Fic: Cold Fusion, Chapter 9
Title: Cold Fusion, Chapter 9
Author: Dal Niente
Rating: T
Word Count: 5,050
Chapter 9
This is the earliest in a long time that Megamind has considered going to sleep, but he’s been awake for the past thirty hours and the exhaustion high wore off a little while ago. The half-finished blueprint in front of him is blurry and he just can’t focus, and he completely ruined part of the paper for drafting when he slipped into random sketches an hour ago. He tips his head back, gazing up at the only light currently shining in the big room.
The lair around him is dark, as he prefers it to be when he’s trying to think, but the drafting table is illuminated by a lamp he’s proud of - there is no filament bulb, only a spherical container with a white-glowing liquid solution inside. He only has to shake the sphere for thirty seconds and then hang it on its string, and it will glow for the next four or five hours.
He’s still working on reducing the recharge time. The compound he currently uses to return the precipitate to its component parts has to be added separately, and the liquid takes almost half a day to reset. He is sure there is a way to reduce the time, maybe even figure out a self-contained system based on molecular masses…Yes, that could work...
Megamind scowls and pushes his chair away, blinking light-spots out of his vision. Enough of this. He isn’t getting anything done, he can’t focus on any one thing for any amount of time, and he’s just plain tired. The last conversation in the car that afternoon had taken a lot out of him, even though Roxanne had agreed to keep things between the two of them for now. She hadn’t been happy about it, and he hardly wanted to have to hide, but they both knew that their relationship would look bad.
Still, he hadn’t liked to leave her like that. She had been frowning as he drove away. She really hadn’t been happy, and convincing himself that no, she isn’t mad at me, had been difficult. Without really thinking about it, he picks up his pencil again and draws a last quick sketch to cheer himself up.
Then he worries his feet out of his boots and takes off his gloves and cape, leaving them in a messy heap by the drafting table, then hurries across the cold bare floor to the oversized couch in the corner and throws himself down onto it before his feet go numb. One of these days he should really look into getting some carpet installed. Some rugs, at the very least.
The couch, though. The couch was a good find - black leather, far too big, and one owner from new so it was already broken-in and all Megamind and Minion had needed to do was make sure it was disinfected. Megamind sleeps on it almost as frequently as he does in his bed. Sometimes more frequently, depending on the plan he’s working on.
He stretches out on his back, folds his long hands over his chest, and closes his eyes.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
The taxi driver says nothing about the destination, but he almost protests when Roxanne tells him to let her out by what looks like an abandoned warehouse in the harbor district. He grapples with his better judgment as she gets her bag from the backseat, and finally tells her that if her body turns up in the harbor, it’s not his problem. She laughs and tips him almost double what she should, and he drives away shaking his head, convinced that the city’s star reporter has finally cracked.
The fake observatory has been taken down.
Roxanne doesn’t really expect the secret entrance to still be labeled, and it isn’t. She also doesn’t really expect it to be open; there is no way Minion would leave it unlocked after he was so concerned about people finding the lair. Still, it’s worth a shot, and she walks towards the wall with one hand stretched out in front of her and the other dragging her suitcase behind her.
She bounces off. Damn.
But there must be a way to get in. She cannot imagine that Megamind would use something as mundane as keys - after all, there’s some pretty strong evidence to suggest that Megamind has never used a key in his life. He’s never needed to.
No point in looking around for a key, then, and Roxanne runs her palms over the wall. It looks like cement - luckily, the moon is full and there is light enough to see by - but it feels cool and smooth beneath her hands. There aren’t any rivets or connectors she can find.
She searches systematically, stretching as high as she can reach and sweeping her hands in straight lines over the smooth plane, back and forth, back and forth, feeling for any difference, for any shift in texture or depth that might give something away.
There. About four feet off the ground, she finds a seam - she follows it with her fingers, traces a rectangle. The difference is delicate, the seams very small and tight, but there is a panel there.
She pulls out her cell phone, hoping for better light, and after a few quick experiments she discovers that by angling the screen almost straight down at the wall, she can see the shadowy outline of a rectangular panel with a circular disc in the middle. It can’t be a retinal scanner; it isn’t at Megamind’s eye level and he’s far too proud to stoop. Roxanne shrugs and takes a wild guess, and presses her left index finger to the middle of the circle. She doesn’t think it will work.
So she’s surprised when there’s a shudder and the entire wall shifts back and slides away. The illusion remains, but she is able to walk through. Really, she should have known Megamind would have her fingerprints. In another life, she might have thought it creepy; now, she finds it both endearing and completely reasonable.
She pulls her suitcase through after her and looks around for a way to close the door after her, since she isn’t about to leave it unlocked. Luckily, closing it proves easier than figuring out how to open it; and the large red button on the real wall by the sliding door is clearly labeled. She watches the fake wall slide shut, impressed. The mechanism is completely silent. Hydraulics?
The lair itself is also unsettlingly quiet - silent but for a distant pulsing hum unlike anything she has heard before. Small wonder she has never noticed it; on her other ‘visits,’ the lair has always been full of light and sound and activity, whereas this is faint, and slow, and steady as breathing. She has to strain her ears to hear it.
Never mind the hum; the lair is quiet, and that’s unusual. There is a light, though, of a sort, emanating from the large room she found before, with Ber-Megamind.
She walks towards the source of the light, pointedly avoiding the “EXIT” on her way past. Halfway to the curtain she stops and takes off her shoes. There may be a reason everything is so quiet, and if there is, Roxanne doesn’t want to be the one who disrupts whatever experiment is in progress.
But all she finds on the other side of the heavy curtain is a drafting table with a sheet of blue paper on it, its surface tilted up. A glowing globe hangs from the ceiling, dangling above an empty chair.
Roxanne moves closer, tilting her head at the globe. What is that? she wonders, and reaches towards it briefly before deciding that since she doesn’t know what it is and it’s hanging in Megamind’s lair, she probably shouldn’t touch it.
