Last night I had a lot of feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and what that means is I go and listen to 39 by Queen and cry a lot. And this time, fic happened, too. Banged this out in about 4 hours, tweaked it today, here you go! Maybe...maybe have some tissues on hand for this one. It hurts but I think it is a good hurt? I hope it is a good hurt.
Lots of lines from or references to external sources in this fic. Some song lyrics, some poetry, and the bit Relativity relays about why Roxanne never bothered to date anyone else is from a Bollywood musical called Mohabbatein. (You might think Megamind is my favorite movie, but nope, it's Mohabbatein. If you've got four hours to spare, give it a watch, it's worth the time!) I pretty much took all the stuff that gives me Yearning Feels and crammed it all into a single one-shot.
Side note, it is WILD trying to write lore for Megamind and Minion's people without being able to write any of what their language sounds like. I have to go by what they're called by other people, which I'm okay with because it mirrors the 'othering' they experience in basically every other aspect of their lives, but it's weird.
Vrallior is mine, please be kind and don't steal her. I still haven't given up on MAYBE someday getting this f!cking novel published -_-
Though you're many years away
He cannot stay.
Neither he nor Minion can stay. Leaf subsides to leaf and dawn goes down to day and Megamind and Minion have seen too much and cried too hard in their lives to stay on Earth, in the end.
Megamind tries to keep his turmoil to himself for as long as he can. These are his problems, aren't they? His restlessly twisting soul, the ache in his mind. But his hands go still and his heart pulls him skyward and trying to live here without any kind of closure hurts and hurts and eventually the only thing in his mind is a faster-than-light engine, a ship, a ship. He wakes in the night with his mind full of stars and he paces Evil Lair until sunrise, struggling. Again and again and again.
It's Minion who finally breaks down and admits he can't stop thinking about it. He can't let go of this, he doesn't know why but he can't; it won't leave him alone. Megamind says yes, yes, it's the same for me. His long hands are shaking badly as he lays out the ship taking form in his mind for Minion to see, but Minion nods, fins fluttering with relief.
The two of them pick up their tools and work in silent tandem, and Roxanne watches from the shadows with her arms wrapped around her chest and her heart aching. She knows. She knew, the third consecutive night that Megamind woke up gasping about stars and unable to come back to bed, she knew.
They can't stay.
And Roxanne can't leave.
She loves these men with all her heart but she cannot leave Earth. Her roots run too deep for her to be able to even think of leaving without feeling like she is ripping her whole self in half lengthways. Her family, her friends, her whole life—
No.
Roxanne stays. Megamind holds her as she cries, and she holds him the same way, both of them grieving the same understanding because love is not air and love is not food, and Megamind—Megamind and Minion hail from a world with abyssal plains far deeper than any Earth can ever offer them. Earth has never truly felt like home to them. They can't stay.
Roxanne stays. She hugs Minion, kisses Megamind, kisses him again, and she smiles for him as she waves them away into the sky. She will keep Evil Lair, not so evil anymore. The brainbots and Achilles the spee-ider bot. She'll keep them safe, make sure they have all the enrichment they need, make sure the alligators keep their training.
She'll keep Evil Lair. She decides this, and she thinks she makes her peace with it, but—
—when Megamind and Minion vanish into the blue, they drag Roxanne's heart after them. Roxanne sinks herself into their saltwater pool and Greta the moray eel swims out from the rocks and winds herself around Roxanne's arms, looking for tummy rubs, and Roxanne cries around her scuba respirator until there is a puddle under her eyes and she cannot see because her goggles are foggy with tears.
They sail. Their ship is sound and their engines carry them faster than the sunlight at their back, and they sleep and they sleep and they sleep until their ship wakes them to find—eventually—Vrallior.
