Chapter 4

"Figure something out," she groans, a week after stumbling into her apartment and spitting out four of the lobed petals almost at the same time. "Famous last fucking words."

Megamind's machine needed some attention prior to today's plan. It was an easy enough fix, although he had to remove two panels and climb into the thing to reach the problem. And he had to take off his shoulder array to do that. Roxanne can count the number of times she's seen Megamind bare-shouldered on the fingers of one hand and have fingers left over.

He took off his shoulder array without disassembling it and put it on his chair, and then he took off his gloves, too, and stretched his arms over his head as he walked towards his machine. Roxanne couldn't see details—his leathers aren't tight enough for that—but she could still see how the lean muscles shifted in his back as he moved. The easy slope of his shoulders when he dropped his arms. Megamind has always borne himself with such upright confidence, a matador's grace; it's ridiculous. Seeing his hands bare and without his cape and high collar was just unreal.

And then he curled himself down small and eased himself into the tangle of wires and hoses, half-singing, "Where are you? Where are you? Oh my sleepy horrible cyborg baby, where are you hiding?"

"Ohhh," said Minion, in the tone of someone who has just realized the issue. "Oh. Oops."

"Oops?" Roxanne echoed, questioning.

"Sir was training a few of the younger bots while we were assembling this," Minion explained. "They go dormant a lot when they're young; it's how they store memories and compare their experiences with the rest of the host. It sounds like one of them may have fallen asleep inside the—"

He was interrupted by a delighted gasp and an exclaimed, "There you are! You silly thing! Are you stuck? Yes, yes, okay—ow! no biting!—aaaand—there we go. Oh, you're very baby, aren't you? Aren't you so baby? Okay."

There was a clunk, a scuffling sort of yelp, and then a blue hand flailing between a couple of black hoses for a moment before Megamind fell out of his machine backwards onto his ass with a grunt, hugging a brainbot against his chest. It had no fins or spikes that Roxanne could see—do they get those when they get older? She had assumed Megamind put them on, but—

"Here we are!" Megamind said, sounding very fondly vexed. "Little troublemaker. Minion, make a note, I need to run diagnostics on K217-6 later; it's been falling asleep more frequently than its crechemates. And in unsafe locations. We're lucky we caught it this time."

The brainbot sort of nuzzled his chest and then drifted away; it did look sort of loopy compared to the other bots Roxanne has seen.

"Name it Sleepy," she offered, forcing words so she wouldn't dwell on the lilting note in Megamind's voice when he had been addressing the young brainbot, the blue of his hands, the length of his throat with his mantle and high collar missing.

"Hmmm," he said as he got to his feet and trotted back to his chair to put his various spikes back on, "I was thinking Trouble. Troublemeister, Trouble…matic? No…"

Roxanne thought for a moment, then grinned. "Insomnia."

Megamind looked at her in apparent surprise, and then his eyes went wide and he actually bark-laughed. "Oh! Yes! Because it's Trouble Sleeping! You're—that is brilliant, I love it, we're doing it. Minion—"

"Already making another note, Sir."

"And you sound so enthusiastic about it," he said, arching a brow at his friend as he plucked at his gloves to settle them more comfortably around his long fingers.

"Is he a minion or is he a secretary?" Roxanne quipped before Minion could snap at him. She knows the signs. She still isn't sure what the little fish was so upset about today, but she is very sure that if Megamind and Minion had started arguing, she would have been in the chair for at least another forty-five minutes. "It's not like you can forget anything."

Megamind scowled at her and clicked the clasp of his mantle shut, flicked the long edges of his high collar. "Oh ho ho, look who is so smart," he said. "It is the principle of the thing, Miss Ritchi, as you well know."

She rolled her eyes at him and very politely refrained from commenting on the fact that it was the absolute height of silly to insist on maintaining his villain act around someone who has just heard him coo you're very baby at one of his cyborgs.

And now she's sitting on her bathroom floor with her head in her hands, trying to breathe steadily and hopefully not trigger another Hanahaki attack.