Shaking her head, she turns her attention to the schematic on the board. It looks like some kind of oversized water filter, probably meant for marine use if the ‘wave action’ power cell is any indication. The lower left-hand corner is a mess of mindless doodles - a bat skeleton posed as if in flight, its minute bones perfectly proportioned; a snake so detailed Roxanne could swear it is looking at her; a little landscape with a half-dead tree and a park bench; and…her eyes go wide.
There, near the bottom, etched in loving detail and white drafting pencil, is a tiny portrait of her. She is looking back over her shoulder, laughing, and the wind is in her hair. It must be from memory; Roxanne is very sure that no such photograph exists.
She rocks back on her heels, staring. She tells herself that she really shouldn’t be surprised at all - Megamind has spent nearly all of his life observing the world around him but rarely taking part in it, and of course his memory would be excellent, and the volatile nature of most of his inventions would require him to include precise detail on his plans, but this…
This, more than anything else, makes up her mind. Yes, she loves him, more than she can possibly say. She wants Megamind and nobody else.
She tears her eyes away from the drawing with an effort and takes a step back, then stumbles and nearly trips over a pile of cloth.
No, she thinks, glancing down, not cloth, clothing - leather gloves and boots, and the mass of crumpled fabric can only be his cape. Roxanne frowns. So Megamind is around here, somewhere. No way could anyone stand barefoot on a floor this cold for long (even with her socks, her feet are freezing), and she looks around, peering into the deep shadows in the corners of the lair. For the most part, she doesn’t see anything but row upon row of weird, spiky, probably deadly machinery.
In the farthest corner, though, low to the ground where the shadows are blackest and the light barely penetrates, Roxanne sees a darker, black-black shape that she can’t quite make out. Might as well, she thinks, but she isn’t about to go into the tangle of machinery without a light of some kind.
Upon closer inspection of the glow-globe, she realizes it’s actually just a blown-glass sphere filled almost all the way with translucent liquid. A loop of glass around a metal hook on the end of a string is all that keeps it aloft, and a silvery hinge at the base of the loop is the only indication that it can be opened. It is beautifully simple - it’s beautiful, and that’s all there is to it.
There are finger-smudges on the glass, so it must be safe. She climbs up on the chair to reach it, to lift it cautiously off the hook with both hands, but then she has to jump hastily down when the chair rocks sharply backwards.
The muffled thump when her feet hit the floor makes her wince, but the globe is safe and there is no response from anywhere else in the lair.
She holds the globe up and blinks at it, fascinated. It is cool to the touch. The liquid inside is slightly more cohesive than water, as she discovers when she sloshes it gently from side to side - oh, and it gets brighter when she shakes it! It’s almost like the glow sticks she played with as a child, but she can’t see any broken capsule inside, and the light it gives off is pure white. Like a tiny moon, she thinks, or a star.
She gathers up her shoes and Megamind’s bundle of clothes and tucks them under one arm. Then, still holding the globe in both hands, she heads off into the darkness.
The rows of machinery look sinister in the low light, throwing leaping shadows on the walls like claws, but Roxanne knows what they look like in full light and they don’t bother her too much as she walks towards the deep shadows, banishing darkness as she goes.
She nearly laughs aloud when she sees what it is: a large, black leather sofa. Megamind is lying on it, dead to the world, his hands folded over his chest as though he were ready for burial.
Roxanne puts the clothes and shoes down on the floor by his elbow, then hesitates.
She doesn’t want to wake him, but she can’t very well stand where she is all night. For a moment, she simply stands and watches him breathe.
His skin doesn’t look particularly tough. In the sharp white light of the glow-globe, it looks translucently paper-thin, stretched tight over his high cheekbones and sharp chin, but Roxanne has seen Megamind face explosions and walk away without a scratch. She brushes the backs of her fingers down the long line of his neck, lays her hand flat along the plane of his cheek.
She’s never kissed him. Not when she knew it was him. She had wanted to, in the park and after the battle and then when he had finally woken up. But after the battle she had been too confused and there had been so many people around, and when he woke up he was freaked out and unsure and Roxanne even feels a little bad about cuddling up with him like she did. And she will not kiss Bernard’s face again, she will not, not until Megamind is very secure about which face Roxanne prefers, and then only if she has to.
She could kiss him now.
Her lips quirk into a smile; Megamind probably wouldn’t complain if she woke him up like that.
She puts the globe down carefully on the pile of clothes, drops into a crouch and turns his face towards her, pressing her mouth to his in one movement.
Megamind wakes with a start in almost the same movement, eyes flying open and then shuttering closed again as he tilts his chin up for a better angle and lifts one hand to the back of Roxanne’s head. He isn’t quite sure how this happened or if he is, in fact, awake, but he isn’t about to try to figure that out. All he knows is that Roxanne is here, kissing him, and that is all that matters.
After a moment, Roxanne pulls back a little, and Megamind smiles dazedly up at her. Roxanne runs a finger over his lip.
“I had a bad dream,” she says softly, in answer to his unasked question. She can hardly keep her smile from jumping off her face. “Can I sleep with you?”
Megamind looks at her, snorts, then bursts into delighted laughter and opens his arms.
It’s happening again, it’s happening again, and he thinks he might die of joy right there when she snuggles in warm against his side. But this is a couch, and if they stay there, one or both of them is going to fall off.
He shrugs himself further into wakefulness. He should have done this before she’d lain down, he thinks regretfully. “We should. Um. The couch isn’t big enough.”
Roxanne lifts her head. “You have a bed?”
He blinks down at her, amused. “Well, of course,” he says. “I can’t sleep on a couch all the time, and much as I am really enjoying having you here, the bed would be more comfortable. Not,” he adds hastily, realizing with some horror how he must sound, “that I’m suggesting anything, I mean, it’s rather soon for that, if that’s even an opt-mmng.” She is kissing him again.
