Fic: Cold Fusion: True North, Chapter 12
Title: Cold Fusion: True North, Chapter 12
Author: Dal_Niente
Rating: M for this chapter
Word Count: 3,997
Author's Note: Another fluffy chapter! This one was also written quite some time ago.
In which Roxanne is stunned and we find out what Megamind has been looking at in the viewfinder. Oh, and the thing Roxanne says that makes Megamind go whaaaaaaaaat…if you’re confused, remember that Minion mentioned it in Cold Fusion. Chapter 2, I think it was. (If anybody is reading this who hasn’t read Cold Fusion, you may want to check it out. Some things might make more sense. It isn’t necessary, though.)
Man, you all are amazing. And I love you all a whole bunch.
Chapter 12
Megamind is awake and staring at the ceiling. Again. It isn’t fair; he ought to be asleep right now. He was able to get some sleep earlier, but not nearly enough.
He has too much on his mind to be able to really relax.
The harbor filter is working. It’s actually performing better than Megamind had expected it to; Metro Harbor is the clearest and cleanest it’s been in living memory. But clear water is not necessarily healthy water. I need to remember to double-check that it isn’t removing any good things from the water with the bad. A healthy colony of algae has built up in the filtration system, which bodes well, but Megamind will still need to check that the filter isn’t impacting the lake’s phytoplankton.
And the Metro Tower rebuild is behind schedule again. Last week’s minor hiccup with the electricians has been smoothed over and progress is still underway, but there must be a way to get everything back on track. He’ll figure something out. Move some brainbots from construction to wiring?
Also, there’s a shortage of windows in the city and he’s going to need to fix that. Most of the glass that was broken in the past year has finally been replaced, but there are still a few shops waiting for the next shipment of plate glass to come in. Note to self: call major glass suppliers in Detroit and Chicago, see if they can give me a discount on a bulk order. And rent another storage unit for the Metro Tower window glass - the furniture alone should fill up the four units we already have.
Speaking of furniture, he also needs to call the company that’s supposed to be sending desks in for one of the office buildings Hal smashed when he turned the broken Tower around. The building itself has been fully repaired, and all the other supplies have arrived, but nobody can return to work until they have desks. The order has been delayed for nearly fourteen business days in spite of the extra fee Megamind paid for a rush delivery, and that’s just unacceptable. He can afford it, but still, money doesn’t grow on trees and he fully intends to demand a refund of the rush fee. He’ll route the money into some city fund or other, then cook the books so nobody notices.
No, he can’t do that anymore; that’s illegal. It’ll have to be via an anonymous donation. Yes.
But there have been a lot of anonymous donations lately. Someone will notice.
He frowns. Well, he could just create a fake organization. Build a website, establish a false history, then contact the appropriate people in Metro City as one of the organization’s board members and establish a partnership… No he couldn’t; that’s mostly illegal too. And it would require the alteration of federal tax records, and that’s very illegal. (Although certainly not impossible. He’s done it before.)
(Twice.)
And anyway, ‘partnership’ would tend to mean that the city would eventually be expected to reciprocate. So what would be the point, really?
Another anonymous donation, then. He sighs.
And he needs to erase the three identities that are still receiving insider information on the stock market. He does feel badly about that. He’s been ignoring the calls, really he has, but he just hasn’t had time to actually get rid of the identities. First thing tomorrow morning - okay, first thing later today, but after the sun is up - all documents in those names are going through the shredder and then he will personally burn them. He will watch them turn to ash. He will. He will make time to do it.
He should go do it now, while he’s still thinking about it. But he doesn’t want to. He wants to go to sleep. He closes his eyes, hopeful, but they won’t stay closed. Whoopee. He sighs, and Roxanne stirs beside him, rolls over, burrows under his arm and then lies still.
He looks at her. She’s curled on her side under the covers, and her skin is warm against his, and he smiles. He’s tired - he’s exhausted - but he does have her to thank for the little sleep he was able to get earlier.
This is twice now that he has wronged her, and twice now she has forgiven him. It’s the second time that things have worked out exactly the opposite of what he had expected. There will not be a third time. He will not hurt her like this again.
He rolls over, picks up the notepad and pen he keeps by his bed to jot down the ideas that come to him in his sleep and tears off the top few pages. Scribbles himself a brief note on the first blank sheet he comes to, then puts the pad back down. He’ll rewrite that note as often as he has to, in as many languages as he knows, until he believes it. It’s all about building neural pathways.
There will be no more sleep tonight, at least not for the time being, although he knows he can usually catch an hour just before dawn. With a sigh, he sits up and swings his legs over the side of his bed, shuffles around with his feet until he finds his slippers. Shivering a little in the cold air, he hurries to get into his pajamas, then pads silently to the door and heads down the hall.
He needs to reorient himself. His life has been turned on its head, and he needs something to hold onto in the midst of all the madness.
