i want to hug the him T^T

one more chapterrrrr!

Chapter 16
Stolen Child - Loreena Mckennitt

The project goes better than Megamind was expecting. His fears do not manifest themselves as reality. He engineers a new form of photophilic algae to live between the panes of glass for the high-rise downtown, and for a couple of days, Roxanne's refrigerator is full of agar gels and petri dishes. She stays at Evil Lair some of those evenings, except for the hours she spends at her apartment, listening to Megamind talk animatedly about what he's doing now—or next—and why.

He has finally begun to relax somewhat in their relationship, finally started to lose some of the shocked oh-god-we're-gonna-crash air that he'd had in the beginning. And one night, when Roxanne wakes up from a restless dream of blood on blue skin, she staggers down the stairs from her loft for a glass of water and finds Megamind sitting cross-legged on her living room floor in his pajamas.

He has headphones on, curved around the back of his head instead of over the top of it, and he's bouncing absently to the music as he pipettes something into the little centrifuge that's taken up residence on Roxanne's coffee table.

He's humming.

Enchanted, Roxanne stops before he can realize she's there. Megamind is not good at humming at all—she can hear the song he's listening to from where she's standing; it's something by Led Zeppelin, she's pretty sure—his voice skips whole steps and sounds terribly out-of-tune and off-kilter. But he has soft chirrups and whirrs under some of the notes like a whispery bird, gentle little trills he doesn't seem to be aware of.

And then something changes. His voice goes low and hollow, crooning in his chest like—like a blues trombone, or something, what the hell—and okay now there's the melody he couldn't keep up with before. Roxanne's eyebrows shoot up under her hairline. Megamind is still whisper-trilling in his upper register, but the sound he's making in his throat sounds like nothing she's ever—

"Good lord," she blurts.

Megamind chirps sharply and spins, looking very spooked. Roxanne waves at him. "No no! I'm sorry, you don't have to stop! Sorry, the centrifuge, finish the thing—"

He makes another shocked noise and whips back around.

Roxanne hesitates, then crosses the floor to him instead of going to the kitchen. "What's up? Anything I can help with? I didn't know you were coming tonight."

His ears turn pink. "Neither did I. Sorry, I…couldn't sleep. Stressed."

"Aw." She brushes a kiss over his scalp as she passes on her way to perch on the edge of the sofa opposite him. "Stressed about what?"

He gives a sharp shrug. "Everything? Us, retirement. Minion is a nervous wreck already and I'm trying not to bother him. But. That means I come here and bother you, instead!" He wilts a little. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry!" She yawns, shaking her head. "God, no, don't be sorry. I'm always happy to see you."

Megamind twitches a small smile at her but it doesn't reach his eyes.

"Have you been over here a lot while I'm asleep?" she asks. And then, when he cringes and goes bright red and wide-eyed, she quickly adds, "Not because I'm upset! I just want you to come to bed, if you're here. You don't have to be se-secr-secret—" She yawns again, hard enough that she has to put her hand over her mouth, but then she sends him a smile. "Just, you can come crawl into bed with me anytime. Okay?"

He blinks. Settles back a little and tilts his head at her. "You would let me do that? Truly?"

"Of course! It's you, why wouldn't I?"

Megamind stares at her.

Roxanne smiles at him, leans down and touches his hand. "Finish your pipetting," she says, getting to her feet, "I need water. I'll be right back."

He nods, bends forward.

She shuffles into the kitchenette, smiling to herself. Megamind is such a sweetheart. He's been so concerned about boundaries and accidentally stepping on them, hyperaware of their previous relationship. He doesn't need to be nervous, of course; Roxanne will tell him if something is wrong. But he worries.

Still, she supposes she can understand his hesitation. Slipping uninvited into her bed is possibly a bit of a leap for someone who used to drug her against her will. That's reasonable.

Megamind is finished with his work when she comes back to the sofa and places a glass of water by his hand. He looks at it, looks at her as he curls his fingers around the sweating glass.

"I love you," he says.

Roxanne smiles. "And I love you," she returns. "Do you need to be doing this? Is it time-sensitive?"

