I have been surgeried upon and I have some screws in my fingers now, which is good because the bones were not so much "broken" as "shattered." Yikes! Quicksilver Maiden suggested getting a teeny-tiny bluetooth keyboard for writing one-handed, which is a thing I had no idea existed, but I did get one and it appears to be working quite well. And the keys have a very satisfying tactile response, which is nice.
Short little chapter, this time, with some cuteness! Roxanne's thing in the last scene was something I had once and it was one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me.
If you're listening to the chapter songs, you should seek out the "down version" of this one. The studio version by Avriel and the Sequoias works too, but...well, this song has a part 2, and...we'll call that foreshadowing? I suppose? Anyway, the down version fits better with the part 2.
CHAPTER 8
Sweet Adeline, Part 1 - Avi Kaplan
It's Friday afternoon, again, and Roxanne is playing with Derya at her apartment a month or so after their trip out to Star Lake. It really is just easier, this way—Salim can drop Derya off on his way to Jum'ah and get some breathing room for a while, have some alone time at home to get some work and maybe some cleaning done, and Roxanne gets to work from home and play with her niece. Eventually, Derya will go to the mosque with her father and grandparents, and occasionally to church with her mother, but probably not before she turns one.
Which Roxanne is not complaining about at all.
Derya can roll over in either direction and she's almost beginning to crawl, now. She pushes herself around with her legs, sort of on her hands. She's figuring it out. No teeth, yet, but she's still gumming everything she can get her hands on; Roxanne's apartment is the tidiest it has ever been as a result.
"Yes!" she exclaims, rolling a ball gently over to her niece and applauding when the baby grabs it and pushes it away. "Yes, that's so good! You got it! Try again?"
And there's. A knock at the door. The balcony door. Three sharp taps.
Roxanne sits up and looks over, and—
Wearing an awkward smile, Megamind waves at her through the glass. Roxanne's heart leaps in a way it never used to, before; she's noticed that a few times since their trip out to the lake and it still throws her every time. But right, that's right: Rose did tell him every Friday, didn't she? Well, Roxanne isn't complaining about that, either.
"Hey, you," she exclaims, opening the door and waving him inside. "Come on in! What are you doing here?"
He ducks inside, fidgeting. "I, ah," he says, "I am having some problems with, with this next…plan. And Minion suggested I take a break, and I don't usually do breaks but—but I remembered, you babysit? On Fridays? And I wondered if, um. If I could come over. I texted," he adds, "but I think you were probably preoccupied." He grins down at Derya, who's sitting up and pushing some kind of cuboid toy across her play mat.
"You can always come over," Roxanne tells him warmly. "Megamind, you're always welcome. And I promise not to be insulted if you're just here for the baby."
He flushes. "Not just the baby," he says, sending a crooked sort of grin at Roxanne. Her heart does a little flip. "Your apartment also has some lovely houseplants."
She laughs. "Ah, you've fallen for my aloe," she teases. "I see. Well, make yourself at home! How was prison?"
He makes a face. "Boring," he says, taking off his shoes. "As always. But they revamped my biosign monitors, which provided a mild challenge." He sits down on Roxanne's floor and Derya greets him with a smile and a little shriek. "Look at you!" he exclaims. "Look at you, sitting up so straight! You aren't a wobble-baby at all anymore!"
Derya replies with a long string of nonsense syllables, and Megamind laughs.
"Yes, I'm sure it is very exciting! Soon you'll be crawling!"
It's funny, Roxanne thinks, how much more he's smiling, these days. He still seems more or less chipper and enthusiastic when he's mid-scheme, and he's still kidnapping her with almost the same frequency as usual. But he relaxes, when he's at her apartment with Derya, in a different way than he relaxes at Evil Lair. And he talks to Roxanne now without getting stiff and suspicious as soon as he realizes he's said something she could potentially use against him.
He trusts her, she realizes when he turns up the Friday after that and offers to make tea because Roxanne can't stop yawning. He's standing at her sink, filling the kettle with his back to her, and his face is fully relaxed and sort of smiling when he turns around, and Roxanne thinks—oh my god, he trusts me.
