Roxanne makes her plans in the attic, and in the apartment downstairs. Learns exactly what kind of mayhem she'll need to cause to get herself classified as a Level One Threat, as a supervillain, plots out how to make it happen.
She keeps books in the attic, and the food that she steals—cans, mostly, and other things that don't go bad. Blankets, pillows, cushions.
She steals houseplants, sets them up underneath the little octagonal window, where the slats let the sunlight through during the day, waters them faithfully, fusses over them, moving them around to catch the most sun possible. Most of them remain small and sickly, in spite of all she can do, but one of them, a large, spiky succulent, thrives against all reason in the dim little attic, growing green and verdant.
Sometimes she talks to the person who drew on the walls. She can almost feel them beside her, sometimes, when she's examining the diagrams.
Sometimes, she can almost see them. Out of the corner of her eye, but not—she knows that they're not there. Not really.
(She talks to them anyway, though, pretending.)
The wall drawings are ingenious, and really her greatest bit of luck since finding the library apartment. The things on the walls—robots and laser guns and—
"Were you a supervillain?" Roxanne asks, not turning her head, looking at the diagram for the gun. "Is that what all this is?"
She builds the gun.
It's not exactly the same; she doesn't have the proper power source that the diagram calls for. She actually has no idea what the power source in the diagram even is—but she experiments and substitutes and finally she comes up with something that's—
"Dangerous," Roxanne murmurs, caressing the gun. "Very dangerous."
She can't get all of the settings on the diagram to work; her gun only has three that function—zap, which hurts and knocks over small objects; stun, which hurts, paralyses you for about ten minutes, knocks over large objects and sends small ones flying; and destroy, which makes things explode in a really gratifying violent manner.
Roxanne practices with the gun, and she practices with her powers. They didn't work on Metro Man last time, but they almost worked, she felt it. So if she builds them up enough…
Supervillainy—studying the supervillains in the library books, Roxanne comes to realize that the—the presentation of the villainy is as important as the actual villainy itself.
Maybe even more important. A supervillain has costumes, a title—it's almost theatrical.
In the tarnished bathroom mirror of the library apartment, Roxanne teaches herself to put on makeup. Red lipstick, crimson bright like freshly spilled blood—red is a particularly unforgiving color; she uses up nearly an entire tube of it before she figures out how to put it on without smudging or going outside the lines of her lips or getting it on her teeth. Dark eye makeup—mascara is such a pain, always leaving little specks of black on her cheeks, and liquid eyeliner is even more unforgiving than red lipstick.
She cuts her hair short. Not shaved off, like it was in the lab, but pixie-cut short. Harder for anyone to grab a handful of it. And with it short like that, she can pass for a boy, if the light is dim and she wears a lot of clothes and no makeup.
Roxanne gets a wig, gets several wigs, experiments with trying to make herself look like different people—older, younger, blonde, red-head, studious and bespectacled or school girlishly sweet, pale and wispy or, with the help of bronzer, deeply tanned.
She stays in the library like that for four and a half months, planning, and slowly her reflection in the mirror starts to look a little less skinny and bedraggled and hunted, her eyes a little less sunken and haunted.
Roxanne sees the night visitor for the first time in the second month.
She's standing next to a bookshelf, running her eyes over the spines, looking for a particular title when she hears—
footsteps.
Someone here, someone in the library, someone—
Roxanne draws deeper into the shadows, hides behind the shelf, and she hears the footsteps coming closer—closer—and then they veer off slightly to the right.
Then everything is quiet for what seems to Roxanne like an eternity.
(who is it; who could be here; what are they doing here)
Finally she can't stand it any longer; she has to look.
As silently as she can, Roxanne slips between the aisles, wending her way towards where the footsteps went. She stops behind a shelf and dares to peer around it, trying to see—
—a person is standing there, in the romance section, right next to that poster of the lighthouse in a storm.
A person, but the proportions are wrong, the head is too large and his skin—Roxanne squints in the dim light of the library.
Blue.
His skin is blue.
He doesn't seem to realize he's being watched, which is fortunate, because in her fascination, Roxanne fails to slip back behind her shelf. She stares.
