Fic: Blue Agents of Destruction
AU, outside the Cold Fusion-verse. Roxanne wakes up to find a strange creature systematically destroying her apartment.
I own nothing. Disney, Dreamworks, please don’t sue me! This was the product of a small livestream hosted by filthy_animal. She and legendaryair and I were the only three watching, so we ended up just watching a bunch of clips and trailers and it was actually a lot of fun, but I mentioned that I had never seen a certain movie and they were both like, oh man, there needs to be crossover fic of that. So here we go! Crossover! Filthy, Emma, m’dears, you are both totally mad. This hasn’t been edited nearly as much as it probably should have been, because I’m kind of in the middle of another project at the moment, but I hope it turned out okay and I hope you both like it!
No, I’m not telling you what it’s a crossover of, that would ruin the fun.
Blue Agents of Destruction
Initially, Roxanne hadn’t been sure how to handle the…it. She wasn’t accustomed to things turning up in her home unexpectedly, that was the first problem; the second had been that it had seemed harmless enough at first. And it was cute - it’s still cute, never mind that it’s shredding her sofa. It’s gleefully enthusiastic about everything, and the cheerful burring noises it’s making provide a rather strange counterpoint to the sound of rending cloth. Big ears, big black eyes, big nose, big grin? And fuzzy to boot. It’s adorable.
It also seems bent on demolishing her apartment, and it’s done a pretty good job so far.
“No, for heaven’s sake-oh come on, quit it!” She reaches out to grab it by the scruff of the neck, but jerks her hand back when it turns its face towards her. It doesn’t look like it’s going to bite, but its teeth are big and she'd rather not take chances.
She bites her lip and stands back, watching the little beast destroy her sofa with a worried expression on her face. Where had it come from? It doesn’t seem particularly bothered by gravity or conventional ‘up-down’ directions. A wall is as good as a floor for walking, and it can leap with the same unpredictable snap-hop Roxanne is used to seeing from jumping spiders.
Cute or not, it has to go. Ordinarily she’d try to get rid of it herself, but she doesn’t even know what ‘it’ is. She pulls out her phone and dials, keeping an eye on the animal at all times.
Wayne picks up on the third ring. “Heyyyy, Roxie. ‘S happening?”
“Hey, Wayne.” Roxanne hesitates, eyeing the little creature and wondering how to explain it. “There’s a…thing,” she says slowly. “In my apartment. I don’t know what it is.”
“Is it gonna hurt you?”
Roxanne hesitates again. The beast sniffs at one of the legs of the coffee table for a moment, then bites through it. “I don’t….think it’s going to hurt me.” The creature turns towards her, at that, and if Roxanne hadn’t known better she would have sworn it had cast her a dirty look.
Wayne makes a disgruntled noise in his throat. “Listen, Roxie, I’d love to help and I’ll be by later but there’s a huge fire west of town and I’m really needed there. Can this wait?”
Roxanne blinks. “Oh - sure, right, of course.” Wayne’s responsibilities as Hero of Metro City take priority. “Should I be there?”
“Nah, it’s your day off. I think they’ve got Marcie on the way.” Then he swears and says a hurried, “Gotta go, bye!”
“Bye,” says Roxanne, belatedly, but he’s already hung up. Okay. No help from Wayne, then. She considers her options - she could wait for Wayne to finish up what he’s doing, or she could…do what, exactly? Try to get the animal out of her apartment by herself? She looks at its teeth again and the way its eyes seem to be sliding in and out of focus, and cringes away from that idea.
The animal is evidently finished with the sofa and has moved on to her CD collection. Its four-toed hands are surprisingly dexterous, sharp claws notwithstanding, and it is going through her collection one CD at a time and looking at the covers as if it can actually read them. What the heck?
It looks up at the CD cabinet and seems to think for a moment, and then it rears onto its hind legs and stretches, twists a little from side to side until a bump appears on either side of its abdomen. Roxanne’s mouth falls open and she watches in horrified revulsion as the creature squeezes its eyes closed and hunches, pushing until the bumps pop out into a third pair of legs.
Understanding hits her like a ton of brick. Of course. Megamind. Somehow, this is his doing--he must be going into genetics. Wonderful. She closes her eyes for a moment, shaking her head, then raises her voice.
“All right, Megamind,” she says loudly, turning in a slow circle. “Nice one. I know you’ve got this place bugged, I know you can hear me! Get your skinny blue ass over to my apartment, pronto, and get this…thing of yours out of here. I-”
Her cell phone rings and she pounces, flips it open.
“-Really don’t care, Miss Ritchi. What are you doing, anyway? Renovating?” He sounds amused and a little perplexed, but mostly amused. “Sounds like you’ve been breaking things all morning. Do tell me what’s going on, won’t you? I’ve got a bet on with Minion.”
“Oh ha ha, it is to laugh,” Roxanne snaps, planting one fist on her hip even though he can’t see. “As if you don’t know. What is this thing, anyway?” She turns around to look for it. Then she lunges. “Get away from my curtains, you little beast!”
“It’s alive?”
“Oh I don’t know, you’re the mad scientist,” Roxanne drawls, glaring up at the thing now perching on her curtain rod and hissing at her. For some reason, she just defaults to sarcasm around Megamind. It happens every time. “Can dead things destroy apartments?”
There’s a lot of muffled whispering that follows this - Megamind and Minion are holding council. Roxanne waits impatiently, tapping her foot and seething. Finally Megamind gets back on the phone. He’s using his gloating voice. “I’m sorry, Miss Ritchi,” he says, “but I’m afraid I just have too much on my plate today to come over and get rid of an infestation for you. Besides, that wouldn’t be very eeeevil of me, would it? Why not call your boyfriend in tights, instead?”
Roxanne’s eyes narrow. “I did,” she tells him acidly. “He’s busy saving lives. And this is one of your experiments! You get rid of it. Destroying my apartment? That’s low, Megs. Even for you.”
“Mmm.” He doesn’t sound too bothered by her tone of scathing disappointment. “So sorry to have inconvenienced you. Oh wait! That’s in my job description! Haaaaa ha ha ha ha!” And he hangs up.
Roxanne glares and stalks into her bedroom, hooks the speakers up to her laptop and turns on the microphone, then cranks the volume all the way up. She suspects, as she has for some time, that Megamind’s listening devices in her apartment run twenty-four seven and that he’s never bothered to install a mute function. And today, she’s going to find out. She flops into her chair and spins back and forth, singing at the top of her lungs.
Well. Not so much singing as yelling on different pitches.
“Down at an English fair, one evening I was there,” she yells, “when I saw a showman shouting underneath the flair --- OH!” And she flings herself into the chorus with all the angry off-key enthusiasm she can muster. The microphone catches her voice and amplifies it twenty times. “I’VE GOT A LOVE-UH-LY BUNCH OF COCONUTS, DEEDLE-EE-DEE-DEE, THERE THEY ARE A-STANDING IN A ROW, BOM BOM BOM, BIG ONES, SMALL ONES, SOME AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD” (breath) “GIVE ‘EM A TWIST, A FLICK OF THE WRIST, THAT’S WHAT THE SHOWMAN SAID. OH! I’VE GOT…”
She cuts off with a little shriek of surprise and pain when the beast slams open the door to her room and jumps at her, snarling, and knocks her out of her chair with a crash. Hastily, she scoots back across the floor, away from the six-legged animal. It rears onto its hind legs and burrs at her, looking disgruntled, then looks at her computer. “No,” Roxanne begins, stretching out a hand, but it’s too late. The beast swallows one of her speakers in one go and then bites her laptop’s screen in half. Roxanne watches, almost unable to believe what she’s seeing, as it crawls under her desk and peels something flat and black off the bottom of her top drawer, and proceeds to eat it.
