Thankfully, Sharp did not get to the business of resurrecting my poor, tragic family life all at once; when I woke the next morning, she appeared more interested in investigating me—and quite thoroughly at that—than anyone in my family.

Needless to say, I was rather late for work that morning.

However, just as I was crossing the threshold, I heard her say, in a musing tone, almost to herself:

"You'd make an interesting father, Bernard."

For reasons quite obvious, this observation disturbed me to no end.

Good God.


The thought nagged me for a good deal of the day as I sat in my solitary office; a father. Of all the vile and unnecessary things to be.

I shuddered as I tried to imagine it—I, the grueling paternal figure of some snot-nosed brat, working myself into slavery just to pay for all those distasteful things children appeared to need these days.

Things like food and tuition and clothing and other such absurdities.

Besides, Gwendolyn was almost a child as it was; with my abominable luck, the young one would probably be a miniature version of her—a brazen little piece of goods, chattering inanely about presidents and Gilbert Lewis and other such absurdities.

For a moment, I allowed my mind to conjure up the dreadful image—a wild, heedless, auburn haired stripling, with some horrible name of Sharp's choosing, calling me Daddy and creeping into bed with Gwendolyn and I and doing all those other hideously cliché things children were supposed to do.

Then, recalling a small, blonde boy with large glasses whose mother didn't like him, I shook my head, delivering the NO with great finality.

Childhood in itself was a dreadful ordeal—I, though no fan of the human race, would never want to inflict it upon an innocent being.

For years afterward, I was to think of what occurred that day at work as an epoch in my life, a brief ray of hope in my recently less meaningless existence.

He came into my tiny box of an office, smiling somewhat nervously. I admit the expression was rather a let down; I had always pictured him looking far more nefarious and dictator-like.

"Er—Mr. Grahame?"

I didn't look up for a moment, per the standard routine—but slowly, slowly, years of obsessive reading and scouring of the Internet came to my aid, and I lifted my gaze from my work.

Sure enough, there he stood—slender, majestic, and an almost Kool-Aid shade of blue. In my shock, my expression momentarily lost its customary look of mindless boredom.

"Yes?"

He closed the door quickly behind him, bearing what I now saw was a fruit basket with the words To Mr. and Mrs, Grahame written in what I strongly suspected was that nosy reporter's neat script on the card.

Oh, dear God.

For a moment, I earnestly believed that there was an afterlife.

"Hello," he, the azure benefactor of Metro City, said. "Er—Bernard, sorry this is so late, Roxie and I have been so busy…"

As he spoke, there came a look into those green, tennis-ball eyes which I decidedly did not like; it appeared that the brilliant villain-turned-guardian of the city was now spending rather a lot of time in the horizontal position. How appalling.

It was, I reflected with a slight grimace, almost a pity; I for one had hoped that they slept in separate rooms.

Separate ends of the house would be better…pixie-haired tart…

Deciding that such sentiments would most probably displease the lovestruck alien, I simply kept silent, waiting for his mind to wrench itself away from the perfume-drenched recesses of Ms. Ritchi's anatomy.

It took a disturbingly long time.

At last, however, he recalled my presence and flushed, continuing at a breakneck pace:

"So anywayyyy, at the request of my dearest Evil Queen—I mean, my beloved fellow Angel in the Works of Goodness—I have a um—reward for—well—you know—being dehydrated and kept in my pockets for ohhh…a few months or so."

"It was three months and twenty seven days," I informed him coolly, not about to let him see that his hallowed footsteps had made the dingy carpet a treasure beyond worth. "And you are extremely boring when you're soliloquizing about Roxanne."

The tips of his ears turned a flaming shade of violet; shuffling his leather-clad feet, he murmured:

"Oh—you heard that. Ah. Well, all that aside, I came to offer my deepest apologies and my congratulations. I heard you too placed your neck in the sacred noose resontly?"