And it's not an entirely new development, she realizes. Even months ago, when he met Derya for the first time, he left his protective spikes at home and he didn't flee at the first sign of danger—he had his hand on his gun and he was tense with alarm, but he waited, because Roxanne asked him to let her explain.
She sees more of Megamind now than anyone except her coworkers, and somehow it still isn't enough. And seeing him with Derya is…
Roxanne has never fantasized about being a mother, or having a baby. She doesn't mind the idea; she has no objections; parenthood has just never called to her the way it always seemed to call Rose and Salim. But watching Megamind with Derya, she finds herself more relaxed about the idea of babies than she's ever been before. He would be a good dad, she thinks—and then of course she scolds herself, because really, she has no business thinking anything like that. They aren't together. She knows he cares for her, knows he trusts her. But she doesn't know more than that, not for sure.
Still. He really is wonderful with the baby.
"She's getting a little bit of separation anxiety," Roxanne tells Megamind when he shows up again a couple weeks later. She's sitting on her sofa, watching him fiddle with a Rubik's cube as Derya bangs some measuring cups together. "She's still okay with me once Salim is gone for a little while, but she cries when he leaves, now."
Megamind makes a sympathetic sound. "That sounds difficult."
"It's pretty normal, apparently," Roxanne says, "but it still hurts."
He looks up. "She loves you, though," he offers. "You know she does."
Roxanne smiles at him. "I know," she says. "It just takes her a few minutes to remember, sometimes." She hesitates. "Can I ask—did you ever experience anything like that?" she asks. He's mentioned things from when he was a baby before. "Do you remember why?"
Megamind glances up, then looks away again. He's quiet for a while. Finally, he says, "I did. Yes. But my reasons were different. I was…well, you know. I left home at eight days old."
"Fear of being abandoned?" Roxanne hazards.
Megamind doesn't look up. "Not…abandoned implies intent? I think? I was sent away to save my life. And Minion's life." He pauses. Frowns. Then he takes a deep breath and straightens his spine, lifts his head, looks at her. "How much do you know about galactic collision?"
Startled, Roxanne has to take a moment to respond to that one. "Um…not much, I'm afraid. Did—did your galaxy—"
"Galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centers," Megamind says, and waits for Roxanne to nod. "When two galaxies collide, one of those black holes can be jarred loose and go rogue. Move through space, engulfing matter in its path." He swallows. "Space is enormous. Incomprehensibly huge, even for my brain. Even within a galaxy. Habitable planets are rare; inhabited planets still rarer. The odds of a rogue black hole consuming an inhabited star system are," his lips twist, "astronomical. But not, unfortunately, impossible." He gestures at himself. "Exhibit A."
Roxanne's heart trips on a beat, then sinks. "A black hole?" she asks. "Did…did anyone…"
"Minion and I are all that made it off our world," he says. "As far as I know. Nothing else made it out."
She swallows. "But—the reefs, the fish—some kind of ark—"
"Minion and I," he says again, his voice heavy. "Nothing else."
Good lord. That kind of loss…it's unfathomable. A whole planet, all its people, their history and cultures and everything they've ever built—it's dizzying. "Megamind," she says, shocked. "I'm…I'm so sorry." He looks away, and she swallows. "Do you…want to talk about it? Or…"
He does actually appear to consider this. "I honestly don't know," he finally says. "I don't, usually. Talk about it." He shrugs. "Who would I talk to? Minion already knows and I doubt he wants to re-live it, and Metro Man and I don't…talk. Much. At all."
Roxanne blinks, briefly startled out of her blank shock. Why would Metro Man even be on the list of potential confidants? Her confusion must show on her face, because Megamind smiles thinly and adds, "He's from the same star system. Different planet."