Figure something out. Yeah, that happened. All she's figured out is that these feelings aren't going away unless she can somehow convince Megamind to stop kidnapping her! And the thought of that, of not seeing him again…it makes her chest hurt worse than the petals. Her previous experiences with Hanahaki have been mostly just tiresome, regrettable things. She coughed up a few petals, thought I do not need this right now, and got over it. Her main reaction to them was irritation, not fucking pining! Roxanne does not pine! Roxanne rolls up her sleeves, keeps her head high, and gets on with her life!

But then, she wanted to get over the others as quickly as possible. She's realizing she does not actually want to get over Megamind.

Also, convincing him to stop kidnapping her would be…difficult. Prohibitively so, honestly. Roxanne has given it some thought and come up with two ways to make it happen, neither of which she likes. The first is the obvious one: she could tell him her feelings and demand that he leave her alone to deal with them. That feels too revealing, too weird to actually consider. She doesn't know how he would react, but the possibility that he might react with scorn makes her stomach feel queasy.

The second option would be to hurt him. She's done that a couple of times in the past just by accident, and she already knows more of Megamind's weak spots than he probably realizes. He's become less prickly with her over the couple of years he's been kidnapping her, and now he's friendly with her more often than not. Friendly in a way he doesn't seem to be with many other people. If Roxanne can use what she's learned of him and ruin that, say something really terrible and scathing…

But Roxanne doesn't want to ruin that. That is something precious and dear and Roxanne wants to keep it. Preserve it. Hold it close to her heart for as long as Megamind will let her.

She sighs and drops her forehead to her knees, coughing. Because that's the whole problem, isn't it? This whole thing is dear to her and she wants to keep it. Wants to keep him. Keep him, and Minion, and the brainbots, and the giant spider-bot that scared her so badly when it scrambled onto the battledeck one day looking for pats.

"Okay," she mumbles. "This is fine."


But what is she supposed to do? She knows what she doesn't want, so…what does she want? What can she do? Some people live with their Hanahaki for years. The rest of their lives, sometimes. They take it and take it and take it. Roxanne has never understood that until now, and it scares her. The realization that she will cough as long as she needs to if she can keep this in her life. That is scary.

"Love is very beautiful," the saying goes. "So what if it brings a little bit of pain with it?"

Yeah. So what? But it's scary. Is all.

And Hanahaki fucking hurts.

Roxanne keeps her petals in jars of water with glitter that she can shake and find peace in the way the sparkles settle. She's careful not to leave evidence of her Hanahaki anywhere in her apartment where Minion or Megamind might find it, but her bedroom is safe. She lines her jars up on her windowsill and drips food coloring into the water, smiles at the rainbow they cast on her mint-green bedspread when the sun is coming up.

She thinks of Megamind and buys Hanahaki expectorant, suppression pills and lozenges for work, numbing gel for her throat. She thinks of Megamind and arranges his petals in water and glitter and makes the best of it that she can.

She thinks of Megamind and takes a few of the petals to a metabotanical professor specializing in Hanahaki flowers at Lake Superior State University. That should be far enough away, she thinks. Megamind is a supervillain, but he's fiercely territorial and keeps his visible activity local. And KMCP isn't national. Probably nobody will recognize her here.

"Thanks for seeing me. Can you tell me what these are?" she asks, taking a petal from the jar she brought with her and holding it out. "I'll probably find out eventually, but I'm curious to know what kind of flower I'm in for."

Professor Raber takes the petal from her slowly, and his brow furrows as he carefully touches the holly-spikes at the ends of the five lobes.

"Hm," he says, and takes it over to the stereo microscope crouching between the piles of books and papers on his credenza. He adjusts the petal a couple times under the light as he examines it, then says, "Hm" again.

A moment later, he asks, "You have more of these?" Roxanne holds up the jar—empty of water, full of petals—and he nods and straightens, frowning. "Good. I won't worry about this one, then."

He rips the petal in half as he walks to pull another microscope down from the shelf behind his desk (the books fall sideways with a puff of dust) and plug it in on top of a stack of ungraded papers. A slide appears from a drawer and he preps it with a bit of torn petal and a drop of water from the glass on his desk. "Not the most professional approach," he says as he sits, a note of apology in his voice, "but it'll do. Now, let me see…"

He trails off, adjusting the focus. Roxanne bites her lips together and waits, looking out the row of windows in the clockbroken silence and feeling unaccountably nervous.

