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Megamind brings recordings to Earth with him: his parents telling him what little they had time to record before they send him into the dark of the sky. And songs from home, his parents singing to him and each other in their language, because these are as important as words—in a time when they had no time, they recorded these songs to send with him. There is, of course, a reason for this, because the people of Punkt do nothing without reason; the reason is because, in their words, when we sing, we hear each other; you must listen for the people who hear your soul.
Megamind assumes this means he would be able to hear his soulmate when they sing, if he had one. But he moves through life in silence, hearing nothing that can't be attributed to vibrations in the air around him. The first human songs he learns are the ones his uncle Guduza sings to help him sleep.
He tries to teach Guduza to sing, when he's older, but humans have no syrinx to give them voices like the people of Punkt. If there's another way for humans to sing, Megamind doesn't know what it is.
(Punkt is a word Megamind borrows from his Glau compatriot, whose language was larynx-based and can be expressed in human alphabets, by human voices.)
(Wayne is from the Glaupunkt quadrant of their binary star system and Megamind is, therefore, from the Punktglau quadrant. He assumes, at first, that this is because Glautian is not as nuanced as Punktsyk, but later he learns that it's because Wayne's language, native to a people capable of moving through three and a half dimensions, relies heavily on indicators of proximity and relative position.)
He decides it doesn't matter. He learns the songs his parents gave him and he sings them to himself to greet the dawn and dusk, sings them to himself while he works. He has no soulmate's music in his mind, but he tells himself this is okay. He grows up in silence and he throws himself into his work; he tells himself he has no time for romance anyway. He tells himself he is whole, and feels something in his chest go dark and brittle the day he finally believes it.
Roxanne grows up experiencing what she assumes are auditory hallucinations. She figures out pretty quickly that nobody else can hear the complicated birdsongs that sing in her ears, and she figures out pretty quickly that she needs to pretend not to hear them. Nobody else seems to hear things that aren't real, and the grown-ups around her get visibly worried when she mentions the birds that aren't there.
When she's very small, she usually only hears the birdsongs in the morning and evening. Warbling and chirping, mostly, although there is some melodic whistling, as well. She likes listening to the songs; they're pretty. They're soothing. They help her wake up and they help her sleep.
Shortly after she starts going to school, the birdsongs start coming all throughout the day, intermittently. This goes on for about two years, and Roxanne does her best to tune them out and listen to her teachers instead of the birds that aren't there. She learns to write earlier than many of her peers, because she needs to take notes.
This is also when she teaches herself to warble with her pinkie fingers in her mouth, holding water or saliva cupped on or under her tongue. The birdsongs are complicated and she can't mimic all of them, but Roxanne is a good mimic and a fast learner. And this is a fun talent to showcase when her family goes camping or as part of getting-to-know-you games at school, as long as she doesn't mention actually hearing the birdsongs.
And she does manage to nail down two or three of the set of thirty-odd calls that she hears, learns to weave their shivering tunes around her tongue, warbling haunting quartertones around the whistling notes. Roxanne is proud of herself for this, even if she can't share her specific accomplishment with her friends.
She figures, it's not hurting anyone. It isn't dangerous, just…strange.
Sometimes, in the two years when the birdsongs come throughout the day, Roxanne hears a voice, a child's voice, singing in a language she doesn't know. That throws her for a loop. It happens very, very rarely, but the few songs it sings are gentle.
She still hears the birdsongs most frequently. Once, she hears both at the same time, the child's voice and the birds that aren't there, and this is completely godawful because she is trying to take a math test, ugh.
Sometimes she thinks maybe hallucination isn't the right word.
The first time it happens, Roxanne is eight years old and standing on a subway platform with her mother. She's humming one of the voice-songs to herself when the older black lady standing next to her starts smiling and singing along with her. The lady tells Roxanne's startled mother it's a lullaby, tells Roxanne she used to sing it to her children when they were small, in KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. Thula thul, thula baba, thula sana, thul'ubab uzobuya, ekuseni—
Roxanne says she doesn't know where she learned it. Maybe at school. But her song makes the lady with the bright cloth wrapped around her hair smile, so she's reassured that hearing songs nobody else can hear must not be a bad thing. Even if most of them are birds that aren't there.
