With my Freeze Ray I will Stop: Chapter 4
Last one, folks. At least for a while; there may be an epilogue someday but not for a couple of months, at least. This was so much fun, though, not gonna lie. I may have to do the occasional one-shot in this 'verse.
Chapter 4
And there was uproar in Metro. For the next week, all anyone can talk about is that last, glorious speech-I quit. He had been very clear about what he meant, but what flair! What showmanship! What panache!
Roxanne remains unavailable for comment.
She watches the news, of course, and she hears the speech; there’s no way to avoid hearing it. It’s all over the ‘net, the TV, the radio. Megamind Resigns, the newspaper headlines declare, Master of Villainy Retires. Extra, extra. Read all about it. She'd rather not.
Metro Man insisted he was stunned. “No, I didn’t expect anything like this-I’m floored, really.” Still, he is the first to approach Megamind a few days later, asking if he knows anything about the string of murders uptown. Both aliens are vague about each other’s involvement, but the killer is in custody not half an hour after Metro Man had entered the Lair. It’s the fastest apprehension of this sort in Metro City history.
Roxanne avoids the television as much as possible; it only upsets her. And then, late one Sunday afternoon, there’s a knock at the door. Not her front door, her balcony door, which is strange for two reasons: one, it’s raining cats and dogs out there; and two, she lives eighteen floors up.
Startled, she looks over, but the curtain is drawn. Curious and not a little apprehensive-Wayne sometimes comes to her balcony, but hardly ever unannounced unless it's an emergency and then he doesn't bother knocking-she puts down her notes and goes over, pulls the curtain aside.
Then she swears and pulls the door jarringly open, scudding on its casters. “What do you want?”
He looks at her, one fist still raised to knock again. “I’m bored. Also, it’s raining, can I come in?”
“Bored?” She gapes at him even as she stands out of the way to let him inside; he's clearly soaked to the bone. “They’re all talking about you! Everybody! Go find a reporter and talk to them, I guarantee you won’t be bored for long!”
He brushes past her into the apartment, waving a hand dismissively. “I am talking to a reporter.”
“Yeah, this one's busy," she says tightly. She'd already been in a crappy mood; the news station is being sued and the plaintiff is refusing to settle out of court. Now her mood is even worse, not least because of the little flare of, finally, something good when she'd seen Megamind. She slides the door closed and folds her arms over her chest. "Go find a different one. And get your muddy boots off my sofa!"
“I don't want a different one,” he scoffs, "I want to talk to you," and puts his feet up on her coffee table instead and frowns at his toes. Roxanne glares at him. They stay like that in silence for a few seconds. And then he says, quietly, “Yesterday I invented a cure for AIDS.”
That was the last thing she’d expected to hear. “What?”
“Coconut milk, that was the key. I’ve been saying it for years, but did they listen?” He wags a finger in the air with a half-hearted flourish, then drops it back into his lap and stares at his hands. “Coconut milk and nanites. I’m working on cancer now,” he remarks joylessly. “It’s…marginally more challenging. Ooh, what's this?” He reaches for her notes and thumbs through them. "A personal injury claim? Who are you suing?"
“I'm not suing anybody, and I thought you were talking to me now,” Roxanne says.
“I’m multitasking.” He heaves a massive sigh and looks up at her, tosses the sheaf of papers back down on the table. “I’m bored. Say something funny.”
“What are you doing here?” She plants her hands on her hips, determined to sound unfazed and trying not to notice the deep shadows under his eyes, the lines around his mouth.
He grimaces, lets out a frustrated growl. “That’s the opposite of funny. That’s awkward and uncomfortable. Can I take off my boots?”
She blinks. “Why?”
“I think you’ll be less likely to throw me out if I’m barefoot.”
She laughs without really meaning to. He’s right. “Only if you put them neatly by the door.” His smile flashes out, just for a second, so quickly that she’s almost not sure it had happened-but it must have, because of the way her heart changed rhythms. Cautiously, she approaches and sits down on the other end of the sofa. “Why are they so muddy?”
“Because I had to park four blocks away and walk here.” He grunts, working the first boot down his leg. “I had to take the back way so people wouldn’t see me. I tell you, I really wasn’t expecting that rooftop garden to be there on top of the EY building. Is that some kind of new green energy something?”