Roxanne cannot stay in Evil Lair, either, it turns out. She barely lasts a week before she starts looking for somewhere she can relocate; Evil Lair just holds too many memories for her, too many ghosts, and her empty bed is far too big and cold. She thought she would stay, could not bear to uproot her life, but she finally yanks her roots up anyway. Wayne helps her, organizes the trip and helps her move everything to an old missile silo on the Washington coast far from any major city. Roxanne renovates it completely, directs the host of brainbots in the construction of the facilities she'll need—a charging hive and a cold fusion reactor, and a new reef pool—and she tops it all off with a telescope and observatory to watch more stars than she could ever see from Metro.
She plays fetch on the beach with the host. She climbs the cliffsides with Achilles. And she is not alone for long. Partly because she opens sections of New Evil Lair to visiting students and scientists, a sort of educational bed and breakfast, but partly because—
—well.
It's a damned good thing she built a new reef pool, that's all.
Megamind comes out of cryosleep with a chill in his bones and, on the navigational viewscreen, a gas giant with a single narrow ring and several orbiting moons, one of which is lit up and twinkling. He expects he will get warm as his little ship comes back to life, but he looks at the little moon he and Minion are approaching and he thinks I wish Roxanne were here, I wish she could see this, and all he feels is hollow.
They come in to land on Vrallior, icy moon around the fifth planet in what is labeled the Na-ax'hauq system in the maps of the Hegemony of the Thirteen Suns. Vrallior's atmosphere is similar to Earth's, similar to that of Megamind's homeworld, but she's far enough from her star that her days are dark and cold and her surface is almost entirely ice. The only cities under Vrallior's sky are huddled in volcanic calderas; Vrallior's people are primarily a cave-dwelling people. All her sprawling civilizations are deep underground.
Her children call themselves sisters and brothers and nisthers to each other: one family, regardless of cultural specifics or linguistic dialect. The Vraj are spacefarers and call themselves cousins to their allies under the Thirteen Suns and anyone beyond. One family, still. But some of the Vraj sisters and brothers and nisthers have ancestors who were cousins from far outside the system labeled Na-ax'hauq in the maps of the Hegemony. Their cousins stumbled, shivering, from a ship that fell dying onto the freezing ice years and years and years ago; the Vraj called them Gorvral-qintav, Starless Two-Legs, and Gorvral-waxtai, Starless No-Legs.
Megamind and Minion aren't sure what to expect when they signal their intent to land in Qintla, a two-tiered caldera-city on Vrallior's surface. They are tentatively optimistic when the answering signal appears to be positive, possibly welcoming. Still, they hesitate. They have no command of Southern Vraj, and they are unused to welcomes from strangers.
But an hour after they fall into low orbit around the moon, a voice calls through the communications array in the whistling, warbling language of Megamind's people. Megamind yelps at the sound and fumbles to amplify—
Greetings, my cousin, please be welcome to dock your vessel at the third slip past the overcrop, a party is forming to meet you.
—well, he understands greetings and he understands welcome and dock vessel and three. This is going to be interesting. But he answers as best he can in what little of his language he knows and he keeps in contact with the whistling voice, and together, they make it work.
Minion and Megamind are met by a group of ten or so, nearly overwhelming. Their welcoming party brings clothing in the Qintlani style to keep Megamind from freezing solid in Vrallior's punishing atmosphere: tall, pointed boots and a sleeved long robe under a long sleeveless over-robe under a sleeved overcloak lined and embroidered with fur of baraktil. They bring a scarf also, a fluffy, thick thing of woven baraktil undercoat, and they instruct him on how to wrap this over and around his head; he has no tinsel hair to keep him warm. For Minion, the Vraj bring a water additive and submersible heat element; they apologize profusely for the lack of clothes that will fit him. If he is willing to share insight as to his interface, an organomech body can surely be modified for compatibility.
Minion nods, tongue-tied. Few of the Vraj whose ancestry can be traced to the Gorvral-qintav look much like Megamind. The Gorvral-qintavs' elastic genetics blended with indiginous Vraj, and Megamind's living cousins are pale and dark-eyed, with ink-tinsel hair and three-fingered hands. But they are psychophysically bound to the Gorvral-waxtai, still, and their skin is still blue-tinted, and the people the Vraj call Gorvral-waxtai are largely unchanged from their starless ancestors. Their bioluminescence has gone dark, but Minion has never seen anyone, ever, who looks even remotely similar to him. As far as he's concerned, they look exactly as they should.