Roxanne glances at the bathroom. She’ll have to go past the creature to get to it, but it has a door that locks, and the creature is still under her desk for the time being. She stands, then launches herself over her bed and scrambles like mad for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her and punching the lock button.
She fully expects to have to wait in there until Wayne comes to help, and as much as Roxanne doesn’t enjoy needing to be rescued, today she’s more than willing to wait however long she has to. She just hopes the little monster doesn’t get bored and start exploring. There’s really nowhere else she can go from where she is except into the shower, and she highly doubts the monster is hydrophobic. Because really, that would be too much to ask.
She looks around for something like a weapon. There’s hairspray, but she doesn’t have any matches. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head, and then her gaze falls on her shower curtain and the metal rod holding it up. The bathroom is a narrow rectangle, with the tub along the short wall opposite the door - there is more than enough room length-ways to get a little bit of leverage.
She walks over and steps up with one foot on the edge of the tub and the other on the lid of the toilet, wraps both hands around the metal curtain rod, and tugs. She doesn’t want to try to break it in the middle and risk bending it, but standing where she is doesn’t seem to be working. Well, she’ll just try the other end. She stands on the edge of the other end of the tub and pulls, leans her full weight against the rod. It shifts a little, but doesn’t break.
“Oh come on,” she says again, wiping her hands on her pajama pants. This is not how she wanted to start the day. She grabs the bar again, hoists herself up a little, and then slams her legs down towards the floor to shock the rod into breaking.
It snaps at the far end and Roxanne tumbles to the floor in an ungainly heap. Her hand hurts a little and she feels kind of shaky from falling, but at least the curtain rod is down. She grins and hefts it - it’s lighter than she had expected, but the end is jagged and sharp where she broke it. It will do for a lance if the little beast tries to attack her again.
She only notices the dull roar when it coughs to a stop nearby. She pauses. It can’t be. No way, she thinks, but tiptoes over to the bathroom door and presses her ear against it anyway.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Megamind leaps from the hoverbike to Roxanne’s balcony without worrying too much about being noticed - this is definitely the earliest he’s ever broken into Roxanne’s apartment, but he’s done it enough times by now that he knows the neighbors’ routines by heart and he knows how not to be caught. He stumbles a little as he lands, almost tripping over what looks like part of an engine. Brushed-red aluminum with white stripes on it, charred and sooty in places, rattles against the tile when he catches himself on the railing and kicks it by accident. Smaller debris litters the tile. Megamind glances up and shades his face against the morning sunlight. He can just make out part of a bent, twisted metal wing sticking out over the roof.
The balcony door is ajar. Odd, he thinks, pushing it gingerly open and stepping inside, usually she keeps it locked. Then he looks around, and his jaw drops, and all doubts he had had about coming are banished by what he sees. He draws the de-gun.
Roxanne’s apartment is a shambles. It’s usually a little cluttered, but this is ridiculous. The couch is in ribbons, the coffee table is broken. The television looks like something has been gnawing on it. The CDs are all over the floor. The refrigerator door is wide open and something reddish is dripping slowly onto the floor. Roxanne’s newspapers, which are usually piled more or less neatly in the corners, are scattered everywhere.
And Roxanne herself is nowhere to be seen. De-gun at the ready, Megamind takes a few quiet steps further into the apartment. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have bothered to come - he would have just unplugged the audio feed from Roxanne’s desk and let her sing herself hoarse while he got on with his duties as a supervillain - but she'd screamed. Roxanne hasn’t screamed in years. And then she had said, “No,” just before the audio had cut out - Megamind might kidnap Roxanne on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean he wants her hurt. He actually rather likes her. And although he’d rather eat an ounce of straight dichloromethane than admit it, he’s a little bit worried.
There’s a snap, followed by a crunching noise, from Roxanne’s bedroom. Carefully, quietly, Megamind creeps towards the bedroom door and peers around it. The bedroom is slightly more intact than the rest of Roxanne’s apartment, although her fluffy comforter is torn in places and there are feathers over everything. A quick glance around tells him that she does not have any immediately apparent idiosyncrasies. No ‘she likes fuzzy things’ or ‘she likes pink.’ The room is done up in tasteful shades of grey and white. He’s almost disappointed.
He clears his throat. “Miss Ritchi?” he calls, his finger tightening on the trigger of the de-gun. “Are you here? Are you, um. Are you hurt?”
A furry blue head pops up on the other side of Roxanne’s bed, big black eyes peer at him, and Megamind barely keeps himself from firing. The animal tilts its head to the side, long ears twitching attentively towards him as it moves its head back and forth as if trying to focus on him. Megamind stares at it, running through a mental list of known mammals and finally identifying the creature in Roxanne’s bedroom as a clear ‘none of the above.’
A new species, then, or an alien one. Forward-facing eyes, wide mouth, sharp teeth, crushing jaw. The animal is a hunter. It blinks at him, then grins and sticks out its tongue. “Whoarrrrnnngh nurrrriiiirrn,” it gurgles, and cackles. Megamind blinks. That sounded like words, he thinks. The creature burrs something else, and hunts around for a moment before picking up a pen with two claws and holding it out towards him. It burrs again, chortling insistently, and when Megamind only stares at it some more, tosses the pen aside and holds up a blue compact mirror from Roxanne’s nightstand, then hops up onto Roxanne’s bed.
Six legs, opposable thumbs, dorsal ridge, supra-orbital sensory ganglia. This creature is more advanced than any Megamind has ever seen. It chirps a question, and plucks a little at one of its arms, blinking up at him.
Megamind’s eyes go wide and he touches his face. “Blue?” he asks. “Is that what you’re saying?” He touches his face, the lining of his cape, the lightning bolt on his chest, then points at the creature. “Blue?”
It chirrups, laughing. “Prrrrue,” it says, sticks out its tongue, and gleefully tears a pillow in half.
“Psst! Megamind!”
He jumps again and turns. Roxanne has opened the bathroom door a crack and is motioning frantically for him to come closer. He takes a few steps towards her, wondering vaguely why she’s in the bathroom and whether she might be indecent. Most of his attention is still on the little monster on Roxanne’s bed, so he’s startled when she reaches out, grabs him by the front of his suit, and drags him bodily into the bathroom and slams the door behind him and locks it.
She stares at him for a moment, and he backs against her bathroom door, all of his focus now fixed clearly on her. She’s still in her pajamas - a men’s Mumford and Sons tee shirt that is many sizes too big for her and a pair of pale green baggy pants with a pattern of planets, stars, and rocket ships on them - and she’s clutching an aluminum rod like a lance, aiming it at his chest. “What manner of demon,” she says eventually, “have you unleashed on my apartment?”
Megamind gapes at her and slowly holsters his gun, lifts his hands. “I have no idea.”
Her lip curls and she jabs a little with the rod. “Don’t give me that,” she snarls. “It’s one of your experiments, right?”
He blinks, and then half of his mouth lifts into a wry smile. “Believe me, Miss Ritchi,” he says, “if I could take credit for that beautiful animal, I would do it in a heartbeat.” His smile grows wider, but his eyes are on the metal rod and he looks a little nervous. “Unfortunately, I’ve never seen him before in my life. I-” Then he looks at her hands and his eyes go wide.
“You’re bleeding!” he exclaims, in quite a different tone, and suddenly the rod has been shoved aside and Megamind has taken her hand in both of his and is inspecting the cut. Roxanne freezes. Megamind is close, too close, close enough that she can smell him - leathery and peppery and just a little bit like engine oil and smoke. His gloved hands are surprisingly gentle, but Roxanne still recoils. What is he doing?
“It’s…just a cut,” she stammers, trying to pull her hand away, but Megamind’s fingers close like a vise around her wrist and he reaches for the medicine cabinet with his free hand.
