyed anything that I…I just kept going. Metro Dude was there to keep me under just enough control that the government stayed off my back through high school, so when the PHED took Minion I already had some experience and I was able to really…expand my core competencies, shall we say?"
She chuckles, and he looks at her, one eyebrow crawling quizzically upward.
"Nothing. I just-I'm starting to realize that there's so much about you I still don't understand." She's smiling, though, so she can't mean it like it's a bad thing-can she?
"I could attempt to clarify something, if you want," he offers, confused, but she shakes her head.
"No. It's okay." She laughs. "I know this must sound weird, but sometimes the only way you can really appreciate something is by not understanding it at first. Or by understanding it from a completely aesthetic viewpoint, like with music. Or poetry, I guess." She shakes her head. "It's like-losing something in translation, maybe? You," she says, "you translated who you are into a bouncy, cackling madman, and while that translation of you was really fun and I liked him, it never occurred to me that I could ever love him. All the little intricacies of who you are were still there, but they got sort of lost in translation."
She lets out another short, embarrassed laugh. "But I don't think I'd be having nearly as much fun with you now if you'd grown up into a normal adult. I appreciated the villain you first, and I still see that side of you sometimes, but there's so much more to you than that and I think what really amazes me is that you can be the man who puts on the show, who runs the show, and still be the guy who comes home after the show and wants nothing more than to curl up with a hot coffee and play with his man-toys. I'm still trying to figure out who you really are.
"Also, you sounded like the old you for a minute there-the 'expanding competencies' thing-and it made me go all nostalgic for the bad old days."
"Oh," he says, and draws himself up a little bit, unsure about where to go with any of what she just said. "I apologize?"
"No, no!" She shakes her head, coloring slightly. "No, it was-nice. Sometimes I almost miss the old you. My supervillain."
"I beg your pardon," he replies stiffly, trying to conceal the fact that he's secretly delighted, "I was not your supervillain."
"Oh, yes you were," she scoffs, grinning. "I was your kidnappee, and you were my supervillain, and Minion was our comic relief and Wayne was our hero, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. I wouldn't have changed a thing."
His eyes light up. "Really? Not anything?"
"It brought us here," she tells him. "Why would I want to change that?"
He's quiet for a while, looking down at his hands twisted in his lap-Pavel's one persistent hangnail that he can't program out of the disguise and keeps forgetting doesn't actually exist still annoys him; whoever Pavel's face actually belongs to had otherwise perfect nails and the tiny red mark is just too out of place. Then he says, "You know we're going to be in trouble when we get back to Metrocity." He frowns. "Metro City."
"Because we're together, you mean."
"I've been in limbo up until now," he elaborates, still not looking at her, tugging on that stupid hangnail. Never mind that it's not really there and he can't feel it. "Politically speaking. Publicly speaking. But this, us, together, this is going to bring everything crashing down. You know that, right?" He isn't quite sure how to make her understand, but he hasn't brought this up before and it needs to be said. He also isn't quite sure how she's going to take it; she tends to take offense to any suggestion that she might someday want to leave him and Roxanne on the defensive makes him feel shaky. "They're going to question all of it, I'm going to be investigated, people will want interviews, the whole nine yards. And I've been trying to think how to respond to it all, and I just can't think of anything. And there's the whole Metro Man thing…"
Roxanne nods. She knows. She's been thinking about it too, off and on over the past few months. "They'll accuse you of killing him."
"They'll want justice done," he says with a helpless shrug, "and I don't blame them. A full pardon? Those are just words, really." Megamind, of all people, knows how empty words truly are. And what power they can hold if wielded properly, whether they're true or not. That's the tough part, really: truth and public opinion very rarely function together.
"So what do we do?"
"I don't know." He finally looks over at her, hoping she might at least have an idea. "I just don't know."
She wets her lips and says what they both are thinking. "You could ask him to come out of hiding-"
"No," he says immediately, "I can't ask him to do that. They'll kill him. They'll want me dead, but they'll kill him, whether they mean to or not. He'll have to come back someday, he and I have discussed it, but not yet. He isn't ready. I mean," he stammers, suddenly aware that he's starting to babble, "he's even offered to come out of hiding, but anyone can see-no. I can't do that to him. I can't. Please don't ask me to."