Everything was a lot easier back when people hated him. People just sort of look at him now. Some of them talk to him, some of them avoid him, but mostly, they just don’t know what to do with him.
But he can walk to the corner bakery as himself. He tried it for the first time a few weeks ago as an experiment, on a relatively cool morning - leather and gloves and cape and all, spiked and black and evil-looking, and he walked out the door without his holowatch. Walked in full daylight through the maze of empty warehouses to Giorgio’s Patisserie, an Italian family-owned bakery with a French name that does surprisingly well for its location. And opened the door, shaking in his boots but not showing it.
Giorgio had blinked once, but that was all the indication he had given that he was surprised, and then he had come out from behind the counter and shaken Megamind’s hand. “Woops, careful of the spikes,” he’d said, and had laughed such a deep, full laugh that Megamind had known he had meant it. And Megamind had laughed, too, astonished but delighted, and had walked out of the bakery ten minutes later with a white paper bag containing the first legitimate purchase he had made as himself in years.
It’s incredible, and he loves it, but it’s also a little bit terrifying to go places without his holowatch. But he doesn’t want to hide from people - this is his city, he’s working to fix it, he’s working for good, he shouldn’t have to hide anymore. He wants the same thing he’s always wanted, the thing he gave up on ever attaining years ago. He wants acceptance. And he’s getting it, he’s getting it in spades, and that’s the scary part.
He needs to ask Roxanne where she got the new holowatch persona. He was fiddling around with the new chip this afternoon - as far as he can tell, there are several hundred new images, all featuring the same young man wearing different outfits. The styles of clothing are all over the place, and the seasonality ranges from spring to winter. And the winter clothes? For each outfit, there is that outfit with a coat; that outfit with a coat and scarf; that outfit with a coat, a scarf, and gloves; that outfit with a coat, scarf, gloves, and hat. The summer clothes also are grouped in variations, but to a lesser extent (after all, winter is when normal people dress in layers).
Bernard had one outfit: the blue turtleneck and brown suit jacket combo. This new persona has hundreds. The sudden deluge of options is, honestly, kind of intimidating.
Megamind needs to reorient. There is still one constant in his crazy, upside-down world, only one, and he needs it now more than ever.
When he reaches the planning room, he grabs his swivel chair and sits, then pushes off the floor and squeaks his way over to Main Control, where he pulls out the collapsible viewfinder. It takes him a few minutes to find the right distance, the right coordinates, and bring everything into focus. Once he does all of that, he settles forward with his elbows on the dark controls so that he can just stare into the viewfinder without having to think about balance.
Inhale. Exhale. It’s sad, kind of, that this is the only way he can stop thinking anymore.
“What are you doing?”
Megamind jumps, looks wildly around. Roxanne is standing just inside the curtain, her moccasin-ed feet at odds with the blue and black dressing gown.
“Wha-nothing,” Megamind says hastily. It’s a reflex more than anything else; this is private.
Roxanne blinks. Frowns.
“It’s, I couldn’t sleep,” Megamind stammers, scooting to hide the viewfinder behind his back. “So I came down here. I do that, sometimes. When I can’t sleep.”
She knows he’s hiding something; he can tell, and he curses his inability to lie convincingly. But he isn’t sure he wants to elaborate further. This is private. He can feel himself growing defensive, can feel the tension pull his shoulders square and stiff.
But Roxanne doesn’t look reproachful or upset. She just looks vaguely, sleepily quizzical. And she sounds vaguely quizzical. “Can I see?”
He sends a glance over his shoulder at the viewfinder, then turns back around. What is he afraid of? He knows she won’t laugh. Well, okay, she might, but she won’t mean it.
But still. This. This is not something he ever expected to share with anyone - this is his, and his alone. It’s been his solace when he needs it, his outlet, the one fixed point in his life when he feels that even Minion might not be the one to turn to. This is Megamind’s true north, and he does not share well.
But this is Roxanne asking, and she’s probably had enough of him hiding things from her, so Megamind swallows his pride and his worry and his fluttering, childish selfishness and nods jerkily. “Sure,” he says. “Sure, come here.”
Roxanne doesn’t move, just tilts her head a little and blinks at him. He can’t tell what she’s thinking, but the moment stretches out and she still doesn’t move.
And then she steps back, shakes her head. “No, it’s okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude, you don’t have to show me if you don’t want to.”
Megamind blinks. She surprised him with that one, and Roxanne grins sleepily when his wide-eyed astonished stare wanes into a smile of shy, tentative relief.
“Followed you ‘cause I was curious.” Roxanne shrugs a little, turns to leave. “I’m going back to bed now. Try to get some sleep, ‘kay?” Then she chuckles. “Sleep, Megamind. You need it.”
She disappears up the hall. She doesn’t see that Megamind has gone absolutely still in his chair or that his face is very, very white.
Day six. His father’s face, tired and careworn. His mother’s voice. “Sleep, dear. You need it.”