The people in the welcoming party see them and sing greetings in warbling voices, all excitement, no alarm at all at this unexpected visit. Megamind sings back, halting and embarrassed at his limited vocabulary, but they flutter their hands and make their eyes wide to reassure him. They have never seen singers like Megamind and Minion, brothers from home. Not cousins, no: surely brothers, long-lost and lonely. The photos and recordings of their unforgotten elders are exactly like Megamind and Minion, bald and deep-blue and twinkling with internal light, the colors and life of their planet of origin.
Welcome, they say. Welcome, welcome, welcome home.
And they say, you must meet, oh, you must, you must meet your sisters! They lead their brothers to a plinth, a projector, a towering pillar of a computer, and then they retreat and fall silent as—
Megamind catches his breath, and Minion says, "Oh."
These sisters are holograms. The pair were memory-keepers in life; they named themselves for negative spaces, and so of course they volunteered to record themselves digitally and continue to keep the memories of their home. They mostly stay sleeping, unless there are questions—or, as is the case for the first time, unless there are refugees—but they are overjoyed to wake and find Megamind and Minion alive and desperate to learn.
Their names cannot be transcribed in Roman letters. Megamind's sister introduces herself with a rising whistle that breaks at the end, and then a falling trill; her name translates to the hollow an ebbing wave pulls behind a stone. Minion's sister has a similar use-name, the word that means current-curl around the reef's edge.
The bipedal hologram's eyes are green. Brilliantly, impossibly so. She is not only a relative in Vraj fashion; she is biologically Megamind's fifth cousin several times removed; the eyes are a dead giveaway. Megamind is of the wrack-house, he learns, whose people look after and are named for breakwater happenings.
His sister-cousin smiles to see him, and touches his face with her tingling fingertips, and she, too, welcomes him home to Vrallior.
Roxanne swims in the reef pool almost nightly, and the ocean at least once a week. She can't say why, but it feels necessary, and Roxanne will listen to her intuition and do whatever it takes if it means what she hopes it will. She listens to her intuition and she listens to her cravings and she eats way more fish than any doctor recommends for someone in her condition.
Wayne comes to stay, a few months later. Not for good, but for a good long visit. First to keep Roxanne off her feet, and later to run relay with the doctors and insist on everything Roxanne told him. He glares at the doctors and puts his foot down and holds Roxanne's hand and talks quietly to her as she gasps and screams, and he presses his head to hers the way Megamind can't, and he keeps his x-ray vision engaged to make sure everything goes as it should.
And he is very careful.
Over the next few days, Megamind and Minion tell their stories to the holograms, the only other consciousnesses that remember the oceans of their homeworld. They listen. And a few days later, when Megamind and Minion ask about names, fascinated by the expanded vocabulary and grammar they're learning, their sisters explain that the name Megamind remembers for himself, the soft falling whistle that sounds like siirh, is little song. And they offer, as use-names—
The word for starlight on the breaking sand for Megamind, a dreamer. And the longshore trough that trips the water for Minion, a catalyst.
That night—Megamind assumes it is night, though night looks about the same as day, on Vrallior—Megamind curls up around his heart in his bed in his cave on this oceanless world and he cries and cries and cries, missing Roxanne so badly he can hardly stand it. She was the one who first told him you take your dreams and make them real, and now here is the ghost of his kinsman, telling him the same thing, and Megamind is desperately homesick for a world that never felt like home to him. He feels the distance like an empty hollow in his bones, years and years of distance, every single one of them wrong.
Roxanne keeps a journal. Many journals.
She isn't sure what else to do. Megamind and Minion will almost certainly return, someday, but who knows when that will be? So she keeps journals and she writes them letters, as many letters as she can. Most are happy, or at least neutral. A fair few are of the I miss you, I miss you so much, how dare you leave me this way, no estés lejos de mí un solo día variety. Don't go far off, not even for a day—
—will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
Vrallior does not feel like home.