"I won't," she assures him, "I won't ask. It was only a suggestion; I know how you are about him." She isn't sure what's gotten into Megamind's head about Wayne, but he's surprisingly protective of the ex-hero-he told her once that he feels responsible for what had happened to him, and after some thought she's decided she can understand that. Wayne is certainly responsible for a lot of Megamind's childhood isolation, but the latter was the driving factor in Wayne's isolation as an adult, his rise to superheroism. If not for the constant scheming, he might never have become as much of a hero as he had.
"Megamind." She frowns at the road ahead. "Whatever else happens, you know I'm with you, right?"
He looks at her and exhales slowly through his nose, and that more than anything else tips her off that he has some kind of motive for bringing this up. He only does that when conversations aren't going the way he wants. "I know," he says quietly. "But just so you know, if it gets to you, if it gets to be too much and you have to leave, I will understand."
"It's not gonna happen, Megs-"
"But if it does," he snaps, sharply enough that she blinks and glances over, "I will understand. Just take that at face value, all right? I'm not asking for reassurance; I am trying to tell you that if the bad publicity and hate ends up being too much and you're unhappy, if you have to leave, I will understand."
She can't look at him, so maybe that's why she doesn't just leave it where it sits-also, what's up with him cutting her off in midsentence and then nearly taking her head off? "How can you possibly understand something like that? I'd be abandoning you. I'd be quitting."
"I've been there. I know what that's like-"
"Look," she says, "I've already told you I'm not going to leave you. Why can't you just leave it alone?"
"Because you aren't being rational!" he snarls, and that's when she starts to get angry. "Think for a minute, I know it's hard for you, but try. What if something happens and you decide that you don't want to be with me anymore? It happens all the time. It's the number one leading cause of breakups: one party decides they don't want to be with the other! It's that simple!"
"Don't you pull the 'I'm smarter than you' card on me," she warns. "Not unless you're trying to piss me off."
He backs off a little. "Okay. Sorry. I didn't mean it that way."
"You did," she says flatly, "but apparently you're mad at me now and that makes it okay."
Irritatingly pinkish fingers clench in the image of denim. "Roxanne, don't…"
"Oh, whatever. Look, the point is, it's not gonna happen."
And he flares right back up. "But it could! We might discover that we're totally incompatible after all. The fact that I'll never be able to sire children with you could be a deal-breaker. If you were anybody else, the fact that Minion will always be with us could have torn us apart weeks ago!" He flops his hands into his lap and stares at her. "For heaven's sake, Roxanne. It is possible that someday we might not be together. Do you understand that? You are being completely irrational!"
She nearly yells at him for that one, but takes a deep breath instead with some effort. "I agree," she says, in a measured, even tone, "that it is physically possible for me to tell you I don't love you anymore. But it's really unlikely, okay? And yes, I am being rational about it. The way we've been living for the past two months? I have no complaints." The next bit slips out before she can think. "I can see us living that way for the next thirty years."
His head turns so fast she's surprised he doesn't get a crick in his neck. "Are you proposing?"
"What?" She very nearly swerves. "No!"
"Good," Megamind says fervently. When she sends him a questioning glance, he flushes to the tips of his ears. "B-because I kind of wanted to be the one to do that. If, you know, that ends up happening. I'm not promising anything, or whatever, I'm just-" He turns, if possible, even redder. "I'm just not going to say anything else for a little while."
She's laughing. She can't help it. This is why she loves him: they're snapping at each other, both of them indignant and defensive, and then all of a sudden he says something and she's laughing. "I'm just saying. I'm happy with you and I'm a stubborn sonuvagun. I cannot imagine public disapproval being enough to change my mind about you."
He smiles at her and nods.
"You can talk, you know," she prompts, grinning, but he shakes his head.
"No, anything else I say at this point is just going to be digging myself a deeper hole." Suddenly he brightens. "Can I veto this conversation topic?"
"For how long?"
He raises and lowers thin shoulders, the moss-green projection of a turtleneck pulling tight across his collarbones. "Twenty-four hours? I declare a twenty-four hour moratorium on any discussion of-um-"
"Proposals? Weddings?"
"Yes. Those."
She bumps a fist into his shoulder. "Well, since you don't appear capable of talking about them anyway…I guess that's okay."
He lets out a dramatic sigh of relief and grabs her hand before she can pull it back, squeezes it. Brushes his thumb across the underside of her wrist. "Thank you." Grins wickedly. "Tell me a story?"