“You-wait, what? Parked what? What back way?”
He glances up at her as he starts on the second boot. “Over the roofs. I took the hoverbike," he finally explains when she blinks at him in obvious confusion. "The invisible car is getting too much recognition, if you can believe it.”
She stares at him for a minute, then gets up and walks over to her balcony, looks at the two muddy streaks on the tile from where he'd landed and then at the corner of the giant accounting firm next door. The roof there is higher than that of her own apartment complex, but still… “You jumped from there? That has to be at least a hundred feet!”
“A hundred and twenty-three.” When she looks horrified, he recoils defensively. “What? I’m springy! You know this! Plus I had a running start.”
“You could have been killed.”
“Like you care,” he says, softly accusatory, and she flinches. Then he shrugs and looks away again. “I didn’t want you to hear me coming and I wanted to see how you would react.” He stands, places his shoes next to each other beside her front door, then turns and leans against it.
“Here’s my problem,” he says flatly. “I love you. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that, but it did. And that thing we had going was great while it lasted, but now that it’s over, I just…it all just totally blows. You made it fun. Without you, there's just no point.” He scowls and folds his arms over his chest.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he says suddenly. She’s staring at him, her mouth open, but he doesn’t appear to notice. “Let’s just-go. Just grab Minion and go to Fiji. Or, I dunno, the Great Wall. You want to go to China? Or, no, what did you say that time, you told me once-” He breaks off, frowning.
“Peru,” she murmurs. “It was Peru.”
“Peru sounds great, let’s go there!” He offers her a smile, dismal hope written all over his face. “We’ll take the Invisible Jet, won't even need passports. Let’s just…go.”
What she ought to do is tell him to leave, but when she opens her mouth, all that comes out is, “You don’t have an invisible jet.”
“I could,” he replies earnestly, “if you wanted me to. I’m sorry about the Freeze Ray, I really am. I don’t know what happened but I’ll never hurt you again. Please believe me.”
She slides down the glass door to sit on the floor, staring at the rug. He’s here. He’s standing in her apartment, and he’s just told her he loves her. How many times has she thought about exactly this? About sitting quietly in her apartment or his Lair, talking, planning a future together? Now that it’s happening, she doesn’t know what to do.
“I know,” she says, “I know you won’t.”
“Then can’t we…can’t we just be?” he asks. He sounds so casual, but she knows without looking that he's almost begging. “Us, together? I know we never really dated, but we were so good together. I miss you. Not just the sex. I miss you. I miss talking to you and making terrible sandwiches when Minion was out, and movie nights with popcorn and soda, just us, and...and laughing with you. Did you mean it when you said you never wanted to see me again?” he asks, and now there’s just a touch of pain in his voice. “Did you mean that, really?”
Roxanne is silent.
“You must have heard by now that I’m not doing the whole ‘villain’ thing anymore. I just-I’m just so sick of that. But I couldn’t let myself realize it for the longest time because really, Roxanne…what else am I supposed to do? I was good at being evil.” He shrugs helplessly. “I’m sorry.”
“It has nothing to do with you being evil,” she says, still gazing down at the floor. “I know you’re not evil. I’ve always known that. ‘Not a villain anymore,’” and she shakes her head. “You never were.”
“Then-then can’t you try?” He’s pleading now, not even bothering to hide it anymore. “Just a little? Can’t you at least try to love me back, even a little?”
“It’s too late for that.” When he doesn’t say anything, she looks up at him. He must not have understood what she meant, because he looks like she’s just struck him across the face.
“But then why?” he whispers. “Why did you wait so long to tell me you couldn’t be friends anymore?” He stares at her and slowly sits down where he is. Now they’re both sitting on the floor and looking at each other. “Why did you tell me to go then? Stringing me along, letting me hope? What’s-I thought you, of all people, would-what is so terribly wrong with me?”
She looks at him, curled by the door with his heart in his eyes, begging mutely, two steps from crying and she knows him well enough now to know exactly what he’s asking. She can almost see the tangled thoughts whirling through his mind, spinning, spinning, nowhere to land. It’s awful.