“My ass chews gum,” he says flatly, and Roxanne blinks, then realizes with a start that he probably isn’t acting - he’s probably only half-aware of what he’s doing. Either way, this is the first she's ever heard him swear. “Do you have any idea how many bacteria live on bathroom appliances? I’d rather not have you die of tetanus, thanks.” He finds the hydrogen peroxide and unscrews the cap with quick, clever fingers, then holds her hand over the sink and pours the clear liquid liberally over the wound.
Roxanne hadn’t been ready for that, and she jerks her hand away with a pained gasp. Megamind gasps too, and blinks at her, and that, that right there, that is the kind of expression Roxanne lives for. Dawning comprehension mixed with horror and disbelief. It’s the best expression ever, especially when it’s on Megamind because his face can really do it justice.
Megamind lets go of her hand and all but leaps away. “Oh - jeez - I’m…” His green eyes are absolutely huge.
Roxanne snorts. The peroxide is still fizzing, a little, still burning and hissing, and the cut across her palm is angry-looking and red, and Megamind is opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water. “Well you can’t just leave me hanging, here,” she says, trying not to laugh at his stunned what-just-happened-here expression. “You started this, genius, so finish it.” She pauses and changes the subject back to the creature still dismantling her bedroom. “You really don’t know what that thing is?”
Megamind swallows and steps closer, pulls a dry towel off the wall-mounted towel rack and goes to tear it. “I really don’t,” he admits.
“Hold it,” Roxanne says, eyeing the fluffy towel. “That’s going to get all kinds of fuzzies in my cut.”
Megamind blinks at her and frowns a little. “Unless you have gauze under your sink…” He checks. She doesn’t. He glances around for another alternative, stroking his thumb down his goatee while he thinks.
“Well, I guess if you have to use the towel,” Roxanne begins, but then Megamind nods to himself and he picks up the hem of his cape and rips a strip off without any kind of hesitation. Roxanne’s eyes bug. “What are you doing?”
“It’s one of my old ones,” he shrugs, and draws the de-gun, rolls the barrel to change the setting, then reaches for her hand again. Roxanne backs away, staring at the gun. “What?” Megamind asks, sounding faintly injured when she steps out of his reach. Then he sees where she’s looking. “Oh. No, look.” He shows her the side of it - de-contaminate - then fires a beam of green light at the strip of blue and black cloth in his hand and holds it up. It’s undamaged. “See? It won’t hurt.”
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Roxanne thinks dazedly as she allows Megamind to take her hand and aim the de-gun at it. She squeezes her eyes closed. I can’t believe there’s a thing in my apartment that Megamind can’t identify. I can’t believe I called him. And, under that and at the same time, where Roxanne refuses to acknowledge, I can’t believe he actually came.
“There!” he announces, sounding very pleased with himself. “All done.”
Roxanne opens her eyes and looks at her hand. It’s probably the messiest bandage she’s ever seen, but it’s a bandage, and Megamind is the one who put it there, and she has to choke back a laugh. “Okay,” she manages. “Let’s just get this over with. You really don’t know what it is?”
“I really don’t,” he says again, and he sounds just a little irritated that she’s making him repeat himself. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“But where did it come from?” she wonders, picking up the shower rod in her good hand.
Megamind shrugs. “Don’t know,” he says, and turns around and opens the door before Roxanne can stop him. “Let’s go ask.”
“What are you doing,” she hisses, but the door is already wide open and Megamind is looking down at something on the floor in front of him.
“Hi,” he says, surprised. “Were you waiting for us?”
Roxanne looks over his shoulder. The blue animal looks back up at them, blinking.
“H…Hghaaiiiieee,” it says, and offers them a broad, hesitant smile. And waves a forepaw, opening and closing its fingers. Roxanne blinks.
“Did it…did it just say hi?” she asks, stunned.
Megamind glances back at her and frowns. “‘He,’” he says quietly. “Not ‘it.’” He turns back to the creature. “Why are you messing up her apartment?” he asks, enunciating clearly. The animal tilts his head. “Why,” Megamind says, spreading his hands and then pointing at the creature, “you,” he waves both hands in the air in a scrambling motion, “mess up,” and gestures around at the wreckage, “this place?”
The creature grins again and scampers over to a floor lamp, closes his jaws around the pole. It snaps easily in half, and the creature turns to grin proudly back at Megamind, looking for approval. Then he staggers and nearly falls, but picks himself up again quickly, blinking and looking around as though momentarily confused.
Megamind’s narrow face splits into a wide smile. “You’re evil!” he exclaims, and drops into a crouch. “C’mere c’mere c’mere,” he says, and the note of excitement in his voice is unmistakable, “let me look at you? Can I?” And the next thing Roxanne knows, Megamind is on his knees and running both hands over the creature. “Night vision, I bet,” he murmurs, and pulls off a glove so hastily that the buckle snaps off and bounces under Roxanne’s bed. Megamind presses his bare hand against the creature’s forehead, measuring with his fingers. “Cranial capacity to body mass…Ohhhhhh, man,” he sighs, sitting back on his heels and gazing down at him. “I have got to get you back to the Lair. Once you learn some of our languages I bet you and I could have some real conversation.”
Roxanne edges out of the bathroom and stares down at Megamind. His eyes are shining, and he looks happier and more exhilarated than she’s ever seen him. Then she looks down at the blue animal, which has started to blink and shake his head and mutter to himself. “What are you talking about?” she demands. “Learning languages? It’s an animal.”
“So are you,” he points out, glancing up at her. The blue thing rubs his eyes and looks around, mouth falling open in apparent astonishment at what he sees, and then he seems to wilt a little. He sits down with a bump and grips his head in both forepaws, scowling in chagrin. “So am I. Hasn’t stopped us, has it?”
“Think was having fun,” the blue thing says. His voice is - burbly. That’s the only word Roxanne can think of to describe it. Sort of a back-of-the-throat chirring voice. And maybe if this had happened four years ago, Roxanne would be freaking out that the thing can talk, but she’s met Megamind, since then and her definition of ‘weird’ has changed a lot. Talking blue monsters? She deals with those on a weekly basis. This one is just a different shape. So what she says is not, “Oh my god, you can talk,” or “It talks!” or “What the shit.”
What she says is, “Having fun? This is you having fun?” She waves an arm around at her apartment. The blue thing settles onto his haunches and looks around, black eyes blinking, and he lays his ears back a little.
“Ship crashed,” he says, aiming a claw at the roof. “Fell onto ledge and hit head. Bonk.” He points at her balcony, raps his knuckles on his skull and twirls around on a hind paw before toppling over backwards. “Reverted.” He shrugs and gets back to his feet, then looks up at her hopefully. “Sorry?”
“Reverted,” Megamind says, cutting off Roxanne’s outraged cry of “Sorry’s not gonna cut it.” “Reverted to what?”
The blue animal screws up his face. “Original genetic im-per-a-tive,” he says carefully. Megamind and Roxanne look at each other, then back at the animal. He flicks his ears back again, hunching ashamedly. “Built to destroy.”
Roxanne throws up her hands. “I can believe that.” She aims a finger at the monster. “You owe me a new set of furniture, you little beast.”
There’s a crashing sound behind them, then a cry of, “Holy smokes, Roxie! You still in here? You OK?”
“Shit,” Megamind whispers, and stands, staring wildly around for somewhere to hide. He leaps towards Roxanne’s bed, but then Metro Man is there and Megamind is caught mid-leap and suspended in midair, feet pedaling wildly, dangling by his collar from Wayne’s massive fist.
“Ah-ha!” Wayne announces, and throws out his chest. “Caught in the act! Your nefarious schemes will have to wait for another day!”
“Gack,” says Megamind, eyes bulging as he claws awkwardly at Wayne’s arm with both hands. “Hlargh.”
Roxanne shakes her head. Ordinarily she’s fine with Wayne hauling Megamind around by the throat, but this time is different. This time she’s painfully conscious of the bandage on her hand and the fact that Megamind inexplicably responded to her cry for help. “Wayne,” she begins, but she’s interrupted by a loud snarl near her feet and she looks down. The blue, multi-legged creature has dropped to all sixes and is growling and stamping and rattling his dorsal spines and glaring daggers up at the floating Metro Man.