The lady and Roxanne's mother chat for a while, until the train comes.
(A few months later, Roxanne's mother will call the number on the card the lady gave her and ask if the lady remembers Roxanne, and could she please have the lady's daughter's contact information; she needs to ask if Roxanne might be worked into her tutoring schedule. Ms. Ndengezi-Krishnan teaches Roxanne tricks with numbers she'll remember for the rest of her life. Roxanne is good at remembering; she has to be, in order to learn the songs in her mind.)
Shortly after that, Roxanne mostly stops hearing the birdsongs while she's at school and starts only hearing them in the mornings and evenings again.
And there's a second child's voice, now, sometimes. She hears this one more often than the first one, but it sings terribly. Its voice is scratchy and it can't carry a tune at all.
The first voice stops singing almost entirely, and when Roxanne does hear it, it's always in the middle of the night and it's almost always Thula Baba. She almost never remembers it when she wakes up.
But the second voice seems to grow as Roxanne does, on the rare occasions she hears words instead of birdsong. This voice doesn't get much better at singing, even in languages she does understand. But it is singing, it's always singing, no matter what language it uses. She never hears the voice speak.
(the birdsongs, Roxanne thinks, are they birdsongs or are they song-songs that sound like birds?)
It's a boy's voice, she realizes when she's in her early teens. She wasn't expecting that. She would have figured a voice inside her head would be a voice like hers.
Huh. Well, it's still not hurting anyone. She shrugs, and moves on with her life, and sometimes tries to sing the songs she hears even though she's really not sure about the tune or the words. She worries for a while when the singing starts happening less frequently. One day, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, she's climbing onto the school bus to go home when she hears it begin a song and break off two seconds in, and she doesn't hear it again for eight whole months. Roxanne gets seriously worried, then.
But then it sings clear in her ears one morning and makes her jump so badly she drops her bowl of cereal, and she almost cries, she's so relieved.
The birds that aren't there sing less than they did before, after that, but they do sing, and Roxanne is glad to have them back.
Some of the birdsongs are deeper, now, and there are a few new ones. Some of these sound more like whalesong than birdsong, which is nice. Whalesong is easier for Roxanne to mimic, once she learns to curl her hands around each other in front of her mouth to make an echo chamber.
Her whistling trick still reliably amazes people at parties, though.
Megamind doesn't sing where people can hear him, anymore. He doesn't sing in prison and he doesn't sing in school and he doesn't sing under the sky. He sings himself into waking and he sings himself to sleep and he sings sometimes when he's working, and that's all, and he tells himself that's good enough.
The duets his parents sang together hurt, but he learns them and sings them anyway, both parts separately, one at a time. If he had a soulmate to sing with him, they could sing together no matter how far apart they were, because they would hear each other as clearly as if they were standing side by side. But Megamind's people are dead and Megamind sings into silence and Megamind receives no answer from the gravitational well of the black hole, not even an echo.
She's in her junior year of college the second time she wonders about the hallucinations. There's a half-circle of women singing near the steps of City Hall, drumming up interest and handing out programs for a concert that evening, and Roxanne is walking past as they finish one song and start singing another, and—she feels—she honestly feels like she's been struck by lightning. She knows that song. She knows that song. It's one of the ones she started hearing in middle school. The voice in Roxanne's head may not be able to carry a tune, but its songs are recognizable.
She takes a program. The group is Russian, the song is Russian, the song has a name, what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck. The subway platform memory feels like light-years ago, long ago and far away; Roxanne was never expecting to recognize a song again as an adult.
She goes to sleep that night with birdsong in her ears and her head spinning with confusion.
Once, only once, he thinks he hears something. He's making his escape after breaking into a museum vault at New Year's, availing himself of the soiree upstairs as a handy distraction, when he hears, from far off—
—not know if you are still around—
A crack splinters through the dark, brittle thing inside him and Megamind stops dead in his tracks. Stops breathing. He turns his head, tips it sideways, trying for a better angle to listen.
