Cold Fusion: Hallows' Eve, Ch. 7 (part 2)
"Two, three AM," the ex-hero mumbles as the door clicks shut. He feels horrible, but he actually relaxes a little as soon as he knows Megamind is out of the room. "I was reading and I lost track of time."
Roxanne rolls her eyes heavenward. "Someday I will have friends who actually go to sleep at normal hours. What the heck were you reading that kept you up so late?"
Wayne colors and mutters something. She leans closer. "Sorry? I didn't catch that."
"I said, I was studying. Kind of."
She blinks, baffled. "Studying?"
He sighs and bends down, paws around under the sofa for a moment, then silently passes her a language dictionary, a grammar handbook, a pack of handwritten flash cards, a notebook, and a slim novel. She blinks down at the books. "Okay, what's this?"
"It's a Chinese-English dictionary, what does it look like?" Wayne looks embarrassed. "It's…it's nothing, it's just something I've been meaning to do for years only I never had time before."
Roxanne stares down at the educational material in her lap. "Are you…trying to teach yourself Chinese?" When he nods, she says, "Why?"
"It's kind of a long story."
She smiles and waits.
Wayne shakes his head. "It was years ago. I went to the Lair for…something, and Blue was looking at something in a microscope and writing in a notebook. In Chinese. We were seventeen or so at the time and I was…I dunno, I was impressed. I'd taken German for a few years at that point, but Chinese, man, that's heavy. That's hard." He looks into the distance, frowning.
Roxanne says nothing. If she doesn't say anything, Wayne will keep talking, and right now, he needs to talk. His parents are dead, yes, but the bulk of the conversation thus far has steered him away from that subject - which is fine, he needs the distraction, but there's something else brewing here. He never just talks like this, and she doesn't want to interrupt him.
"And you know, I think that was when I first realized that he really was intelligent. I'd always figured he cheated, and that's why his grades were so good and all of his coursework was always done. But then there he was, right in front of me, writing in Chinese with one hand and English with the other and it looked so cool, and that's not something you can fake, either. My grades were never bad, but I'm no genius. I coasted. And I know the teachers were liberal with their grading where I was concerned. I'd say about twenty percent of my final GPA was a total joke. But language, I mean, and science and engineering and all that stuff he does, that's real. That's…you can touch it, it's not…it doesn't depend on people's opinions of you. And it's not a comparison thing, either. I was born with these powers, I never worked for them. And I remember standing there and looking at him and thinking, holy shit, it's not just for show, he's actually brilliant." He pauses for a moment and makes a small, disgusted noise in the back of his throat. "God, that sounds so shallow. Like I'd just then realized."
Then he laughs a little. "Heck, that was half the fun of fighting with him. I never knew what he was gonna come up with next. Anyway. I…I looked at that, and I thought, why can't I do that?" He looks up at Roxanne. "You know. Why not? If he can do it…it's a language, loads of people learn foreign languages. I got pretty good at German. I'm not stupid. I'm not. So now that I've finally got free time, I…I figured I'd give it a go."
"So how's it going?" She flips through the notebook, glances at the untidy scrawl of tangled characters.
He waves an irritated gesture in the air. "It's hard. It's damn near impossible. I've got loads of respect for the little guy if he can teach himself stuff like that. I just, I need to stick with this." He leans back and throws one massive forearm across his eyes. "I've had a lot of free time, lately. I don't know, I just thought…I just thought, maybe, maybe I'll start a project and actually finish it for once, you know? Mom was always after me to finish what I started, but I never did…"
He falls silent for a moment. "I probably won't finish this one either."
Roxanne's heart twists in her chest. "Wayne…"
"He was wrong, you know. He just assumed I wouldn't know what he was talking about, but I have read Cicero. I didn't really understand all of it, but I've read a lot of stuff over the past few months and I might go back and skim through it again. It's all I've been doing, to keep from… I tried spending time online but I kept reading the news and feeling like…like I should be out there, helping, but I can't, I just, I can't." He swallows and forces himself away from that line of thinking. "So yeah, I've been doing a lot of reading.