Outside, it's a nice day. The leaves are falling in drifts across the quad, it's sunny and not too cold yet. Students are walking to class, chatting and laughing. Roxanne smiles a little, remembering her own days at university before her life got messy.

"Now that's odd," Professor Raber mumbles, and she glances back at him in time to see him spin the magnification to maximum. "I wonder if…"

He stands up from his desk. His frown hasn't lifted; if anything, he looks even more perplexed. "Wait here, try not to move anything," he says firmly, "I'll be right back."

"Okay," says Roxanne, amused at his phrasing—'try not to move anything,' not 'don't touch'—and bends to look at a sheaf of papers held together with binder clips as his hurried footsteps fade away down the hall. The role of petal cell shape and pigmentation in pollination success in Antirrhinum majus, it's called. It's an academic paper and it assumes a level of familiarity with the topic that Roxanne doesn't possess, but that's okay. She's able to piece together enough information to grasp the general idea as she pages through it. Perceived color? The deep color of a petal might not be due to pigmentation, but the structure of its outermost layers of cells?

Huh.

I wonder if that has anything to do with why some Hanahaki flowers are deeper-hued than those found in nature, she thinks, and thumbs through the rest of the paper to see if that might be mentioned anywhere. It isn't.

But one of the books on the shelf behind Professor Raber's desk looks promising: Pollinators and Metabotanicals: Theories on Hanahaki Husbandry. Roxanne pages through it, frowning.

"...works, then what you're proposing is an inverted carpal array," says a woman's voice, approaching, and Roxanne looks up, "on something like a lily or a—oh. Hello."

Roxanne waves and slides the book back into the space where she found it. "A lily?" she asks.

"Well, no," Professor Raber says, and clears his throat, gestures at the woman with the blonde ponytail and terse expression he followed back into his office. "This is Dr. Elarin, she specializes in aquatic plants. If you could show her one of your…okay, now what do you make of that?"

Elarin takes the petal from Roxanne and peers at it, brow furrowing. After a moment, she takes it over to the same stereo microscope her colleague did.

Roxanne glances over at him and raises an eyebrow. He returns a sort of distracted-looking smile but doesn't say anything.

"You may be right," Dr. Elarin says, after a long minute or so. "I…huh. Give me that slide."

She peers into the other microscope for a few seconds, absentmindedly rubbing the other petal between her fingertips, then turns and squints up at Professor Raber. "This doesn't make any sense at all."

Roxanne clears her throat. "Thoughts?"

Raber opens his mouth, but it's Elarin who says, "The structure of this thing does not follow any growth pattern either of us is familiar with. It—"

"You see how its curve inverts close to where the sepals would attach," Raber says, and Dr. Elarin's lips thin. "It's difficult to say anything for sure without a bud or whole blossom, but…well, I was thinking it could be some kind of lily based on the spine of it, but the way the petal is built would almost have to indicate a pistil structure pointing downwards. So then I thought some kind of air plant or hanging vine until I got it under the microscope—"

"I'll have to get closer and check out its biochemistry," Elarin says, "but it has a stratum corneum and its cell walls are seaweed-like. Almost like a seagrass. In the horn layer of the petal." She says this as though it should hold some significance, but Roxanne only frowns and tilts her head, gestures for her to continue. Elarin nods. "Seagrasses are the only flowering marine plants that we know of," she tells her. "But your flower, whatever it is, should exhibit a similar tolerance for salinity. It's a halophyte of some kind, almost certainly, but with its pollination structure on the ventral side."

"So…you're saying…"

"We're saying whatever flower that belongs to is some kind of flowering marine plant," Raber says, polishing his glasses on the hem of his sweater, "and it'll have real pollinators. So—"

"Seagrass has real pollinators," Elarin states, flat. "And—"

He makes a disgruntled sound. "Pollinators that aren't piddlingly tiny arthropods," he amends, and turns his attention back to Roxanne and opens his mouth.