—don't have you walking by my side, but I have you here inside my heart—
His heart in his mouth, he puts the canvas-wrapped statuette on the floor and shoves his fingers in his ears, but—
The song cuts out. His heart sinks back down into its hollow inside his chest where it belongs. Ah, yes, Megamind thinks, the recordings; I guess he didn't destroy them, then, but he's in too much pain to get angry about them being used to entertain at a fucking New Year's Eve soiree.
He picks up the statuette and tucks it under his arm and makes his escape, biting his lip until he tastes copper.
(He also picks up a Van Eyck on his way out in the faint hope that it will make him feel better, but it doesn't. He goes to sleep that night curled up on his side in the silence, unable to sing.)
The third time it happens, she's just kind of absently messing around on YouTube and somehow she's started watching old videos of Queen from live shows, and suddenly it's Freddie goddamn Mercury singing a Hungarian folk song at a concert in Budapest in 1986. It's a pretty song, Roxanne has to admit, slow and sort of sweetly sad, but she is completely certain she has never heard it with her ears before in her life.
This is, she thinks, possibly some kind of X-Files nonsense. She cannot hallucinate songs that actually exist unless she's heard them somehow, somewhere. Can she?
She doesn't know, and she's more than a little bit freaked out about that. But…once again, it isn't hurting anyone. It's just a voice that sings in her head, badly. She's googled just about everything she can think of on auditory hallucinations but she has no other symptoms of anything she can identify.
By this point, Roxanne has refined her whistling trick and learned a few more of the birdsongs, a couple of the whalesongs, and one of the combination bird-whale songs, and she thinks—sometimes—she can hear something like meter, there, something like a rhythm. She's getting better at picking it out.
Roxanne doesn't say much, the first time Megamind kidnaps her. She just sits and watches him, her eyes narrowed, her mouth a thin line. But she doesn't scream at him or at the sight of him, and she doesn't cry, which makes a nice change. The last two humans he kidnapped both cried, and honestly, Megamind could do without that.
She just watches him. She gasps once while the cameras are rolling, but other than that she seems…reasonably unfazed. Interesting. He likes interesting.
The fourth time he kidnaps her, she says hello to Minion and apologizes for not remembering his name. Doesn't bat an eye at him, doesn't jump at all when she sees him. This is a first. This is a first ever with Minion in the gorilla suit. Humans tend not to react well to Minion.
Interesting again, Miss Ritchi, Megamind thinks, and finds himself warming to her.
As an adult, Roxanne hears the birdsongs throughout the day. They're sporadic, intermittent, sometimes almost mingled. But she never hears them during a kidnapping.
Well, she supposes when she realizes this two years in, that makes some sense. She's on high alert during kidnappings, she's on her toes. Not scared, but—ready. Focused. She has to be on her toes around Megamind if she's going to verbally spar with him and try to make his eyes dance.
(No amount of focus has ever made any kind of difference before, but Roxanne can't think of any other way to explain it.)
Five years after Megamind starts kidnapping her, something goes wrong. His battlesuit crashes to the ground, venting coolant into the snow. Megamind doesn't eject properly and Roxanne sees scalding-hot steam hissing into the carapace of the suit, sees sparks in the steam and smoke rising up from the tangle of mangled metal, hears Minion scream and watches him lunge off the edge of the building she's perched on and dive for the wreckage. He vanishes into the steam and when he emerges, carrying a limp blue-and-black figure, he's whistling something; Roxanne hears him warbling like a bird and squeaking like a dolphin and—what—
"Oh crud," Metro Man says, alarmed, and he dives down, too. Minion snarls at him and drives him back with Megamind cradled in one arm, his free hand wrapped around an energy sword he pulled from somewhere. Metro Man puts up a "fight," but Minion is thundering away down the street within thirty seconds.
Roxanne is staring after them with her eyes huge and her jaw slack because—she knew a couple of those whistles, she recognized one or two of those sounds—words, she realizes, they're words—oh fuck—
She has no idea what this means.
She also has no idea what it means that her heart is jackhammering in her chest like it's trying to escape. The steam—god, is he going to be okay? Is he—(she knew the whistles, the tripletone warble-chirp and the descending whistleclick)—is Megamind dead?—(tripletone warble and descending whistleclick; they sound different spoken instead of sung and she has no idea what either of them mean but)—he can't be dead, he can't be. He can't.