"You're kidding," she says, staring at him, but Megamind shakes his head. "Wow," she says, for lack of anything better to say. "Well…if you ever do want to talk, I'm here." This feels ridiculously inadequate, but it's all she can think of. Maybe if she can get her head around it, later, she'll figure out something better, but for now this is all she's got. "I will have no idea what you're going through, what you've gone through, but…I'm here to listen, if you need me."
He looks up at her. Smiles a little. "You really are entirely too good to me, Miss Ritchi."
Roxanne wrinkles her nose at him. "This is what friends are for, Megamind."
"Like I said."
She rolls her eyes. "I like you, you silly creature," she says. "Of course I'm here, if you need me." They need a change of subject. Something cheerful. "Hey, you want to see how much of a mess Derya can make of her baby food?"
Megamind looks up, grinning.
He doesn't come the week after that, and Roxanne thinks he isn't going to. She sends Derya home with a wave and a kiss goodbye and then sets about tidying her apartment a little, putting away the baby toys she keeps for when her niece comes to visit, and then sitting down with her laptop to get a little work done before dinner.
It's getting on toward evening when there's a tap on the glass at the balcony door. It isn't sharp, this time; it's almost hesitant. Surprised, Roxanne goes and pulls the curtain back—
—and yes, there's Megamind, smiling nervously at her in the twilight. He's holding some kind of flattish box.
"You came!" Roxanne says as she opens the door. "Derya's gone home, I'm afraid."
"Yes, I lost track of time," he says. "I can go if you want me to. I don't—Minion said this would be imposing, and—but I thought, maybe—"
"No, come in, come in," Roxanne tells him, standing back and holding the door open. "I'm not doing anything this evening. What's up?" She grins. "Here to visit my aloe?"
"I brought a puzzle," he says, holding up the box. And sure, okay. Roxanne is down for puzzle time.
"I'll go clear off the dining table," she says, and his nervous smile relaxes into a relieved one.
It is immediately clear that Megamind has never done a puzzle before in his life. But Roxanne shows him: turn all the pieces right side up and find the corners and the edge pieces first, and he says, "Aha!" and goes at it with a will.
The puzzle he has is a thousand pieces, which Roxanne is unsure about—as much fun as this is turning out to be, she cannot in fact stay up all night—but it turns out not to be a problem. For one thing, this particular puzzle has a lot of colors in small blocks: an impressionistic picture of a rainy night in a park, with bright lights reflecting orange and yellow and blue and green off the leaves, and shimmering up off the path where a couple is walking close together under an umbrella. It isn't hard to see which pieces might go where, latitude-wise. Longitudinally is more of an issue for Roxanne, particularly with the trees.
But once they get the edges in place, Megamind looks at the box, looks at the rectangle in front of him, and begins slowly arranging pieces within the rectangle without connecting them to anything. Roxanne is focused on separating out pieces of the path and trying to fit them with each other when she notices he's only occasionally putting anything together.
"What are you doing?" she asks, and he pauses and blinks at her.
"Putting the pieces where they go," he says. "That's how this is done, yes? That's the objective?"
"It is," she says slowly. "But…"
"And look," Megamind says. He shows her the piece he's holding. "The green and gold here, and this line and this shadow—that's here, on the box." He taps on a section of the trees. "See?"
Roxanne squints.
"Like this," Megamind says, placing the piece on the box next to the space he's indicating. "Here."
And she can sort of see, now that the comparison is side-by-side. Still, for him to look at the box, and look at a pile of haphazard puzzle pieces, and think, ah, this goes here…
"You're staring at me," he says, sounding uncertain. "Is this not right?"
"Megamind," Roxanne says, "have I ever told you that your brain is the absolute most incredible thing I have ever seen in my life?"
Megamind's eyebrows shoot straight up his forehead and his eyes go wide, and then he turns very pink and splutters a string of incoherent nonsense, a bunch of broken-together syllables like he's just tried to say four things at once and failed at all of them. Roxanne reaches out and pats his shoulder and he shuts up, staring at her.
"I just mean," she says, feeling her own ears heat at how obviously flustered he is—she didn't mean to make him look so unsettled, but she can't say she's sorry she did— "It is a privilege to watch you think."