"—and I'll thank you not to speak on my area of study," Elarin snaps. She turns to fully face Roxanne, putting her shoulder to Professor Raber to shut him away from their conversation. "Again, without a whole specimen, all bets are off. And Hanahaki flowers are weird by any measure. But this is most likely a saltwater plant that was at one point terrestrial before re-evolving for life at sea. The petal shape indicates a possible waterlily-like structure to stay afloat, and then the layer structure is what indicates a tolerance for salinity, partly due to that shiny, waxy coating it has."

"I'm confused," Roxanne says, waving for her to stop. "I just want to make sure I've got this right. You're describing a waterlily? But upside-down?"

"A saltwater lily, yes," Elarin says. "A saltwater lily, a floating saltwater flower with its reproductive structures fully submerged. That is not something I have ever seen. Not in academia, not in the fossil record, not in any indigenous oral histories I'm familiar with. Nowhere."

Roxanne swallows and looks back down at her petals, turning her jar over and over in her hands. She can already tell where this is going.

"...Now, I don't want to assume," Raber begins, when the silence drags out and Roxanne doesn't speak, "but I will say that people in love with...ah, with metahumans and other...powered individuals do sometimes cough up unusual flowers. Hybrids, endangered species. Extinct ones, occasionally. I've even seen one specimen that last bloomed in the wild during the late Jurassic or early Cretaceous. But this is new to me as well.."

Roxanne takes a careful breath and gathers herself. "Could it be extraterrestrial?"

Dr. Elarin's head snaps up, but her colleague just raises his eyebrows and says, "Possibly. Is your pseudamour not from Earth?"

She nods.

"In that case, I would say it's very likely. Now—"

"I would very much like to have the rest of those petals," Dr. Elarin says, eyes huge.

Roxanne shakes her head, trying to think about the request but mostly trying to get her head around the confirmation that she is almost definitely coughing up alien plant life. She already kind of suspected, but...hearing the differences, hearing how overtly, obviously bizarre this otherwise innocuous-looking petal is...

Dr. Elarin throws her hands into the air and Roxanne jumps. Apparently she took too long to respond.

"A close enough look at intercellular signaling mechanisms in extraterrestrial marine plant life could completely revolutionize our understanding of growth signaling in flowering plants on Earth!" the marine plant expert exclaims. "And the—maintaining osmotic pressure in a haline environment, the permeability—of an alien species—or even, even just the structure of the cell walls! Are they glycoproteins, polysaccharides—they could be a-a-a peptidoglycan, even! A biogenic silica of some kind! Or something else, something we've never seen! Even just the conceptual implications are—you don't even—the plant those petals belong to is completely divorced from every evolutionary chain on this planet, but convergent evolution SOMEHOW managed to produce something that the botanoamadic field on Earth recognized as a flower for Hanahaki purposes in humans, do you have any idea what that MEANS?"

"No," says Roxanne, honestly.

"Neither do I! But I want to! May I have the petals please!"

The jar is warm in Roxanne's hands as she unconsciously grips it just a little bit tighter. Dr. Elarin is nearly vibrating with fervor. And she's been very short throughout their conversation so far, completely unsmiling and impatient, brusque and almost annoyed. She hasn't given Roxanne much reason to trust her, not even just basic pleasantries.

"...I don't know how much of your research budget comes from federal grants," Roxanne says. "I don't want any hands on them I don't know about. So—"

"I'll do my research at home! I'll use all my own equipment, my own computers—I have my own lab, even my own server, I'll store everything on-site, no 'cloud' bullshit—"

Roxanne squints at her, momentarily sidetracked. "Why do you have that much lab equipment in your home?"

Elarin freezes, staring, her face stuck in a kind of urgently hesitant grimace, her hands stiff and trembling as she grapples with something.

"Yes, tell us, Mira," Professor Raber says, in an amused I-know-what-the-answer-is tone Roxanne usually only hears from Minion. Mira Elarin's gaze snaps to him. "Why DO you have that much lab equipment in your home?"

Roxanne has just enough time to wonder what she's just stumbled into, and then Mira wraps her fingers in her ponytail and yanks. Roxanne's eyebrows fly up as what turns out to have been a very high-quality lace front wig hits the floor and reveals short, dark green hair underneath, as well as a line of blue-green skin that disappears under the woman's thick foundation.

"Oh!" Roxanne relaxes. "Admiral Algae. You could have just said; the demonstration wasn't necessary."