Roxanne doesn't hear birdsong for the rest of the day, but she wakes up in the middle of the night to Thula Baba being sung in a wobbly voice she now recognizes as definitely belonging to Minion. She rolls onto her side, hugging her spare pillow, her eyes wide in the dark, and sings along, desperately hoping it helps—kukh'inkanyezi, zi-holel' ubaba, zimkhanyisela indlel'e ziyak-haya—
She calls Metro Man the next morning, early, and demands that he take her to Evil Lair. He refuses, of course, and Roxanne pushes him, tells him she absolutely must see Megamind. And Minion. Right now. Right now, I said. Yes, I know he's injured. Yes, I know the brainbots probably won't let me in. Yes, I know Minion won't want to see me.
"Wayne," she finally says, interrupting him mid-protest, "can Megamind sing?"
"No," he replies after a second, startled. "No, he's—totally crap at it. Never stopped him, but—no. Why?"
"Because I think you're wrong," Roxanne says flatly. "I think he can sing perfectly well, but not in any human languages. But—" She picks up her glass of water and takes some into her mouth, then sticks her pinkies between her lips and warbles her way through a couple lines of one of the songs she knows the best.
Wayne frowns. "Your birdcall trick?"
"I learned it because I hear it in my mind," she tells him. "I have heard birds that aren't there in my mind almost every day since I was a little, little kid. As far back as I can remember." She crosses her arms, flops back in her chair. "And sometimes really bad human singing, too. And I do realize how this sounds, but I think it's him, Wayne, I—yesterday, Minion said something in whistles and I—" She stops. The color is draining out of Wayne's face. "Okay," she says slowly. "What does that face mean?"
Wayne swallows. "So, uh. The Punktak—his people—they had, um." He's staring at her. "They had a thing where, where when you sing, your—your soulmate hears you."
Roxanne recoils, startled. Your what?
"And—and he's—Roxie, okay, you do know he's in love with you, right?"
She jerks back like he's slapped her. "That is not something you get to tell me," she snaps, sharp. "Wayne, honestly, if that was something he wanted me to know, he'd tell me himself, how dare you?"
He shakes his head hard, holds his hands up, palms out. "Okay, okay, I know," he says, very quickly. "But cards on the table, Roxie. I'm putting it out there because apparently you're literally his soulmate, and that's…probably one shock too many for him right now. So, no, I am absolutely not taking you to the Lair right now. No. Full stop."
"Wayne, I swear to god—"
"Full fucking stop, Roxie," he says, equally sharp, and she stops, genuinely startled at the profanity. Wayne sighs and drops his shoulders. "Look," he says, sounding suddenly very tired, "he thinks he doesn't have one, okay? He can't hear you singing. He thought there would never be one, for him, he—"
"You know this…how? Exactly?" she asks, suspicious. Wayne grimaces.
"Because of some seriously crappy stuff I did when we were kids," he says. "Stuff I'd really rather not go into. I was—we were almost fifteen, and I—I did some stuff I still regret, Roxie, and—but it's none of your business exactly how I know. That's between him and me. But I know. And—"
"Fifteen," she whispers, her heart squeezing uncomfortably. She's a year older than Wayne, she already knows. And she already knew he and Megamind went to school together. And this, this soulmate stuff, this strikes her as being something deeply, intensely personal, and if Wayne knows…"This was in November?"
He doesn't reply, but the way he freezes answers her question just as well.
Roxanne pulls a shaky breath. "Wayne, I don't know what 'stuff' you pulled," she says in a low voice, "but he stopped singing for eight months. So, yeah," she whispers, "yeah, I sure hope you do still regret it."
His jaw flexes and he presses his lips together, but he nods.
Roxanne sits and breathes for a minute. And. Thinks.
That…okay, so, that was Megamind, all those years, then. It wasn't her, it was—she was right, it was X-Files stuff. Okay. Well, that's okay, then. And—she isn't hallucinating. Apparently she never was. Huh.
"Is he my soulmate, too, then?" she asks quietly, thinking she wouldn't mind and won't be surprised if he is.