It’s cliché, but it works, and the soft smile Roxanne wears when she pulls away again makes him want to die and sing and explode and sit very quietly and just feel all at once.
“Megamind,” Roxanne says, very seriously, “I love you. And it is an option. But not tonight.”
She just…said… He hasn’t heard anything past ‘I love you,’ and he does not trust himself to speak so he slides his hand back up to curl it around her jaw and pull her towards him, and this time he is kissing her.
Initially, anyway. That’s before Roxanne licks his lips apart and presses him down, her tongue flicking into his mouth. His hands flutter over her back; he isn’t really sure what to do with them and can’t think clearly enough to figure it out.
Then the leather couch squeaks loudly in protest, completely ruining whatever ‘moment’ they’d had going, and Roxanne has to bury her face in the curve of Megamind’s shoulder to muffle her laughter. It is infectious, and he finds himself laughing, too, hugging her as tightly as he can manage without crushing her, both of them giggling like children.
As their laughter dies away, and Megamind feels Roxanne smiling against his collarbone, he realizes that if he doesn’t do something right now neither of them is going to move. And then they will both wake up with twisted necks, cranky and achy and snappish. That’s if he can wake up cranky with Roxanne almost lying on top of him like she is; he isn’t at all sure that that’s even possible.
He pushes himself up on his elbows and waits for Roxanne to move before sitting up the rest of the way. “Come on,” he says. “Bed. If we sleep here we’ll wake up even more tired than we are now.”
Roxanne sighs a little, but Megamind is right. She slips her feet back into her shoes, picks up the glow-globe, and stands. She looks around the darkened lair while she waits for him to get his boots back on. What would it be like to live in a place where one wrong move could send you falling into...is that one actually made of knives? What the...
A weight settles over her shoulders without warning and she jumps and lifts a hand to her neck, feels cold metal spikes. She turns to Megamind, who is standing now as well and gazing at her critically with his arms crossed over his chest and hips cocked to the side. “Hmm.”
Roxanne rubs the material between her fingers. It isn’t silk; it’s too heavy for that, but it is much softer than she’d expected and it follows her every movement, and she says the first thing that pops into her head: “I have got to go rollerblading in this sometime.”
Megamind snorts. “I’ll make you one that fits better,” he promises, then frowns a little and tilts his head the other way. “With a modified collar. That one’s too wide for you.” He puts a hand in the small of her back and steers her back towards the drafting board and her suitcase.
“No spikes,” Roxanne tells him. “If I fall, I’d rather not get impaled.”
“How about smaller spikes?” Megamind asks, holding up his thumb and forefinger. “Little ones?”
Roxanne chuckles. “No spikes.”
“Oh, please?”
“No. And no catsuit, either,” she adds, much to Megamind’s dismay, as she stoops to pick up her bag. “I don’t have the figure for that.”
When he doesn’t respond, she looks at him, and finds that he is gazing at her with burning eyes. Good lord, she thinks, completely taken aback when she realizes she is actually blushing. Where on earth did he learn to smolder?
Megamind holds her with his eyes for moment more and then turns away, but not before the corners of his mouth curl up into an amused, vaguely condescending smile that is different from the ones Roxanne has seen him wear before.
Honestly, he talks with his face almost as eloquently as he does with his voice. The smile and the eyes and the posture all scream, I heartily disagree, I’m just too polite to argue with you right now. And he is blue and big-headed in every sense of the word and gangling and absolutely gorgeous.
And somehow, through some miraculous stroke of brilliant luck, he is hers. And she is his, completely, and she cannot stop staring.
“You should have seen Minion’s face,” Megamind says quietly as he leads her down a long, wide hall. “He said - all he said for the next five minutes, actually, was a lot of variations on ‘I told you so.’”
Roxanne looks at him. She has known him for years, and she still can’t figure out which of them is taller. One or both of them has always been wearing heels. “I was wondering about that. You sounded earlier like you hadn’t talked to him at all.”
“I didn’t -” Megamind hesitates for a bare second, then continues. “I didn’t want to let myself believe him. He said you loved me, and I couldn’t…” He trails off, shaking his head. “You understand. I couldn’t believe that. I still can’t really believe it. In here,” he adds before Roxanne can tell him again that he is being stupid.
She puts the globe down on the large bed and grins at the black sheets, but turns to face Megamind before doing anything else. He meets her gaze with an almost sheepish smile. “You,” Roxanne says, “are unbelievable.” She brings her hands up to wrap around the sides of Megamind’s long neck, pressing the heels of her palms into the hollows just behind his ears so that she can lace her fingers together slowly at the base of his skull. Megamind’s breath catches in a ragged gasp.
“Listen to me.” Roxanne’s voice is firm, and Megamind’s eyes are huge. “I love you. More than you will ever know. More than I can say. More than there are stars.” Half of her mouth curves into a wry grin. She isn’t good with flowery speech. “I love you. If you believe nothing else, believe that, and if you won’t listen to me, listen to Minion. He knows what he’s talking about.”
Megamind inhales, blinks a few times, tries to ignore what her fingers are doing enough to form words. “The.” His expression is almost pained as he struggles to get out a coherent sentence. “The comparison is. It doesn’t work. The units of measurement, they, they don’t…” Fuck, how can he possibly speak when she’s smiling at him like that and has her hands around his neck? He can hardly move. “Move…your hands,” he finally manages.
Bemused, Roxanne slides her hands down to rest on his narrow shoulders, and Megamind almost staggers. Roxanne stands for a moment, wondering if what she did had somehow hurt him. He is breathing hard. “What just happened?”
He laughs breathlessly, helplessly. “The high collars, they exist for a reason. Um.” He lifts his gaze to hers, hoping, praying, that he will not have to explain further.
Roxanne’s jaw goes slack for a moment. “Oh.”
Thank God she’s so smart. “Yes.”
She’ll have to remember that, but he is embarrassed and blushing madly and Roxanne doesn’t want to embarrass him further. “Okay, then,” she says. “But my point stands.”
