Fic: Cold Fusion: True North, Chapter 13
Title: Cold Fusion: True North, Chapter 13
Author: Dal_Niente
Rating: M for later chapters
Word Count: 2,759
Author's Note: I feel it's safe to warn you that there's no end in sight to the Cold Fusion series - I foresee one short one before the Christmas fic. Possibly two - and possibly neither, depending on how things work out. And I'm sort of toying around with an idea for one after Christmas, another long one, with the sort of threat that makes Anderson look like a carnival clown handing out balloons. Either way, the next few will tone down the angst a bit and focus more on plot and events. Is there no end to the madness? Is there no end to the plot bunnies?
I kid, I kid, I am enjoying this immensely. I only hope that you are, too!
Chapter 13
Clank. Clank. Clank. Shuffle. …whirrrrrrrrr
Roxanne cracks one eye open, trying to remember where she is and trying to figure out why she hurts all over. She’s leaning against Megamind, who is leaning against her, and they are sitting on…
…Nothing.
She is strongly considering freaking out about this, when Minion’s voice echoes out of the blackness. “Sir? Are you in heeeeere…!”
Right. The starfield. Megamind’s home star system.
“Sir? Sir!” Minion actually sounds panicked.
Roxanne lifts her head and blinks a little, trying to see through the darkness. “Minion?”
There’s a pause. “Miss Ritchi? What’s going on?”
“Hang on. Um…”
That’s when Megamind comes awake in a flurry of juddering limbs, like a marionette spasming to life. Or, rather, a marionette trying to spasm to life - his whole body jerks, twitches, and then he yelps and presses a hand to his shoulder. “Owwww…”
He slits his eyes open and peers at Roxanne. “You okay?”
“Oh yeah, I feel like a million bucks,” she groans, stretching slowly and feeling the pull of cramped muscles.
Megamind gets to his feet by pulling himself up on the edge of the controls. Roxanne hears clicking, and then the space projection disappears and she is once again sitting on the floor of the Lair’s main control room, sunlight streaming through the windows near the ceiling.
Minion is standing in the doorway, looking deeply unsettled. Roxanne doesn’t blame him. She can’t imagine what pulling back a curtain and staring out into the infinite darkness of space would be like, especially in broad daylight, but Minion recovers incredibly quickly. “New projection, Sir?” he says, clanking over to where Megamind is still standing hunched over the controls, trying to straighten his spine. “Interesting perspective.”
Megamind nods, winces. “Yes, I developed it last night…agh, ow. Minion, please…?”
Roxanne hauls herself to her feet, blinking in the sunlight as Minion nods. “Way ahead of you,” the fish says, and sets a box of what look like very long, thin pins down on the seat of Megamind’s chair. “Hold on, Sir.”
“I know.” Megamind braces his hands against the controls. He really does not look good. His neck is twisted at an odd angle, and his back is curved to one side.
Minion sighs. “I don’t know why you do this to yourself, Sir, I really don’t,” he mutters, and then puts one of the pins through the flannel of Megamind’s pajamas into his back at the base of his spine, pushes it deep into muscle. Megamind’s face twitches a little, but that’s the only sign he gives that he feels it, and he doesn’t move when Minion inserts another pin, then another, until there are two rows of pins running up the middle of his back. Roxanne is staring openly.
Carefully, Minion places the last two pins at the top of Megamind's neck, just under the curve of his skull. “Okay, Sir! You are good to go.”
Eyes closed, Megamind takes a deep breath and then, as he exhales, twists smoothly back into alignment, taking his hands off the console and standing. His head moves into place first and the rest of his body follows - it’s an oddly snakelike movement, slow and measured and calculated, and Roxanne can tell that he and Minion have done this many times before.
Minion moves him away from the console, and Roxanne has to consciously stop herself from taking a step back. Few humans stand with their weight evenly distributed around their center of gravity, with their spines fully lengthened, and it’s unnerving. Megamind’s face is totally serene. He looks like a medical diagram.
He looks like an alien.
Right on cue, Megamind’s eyes slide open and he’s already looking at her, but his face does not move and neither do his eyes, and the perfect balance and total lack of movement is just horrifying. It isn’t right.