"May I PLEASE have the petals," Mira snaps.

"Sure, here."

The villain known as Admiral Algae controls the coast of Michigan on the Huron side from just south of Cheboygan down to Thunder Bay, and Roxanne is pretty sure she's angling for a 'super' designation within the next couple of years if she can claim the rest of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. More importantly, she has similar antiestablishment views to Megamind's, and although the two villains have never actually spoken, Megamind has mentioned her more than once in a positive light. And she's the first human Roxanne has met who could match Megamind's occasionally alarming level of intensity.

Mira seizes the jar from Roxanne and holds it up in front of her face, peering into it as she tilts it from side to side. "Fabulous. Bring me more of these and we'll do lunch."

"We can skip the lunch."

"Even better," says Mira Elarin, and jams her wig back down over her mossy hair and leaves without saying anything else.

Roxanne exhales.

Well.

That was. Something. She breathes for a moment, trying to hold herself steady as the world settles back down around her in the sudden quiet and praying she doesn't have a Hanahaki attack right now.

Okay. She's okay. She's coughing up alien petals but that's. That's fine.

"Huh," Professor Raber says, oblivious to how very alone Roxanne suddenly feels. "I wasn't expecting her to actually show her hand. Interesting." He pauses, then shrugs. "Well. Not my business. Regardless, I wouldn't worry about contamination or invasive ecology, or anything like that. Hanahaki—"

"The flowers don't reproduce," Roxanne murmurs. "I know."

He fumbles a little. "Ah? Good. Yes. These, ah…" He taps the thorned end of the half-petal he's still holding. "These do come up the other direction, yes? Ah, good. That's something, at least."

Roxanne sighs and forces a smile. "Thank you for your help," she says, shrugging her jacket on over her sweater and moving her purse to her shoulder. "I appreciate it."

"Of course. Consider sending me one of the full blooms, if you reach that stage," he adds. He sends her a thin, mildly apologetic smile as he shakes her hand. "It's self-serving, of course, but I am intrigued to see what they look like."

"Me, too," Roxanne says, and turns toward the door. "Me, too."


She's digging in her purse for her keys as she steps out of the building and walks slowly toward the stairs down to the quad, so she isn't paying attention to who's entering and leaving. Or who's holding still. Her hand is on the brass railing in the center of the stairs when she hears her name.

"You're Roxanne Ritchi."

She freezes. Mira Elarin is sitting on the top step next to the outer railing of the building with her wig back in place and her identity once again hidden. After a moment, she leans forward and puts her elbows on her knees, holds the jar of alien flower petals up in the fingers of one hand. Tips it back and forth and looks over at Roxanne. "These are Megamind's."

Roxanne swallows. Breathes. "They are."

Slowly, Mira nods. "So," she says, "you know my secret identity. And I know the identity of your pseudamour."

Oh, that's what she's doing. Well, Roxanne can't really blame her. "I don't think either of us has anything to fear from the other."

Mira leans back and wrinkles her face at her in thoughtful confusion, squinting a little against the bright sky. "You don't want him to know." When Roxanne shakes her head, she frowns. "Why not? Cagey Hanahaki games don't cut the mustard. He's let you get to know him well enough to cough up dark petals; I don't think you'd have to worry."

Roxanne huffs a terse laugh and looks down. "Yeah. I...you might be right. But. I'd like things to develop naturally, if possible, and he...seems happy with the way things are."

"Are you happy? Or are you scared?"

She forces her flash of anger down, forces a half-smile. "Yeah, actually. I am happy, for the most part. Also, Megamind doesn't date. Really ever. So."

"Ah." Mira purses her lips and turns to stare away across the quad. "Yes. I...had heard that, yes."

"Oh! Dr. Elarin! Hey!" A student comes jogging up, rummaging in his bag. "Hey, real quick—I had a question about the assignment from Monday—"

"Office hours," Mira says, flat.

"It'll take thirty seconds. I just—"

"Did you check the portal?"

"No, but—"

Her voice hardens. "Check the portal, and if you can't find the answer there, come see me during my office hours."

"But I just—"

"Office. Hours."

The student pulls a face and starts to turn away. "Yeah, fine, whatev—"

He breaks off suddenly, doubling over with a horrible barking sound that Roxanne recognizes instantly from personal experience. She winces.