“I don’t know what love feels like,” Megamind tells her when he can speak clearly again. He is determined to ignore his awkward response as long as Roxanne does, but he’s very glad that his room is still fairly dark and she can’t see how shaken he is. “But I can’t think of anything else to describe this.”
Roxanne grins and releases his shoulders, picks up her bag and hefts it onto his bed. She isn’t going to sleep in her work clothes, and she has to do something to defuse the tension. She isn’t up for another heavy conversation until she’s had at least one good night’s sleep. “Well, if you can’t think of anything else.”
Megamind squints. “Are you making fun of me again? I can’t tell.”
Roxanne looks up at him. She is usually such a spitfire, full of jokes and quick remarks, but the way she looks at him now is so soft and quiet and fond that he almost takes a step back. It’s the way she looked at him in the park when she’d said that she could only hope that their being together was the natural state of things, and it’s the way she looked at him when she turned the watch and revealed that he wasn’t Metro Man.
She says something, but he doesn’t really hear her. It doesn’t matter, since he couldn’t respond anyway.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Megamind’s bed is more than big enough for both of them to sleep on separate sides, but when Megamind crawls tentatively into the middle just to see what happens, he finds that Roxanne is already there. She doesn’t say anything - only presses her body backwards against his chest, the top of her head tucked under his chin, and pulls his arm over her shoulders so that they are lying on their sides and nestling together like spoons. He wonders briefly what to do with his other arm, and eventually slips it under her head.
“Do that,” Roxanne warns in a low voice, and he jumps, “and you’ll wake up in the morning with no feeling in your hand.”
“Do you mind if I…?” he asks, rolling his shoulder so that his arm extends between her ear and her shoulder. The curve of her neck fits around his arm perfectly, and he crooks his elbow to wrap his arm up around her chest. She shifts around a bit, and then settles.
Megamind isn’t sure how it happens, but he ends up curled around her body and clutching her against him with both arms.
“Is this okay?” he asks after a couple of minutes, and Roxanne stirs.
“Mm? Yes,” she says, snuggling backwards again, and then finding one of his hands and wrapping her own around it. “Yes, ‘s lovely. Go to sleep, Megamind.” But a sudden puff of air a second later tells him that she’s thinking about something.
He lifts his head and looks down at her. “What?”
“It’s not going to be easy, is it,” she says softly, more clearly than she had spoken before, and Megamind knows she’s thinking about their talk in the car earlier that day.
It’s easier to think about, easier to talk about now that they are lying close together in Megamind’s bed and not about to part ways. “No,” he tells her. “It won’t be easy.”
Roxanne scowls. “I don’t like it.”
Megamind tenses. “I know,” he says carefully. “I don’t like it either. If you’d rather put this off until we find out what Wayne is up to, I understand completely.” So much of what he and Roxanne do depends on the public’s opinion of him, and the public’s opinion hinges on the not-fact that he killed Metro Man.
Roxanne squirms around in his arms until she is facing him. “Stop,” she tells him. “I told you before, we’re not putting this off unless you want to.”
“No, I don’t want to put it off.” He frowns a little. “But what about your family? Minion told me that you’d said dating Wayne made things easier for you. It might be simpler if you dated someone else, first, to get them used to the idea.”
Roxanne pulls away just a little, just so that she can look up and meet his eye. “I’m not going to break some poor sap’s heart just to make things simpler.”
“No,” Megamind says immediately. “No, of course not. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just.” He shakes his head, lets out a soft groan of annoyance.
Roxanne reaches a hand up, touches his face. “Tell me.”
“I know you,” he says flatly. “I’ve known you for ages, and I know that you trust your family and they trust you. If you have to hide me from your family, it’ll stress you out. It will,” he presses before Roxanne can interrupt. “You know it will. It will stress you out, make you unhappy. You’ll grow to resent me, to resent that you have to hide your relationship not only from your family but from the public in general. And resentment breeds hatred. Oh, for heaven’s sake, what is so funny?”
Roxanne is laughing again. “You know,” she says, “for a guy with no relationship experience…”
“I do read,” he reminds her irritably. “And I know basic psychology. I know advanced psychology. I know how things work.”
“Regardless.” She presses her lips together for a moment, runs a finger along one of Megamind’s eyebrows, making him blink. Then she rubs it back the wrong way with a mischievous grin and he yelps and swats at her hand. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. It’ll be okay. I don’t think I could ever really hate you, I’ve known you too long.”
Far from reassuring him, this reminder only sobers him further. “That’s another thing,” he says. “You don’t think we might be moving too quickly? Don’t forget that you only found out who I was a couple weeks ago.”
Roxanne half-smiles. “I thought about that, too. And I don’t think I’m worried about it. I still plan on dating you - dragging you out of the lair every few nights, going to dinner, going to the theater, going to the park.
“And don’t you forget,” she adds, “that I’ve been seeing you as Bernard since this past winter. That’s a good few months, right there. So, no, I don’t think we’re moving too fast.”
There is a pause, during which they lie still and listen to one another breathe. “I hope this works out,” Megamind admits after a little while.
Roxanne starts a little, and he realizes she was nearly asleep. “Yeah,” she says blearily. “Me too.” She pushes him onto his back and wraps herself around him the way she had before on the couch and when he had woken up.
“Can I ask what made you think of that?” he asks, bringing his hand up to curl around her back.
“When I said, ‘go to sleep, Megamind,’” Roxanne mutters. She hasn’t slept well for some time, and her body is going to sleep without her - her speech quickly begins to slur. “Never thought I’d say those words. I’m glad I can. M’glad you’re here. N’your pajamas are the best pajamas.” She hums and presses even closer, deeper into his side. “And yer slippers. Little evil bats. Heh.”
He lets out a shocked bark of laughter, then presses his lips to her hair before he lays his head back down and closes his eyes. “I love you, too,” he whispers into the darkness, and follows her down into sleep.