No. No sleep. He knows what he has to do. It’s going to be difficult - hellishly complex, but he can do it. Light sources are not easy to work with, and he’ll need to program conflicting frequencies and multiple line-of-sight interactions. And there is the problem of routing video feed from the telescope lens to the cameras. And the perspective and scale are going to be nearly impossible to work out. But he can do it. He has to. He needs to.
Wide awake, he rolls out the 3-D projectors.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
“Roxanne.” There is a hand on her shoulder, long fingers wrapped around her bicep, shaking gently. “Roxanne?”
She stirs, turns her face to the pillow. “Mmmglfh.”
Megamind shakes her more insistently. “Roxanne,” he hisses. “Wake up. Please?”
It’s the ‘please’ that catches her, it always does. He always sounds so hesitant. “Time’s it?” she mumbles, and he lets go immediately.
“Half-past four. Come on, I want to show you - I want you to see something.”
She sniffs, scrubs the back of her hand over her eyes. Megamind is tired, too, but his green eyes are shining and there’s an excited smile hovering around the corners of his mouth like it’s afraid to show itself.
“Mmkay,” Roxanne says, and crawls out of bed. Her neck is stiff.
Megamind is holding out her robe for her, and she shrugs into it. The way he moves catches her attention - he helps her into the robe but releases it as soon as she was in, drawing his hands away from her shoulders without touching her. He ties the sash around her waist using only the tips of his fingers, then turns and almost skips to the door.
Roxanne blinks at him. She hasn’t seen him like this in a while, not since he gave up villainy, not since the last time he’d kidnapped her. He’s moving the way he used to when he had a new plan, something new to show off. Judging by the way he’s bouncing, it’s probably a full-size doomsday device.
Megamind half-dances down the hall while Roxanne trails slowly along behind him, utterly confused.
When she rounds the corner, he’s sitting in the high-backed chair where she had found him only a few hours before, rubbing his hands together, frightened and enthusiastic all at once. Something is different about the room, but Roxanne cannot quite put her finger on it. Before she can really look around, Megamind licks his lips, throws a switch, and the windowless lair is plunged into absolute darkness. Roxanne feels the curtain trundle closed behind her.
Megamind’s voice threads its way out of the dark. “This is what I was looking at,” he says quietly, and there is a click and Roxanne’s jaw drops. Her eyes go wide.
The lair is still completely dark - she cannot see viewscreens, or machines, or Megamind, but the air around her is filled with points of brilliant light. The farthest ones away are barely pinpricks while the largest ones, the ones closest to her, are easily as big as her head. No two are alike.
The totality of the illusion is bizarre; it’s like everything has disappeared but this, and all she can see, no matter which way she turns - even if she’s looking down, which is really weird and actually a little bit scary - is a field of lights extending into infinity. Some look like clusters of smaller pinpricks of light and some look like little more than glowing frozen smoke, but most are flat, and shaped like hurricanes.
Not hurricanes. Galaxies. She isn’t sure how he did it, but somehow, Megamind is projecting a close-up view of outer space into his lair in three dimensions. It’s like being the Hubble telescope. And it is beautiful.
She finds her voice. It’s strained, and she realizes that she hasn’t been breathing. “Oh my god.”
Megamind looms out of the array of stars, lit from all directions, watching her with a kind of hopeful pride. “This way,” he says, and tugs gently at her hand. Roxanne balks. Her mind is still asleep enough to register the galaxies as obstacles, and if she moves, she’ll throw them off course or fall into the infinite blackness below her feet - the endless void of space.
Megamind grins. “It’s just a projection,” he says softly, and she lets him pull her away. How he can tell where he’s going is anyone’s guess. Roxanne can’t see the floor; she only knows it’s there because her feet keep hitting it, but it’s like walking into and onto nothing. Her grip is probably crushing Megamind’s hand, but he says nothing.
Then he stops walking, and Roxanne stumbles a little against him. She squints into the blackness and feels a shift in her focus, as if she has just gone from looking at the surface of a lake to gazing down through the water - there are shapes behind the blackness, somehow in the same space as the blackness, but she is able to see that she is standing by the wall of control panels. Megamind reaches down and flutters a hand over the keys. The galaxies shift, dance, pull back and fade out around a single one of their number - that one expands, explodes into brilliance around them before falling into darkness. When Roxanne’s eyes adjust again, she is surrounded by individual stars.
Megamind moves to stand close behind Roxanne, puts his hands on her shoulders and waits for a minute while Roxanne gapes up at the shimmering matrix, and then he takes her left hand in his and lifts their joined hands to point to a red-burning giant some ten feet in the air. There’s a much smaller, much whiter star hanging just below it, but Megamind is definitely looking at the red star. “That one,” he whispers.
Roxanne glances sideways at him. He is pressed against her back; his right hand still rests on her shoulder and their left arms are extended together out and up, and he is leaning forward and staring with shining eyes up at the red star. His fingers tighten on her shoulder.