"Oh, for the love of zostera," Mira sighs, and shoves herself up. She pulls a packet of expectorant and a single-use inhaler from her bag and preps the little device as she walks down the steps, saying, "Here. One hand on the railing, Paul, other hand out—" She pushes the inhaler into his hand and then steps back. "And two big breaths, ready. One." He wheezes. "Two. Aaaand out, big push." Another shuddering inhale, and finally a long, rough cough that ends in...some kind of daisy bud, Roxanne thinks.

"There we go," Mira says, in the same unsmiling, brusque tone she's used all afternoon. "Better? Good. Office hours. Go away."

Paul stumbles back down the steps, waving a weak thumbs-up and still kind of coughing as he gets his breath back. Mira scowls and comes back up the steps, shaking her head and muttering about broke kids and student loans.

Roxanne looks at her. "That was nice of you." Then she grins a little. "But I don't think I would have gotten along with you as a professor. You could have just answered his question."

Mira looks her up and down, and then her lip curls and she sort of snorts. "You're a workaholic with zero life outside of your career, aren't you."

Too startled even to be offended yet, Roxanne pulls her head back and blinks at her. Where did that come from?

"Look. Academia will eat your whole life if you don't set boundaries on it. And I kind of have a lot going on in my free time, as you are uniquely aware, so, yeah. Either respect my time or get bitched at." She shrugs. "Speaking of which," she continues, "thanks for the petals, very excited about these, good luck with your...whole...Hanahaki mistake. I'd say don't be a stranger, but—"

"—But you're busy, you don't know me, and you have zero patience for people who don't react to their feelings to your particular satisfaction," Roxanne finishes sweetly. "I get it." Look, I can read people at a glance too, ooooo. You aren't special, you're just rude. She starts to walk away down the steps, starts to redirect her attention to what she learned before this...whatever this was.

But apparently Mira isn't done. "Antagonizing a known villain? I really figured you were smarter than that. You are scared, aren't you."

Okay, you know what? No. Fuck this. Roxanne is tired, she has a long drive ahead of her, she was not reassured by any of what she learned today, and she has a lot of research to do when she gets home. And she was done with this conversation before it even started; this whole exchange was a waste of her time. She and Mira were already on the same page about each other's leverage and this entire thing was unnecessary.

So she turns. Rolls her shoulders back and lifts her chin, straightens her spine, glare-smiles. "Oh, sweetheart, you already clocked me as career-driven." She widens her smile vertically—more of a baring of teeth than smiling; it's meant to be derisive and Roxanne is very good at it—and Mira blinks and pulls back slightly. "I built that career on antagonizing a supervillain. Come back when you've got the title and maybe you'll get more respect from me. In the meantime," she narrows her eyes, "I'm going home, and I'm going to live my life the way that makes me happy."

There's a pause.

"I don't like you," Mira decides.

"Feeling's mutual," Roxanne replies. She spins on her heel and sets off down the stairs, waving over her shoulder without looking back, wiggling her fingers. "Thanks for your help, enjoy the xenobotany! Let's not do this again!"

"Yeah, bye! Hope you choke!"

Roxanne rolls her eyes as she stalks away across the quad, scattering leaves around her ankles. She heads straight for the lot where she's parked, ignoring the paved paths and cutting across the cool grass.

Well. She got what she came for, at least, even if none of it was actually helpful: information on Megamind's flowers. That's one question answered. About fifty more just popped up in its place, but that's fine. It's fine.

Hanahaki mistake. She growls under her breath. What an asshole. Roxanne knows what she's doing; she is not going to rock this boat until she has more to go on. Nobody who dedicated their life to the study of pond slimes has any right to judge her situation. She'll stay the course. Megamind is happy with the way things are, and Roxanne is, too. She has her expectorant, her lozenges. She'll get through this; it's manageable.

She slams the car door a little harder than necessary, blinking back angry tears.

She's not scared. She's not. She can get her head around all this just fine if she tries; she knows herself and what she wants. Hanahaki isn't scary. Roxanne isn't scared. Maybe she was, a little, but—she's not anymore.

She's not. She's fine.