Vrallior is beautiful, and Megamind is welcome there. For the first time in his life, he is welcomed without question, with open hands and open hearts. But the sun shines bare and cold when it rises in the far distance and everything on Vrallior is either glittering ice or glimmering cave-walls. Dark and cold and unfamiliar. Vrallior does not feel like home.
Roxanne does not leave angry letters. She takes a stick, sometimes, when she goes down to the ocean, and she writes all the angry words she has in the sand where the ocean will rinse them clean. Letters in the sand cannot stay. She writes her letters in the sand and uses them to tumble the sharp-edged stone of her anger until all its edges are worn down soft and smooth, until she can hold her anger without hurting and finally bury it in the sand and let it go.
Megamind will be back. Someday. He will. Roxanne knows better than to hope to ever see him or Minion again in this lifetime, but she can write letters and share her life with them that way after she's gone. They couldn't share their lives with her, but she can share her life with them, and she will.
They only stay a year or so on Vrallior. Vrallior has no inland seas, only cave-lakes. No sunlight but what is reflected from the gas giant that dominates the sky. And Vrallior has more family than Megamind knows how to handle even thinking about. He is glad, so glad, to have met them, and so is Minion, but…was this a mistake?
Megamind never stops feeling the empty years between Vrallior and Earth; he only feels increasingly desperate to close the distance. The Vraj are kind, and Megamind's holographic sister is a blessing, but she gives him all the knowledge she can give and then tells him, gently, to let her rest. And then Megamind has…not much, really. His people are extinct. Their descendants practice their language and teach their customs, but they don't mean anything.
He gasps awake and he gasps awake and he gasps awake with stars in his mind until finally one night he gasps awake without stars. No stars, just the memory of Roxanne blinking back tears as she kissed him and smiled for him and told him to keep himself safe.
He can't—
Oh, but he can't take Minion from his people. He can't ask Minion for this. Megamind's people are extinct, but Minion's are not. He can't—ask—he will not leave Minion, he will not, but he can't ask him for—
Two nights later, Megamind rolls out of bed and stumbles into Minion's rooms anyway, wild-eyed and panicky and panting.
He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't have to. Minion looks at him, his silvery organomech body shimmering in the light of the glow-worms at the cave ceiling. For a moment, they just look at each other, and then Minion says, quietly, "I miss the sun, Sir. I don't want to go dark. And I miss—I miss Roxanne."
His heart in his throat, Megamind nods.
It took nearly thirty years to reach Vrallior, even outrunning the sunlight. But if they fly—if they fly quickly, as quickly as they can—then maybe, just maybe, they can reach Earth in time.
Maybe.
Little hands write letters in the sand, too. Roxanne raises her daughter as best she can, even though she has no guidebook or reference or anything to help her. She raises her daughter to love fiercely and laugh loudly and to use her clever hands to do whatever she needs to do without ever looking back. And to kick the shit out of anyone who tries to hurt her. She raises her daughter with all the love she has, and on clear nights they curl up together under the telescope and look at the stars.
Relativity laughs. And Relativity grows. And Relativity eventually finds one of her mother's journals one night and reads a few entries, reads o stay your soul and leave my heart its song; omnia Sol temperat absens in remota, and she looks at her own name, and she thinks.
Relativity is good at thinking.
Fifty-seven years after Megamind and Minion leave Earth, their ship wakes them to a familiar sight: a blue and green world rising before them with a single moon swinging in her orbit, her atmosphere scudded over with clouds in golden sunlight.
Earth was never truly home. But they know, now, that their home was on Earth, because their home was Roxanne. The only trouble is—Roxanne will be in her nineties, or nearly, if she's still alive. Her parents were both sharp right up to the end, but nothing is certain. Will she know them? Will she be upset if they return after so many years? They did leave her. They're coming back but they left, and that's—
Will she be married to someone else?
