Roxanne had learned in her life that time could be a very fickle thing. She could remember laying awake in bed on eves of dates that were important in a little girl's life, such as Christmas Day, a birthday, or the day before a big party. Time would seemingly dig its heels into the ground and refuse to budge, making the seconds tick so slowly it felt like time might as well be doing a moon walk. Then on other occasions, when she was not looking forward to something, like having a blood test—or any kind of test for that matter—time seemed to pull on its sneakers and run laps around the world, making hours feel like seconds.
Curled up on a chair, with her arms around her for support, Roxanne couldn't help but notice that time was being equally cruel to her now as it had been in her youth. It was going by so slowly that it felt like the man she loved had been taken into that emergency room years ago instead of only an hour.
Lady had warned them that the operation will be a long one. They had to fix a lot of damage done to his body, both externally and internally. His blood had to be flushed out, taking the toxins of the vampire, Dracula, with them to be replaced with his own. The open, torn wound on his shoulder had to be stitched up as did the sword injury to his stomach. Casting bones in plaster was easy, but that couldn't be done until everything else was dealt with. Then there was the matter of his poor skin; thankfully it was only 1st degree burns and nothing too serious, yet it was still a matter to be concerned about.
In the past hour Roxanne had been vaguely aware of people walking up to her and talking about the man, how proud they were of him, how sorry they were that he had been injured. One older man even told her point blank this is how it was, and any of them would be lucky to reach fifty if they were fighters. Information gatherers lived far longer than the fighters, and it was a sad fact of life she had to accept. She could remember crying, and Bernard telling the old man to get lost.
Wayne, too, was feeling the painful sting of time going in reverse. He was moving his way through the manor, checking in on everyone. There were many injuries, and of course there were deaths. In this line of work, in this family, death was but another part of daily life, but he had never faced it head on like he was now. His Father was dead and that was something he could accept. But the idea of his brother being dead, dying on the operating table or passing away after the life saving attempts; it felt like there was a knife in his heart and it was twisting itself deeper with every passing moment he didn't know how Megamind was faring.
He returned to the 'waiting room' area and sat down on a couch. He leaned forward and grasped his forehead in his hands.
Bernard hadn't really moved from his seat against the wall, since he still felt sore from his own vampire interactions the night before, but also because he just didn't feel like leaving the space. He and Megamind had never really seen eye to eye on things; their first meeting had gone far from swell (he passed out when Megamind first revealed himself to be an alien), but that hardly meant they hated each other. They tolerated one another, for Wayne's sake, but now he felt bad about even that. Why couldn't he get along with his boyfriend's brother? What if it was too late now and they would never now what it would be like to share a genuine laugh over something, as friends?
He felt like a heel.
Outside, the world was in a mess. The Family had no way to cover up what was being showed live, and by now footage of the fight was being displayed all across the country. Many wondered if they could say it was done to promote a movie, or a new book series. It could be possible but at this point, police were looking for the people in the riots, and now that the threat was over people were finally returning to Metro City and their homes.
Megamind's face was now showing on screens everywhere, too. Some chalked him up as a disfigured human being. Others said he was an actor wearing face paint and a helmet. One had to wonder how the internet was reacting, but nobody really felt like logging on to find out.
Thousands of years of hiding in the shadows, ruined because Dracula wanted to be seen and heard in the heart of the city. It was like he knew he would meet his end, and wanted to bring the Family out into the public eye for the first time ever. The beast was gone but his legacy remained, since vampires continued to live even with their king destroyed. That meant vampire hunting would continue to flourish, but at least there was now no longer any threat of the monster known as Dracula who had been shot, stabbed, set on fire, and now his remains were suspended in Holy Water and kept somewhere safe until they could be dealt with.
"Roxanne?"
Hearing her name, Roxanne slowly lifted her head to see Eagle standing in front of her. "Hm?" she asked softy.
"Uh, your... your mobile's been ringing non-stop for half an hour now. Do you want it?" she asked.