Rolling my eyes at the characteristic mispronunciation, I replied, with a shrug:

"Unfortunately. The Grahame Family Tree is nearly reduced to a few charred pieces of timber."

Clearly, even evil geniuses had difficulty replying to such a statement as that.

"Ah. Yes. Well—my condolences. Again, congratulations and I am very sorry about all the con-foo-sion. Well, I had better go—things to do, planets to dominate—no, sorry, I mean, cities to protect. The um, Eeeevil thing is a bit hard to get over. Goodbye, Bernard—give your um—wife my…regards."

And with a swish of black leather he was gone, closing my door behind him while I, numb, tried to process what had just occurred.

How…not horrible.

-88888—

Sharp was mindbogglingly calm about the entire affair.

"Oh, how sweet!" she said, smiling as she examined the gleaming basket of organic victuals. "They really do seem very nice—I'd like to get to know them a bit better."

I was on the cusp of actually agreeing with her—luckily, however, I recalled the piquant, made-up face of the insufferable Ms. Ritchi, and the order of the world was thus maintained.

"You weren't so fond of them when you were insanely jealous of Roxanne Ritchi."

She flushed and looked as if she had rather hoped I'd forgotten that.

"Oh—that was stupid of me, I know. But Bernard—well—she's gorgeous, and she'd been all over you—well, the Megamind version of you. I justwanted to make sure you hadn't been screwing her secretly behind Megamind's back."

Then, cutting off the inevitably sarcastic repartee on my part, she continued:

"But, really, I'll at least have to write them a thank you note—and you will sign it, yes you will."

"Why on earth would I want to thank them?"

She shot me the patented "Know-It-all" smirk.

"Well, that ecstatic grin you had on your face when you came in might be a good reason."

Immediately I frowned; damn. I'd hoped she hadn't seen that.

"Hell," Sharp said playfully, "I don't think I've ever made you look like that.."

Abruptly her expression became wicked; leaning in, she murmured:

"Except for that one time. Remember?"

With blazing cheeks, I acknowledged that the memory in question had not entirely eluded me…

"I hope not," she said softly, and then both hands were on my chest, moving up and down—and then, just as I was beginning to seriously consider forgetting any work I'd planned to do for that night, she stopped, one hand frozen in the act of slipping beneath my turtleneck.

"I wonder…" she mused, biting her lip. Rather disappointed at this unorthodox turn of events, I inquired quite acerbically just what sort of idiocy she was contemplating now.

"Hush," she said, absently. "I'm thinking."

"An unusual state of affairs, I'll grant you that."

Her only reply was to pinch me on the arm

There was a moment of deep contemplation on the part of Sharp; then, with that characteristically bewildering shifting of gears, she let go of me altogether and sat down at the table, pulling from out of nowhere a pile of plain white cards.

"C'mon, I've got to write them a thank you note. Come help me."

At once I mapped out the swiftest escape route—her hand, however, was too quick, and wrapped itself around my arm with alarming speed.

"No, you don't. At least sign your name."

"Absolutely not."

She set down her pen and looked up at me, wide eyed and distracting. I scowled back; it was unusual for the Sharp Child to employ such cunning tactics.

"If you do," she coaxed, her tone one of unspoken promise, "I'll make you very, very happy…"

"I doubt that's within your power," I shot back, as my mind raced with all the ways she could "make me happy". "I don't believe I've ever been in such a state."

Again, that smirk; my pulse became momentarily unsteady.

"I think I can swing it."

And standing up, she took me by the lapels of my blazer, toying with them for a moment before leaning in and kissing me for all I was worth, twining both hands in my hair and nudging a knee between my legs, eliciting a moan…

And then she was gone, sitting demurely at the kitchen table, grinning at the expression on my face.

"That's all you're getting for right now," she said firmly, as I intimated none too subtly that I was not averse to continuing. "I have to write this out, and anyway I want to think about something."

And that was all she would say on the matter.