While she stares, he puts a book back on the shelf, sighs, and rubs a hand over his face.
Is he tired? No—no, not tired, the set of his shoulders is wrong for that, too stiffly held. The gesture isn't tired it's—unhappy?
He drops his hand and looks over the books, stroking his fingertips over the spines. He pulls one out and turns it over to read the back, gives a minute shake of his head, and returns it to the shelf, pulls out another one.
Finally he seems to find a book that he likes. He flips it open and reads a few pages of it, then closes it and starts to turn.
Roxanne dodges quickly into another aisle as he moves down the line of books. His footsteps fade into the distance, and, after a while, she hears the sound of the library doors closing.
He comes back periodically after that, returning books, picking out another. Always that section. Sometimes he'll go weeks without returning; other times he'll come several days in a row.
Roxanne probably should find his visits a source of annoyance; they're certainly inconvenient, but—she feels a strange kind of kinship to him.
He's—real, more real than the ghost of whoever wrote on the attic walls.
She starts hiding near the romance section for a bit of time each night, hoping he'll come.
She keeps a tight leash on her powers whenever he's there, but she can never quite get them to turn off completely. If he feels them, though, it must be a very mild compulsion, easily dismissed from his mind.
Roxanne takes to reading the books he returns. There had been very few books in the lab, and she hadn't often been allowed to read them; they'd frequently been withheld from her as punishment. The first novel she reads, after escaping, is one the night visitor puts back—Shy Violet.
(she would have thought she'd hate to read romance, but she devours them. it's not like—the books aren't like her powers. they're—real, in spite of being fiction, real in a way that her powers aren't.)
(I want that, she thinks, and pushes the thought aside.)
The second time Roxanne faces Metro Man, she does it as the Temptress, and when she uses her powers on him—
It works.
The jewel robbery goes off without a hitch. Metro Man gazes at her adoringly as she walks away wearing a fortune in jewels, a scarlet lipstick print on his cheek, her calling card.
Later, Roxanne looks at the shining gems, spread out on the ragged blankets she sleeps on, and laughs until she cries.
She falls asleep crying.
The seventh time the Temptress faces Metro Man, she doesn't actually face him at all.
"—it's you," Roxanne blurts out, staring stupidly at the blue-skinned figure dressed all in black, holding a ray gun identical to the one drawn on her attic walls.
He looks confused, and then there's a flash of blue light.
She wakes up when they rehydrate her in the prison.
(she breaks out in eighteen hours)
(when she gets back to her attic at the library, she looks at the wall with the ray gun blueprints, and she laughs until she sobs.)
Is everyone's life like this?
Does the universe throw this kind of cruel irony at everyone, or is it just Roxanne?
Her attic ghost and her library visitor are the same person, and they're not a supervillain at all, they're a fucking superhero. Hers. Her fucking superhero.
(Megamind. Megamind. His name is Megamind.)
The next time he comes to the library at night, she watches him pick out a book, and she does not try to use her powers on him, and she does not attack. When he's gone, she picks up the book he left behind and sits on the floor in front of the lighthouse poster. She doesn't read the book, just curls up into a miserable huddled ball.
The second time that the Temptress faces Megamind, she's prepared, and she has time to use her powers.
They don't work on him.
They don't work on him the third time she faces him; they don't work on the fourth time; they don't work on the fifth.
They work on Metro Man; they even work, after a fashion, on Megamind's sidekick, who's a fish in a robot suit, for god's sake.
But they don't work on Megamind.
The sixth time they don't work on him is when Roxanne realizes that they actually don't work on him at all. No matter how hard she hits him with them. No effect.
She overtaxes her powers badly, that time, ends up in the prison for a day and a half. When she gets home, she takes a bath in the apartment bathtub, the water as hot as the creaky old pipes will produce.
They don't work on him. Her powers don't work on him. Of all the people.
The universe hates her, Roxanne decides. It's playing with her, torturing her like a cat with a mouse.
...to be continued.
Happy day 10 of my Birthday Fic Month! Thank you all so much for continuing to read and review my stories; it really means a lot to me, and makes me so happy!