“That one,” he says again, and there are tears in his voice. “T Pyxidis.”
Roxanne looks back up at the star. Understanding comes crashing down, wakes her up completely with a shock like ice. “Home?” she whispers, and feels him nod.
The stars are amazing enough by themselves, but for him to show her something so incredibly personal…there is no comparison. It’s impossible. There is absolutely nothing that Roxanne can compare to what Megamind is doing, but she is well aware of the significance. He’s sure of her.
He’s sure of her.
And she is sure of him.
She drops her arm just as he lowers his head to rest it on her shoulder, wrapping his thin arms around her and pressing close against her back. And that’s when the implications slam home.
He is the last of his kind, alone in a way that Roxanne cannot even begin to comprehend. His home world is dead, torn apart and compressed by the gravity of a collapsing star. The people of his new world had thrown him to the ground and kicked him until he stayed there. Everything he has, he made himself. Built from the ground up with his hands.
And now he has shown her the one thing he has not shared with anyone else, ever, the last he has of his home. The last anyone has of his home. Roxanne is standing on Earth and looking across the years at a star that died eight days after Megamind was born, and she feels every lonely, empty mile of it.
All the planets in the galaxy, and he was sent to hers. All the countries on Earth, and he fell to this one. And, out of all the people in Metro City - out of all the seven billion people on Earth - Megamind picked her. And he thinks he’s the lucky one?
(Megamind isn’t sure what she’s thinking, but she went from total emotional flatline to utter shock to love-love-love just boiling off of her in about five seconds.)
(Some people think that love, as an emotion typically associated with the color red, should smell like cinnamon. It doesn’t. It smells and tastes like cloves - and like cloves, it’s unbelievably strong, and if you bite it too hard it bites back.)
And, good lord, what is Roxanne supposed to say? How do you respond to something like this without a full choir to back you up?
“This. Is.” The words are barely there. “You just…this.” Someday she will be able to form a coherent sentence.
Megamind chuckles, ducks his head against her shoulder again, and says nothing. A long moment passes.
“I do actually know what this means to you.” Roxanne’s voice is low. “And it…I understand what you’re doing. And it’s…a little overwhelming.” He tenses. “In a good way,” she adds quickly, and Megamind relaxes again. Roxanne lets out a breath and leans back against him a little. “I wish you knew how much I love you.”
She isn’t aware that she said the last part out loud until he clears his throat. “I do, in fact,” he admits awkwardly. “Actually, it’s…kind of making me dizzy.”
Roxanne turns her head to look at him, sees him gazing at her out of the corner of his eye, and bursts out laughing. “Oh god - I’m sorry - I can try to, to tone it down or something -”
But Megamind is laughing too and shaking his head. “No no, it’s okay. Just means I need to spend more time with you, that’s all.” He buries his nose in her neck and inhales, then shivers all over, still laughing. “Whoaaaaagh,” he says, “that’ll clear out your sinuses. Eeeyikes.”
Roxanne has to turn around and put her arms around him to keep from falling over laughing, but that only makes Megamind laugh harder. And they both end up sitting on the floor, leaning on one another and snickering.
Last night, she had wanted to wring his skinny neck. Now, she wants nothing more than to sit in the middle of this projection with him forever.
She’s sitting in the middle of space. It looks so real. Roxanne doesn’t know much about programming, but she can guess that this kind of hologram cannot be easy to create. It takes up the space inside the Lair, then overlays obstacles to give the impression that it goes on forever. “This is incredible. It’s like I’m looking through four dimensions.”
“Five, actually,” Megamind replies, and Roxanne can hear him grinning. “Self-contained infinite cascading tesseract. My own invention, you need it to get the perspective right, to get the scale to work out. Basically useless except for things like this.” He pauses, asks shyly, “Do you like it?”
She turns, stares up at him. He looks so hopeful, and her reply of, That is a very stupid question, what the hell do you think, dies on her lips.
Instead, she says slowly, “Do you remember the first night I stayed over here? When I told you I loved you more than there are stars?” Megamind nods, frowning a little bit, confused. “And how you tried to explain that it was a flawed comparison?”
“I remember. I also remember where you had your hands. It was very distracting.”
Roxanne grins. “And now I know why. Anyway, I think I figured out why the comparison is flawed - it’s volumetric, isn’t it? Love would be measured as a volume, but the quantity of stars is just a number-line figure.” She waits for him to nod again before she continues. “Well, I’ll try again. I love you enough to fill all the space between the stars.”
Megamind regards her in silence for a while, an odd little half-smile tweaking his lips to the side. Then he says, “Roxanne, you can’t possibly comprehend the size of that sort of space.”
Her answering smile is that soft, fond one that she shows him so rarely and that always makes his heart skip a few beats. It’s so unguarded. “Megamind,” she returns, “I don’t have to.”
He has to look away, then - he has to look up at T Pyxidis very quickly, because if he doesn’t, he’ll cry again, and now is not the time.