"You know, I never went to college?" he asks suddenly, but he doesn't sound like he wants an answer. "I went straight into the hero business. I never had to go to college. I have money coming out of my ears so I never had to learn a trade, and besides, I was always destined to be a hero. I've been a hero ever since I graduated high school - since before that, even. And it sounds dumb but I'm only just starting to realize how much I missed. There's so much I want to learn, and I've never had time before, and now I have all the time in the world but I just can't…I can't enjoy it. I keep thinking, I should be out there, I should be doing something with my life. Eight thousand lives, and all I can think about is all the ones I didn't save. And all the ones I'm not saving right now."
He sits up and looks wildly at Roxanne, almost begging for her to understand, for someone to understand what he's trying to say. "But it's my life!" he exclaims. "It's the only one I'm going to get! Why can't I just do something for me, for once? I don't…can't I do that? Why do I have to save everyone? Why is that my job? If I ever come out of hiding, they're gonna say I abandoned them, I left them, they're gonna say I wasn't allowed to just quit - and they're gonna be right! They'll be right." He stares at her, and Roxanne stares back with absolutely no idea of how to answer, and then he just sort of wilts, dropping his head and rubbing his hands backwards through his tangled hair. Then his shoulders hitch and he's crying, he can't help it. "I - dang it, I'm sorry, gimme a minute -"
"You can cry."
"No, just hang on, all right? I'm fine, I'll be fine."
Roxanne's eyes narrow. Now there's a familiar line.
It takes him less than a minute to bring himself back under control. "I can't go back." He clenches his fingers in his hair. "I can't. I don't want to. I don't want it. I thought I did - once - but I don't. I don't, I can't."
"You don't have to," she says, but he draws a ragged breath and collapses further in on himself.
"Then why can't I just quit?" he whispers. "Why can't I just let it go?"
Roxanne's phone chirps, and she releases such a loud and varied string of chagrined profanity that it startles even her, but that was really not the time for someone to text her. That was just about the worst possible time. She isn't even going to look at it, but then Wayne says dully, "What's he say?"
She blinks at him, uncomprehending. "Who?"
He swallows. "Blue. What's he say?"
"Uh…" She fishes out her phone and looks at it - sure enough, it's from Megamind. She looks at Wayne. "How did you know?"
"Because he knows me."
She shakes her head and looks at the texts - it's too long so it separated into several parts. Bring on the self-loathing, it reads. If I'm right, he's been trying to avoid this for a while now but the fire just brought everything crashing down at once and now his instinct for self-preservation and his hero complex are duking it out in his subconscious. Tell him he needs to keep remembering that the hero-guilt is a complex. Oh AND he'll be guilty about his parents because his mind is refusing to focus on them, so be prepared for that. Also, what do you think of maybe seeing if we can get Minion to talk to him? I think he might need a minion right about now.
She looks at Wayne, then texts, U may b rite but I dont thnk he'll talk 2 minion. Ill try n get him 2 talk 2 me. Stop txtng & drvng. Aloud, she says, "He says you have a guilt complex." She silences her phone and puts it away.
Wayne makes a disgruntled noise. "I know that already. But the guilt's there for a reason. I'm being selfish."
"No, you aren't," she says flatly. "That's why it's a complex. You've always been a hero, but now you aren't and you don't know what to do. You don't know who you are without the hero." And then she has an idea, pulls out her phone, types and sends one last quick text. "Wayne. You know what you need to do?"
"What?"
"You need to listen to My Life until your ears bleed."
He looks up at her. "Billy Joel?" he asks, sounding baffled.
Roxanne nods firmly. "Yup. And then you need to listen to Bon Jovi's…I don't remember what the title is but it's pretty much the same thing. Because of…" She thinks for a moment. What did he say they were? C'mon, Roxie, we just talked about this yesterday. "Um…neural pathways! That was it."
"What," says Wayne again.
"If you listen to good music until it gets stuck on infinite loop in your head, I bet it'll help. Build up productive strings of molecules in your brain until they outnumber the bad strings of molecules. Or something."
