Chapter 10
Roxanne has been buying vases. Tall, clear glass vases are surprisingly cheap when you buy them in bulk, which she does, and she fills them with water and arranges them around her room and floats her flowers in them. She does end up needing to use the expectorant Mira sent her; the flowers do not get any easier to expel even after Roxanne learns what to expect. Their long, curling stamens stay coiled in the buds, she thinks, which doesn't make them any more difficult, but it also doesn't help. The mature buds are a little more full, and Roxanne has to bend nearly double and tip her head back like a sword swallower to get them into her mouth. And then they spring open almost immediately and she has to pull them out with her fingers before the stamens pop free.
But they really are beautiful flowers. In the course of her research, Roxanne discovers that blue pigment is exceptionally rare on Earth. Blue birds—jays, thrushes, finches—are not pigmented blue but are in fact gray, with microscopic patterns in the physical structures of their feathers that disperse all wavelengths of light except blue. Blue butterflies do something similar with the scales of their wings. The only known animal on Earth known to produce a truly blue pigment is the obrina olivewing butterfly, and its wings aren't even particularly blue to look at.
She does finally text Mira after she learns this. Her curiosity is killing her. And the response surprises her: the botanist doesn't know. Pigments are apparently quite complicated. The petals do contain a number of unknown molecules, some of which could be cyan biochromes, but it's going to be a while before Mira knows anything for sure.
You'd have better luck nutting up and asking your alien, she texts. Pigments are more of a physical chemistry question than botany. I can identify known compounds and similar, but figuring out the exact biological purposes of alien ones is a new frontier. It's possible. Are you sending me a bud or what?
Roxanne rolls her eyes. She should have sent Mira that flower she spat into the toilet. How do I preserve these for him? she sends. I don't want them to just decay before he can take a look. Can I freeze them?
A long, long silence after that question. But later that night—after she coughs up another flower in full bloom as well as a half-bloomed bud—her phone buzzes.
Liquid nitrogen. I will send something for you to keep them stable if you SEND. ME. A. BUD.
That's surprising. Curled up on her couch under her knitted afghan, Roxanne frowns at her phone. Something to keep the flowers stable? Long-term? That's way above and beyond anything she would have expected. There's gotta be a catch. Is this thing going to freeze my hands off?
if you're REALLY stupid (:
Roxanne snorts. There it is, sarcastic backwards smiley and all. But...okay. She's handled all kinds of potentially explosive gadgets with Megamind before; she can handle some cold storage, no problem. Deal, will send a flower too.
Primo. then I will include an emergency shutoff switch.
She flops back onto her sofa with a phlumph and heaves a sigh, then bites off a curse when her uneven breathing pulls yet another Hanahaki attack behind it. Fuck fuck fuck this is not ANYTHING like what she wants the rest of her life to look like! Yanking alien flowers out of her mouth! Ugh! And it hurts; without the expectorant from Admiral Algae, she'd probably be bleeding. She's building a tolerance to suppressants; she's already on the maximum-strength lozenges. The expensive ones. Her only remaining option is to try and go prescription, but the last thing Roxanne wants to do is involve doctors. Megamind famously spurns hospitals and doctors of all stripes; Roxanne is leery of bringing them in on this just in case.
Which means more people are going to find out soon. More than just Jessee at work and Wayne. Roxanne trusts Wayne not to run his mouth about this, and Jessee...Roxanne is too tired to worry about Jessee. But the other woman also has Hanahaki, so it's unlikely she'll betray Roxanne. Besides, betray her to whom? Without knowing who her pseudamour is, there's nothing to be gained from telling anyone.
Roxanne stumbles up to her bedroom, still coughing, dizzy and mentally cursing the sharp squeezing feeling in her chest that comes with the flowers. She grabs a new vase from its box and rinses it under her shower, coughing the whole time, until finally she's able to reach into her mouth and grab the end of the bud.
There's another flower on the heels of this one. Dammit, okay. Another vase.
Roxanne is half-blinded with tears at this point, so she isn't really paying attention when she drops the first flower into its vase and goes staggering out to get a second one. She isn't really thinking about the first flower at all as she works to get the second one out. The second comes more quickly than the first, thankfully; Roxanne gets back to the bathroom and sits down hard on the edge of her tub, already wheezing on the inhaler full of Mira's concoction. (The greenish slime doesn't taste good; it tastes sort of like bleu cheese, but it gets the job done better than anything else Roxanne has found, even if the taste does linger in her mouth and nose for hours afterwards.) It's only when she's halfway through filling the second vase, perched on her bathtub with the second flower in hand and the first flower floating in its vase on the floor, that Roxanne finally blinks the tears from her eyes and looks blearily down at the flower she's holding.