She outright cackles and extracts her hand so she can put it back on the wheel. "No. No, no no. I do not tell stories."
"Neither do I, but you got me to recite Tennyson." He raises his eyebrows at her. "I think you owe me one."
"No, I mean, I can't even tell jokes. I'm a terrible storyteller." She shakes her head.
He sighs, but grins. Then he settles back in his seat, wiggles for a moment, and leans the seat back a little. He folds his hands comfortably over his stomach. "The year 1866 was signalized by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten," he says. She shoots him a bewildered look, but he just smirks at her.
"Megamind, what are you talking about?"
"Shh," he says, holding a finger to his lips. Green eyes dance, and Pavel's mouth curls into Megamind's mischievous smile. "I am telling you a story."
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Sedgwick, Colorado
1:35 PM EST
11:35 AM Mountain Standard Time
They stop for lunch at a café that, as far as either of them can tell, is in the middle of nowhere. The letters on the red roof tell them it's Lucy's Place, little else-the signs painted on the windows are better but not by much. Meet your friends at. Welcome to.
"And you're sure I can eat this stuff," Megamind is saying as they walk inside.
Roxanne rolls her eyes at him, clenching and unclenching her cold hands in her pockets. She had been rummaging through the trunk in the parking lot, digging for the camera bag she had accidentally buried under what seemed like all of their stuff. "For the last time, yes."
"But how do you know?"
A cheerful voice calls out from behind the register, "Go on and take a seat wherever, be right with you!"
They sit in one of the two available booths by the window, and the waitress is indeed right with them, smiling and asking if she can get them something to drink.
"Water, thank you," Megamind says.
"I'll have a soda, whatever's closest," Roxanne tells her. She's sitting on her hands, trying to warm her fingers.
"Gotcha, we'll surprise you. Our specials today are the buffalo burger and the chicken-fried steak, okay?"
Megamind looks around. Aside from the booths by the front and side windows, there's a counter with some stools and a row of benches down a long table in the middle of the room. That's all. It's not a very big place, but for all that it certainly is busy.
"Watch out for the pits in the cherry pie," Roxanne murmurs, and he looks at her.
"Sorry?"
"That sign on the wall. I guess there are pits in the cherry pie."
"Huh," he says.
The waitress is back with their drinks. Roxanne's is a terrific shade of orange. "Get your orders, or you still need a minute?"
"You all use real sugar, right?" Megamind asks. "Not that processed stuff?"
"That's right, we do things home-style here."
"In that case, I'll have the chicken-fried steak," Roxanne says, and looks across the table at her companion.
"I don't know what that is," he admits.
The waitress raises her eyebrows in surprise. "It's Heaven fried and covered in milk gravy, sweetheart," she tells him. "Best thing for you in the middle of winter like this-keep you from turning blue out there."
His lips twitch. "In that case, I think I'd better have one of those."
Lunch is uneventful, conversation is light. Both Roxanne and Megamind are in considerably higher spirits. He is quick to laugh and quicker to smile, teasing her mercilessly about anything and everything, more relaxed than she has seen him in a long time regardless of their earlier disagreement.
They pay their bill and get up to leave, only to be chased back into their seats by their waitress, who makes it cheerfully but abundantly clear that they aren't leaving without cake. Megamind asserts that since she's dragged them so unceremoniously back inside, the only way they can possibly retaliate is to insist that she take a picture with the two of them. A man with a green baseball cap and an enormous walrusy mustache agrees to do the honors.
The camera flashes, and, laughing, they take the camera from the mustachioed man's shaking hands and make their escape without looking at how the photo turned out, waving to their waitress as they exit the restaurant and head back to the car.
"He was really staring at you, did you notice?" Roxanne says as she gets in and starts the car.
"Who?"
"The guy who took our picture. He was watching you all the way to the car." She sends him a questioning glance. "You didn't see?"
Shrugging, Megamind stows the camera under his seat. "I'm sure it's fine. It's not like the disguise generator failed-although, really, I'm sort of surprised we've made it this far without any strange disasters."
"Those do tend to find us with alarming frequency," she agrees. "How far did Lucy say the gas station was from here?"
"Thirty miles or so," Megamind says as Roxanne stops, waiting for an opening in the traffic. He inhales and looks like he's about to shout something-but stops himself at the last minute.