“Hey,” Wayne says, frowning, and he drifts a little lower to the floor. Megamind kicks at him but can’t quite reach him. “What’s that?”
The blue thing garbles something at him, Roxanne isn’t sure what - and then he launches himself at Wayne and sinks his teeth into the hero’s forearm.
“Ow,” Wayne says loudly, and drops Megamind onto the floor, where he sits for a moment, holding his throat and gasping, thin legs curled gracelessly under him.
“You…you okay?” Roxanne asks in an undertone. It feels weird to be asking Megamind if he’s all right, but she figures she owes him that much this time. He glances up at her and gives her a thumbs-up, then looks over at Wayne. His mouth falls open and he stares.
The blue creature is still hanging onto Wayne’s arm, and Wayne is tugging on him with his free hand, his square jaw clenched. His muscles ripple - he isn’t holding back like he usually does. That little blue animal is made of some tough stuff.
“Rackum…frackum…” He yanks on the animal by its hind legs, but he only growls and tightens his grip, and Wayne pauses and glares down at Megamind. “What have you done?” he grits out.
Megamind scowls. “I didn’t do anything,” he snaps, pushing himself to his feet. “I had nothing to do with him. I wish I had. He’s gorgeous.” Wayne rolls his eyes and smashes the blue animal against Roxanne’s doorframe. He smashes him through the doorframe and out the other side, but the little creature just shuts his eyes and growls louder, squeezing his jaw tighter until Wayne gasps and winces. Megamind grins. “You can stop, now,” he says, and the blue animal slits an eye open at him and burrs, then lets go of Wayne’s arm.
Wayne holds him squirming at arms’ length and stares at him. “What is it?” Then he glances down and his eyebrows go up. “Ow,” he says again, sounding very surprised. His suit is torn, and there are livid purple bruises rising in two half-moons on his arm. “That hurt.”
The blue thing snarls at him, then pins his ears to the back of his head and cackles.
“It hurt Wayne,” Roxanne says dumbly, and now she’s surprised. “It hurt Wayne?”
“Wayne hurt him,” the thing grumbles, pointing at Megamind. Then he sticks out his tongue and scrubs at it with both forepaws and a pained expression on his face. “Nasssssty.”
“Listen,” Roxanne says hurriedly to Metro Man. “This really isn’t what it looks like. I woke up and my apartment was like this and I didn’t know what to do about that.” She nods at the blue animal.
“So you called him?” Wayne stares at her in consternation. “Where did you get his number?” He looks at Megamind, his indignant confusion progressing rapidly towards total bafflement. “For that matter, when did you get a phone?”
“Oh for crying out loud, I’ve had her apartment bugged for months,” Megamind snarls, shrugging his shoulders a few times and adjusting his collar with sharp, angry movements. Roxanne blinks at him. When had he gotten so upset? “She didn’t even have to call me. All she did was start to yell and then I called her. And then this little guy jumped her and the line went dead, so I figured I’d come over and see what was up, because you,” he spits, “were busy.”
Wayne actually takes a step back. “Hold on a minute,” he begins, but Megamind’s head snaps up.
“Don’t ‘hold on a minute’ me,” he growls. “Ohhh, ho, ho. You’ve caught me red-handed this time!” His voice and face and posture are all so furiously sardonic. “If word of this ever gets out, my reputation is shot. Thank you so much.” He rounds on Roxanne, the very picture of righteous indignation, and waves a hand in Wayne’s direction. “You might have told me you had called him, too! A little warning would have been nice!”
“Well of course she called me,” Wayne says, and he’s starting to sound angry now, as well. “I’m her boyfriend.”
Megamind goes very still, then glares hatefully at Wayne. “Yes,” he replies coldly as he turns away. “I am, in fact, aware of that. My god, must you remind me every time?” He draws himself up and dusts himself off, then looks down at the little animal. “Do you have a name?”
It puffs out its chest. “My name Stitch!” it exclaims.
Megamind nods, then bends at the waist and holds out a slim, black-gloved hand, as if he’s been doing this sort of thing his whole life. Stitch stretches up and shakes it. “Stitch, my name is Megamind. Please come with me; I’ll try to help you repair your vessel and then you can be on your way.” Half of a lonely smile finds its way onto his features. “Blue agents of destruction ought to stick together, don’t you think?” Then he turns and fixes first Wayne and then Roxanne with a flat, level gaze. He looks offended, and just a little bit hurt. “And next time, you can just wait for your boyfriend to come and save you, Miss Ritchi. Expect no aid from me.” And he swirls his ragged cape around him and stalks towards the door.
“Fine, but will you at least refrain from bugging my apartment?” Roxanne calls at his retreating back. It’s worth a shot.
Megamind spins on the heels of his boots, then clicks his feet down and pulls his shoulders back into a surprisingly militarily rigid pose, his green-gold eyes flashing. “No! I will not refrain from bugging your apartment,” he declares. “And do you know why I will not?” He pulls his head back, lip curling, and snaps a finger into the air with a flourish. “Because I am a villain, Miss Ritchi! And villains don’t refrain from bugging their kidnappees’ apartments! And they certainly do not help their kidnappees! Villains don’t even try!”
Then he whirls again and tromps off, already issuing clipped orders into his watch for brainbots to come and clear the wreckage of a modified spacecraft off the roof of Roxanne’s apartment building. Stitch looks up at Roxanne and Metro Man and wrinkles his nose.
“Meanie-pants,” he says flatly, and scuttles off after Megamind.
Wayne blinks at Roxanne as the door swings shut behind the blue creature.
“What the hell was that about?” he asks. Roxanne can only shake her head.
But when she goes to bed that night, she changes the bandage on her hand. And she stands at her sink for a few minutes, staring at the bloodstained strip of cloth that Megamind had used as a makeshift wrap. Sleek sealskin black on one side, slick electric blue with little lightning bolts on the other, it feels more like a swishy liquid than a piece of cloth, and Roxanne can’t help but wonder what it’s made of.
Megamind had torn one of his capes just so that Roxanne wouldn’t have to pull towel fuzz out of her hand later on. Roxanne is a little reluctant to think about the implications of that, given how vain he is, and finally she just shoves the strip of cloth into the very back of the cupboard under her bathroom sink, determined to forget this whole bizarre encounter ever happened.
“You’re bleeding!” “Villains don’t even try.”
Roxanne grins in sudden and amused understanding. “You’re not a villain,” she mutters. “You’re as lost and confused as the rest of us. You just hide it better.”
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
A week later, she gets an envelope in the mail from Hawaii. Perplexed, she opens it and finds a “Sincerest apologies” card with a sunset on the cover and “Srry i brok your house!” scrawled over the inside in blue crayon. Built to destroy, huh? she thinks. And when Megamind kidnaps her a week after that, she tells him she had gotten a letter from Stitch, watching him carefully to see how he reacts. “It was nice of you to help him fix his ship.”
“Yes, well,” he says shortly, adjusting the flamethrowers and frowning. He flips a few switches, scoots across the floor in his high-backed chair and types something into one of the massive computers. “Like I said. Blue evil people should watch each other’s backs.” He is aloof, unsmiling, almost haughty. He is still offended.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Roxanne says, and Megamind turns and stares at her, his lips parting in surprise, completely taken aback by the unexpected apology. Then he smiles.
It’s the first real smile she’s ever seen from him, and she’s surprised how natural it looks, and she finds herself smiling back without really meaning to.
“That’s okay,” he says. “You were having a rough day. Oh, and by the way,” he adds slyly, and raises an eyebrow, and Roxanne knows he's forgiven her. “I like your pajamas. Rocket ships. Very…Freudian, Miss Ritchi.”