Fin
Chapter 8
Epilogue
Author: Dal Niente
Rating: T
Word Count: 5,050
Chapter 9
This is the earliest in a long time that Megamind has considered going to sleep, but he’s been awake for the past thirty hours and the exhaustion high wore off a little while ago. The half-finished blueprint in front of him is blurry and he just can’t focus, and he completely ruined part of the paper for drafting when he slipped into random sketches an hour ago. He tips his head back, gazing up at the only light currently shining in the big room.
The lair around him is dark, as he prefers it to be when he’s trying to think, but the drafting table is illuminated by a lamp he’s proud of - there is no filament bulb, only a spherical container with a white-glowing liquid solution inside. He only has to shake the sphere for thirty seconds and then hang it on its string, and it will glow for the next four or five hours.
He’s still working on reducing the recharge time. The compound he currently uses to return the precipitate to its component parts has to be added separately, and the liquid takes almost half a day to reset. He is sure there is a way to reduce the time, maybe even figure out a self-contained system based on molecular masses…Yes, that could work...
Megamind scowls and pushes his chair away, blinking light-spots out of his vision. Enough of this. He isn’t getting anything done, he can’t focus on any one thing for any amount of time, and he’s just plain tired. The last conversation in the car that afternoon had taken a lot out of him, even though Roxanne had agreed to keep things between the two of them for now. She hadn’t been happy about it, and he hardly wanted to have to hide, but they both knew that their relationship would look bad.
Still, he hadn’t liked to leave her like that. She had been frowning as he drove away. She really hadn’t been happy, and convincing himself that no, she isn’t mad at me, had been difficult. Without really thinking about it, he picks up his pencil again and draws a last quick sketch to cheer himself up.
Then he worries his feet out of his boots and takes off his gloves and cape, leaving them in a messy heap by the drafting table, then hurries across the cold bare floor to the oversized couch in the corner and throws himself down onto it before his feet go numb. One of these days he should really look into getting some carpet installed. Some rugs, at the very least.
The couch, though. The couch was a good find - black leather, far too big, and one owner from new so it was already broken-in and all Megamind and Minion had needed to do was make sure it was disinfected. Megamind sleeps on it almost as frequently as he does in his bed. Sometimes more frequently, depending on the plan he’s working on.
He stretches out on his back, folds his long hands over his chest, and closes his eyes.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
The taxi driver says nothing about the destination, but he almost protests when Roxanne tells him to let her out by what looks like an abandoned warehouse in the harbor district. He grapples with his better judgment as she gets her bag from the backseat, and finally tells her that if her body turns up in the harbor, it’s not his problem. She laughs and tips him almost double what she should, and he drives away shaking his head, convinced that the city’s star reporter has finally cracked.
The fake observatory has been taken down.
Roxanne doesn’t really expect the secret entrance to still be labeled, and it isn’t. She also doesn’t really expect it to be open; there is no way Minion would leave it unlocked after he was so concerned about people finding the lair. Still, it’s worth a shot, and she walks towards the wall with one hand stretched out in front of her and the other dragging her suitcase behind her.
She bounces off. Damn.
But there must be a way to get in. She cannot imagine that Megamind would use something as mundane as keys - after all, there’s some pretty strong evidence to suggest that Megamind has never used a key in his life. He’s never needed to.
No point in looking around for a key, then, and Roxanne runs her palms over the wall. It looks like cement - luckily, the moon is full and there is light enough to see by - but it feels cool and smooth beneath her hands. There aren’t any rivets or connectors she can find.
She searches systematically, stretching as high as she can reach and sweeping her hands in straight lines over the smooth plane, back and forth, back and forth, feeling for any difference, for any shift in texture or depth that might give something away.
There. About four feet off the ground, she finds a seam - she follows it with her fingers, traces a rectangle. The difference is delicate, the seams very small and tight, but there is a panel there.
She pulls out her cell phone, hoping for better light, and after a few quick experiments she discovers that by angling the screen almost straight down at the wall, she can see the shadowy outline of a rectangular panel with a circular disc in the middle. It can’t be a retinal scanner; it isn’t at Megamind’s eye level and he’s far too proud to stoop. Roxanne shrugs and takes a wild guess, and presses her left index finger to the middle of the circle. She doesn’t think it will work.
So she’s surprised when there’s a shudder and the entire wall shifts back and slides away. The illusion remains, but she is able to walk through. Really, she should have known Megamind would have her fingerprints. In another life, she might have thought it creepy; now, she finds it both endearing and completely reasonable.
She pulls her suitcase through after her and looks around for a way to close the door after her, since she isn’t about to leave it unlocked. Luckily, closing it proves easier than figuring out how to open it; and the large red button on the real wall by the sliding door is clearly labeled. She watches the fake wall slide shut, impressed. The mechanism is completely silent. Hydraulics?
The lair itself is also unsettlingly quiet - silent but for a distant pulsing hum unlike anything she has heard before. Small wonder she has never noticed it; on her other ‘visits,’ the lair has always been full of light and sound and activity, whereas this is faint, and slow, and steady as breathing. She has to strain her ears to hear it.
Never mind the hum; the lair is quiet, and that’s unusual. There is a light, though, of a sort, emanating from the large room she found before, with Ber-Megamind.
She walks towards the source of the light, pointedly avoiding the “EXIT” on her way past. Halfway to the curtain she stops and takes off her shoes. There may be a reason everything is so quiet, and if there is, Roxanne doesn’t want to be the one who disrupts whatever experiment is in progress.
But all she finds on the other side of the heavy curtain is a drafting table with a sheet of blue paper on it, its surface tilted up. A glowing globe hangs from the ceiling, dangling above an empty chair.
Roxanne moves closer, tilting her head at the globe. What is that? she wonders, and reaches towards it briefly before deciding that since she doesn’t know what it is and it’s hanging in Megamind’s lair, she probably shouldn’t touch it.