"What?"
He blushes. "It is at this juncture that I would ordinarily tell Minion to punch it."
Roxanne laughs, and, shaking her head, punches it.
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Sterling, Colorado
2:09 PM EST
12:09 PM MST
Everything at the gas station starts off as usual, except for the extremely sluggish, out-of-season wasp that Roxanne has to shoo out her window as they pull in. Megamind stretches his legs and back, bending every which way until she's certain he can't possibly bend any further or risk falling over, then follows her into the station. He rants for a few seconds about the casino machines, about probability and counting cards and vector lines, and they briefly go their separate ways before heading back out to the car.
It's funny, Roxanne will think later, that if her traveling companion hadn't stopped to yell about the machines or had yelled for a little bit longer, or if she hadn't ignored Megamind's disparaging noises and stopped at the counter to pick up a postcard for Minion, nothing might have happened. As it is, his earlier comment about 'strange disasters' turns out to be slightly prophetic.
Maybe it's the antique car that catches his attention. Maybe he sees something in Pavel's quiet appearance that ticks him off. Maybe he's just having a really bad day. Roxanne isn't sure. But when Megamind glances over at the man lounging against one of the fake hitching posts in front of the building, he spits out his cigarette and squares his shoulders. "What're you looking at?"
Megamind's hand closes around her elbow. "Come on," he mutters. "Just walk faster."
He turns and starts for the car, but big-and-ugly calls after him, "Hey! Hey man, don't you walk away from me!"
He sighs and stops moving. "What are you doing?" Roxanne hisses. "I thought we were walking faster?"
"The car's too far away and he's got friends between it and us," he replies in a low voice.
"So what do we do?"
"Stay behind me and don't say anything." Then he turns around, raises his voice. "C'mon, man. You don't want trouble."
"Yeah, Tiny? I think I do want trouble, what you think about that?"
He watches him approach, raising his hands as the man steps forward, but when he speaks he doesn't sound nervous at all. "I think if you really want it, I can bring it."
"Ha!"
Roxanne's stomach turns over-are they really going to fight? Should she do something? What can she do?
Big-and-ugly starts to lift his fists, but then Megamind moves.
He strikes first, ducking forward and hitting the man repeatedly in the face, making him stumble back. He recovers and swings but Megamind bats his arm to the side in a tight, circular sweep that turns into something like a fencing thrust and ends in a sickening crunch.
Big-and-ugly lets out a pained sound and flails, catching Megamind a glancing blow before crumpling to his knees, clutching his arm. Megamind whirls and grabs Roxanne by the wrist, pulling her away. He jogs with her to the car, and okay, now she sees the two other guys sidling quickly towards them, coats buttoned up to their chins. She slides into the passenger seat and he closes the door after him-but the window's still down, and suddenly there's a knife pressed to Megamind's neck under his ear, above his scarf.
At this point, several things happen very quickly.
Megamind snaps the door back open, grabbing the guy's wrist in one hand and shoving it backwards against the inside edge of the window as he does so, then shunts the door open wider to dislocate his would-be assailant's shoulder as he steps out of the car. The man starts to yell, but Megamind already has his mouth and chin with his other hand. He jerks the thick chin around to the side as he lets go of the man's captive wrist, then slams his elbow into the base of the man's neck as he goes down. He doesn't get up again.
Then Megamind has to turn around fast, because the third guy is coming up behind him. Guy Number Three is built like a tank and swings with a haymaker, but Megamind ducks in and hits him across the face with the sharp bone of his elbow, leaving a line of blood behind. Three stumbles but recovers. From where Roxanne is sitting, there's no finesse or fancy moves anymore, just a flurry of open palms and closed fists, feet trying to trip each other up.
It's over quickly, only a few seconds, but those drag on like an eternity. Then Three swings and Megamind grabs him by the hand, twists hard, and drags him around using the captive arm as a lever and brings his knee up to slam into Three's ribcage. He doubles over and Megamind follows him down, drumming his fists on the side of his head all the way to the ground, then strikes him twice in the ear with the side of his forearm before diving back into the car and slamming the door.
He turns the key in the ignition and proceeds to leave two lovely black streaks of rubber on the parking lot on his hasty exodus to the highway.
"What the hell was that?" Roxanne says shrilly after a brief moment of stunned silence. "What. What the hell?"