Before she really knows what she's saying, she blurts the truth. “I was scared, Megamind,” she says. “I was just plain scared.” She sniffs once, angry with the way her voice shakes, and then all the tears she’s been keeping bottled up spill over and dump down her cheeks. She tries glaring at the ceiling, but that just makes the stupid tears run into her ears again and tickle, and why is that even a thing? Her heart is doing somersaults in her chest and somehow she’s focusing on how irritating gravity is? Furious now with both herself and the world in general, she looks down at the floor instead, trying to think of how to explain.
Great, now her nose is running. I cannot fucking win.
Sudden movement makes her jump, but it’s just Megamind scrambling over to where she’s sitting. “Scared? Of me?” He reaches for her, then stops, utterly and openly horrified. He swallows painfully and manages to rasp out, “So, this whole time, you were only-because you-” The idea is too terrible to finish and he breaks off with a gasp. He had known she could act, but this…not this. Please, God, never this.
He wants to die. He wants to die so badly he’s honestly surprised he doesn’t drop on the floor right then and there. Because if the only reason she’d let this go so long is that she’d been afraid of what he might do if she denied him, then maybe he really has been wrong all this time, maybe they're right, maybe he is a monster and he just can't see it.
Helplessly, he touches her hands. She jerks away in one last desperate attempt to get him out of her heart, but he freezes, his expression shattering completely, and that’s the last straw. She gives up trying to fight it and does what she had wanted to do so badly that night in the hospital before she had torn both their hearts in half: she grabs him by the shoulders and rises onto her knees so she can hug him as tightly as she possibly can. “I’m not afraid of you, you incredibly stupid man,” she chokes, and the way he gasps for air and breathes like he’d been drowning makes her want to outright sob for him, “I was afraid for you. I wanted it to work, I really did, that's why I let us go so long-but I couldn't, not anymore, I was in too deep already and I just couldn't be afraid for you anymore."
Dazed, he manages to get free enough to twine his arms around her waist-he hesitates, then locks them closed across her back and buries his face in her neck. Those skinny arms of his are surprisingly strong, as Roxanne well knows, but he’s holding her tighter than he ever has before, he’s all but clinging to her, and that’s the difference. This is what she’s been choking back, clenching behind her teeth, this is what pounded in her head and heart when she saw him so close and still so far away, untouchable no matter how intimately they had touched. That final barrier has finally fallen down.
And she’s clinging to him just as tightly. She isn’t sure she can let go. He’s curled around her now, fingers stretching her shirt the way they’re clenched against her back, the spikes of his shoulder array digging achingly into her upper chest, and the only thing she can do is pull him closer still and struggle to form sentences. “I'm so sorry I did this to you," she gulps, "and believe me, I'll get it if you never trust me again. But I was so scared, and I couldn’t ask you to give up evil, not for me. You loved it so much! But every scheme-that last time, he hit you and you went flying, you took out that whole console array and it fell over on you...I just…” She pushes her cheek against his temple, one of the few weak points he has. "If you'd fallen the other way and the corner of that monitor had clipped your head instead of your leg, you'd be dead."
Her hands twist in his cape, tugging on it frustratedly until the safety triggers and the whole array releases and pops free. She drags him flush against her. “I can’t live with that fear,” she exclaims into his shoulder. “What you do is dangerous. It was only going to escalate, and someday you weren’t going to c-come back, you weren’t going to get up. Someday it was going to be real. Villains, they-they don’t have happy endings, they don’t die of old age in their beds with their wives."
"Oddly enough," he mumbles, "the issue of wives has never really been something it's occurred to me to consider."
“Your hands,” she says, as if she hasn't heard, and feels them shift against her back. “Your amazing, beautiful hands. You’ve lived by your hands and you’ll die by your hands-you’ll build the machine that kills you. And I can’t do that, I can’t do it, Megamind. You’re amazing." Her fingers twist in spandex, which isn't easy to do considering how tight it is, but she manages. "You’re wonderful and amazing and the most incredible person I’ve ever known, and I’ll do a lot for you, but I won’t do that." She shakes her head wildly. "I won’t watch you die."
"Why didn't you just tell me?"