But Wayne shakes his head. "I dunno," he says, still subdued. "I'm not sure humans have soulmates. If you do, you don't have any way to find them. I think the Punktak only developed whatever this is because they were already paired up with the, uh, the minion-fish. It's all that…that woo-woo psychic brain stuff, you know?
"But look, Roxie, I know you're gonna talk to him about this at, at some point, but…be careful, okay?" He fidgets. "He's…he's kinda sensitive about the whole bird thing. And. Like I said, he doesn't think he has one, so—wait 'til you're sure, huh?"
But—even if he never heard her singing, he still—
"But he found me," she whispers. "He…he found me." She swallows hard, thinking, I need to talk to him, I need to talk to Minion, I need, I need, I need— but she knows Wayne is right and what she needs is to hold off until she's sure about how she feels.
She's sure. She reviews some footage of the end of that last battle when Megamind fell, the steam and the smoke and Megamind blistered and bleeding into Minion's fur, and Hal makes some crack about what do Megamind and a newspaper have in common? they're both black and blue and red all over, and Roxanne wants to throw up and she wants to punch Hal in the teeth more than she's ever wanted anything else in her entire life.
Except to see Megamind. She wants that right now even more than she wants to stomp Hal's jaw against the sidewalk.
So. Yeah. She's sure.
The trouble is, there's no way Megamind will believe her if she just tells him. She'd prefer not to startle him with this, but…she can't see how else to do it in a way that won't result in him hitting her with the spray before she has a chance to demonstrate. And he'll probably never speak to her again, so…
So she starts carrying a razorblade taped carefully under the band of her watch. The next time she's kidnapped, a full month later, she cuts through the ropes on her hands while he isn't looking and pretends she's still tied until she's gathered enough saliva on and under her tongue. And then she puts her fingers in her mouth.
Everything is blissfully normal until it isn't. Megamind is making a couple fine-tuning adjustments when he hears a voice he doesn't recognize sing, rise up, follow me—
Megamind whips around, gasping like he's been stabbed, a knife in his back, a knife in his heart.
Roxanne. Roxanne knows—she knows this song, she—the recordings Wayne stole back in high school, she found them, she listened—she—how dare—how dare—
With love in your heart as the only song, she sings, and, there is no such beauty as where you belong, and, rise up, follow me; I will lead you home, and—
(how is she doing that, part of his brain wonders, but the rest of him is too angry to listen or think anything beyond how dare you)
"Enough," Megamind snarls, and Roxanne stops, blinking her eyes open, looking startled. He can feel what he must look like, can feel how his face must be contorted and ugly with grief and rage, but he can't bring himself to tone it down; Roxanne has just reached into his soul and taken hold and twisted. "That is enough."
"Megamind—"
"Fuck you," he hisses, baring his teeth. He's pressed himself back against his control panel, shaking his head, glaring at Roxanne through the tears standing in his eyes, trembling with panicky fury. "How—how dare you—I, and I—you—fuck you—" He curls forward, one hand braced against his control panel and the heel of the other grinding against his chest as he curls protectively away around his shattering heart, gasping, losing the fight against his tears. The dark, brittle thing in his chest is splintering.
"Oh," Roxanne says, sounding alarmed, and he hears a clatter and a soft sort of clunk and an oof that he knows means she's forgotten her ankles are still tied. "Megamind, no—it's not like that, it's not—I don't know what you're thinking but it's not—"
Megamind slaps his watch. "Minion," he grits out. "Minion, I need you here."
"Megamind please listen to me," Roxanne says desperately. "I—"
"Oh I think you've said quite enough."
"I'm your soulmate—"
His head snaps up. "How dare you!" he shrieks, stumbling away like she's kicked him in the gut. She just said that? What the hell is she trying to do with this? What angle is this? He knew they weren't friends but he never thought she hated him; she was never so cruel before, what—how could he possibly have miscalculated so badly—
"Sir? Miss Ritchi?" Minion says, clanking in, and oh thank everything, at least Megamind isn't alone for this.
Roxanne twists around on the floor. There's no way she can whistle now, her mouth is too dry. Megamind speaks behind her, starts to address his friend, but Roxanne talks over him, staring up at Minion from the floor and blurting, "Why do you sing in isiZulu?"