No matter what, the two of them agree, no matter what, they will take whatever comes and they will make the best of it. If Roxanne is angry with them, at least they will have seen her. If she is married and happy, they will be happy for her. If she is dead—
—if she is dead, then they will visit her resting place, and they will sing for her, and then probably they will pack up Evil Lair and go back to their brothers and sisters and nisthers on Vrallior, because there will be nothing left for them on Earth, then.
The empty lair in Metro throws them for a loop, but they find New Evil Lair on the Washington coast without too much trouble. It's well-hidden, though, and they hesitate again, circling warily until they see a man with his hair in cornrows in a strange vehicle, racing Achilles up a cliff face from the beach.
The old spee-ider bot hears their ship and flings itself up onto solid ground and comes thundering across the land as Megamind and Minion stumble out of their ship onto the grass, blinking in the sunset and breathing in the sea air and staring out at the ocean, hearing the crashing surf.
Vrallior did not have oceans. Maybe they will not go back, after all.
Achilles bounds up to them and play-bows, wagging its antennae and rattling at them, and Megamind runs his shaking hands over its many eyestalks and praises it—such a good bot, such a lovely spee-ider bot, to remember Daddy after—after so many, many years—
"Hey," the man says, unstrapping himself and clambering down from the cockpit of the unfamiliar machine. "Hey! Megamind, Minion, you made it back!"
Megamind looks at him, blinking.
"Yes," Minion says, halting, uncertain. "Yes, we're back."
"I'm Hank," says the man, white teeth flashing in his dark face as he smiles. "C'mon, let me show you the new place—oh, but hang on, I want to text—"
Fifty-seven years. The woman who comes out of New Evil Lair as they approach with Achilles at their heels is not Roxanne.
Not Roxanne, but she has Roxanne's smile, and she—
"Hi, Dad," she says, and her mother's eyes shine with tears in her blue face. "It's…um. It's good to meet you?"
"I didn't know," Megamind says, gripping her shoulders as he steps back from hugging her. His daughter is so much taller than he is; she had all the correct nutrition she needed when she was younger. "I didn't know. If—if I had known, I would never have—I wouldn't—"
"I know," says Relativity, bending to touch foreheads. "It's okay. I was upset with you when I was a kid, but…eh. It's okay. You needed to go, and Mom needed to stay. I know."
Megamind swallows. Minion puts his hand on his shoulder.
"Roxanne," Megamind says. "She…had a good life. I hope." Everything in him is shivering. He should never have left. "She loved you? Gave you a good childhood? You were happy?"
Relativity nods and smiles. "We both were," she says. "I had a wonderful childhood. I got to swim at the beach here, and I got to study by myself, anything I wanted. Everything I wanted. I had friends—I have friends, I should say! You met Hank. And I had Mom, and…yeah, I think, I think she had a good life." She steps back, blue eyes roving over her father's face. "She was…sad, though. She missed you. And you," she adds, looking up at Minion. "She really missed both of you a lot. She wrote letters—journals—I have everything. Come on inside, I'll have the brainbots get your rooms ready, we'll talk. I'm really glad you came back."
Hours later, Megamind closes Roxanne's bedroom door with his hip, clicks it softly shut behind him. He's carrying a box of notebooks, various sizes. They're labeled by year.
He does not sleep, that night. He spent a lovely if emotionally fraught evening with his—his daughter. Relativity, what a name. But now he has his journals from Roxanne, all the letters she wrote to him, and he is going to hold as much of her as he can.
He curls up in Roxanne's small bed and he reads quickly. He is good at reading. And he drinks in—her fears, her worries about being a mother alone, raising a child who thinks so differently.
I am doing my best, she writes. I hope it's enough.
I love you, she writes. I remember when we stood in the summer rain on the docks behind Evil Lair back in Metro and we watched the lightning over the lake. Tivvy and I are going out to Michigan this summer to stay with Wayne. She's never seen a freshwater lake that big. I'm excited for her.
I miss you, she writes. Tivvy ran into some trouble with some kids in her reading group at the library today. They're all so much older than her and you'd think they would be better than this, picking on a kid less than half their age, but…I just wish I knew what to tell her. I wish I knew what would have helped you.