He rips his gaze away from her face and stares down at the puzzle in front of him. Roxanne has seen him blush before, a few times, but she has never seen his ears this particular shade of fuschia.
"Thanks," he says, a moment later, sounding strangled. "I'm—your brain is—also—yes."
Roxanne isn't sure about that one. She's only human, and far from brilliant by her own standards. So she laughs a little, and shakes her head, and goes back to the puzzle.
A couple minutes later, Megamind clears his throat. "Roxanne, can I ask you something?" he says. "Um. It's—I have always wondered, and—maybe I can ask you? Maybe you know."
"Sure," Roxanne tells him, surprised. "What's up?"
"I saw some pictures, once," Megamind says, "when I was a child. One of my teachers had them in a folder. Simple pictures—a bird, a dragon, two sharks. An airplane. Nothing special. They were shaded strangely, sort of fuzzy? They had no outlines. And the way they were colored was strange, too; the background sort of…bent around them? And through them, at the same time. They were camouflaged, almost. Everything was very bright, tight patterns. Computer-generated, I think."
Roxanne nods slowly, trying to picture this. "Okay…"
"My classmates had difficulty seeing them," Megamind says, frowning. He moves a couple pieces around on the puzzle, adjusts their placement slightly. Connects a couple. "I didn't ask, I knew not to ask that sort of thing, by then, but—do you know what those were?"
She frowns. Absently hands him the patch she's pieced together so he can put it where it goes in the puzzle, and starts slowly assembling the rainy path. "I'm not sure," she says, finally. "When you say they had difficulty, what do you mean?"
"A few of my classmates couldn't see them at all," Megamind says. "And the ones who could, had to stare. They held the pictures very close to their faces and then moved them away. Sometimes they did this more than once? Do you—"
"Oh, Magic Eye!" Roxanne exclaims. Megamind sits up a little.
"You do know what that is, then," he says. "My uncles had no idea what I was talking about."
She pauses, sidetracked. "Uncles?" she repeats. "I didn't…you have family on Earth?"
"The men who raised me," he says. "Inmates at the Prison for the Criminally Gifted. They didn't know what I meant."
"Well," Roxanne says, "depending on when they entered the prison, I'm not surprised. I think autostereograms only hit the US in the early 1990s."
Megamind nods. "I was in high school," he says, "yes. Yes! Autostereograms," he says. "Magic Eye."
"I don't know how they're made," Roxanne says, pitching her tone apologetic. "I just know that's what they're called."
"That is more than enough for me to go on," Megamind tells her. "Autostereogram. Fantastic. One mystery solved, finally."
"And you could just…look at these pages and see the picture?" Roxanne asks, fascinated. So it's not just his mind, then; it's his eyes, too. "At a glance?"
He nods again. "No one else could," he says. "I pretended, when it was my turn."
That's sad, Roxanne thinks. That he needed to hide, that way. It sounds like a neat talent. Still, she gets it—showing off doesn't win you any friends when everyone already thinks you're a know-it-all.
"You really were raised by the inmates, then?" she asks. School didn't like me, either, Megamind said once, and she can't imagine he's eager to go too in-depth on the subject, so Roxanne focuses on the other thing she's just learned. "I thought that was just a rumor; I assumed it was the warden there who brought you up. He's certainly protective enough."
Megamind hesitates, but he sends her a small smile. "Warden Jim did his best when he could," he says. "He still does. But by the time he found out about me, I was already quite firmly attached to Mitch and Guduza. And they had some…concerns, about what might happen to a pair of alien infants if news of our presence got out and we were accessible at, say, a house. Rather than a prison." His expression darkens. "Concerns that turned out not to be unfounded," he adds. "Prison really was the safest place for me."
"Huh." She isn't sure what to say to that. This isn't an interview, after all; if it was, she could have probably come up with at least three leading questions just based on 'concerns' alone, but—this is just a conversation. What kind of childhood must that have been, Roxanne has to wonder.