Chapter 11
Top of Page
Chapter 13
Return to Master List
Author: Dal_Niente
Rating: M for this chapter
Word Count: 3,997
Author's Note: Another fluffy chapter! This one was also written quite some time ago.
In which Roxanne is stunned and we find out what Megamind has been looking at in the viewfinder. Oh, and the thing Roxanne says that makes Megamind go whaaaaaaaaat…if you’re confused, remember that Minion mentioned it in Cold Fusion. Chapter 2, I think it was. (If anybody is reading this who hasn’t read Cold Fusion, you may want to check it out. Some things might make more sense. It isn’t necessary, though.)
Man, you all are amazing. And I love you all a whole bunch.
Chapter 12
Megamind is awake and staring at the ceiling. Again. It isn’t fair; he ought to be asleep right now. He was able to get some sleep earlier, but not nearly enough.
He has too much on his mind to be able to really relax.
The harbor filter is working. It’s actually performing better than Megamind had expected it to; Metro Harbor is the clearest and cleanest it’s been in living memory. But clear water is not necessarily healthy water. I need to remember to double-check that it isn’t removing any good things from the water with the bad. A healthy colony of algae has built up in the filtration system, which bodes well, but Megamind will still need to check that the filter isn’t impacting the lake’s phytoplankton.
And the Metro Tower rebuild is behind schedule again. Last week’s minor hiccup with the electricians has been smoothed over and progress is still underway, but there must be a way to get everything back on track. He’ll figure something out. Move some brainbots from construction to wiring?
Also, there’s a shortage of windows in the city and he’s going to need to fix that. Most of the glass that was broken in the past year has finally been replaced, but there are still a few shops waiting for the next shipment of plate glass to come in. Note to self: call major glass suppliers in Detroit and Chicago, see if they can give me a discount on a bulk order. And rent another storage unit for the Metro Tower window glass - the furniture alone should fill up the four units we already have.
Speaking of furniture, he also needs to call the company that’s supposed to be sending desks in for one of the office buildings Hal smashed when he turned the broken Tower around. The building itself has been fully repaired, and all the other supplies have arrived, but nobody can return to work until they have desks. The order has been delayed for nearly fourteen business days in spite of the extra fee Megamind paid for a rush delivery, and that’s just unacceptable. He can afford it, but still, money doesn’t grow on trees and he fully intends to demand a refund of the rush fee. He’ll route the money into some city fund or other, then cook the books so nobody notices.
No, he can’t do that anymore; that’s illegal. It’ll have to be via an anonymous donation. Yes.
But there have been a lot of anonymous donations lately. Someone will notice.
He frowns. Well, he could just create a fake organization. Build a website, establish a false history, then contact the appropriate people in Metro City as one of the organization’s board members and establish a partnership… No he couldn’t; that’s mostly illegal too. And it would require the alteration of federal tax records, and that’s very illegal. (Although certainly not impossible. He’s done it before.)
(Twice.)
And anyway, ‘partnership’ would tend to mean that the city would eventually be expected to reciprocate. So what would be the point, really?
Another anonymous donation, then. He sighs.
And he needs to erase the three identities that are still receiving insider information on the stock market. He does feel badly about that. He’s been ignoring the calls, really he has, but he just hasn’t had time to actually get rid of the identities. First thing tomorrow morning - okay, first thing later today, but after the sun is up - all documents in those names are going through the shredder and then he will personally burn them. He will watch them turn to ash. He will. He will make time to do it.
He should go do it now, while he’s still thinking about it. But he doesn’t want to. He wants to go to sleep. He closes his eyes, hopeful, but they won’t stay closed. Whoopee. He sighs, and Roxanne stirs beside him, rolls over, burrows under his arm and then lies still.
He looks at her. She’s curled on her side under the covers, and her skin is warm against his, and he smiles. He’s tired - he’s exhausted - but he does have her to thank for the little sleep he was able to get earlier.
This is twice now that he has wronged her, and twice now she has forgiven him. It’s the second time that things have worked out exactly the opposite of what he had expected. There will not be a third time. He will not hurt her like this again.
He rolls over, picks up the notepad and pen he keeps by his bed to jot down the ideas that come to him in his sleep and tears off the top few pages. Scribbles himself a brief note on the first blank sheet he comes to, then puts the pad back down. He’ll rewrite that note as often as he has to, in as many languages as he knows, until he believes it. It’s all about building neural pathways.
There will be no more sleep tonight, at least not for the time being, although he knows he can usually catch an hour just before dawn. With a sigh, he sits up and swings his legs over the side of his bed, shuffles around with his feet until he finds his slippers. Shivering a little in the cold air, he hurries to get into his pajamas, then pads silently to the door and heads down the hall.
He needs to reorient himself. His life has been turned on its head, and he needs something to hold onto in the midst of all the madness.
Everything was a lot easier back when people hated him. People just sort of look at him now. Some of them talk to him, some of them avoid him, but mostly, they just don’t know what to do with him.