He glances down at the petri dishes and test tubes. "No. They can go in the refrigerator for now."

She nods. "Cool. Let's put them away, then? Come to bed, love. It's late."

Megamind takes a sip of his water and sighs, nods. But he doesn't actually move.

Roxanne tilts her head. "You okay?"

He shakes his head.

She frowns. Hmmm…okay. What to do? She could come around the table and sit with him. Or…

She stands up. "Come on. Help me put the stuff where it goes."

And he does, of course. He gets to his feet and stacks the petri dishes as Roxanne gathers up the test tubes in their stand, and he follows her to the fridge and arranges everything on the shelves Roxanne cleared out for him a few days ago. He takes the test tubes and slips them into the door of her fridge.

Roxanne closes the refrigerator with a soft k-chunk and then turns to pull him close. "Sweetheart. What's wrong? Come here."

He groans and steps into the hug, drops his forehead to her shoulder. The metal at his temple is smooth against her skin. "I don't know," he mumbles. "I don't know what's wrong. I just feel terrible and my heart won't slow down and I keep thinking. It's all guns again."

She hums sympathetically. Megamind heaves an unhappy sigh. After a moment, Roxanne offers, "Make an algae gun? Shoot bioactive green goo at people."

"...What."

"Good for the environment," Roxanne says, grinning.

He snorts. "What?"

"Yeah! And you shoot it and it would go—pblap."

Megamind dissolves into tired giggles.

"Let's go to bed," Roxanne says, and leads him away.

"You did a bunch of work tonight without building a gun," she tells him later, trying to sound encouraging. "You're going to be okay."

"I know." He shoves his forehead against her bare stomach. "I know, I know. I do."

"It's okay to be scared."

"I'm not scared," he grumbles, muffled against her soft skin. Roxanne strokes his head, his shoulders.

"It's a very new thing you're doing," she tells him gently. "New is frightening. I would be scared."

Megamind makes a small, unhappy sound, and crawls a little further up her body before flopping down again.

After a pause, Roxanne yawns, and then says, "Well. No matter what you do when you come over…I want you to come snuggle afterwards. Okay?"

He nods. "Yes. I can do that. I will be happy to do that. Are you sure? Even without telling you?"

She snorts. "We're dating," she says. "Of course I'm sure."

"Still," he says, "I think this is maybe not a good thing to assume, dating or otherwise. But…all right. Thank you."

"I love you," Roxanne tells him.

He's quiet. She squeezes him and trails her fingertips down the scar that runs nearly the length of his spine, a ropy thing that must have been hell on wheels to heal.

"Hey, um," she ventures, after a moment, "do you…do you have any ideas about why weaponry is your go-to? I sort of assumed it was because of feeling unsafe, but…is there something else?"

Megamind sighs. "Why would you ask me that," he says, sounding very tired.

"I was just…thinking." She swallows, gently cups her hand over the swell of his skull and presses his head to her chest. Megamind burrows closer, curls tighter around her body and flops the blankets up over the two of them. "You said, when we got back to Evil Lair a few days ago, what if this is all I'm good for, and…I don't know. Something about that…I don't know. But maybe it's nothing!" she quickly adds. "Is it? Nothing?"

He sighs again. He's quiet for a while, but finally he says, "I doubt it. It took me a while to make the connection, but—no. I don't think it's a coincidence." He takes a deep breath. "And, thinking about it…I don't think it's a coincidence that I felt so incredibly trapped in that line of work for so long."

Roxanne swallows hard and glances at her alarm clock, which reads a quarter to four in the morning. She has to get up for work in a few hours, but—screw it, she decides. This has been weighing on Megamind terribly, and Roxanne has been worried since she started wondering about it. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Megamind makes a sort of disgruntled noise in his throat. "Not particularly. And it's stupid, probably. Almost certainly stupid; I knew it was bullshit when they said it! It should not have gotten to me the way it did. But."

"Please tell me," Roxanne says, startling herself. "I'm worried. 'They'? Who were 'they'?"

He hesitates, then lifts himself up on his elbows and nudges at her. "Roll over. I need to be on your other side and I need to be holding you. Please. Now."