Sighing, Roxanne nodded. Great... no doubt somebody spotted her too amongst the people and her boss, friends, or family might be calling demanding to know what the Hell was going on. What could she say? She didn't know. But either way Eagle brought her bag back to her and sure enough, her phone was ringing noisily. As she lifted it out of her bag she saw Wayne and Bernard watching her.
"...no." Roxanne mumbled as she turned her phone off, and dropped it back into her bag. "I'm not in the mood."
"Good idea." Bernard said as he rested his head against Wayne's shoulder gently, letting his eyes slip shut.
"What'll we do?" she suddenly asked. "If... if he dies?
Wayne opened his eyes and sighed slowly. "We'll hold a funeral. That's what we'll do."
"No, that's not... that's not what I meant." Roxanne said, sitting up slowly in her chair. "What will we do? He means... he means so much to all of us, doesn't he?"
"Of course he does." Wayne replied. "But there's nothing we can do if he dies. The best we can do is hold him a proper funeral, remember him for what he was, what he died achieving, and cry because we're left here and he's moved onto somewhere better."
"I don't want him to move on to somewhere better, and I know that sounds so horribly selfish, but I can't help it," she said, voice cracking with emotion. "He's supposed to stay here, alive, where I can take care of him. Where I can repay him for saving me, where I can love him and keep him safe for once...!" Roxanne lifted her hands and wiped furiously at the tears that dare show her weakness, shoulders shaking. "God damn it...!"
She didn't hear Wayne get up or move across to her, but she felt his strong, powerful arms wrap around her and she clung to him desperately as those foolish tears continued to spill.
"I know it's not fair," Wayne said as he somehow kept his voice steady despite how fast his heart was beating within his chest. "But we can't think of the bad now. We have to hope and pray he gets through this. If he does, he does. If he doesn't, we have to accept that too. Just hope, Roxanne. Don't give up just yet."
Minion, meanwhile, was fixing his leg.
It was keeping his mind preoccupied and off of what was going on in the world outside. He didn't care if they were revealed to the world, or that people would be talking about them everywhere. It didn't matter that people had finally seen him in that security footage; none of it mattered. All that mattered to him was the blue man undergoing an operation this very second. How he wished he could have done more for his friend, yes he knew he had given him the chance to get to his feet and plunge the sword into the beast, but why not more? Those vampires who had clung and gripped at him had been purposely trying to control him, to keep him out of the battle for as long as possible.
It had worked, and now his best friend lay dying
"No. No, he's not dying." Minion said as he slowly moved the toes of the giant gorilla suit experimentally, seeing if he had done the wiring properly. "He's just hurt. They can fix him. T-they can."
"Minion?" the whispery voice of one of his 'sort of' aunts came to him from around the corner.
"Huh?" he looked up as his hands continued working on the leg and saw the woman looking into the tech room he was working in. "Yes?"
"There's a woman at the gates. She keeps asking for... for your Father or Wayne and Ethelwine." she said.
"What?" Minion set his tools aside and got to his feet. "What do you mean 'a woman'? Is she part of us or not?"
"Well... a few of us recognize her but we're surprised she's here."
"Who is she?" asked the fish as he tested his feet carefully, and was pleased to discover his leg worked fine.
"She was the Father's wife."
~*~
Wayne didn't know what to think when Minion came rushing up to him in the waiting room. This state of mind continued as Minion explained that his Mother was at the gates, wanting to be let in. The man stared blankly at the fish, before the two walked to the nearest window and stared out over the manor's property to the huge gate. There were some people out there, talking to the woman who was partly blocked by the large gates.
"Is it her?" Minion asked.
Wayne concentrated and his vision suddenly became like a pair of binoculars. He closed in on the woman, whose hands were gripping at the steels bars. Finally she moved her head, only just, and Wayne saw it. That same curly hair, though it was much longer now, and instead of being a rich auburn color it was now grey. She had the same eyes, though dulled by age, and there was a familiar beauty spot on her cheek he could clearly remember in his mind.
"What is she doing here after all these years...?" he mumbled.
"What should we do?" asked the fish. "Should we gas her and remove her, or let her in?"