But he can walk to the corner bakery as himself. He tried it for the first time a few weeks ago as an experiment, on a relatively cool morning - leather and gloves and cape and all, spiked and black and evil-looking, and he walked out the door without his holowatch. Walked in full daylight through the maze of empty warehouses to Giorgio’s Patisserie, an Italian family-owned bakery with a French name that does surprisingly well for its location. And opened the door, shaking in his boots but not showing it.
Giorgio had blinked once, but that was all the indication he had given that he was surprised, and then he had come out from behind the counter and shaken Megamind’s hand. “Woops, careful of the spikes,” he’d said, and had laughed such a deep, full laugh that Megamind had known he had meant it. And Megamind had laughed, too, astonished but delighted, and had walked out of the bakery ten minutes later with a white paper bag containing the first legitimate purchase he had made as himself in years.
It’s incredible, and he loves it, but it’s also a little bit terrifying to go places without his holowatch. But he doesn’t want to hide from people - this is his city, he’s working to fix it, he’s working for good, he shouldn’t have to hide anymore. He wants the same thing he’s always wanted, the thing he gave up on ever attaining years ago. He wants acceptance. And he’s getting it, he’s getting it in spades, and that’s the scary part.
He needs to ask Roxanne where she got the new holowatch persona. He was fiddling around with the new chip this afternoon - as far as he can tell, there are several hundred new images, all featuring the same young man wearing different outfits. The styles of clothing are all over the place, and the seasonality ranges from spring to winter. And the winter clothes? For each outfit, there is that outfit with a coat; that outfit with a coat and scarf; that outfit with a coat, a scarf, and gloves; that outfit with a coat, scarf, gloves, and hat. The summer clothes also are grouped in variations, but to a lesser extent (after all, winter is when normal people dress in layers).
Bernard had one outfit: the blue turtleneck and brown suit jacket combo. This new persona has hundreds. The sudden deluge of options is, honestly, kind of intimidating.
Megamind needs to reorient. There is still one constant in his crazy, upside-down world, only one, and he needs it now more than ever.
When he reaches the planning room, he grabs his swivel chair and sits, then pushes off the floor and squeaks his way over to Main Control, where he pulls out the collapsible viewfinder. It takes him a few minutes to find the right distance, the right coordinates, and bring everything into focus. Once he does all of that, he settles forward with his elbows on the dark controls so that he can just stare into the viewfinder without having to think about balance.
Inhale. Exhale. It’s sad, kind of, that this is the only way he can stop thinking anymore.
“What are you doing?”
Megamind jumps, looks wildly around. Roxanne is standing just inside the curtain, her moccasin-ed feet at odds with the blue and black dressing gown.
“Wha-nothing,” Megamind says hastily. It’s a reflex more than anything else; this is private.
Roxanne blinks. Frowns.
“It’s, I couldn’t sleep,” Megamind stammers, scooting to hide the viewfinder behind his back. “So I came down here. I do that, sometimes. When I can’t sleep.”
She knows he’s hiding something; he can tell, and he curses his inability to lie convincingly. But he isn’t sure he wants to elaborate further. This is private. He can feel himself growing defensive, can feel the tension pull his shoulders square and stiff.
But Roxanne doesn’t look reproachful or upset. She just looks vaguely, sleepily quizzical. And she sounds vaguely quizzical. “Can I see?”
He sends a glance over his shoulder at the viewfinder, then turns back around. What is he afraid of? He knows she won’t laugh. Well, okay, she might, but she won’t mean it.
But still. This. This is not something he ever expected to share with anyone - this is his, and his alone. It’s been his solace when he needs it, his outlet, the one fixed point in his life when he feels that even Minion might not be the one to turn to. This is Megamind’s true north, and he does not share well.
But this is Roxanne asking, and she’s probably had enough of him hiding things from her, so Megamind swallows his pride and his worry and his fluttering, childish selfishness and nods jerkily. “Sure,” he says. “Sure, come here.”
Roxanne doesn’t move, just tilts her head a little and blinks at him. He can’t tell what she’s thinking, but the moment stretches out and she still doesn’t move.
And then she steps back, shakes her head. “No, it’s okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude, you don’t have to show me if you don’t want to.”
Megamind blinks. She surprised him with that one, and Roxanne grins sleepily when his wide-eyed astonished stare wanes into a smile of shy, tentative relief.
“Followed you ‘cause I was curious.” Roxanne shrugs a little, turns to leave. “I’m going back to bed now. Try to get some sleep, ‘kay?” Then she chuckles. “Sleep, Megamind. You need it.”
She disappears up the hall. She doesn’t see that Megamind has gone absolutely still in his chair or that his face is very, very white.
Day six. His father’s face, tired and careworn. His mother’s voice. “Sleep, dear. You need it.”