He stares blankly for a few seconds, and then his eyes slide closed again. Roxanne swallows.
“Hold still.” Minion pulls out the pins in the same order he inserted them, starting at the bottom and working his way up. Only after the last pin is gone does Megamind open his eyes again and settle into a more natural stance.
He glances at Roxanne. There are dark smudges under his eyes and cheekbones, and the lines around his mouth have deepened. “I'm sorry you had to see that.”
Roxanne has to take a minute to find her voice. She knows he’s an alien - last night had driven that home rather well - but weird physiology aside, this is the first time he’s actually looked it, and not just like a blue-skinned human with a big head. “What just happened?”
“The direct nerve stimulation triggers a release of tension in my body’s fascia. I don’t think it works on humans.”
Roxanne shakes her head. “Right, okay, but what happened?”
Megamind just looks embarrassed. Minion grimaces. “He can’t sleep like that - he shouldn’t, anyway. In layman’s terms, his muscles lock up harder and faster than yours do, and they take longer to relax. So a knot in your neck from one night’s bad posture might take you a few hours to work out, maybe you have to sleep on it differently the next night? The same kind of tension in his neck would take about three days to work out on its own.”
Megamind casts a sharp glance up at Minion. “A day and a half.”
“Three of your days,” Minion says, equally sharply, and Megamind rolls his eyes.
“I’ll be fine,” he tells Roxanne, then blinks. She’s looking at him like she’s never seen him before. “What?”
“Nothing, just…times like this, I wish I’d studied more anatomy or gone into medicine or something.” She shakes her head again. “You’ve gotta be science’s dream child. Compare the way your body works to the way our bodies work…I just think we could learn a lot from you.”
“Probably,” Megamind agrees, but there’s a quieter note in his voice that Roxanne misses.
“I mean, seriously,” she continues, “I’m really glad you’re here, but how did the government just pass you by? I would think they’d have tried to take you ages ago. Study you, or something.”
The silence that follows this makes her look around. Megamind’s narrow face is drawn as if in pain. Minion’s mouth is open like he wants to say something but can’t find the words.
“They did.” Megamind glances at Roxanne with an awkward half-smile, then looks quickly away again. And then, before Roxanne can say anything, he turns his face towards Minion. “I’m going to go get dressed. See you at breakfast.”
There’s another long silence after he disappears, walking towards the curtain using the same clipped movements Roxanne had noticed when he’d left her with Minion in the pool room.
Finally Minion sighs. “Miss Ritchi, I am really, really sorry.”
She blinks up at him, still trying to figure out what just happened. “W-why?”
Minion is visibly distressed; his fins are fanned as far as they’ll go on either side. “I meant to warn you ages ago. There just…didn’t seem to be a time, and I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject, and…well…” He trails off.
“Call me dense, but I’m confused.” Roxanne looks from the curtain to Minion. “What did I say? I think I missed something somewhere along the way.”
But Minion shakes his head. “No, no, there was no way you could possibly have known. We…we don’t talk about it.” He takes a deep breath. “When we were six years old, some people came to the prison. Suits. Feds. The warden was away, out sick with the flu. They came in, flashed some papers, said a lot without saying much at all, and walked out with the boss. I couldn’t go. He made them think I was just a pet. He made sure everyone thought I was just a pet. He’d already read through the prison library by that point; I think he’d been expecting them.”
Roxanne has to sit down. Luckily, Megamind’s swivel chair is within reach, and she sinks into it without really noticing. Nowhere, in any of her research, has she found any reference to this.
Minion continues in a monotone. “The warden came back a week later and found the boss gone. He called in a few favors, we never found out which ones or who granted them, but there was a big fight that lasted two years and ended with the warden threatening to go to the press about some documents or footage or something he’d found. The feds said he wouldn’t dare. He called their bluff and went. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what it was he found; it never made it into the press and we never heard anything else about it, but two days after the warden left to go to the newsroom, Sir was back and we were going to school.”