She has stars at the edges of her vision and her ears are ringing. She's pretty sure she cracked at least one rib, maybe two. But for once, the first thing on her mind after an attack is not the relationship she doesn't have. For once, Roxanne has other things to think about immediately upon getting enough air to clear her vision and think clearly.
The pair of flowers she just spat out are glowing.
They're glowing. Not just vibrant, not just shiny in their outermost layers. Roxanne turns off the water and puts the second one in its vase, then looks at them in bewilderment for a moment.
None of the other flowers glowed. Is she hallucinating? She's never hallucinated before.
She glances around her bathroom, helplessly trying to think of some explanation. Maybe—oh, maybe they aren't really glowing? Maybe this is like the pigment thing, maybe it's a biological trick of the light. Maybe they're...hyperreflective, or something. But when she stands up and turns off her bathroom light just to see what happens, the pair of flowers keep right on shining, their cores a pale greenish-blue that extends all the way down their reproductive structures into the water of their vases, twinkling brightest at the curled ends laden with inert pollen waiting for a pollinator that isn't coming.
She stares at them for a few minutes, then finally does what she's been thinking about doing for quite some time: as she packages up a few buds and a non-glowing flower to send to Mira, she also packs the glowing flowers into a box and sends them away to be preserved in resin by a professional. Maybe she'll cough up another glowing one and maybe she won't; either way, she is keeping these first ones, no matter what happens. These two are not getting crushed or torn, not on her watch. Maybe she'll be able to give Megamind a glowing bouquet somehow when she's finally ready to tell him.
She does cough up more glowing flowers. Not very many, maybe one out of every six, but glowing or not, it is a pain in the ass trying to hide the flowers at work. She clogged up the office toilet she spat the first one into, so that's out. She stuffs them into her purse instead and keeps it zipped shut and just prays her aliens don't go snooping in her bag. That could be very, very bad.
(She wakes up from a nightmare of Megamind going to take her eyeliner and pulling out one of the flowers instead. He laughs at her. She wakes up with tears on her cheeks and petals in her throat.)
The flowers that get a bit crushed in her purse are the ones she puts into the frozen storage containers Admiral Algae sends her, along with the buds she kept and the rest of the petals. But what would happen if she sent one of the fresh ones to Megamind in the mail? Anonymously? Would she be able to get his reaction? Would he even know what it was? Could she tell him to look in her purse again during a kidnapping, and tell him she loves him from there? She tries to steel herself and just do it, a couple times, but her mouth goes dry and she can't make the words come. How is she supposed to do this? What's the right thing to do, here? She has so many flowers in storage for him now, and it's not like she'll stop producing them if Megamind isn't willing to give her a chance. She could tell him. She has the relics of his planet she was waiting for; she could tell him anytime.
But if he does decide to try falling in love with Roxanne, she'll stop coughing up flowers. That could also be bad, from Megamind's perspective. Currently, she's the only thing on Earth capable of replicating anything from his planet of origin. Is he—but—he isn't that kind of selfish. Is he? Would he spurn her just to get more flowers? That sounds ridiculous, but trauma does not make for fully rational responses.
Roxanne has too many questions, and more keep coming. Between the anxiety of No Answers and the physical strain of Hanahaki disease, both her appetite and her sleep schedule are completely destroyed as the end of February approaches. Her boss tells her to either go home and get some rest or get better under-eye concealer, and Roxanne bites her lip until it bleeds.
At least her room is pretty. She has her rainbow of jars, her vases of floating alien blossoms. A few of which are glowing, somehow, for some reason. Roxanne's bedroom looks like fairyland and Roxanne's life feels pretty much like shit.
She's so tired.
Meanwhile, on Megamind's side of things.
He.
Is.
Furious.
"I'm sorry," he says, voice low and dangerous. "I am going to need you to…repeat. That."
The woman two barstools down gulps, fidgets with her napkin. "She has Hanahaki. I didn't see the flower, but it's a distinctive cough. I know what I heard. Sounded like she's pretty far along."
Megamind presses both hands flat against the bar for a moment. There's a roaring in his ears.
He has been on reasonably amicable terms with his nemesis for some time now. The two of them occasionally collaborate on timing and location, and Megamind has been known to quietly lend fleets of cloaked brainbots when the need is dire. But this…this changes things.
He slides a pair of hundred-dollar bills down the bar, rises to his feet, and leaves without another word.
Megamind is not. Thinking clearly. At this point. He is exhausted and in pain and too stubborn to consider all of the available possibilities. He might have drawn a more appropriate conclusion if he was in better condition. He might have consulted with Minion. He might have done any number of things that are not what he does at this point, which is to grip his rage between his teeth and pours himself into his work. Roxanne is suffering. For a stupid reason. And Megamind knows it. And Megamind is done holding back.
Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness, that's what he said to Roxanne when he realized exactly what he needed to do. He's been patient since then, testing the limits of what he's beginning to discover.
No more.