He laughs shortly. "Let Blue explain it. He's the genius. But thanks for trying." He heaves a massive, uneven sigh, and scrubs at his eyes. "Argh. I'm sorry, that came out really bad. I just… I wish I could talk to my mom, but she wouldn't understand. Father never did either. Not like it matters now, anyway," he mutters. "My life is just a shambles. I don't know who I am, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't even know who I want to be or what I want to do, and now this fire…funeral arrangements and insurance policies…but technically I'm dead, too, so that's a bust."
He sighs again, and it's obvious to Roxanne how tired he is. "Hey," she says quietly. "Did you ever tell your parents you were still alive?"
His silence is answer enough.
"Oh, Wayne," she says.
"I didn't mean for it to go on this long," he mumbles. He doesn't look at her. "I just wanted to be left alone 'til I could figure out what I was doing. I just wanted to come up with something that would make them understand."
His father had always been difficult to please, and his mother followed her husband's lead. They could very easily have guilted their son out of hiding. Roxanne groans and pinches the bridge of her nose for a second. Wayne is very good at not dealing with things if he doesn't want to deal with them. He's very stubborn, and very opinionated, and he sees the world the way he wants to see it, but Roxanne knows - and she really doesn't want to go where she's going to go in a minute, but it needs to be said - she knows what that's like because she's the same way.
"Okay, you. Lie down." She reaches out and pokes the big man in the middle of his forehead. "You are going to take a nap, and you're going to deal with this when you're better rested. Okay?"
He manages a half-smile and a nod. "Yeah," he whispers. "Yeah, okay."
"One more thing," she says, steeling herself, and waits until he finally looks at her again to tell him, "You are allowed to cry."
He shakes his head. "I don't wanna unload on you, you don't need that -"
"Wayne." She cuts him off. "You are one of my closest friends. You know things about me that nobody else does." There's something in her tone - a warning, a sharpness, that catches his attention. She locks eyes with him and takes a deep breath. "But there are things even you don't know. And I am telling you right now that I know what you're going through. The circumstances were different but I do know what it feels like to go through life telling yourself that you're fine, you're fine, you're fine, everything is totally fine even though it isn't, even though it's killing you." She can feel herself getting shaky, and she licks her lips and forces her voice to stay steady. "And I know what it is to come out of that. And I know what it's like to feel like everything that went wrong with your life is your fault. And I am telling you right now that it is not your fault, and you are allowed to cry." She offers him a very wobbly smile. "God knows I did."
Wayne stares at her for a long moment, and she stares back - if she moves, if she even blinks, she thinks she might break into a million little pieces.
Then white membranes slide sideways over his eyes just before he squeezes them shut, and then he leans forward and drags Roxanne to him and just sobs, choking on juddering gasps that wrack his massive frame. And she grabs onto the back of his shirt and ignores the fact that she's going to have bruises after this and cries right back. Megamind isn't there, he won't see her crying on Wayne the way she's never cried on him. And bruises are nothing new.
"S-sorry, I'm-"
"No, it's okay, I told you-"
"O-okay, okay, sorry, I'm sorry, I just don't know what I'm d-doing and I can't, I can't, I can't-"
"I know, I know, it's okay, you don't have to."
It isn't quiet, and it isn't restrained, and it isn't pretty. It's loud and it's open and it's raw. And it hurts. Roxanne is surprised how much it hurts. It's not even about her, and it still hurts.
"I miss them," he gasps. "Every day. It's like I'm betraying my family but I think about them and I miss them and I don't even remember them, and I didn't mean to stay away this long but I just couldn't face him and tell him that I quit, but now - but now-"
"He knows. And he understands."
Wayne shakes his head wildly. "But I should have been there - I should have saved them -"
"You didn't know!" Roxanne exclaims. "You couldn't know."
He lets out a torn, angry sound that turns into, "Yes I could have! It's my job! Nobody else, nobody…there's nobody else who can do it. It falls to me. It's my duty."
"It's your life!" she cries. "You should do what you want with your life! You know that, I know you know that, you said you knew that."
Wayne freezes, then curls up a little. He may be physically invulnerable, but he is no stranger to pain. "But how can I make myself believe it?" he chokes out. "Roxie. How do I just quit?"
If there's an answer to that, Roxanne doesn't know what it is. She just holds onto him and rocks him and hopes the storm passes soon. It's all she can do.
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