"Because you'd have asked why. And I would have had to say I wanted you to give up villainy, and I can't ask you to do that for me or anyone. It makes you so happy; I couldn’t-”
“You made me happy,” he says into the muffled space between them, feeling lightheaded and dizzy, as though he’s just been handed a reprieve. “I don’t know when, I don’t know how, I think it was even before we started seeing each other but it was you.” Every word trembles like thunder and broken lightning as he squeezes her in even tighter. “It has always-been-you. I didn’t even realize until you were gone.” He suddenly lifts his head so he can meet her eye. “You’ve killed me, you know-slain the villain. I can’t do it without you. Two years ago, it might have been different, but now…” He shakes his head, and God, he looks so tired.
She stares at him. “But I can’t ask you to do that! I don’t want you to give it up just for me-”
“No, no, don’t you get it, don’t you see?” He pulls back now and grips her by the arms, his whole exhausted face abruptly alight, glowing in a way that she has never seen. “I’m not giving it up for you! I’m giving it up for me.” He brings her to her feet, swinging her around in a jubilant little circle. “I am giving up villainy for me! If I can’t enjoy it on my own, then it was never really about the villainy in the first place.” He tilts his head and brushes her hair away from her forehead with shaking fingers. “Do you understand?”
She still looks doubtful, but she knows enough to believe him and she nods. “But what will you do now?”
He shrugs hugely. “I don’t know. I don’t care. Anything I want! Probably I’ll become some kind of consultant. But whatever I end up doing…” He steps back and takes her hands in his, squeezes them. “I would like to do it with you. If you’ll have me.”
She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out-which is good, really, because she has absolutely no idea what to say.
Megamind looks at her for a moment, then lets go of her and takes another step back. “You don’t have to answer right away,” he tells her, backing away until he falls onto the sofa. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen when you told me you didn’t want to see me again. But I couldn’t…leave it like that. I’ll never bother you again if that’s what you want, but I had to see you just one last time.”
She wets her lips and crosses her arms over her chest, already missing the bizarre coolth of him and feeling profoundly awkward as a result. “I just don’t know where to go from here,” she whispers. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
They stay for a moment, him staring at her from the sofa, her standing and looking anywhere but at him.
“I was pushing you away,” she says after a long pause. “Even before that issue with the freeze ray. I think you noticed that.”
“I didn’t want to think that was what you were doing, but-”
“No, I was. Pushing you away.” She heaves a frustrated sigh and rubs at her eyes, shaking her head. “I was…falling in love with a supervillain, and that’s not a good idea. That’s a terrible idea.”
There’s a stunned sort of silence from Megamind’s direction. Then, “What?”
She glances up. He looks almost totally calm, one hand resting in his lap and the other on a throw pillow, but the hand on the pillow is clenched, twisted white-knuckled into the fabric. Has anyone, ever, told him he’s loved? Do I even want to do that? Do I want to go down that road with him? She still hasn’t decided where she wants to go from here.
The silence drags between them, heavy and cumbersome. He’s almost flinching, unblinking, his green eyes flicking back and forth between hers, and…and what is she supposed to say? What’s she supposed to do? If she looks away, he’ll think she wants to be rid of him (does she?). If she keeps staring at him like this, he’ll think she doesn’t want to admit something (can she?).
She starts to opens her mouth, but he stiffens. “Tell me the truth,” he warns in a low voice, his expression guarded, but then he raises his eyebrows as high as they’ll go and his tone turns to hesitant disbelief. “Can you-love me?”
And still she hesitates. If she says it, it’ll be true. Past the point of no return…
But it’s true already, isn’t it? If she has to go down that road with somebody, isn’t it true that she wants it to be with him?
It is.
“Okay,” he says as she stares at him, frozen, the full realization slamming home. His expression sours and he starts to stand. “I get it, I’ll leave. Here’s looking at you, kid-”
“Stop.” Suddenly she’s in front of him, her hands on his shoulders, pushing him down to sit on the couch. Again. His pulse quickens and some small, sequestered part of his mind begins to wonder if maybe, just maybe…
He leans away from her, desperately trying not to hope. “Roxanne?” he says again.
She stares at him, into his eyes. Lifts one hand, brushes her fingers across his skin before laying her palm flat against the plane of his cheek. He stares right back, touches the hand on his face with the tips of his fingers and holds very still-they've been here before. Except now she knows how he talks with his face, she knows how soft his lips are. She knows how easy it is to fall into his eyes and get lost there, the way she's doing now. She knows him like the pain of loss, like breathing, like her own right hand. She knows him.