No. No sleep. He knows what he has to do. It’s going to be difficult - hellishly complex, but he can do it. Light sources are not easy to work with, and he’ll need to program conflicting frequencies and multiple line-of-sight interactions. And there is the problem of routing video feed from the telescope lens to the cameras. And the perspective and scale are going to be nearly impossible to work out. But he can do it. He has to. He needs to.
Wide awake, he rolls out the 3-D projectors.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
“Roxanne.” There is a hand on her shoulder, long fingers wrapped around her bicep, shaking gently. “Roxanne?”
She stirs, turns her face to the pillow. “Mmmglfh.”
Megamind shakes her more insistently. “Roxanne,” he hisses. “Wake up. Please?”
It’s the ‘please’ that catches her, it always does. He always sounds so hesitant. “Time’s it?” she mumbles, and he lets go immediately.
“Half-past four. Come on, I want to show you - I want you to see something.”
She sniffs, scrubs the back of her hand over her eyes. Megamind is tired, too, but his green eyes are shining and there’s an excited smile hovering around the corners of his mouth like it’s afraid to show itself.
“Mmkay,” Roxanne says, and crawls out of bed. Her neck is stiff.
Megamind is holding out her robe for her, and she shrugs into it. The way he moves catches her attention - he helps her into the robe but releases it as soon as she was in, drawing his hands away from her shoulders without touching her. He ties the sash around her waist using only the tips of his fingers, then turns and almost skips to the door.
Roxanne blinks at him. She hasn’t seen him like this in a while, not since he gave up villainy, not since the last time he’d kidnapped her. He’s moving the way he used to when he had a new plan, something new to show off. Judging by the way he’s bouncing, it’s probably a full-size doomsday device.
Megamind half-dances down the hall while Roxanne trails slowly along behind him, utterly confused.
When she rounds the corner, he’s sitting in the high-backed chair where she had found him only a few hours before, rubbing his hands together, frightened and enthusiastic all at once. Something is different about the room, but Roxanne cannot quite put her finger on it. Before she can really look around, Megamind licks his lips, throws a switch, and the windowless lair is plunged into absolute darkness. Roxanne feels the curtain trundle closed behind her.
Megamind’s voice threads its way out of the dark. “This is what I was looking at,” he says quietly, and there is a click and Roxanne’s jaw drops. Her eyes go wide.
The lair is still completely dark - she cannot see viewscreens, or machines, or Megamind, but the air around her is filled with points of brilliant light. The farthest ones away are barely pinpricks while the largest ones, the ones closest to her, are easily as big as her head. No two are alike.
The totality of the illusion is bizarre; it’s like everything has disappeared but this, and all she can see, no matter which way she turns - even if she’s looking down, which is really weird and actually a little bit scary - is a field of lights extending into infinity. Some look like clusters of smaller pinpricks of light and some look like little more than glowing frozen smoke, but most are flat, and shaped like hurricanes.
Not hurricanes. Galaxies. She isn’t sure how he did it, but somehow, Megamind is projecting a close-up view of outer space into his lair in three dimensions. It’s like being the Hubble telescope. And it is beautiful.
She finds her voice. It’s strained, and she realizes that she hasn’t been breathing. “Oh my god.”
Megamind looms out of the array of stars, lit from all directions, watching her with a kind of hopeful pride. “This way,” he says, and tugs gently at her hand. Roxanne balks. Her mind is still asleep enough to register the galaxies as obstacles, and if she moves, she’ll throw them off course or fall into the infinite blackness below her feet - the endless void of space.
Megamind grins. “It’s just a projection,” he says softly, and she lets him pull her away. How he can tell where he’s going is anyone’s guess. Roxanne can’t see the floor; she only knows it’s there because her feet keep hitting it, but it’s like walking into and onto nothing. Her grip is probably crushing Megamind’s hand, but he says nothing.
Then he stops walking, and Roxanne stumbles a little against him. She squints into the blackness and feels a shift in her focus, as if she has just gone from looking at the surface of a lake to gazing down through the water - there are shapes behind the blackness, somehow in the same space as the blackness, but she is able to see that she is standing by the wall of control panels. Megamind reaches down and flutters a hand over the keys. The galaxies shift, dance, pull back and fade out around a single one of their number - that one expands, explodes into brilliance around them before falling into darkness. When Roxanne’s eyes adjust again, she is surrounded by individual stars.
Megamind moves to stand close behind Roxanne, puts his hands on her shoulders and waits for a minute while Roxanne gapes up at the shimmering matrix, and then he takes her left hand in his and lifts their joined hands to point to a red-burning giant some ten feet in the air. There’s a much smaller, much whiter star hanging just below it, but Megamind is definitely looking at the red star. “That one,” he whispers.
Roxanne glances sideways at him. He is pressed against her back; his right hand still rests on her shoulder and their left arms are extended together out and up, and he is leaning forward and staring with shining eyes up at the red star. His fingers tighten on her shoulder.
“That one,” he says again, and there are tears in his voice. “T Pyxidis.”