Shaking her head, she turns her attention to the schematic on the board. It looks like some kind of oversized water filter, probably meant for marine use if the ‘wave action’ power cell is any indication. The lower left-hand corner is a mess of mindless doodles - a bat skeleton posed as if in flight, its minute bones perfectly proportioned; a snake so detailed Roxanne could swear it is looking at her; a little landscape with a half-dead tree and a park bench; and…her eyes go wide.
There, near the bottom, etched in loving detail and white drafting pencil, is a tiny portrait of her. She is looking back over her shoulder, laughing, and the wind is in her hair. It must be from memory; Roxanne is very sure that no such photograph exists.
She rocks back on her heels, staring. She tells herself that she really shouldn’t be surprised at all - Megamind has spent nearly all of his life observing the world around him but rarely taking part in it, and of course his memory would be excellent, and the volatile nature of most of his inventions would require him to include precise detail on his plans, but this…
This, more than anything else, makes up her mind. Yes, she loves him, more than she can possibly say. She wants Megamind and nobody else.
She tears her eyes away from the drawing with an effort and takes a step back, then stumbles and nearly trips over a pile of cloth.
No, she thinks, glancing down, not cloth, clothing - leather gloves and boots, and the mass of crumpled fabric can only be his cape. Roxanne frowns. So Megamind is around here, somewhere. No way could anyone stand barefoot on a floor this cold for long (even with her socks, her feet are freezing), and she looks around, peering into the deep shadows in the corners of the lair. For the most part, she doesn’t see anything but row upon row of weird, spiky, probably deadly machinery.
In the farthest corner, though, low to the ground where the shadows are blackest and the light barely penetrates, Roxanne sees a darker, black-black shape that she can’t quite make out. Might as well, she thinks, but she isn’t about to go into the tangle of machinery without a light of some kind.
Upon closer inspection of the glow-globe, she realizes it’s actually just a blown-glass sphere filled almost all the way with translucent liquid. A loop of glass around a metal hook on the end of a string is all that keeps it aloft, and a silvery hinge at the base of the loop is the only indication that it can be opened. It is beautifully simple - it’s beautiful, and that’s all there is to it.
There are finger-smudges on the glass, so it must be safe. She climbs up on the chair to reach it, to lift it cautiously off the hook with both hands, but then she has to jump hastily down when the chair rocks sharply backwards.
The muffled thump when her feet hit the floor makes her wince, but the globe is safe and there is no response from anywhere else in the lair.
She holds the globe up and blinks at it, fascinated. It is cool to the touch. The liquid inside is slightly more cohesive than water, as she discovers when she sloshes it gently from side to side - oh, and it gets brighter when she shakes it! It’s almost like the glow sticks she played with as a child, but she can’t see any broken capsule inside, and the light it gives off is pure white. Like a tiny moon, she thinks, or a star.
She gathers up her shoes and Megamind’s bundle of clothes and tucks them under one arm. Then, still holding the globe in both hands, she heads off into the darkness.
The rows of machinery look sinister in the low light, throwing leaping shadows on the walls like claws, but Roxanne knows what they look like in full light and they don’t bother her too much as she walks towards the deep shadows, banishing darkness as she goes.
She nearly laughs aloud when she sees what it is: a large, black leather sofa. Megamind is lying on it, dead to the world, his hands folded over his chest as though he were ready for burial.
Roxanne puts the clothes and shoes down on the floor by his elbow, then hesitates.
She doesn’t want to wake him, but she can’t very well stand where she is all night. For a moment, she simply stands and watches him breathe.
His skin doesn’t look particularly tough. In the sharp white light of the glow-globe, it looks translucently paper-thin, stretched tight over his high cheekbones and sharp chin, but Roxanne has seen Megamind face explosions and walk away without a scratch. She brushes the backs of her fingers down the long line of his neck, lays her hand flat along the plane of his cheek.
She’s never kissed him. Not when she knew it was him. She had wanted to, in the park and after the battle and then when he had finally woken up. But after the battle she had been too confused and there had been so many people around, and when he woke up he was freaked out and unsure and Roxanne even feels a little bad about cuddling up with him like she did. And she will not kiss Bernard’s face again, she will not, not until Megamind is very secure about which face Roxanne prefers, and then only if she has to.
She could kiss him now.
Her lips quirk into a smile; Megamind probably wouldn’t complain if she woke him up like that.
She puts the globe down carefully on the pile of clothes, drops into a crouch and turns his face towards her, pressing her mouth to his in one movement.
Megamind wakes with a start in almost the same movement, eyes flying open and then shuttering closed again as he tilts his chin up for a better angle and lifts one hand to the back of Roxanne’s head. He isn’t quite sure how this happened or if he is, in fact, awake, but he isn’t about to try to figure that out. All he knows is that Roxanne is here, kissing him, and that is all that matters.
After a moment, Roxanne pulls back a little, and Megamind smiles dazedly up at her. Roxanne runs a finger over his lip.
“I had a bad dream,” she says softly, in answer to his unasked question. She can hardly keep her smile from jumping off her face. “Can I sleep with you?”
Megamind looks at her, snorts, then bursts into delighted laughter and opens his arms.
It’s happening again, it’s happening again, and he thinks he might die of joy right there when she snuggles in warm against his side. But this is a couch, and if they stay there, one or both of them is going to fall off.
He shrugs himself further into wakefulness. He should have done this before she’d lain down, he thinks regretfully. “We should. Um. The couch isn’t big enough.”
Roxanne lifts her head. “You have a bed?”
He blinks down at her, amused. “Well, of course,” he says. “I can’t sleep on a couch all the time, and much as I am really enjoying having you here, the bed would be more comfortable. Not,” he adds hastily, realizing with some horror how he must sound, “that I’m suggesting anything, I mean, it’s rather soon for that, if that’s even an opt-mmng.” She is kissing him again.
It’s cliché, but it works, and the soft smile Roxanne wears when she pulls away again makes him want to die and sing and explode and sit very quietly and just feel all at once.