And everything goes back to normal.
Return to Master List
I own nothing. Disney, Dreamworks, please don’t sue me! This was the product of a small livestream hosted by filthy_animal. She and legendaryair and I were the only three watching, so we ended up just watching a bunch of clips and trailers and it was actually a lot of fun, but I mentioned that I had never seen a certain movie and they were both like, oh man, there needs to be crossover fic of that. So here we go! Crossover! Filthy, Emma, m’dears, you are both totally mad. This hasn’t been edited nearly as much as it probably should have been, because I’m kind of in the middle of another project at the moment, but I hope it turned out okay and I hope you both like it!
No, I’m not telling you what it’s a crossover of, that would ruin the fun.
Blue Agents of Destruction
Initially, Roxanne hadn’t been sure how to handle the…it. She wasn’t accustomed to things turning up in her home unexpectedly, that was the first problem; the second had been that it had seemed harmless enough at first. And it was cute - it’s still cute, never mind that it’s shredding her sofa. It’s gleefully enthusiastic about everything, and the cheerful burring noises it’s making provide a rather strange counterpoint to the sound of rending cloth. Big ears, big black eyes, big nose, big grin? And fuzzy to boot. It’s adorable.
It also seems bent on demolishing her apartment, and it’s done a pretty good job so far.
“No, for heaven’s sake-oh come on, quit it!” She reaches out to grab it by the scruff of the neck, but jerks her hand back when it turns its face towards her. It doesn’t look like it’s going to bite, but its teeth are big and she'd rather not take chances.
She bites her lip and stands back, watching the little beast destroy her sofa with a worried expression on her face. Where had it come from? It doesn’t seem particularly bothered by gravity or conventional ‘up-down’ directions. A wall is as good as a floor for walking, and it can leap with the same unpredictable snap-hop Roxanne is used to seeing from jumping spiders.
Cute or not, it has to go. Ordinarily she’d try to get rid of it herself, but she doesn’t even know what ‘it’ is. She pulls out her phone and dials, keeping an eye on the animal at all times.
Wayne picks up on the third ring. “Heyyyy, Roxie. ‘S happening?”
“Hey, Wayne.” Roxanne hesitates, eyeing the little creature and wondering how to explain it. “There’s a…thing,” she says slowly. “In my apartment. I don’t know what it is.”
“Is it gonna hurt you?”
Roxanne hesitates again. The beast sniffs at one of the legs of the coffee table for a moment, then bites through it. “I don’t….think it’s going to hurt me.” The creature turns towards her, at that, and if Roxanne hadn’t known better she would have sworn it had cast her a dirty look.
Wayne makes a disgruntled noise in his throat. “Listen, Roxie, I’d love to help and I’ll be by later but there’s a huge fire west of town and I’m really needed there. Can this wait?”
Roxanne blinks. “Oh - sure, right, of course.” Wayne’s responsibilities as Hero of Metro City take priority. “Should I be there?”
“Nah, it’s your day off. I think they’ve got Marcie on the way.” Then he swears and says a hurried, “Gotta go, bye!”
“Bye,” says Roxanne, belatedly, but he’s already hung up. Okay. No help from Wayne, then. She considers her options - she could wait for Wayne to finish up what he’s doing, or she could…do what, exactly? Try to get the animal out of her apartment by herself? She looks at its teeth again and the way its eyes seem to be sliding in and out of focus, and cringes away from that idea.
The animal is evidently finished with the sofa and has moved on to her CD collection. Its four-toed hands are surprisingly dexterous, sharp claws notwithstanding, and it is going through her collection one CD at a time and looking at the covers as if it can actually read them. What the heck?
It looks up at the CD cabinet and seems to think for a moment, and then it rears onto its hind legs and stretches, twists a little from side to side until a bump appears on either side of its abdomen. Roxanne’s mouth falls open and she watches in horrified revulsion as the creature squeezes its eyes closed and hunches, pushing until the bumps pop out into a third pair of legs.
Understanding hits her like a ton of brick. Of course. Megamind. Somehow, this is his doing--he must be going into genetics. Wonderful. She closes her eyes for a moment, shaking her head, then raises her voice.
“All right, Megamind,” she says loudly, turning in a slow circle. “Nice one. I know you’ve got this place bugged, I know you can hear me! Get your skinny blue ass over to my apartment, pronto, and get this…thing of yours out of here. I-”
Her cell phone rings and she pounces, flips it open.
“-Really don’t care, Miss Ritchi. What are you doing, anyway? Renovating?” He sounds amused and a little perplexed, but mostly amused. “Sounds like you’ve been breaking things all morning. Do tell me what’s going on, won’t you? I’ve got a bet on with Minion.”
“Oh ha ha, it is to laugh,” Roxanne snaps, planting one fist on her hip even though he can’t see. “As if you don’t know. What is this thing, anyway?” She turns around to look for it. Then she lunges. “Get away from my curtains, you little beast!”
“It’s alive?”
“Oh I don’t know, you’re the mad scientist,” Roxanne drawls, glaring up at the thing now perching on her curtain rod and hissing at her. For some reason, she just defaults to sarcasm around Megamind. It happens every time. “Can dead things destroy apartments?”
There’s a lot of muffled whispering that follows this - Megamind and Minion are holding council. Roxanne waits impatiently, tapping her foot and seething. Finally Megamind gets back on the phone. He’s using his gloating voice. “I’m sorry, Miss Ritchi,” he says, “but I’m afraid I just have too much on my plate today to come over and get rid of an infestation for you. Besides, that wouldn’t be very eeeevil of me, would it? Why not call your boyfriend in tights, instead?”
Roxanne’s eyes narrow. “I did,” she tells him acidly. “He’s busy saving lives. And this is one of your experiments! You get rid of it. Destroying my apartment? That’s low, Megs. Even for you.”
“Mmm.” He doesn’t sound too bothered by her tone of scathing disappointment. “So sorry to have inconvenienced you. Oh wait! That’s in my job description! Haaaaa ha ha ha ha!” And he hangs up.
Roxanne glares and stalks into her bedroom, hooks the speakers up to her laptop and turns on the microphone, then cranks the volume all the way up. She suspects, as she has for some time, that Megamind’s listening devices in her apartment run twenty-four seven and that he’s never bothered to install a mute function. And today, she’s going to find out. She flops into her chair and spins back and forth, singing at the top of her lungs.
Well. Not so much singing as yelling on different pitches.
“Down at an English fair, one evening I was there,” she yells, “when I saw a showman shouting underneath the flair --- OH!” And she flings herself into the chorus with all the angry off-key enthusiasm she can muster. The microphone catches her voice and amplifies it twenty times. “I’VE GOT A LOVE-UH-LY BUNCH OF COCONUTS, DEEDLE-EE-DEE-DEE, THERE THEY ARE A-STANDING IN A ROW, BOM BOM BOM, BIG ONES, SMALL ONES, SOME AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD” (breath) “GIVE ‘EM A TWIST, A FLICK OF THE WRIST, THAT’S WHAT THE SHOWMAN SAID. OH! I’VE GOT…”
She cuts off with a little shriek of surprise and pain when the beast slams open the door to her room and jumps at her, snarling, and knocks her out of her chair with a crash. Hastily, she scoots back across the floor, away from the six-legged animal. It rears onto its hind legs and burrs at her, looking disgruntled, then looks at her computer. “No,” Roxanne begins, stretching out a hand, but it’s too late. The beast swallows one of her speakers in one go and then bites her laptop’s screen in half. Roxanne watches, almost unable to believe what she’s seeing, as it crawls under her desk and peels something flat and black off the bottom of her top drawer, and proceeds to eat it.
Roxanne glances at the bathroom. She’ll have to go past the creature to get to it, but it has a door that locks, and the creature is still under her desk for the time being. She stands, then launches herself over her bed and scrambles like mad for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her and punching the lock button.