The notebooks have pictures, too, here and there. Relativity, running down the beach with a kite in her hand. Relativity, throwing a frisbee for the brainbots. Relativity, learning to scribble almost before she learned to hold her head up.
I wish you were here, Roxanne writes. And again, and again. I wish you were here. I wish you were here.
The sun is rising when Megamind finally finishes blitzing through Roxanne's journals. He should maybe go slower, maybe space things out, savor these gifts she left for him—but he can't, god, he can't. He misses her more than he has ever missed anything in his life. He had thought the way he missed his parents, his homeworld, would be the most he ever missed something, but he barely knew them. He knew Roxanne. He knew her, he loved her, and he left her, and he misses her so badly now that he thinks he will snap in half if he moves too quickly.
He should never have left. He should have stayed, should have told Roxanne every day how he loved her, should have been there every time she wished for him.
The sun rises, golden and warm. Megamind wipes the tears from his eyes and blows his nose and resolves to be here for Relativity now, for the rest of her days. He's younger than she is, biologically if not chronologically; he'll definitely outlive her.
Megamind will be here for her now.
He goes to breakfast. Minion is there already, looking about as tired as Megamind feels; Roxanne left letters for Minion, too. Relativity has made a kind of baked oatmeal fruit thing, which is absolutely delicious and which Megamind can barely choke down past the grief in his throat.
Relativity looks at her father. And she looks at her—whatever Minion is to her. Uncle? Also father? English consistently fails to have words for Minion. She looks at the two of them, and she checks a few things on her tablet, and finally she puts down her fork.
"So, um." She swallows, and they both look at her. "I need to admit to a small piece of revenge. For leaving Mom alone. Because that was a dick move, you guys."
"I'm aware," Megamind says softly. "I'm so sorry."
"I know you are," Relativity says. "I can tell. So. I want you to wait here, okay? For like half an hour. Can you stay in the kitchen for half an hour? Read the newspaper? There's something I need to show you, but I'll bring it to you. I would have told you last night—but, revenge. But revenge is over now. So I need you to wait here. Yes?"
They look sort of puzzled, but they nod.
"Yes," Relativity answers aloud for them. She stands up. "Good. I'll be back in a little bit."
"I will be fine," Relativity says, holding her mother's hand and smiling. "I will be fine. I have the brainbots. I have Achilles. I have Hank and Edna and Ahn. I will be fine."
"You're sure," Roxanne whispers, even though Relativity does not say anything, ever, unless she's sure. She takes after her mother, that way.
"Yes," Relativity says. "Yes. Of course I'm sure. Besides, it's not like we'll never talk again. It's only for a little while, Mom. Probably."
Roxanne squeezes her hand. "But what if it isn't a little while," she says, "baby, what if it's longer? What if I wake up and you're—"
Relativity rolls her eyes. "I'll wake you if I turn seventy-five and we'll figure it out then," she says flatly. "Mom, seriously. Go to sleep. It'll be fine."
Roxanne has to study her for a minute. "You are doing this for me," she finally says, "for the sake of someone you've never even met. You are helping me wait for someone who—"
"—left, yes, because you love him. You do. And he did what he needed to do, but now I'm doing what I need to do. And right now, what I need to do is give you time." She grins, teases, "You named me Relativity, Mom. Let me give you time."
Roxanne chuckles. "Promise me," she says, as her daughter rests her limp hand gently on her stomach. "Promise me you'll wake me if you need me. Or even if you just miss me. And if you get married I want to be at your wedding, understand? Wake me for that."
Her daughter snorts. "Yeah, that'll happen," she scoffs.
"I know, I know, you're your uncle's niece," Roxanne sighs. She leans back and shifts around a little. Just a little; it's hard to move with this stuff in her veins. "I have to say it, sweetie. I would have married Minion."
"And you're still asking me if I'm sure about this." Relativity leans over the controls. "Yeah, I know. God, were you this much of a pain for Dad?"
