A huge thank-you to my brilliant beta, HaydenXCharm. Any remaining errors are my own!

Megamind Unmasked

Paired work in History. Roxanne took the window of opportunity to slide into the spare seat beside Bernard, flipping her books open. "Looks like it's you and me, huh?"

"Like I need your help," he said.

Roxanne blinked. Wow. Okay. Everyone was a little bitchy in high school. She needed to earn his trust. "Never said you did. So, is there any topic you'd like to work on?"

She tried to remember what they'd been up to, what kind of cramming she needed to do for the history exams, what she'd written her essay on.

"Does it even matter, at this point? This pointless busywork is just a distraction." He turned away from her and pulled out his notepad. In it were sketches of Metro Dude and Superman. Roxanne sighed and smiled as bravely as she could. She found her page in the textbook and began reading.

She offered to carry his books for him between classes. She asked him about comics and which ones would be good for a beginner. She asked him about whether or not he felt that the library should charge for overdue books or start a reserve collection so that students couldn't lock up vital resources so close to exams.

He sighed, shoulders slumping even lower, and he let the fire doors swing shut in her face as he entered the lunchroom. She reeled back, narrowly saving herself from a flat nose. She rushed to catch up to him in the line, only three spots behind him as he paid and made his way to a table. She set her tray down across from him firmly and tried to wear her most patient kind smile ever. Inside, she was breaking a little. It was like there was no trace of the man she'd been growing so fond of.

Bernard sighed and turned away from her. He opened his book and proceeded to ignore her, expertly, in fact. Roxanne sat her chin on her hand and stared down at her lunch. She had no appetite. She had never thought that trying to be nice to someone you genuinely liked would be so hard. Was she just a failure as a friend? Or had Bernard gone through some kind of transformation later in life? Perhaps he just had a lot of growing up to do. College changed some people a lot. Moving out changed people. Facing over a decade of terrorism from an evil supervillain changed people, too. Maybe now wasn't their time, and that's why she'd never noticed Bernard at school.

It was getting harder and harder for Roxanne to hang on to her memories of the future. What he had looked like? How he had smiled? How open his big green eyes looked?

Wait, green?

Roxanne jumped up and moved around to stare at Bernard once more. Not green. It was Bernard, but it wasn't her Bernard. What did that mean? Had the reset button failed? Had she been shunted off into an alternate reality? Was it some kind of punishment? You get to re-do things, but you can never get what you want?

No, that was a little too... fictional. Reality didn't work that way. Reality didn't punish you, it was just punishing. Roxanne could find a way around this, if she just put her mind to it. She'd find her real green-eyed Bernard, and she'd be there for him. She'd save Bernard, and she'd save Metro Man. That was just how things were going to be.

Bernard rolled his eyes and shoved her away. "Get out of my face."

"Fine, fine." Roxanne said. "I can tell when I'm not-"

Suddenly, she heard him. His voice. Her Bernard. She'd know that cry of excitement and joy anywhere.

"Oh! Oh, you fantastic fish, you!" That was definitely Bernard, except it wasn't Bernard as she knew him.

Roxanne had gone to see a film in 3D once. She hadn't liked it very much, but that had more to do with getting kidnapped right afterwards. She had worn the gimmicky glasses and she'd gotten a headache. She'd read the news online when they'd first been released; she'd learned how they worked. Depth is produced by both your eyes processing slightly different images of the world around you. Your brain fits the ideas together. It triangulates. It tells you how far away it thinks things are.

Without looking, two images overlapped in Roxanne's mind. Bernard's wide green eyes and Megamind's furrowed eyebrows above narrowed eyes that were just as green. Hearing his voice like that had made everything become clear. Depth perception. Stereo vision. She had never known Bernard. Somehow, Megamind had assumed his identity, disguised himself as a normal human being. He had been playing the long con with her. He had even been cleaning up the city, returning the paintings he'd stolen, faking reparation. No wonder there hadn't been any noise, any sign between Megamind disappearing and Bernard appearing in the Evil Lair. Her instincts had been spot on. Bernard had been dangerous. Whatever he'd had planned for her before she'd pushed that button, it had to be awful.