She fully expects to have to wait in there until Wayne comes to help, and as much as Roxanne doesn’t enjoy needing to be rescued, today she’s more than willing to wait however long she has to. She just hopes the little monster doesn’t get bored and start exploring. There’s really nowhere else she can go from where she is except into the shower, and she highly doubts the monster is hydrophobic. Because really, that would be too much to ask.
She looks around for something like a weapon. There’s hairspray, but she doesn’t have any matches. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head, and then her gaze falls on her shower curtain and the metal rod holding it up. The bathroom is a narrow rectangle, with the tub along the short wall opposite the door - there is more than enough room length-ways to get a little bit of leverage.
She walks over and steps up with one foot on the edge of the tub and the other on the lid of the toilet, wraps both hands around the metal curtain rod, and tugs. She doesn’t want to try to break it in the middle and risk bending it, but standing where she is doesn’t seem to be working. Well, she’ll just try the other end. She stands on the edge of the other end of the tub and pulls, leans her full weight against the rod. It shifts a little, but doesn’t break.
“Oh come on,” she says again, wiping her hands on her pajama pants. This is not how she wanted to start the day. She grabs the bar again, hoists herself up a little, and then slams her legs down towards the floor to shock the rod into breaking.
It snaps at the far end and Roxanne tumbles to the floor in an ungainly heap. Her hand hurts a little and she feels kind of shaky from falling, but at least the curtain rod is down. She grins and hefts it - it’s lighter than she had expected, but the end is jagged and sharp where she broke it. It will do for a lance if the little beast tries to attack her again.
She only notices the dull roar when it coughs to a stop nearby. She pauses. It can’t be. No way, she thinks, but tiptoes over to the bathroom door and presses her ear against it anyway.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Megamind leaps from the hoverbike to Roxanne’s balcony without worrying too much about being noticed - this is definitely the earliest he’s ever broken into Roxanne’s apartment, but he’s done it enough times by now that he knows the neighbors’ routines by heart and he knows how not to be caught. He stumbles a little as he lands, almost tripping over what looks like part of an engine. Brushed-red aluminum with white stripes on it, charred and sooty in places, rattles against the tile when he catches himself on the railing and kicks it by accident. Smaller debris litters the tile. Megamind glances up and shades his face against the morning sunlight. He can just make out part of a bent, twisted metal wing sticking out over the roof.
The balcony door is ajar. Odd, he thinks, pushing it gingerly open and stepping inside, usually she keeps it locked. Then he looks around, and his jaw drops, and all doubts he had had about coming are banished by what he sees. He draws the de-gun.
Roxanne’s apartment is a shambles. It’s usually a little cluttered, but this is ridiculous. The couch is in ribbons, the coffee table is broken. The television looks like something has been gnawing on it. The CDs are all over the floor. The refrigerator door is wide open and something reddish is dripping slowly onto the floor. Roxanne’s newspapers, which are usually piled more or less neatly in the corners, are scattered everywhere.
And Roxanne herself is nowhere to be seen. De-gun at the ready, Megamind takes a few quiet steps further into the apartment. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have bothered to come - he would have just unplugged the audio feed from Roxanne’s desk and let her sing herself hoarse while he got on with his duties as a supervillain - but she'd screamed. Roxanne hasn’t screamed in years. And then she had said, “No,” just before the audio had cut out - Megamind might kidnap Roxanne on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean he wants her hurt. He actually rather likes her. And although he’d rather eat an ounce of straight dichloromethane than admit it, he’s a little bit worried.
There’s a snap, followed by a crunching noise, from Roxanne’s bedroom. Carefully, quietly, Megamind creeps towards the bedroom door and peers around it. The bedroom is slightly more intact than the rest of Roxanne’s apartment, although her fluffy comforter is torn in places and there are feathers over everything. A quick glance around tells him that she does not have any immediately apparent idiosyncrasies. No ‘she likes fuzzy things’ or ‘she likes pink.’ The room is done up in tasteful shades of grey and white. He’s almost disappointed.
He clears his throat. “Miss Ritchi?” he calls, his finger tightening on the trigger of the de-gun. “Are you here? Are you, um. Are you hurt?”
A furry blue head pops up on the other side of Roxanne’s bed, big black eyes peer at him, and Megamind barely keeps himself from firing. The animal tilts its head to the side, long ears twitching attentively towards him as it moves its head back and forth as if trying to focus on him. Megamind stares at it, running through a mental list of known mammals and finally identifying the creature in Roxanne’s bedroom as a clear ‘none of the above.’
A new species, then, or an alien one. Forward-facing eyes, wide mouth, sharp teeth, crushing jaw. The animal is a hunter. It blinks at him, then grins and sticks out its tongue. “Whoarrrrnnngh nurrrriiiirrn,” it gurgles, and cackles. Megamind blinks. That sounded like words, he thinks. The creature burrs something else, and hunts around for a moment before picking up a pen with two claws and holding it out towards him. It burrs again, chortling insistently, and when Megamind only stares at it some more, tosses the pen aside and holds up a blue compact mirror from Roxanne’s nightstand, then hops up onto Roxanne’s bed.
Six legs, opposable thumbs, dorsal ridge, supra-orbital sensory ganglia. This creature is more advanced than any Megamind has ever seen. It chirps a question, and plucks a little at one of its arms, blinking up at him.
Megamind’s eyes go wide and he touches his face. “Blue?” he asks. “Is that what you’re saying?” He touches his face, the lining of his cape, the lightning bolt on his chest, then points at the creature. “Blue?”
It chirrups, laughing. “Prrrrue,” it says, sticks out its tongue, and gleefully tears a pillow in half.
“Psst! Megamind!”
He jumps again and turns. Roxanne has opened the bathroom door a crack and is motioning frantically for him to come closer. He takes a few steps towards her, wondering vaguely why she’s in the bathroom and whether she might be indecent. Most of his attention is still on the little monster on Roxanne’s bed, so he’s startled when she reaches out, grabs him by the front of his suit, and drags him bodily into the bathroom and slams the door behind him and locks it.
She stares at him for a moment, and he backs against her bathroom door, all of his focus now fixed clearly on her. She’s still in her pajamas - a men’s Mumford and Sons tee shirt that is many sizes too big for her and a pair of pale green baggy pants with a pattern of planets, stars, and rocket ships on them - and she’s clutching an aluminum rod like a lance, aiming it at his chest. “What manner of demon,” she says eventually, “have you unleashed on my apartment?”
Megamind gapes at her and slowly holsters his gun, lifts his hands. “I have no idea.”
Her lip curls and she jabs a little with the rod. “Don’t give me that,” she snarls. “It’s one of your experiments, right?”
He blinks, and then half of his mouth lifts into a wry smile. “Believe me, Miss Ritchi,” he says, “if I could take credit for that beautiful animal, I would do it in a heartbeat.” His smile grows wider, but his eyes are on the metal rod and he looks a little nervous. “Unfortunately, I’ve never seen him before in my life. I-” Then he looks at her hands and his eyes go wide.
“You’re bleeding!” he exclaims, in quite a different tone, and suddenly the rod has been shoved aside and Megamind has taken her hand in both of his and is inspecting the cut. Roxanne freezes. Megamind is close, too close, close enough that she can smell him - leathery and peppery and just a little bit like engine oil and smoke. His gloved hands are surprisingly gentle, but Roxanne still recoils. What is he doing?
“It’s…just a cut,” she stammers, trying to pull her hand away, but Megamind’s fingers close like a vise around her wrist and he reaches for the medicine cabinet with his free hand.
“My ass chews gum,” he says flatly, and Roxanne blinks, then realizes with a start that he probably isn’t acting - he’s probably only half-aware of what he’s doing. Either way, this is the first she's ever heard him swear. “Do you have any idea how many bacteria live on bathroom appliances? I’d rather not have you die of tetanus, thanks.” He finds the hydrogen peroxide and unscrews the cap with quick, clever fingers, then holds her hand over the sink and pours the clear liquid liberally over the wound.