He didn't know what to do. Megamind was still in surgery, his family was mending itself after a terrible war, and now his Mother who abandoned them over twenty years ago was now standing outside the gates wanting to be let in. She didn't even know that her husband was dead, or had been missing all these years. A knot of distress built up in his stomach, remembering how upset his brother got whenever their Mother was brought into the conversation. Would he want to see her, to talk to her? That is, if he could and if he recovered well enough to speak at all? Would he make peace with her, or would he want her out of his sight? There were so many ways for so many people to get hurt now...
"Wayne?" Minion whispered.
"Let her in." Wayne finally said after what felt like a lifetime of considering the possibilities. "I'll talk to her."
Minion nodded but knew better than to go out there himself. He had people to tend to in the house, so he asked one of the cousins, going by the name of Alice, if she could be kind enough to show the woman into the house and into the drawing room. There weren't many people in there, and could be easily emptied for a private one-on-one talk with Wayne. Alice was wary but didn't argue; it wasn't her house to do so. With Ethelwine out of action at the moment, people had to follow Wayne's directions and whatever the towering man wanted, he got.
So when the woman was shown into the house, she was taken immediately to the drawing room and told to wait. Naturally she did, and her eyes raked in the room. It was cozy, with rich colored walls, old wallpaper, and a hard wooden floor that had a large circular carpet on top of it to keep the cold at bay. There were bookshelves, familiar ones, and paintings on the walls that didn't have bookshelves up against them. She was just considering whether she should get up when the door to the room was pushed open, and there stood a man like no other she had seen before outside of fantasy movies. Gerard Butler's portrayal as Leonidas flashed through her mind briefly.
He was tall, with brown hair streaked with grey, and the beard growing on his sharp chin only added to the feeling of testosterone he seemed to exude with barely any effort. His blue eyes looked at her with an uncertain glint, and the way he was holding onto the doorknob told her how apprehensive he was. Dressed there in casual clothes like that, he almost looked like a magazine model, showing the latest clothes for sale in K-Mart or somewhere similar.
The two watched each other quietly for a moment before he finally cleared his throat.
"I'm sure you realize how strange it is, having somebody show up at our gates," he said as he shut the door behind him as he walked into the room.
"Oh I'm sure it is," she replied.
"What's your name?" Wayne asked.
"Sorry, yes. That's so rude of me..." the woman brushed a loose hair out of her face and for a brief second she was young again in Wayne's eyes. Her thick, curly auburn hair was always falling into her face and she was forever pushing it away. "My name is Nina. Nina Zammit." She moved forward and held her hand out to the man, whose face was somehow familiar even if she had never seen him before in her life. Another fleeting memory passed through her mind as her eyes met his, and it was of a little boy with brown hair who would fly around the room for praise.
"Nina." Wayne remembered her name, and returned the gesture by reaching out and taking her hand into his own. Once his hand had been smaller than hers, and even if he hardly needed it he used to hold her hand when they went outside. "I'm-"
"Wayne." They both said the name at the same time, causing him to look alarmed while she just looked mildly bemused.
"You remember us," he stated, rather than asked.
"Not entirely." She withdrew her hand, and looked around the room before pulling her knitted shawl closer to her shoulders. Nina was wearing a simple, soft orange colored dress, and had the white shawl around her shoulders. She looked old, older than Wayne would care to admit, but his parents hadn't exactly been spring chickens when they had adopted Megamind and himself.
"What do you mean?" Wayne asked. A sneaking suspicion was beginning to creep into his mind. Had their Father erased her memories when she left? Was it done to protect her, or them? How could their Father have done that to her? How many years had he wiped away with a stroke of a brush, as if she had been a drawing and simply erased half of her life?
Nina moved to a seat and sat down in it, while Wayne sought out one of his own to sit in. "It's so strange... for almost thirty years I've felt like a part was missing. I've never been sure of what, but, you know. You can't have feelings like that cloud you entirely..." she shrugged slightly. "I'm a writer, now you see. I buried myself in work, but still those thoughts and feelings tugged at me. Dreams always had a blue boy in them, and a man and a little boy but I never really understood it." She frowned slightly, causing wrinkles to show on her forehead. "And on Mother's Day, especially, I would feel sad. Sadder than I should."