"That," says Megamind, breathing hard through his nose, "was thoroughly irritating. Can you take the wheel for a minute?"
Roxanne reaches over to steer while he turns off the watch and pulls up his sleeve to inspect his arm. "Damn," he says. "I'm more out of practice than I thought. It wasn't even a gun. Man, I liked this sweater, too."
"Are you hurt?"
"Not badly," he grunts, twisting around to reach for the wool blanket in the backseat. "You okay steering for a minute?"
"Which arm is it?"
"The right. Hang on, I need to get a towel or the blanket or something. I can't believe I did that." Blue fingers reach for his seat belt, but Roxanne shakes her head.
"I'll get it. You drive." There's a roll of paper towels on the floor behind the driver's seat; Roxanne unbuckles to get to it. Her stomach flops uncomfortably when she sees the blood on Megamind's arm. "I really hope this looks worse than it is."
"It'll be fine. Just put pressure on it. There's some Band-Aids in the glove box."
"Band-Aids?" Pressing the wadded-up paper towels against his forearm, she thinks she might be getting a little bit hysterical. "You're bleeding all over the car!"
He glances over at her, genuinely amused. "Not all over." Then he blinks. "You're really pale. You okay?"
"I just watched you get stabbed!"
"Cut," he corrects, "not stabbed. And it's just a shallow cut, too, look-it's not even that big."
"It's three inches long!"
Frowning, Megamind looks at the side of his hand and wrist. "Two and a half," he amends, and Roxanne makes an incredulous scoffing sound. "But look at it, it's shallow."
"If it were shallow, it wouldn't still be bleeding like this. I know how you heal; don't lie to me." She keeps her hand planted firmly on his arm as she rummages through the glove compartment, looking for the Band-Aids. "Where," she asks, "did you learn to fight like that?"
He sends her an amused glance. "In prison? Also, keep in mind that as far as I'm concerned, 'shallow' covers anything that doesn't hit bone. I've had worse than this."
She looks at him sharply, even though part of her is trying not to laugh at the fact that Megamind's car comes fully stocked with bandages, because of course it would. "That was not prison fighting."
"Well, when one spends one's childhood around the criminally gifted," Megamind says, "one tends to learn…certain techniques. I am a jack of all trades and master of none." He shrugs. "I mean, I can handle myself in a low-down, drag-out brawl. I am a mean bastard with a good piece of chain. Slocks are better, and pipe is best. But this wasn't that kind of setting, and I had you to think about. So, you know. Take them down as fast as possible."
She's staring now and she knows it, but she can't help herself. For one thing, god only knows when's the next time she'll be able to look at his real face, but far more interesting to her right now is that this is a side of him that she has never seen before and it's fascinating, not to mention little bit scary. It's easy to forget his background, how he was raised, where, and by whom, but at times like these, when he sidesteps a few punches and uses his elbows and open palms to take down three would-be assailants, the man he's never been is all too easy to recognize. Her boyfriend-the one with the blazingly happy smile and dancing eyes, who all but purrs when she holds him a certain way-is a 'mean bastard with a good piece of chain'?
She doesn't say any of this, of course. She tries not to call him out about the weird stuff; it only makes him uncomfortable. What she says is, "What's a slock?"
"Bunch of padlocks in a sock. Soap works too if you don't have any metal."
"Soap?"
"It's harder than you think, and the density helps." He shrugs. "I'm most comfortable with my hands," he says. "My uncle Guduza is Zulu; he taught me the basics of stick-fighting. But you need sticks for that, and I don't carry those around. Mitch and Vinnie taught me my street fighting-you know, keep your chin down, direct strikes away from your center line, never probe your attacker."
Roxanne stifles a snort. "Probe?"
"You know, like sparring or jabbing to get a feel for them. Those men didn't want to fight, they wanted to rob us or worse. Lucky for us, they weren't trained by Metro City's biggest and baddest. We had a guy in for a little while who knew some Silat, some Krav, some really nice techniques for insurance fraud-he'd been an instructor before he lost everything when the market crashed. Made it nearly three years without getting caught before they got him on a DUI and saw some interesting papers on the passenger seat of his car. I learned a lot from him. It's great exercise, too!"
She closes the cut with two butterfly bandages. "This might scar."