“Megamind,” Roxanne says, very seriously, “I love you. And it is an option. But not tonight.”
She just…said… He hasn’t heard anything past ‘I love you,’ and he does not trust himself to speak so he slides his hand back up to curl it around her jaw and pull her towards him, and this time he is kissing her.
Initially, anyway. That’s before Roxanne licks his lips apart and presses him down, her tongue flicking into his mouth. His hands flutter over her back; he isn’t really sure what to do with them and can’t think clearly enough to figure it out.
Then the leather couch squeaks loudly in protest, completely ruining whatever ‘moment’ they’d had going, and Roxanne has to bury her face in the curve of Megamind’s shoulder to muffle her laughter. It is infectious, and he finds himself laughing, too, hugging her as tightly as he can manage without crushing her, both of them giggling like children.
As their laughter dies away, and Megamind feels Roxanne smiling against his collarbone, he realizes that if he doesn’t do something right now neither of them is going to move. And then they will both wake up with twisted necks, cranky and achy and snappish. That’s if he can wake up cranky with Roxanne almost lying on top of him like she is; he isn’t at all sure that that’s even possible.
He pushes himself up on his elbows and waits for Roxanne to move before sitting up the rest of the way. “Come on,” he says. “Bed. If we sleep here we’ll wake up even more tired than we are now.”
Roxanne sighs a little, but Megamind is right. She slips her feet back into her shoes, picks up the glow-globe, and stands. She looks around the darkened lair while she waits for him to get his boots back on. What would it be like to live in a place where one wrong move could send you falling into...is that one actually made of knives? What the...
A weight settles over her shoulders without warning and she jumps and lifts a hand to her neck, feels cold metal spikes. She turns to Megamind, who is standing now as well and gazing at her critically with his arms crossed over his chest and hips cocked to the side. “Hmm.”
Roxanne rubs the material between her fingers. It isn’t silk; it’s too heavy for that, but it is much softer than she’d expected and it follows her every movement, and she says the first thing that pops into her head: “I have got to go rollerblading in this sometime.”
Megamind snorts. “I’ll make you one that fits better,” he promises, then frowns a little and tilts his head the other way. “With a modified collar. That one’s too wide for you.” He puts a hand in the small of her back and steers her back towards the drafting board and her suitcase.
“No spikes,” Roxanne tells him. “If I fall, I’d rather not get impaled.”
“How about smaller spikes?” Megamind asks, holding up his thumb and forefinger. “Little ones?”
Roxanne chuckles. “No spikes.”
“Oh, please?”
“No. And no catsuit, either,” she adds, much to Megamind’s dismay, as she stoops to pick up her bag. “I don’t have the figure for that.”
When he doesn’t respond, she looks at him, and finds that he is gazing at her with burning eyes. Good lord, she thinks, completely taken aback when she realizes she is actually blushing. Where on earth did he learn to smolder?
Megamind holds her with his eyes for moment more and then turns away, but not before the corners of his mouth curl up into an amused, vaguely condescending smile that is different from the ones Roxanne has seen him wear before.
Honestly, he talks with his face almost as eloquently as he does with his voice. The smile and the eyes and the posture all scream, I heartily disagree, I’m just too polite to argue with you right now. And he is blue and big-headed in every sense of the word and gangling and absolutely gorgeous.
And somehow, through some miraculous stroke of brilliant luck, he is hers. And she is his, completely, and she cannot stop staring.
“You should have seen Minion’s face,” Megamind says quietly as he leads her down a long, wide hall. “He said - all he said for the next five minutes, actually, was a lot of variations on ‘I told you so.’”
Roxanne looks at him. She has known him for years, and she still can’t figure out which of them is taller. One or both of them has always been wearing heels. “I was wondering about that. You sounded earlier like you hadn’t talked to him at all.”
“I didn’t -” Megamind hesitates for a bare second, then continues. “I didn’t want to let myself believe him. He said you loved me, and I couldn’t…” He trails off, shaking his head. “You understand. I couldn’t believe that. I still can’t really believe it. In here,” he adds before Roxanne can tell him again that he is being stupid.
She puts the globe down on the large bed and grins at the black sheets, but turns to face Megamind before doing anything else. He meets her gaze with an almost sheepish smile. “You,” Roxanne says, “are unbelievable.” She brings her hands up to wrap around the sides of Megamind’s long neck, pressing the heels of her palms into the hollows just behind his ears so that she can lace her fingers together slowly at the base of his skull. Megamind’s breath catches in a ragged gasp.
“Listen to me.” Roxanne’s voice is firm, and Megamind’s eyes are huge. “I love you. More than you will ever know. More than I can say. More than there are stars.” Half of her mouth curves into a wry grin. She isn’t good with flowery speech. “I love you. If you believe nothing else, believe that, and if you won’t listen to me, listen to Minion. He knows what he’s talking about.”
Megamind inhales, blinks a few times, tries to ignore what her fingers are doing enough to form words. “The.” His expression is almost pained as he struggles to get out a coherent sentence. “The comparison is. It doesn’t work. The units of measurement, they, they don’t…” Fuck, how can he possibly speak when she’s smiling at him like that and has her hands around his neck? He can hardly move. “Move…your hands,” he finally manages.
Bemused, Roxanne slides her hands down to rest on his narrow shoulders, and Megamind almost staggers. Roxanne stands for a moment, wondering if what she did had somehow hurt him. He is breathing hard. “What just happened?”
He laughs breathlessly, helplessly. “The high collars, they exist for a reason. Um.” He lifts his gaze to hers, hoping, praying, that he will not have to explain further.
Roxanne’s jaw goes slack for a moment. “Oh.”
Thank God she’s so smart. “Yes.”
She’ll have to remember that, but he is embarrassed and blushing madly and Roxanne doesn’t want to embarrass him further. “Okay, then,” she says. “But my point stands.”