"And I learned a lot," Megamind offers. "They took care of me. I was okay." She looks up, and he grins at her. "You looked worried," he says. Then he glances down. "That piece you're holding doesn't go anywhere near there. Sorry."
Startled, Roxanne laughs. "Okay, Puzzle Master," she says, sliding it over, "you put it where it goes, then."
He does so, still grinning.
"I'm glad you came over," Roxanne tells him. "It's been ages since I've done a puzzle."
Megamind nods. "Yes, I—" He reaches for a piece at approximately the same time Roxanne does, and immediately jerks away.
"Oh, here," she says, handing it to him and smiling and wondering what the heck kind of Lady and the Tramp turn her life is taking, these days. Megamind's cheeks are pink again. "Didn't mean to steal it out from under you."
Megamind takes it, quiet, and fits it into a space between two other pieces, locks the three of them together.
"Yes," he says, after a while. "Yes, thank you for letting me visit. I was…I wasn't having a good night." He looks up, smiles at her from under his eyelashes. "This is helping."
Two Fridays later, Megamind's phone pings at him, and he glances down at it, then frowns. Need you to come over, Roxanne says. ASAP. Sorry.
Which sounds like something is wrong. Megamind is working, but that's okay; he can come back to the power cells for his robo-sheep later. He goes to put on clothes instead of his leathers, buzzes Minion on his watch to let him know where he's going, and then he shrugs into the jet pack and takes off.
The balcony door is unlocked when Megamind arrives, and Derya is crying. "I know," Roxanne is saying, her voice scratchy, "I know, sweetie, but I don't want you to get sick. I know, baby. I'm sorry. Megamind will—"
"Roxanne?" Megamind asks. She's sitting on the sofa, bundled up in her thick winter bathrobe. "What's wrong?"
As soon as she looks over at him, he sees exactly what's wrong. Her eyes are glassy and her cheeks are bright red, flushed with fever.
"I woke up with a little bit of a sore throat," she says, plaintive, "and I thought I was fine. I thought it was allergies. And then I got a headache, and that just happens sometimes. But then the last hour just…I don't know what's happening; I've never felt this awful; everything is achy and I'm so cold and my head hurts and my neck hurts and Derya wants held but I don't want to get her sick and I don't know what to do—" She's all but crying by the time she cuts herself off.
Megamind comes forward and scoops Derya up into his arms. "Shhhh," he says, tipping his head forward and nuzzling her, bouncing her. "Shhh, it's okay, sweetheart, you're okay. What's the matter? Oh, you're thirsty. We'll fix it.
"Roxanne, go to bed," he adds. "Your body is fighting something and it can't do that effectively when you're trying to stay awake."
"Are you sure?" She sounds very hopeful. "I—I can stay up, if you need me to. I just need someone else to handle her. I don't know what this is; she's vaccinated for flu but—"
"Go to bed," he says, turning and scowling down at her with his no-arguments face. "Go to bed and go to sleep. Derya and I will be fine. We'll play with her toys and read books. I know how to feed her and I know how to change her, and I know which cries mean what. Go to sleep."
Roxanne nods and stands up slowly, hunching her shoulders. "Okay," she says, hugging herself and shivering. "Thank you. I'm so sorry."
"That's quite all right, Miss Ritchi," he says, shaking his head. "Get some rest."
Roxanne nods again and stumbles away to collapse into bed.
She doesn't have any dreams that she can remember, but she stays dead asleep for far longer than she was expecting to. It's fully dark outside when she wakes up, bundled under her blanket and comforter and still wrapped in her bathrobe and two pairs of wool socks. She is sweatier than she has ever been in her life.
Slowly, she sits up. She…huh.
She feels completely fine. The pounding headache from earlier is gone, the shakes are gone, and she's not freezing cold anymore. She has no sore throat, no congestion. No cough, she realizes as she takes a deep breath. She feels a little weak on her feet, but that can be attributed to not having eaten lunch or dinner before she passed out.
She changes into dry pajamas and clean socks. She'll take a shower in the morning. For now, she'll just…microwave some soup. Chicken broth, or something.