"No it won't," he says confidently. "I don't scar easily. The few I've gotten have faded over time-or are currently fading. Besides, the knife was sharp and the cut is clean. I'll be fine."
"What about the two on your chest?"
Unconsciously, his hand flickers towards the small lines near his right collarbone. "Those are different. They were cauterized and never had the chance to heal properly."
"How did you get them?"
"Laser fire," he says shortly. Then he glances over at her. His thin smile doesn't reach his eyes. "You were there. It was years ago, before you were really used to me. I'm not surprised you don't remember."
If I was there…Roxanne frowns. "Your lasers?"
Megamind laughs. "No. Metro Man came at me from the side and I wasn't ready, I didn't dodge fast enough."
She does remember that, oddly enough. She remembers that she had been surprised at how quickly Megamind had given up. He had reeled back with a startled cry, one hand pressed against his shoulder, staring at Wayne with wide green eyes. Then his brows had lowered and he had snarled something, she doesn't remember what, and a minute later she had been safe in the air and on her way home. She had never realized he was really hurt; the thought had simply never occurred to her.
She changes the subject. No time like the present, and she doesn't want to wait for him to calm down before riling him back up again. "I need to talk to you about my dad."
He blinks a few times. "Wait, really?"
"There are some things you should know."
"But you never talk about your dad."
Roxanne opens her mouth, then hesitates. "On second thought, maybe we should wait until I'm driving."
Megamind laughs at that. "Oh, please. I'm sure I can handle it. What's wrong?"
"He may or may not work for the PHED. Whoa!" She plants her feet and throws her hands up against the ceiling; the car has just leapt unexpectedly forward.
"Sorry, sorry!" He brakes quickly, ears burning. "I-I must have misheard you; I thought you said your father might work for the PHED."
Roxanne bites her lip and looks down at her lap. Megamind glances over at her and groans. "Jeez, Roxanne! You don't think maybe I'd have liked a little more time to prepare myself?"
"I'm sorry!" she protests. "It honestly didn't occur to me until Minion said something. Dad never talks about his job-he just says he helps people. He used to bring people from work home when I was little; I met a lot of cool people that way."
"So what, exactly, makes you think he works with the PHED?" Megamind demands, flexing his hand a little and scowling at the way the bandage tugs at his skin.
Roxanne grimaces. "Because one of the people he brought home may have been green."
"Green."
"Not bright green, but she was definitely greenish. I…didn't tell Minion about that one. But she was really nice!" she adds, and Megamind makes a noise like ohmigod. "It was just one of those things you think is normal when you're little." She shrugs apologetically. "I really didn't consider how strange it was until recently."
He hisses an incredulous puff of air through his nose. "I don't believe this."
She shakes her head. "Look, I don't know for sure, and I'm sorry if it makes you worry. But Minion said I should tell you about it, so now I have."
He laughs shortly. "Well, all I can say is if you're right, the tiny world we live in has just gotten smaller."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"It's okay." And it is, really. He remembers everyone he had met in Washington when he had been a child, and he would have remembered someone named Ritchi. "There's actually a good chance you're mistaken," he admits. He had wanted to avoid telling her about this, but he might as well. As long as we're getting all the heavy conversations out of the way in one fell swoop… "If your father were associated with the PHED, it would have showed up in your background check."
Roxanne stares at him. "You ran a background check on me?"
"Years ago." He waves it away. "It was nothing personal; I checked all my kidnapees. The last thing I wanted was to grab someone in Witness Protection or with diplomatic immunity or something."
She's quiet for a while, long enough for him to start to worry. But when she speaks, she only sounds curious. "And Chad didn't show up?"
"Not by name. I knew you had a restraining order out at one point, but not who it was against."
"But you could have found that out, if you wanted to."
"Yes." He had thought Roxanne knew how much of an open book her life has become, but if she's surprised that he ran a background check on her…maybe he'd better let her know. Just to be safe. "Look, I'm not going to pry, but you don't exactly have a ton of privacy."
"I know there are cameras in the Lair."
He winces. "I was thinking more about the brainbots. They're around the Lair, sure, but they're also my eyes and ears around the city."
She frowns a little, confused. "What's your point?"
"My point is, the brainbots know where you are if you're within Metro City limits. Also certain areas of Chicago and New York-well, and parts of Japan-and Switzerland-okay, and there may still be a few in San Salvador but that's beside the point." He glances over, nervous. "I really hope this isn't a surprise."