Roxanne snorts. "Oh, goodness, no," she says as her capsule's hatch begins to slide shut. She closes her eyes. "No, for your father I was much, much worse."
Relativity opens the door of the kitchen and takes a deep breath. "Okay," she begins, and then quickly sidetracks to, "no no no, don't get up. Minion, you're—probably fine, but I'm pretty sure Dad needs to be sitting for this. Okay."
She looks at Megamind and looks at Minion, both of them watching her with vaguely puzzled expressions on their faces. The two of them look awful, they really do. Completely exhausted. Maybe she shouldn't have left this go overnight, maybe she should have told them—but she desperately wanted to make sure they fucking appreciated this, because she was without her mother for more than thirty years of her life, more than half her life, and she did not do that for these men who left her mom alone. She did that as a gift for her mother, and if either of these two almost-strangers hurts Roxanne again, Relativity will rip them apart.
But judging by their expressions, she has nothing to worry about.
She sighs.
"I asked my mom, one time," she says, "when I was a teenager, why she never dated anybody. She just never seemed interested, but…not the same way I was never interested. And she said, well, I still love your father. And I knew that, of course; I mean, she never made a secret of it." She laughs a little. "Mom talked about you guys all the time, told me bedtime stories about your old plots and schemes. But, but I wanted to know—she could have moved on, you know? She could have found someone else, and she never did. Did she ever regret not dating?
"And she told me, she said—I didn't love them on the condition that they would live longer than me. And I didn't love them on the condition that they would stay on Earth. If I have no conditions in love, why should I have any regrets? And so what if they aren't here with me, today? I still love them the same as if they were here. Not because I can't find someone else to love, but because loving them this way makes me happy."
Across the room, Megamind rounds his shoulders and bows his head, stares down at his hands in his lap. Minion is not moving; his jaw is set.
"I love my mom," Relativity says. "And I didn't want to lose her. I didn't—maybe it's the alien thing, not wanting to leave home, but—I never felt the need to leave, find my own space. I didn't want—" She cuts herself off, but Megamind can't look at her. He can't.
God, hearing this is—the words are beautiful, but hearing them is—it hurts.
"I love my mom," Relativity says again, a blur in his peripheral vision. "I wanted her to be happy."
Megamind nods, wordless. And—
By the sink, Minion makes a sharp sound, and Relativity takes a deep breath and says, "Anyway…did you know you're not the only one who knows how to build cryostasis chambers?"
—what?
Megamind looks up. Relativity has stepped to the side just a little, and—and coming through the kitchen doorway behind her is—
"You're home," Roxanne cries, her voice already thick with tears as she comes rushing in to meet him, and Megamind screams and launches himself out of his chair and into her arms.
They collide with such force that Megamind spins her almost all the way around before she's able to pull him close properly. She presses her cheek to the corner of his jaw and the arch of his neck, her shoulders hitching as she wraps him in the biggest hug, and Megamind sobs like a shocked child into her shoulder and drags his fingers in the back of her shirt.
"You're home," she chokes again, "you came home."
"You're alive," he gasps, all of him shaking, "you-you're alive—"
She's alive. She's alive, and Megamind has time and Roxanne has time and Minion has time and—they all have time, they all—they have time, still. Less than they might have, but they do have time, and Megamind is absolutely beside himself with relief. He gulps and puts his arms around her waist—no—moves to hug her around her shoulders—no, that isn't—he twists his hands in her shirt again—god, he can't figure out how to get close enough—
Finally Minion picks him and Roxanne up against his metal breastplate, and Megamind just gives up and clutches her however he can. Roxanne shifts one arm free so she can hug Minion, too, but she's still clinging onto Megamind with the other and crying, her tears trickling over his skin.
Eventually Megamind is able to pull his head back enough to shove against her forehead.
"Surprised to see me?" Roxanne says, teasing through her tears, and Megamind sniffs wetly and brings a shaking hand up to fit the curve of her cheek, sings relief-sorrow-affection-relief in his chest because words are absolutely beyond him right now.
"You got old," Minion says, and Roxanne laughs and flicks his tank.