Wayne hadn't been sure before, but he was now. Megamind had told him how there were trace fragments left in a persons subconscious after having their memory altered, but normally it would only be a sense of déjà vu. Since Nina had such so much of her life removed of course larger pieces were left behind, buried deep down within her mind, struggling to break free. "Father erased the memories of us."
She looked up at Wayne suddenly, eyes wide. "You were the little boy who flew." Nina whispered quietly. "Wayne."
"Ah... yeah. Yes. That. That was me." Wayne awkwardly shrugged.
Nina looked at him in shock, before scooting forward in her chair and reached out. Knowing she couldn't hurt him even if she tried, he let her brush back the brown fringe and looked at him with a critical eye. She frowned slightly, before tilting his head slightly this way, then that. It was amusing to him, and he couldn't help but give a small smile in amusement.
"There you are," Nina mumbled. "Wayne." She withdrew her hand, smiling shakily. "Look at how big you've grown...! I would never have thought... and your brother. He was all over the news..." She once again brushed a hair out of her face. "Seeing his face brought so much back, but it's still like a jigsaw puzzle. Pieces are missing, but some things are as clear as day. Like this house." She looked around the room again as she gripped her shawl to her chest. "This house..."
"My brother's in a dangerous place right now." Wayne admitted, causing Nina to look back at him with wide eyes. "What happened out there, well, he's badly hurt and is in ER as we speak. You remember him, don't you?"
"The little blue boy, yes. He's been running around my dreams and nightmares for years, but I never picked up on who he was, or what he symbolized." Nina said quietly. "His name it... I don't... Ethan? No..."
"Ethelwine. He prefers to call himself Megamind, though."
"Megamind?" asked the woman.
"He has a bit of a complex," Wayne smiled faintly. "But yeah. He's... been a bit sour about you leaving." He finally touched on the subject and sat there for a moment before looking at the woman who had been his Mother at some point in his life. "Why did you leave us?"
She knew that question would be coming. Even if so much of her life in this house, and marriage to her husband, had been erased, there were still strong pieces that now stood out against the rest. Memories of putting the boys down to bed and watching them sleep, knowing of a looming threat that could kill them so easily had brought her such nightmares. It had been horrible. "It wasn't that I didn't love you all," she finally said after a pause. "I did. I could never have children myself because of my body, so when your Father brought this little blue boy home I was so happy. He was... mischievous, curious, and so adorable with the little fish. Hah. That little fish just now came back to me. He was always with him... and then you came to us from the... Scotts? Somebody… You needed a home, and your Father let you into our hearts and our home. We were a family." She shifted in her chair, obviously distressed by the amount of memories that were rushing back to her like a dam had burst.
"But then he began training... Ethelwine was going to be the fighter. He wasn't even four and he knew how to kill creatures of the night my husband had been fighting against for so long. I... I couldn't stand to watch it happen. His innocence was lost, so was yours, because of a war neither of you should have been in," Nina continued, lifting a hand to rub at one of her old, tired eyes. "I hated your Father for that, for doing that to the both of you. We used to argue about it... Long, tired arguments that got nowhere... until finally I said the pain was too much that I couldn't stay."
"And that's when he erased the memories of us," Wayne concluded. "He sent you back out into the world. Did you even remember him?"
"He let me remember him, just enough to know we were married, and that it had ended. No little boys. No hidden house. No secret war. But it couldn't stop the dreams, the nightmares. And it all became so... so clear, seeing what's on the television now..." Nina rubbed at her eyes again and Wayne wondered if there were tissues in the room. Thankfully she pulled one out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes properly. "I'm sorry."
"No you don't have to be." he said softly. "Really you don't."
"But I left. I shouldn't have," Nina whispered. "I could have had such a different life to the one I have now."