He sighs again and looks up at Roxanne. “And that’s all I know,” he finishes, and shrugs. “He doesn’t talk about it. The warden hired psychiatrists to try to get him to talk, but it never worked.”
“Never?”
Minion shakes his head. “He wouldn’t let them. It was the first I’d seen him like that.”
Roxanne should stop asking questions. She can’t. “Like what?”
Minion hesitates. “Well…mean.” He sighs. “He never was, before, and even after we started school he tried to make friends. He genuinely wanted to make friends, which I took as a positive sign. But back at the prison he was just…he’s brilliant, you know that,” he says desperately, and Roxanne nods. “Well, most of the psychiatrists didn’t bother coming back after the first session. He played games with the ones that kept trying. And after he decided to go bad, he stopped hiding it. The only reason we weren’t expelled from school was that all the teachers were scared of him. He turned around a little while later, but by then his reputation was secure.”
“And he never talked to you about anything? Never said anything?”
Minion looks at her, his expression unreadable. Finally he says, “I asked and asked. Eventually he turned to me and said that he had learned a lot. And that one of the more interesting things he had learned was that human rights codes apply only to humans. He mentioned specifically the Declaration of Helsinki, the National Research Act, the Belmont Report, and Title 45 of the CFR.” The fish smiles a little, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “After that, I stopped asking.”
Roxanne has her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs. She isn’t sure when that happened, but there are times when the world is not a nice place, when Roxanne remembers the way things really work - at the bottom line, after taxes - and this is one of those times. “Thank you for telling me.”
Minion nods. He’s aware of just how big a bombshell he just dropped, and he doesn’t expect Roxanne will move anytime soon. “Would you prefer to be left alone?”
She nods.
“Okay. I’m sorry to have hit you with this so suddenly. Breakfast in half an hour?”
Another nod.
“Okay,” Minion says again, sounding a little bit lost. He flutters a hand towards her, as if he isn’t quite sure whether to offer physical comfort or not - he touches her hair, her shoulder, then turns quickly and leaves.
Roxanne takes a deep breath and puts her head between her knees, then curls into the smallest ball she can on Megamind’s chair.
Holy shit.
She’s got to get it together. She can’t be shell-shocked all day, that won’t do anybody any good. But. She really had not seen this coming. It’s a whole other can of worms.
Well, it explains a lot. It explains why Megamind seems so uncomfortable discussing the specifics of his physiology. It probably also explains why he is so insistent that the fact that he’s an alien must be a huge barrier; the extent of his difference was hammered into him at a very young age, and not just by schoolyard bullies. And it explains why Minion had brought Megamind to her when he was injured, rather than a hospital or the jail. “I can't take him to a hospital, they wouldn't know what to do with him and they'd call the government and if he can't defend himself-”
She doesn’t notice the quiet footsteps until they stop in front of her chair. Megamind’s voice is quiet, calm. “Minion told you.”
Roxanne leans forward, wraps her arms around his waist. Pushes the top of her head into his stomach, stares at the floor. “I had no idea.”
“Not many people do,” he admits, and he actually sounds faintly amused. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago. I’m over it.”
She makes a small, disbelieving noise, and fists her hands in his suit. Squeezes her eyes closed.
“Mostly,” he amends, and runs his hands over her back, cards his fingers through her short hair. “Mostly over it. You caught me by surprise, and I was already feeling kind of expose-ed. That’s all.”
Roxanne swallows. “Is there anything else I should know?”
Megamind hums for a minute, as if deep in thought. “There’s a bomb under Washington. It’s set to go off in the event of my untimely death. If it ever detonates, there’ll be a flash of light, a burst of confetti, and a little flag that says, ‘Bang!’ on it. But that’s all.”
“What?” Roxanne pulls her head back and looks up at him.
Megamind is staring down at her with laughing eyes. “I really am okay.”
When she still looks dubious, he actually chuckles. “You’re finding out about this now, but it happened when I was six, okay? I’m a grown-up now. Got my big-boy pants and everything. Really. I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
Megamind grins and puts one hand on his chest and the other on his abdomen. “Cross my hearts and hope to die.”