"It is," Roxanne says slowly. "I mean, I know the bots are all over the place, but-wait, are they watching me?"
"They keep tabs on everyone they recognize," Megamind tells her. "So, yes."
Roxanne stares at him, fiddling nervously with her seat belt. "I don't know if I'm comfortable with that. You can find out where I am?"
He frowns. "I'm not going to do that."
"Why not?"
"Well, for one thing," he says slowly, "because it would be a gross invasion of the privacy you should have. And for another? Because I trust you." He rolls his eyes. "Why would I need to know where you are?"
She shrugs. "You don't. But you could."
"But I won't." That isn't quite the truth, though. He grimaces. "Unless it's an emergency."
"What kind of emergency?" She's really not okay with this.
He heaves a sigh. "Remember Carnival?"
"Carn-Evil, yes."
"Oh, whatever. How do you think I found you so quickly that time?" He cocks an eyebrow at her. "Brainbots. Roxanne, do you love me?"
She blinks, confused. "Of course I do."
"And do you trust me?"
"Yes."
He takes a deep breath, stifling the little thrill that always runs through him when she responds to questions like that without thinking. "Then believe me when I tell you I'm not going to use the brainbots to check up on your location unless it's an emergency and I have no other options. I promise."
She looks at him for a long, tense moment, then nods. "Okay."
He grins, relieved. That was easy. "Really?"
"Yeah. You don't break your promises." Then she offers him a weak half-smile. "Besides, it's not like it's useless. It could come in handy if something bad happens."
There's a pause.
Eventually Megamind breaks it with a strange little laugh. "So, hey. Turns out we're still capable of awkward silences."
She snorts. "How-reassuring?" Then they're both laughing. "I don't believe this," she finally chuckles. "I mean-I still keep being so surprised when I stop and think about what we're doing."
Because how, how could she have known five years ago that someday she would be driving through Colorado with the man who had been kidnapping her for the past few years on their way to visit her family over Christmas? How could she have known that she would be falling asleep if not in his arms every night then pretty damn close? How could she have known that she would someday actually crave physical contact with him? How could she have known they would fit so well together?
He isn't even human. There's nothing remotely normal about what they're doing, and yet, somehow, it's so right.
Megamind reaches for the radio. "Music?" he asks.
"Sounds like a plan."
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
"Crank it up!" She giggles uncontrollably, turning up the volume until Megamind actually has to take it down a notch.
"I don't know this one!" he yells.
"Then learn it!" she shouts back, already air-drumming wildly. "We belong to the light, we belong to the thunder-"
Megamind joins her on the chorus the next time it comes around, glad she can't hear him. When the song ends, he quickly lowers the volume and starts scanning through channels. "I get to pick the next-oh yes! Shot through the heart! And you're to blame!"
She cheers and joins in, almost inaudible over Bon Jovi, but she's beaming and laughing whenever she messes up a line and Megamind is cackling right along with her.
They're both panting when he finally turns the music back down until they find out what's on next. "I don't think I've ever caught that one as it was just starting before," she gasps.
"Me either." Then, when the drums start up and she turns towards him with glee shining out of her whole face, he groans. "Really? Africa?"
"Turn it up, turn it up! I hear the drums echoing tonight-"
He sticks out his tongue but twists the dial anyway. And when the chorus rolls around and Roxanne starts pointing at him and singing about how it's gonna take a lot to take me away from you, there's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do, he's kind of glad he didn't switch the station.
A while later, they're both hoarse and their sides hurt from laughing. Megamind has learned that Roxanne knows all the words to every Bruce Springsteen song that will ever come on the radio, can hit notes that make him wince, can stay more or less in tune as long as she doesn't hit those notes, and although she isn't too familiar with the genre she likes a lot of the same hard rock that he does and has at least a passing familiarity with AC/DC. Roxanne has learned that Megamind, while completely incapable of singing in tune despite his claim to perfect pitch, can manage a surprisingly good death metal growl. She also knows that the only real problem he has with Africa is the mispronunciation of 'Serengeti.'
They're both having more fun than they've had in weeks. Megamind's lazy smile stays relaxed, and the two of them lapse into a comfortable silence to give their voices a break. The landscape flying past has changed from prairie to rolling hills, and Roxanne knows from experience that the Rockies are approaching fast.
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