Roxanne looks back up at the star. Understanding comes crashing down, wakes her up completely with a shock like ice. “Home?” she whispers, and feels him nod.
The stars are amazing enough by themselves, but for him to show her something so incredibly personal…there is no comparison. It’s impossible. There is absolutely nothing that Roxanne can compare to what Megamind is doing, but she is well aware of the significance. He’s sure of her.
He’s sure of her.
And she is sure of him.
She drops her arm just as he lowers his head to rest it on her shoulder, wrapping his thin arms around her and pressing close against her back. And that’s when the implications slam home.
He is the last of his kind, alone in a way that Roxanne cannot even begin to comprehend. His home world is dead, torn apart and compressed by the gravity of a collapsing star. The people of his new world had thrown him to the ground and kicked him until he stayed there. Everything he has, he made himself. Built from the ground up with his hands.
And now he has shown her the one thing he has not shared with anyone else, ever, the last he has of his home. The last anyone has of his home. Roxanne is standing on Earth and looking across the years at a star that died eight days after Megamind was born, and she feels every lonely, empty mile of it.
All the planets in the galaxy, and he was sent to hers. All the countries on Earth, and he fell to this one. And, out of all the people in Metro City - out of all the seven billion people on Earth - Megamind picked her. And he thinks he’s the lucky one?
(Megamind isn’t sure what she’s thinking, but she went from total emotional flatline to utter shock to love-love-love just boiling off of her in about five seconds.)
(Some people think that love, as an emotion typically associated with the color red, should smell like cinnamon. It doesn’t. It smells and tastes like cloves - and like cloves, it’s unbelievably strong, and if you bite it too hard it bites back.)
And, good lord, what is Roxanne supposed to say? How do you respond to something like this without a full choir to back you up?
“This. Is.” The words are barely there. “You just…this.” Someday she will be able to form a coherent sentence.
Megamind chuckles, ducks his head against her shoulder again, and says nothing. A long moment passes.
“I do actually know what this means to you.” Roxanne’s voice is low. “And it…I understand what you’re doing. And it’s…a little overwhelming.” He tenses. “In a good way,” she adds quickly, and Megamind relaxes again. Roxanne lets out a breath and leans back against him a little. “I wish you knew how much I love you.”
She isn’t aware that she said the last part out loud until he clears his throat. “I do, in fact,” he admits awkwardly. “Actually, it’s…kind of making me dizzy.”
Roxanne turns her head to look at him, sees him gazing at her out of the corner of his eye, and bursts out laughing. “Oh god - I’m sorry - I can try to, to tone it down or something -”
But Megamind is laughing too and shaking his head. “No no, it’s okay. Just means I need to spend more time with you, that’s all.” He buries his nose in her neck and inhales, then shivers all over, still laughing. “Whoaaaaagh,” he says, “that’ll clear out your sinuses. Eeeyikes.”
Roxanne has to turn around and put her arms around him to keep from falling over laughing, but that only makes Megamind laugh harder. And they both end up sitting on the floor, leaning on one another and snickering.
Last night, she had wanted to wring his skinny neck. Now, she wants nothing more than to sit in the middle of this projection with him forever.
She’s sitting in the middle of space. It looks so real. Roxanne doesn’t know much about programming, but she can guess that this kind of hologram cannot be easy to create. It takes up the space inside the Lair, then overlays obstacles to give the impression that it goes on forever. “This is incredible. It’s like I’m looking through four dimensions.”
“Five, actually,” Megamind replies, and Roxanne can hear him grinning. “Self-contained infinite cascading tesseract. My own invention, you need it to get the perspective right, to get the scale to work out. Basically useless except for things like this.” He pauses, asks shyly, “Do you like it?”
She turns, stares up at him. He looks so hopeful, and her reply of, That is a very stupid question, what the hell do you think, dies on her lips.
Instead, she says slowly, “Do you remember the first night I stayed over here? When I told you I loved you more than there are stars?” Megamind nods, frowning a little bit, confused. “And how you tried to explain that it was a flawed comparison?”
“I remember. I also remember where you had your hands. It was very distracting.”
Roxanne grins. “And now I know why. Anyway, I think I figured out why the comparison is flawed - it’s volumetric, isn’t it? Love would be measured as a volume, but the quantity of stars is just a number-line figure.” She waits for him to nod again before she continues. “Well, I’ll try again. I love you enough to fill all the space between the stars.”
Megamind regards her in silence for a while, an odd little half-smile tweaking his lips to the side. Then he says, “Roxanne, you can’t possibly comprehend the size of that sort of space.”
Her answering smile is that soft, fond one that she shows him so rarely and that always makes his heart skip a few beats. It’s so unguarded. “Megamind,” she returns, “I don’t have to.”
He has to look away, then - he has to look up at T Pyxidis very quickly, because if he doesn’t, he’ll cry again, and now is not the time.
Chapter 11
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