Roxanne blinks. “Hearts? Plural?” She hasn’t come across that in her research either.
“No. Not really. I just have the one.” His grin widens, and he spreads his arms in a grossly exaggerated gesture of I-don’t-care. “Sure, it’s got six chambers, but who’s counting?” He looks back down at Roxanne. “Please get up. That doesn’t look comfortable.”
Reluctantly, Roxanne lets go of him and unfolds herself from the chair. “You’re really okay?”
He sighs, puts both hands on her shoulders and looks her in the eye. “Yes. I am. I may be on the nuttier side of sane about some things, but I moved past that particular problem a long, long time ago. It may shed some light on certain of my eccentricities, but I haven’t had any problems because of it in years. And honestly, it wasn’t as bad as all that.”
“And it won’t happen again, right?” Roxanne has to ask. “They’re not going to show up and take you away again, right?”
Megamind nods and holds up a finger, signaling wait. Then he peels back one of the top corners of the blue lightning bolt on his suit, revealing a hidden pocket, and removes something rectangular and silvery-black. He hands it to Roxanne. “This,” he says as she turns it over in her hands, “is the extraterrestrial equivalent of a green card.”
“This certifies that Mega Mind is legally a non-human person and combined citizen of the United Nations of Planet Earth.” She looks up. “Your name is legally Megamind? It’s not an alias?”
He shrugs. “My people chose their own names. Besides, it’s who I am. That card, there,” he points at it, “means that I’m bound by your laws and entitled to the same rights and protections that you are. Wayne has one, too, but it’s kind of redundant because he has adoption papers. I think there are a few others like us, but I’ve never bothered to track them down. Anyway.” He takes the card back from her. “I have never let it expire, and I do not want to find out what would happen if I did. But the general gist of it is, as long as I have that…” He trails off, shakes his head. “I’m safe.”
“Good,” Roxanne says firmly, and hugs him hard.
He closes his eyes and returns the gesture. He will never get tired of hugs, never.
After a minute, Roxanne stirs. “Megamind?”
“Hmm?”
“Is there really a bomb under Washington?”
Chapter 12
Top of Page
Chapter 14
Return to Master List
Author: Dal_Niente
Rating: M for later chapters
Word Count: 2,759
Author's Note: I feel it's safe to warn you that there's no end in sight to the Cold Fusion series - I foresee one short one before the Christmas fic. Possibly two - and possibly neither, depending on how things work out. And I'm sort of toying around with an idea for one after Christmas, another long one, with the sort of threat that makes Anderson look like a carnival clown handing out balloons. Either way, the next few will tone down the angst a bit and focus more on plot and events. Is there no end to the madness? Is there no end to the plot bunnies?
I kid, I kid, I am enjoying this immensely. I only hope that you are, too!
Chapter 13
Clank. Clank. Clank. Shuffle. …whirrrrrrrrr
Roxanne cracks one eye open, trying to remember where she is and trying to figure out why she hurts all over. She’s leaning against Megamind, who is leaning against her, and they are sitting on…
…Nothing.
She is strongly considering freaking out about this, when Minion’s voice echoes out of the blackness. “Sir? Are you in heeeeere…!”
Right. The starfield. Megamind’s home star system.
“Sir? Sir!” Minion actually sounds panicked.
Roxanne lifts her head and blinks a little, trying to see through the darkness. “Minion?”
There’s a pause. “Miss Ritchi? What’s going on?”
“Hang on. Um…”
That’s when Megamind comes awake in a flurry of juddering limbs, like a marionette spasming to life. Or, rather, a marionette trying to spasm to life - his whole body jerks, twitches, and then he yelps and presses a hand to his shoulder. “Owwww…”
He slits his eyes open and peers at Roxanne. “You okay?”
“Oh yeah, I feel like a million bucks,” she groans, stretching slowly and feeling the pull of cramped muscles.
Megamind gets to his feet by pulling himself up on the edge of the controls. Roxanne hears clicking, and then the space projection disappears and she is once again sitting on the floor of the Lair’s main control room, sunlight streaming through the windows near the ceiling.