Roxanne hadn’t been ready for that, and she jerks her hand away with a pained gasp. Megamind gasps too, and blinks at her, and that, that right there, that is the kind of expression Roxanne lives for. Dawning comprehension mixed with horror and disbelief. It’s the best expression ever, especially when it’s on Megamind because his face can really do it justice.
Megamind lets go of her hand and all but leaps away. “Oh - jeez - I’m…” His green eyes are absolutely huge.
Roxanne snorts. The peroxide is still fizzing, a little, still burning and hissing, and the cut across her palm is angry-looking and red, and Megamind is opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water. “Well you can’t just leave me hanging, here,” she says, trying not to laugh at his stunned what-just-happened-here expression. “You started this, genius, so finish it.” She pauses and changes the subject back to the creature still dismantling her bedroom. “You really don’t know what that thing is?”
Megamind swallows and steps closer, pulls a dry towel off the wall-mounted towel rack and goes to tear it. “I really don’t,” he admits.
“Hold it,” Roxanne says, eyeing the fluffy towel. “That’s going to get all kinds of fuzzies in my cut.”
Megamind blinks at her and frowns a little. “Unless you have gauze under your sink…” He checks. She doesn’t. He glances around for another alternative, stroking his thumb down his goatee while he thinks.
“Well, I guess if you have to use the towel,” Roxanne begins, but then Megamind nods to himself and he picks up the hem of his cape and rips a strip off without any kind of hesitation. Roxanne’s eyes bug. “What are you doing?”
“It’s one of my old ones,” he shrugs, and draws the de-gun, rolls the barrel to change the setting, then reaches for her hand again. Roxanne backs away, staring at the gun. “What?” Megamind asks, sounding faintly injured when she steps out of his reach. Then he sees where she’s looking. “Oh. No, look.” He shows her the side of it - de-contaminate - then fires a beam of green light at the strip of blue and black cloth in his hand and holds it up. It’s undamaged. “See? It won’t hurt.”
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Roxanne thinks dazedly as she allows Megamind to take her hand and aim the de-gun at it. She squeezes her eyes closed. I can’t believe there’s a thing in my apartment that Megamind can’t identify. I can’t believe I called him. And, under that and at the same time, where Roxanne refuses to acknowledge, I can’t believe he actually came.
“There!” he announces, sounding very pleased with himself. “All done.”
Roxanne opens her eyes and looks at her hand. It’s probably the messiest bandage she’s ever seen, but it’s a bandage, and Megamind is the one who put it there, and she has to choke back a laugh. “Okay,” she manages. “Let’s just get this over with. You really don’t know what it is?”
“I really don’t,” he says again, and he sounds just a little irritated that she’s making him repeat himself. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“But where did it come from?” she wonders, picking up the shower rod in her good hand.
Megamind shrugs. “Don’t know,” he says, and turns around and opens the door before Roxanne can stop him. “Let’s go ask.”
“What are you doing,” she hisses, but the door is already wide open and Megamind is looking down at something on the floor in front of him.
“Hi,” he says, surprised. “Were you waiting for us?”
Roxanne looks over his shoulder. The blue animal looks back up at them, blinking.
“H…Hghaaiiiieee,” it says, and offers them a broad, hesitant smile. And waves a forepaw, opening and closing its fingers. Roxanne blinks.
“Did it…did it just say hi?” she asks, stunned.
Megamind glances back at her and frowns. “‘He,’” he says quietly. “Not ‘it.’” He turns back to the creature. “Why are you messing up her apartment?” he asks, enunciating clearly. The animal tilts his head. “Why,” Megamind says, spreading his hands and then pointing at the creature, “you,” he waves both hands in the air in a scrambling motion, “mess up,” and gestures around at the wreckage, “this place?”
The creature grins again and scampers over to a floor lamp, closes his jaws around the pole. It snaps easily in half, and the creature turns to grin proudly back at Megamind, looking for approval. Then he staggers and nearly falls, but picks himself up again quickly, blinking and looking around as though momentarily confused.
Megamind’s narrow face splits into a wide smile. “You’re evil!” he exclaims, and drops into a crouch. “C’mere c’mere c’mere,” he says, and the note of excitement in his voice is unmistakable, “let me look at you? Can I?” And the next thing Roxanne knows, Megamind is on his knees and running both hands over the creature. “Night vision, I bet,” he murmurs, and pulls off a glove so hastily that the buckle snaps off and bounces under Roxanne’s bed. Megamind presses his bare hand against the creature’s forehead, measuring with his fingers. “Cranial capacity to body mass…Ohhhhhh, man,” he sighs, sitting back on his heels and gazing down at him. “I have got to get you back to the Lair. Once you learn some of our languages I bet you and I could have some real conversation.”
Roxanne edges out of the bathroom and stares down at Megamind. His eyes are shining, and he looks happier and more exhilarated than she’s ever seen him. Then she looks down at the blue animal, which has started to blink and shake his head and mutter to himself. “What are you talking about?” she demands. “Learning languages? It’s an animal.”
“So are you,” he points out, glancing up at her. The blue thing rubs his eyes and looks around, mouth falling open in apparent astonishment at what he sees, and then he seems to wilt a little. He sits down with a bump and grips his head in both forepaws, scowling in chagrin. “So am I. Hasn’t stopped us, has it?”
“Think was having fun,” the blue thing says. His voice is - burbly. That’s the only word Roxanne can think of to describe it. Sort of a back-of-the-throat chirring voice. And maybe if this had happened four years ago, Roxanne would be freaking out that the thing can talk, but she’s met Megamind, since then and her definition of ‘weird’ has changed a lot. Talking blue monsters? She deals with those on a weekly basis. This one is just a different shape. So what she says is not, “Oh my god, you can talk,” or “It talks!” or “What the shit.”
What she says is, “Having fun? This is you having fun?” She waves an arm around at her apartment. The blue thing settles onto his haunches and looks around, black eyes blinking, and he lays his ears back a little.
“Ship crashed,” he says, aiming a claw at the roof. “Fell onto ledge and hit head. Bonk.” He points at her balcony, raps his knuckles on his skull and twirls around on a hind paw before toppling over backwards. “Reverted.” He shrugs and gets back to his feet, then looks up at her hopefully. “Sorry?”
“Reverted,” Megamind says, cutting off Roxanne’s outraged cry of “Sorry’s not gonna cut it.” “Reverted to what?”
The blue animal screws up his face. “Original genetic im-per-a-tive,” he says carefully. Megamind and Roxanne look at each other, then back at the animal. He flicks his ears back again, hunching ashamedly. “Built to destroy.”
Roxanne throws up her hands. “I can believe that.” She aims a finger at the monster. “You owe me a new set of furniture, you little beast.”
There’s a crashing sound behind them, then a cry of, “Holy smokes, Roxie! You still in here? You OK?”
“Shit,” Megamind whispers, and stands, staring wildly around for somewhere to hide. He leaps towards Roxanne’s bed, but then Metro Man is there and Megamind is caught mid-leap and suspended in midair, feet pedaling wildly, dangling by his collar from Wayne’s massive fist.
“Ah-ha!” Wayne announces, and throws out his chest. “Caught in the act! Your nefarious schemes will have to wait for another day!”
“Gack,” says Megamind, eyes bulging as he claws awkwardly at Wayne’s arm with both hands. “Hlargh.”
Roxanne shakes her head. Ordinarily she’s fine with Wayne hauling Megamind around by the throat, but this time is different. This time she’s painfully conscious of the bandage on her hand and the fact that Megamind inexplicably responded to her cry for help. “Wayne,” she begins, but she’s interrupted by a loud snarl near her feet and she looks down. The blue, multi-legged creature has dropped to all sixes and is growling and stamping and rattling his dorsal spines and glaring daggers up at the floating Metro Man.