Roxanne follows where he guides her, and Megamind curls close against her back with both arms wrapped around her, sort of the way he held her all those weeks ago at her sister's house when he staggered inside out of the rain.

"Holding me?" she asks as he settles. "Not me holding you?"

"No. Door behind me, nothing grabbing me."

Oh. That doesn't bode well. Then again, anything that can drive a supergenius of Megamind's caliber to villainy and keep him there has to be pretty bad.

"Can I…?" She slides her lower hand up to thread her fingers into the spaces between his where he has his arm hugged up around her side. "Is that okay?"

"I think so." He exhales through his nose, his cool breath ghosting over her bare shoulder. "I should let you sleep," he says, instead of elaborating. "It's late."

"That's what Minion's wake-'em-up juice is for," Roxanne tells him flatly. Minion's wake-'em-up juice is an absurdly strong white tea sweetened with honey and milk until the sleepy drinker can get the bitter concoction down. "I've been worrying about this, I really just…please tell me."

He breathes for a moment.

"I was a child," he finally says, "when they came for me. They came in black suits and white coats," and he doesn't have to elaborate on that for Roxanne to know exactly what it means, "and they. Took me away. And they—studied. Me. My genetics, my psychology, my physiology. And it—it was—they allowed me, while I was there," he says, taking a deep breath, "to overhear certain conversations. They wanted me to think that if I—did—what they wanted—that it would be better. They thought, they thought if they didn't tell me directly, they might have a better chance of convincing me."

Roxanne frowns. She's pretty good at reading between lines, but there are entirely too many possibilities in there for her to sort through. "I don't think I understand."

Megamind clears his throat, and when he speaks again, it's in another man's voice. But the sound of it is vague and sort of faraway—close by, but hollow. "Let it think it's manipulating us," he says. "Let it think it has leverage. It's smart, too smart. Engaging directly will only tip our hand."

Roxanne frowns harder. Behind her, Megamind swallows. "They didn't know I could hear them, for that part," he says dryly, in his own voice again. "Idiots. Anyway, they said they wanted to learn from me. What they truly wanted was for me to design weapons for them."

Ice rinses down her spine and runs her blood cold. A world in which the US military is armed with Megamind's technology is not a world she wants to imagine. "Jesus," she whispers.

"Indeed." He takes a breath and switches his voice back again. "Well it isn't cooperating with us in the slightest and frankly I'm sick of dealing with it," he says, in an extremely exasperated tone. "It's a drain on the budget and a waste of my fucking time; sign the kid over to xenomorphology and be done with it. See what they make of it; maybe they'll find something useful."

She bites her lip hard for a moment. "And…xenomorphology…I can guess what that is, but god. I'm guessing that was the whole 'biological study' fear you've got?"

He nods against her shoulder. "Yes. They sucked. To be fair—let's be fair—I do not think they intended to hurt me very badly. It was study, you understand, not torture. But when you put a shunt in someone's skull to keep them complacent, you have to know it's going to cause some kind of pain."

Roxanne blinks, heart twisting in her chest, stomach roiling. "A shunt," she echoes. "I don't—"

"It's a tube," he says. "Well, a valve, in my case. Placed through a hole in the skull to drain cerebrospinal fluid into another part of the body where it can be reabsorbed. It's an entirely reasonable procedure, intended to relieve pressure on the brain in cases of excess fluid or swelling."

"Intracranial pressure," Roxanne says, remembering a term she heard somewhere, and feels him nod again.

"Yes. Unfortunately, I did not have an excess of fluid or swelling. In my case it created a pressure imbalance rather than relieving one."

Roxanne bites her lip, squeezes his hand. His fingers tighten between hers ever so slightly.

"They intended it to keep me foggy," he says, "to keep me from thinking of more ways to escape. It worked, but. It gave me the worst headaches. Full-body migraines on days they took fluid. I was foggy because thinking of anything except how badly everything hurt was…difficult."

Oh god, she wants to say, but her voice won't seem to work.

"Here," Megamind says, taking her hand and guiding it up and back, pressing her fingertips to the base of his skull behind his ear. There's a slight depression there, only about the diameter of a pencil eraser. "Feel that? Just there. Feel it?"