"Yes, that's what happens when you go away for twenty-some years," she says. "And I am not old, I'm barely into my fifties, you butthead. And I still got an ass that won't quit, how about that."
Minion snorts, and Megamind manages a very watery laugh.
"You're beautiful," he whispers, ducking forward and kissing her quickly, tasting salt. "I missed—I missed you so much, I—I'm—"
"I'm so sorry we left," Minion says, mournful. "We shouldn't have gone. I'm so sorry."
But Roxanne shakes her head. "No," she tells him firmly. "No. You two needed to go and see what you could find out. But I'm so glad—I'm so, so happy you're back—and you'll stay, now, won't you?" Her voice cracks. "You'll stay?"
"Yes," Megamind says, immediate, and Minion is nodding, nodding, "yes, we are staying. We're here to stay. Relativity—oh."
Their daughter seems to have made herself scarce. Well, that's…that's okay. They'll have time later. For now…
Minion places them gently on the ground. "I want to go talk to Relativity," he says. "I'm going to go find her. And, and then I think I need a nap." He smiles a little. "I didn't…sleep. Well. Or at all."
Roxanne makes a gentle scoffing sound in her throat and rests her hand on his arm, still the silvery-iridescent organomech of Vrallior. "Sleep, Minion. You need it. We can all catch up later today. And if you didn't sleep, I bet this one didn't, either." She pokes Megamind in the stomach, crow's-feet and laugh lines crinkling at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Megamind smiles back, helpless, dazzled with relief and ebbing grief, and he catches her hand and kisses the heel of her palm, presses her warm warm hand to the side of his face and closes his eyes for a moment.
Her other hand comes to rest softly along the edge of his jaw, and Megamind opens his eyes and then very nearly bursts right back into tears at the look on Roxanne's face.
"I love you," he chokes out, instead, and "I'm sorry," and Roxanne tips his face up and kisses him.
They go to bed. Not for anything particularly exciting; they'll have time for that later. Cryosleep is not the same as real sleep, and Roxanne is tired and achy as her priming drugs wear off and Megamind has been awake for too long.
"We'll need a bigger bed," Roxanne murmurs, snuggling closer to her alien partner. "I couldn't handle our other one. Maybe the brainbots know where it is."
Megamind yawns and burrows in against her, his head on her shoulder, his arm across her body. "I like this one for now. 'S cozy. God, I missed you, Roxanne," he adds. The horrible hollow-boned feeling that plagued him before is slowly easing as he fills with the warmth of her. "I woke up out there and it was like...it was like I could feel the distance. Everything was wrong."
"You slept through the years, though," Roxanne says. She tucks herself in under the gentle weight of Megamind's body, adjusts the blankets a little. "I didn't get to do that, and I missed you too. Every day." She clears her throat, but her voice still goes raspy as she says, "Don't ever go away again. I know you needed to go and god, god, I don't blame you, but please. Please, sweetheart, I can't do this again."
He fumbles around until he finds her hand and squeezes it. "I promise. I swear to you. Never again, Roxanne. Not ever. I thought you were dead, I thought—" He sniffs hard, shakes his head, lifts her fingertips to his lips and kisses them, kisses her knuckles. This is the first time he has felt truly warm under his blanket in far too many years. "I'm staying. I promise, I promise. I'll stay."
"Good," she says softly, and cranes her neck for a moment so she can kiss the top of his head. Megamind whines in his throat and cuddles his arms as close beside her as he can get them without shoving them under her body entirely, and Roxanne hugs his slender frame. "Good. I love you."
Megamind heaves a sigh, his breath shuddering with the echo of earlier tears. "I love you, too." He pauses for a moment, listening to Roxanne's heartbeat under his ear. "I'm so sorry I had to run so far away to find home."
Roxanne swallows. "Are you home?" she asks, hopeful, wistful. "Finally?"
He nods hard and huddles close beside her, against her. Fits his forehead to the curve of her neck so he can feel her pulse there, too.
"Yes," he whispers. "Yes, I'm home."