“It’s not a question of can,” she whispers into the tension. "The question is do I love you, and the answer is yes, completely, yes I do, I love you. Megamind, I've loved you for ages."
He lets out a choked hiss like he’s been stabbed, a hiss that sounds an awful lot like, “Please-”
She places her other hand along the side of his face, strokes her thumb across the thin skin under his eye, then slips her hand around to the back of his head and leans in and nuzzles. Against his forehead, despite the fact that he's never told her what that does to him. “I love you,” she says again. “I was just too scared or stupid to admit it, but I promise, I'll never run from that again. These past few months have been some of the best I've ever had, and...I don't know when or how it happened, but somewhere along the line I seem to have fallen hopelessly in love with you.”
He lets out a damp laugh and slowly forces himself to relax. "Really? That's fantastic, I love you too. Can we maybe not put my heart through the wringer, next time?"
She kisses him, long and slow and deep, tastes freshwater tears on his lips despite his flippancy and swears again, privately, that this will never happen again, never again. He deserves better.
He inhales shakily when she pulls away, rests his head against hers.
"I'm sorry."
"No, it's okay, I mean we're even now, I froze and killed you and you...trompled my heart, so we're even. Can we be even?"
She chuckles. "By which you mean can we stop being complete idiots now? Absolutely."
"Good," he whispers, and twines his arms around her waist and pulls her into his lap.
Except it's an awkward angle, and Roxanne squeaks and falls sideways on the sofa, and since Megamind refuses to let go of her he ends up falling over as well. They squirm around for a few seconds and end up mutually curled around each other; Megamind's got his spindly legs around Roxanne's waist and his hands curled between their chests; she has her arms around him and her face in his neck.
They rest like that for a while, until Megamind murmurs, "So how is this going to work?" He frowns. "We've only ever really done sex. Well, and movie nights. Two-man pajama parties don't really count when you're not wearing pajamas."
She laughs into his chest and shrugs a little. "I don't know. We could try dating. Going out on the town."
He pulls back in surprise, craning his head around to look down at her. "You'd go out with me? Out where there are people, with me?"
"Told you before, don't sell yourself short. Anyone who knows you should count themselves lucky to be seen with you." She lifts her head, kisses the sweet spot behind his jaw and feels him go just a little bit limp the way he always does. "You're poised. Cultured, surprisingly enough; your table manners blow me away. You aren't boorish or selfish or unthinking. Megamind, you're elegant. And you're the sweetest, most sincere person I know. Why wouldn't I want to go out with you?"
"I'm not very good in crowds," he mumbles. "They make me nervous. You might not like me in a crowd. And people are going to stare."
She laughs and reaches up, grabs his chin and tilts his head down so she can kiss him, long and slow and lazy, absently scuffing his goatee with her thumbnail. It's funny, but the difference is nearly tangible. Neither of them is holding anything back; it's like a wall they hadn't even known was there has come crashing down and all of this has suddenly become real. "Let them stare," she says softly when she pulls away, and he blinks down at her, smiling, his eyes at half-mast as she smooths his beard back into place and trails her fingertips down the strong length of his throat. "At you and me. At me and my blue man."
"Your blue man would like to remind you that you should probably stop playing with his neck unless you're trying to start something. Which," he adds when she starts to grin, "we probably shouldn't."
She pauses. "What? Why not?"
He swallows. "Well, because. Because our whole relationship until now has been based on sex. And maybe it would be a good idea to not have sex for a while. Try to base this on something a little more substantial?"
He'd been worried that she would be disappointed, but her grin softens into that smile, the quietly fond one she shows him so rarely, the one that's always confused him before because you don't really smile like that at someone if you don't love them. "Oh," she says. "Oh. Good idea. Can we base this on cuddling, then? And talking things out without judging each other?"
"I like that plan," he says. "Yes, let's do that."
True to her word, she smiles up at him and then snuggles into his chest. "I love you."
"I love you too."
"Remember how, that first night, you said I wasn’t your girlfriend, and I said I could be,” she says, “and you said let’s not go there?”
She feels him go briefly stiff with surprise, then nod emphatically. “Oh," he breathes. "Let’s go there. Can we? Let’s.”
“Yes,” she says, and smiles and closes her eyes. “Yes, let’s go there.”
Fin.
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