Minion is standing in the doorway, looking deeply unsettled. Roxanne doesn’t blame him. She can’t imagine what pulling back a curtain and staring out into the infinite darkness of space would be like, especially in broad daylight, but Minion recovers incredibly quickly. “New projection, Sir?” he says, clanking over to where Megamind is still standing hunched over the controls, trying to straighten his spine. “Interesting perspective.”
Megamind nods, winces. “Yes, I developed it last night…agh, ow. Minion, please…?”
Roxanne hauls herself to her feet, blinking in the sunlight as Minion nods. “Way ahead of you,” the fish says, and sets a box of what look like very long, thin pins down on the seat of Megamind’s chair. “Hold on, Sir.”
“I know.” Megamind braces his hands against the controls. He really does not look good. His neck is twisted at an odd angle, and his back is curved to one side.
Minion sighs. “I don’t know why you do this to yourself, Sir, I really don’t,” he mutters, and then puts one of the pins through the flannel of Megamind’s pajamas into his back at the base of his spine, pushes it deep into muscle. Megamind’s face twitches a little, but that’s the only sign he gives that he feels it, and he doesn’t move when Minion inserts another pin, then another, until there are two rows of pins running up the middle of his back. Roxanne is staring openly.
Carefully, Minion places the last two pins at the top of Megamind's neck, just under the curve of his skull. “Okay, Sir! You are good to go.”
Eyes closed, Megamind takes a deep breath and then, as he exhales, twists smoothly back into alignment, taking his hands off the console and standing. His head moves into place first and the rest of his body follows - it’s an oddly snakelike movement, slow and measured and calculated, and Roxanne can tell that he and Minion have done this many times before.
Minion moves him away from the console, and Roxanne has to consciously stop herself from taking a step back. Few humans stand with their weight evenly distributed around their center of gravity, with their spines fully lengthened, and it’s unnerving. Megamind’s face is totally serene. He looks like a medical diagram.
He looks like an alien.
Right on cue, Megamind’s eyes slide open and he’s already looking at her, but his face does not move and neither do his eyes, and the perfect balance and total lack of movement is just horrifying. It isn’t right.
He stares blankly for a few seconds, and then his eyes slide closed again. Roxanne swallows.
“Hold still.” Minion pulls out the pins in the same order he inserted them, starting at the bottom and working his way up. Only after the last pin is gone does Megamind open his eyes again and settle into a more natural stance.
He glances at Roxanne. There are dark smudges under his eyes and cheekbones, and the lines around his mouth have deepened. “I'm sorry you had to see that.”
Roxanne has to take a minute to find her voice. She knows he’s an alien - last night had driven that home rather well - but weird physiology aside, this is the first time he’s actually looked it, and not just like a blue-skinned human with a big head. “What just happened?”
“The direct nerve stimulation triggers a release of tension in my body’s fascia. I don’t think it works on humans.”
Roxanne shakes her head. “Right, okay, but what happened?”
Megamind just looks embarrassed. Minion grimaces. “He can’t sleep like that - he shouldn’t, anyway. In layman’s terms, his muscles lock up harder and faster than yours do, and they take longer to relax. So a knot in your neck from one night’s bad posture might take you a few hours to work out, maybe you have to sleep on it differently the next night? The same kind of tension in his neck would take about three days to work out on its own.”
Megamind casts a sharp glance up at Minion. “A day and a half.”
“Three of your days,” Minion says, equally sharply, and Megamind rolls his eyes.
“I’ll be fine,” he tells Roxanne, then blinks. She’s looking at him like she’s never seen him before. “What?”
“Nothing, just…times like this, I wish I’d studied more anatomy or gone into medicine or something.” She shakes her head again. “You’ve gotta be science’s dream child. Compare the way your body works to the way our bodies work…I just think we could learn a lot from you.”
“Probably,” Megamind agrees, but there’s a quieter note in his voice that Roxanne misses.
“I mean, seriously,” she continues, “I’m really glad you’re here, but how did the government just pass you by? I would think they’d have tried to take you ages ago. Study you, or something.”