"You made your choices. Father made his. It's nobody's fault things happened the way they did; they just happened. But you're here now, and... And when Megamind is better you can see him, too. I hope." He remembered Megamind's sour attitude towards the woman. Maybe having gone through a war and a battle with Dracula would soften him to the idea of seeing his Mother again?
"I hope so too but... I wouldn't blame him if he doesn't. To be honest, I never thought I'd get through the front gate," Nina said as she set her tissue back down her sleeve.
Wayne chuckled softly, finding the release of tension in his chest being like that of a fire being put out. Even if he still felt anxious about his brother; worried and concerned, and a little bit scared as to how the world at large would respond to what had happened today, sitting here with his... Mother for the first time since he was five years old was... nice.
He just prayed Megamind would make it through the operation to allow her back into his life.
~*~
"You should feel very proud."
The ethereal voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, and Megamind tightly shut his eyes. It felt as though he was standing under a spotlight, since the light pierced through even his shut eyelids.
"Huh?" he asked dumbly.
"What you pulled off today, that was very impressive."
"Oh yeah, that."
Megamind forced his eyes open and saw that he was standing in the middle of town again. The fountain was there, and when he approached it he looked down at his reflection in the shimmering water. He looked totally fine, there were no cuts, bruises, sword wounds, or bite marks on his person at all. Tilting his head slightly to the side, Megamind made a curious noise, turned around, and yelped at what he saw before leaping back... and into the fountain.
His Father stood there wearing a simple suit, his hands in his pockets.
"Careful there, son, you'll hurt yourself. Though... I don't think you even could if you tried in here."
The alien sat in the fountain still, staring at the man standing there before him.
"Shut your mouth, it looks like you're catching flies," Father instructed, and Megamind did just that. "That's better. Now get out of there before you catch a death."
Slowly, Megamind climbed out of the fountain, but didn't seem to notice how the water instantly dried against his leather clothes. "Father?" he asked.
"Hmm hm," nodded his Father.
"But you're dead," Megamind pointed out the obvious.
"I am," nodded the man again.
"Am I dead?" he asked, looking down at himself and gingerly touched his own stomach.
"I don't know, are you?"
"I don't know!" Megamind shot back, looking around him. "We're in town. Why are we in town?"
"Because it was the last place you were conscious. But that's just my guess," shrugged the white haired man before smiling, causing his moustache to bristle as he did. "But you did really well today, son. I'm proud of you. You vanquished one of the oldest and greatest threats to the world. And you used my sword; nice touch, that."
Megamind gave a small, embarrassed smile. "Well. I just did what you'd do."
"No, you did what you do. And you did it wonderfully. We're all very proud of you."
"We?" Megamind asked.
"Every person you've freed of the vampires curse. Every family member who has fought. Every person who has died because of these monsters. Trust me, Ethelwine, you've done brilliantly." Father smiled again. "You, Wayne, Minion, even those I never got to meet in my life have done well."
"This is really great, hearing all this but..." the blue alien looked around the abandoned city, as if realizing how eerily silent it all was. "If I'm dead, why didn't I get a flashback of my entire life? Or a guiding light? Isn't that how this normally works?"
"Well there is that, or maybe you're not dying at all," shrugged the man. "Besides, you've still got a lot to deal with back there in the land of the living."
"Really?" Megamind tilted his head slightly.
"Maybe it's not your time."
"Is it?" asked Megamind.
"You tell me," smiled Father.
"...you're being very vague, Father. Not much has changed in death at all."
"Can't keep a good man down," Father grinned now, and looked up at the blue sky. He shut his eyes as he sighed, "You simply can't."
Megamind turned his head up and saw the sun was shining brightly in the sky but... it felt wrong. The sun seemed closer than normal, and it was getting even closer. But instead of feeling a panic, or a burning feeling that one would expect with a rapidly expanding sun, he instead felt an odd sense of calm. He turned to look at his Father again but the man was gone, melted into the bright light that was now consuming everything around him.
Shutting his eyes, Megamind opened his arms out above his head as the light consumed him.
To be continued