“I don’t know what love feels like,” Megamind tells her when he can speak clearly again. He is determined to ignore his awkward response as long as Roxanne does, but he’s very glad that his room is still fairly dark and she can’t see how shaken he is. “But I can’t think of anything else to describe this.”
Roxanne grins and releases his shoulders, picks up her bag and hefts it onto his bed. She isn’t going to sleep in her work clothes, and she has to do something to defuse the tension. She isn’t up for another heavy conversation until she’s had at least one good night’s sleep. “Well, if you can’t think of anything else.”
Megamind squints. “Are you making fun of me again? I can’t tell.”
Roxanne looks up at him. She is usually such a spitfire, full of jokes and quick remarks, but the way she looks at him now is so soft and quiet and fond that he almost takes a step back. It’s the way she looked at him in the park when she’d said that she could only hope that their being together was the natural state of things, and it’s the way she looked at him when she turned the watch and revealed that he wasn’t Metro Man.
She says something, but he doesn’t really hear her. It doesn’t matter, since he couldn’t respond anyway.
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Megamind’s bed is more than big enough for both of them to sleep on separate sides, but when Megamind crawls tentatively into the middle just to see what happens, he finds that Roxanne is already there. She doesn’t say anything - only presses her body backwards against his chest, the top of her head tucked under his chin, and pulls his arm over her shoulders so that they are lying on their sides and nestling together like spoons. He wonders briefly what to do with his other arm, and eventually slips it under her head.
“Do that,” Roxanne warns in a low voice, and he jumps, “and you’ll wake up in the morning with no feeling in your hand.”
“Do you mind if I…?” he asks, rolling his shoulder so that his arm extends between her ear and her shoulder. The curve of her neck fits around his arm perfectly, and he crooks his elbow to wrap his arm up around her chest. She shifts around a bit, and then settles.
Megamind isn’t sure how it happens, but he ends up curled around her body and clutching her against him with both arms.
“Is this okay?” he asks after a couple of minutes, and Roxanne stirs.
“Mm? Yes,” she says, snuggling backwards again, and then finding one of his hands and wrapping her own around it. “Yes, ‘s lovely. Go to sleep, Megamind.” But a sudden puff of air a second later tells him that she’s thinking about something.
He lifts his head and looks down at her. “What?”
“It’s not going to be easy, is it,” she says softly, more clearly than she had spoken before, and Megamind knows she’s thinking about their talk in the car earlier that day.
It’s easier to think about, easier to talk about now that they are lying close together in Megamind’s bed and not about to part ways. “No,” he tells her. “It won’t be easy.”
Roxanne scowls. “I don’t like it.”
Megamind tenses. “I know,” he says carefully. “I don’t like it either. If you’d rather put this off until we find out what Wayne is up to, I understand completely.” So much of what he and Roxanne do depends on the public’s opinion of him, and the public’s opinion hinges on the not-fact that he killed Metro Man.
Roxanne squirms around in his arms until she is facing him. “Stop,” she tells him. “I told you before, we’re not putting this off unless you want to.”
“No, I don’t want to put it off.” He frowns a little. “But what about your family? Minion told me that you’d said dating Wayne made things easier for you. It might be simpler if you dated someone else, first, to get them used to the idea.”
Roxanne pulls away just a little, just so that she can look up and meet his eye. “I’m not going to break some poor sap’s heart just to make things simpler.”
“No,” Megamind says immediately. “No, of course not. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just.” He shakes his head, lets out a soft groan of annoyance.
Roxanne reaches a hand up, touches his face. “Tell me.”
“I know you,” he says flatly. “I’ve known you for ages, and I know that you trust your family and they trust you. If you have to hide me from your family, it’ll stress you out. It will,” he presses before Roxanne can interrupt. “You know it will. It will stress you out, make you unhappy. You’ll grow to resent me, to resent that you have to hide your relationship not only from your family but from the public in general. And resentment breeds hatred. Oh, for heaven’s sake, what is so funny?”
Roxanne is laughing again. “You know,” she says, “for a guy with no relationship experience…”
“I do read,” he reminds her irritably. “And I know basic psychology. I know advanced psychology. I know how things work.”
“Regardless.” She presses her lips together for a moment, runs a finger along one of Megamind’s eyebrows, making him blink. Then she rubs it back the wrong way with a mischievous grin and he yelps and swats at her hand. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. It’ll be okay. I don’t think I could ever really hate you, I’ve known you too long.”
Far from reassuring him, this reminder only sobers him further. “That’s another thing,” he says. “You don’t think we might be moving too quickly? Don’t forget that you only found out who I was a couple weeks ago.”
Roxanne half-smiles. “I thought about that, too. And I don’t think I’m worried about it. I still plan on dating you - dragging you out of the lair every few nights, going to dinner, going to the theater, going to the park.
“And don’t you forget,” she adds, “that I’ve been seeing you as Bernard since this past winter. That’s a good few months, right there. So, no, I don’t think we’re moving too fast.”
There is a pause, during which they lie still and listen to one another breathe. “I hope this works out,” Megamind admits after a little while.
Roxanne starts a little, and he realizes she was nearly asleep. “Yeah,” she says blearily. “Me too.” She pushes him onto his back and wraps herself around him the way she had before on the couch and when he had woken up.
“Can I ask what made you think of that?” he asks, bringing his hand up to curl around her back.
“When I said, ‘go to sleep, Megamind,’” Roxanne mutters. She hasn’t slept well for some time, and her body is going to sleep without her - her speech quickly begins to slur. “Never thought I’d say those words. I’m glad I can. M’glad you’re here. N’your pajamas are the best pajamas.” She hums and presses even closer, deeper into his side. “And yer slippers. Little evil bats. Heh.”
He lets out a shocked bark of laughter, then presses his lips to her hair before he lays his head back down and closes his eyes. “I love you, too,” he whispers into the darkness, and follows her down into sleep.
Fin
Chapter 8
Epilogue