The silence that follows this makes her look around. Megamind’s narrow face is drawn as if in pain. Minion’s mouth is open like he wants to say something but can’t find the words.
“They did.” Megamind glances at Roxanne with an awkward half-smile, then looks quickly away again. And then, before Roxanne can say anything, he turns his face towards Minion. “I’m going to go get dressed. See you at breakfast.”
There’s another long silence after he disappears, walking towards the curtain using the same clipped movements Roxanne had noticed when he’d left her with Minion in the pool room.
Finally Minion sighs. “Miss Ritchi, I am really, really sorry.”
She blinks up at him, still trying to figure out what just happened. “W-why?”
Minion is visibly distressed; his fins are fanned as far as they’ll go on either side. “I meant to warn you ages ago. There just…didn’t seem to be a time, and I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject, and…well…” He trails off.
“Call me dense, but I’m confused.” Roxanne looks from the curtain to Minion. “What did I say? I think I missed something somewhere along the way.”
But Minion shakes his head. “No, no, there was no way you could possibly have known. We…we don’t talk about it.” He takes a deep breath. “When we were six years old, some people came to the prison. Suits. Feds. The warden was away, out sick with the flu. They came in, flashed some papers, said a lot without saying much at all, and walked out with the boss. I couldn’t go. He made them think I was just a pet. He made sure everyone thought I was just a pet. He’d already read through the prison library by that point; I think he’d been expecting them.”
Roxanne has to sit down. Luckily, Megamind’s swivel chair is within reach, and she sinks into it without really noticing. Nowhere, in any of her research, has she found any reference to this.
Minion continues in a monotone. “The warden came back a week later and found the boss gone. He called in a few favors, we never found out which ones or who granted them, but there was a big fight that lasted two years and ended with the warden threatening to go to the press about some documents or footage or something he’d found. The feds said he wouldn’t dare. He called their bluff and went. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what it was he found; it never made it into the press and we never heard anything else about it, but two days after the warden left to go to the newsroom, Sir was back and we were going to school.”
He sighs again and looks up at Roxanne. “And that’s all I know,” he finishes, and shrugs. “He doesn’t talk about it. The warden hired psychiatrists to try to get him to talk, but it never worked.”
“Never?”
Minion shakes his head. “He wouldn’t let them. It was the first I’d seen him like that.”
Roxanne should stop asking questions. She can’t. “Like what?”
Minion hesitates. “Well…mean.” He sighs. “He never was, before, and even after we started school he tried to make friends. He genuinely wanted to make friends, which I took as a positive sign. But back at the prison he was just…he’s brilliant, you know that,” he says desperately, and Roxanne nods. “Well, most of the psychiatrists didn’t bother coming back after the first session. He played games with the ones that kept trying. And after he decided to go bad, he stopped hiding it. The only reason we weren’t expelled from school was that all the teachers were scared of him. He turned around a little while later, but by then his reputation was secure.”
“And he never talked to you about anything? Never said anything?”
Minion looks at her, his expression unreadable. Finally he says, “I asked and asked. Eventually he turned to me and said that he had learned a lot. And that one of the more interesting things he had learned was that human rights codes apply only to humans. He mentioned specifically the Declaration of Helsinki, the National Research Act, the Belmont Report, and Title 45 of the CFR.” The fish smiles a little, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “After that, I stopped asking.”
Roxanne has her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs. She isn’t sure when that happened, but there are times when the world is not a nice place, when Roxanne remembers the way things really work - at the bottom line, after taxes - and this is one of those times. “Thank you for telling me.”
Minion nods. He’s aware of just how big a bombshell he just dropped, and he doesn’t expect Roxanne will move anytime soon. “Would you prefer to be left alone?”
She nods.
“Okay. I’m sorry to have hit you with this so suddenly. Breakfast in half an hour?”
Another nod.
“Okay,” Minion says again, sounding a little bit lost. He flutters a hand towards her, as if he isn’t quite sure whether to offer physical comfort or not - he touches her hair, her shoulder, then turns quickly and leaves.
Roxanne takes a deep breath and puts her head between her knees, then curls into the smallest ball she can on Megamind’s chair.