It felt awful enough as it was. She couldn't breathe. Her heart ached in her chest. Her eyes burned. She ducked her head down, grabbed her bag, and walked as fast as she dared to the nearest bathroom, where she proceeded to cry her heart out. She'd never loved anybody before Bernard. She'd never had the time. She'd never felt that kind of trust or delight. He'd been so smart, and so nice, and so funny. He had a job as demanding as hers, and he'd still made time for her, no matter what day of the week it was.

All right, so in hindsight, that was far less sweet, because she sincerely doubted that Megamind had bothered to show up for Bernard's shifts at the Museum, or... wherever archivists went when things were blown up. Still, she felt the loss of this person who had never existed, and all she could do was grieve.

She couldn't even get angry or even with Megamind, because the man who had done this to her was a decade and a half away from her. The version of him that she could talk to was younger. This boy had never killed anyone. He'd never drugged her or kidnapped her. He'd never set the stadium on fire, and he'd never hacked Metro Tower's antenna to transmit educational documentaries on engineering across every free to air channel in the county. He'd never tied her to a wooden board and put her on a conveyor belt moving towards a rusty saw; he'd never threatened her with anything substantial, nothing that could kill her.

'Her' Bernard had never existed.

Screw school. She was going home.

She cried until everything was out, nose running and face turning a blotchy pinkish red. She sat with her back against her bedroom door, keeping it shut, because she didn't have a lock, and her mother was worried. How could she not be? Roxanne was still, as far as she knew, a kid.

She hadn't lived with her mother in years, and she resented the comfort that she attempted to give. In the end, despite it all, Roxanne found herself wrapped reluctantly in a fluffy dressing gown with a mug of hot cocoa and an insipid romantic comedy on the television.

"Can we watch the news instead?"

Her mom hugged her. "Of course we can."

"This movie's my favourite, but I've seen it a thousand times now." Plus, it was pretty pathetic when you'd grown up and had actual relationships with actual people.

"Romance is for babies," her mom agreed.

It was like she'd learned the script for empathic parenting when Roxanne was five, and it hadn't changed since then. Ugh. But her mother didn't know that she had a thirty-something brain in her teenge body, and there was something to be said for being mothered. The cocoa was nice, and it was nice being taken care of. It was actually helping with the rage inside Roxanne's chest.

She still couldn't let go of Bernard, in her heart. She'd known him. She'd liked him a lot. He was coming close to the best thing that had ever happened to her. Why had Megamind had to go and ruin everything?

The news reported on the weather, Chechnya, the acquisition of KMCP media by Metro Industries. They were all little things that Roxanne hadn't noticed as a teenager, but revealed so much to an informed adult. How had she never seen it all? The Scott family had been slowly buying up little pieces of the banks, the media.

However, right now, she wasn't an informed adult. There was no guarantee she'd ever get back to herself. Her mom was looking at her expectantly. Her cocoa was going cold. She put the future aside and stopped worrying about it. She stopped avoiding the truth.

"I liked someone," Roxanne said. She didn't want to lie to her Mom. "He didn't turn out to be who I thought he was."

"Oh, sweetie." Her Mom pressed a warm, comforting hand to the top of her head. "It feels awful, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, it does."

Bernard was the only imaginary person Roxanne would miss more than life itself, she was sure of it.

Roxanne knew she should confront him, demand his help, try to get back to the future, but there was no guarantee that a teenage Megamind had the knowledge to hold a candle to his future skills. Wearing Bernard's face, he'd said that the physics were impossible. There was a chance that she'd triggered a prototype, a faulty machine. There might not be any going back. There was also the problem of Metro Dude.

Oh, if she had a choice she would go back, she would try to salvage the present that she'd been living in rather than risking changing the past. She didn't know what to do all on her own. Even if Bernard had never been real, he'd been an illusion of friendship. Roxanne felt all alone now.

Roxanne Ritchi wasn't a hero, but she sure as hell couldn't stand the thought of giving up and letting Metro Man die. She had to talk some sense into him! She decided she would confront Megamind, but that she'd take a week to get there. She would work through her feelings about Bernard before talking to Megamind, so that her anger wouldn't twist her words. As dumb as it sounded, it wasn't fair to Megamind to bring all her emotional baggage to a fight with him.

It wasn't like he'd done anything wrong yet. Roxanne had very strong feelings about fairness and justice. She wasn't about to change her values, even if it would make her feel better to yell at him.

All of her plans soured in her stomach as she remembered their deal together. Calculus. The library. Megamind, and Bernard.