She shuffles out to her kitchen and she's just pulled a can of chicken stock out of the cupboard when a sound from her living area makes her jump and look over.
Megamind has just pushed himself up on his elbows on the couch, Roxanne's throw blanket slipping down onto the floor. "Roxanne?" he says, sitting the rest of the way up and squinting at her, blinking against the kitchen lights.
For a second, she thinks something happened with Derya and the baby is also spending the night—but no, no; Salim must have picked her up as usual. And Megamind—Megamind must have—
"You stayed," she says, dumbfounded. "You didn't have to do that."
He frowns and stretches a little, then gets stiffly to his feet. "You had a fever," he says. "Don't be ridiculous; of course I stayed. And don't worry," he adds, coming into the kitchen. "Derya was fine. She was just thirsty when I came over. We had some water and we had a diaper change and we had lunch, and we played for a while and then Salim came and picked her up. Put that away." He takes the can out of Roxanne's unresisting hands and puts it back in the cupboard, nodding at her kitchen island with the tall chairs. "Go sit, I'll heat you up some soup."
"But that was soup," Roxanne says, as she goes and sits. She feels fine, physically, but mentally she's still fairly out of it.
"Minion's soup," Megamind says, removing a two-quart container of something brownish and noodly from the refrigerator. "He brought some over earlier while you were asleep. It is far superior to canned cooking stock."
Roxanne could cry. She was having the worst afternoon, she was frantic and tired and feverish and scared of infecting her infant niece with some unknown illness, and Megamind came just when she needed him and he took over and helped and he's still here, still helping, and Minion brought her soup and Roxanne just…she wants to thank them, but Minion doesn't have a phone and Megamind doesn't like being thanked. She wants to tell Megamind she loves him, but she has no idea how he'll react to that, and she's still trying to get her head around it, herself.
She climbs back out of her chair and taps him on the shoulder. He pauses, puts down the ladle he's been using to transfer soup from the container to the pot he's put on her stove. "Hmm?" he says. And then, "Oh—" as she wraps her arms around his back and tucks her face against his shoulder.
He stands with his arms away from his body for a moment, frozen, but—then he hugs her back. Strokes her damp hair with his fingertips.
Roxanne squeezes him, hard, with both fists clenched against his narrow back, before she releases him and steps away. "You're a good friend," she says. "I'm glad you stayed. You didn't have to."
He flaps a hand at her, but he's hiding a smile, she can tell. "Go sit," he says again. "I don't mind. I always love visiting with Derya, you know that. And you have lots of books; I can't remember the last time I was able to just sit and read. It was nice." He grins over his shoulder at her. "I checked on you a few times and I don't think you moved at all after you got into bed. How are you feeling? Better, I assume."
"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I feel great, actually. I have no idea what that was. That was bizarre."
He hums. "That was an effective fever response," he says. "That's how fevers are supposed to work. They're supposed to burn the infection out of you."
She shakes her head, amazed. "Well," she says, "I just hope Derya doesn't get sick with whatever I had. Or…what I almost had, I guess? I don't even know."
"I'm sure she'll be fine," Megamind says. "She's had her vaccines, and I washed her washable toys after you went to bed. And then I…also washed Derya. Just in case. We had a good time playing in your sink."
Roxanne laughs a little. "Really?"
He nods. "I thought of it while I was washing her toys, and once the diaper was already off, I figured, what the heck, why not. So I got the baby shampoo from your bathroom and we splashed around in some soapy water in your sink for a while, and then I rinsed her off. I don't know if that was the right move, but she had fun."
"I'm sorry I missed it," Roxanne says. The mental image is certainly adorable. "God. I'm…I am so glad you were checking your phone. I don't know what I would have done without you."
"It was my pleasure." He pours the soup into two large bowls, then sits down next to Roxanne at the island. "I wasn't initially planning on visiting today, but I'll never complain about baby time."
Roxanne tips her upper body sideways and leans her head against his shoulder for a moment, then starts in on her soup.