Holy shit.
She’s got to get it together. She can’t be shell-shocked all day, that won’t do anybody any good. But. She really had not seen this coming. It’s a whole other can of worms.
Well, it explains a lot. It explains why Megamind seems so uncomfortable discussing the specifics of his physiology. It probably also explains why he is so insistent that the fact that he’s an alien must be a huge barrier; the extent of his difference was hammered into him at a very young age, and not just by schoolyard bullies. And it explains why Minion had brought Megamind to her when he was injured, rather than a hospital or the jail. “I can't take him to a hospital, they wouldn't know what to do with him and they'd call the government and if he can't defend himself-”
She doesn’t notice the quiet footsteps until they stop in front of her chair. Megamind’s voice is quiet, calm. “Minion told you.”
Roxanne leans forward, wraps her arms around his waist. Pushes the top of her head into his stomach, stares at the floor. “I had no idea.”
“Not many people do,” he admits, and he actually sounds faintly amused. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago. I’m over it.”
She makes a small, disbelieving noise, and fists her hands in his suit. Squeezes her eyes closed.
“Mostly,” he amends, and runs his hands over her back, cards his fingers through her short hair. “Mostly over it. You caught me by surprise, and I was already feeling kind of expose-ed. That’s all.”
Roxanne swallows. “Is there anything else I should know?”
Megamind hums for a minute, as if deep in thought. “There’s a bomb under Washington. It’s set to go off in the event of my untimely death. If it ever detonates, there’ll be a flash of light, a burst of confetti, and a little flag that says, ‘Bang!’ on it. But that’s all.”
“What?” Roxanne pulls her head back and looks up at him.
Megamind is staring down at her with laughing eyes. “I really am okay.”
When she still looks dubious, he actually chuckles. “You’re finding out about this now, but it happened when I was six, okay? I’m a grown-up now. Got my big-boy pants and everything. Really. I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
Megamind grins and puts one hand on his chest and the other on his abdomen. “Cross my hearts and hope to die.”
Roxanne blinks. “Hearts? Plural?” She hasn’t come across that in her research either.
“No. Not really. I just have the one.” His grin widens, and he spreads his arms in a grossly exaggerated gesture of I-don’t-care. “Sure, it’s got six chambers, but who’s counting?” He looks back down at Roxanne. “Please get up. That doesn’t look comfortable.”
Reluctantly, Roxanne lets go of him and unfolds herself from the chair. “You’re really okay?”
He sighs, puts both hands on her shoulders and looks her in the eye. “Yes. I am. I may be on the nuttier side of sane about some things, but I moved past that particular problem a long, long time ago. It may shed some light on certain of my eccentricities, but I haven’t had any problems because of it in years. And honestly, it wasn’t as bad as all that.”
“And it won’t happen again, right?” Roxanne has to ask. “They’re not going to show up and take you away again, right?”
Megamind nods and holds up a finger, signaling wait. Then he peels back one of the top corners of the blue lightning bolt on his suit, revealing a hidden pocket, and removes something rectangular and silvery-black. He hands it to Roxanne. “This,” he says as she turns it over in her hands, “is the extraterrestrial equivalent of a green card.”
“This certifies that Mega Mind is legally a non-human person and combined citizen of the United Nations of Planet Earth.” She looks up. “Your name is legally Megamind? It’s not an alias?”
He shrugs. “My people chose their own names. Besides, it’s who I am. That card, there,” he points at it, “means that I’m bound by your laws and entitled to the same rights and protections that you are. Wayne has one, too, but it’s kind of redundant because he has adoption papers. I think there are a few others like us, but I’ve never bothered to track them down. Anyway.” He takes the card back from her. “I have never let it expire, and I do not want to find out what would happen if I did. But the general gist of it is, as long as I have that…” He trails off, shakes his head. “I’m safe.”
“Good,” Roxanne says firmly, and hugs him hard.
He closes his eyes and returns the gesture. He will never get tired of hugs, never.
After a minute, Roxanne stirs. “Megamind?”
“Hmm?”
“Is there really a bomb under Washington?”
Chapter 12
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