She tried to catch Minion's eye in English, but her seat was too far from his, and so she had to keep that sinking feeling inside herself, dreading the afternoon. She had to study with them, because she needed to get into college, and that meant getting a passing grade.

She couldn't hide how uncomfortable it was, to approach what had basically become 'their' table in the library. Megamind had begun to smirk when he first saw her, but by the time she'd set her books down, he was frowning with sincere concern.

She wished she didn't recognise the expression. Part of her expected him to try to lighten the mood with a slightly socially awkward joke and a little half-shrug, but he wasn't putting any act on for her. He wasn't himself, as she knew him, whatever face he wore. He cleared his throat, as she pulled her chair out.

"Don't like the scenery?"

She blinked at him, until she realised what he meant. She wasn't watching Bernard like she usually did. She should have guessed that Megamind would notice. "Huh? Yeah. It was a case of mistaken identity. Look. About all this..."

He nodded. "I understand completely. This place closes too early, and the clientele is far too mainstream."

She nodded, and picked up her things again. "Sorry," she said.

"Not at all. Just lead the way, and we can resume our cram session in a more suitable location."

She rolled her eyes and was glad that Minion was there to give him a look of total disgust. "Where do you suggest?" She had to do it, she didn't have to like it, or to make it easy. She was going to make him work for anything she told him about Metro Dude.

"Er..." He really didn't get out much.

"The public library? My place? Your place? A coffee shop? There's only so many places in the area, that have chairs and these flat surfaces that I like to call tables." She gestured with her hands, in case he didn't quite understand what they looked like.

"I know what a table looks like! Genius, remember? I'd like to see you draw one. I'm not the one who's so far behind in math that she can't get with the times!"

They made it all the way down the corridor and out the doors before the pun made sense to her. She groaned. "Oh. Oh, that's bad. That delivery was way off. How could you even make a joke that stilted? Times table? Ugh."

Megamind brushed his fingers against his shirt collar. "I'm practising my banter."

Somehow, knowing that was worse than thinking that he was just a natural at it. It would have been cute in a dorky way, if it had been possible for a jerk like Megamind to be cute.

Being in the public library was unnerving. The last time she'd been in it, she'd been fifteen years in the future and laughing at Bernard's jokes. She picked a different table, just to get some distance from those memories, and spread her notes out. While she waited for Megamind to check what she'd tried at home by herself, she skimmed back over some things.

"I'm not that bad at it, am I? Never mind. I am. I am that bad at it."

"You just haven't studied, is all," Minion said kindly.

"Yeah. It feels like I haven't studied it for fifteen years."

Megamind frowned and tapped his finger on a page. "That's an oddly specific amount of time. Anyway, you're making progress, which proves that your brain is capable of storing this information. You just need to apply yourself more."

Roxanne pinched the bridge of her nose. "I just need to crawl into a hole and die, and then come back to life once exams are over!" She was a teenager, and she was facing exam week. She had license to get a little melodramatic.

"Well, you could always turn evil and set the school on fire. I'd be happy to drive your getaway car." Sarcastic, but he sounded halfway sincere and looked almost hopeful.

It was funny because she'd never do that, and she'd never trust him. It was safer to joke about how she'd never destroy the school than it was to talk about things a little more grounded in reality. He'd never spent any time with anyone other than Minion at school. He was capable of things that she wasn't, and a lot of it had to do with their individual situations.

She'd never seen it before, how pivotal high school had been for all of them. She could feel the hollow echo of her conversation with Bernard in the park, her wishing she'd been there for him with all her naivety.

She looked up at the right moment to catch his gaze. She'd been silent for too long, thinking. He'd fallen quiet, into his own thoughts. He looked naked. So raw, so open, compared to the Megamind she knew. He hadn't been expecting her to notice, from the way his eyes widened when he saw she was watching.

"No, that's okay," she said, trying to hang on to that feeling. "I think that if I turned evil, I'd be more into giant robots and explosions."

She waggled her eyebrows, in case he didn't realise that had been a joke. He snorted and looked up at her from under hooded eyes, like he wasn't quite sure it was okay to be in on the joke. She'd seen that expression on his face, albeit a little pinker and with hair on top. His lips quirked up in a little half-smile, and her heart quirked up right along with them.

Maybe she had known Bernard, all along.