“Hey,” Wayne says, frowning, and he drifts a little lower to the floor. Megamind kicks at him but can’t quite reach him. “What’s that?”
The blue thing garbles something at him, Roxanne isn’t sure what - and then he launches himself at Wayne and sinks his teeth into the hero’s forearm.
“Ow,” Wayne says loudly, and drops Megamind onto the floor, where he sits for a moment, holding his throat and gasping, thin legs curled gracelessly under him.
“You…you okay?” Roxanne asks in an undertone. It feels weird to be asking Megamind if he’s all right, but she figures she owes him that much this time. He glances up at her and gives her a thumbs-up, then looks over at Wayne. His mouth falls open and he stares.
The blue creature is still hanging onto Wayne’s arm, and Wayne is tugging on him with his free hand, his square jaw clenched. His muscles ripple - he isn’t holding back like he usually does. That little blue animal is made of some tough stuff.
“Rackum…frackum…” He yanks on the animal by its hind legs, but he only growls and tightens his grip, and Wayne pauses and glares down at Megamind. “What have you done?” he grits out.
Megamind scowls. “I didn’t do anything,” he snaps, pushing himself to his feet. “I had nothing to do with him. I wish I had. He’s gorgeous.” Wayne rolls his eyes and smashes the blue animal against Roxanne’s doorframe. He smashes him through the doorframe and out the other side, but the little creature just shuts his eyes and growls louder, squeezing his jaw tighter until Wayne gasps and winces. Megamind grins. “You can stop, now,” he says, and the blue animal slits an eye open at him and burrs, then lets go of Wayne’s arm.
Wayne holds him squirming at arms’ length and stares at him. “What is it?” Then he glances down and his eyebrows go up. “Ow,” he says again, sounding very surprised. His suit is torn, and there are livid purple bruises rising in two half-moons on his arm. “That hurt.”
The blue thing snarls at him, then pins his ears to the back of his head and cackles.
“It hurt Wayne,” Roxanne says dumbly, and now she’s surprised. “It hurt Wayne?”
“Wayne hurt him,” the thing grumbles, pointing at Megamind. Then he sticks out his tongue and scrubs at it with both forepaws and a pained expression on his face. “Nasssssty.”
“Listen,” Roxanne says hurriedly to Metro Man. “This really isn’t what it looks like. I woke up and my apartment was like this and I didn’t know what to do about that.” She nods at the blue animal.
“So you called him?” Wayne stares at her in consternation. “Where did you get his number?” He looks at Megamind, his indignant confusion progressing rapidly towards total bafflement. “For that matter, when did you get a phone?”
“Oh for crying out loud, I’ve had her apartment bugged for months,” Megamind snarls, shrugging his shoulders a few times and adjusting his collar with sharp, angry movements. Roxanne blinks at him. When had he gotten so upset? “She didn’t even have to call me. All she did was start to yell and then I called her. And then this little guy jumped her and the line went dead, so I figured I’d come over and see what was up, because you,” he spits, “were busy.”
Wayne actually takes a step back. “Hold on a minute,” he begins, but Megamind’s head snaps up.
“Don’t ‘hold on a minute’ me,” he growls. “Ohhh, ho, ho. You’ve caught me red-handed this time!” His voice and face and posture are all so furiously sardonic. “If word of this ever gets out, my reputation is shot. Thank you so much.” He rounds on Roxanne, the very picture of righteous indignation, and waves a hand in Wayne’s direction. “You might have told me you had called him, too! A little warning would have been nice!”
“Well of course she called me,” Wayne says, and he’s starting to sound angry now, as well. “I’m her boyfriend.”
Megamind goes very still, then glares hatefully at Wayne. “Yes,” he replies coldly as he turns away. “I am, in fact, aware of that. My god, must you remind me every time?” He draws himself up and dusts himself off, then looks down at the little animal. “Do you have a name?”
It puffs out its chest. “My name Stitch!” it exclaims.
Megamind nods, then bends at the waist and holds out a slim, black-gloved hand, as if he’s been doing this sort of thing his whole life. Stitch stretches up and shakes it. “Stitch, my name is Megamind. Please come with me; I’ll try to help you repair your vessel and then you can be on your way.” Half of a lonely smile finds its way onto his features. “Blue agents of destruction ought to stick together, don’t you think?” Then he turns and fixes first Wayne and then Roxanne with a flat, level gaze. He looks offended, and just a little bit hurt. “And next time, you can just wait for your boyfriend to come and save you, Miss Ritchi. Expect no aid from me.” And he swirls his ragged cape around him and stalks towards the door.
“Fine, but will you at least refrain from bugging my apartment?” Roxanne calls at his retreating back. It’s worth a shot.
Megamind spins on the heels of his boots, then clicks his feet down and pulls his shoulders back into a surprisingly militarily rigid pose, his green-gold eyes flashing. “No! I will not refrain from bugging your apartment,” he declares. “And do you know why I will not?” He pulls his head back, lip curling, and snaps a finger into the air with a flourish. “Because I am a villain, Miss Ritchi! And villains don’t refrain from bugging their kidnappees’ apartments! And they certainly do not help their kidnappees! Villains don’t even try!”
Then he whirls again and tromps off, already issuing clipped orders into his watch for brainbots to come and clear the wreckage of a modified spacecraft off the roof of Roxanne’s apartment building. Stitch looks up at Roxanne and Metro Man and wrinkles his nose.
“Meanie-pants,” he says flatly, and scuttles off after Megamind.
Wayne blinks at Roxanne as the door swings shut behind the blue creature.
“What the hell was that about?” he asks. Roxanne can only shake her head.
But when she goes to bed that night, she changes the bandage on her hand. And she stands at her sink for a few minutes, staring at the bloodstained strip of cloth that Megamind had used as a makeshift wrap. Sleek sealskin black on one side, slick electric blue with little lightning bolts on the other, it feels more like a swishy liquid than a piece of cloth, and Roxanne can’t help but wonder what it’s made of.
Megamind had torn one of his capes just so that Roxanne wouldn’t have to pull towel fuzz out of her hand later on. Roxanne is a little reluctant to think about the implications of that, given how vain he is, and finally she just shoves the strip of cloth into the very back of the cupboard under her bathroom sink, determined to forget this whole bizarre encounter ever happened.
“You’re bleeding!” “Villains don’t even try.”
Roxanne grins in sudden and amused understanding. “You’re not a villain,” she mutters. “You’re as lost and confused as the rest of us. You just hide it better.”
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
A week later, she gets an envelope in the mail from Hawaii. Perplexed, she opens it and finds a “Sincerest apologies” card with a sunset on the cover and “Srry i brok your house!” scrawled over the inside in blue crayon. Built to destroy, huh? she thinks. And when Megamind kidnaps her a week after that, she tells him she had gotten a letter from Stitch, watching him carefully to see how he reacts. “It was nice of you to help him fix his ship.”
“Yes, well,” he says shortly, adjusting the flamethrowers and frowning. He flips a few switches, scoots across the floor in his high-backed chair and types something into one of the massive computers. “Like I said. Blue evil people should watch each other’s backs.” He is aloof, unsmiling, almost haughty. He is still offended.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Roxanne says, and Megamind turns and stares at her, his lips parting in surprise, completely taken aback by the unexpected apology. Then he smiles.
It’s the first real smile she’s ever seen from him, and she’s surprised how natural it looks, and she finds herself smiling back without really meaning to.
“That’s okay,” he says. “You were having a rough day. Oh, and by the way,” he adds slyly, and raises an eyebrow, and Roxanne knows he's forgiven her. “I like your pajamas. Rocket ships. Very…Freudian, Miss Ritchi.”
And everything goes back to normal.
Return to Master List