She swallows, forces words. "That's where it was?"

"That's where it was," he confirms. "It never did heal properly."

He lets go of her hand and wraps his arm back down around her, shoves his face against her back. "Anyway," he says, voice muffled, "there was…more, of course, but it was a long time ago. I would prefer not to talk about the rest of it. The point is, I think that might be…" He sighs, swallows. "I think it might have gotten to me. The weapons thing."

"Oh love," Roxanne says, heartsick and hurting for him, "oh, my love. God. I'm so sorry."

His arms around her tighten almost imperceptibly. "I used to think," he says, "that I had moved on. Processed it. Put it behind me."

"But really you just tried not to think about it?"

He makes a sound of assent. And then, to her surprise, he says, "And then I—met—Derya. She's so small. She's just a kid. A baby. And I—if she ever—if anyone ever—did to her what they did to me—I would rip this world in half."

"I would help you," Roxanne says, fervent. "God, Megamind, I am so sorry. I'm so sorry that happened to you, sweetheart, but...yes, that does sound like it would do a number on a kid's psyche. Knowing that's what they wanted from you…I can't imagine."

He hums. Then he says, sounding hopeful, "Now that we know that's probably why, do I still need therapy? I don't need therapy now, right?"

"That's not how it works, I'm afraid," Roxanne tells him, still trying to get her head around this and wishing she could hold him. "You definitely do need to see a professional about it."

He huffs a breath against her shoulder. "Balls," he says flatly, and Roxanne splutters a startled laugh.

"I know, I know you aren't happy about it," she says, stroking his arm, "but—my love, oh my love—that's—way beyond my pay grade. And just knowing what caused your trauma isn't enough to make it go away, I'm sorry."

From the way he heaves yet another sigh, she's pretty sure he already guessed that.

"Well," he says, "thank you for listening, at least. I…apologize for dropping this on you at four in the morning."

"I'm glad you did!" She shoves herself backwards against his thin chest. "I'm glad you did, I…sort of was afraid it might be something like that, when you said the frog thing. I'm so glad you told me. Thank you for telling me."

He turns his head and rests his cheek against the curve of her shoulder, just the same way he did that first night on Rose and Salim's futon. "Tell me again," he says softly. "Please?"

"I love you," Roxanne says. "Megamind, I love you so much. I'm going to be here, I'm going to be right here beside you, okay? No matter what. For the rest of your life. I'll be right here."

He hugs her. She wishes to god she could hug him back, but she knows why she can't. It's awful. "And," Megamind says, still quiet, "that's going to be a long time?"

"Please can I roll over and hug you," she blurts. She feels him startle. "Please? It's okay if you can't, I just—Megamind—"

"You can hug me," he says, after a surprised second or so. "Yes, I think, I think it should be okay now. Yes please."

Immediately, she squirms around in his arms and shrugs him up onto her pillow so she can hug him tighter than tightly for a second before settling back and pushing her forehead against his, their noses brushing.

"Yes," she whispers, firm. "Yes, it's going to be such a long time. Such a long time, Megamind. You're going to watch Derya grow up, you hear me? You're going to drive her to school and teach her how to scare off all her bullies. How to throw a punch, how to shoot a ray gun, how to play poker and shoot pool. All of that."

"What makes you think I know how to play pool," he says, sounding amused and somewhat startled now.

"You're almost forty and you're an alien supergenius from the wrong side of the tracks; do you not know how to play pool?"

He snorts. "No, I do," he says, "of course I do. I just didn't realize you were aware of that."

"I was guessing," she says. "I'm very good at what I do."

She's beginning to calm down from her earlier unhappy state, now that she has her arm over his slender body and can feel his soft breath brushing over her lips. "I love you," she tells him again. "Megamind, I was never expecting to love you as much as I do, but I love you more than air."

He hums and turns his head to the side a little, fits the gentle sweep of his temple to the curve of her forehead, and curls his fingers against her back.

After a moment, he murmurs, "I love you, too. Sleep, Roxanne. You need it."

She sighs, huffing her own very warm breath over his throat and shoulders, and holds him close and safe as she closes her eyes.