Minion pulls up short, jerks back. "What?"
"I hear you at night, sometimes," Roxanne says, speaking very quickly because any minute now Megamind is going to come with the spray and if he won't listen then hopefully Minion will. "I hear you at night sometimes and a lady on a subway platform said it was a lullaby when I was eight years old; why do you sing in isiZulu?"
Minion stares at her. Roxanne stares back with tears in her eyes, now, too. She's too scared to break his gaze, too terrified to look around and see what Megamind's face looks like right now.
After a moment, she gulps, then chokes out, "Thul—thula thul, thula mtwana, thula sana—thul'ubaba uzobuya ekuseni—thu—" Her voice cracks and she gulps again. Minion's eyes are bigger than she's ever seen them. "Minion," she says, "Minion, I woke up in the middle of the night after he got scalded in that last battlesuit and you were singing in my head and I thought, I thought he might be really hurt, I tried to sing back but I guess you can't hear me—and I hardly ever hear you sing anymore; you don't usually; you never did as much singing and I don't think I've ever heard you do one of the birdsongs," she hears Megamind's sharp inhale at that but she keeps going, "but I wanted Metro Man to bring me here and he wouldn't and I told him about the singing and I showed him my whistling, but he said—he said something about doing something bad, years ago, and—he told me, he explained about the soulmate thing and Minion I think—I'm pretty sure I'm—"
"Is that how," Megamind whispers, "is that how you heard them."
Roxanne glances at him. He's still trembling and his hands are clenched into fists at his sides, but his face has gone almost frighteningly blank.
"No," she says, "no, Megamind, I just said, I hear them in my head."
"Liar," he hisses.
"Miss Ritchi," Minion says, also quietly, "when you said, you showed Metro Man your whistling. What is that?"
She swallows hard, shakes her head. "I can't, I can't show you right now, my mouth is too dry."
Minion turns on his heel and clanks away without a word. Roxanne squeezes her lip between her teeth and clenches her eyes closed. This has gone. Horribly, horribly wrong. She had thought, maybe showing him. Maybe that would work. But she was wrong.
Well, she has nothing else to lose, at this point, and dry-mouthed or no she can still sing with her larynx. She'll try the Russian one, then, the one Megamind used to try to sing, the one she heard the women sing on the steps of City Hall back in school. "Vyydu noch'yu v pole s konem," she begins, "nochkoy temnoy tikho poydem," but Megamind just squints at her and grits his teeth. No? No, then. She'll try a different one. "Tavaszi szél vizet áraszt—"
"Why are you doing this?" he interrupts, lips twisting. He has both arms folded over his chest, his fingers tucked under and around his ribs, his shoulders rounded like he's in pain. "Miss Ritchi, I do not have a soulmate. I have listened for the people who hear my soul and I hear nothing. And no wonder. All of my people are dead."
"Then why can I hear you?" she asks, desperate. "When you sing? Why can I hear you? All my life, Megamind, you—I've had you with me all my life—"
Megamind sneers, rolls his eyes, starts to turn away.
"You don't believe me," Roxanne says. "You don't think I hear you? Do you—do you think I'm lying; why would I lie?"
"Why wouldn't you?" he fires back, snapping back around to face her. "Every other human who heard those recordings—those birdsongs—thought they were a total joke. Just the funniest things in the world." His shaking voice goes high and mocking. "Oh, look, a bird that thinks it's a boy; a bird that taught itself to speak; it even lives in a cage. Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?" He scoffs in his throat and hugs his arms tighter around his chest and shoves off the control panel. "See the pretty birdy," he mocks, eyes flashing dangerously as he starts to stalk back and forth, "sing us a song, sing us a song! want some birdseed, pretty birdy; want a cracker, pretty Polly?"
"Megamind," Roxanne whispers, horrified.
"I threw up birdseed for a week," he snarls, pulling his lips back from his teeth, still pacing like a restless tiger, long cape flickering behind him. "They held me down and they shoved it down my throat and they got it stuck in my crop and it took me a week to get rid of all of it.
"So I do hope you'll understand," he spits, "if I have some difficulty giving you the benefit of the doubt on this ill-conceived idea of a joke, Miss Ritchi. It isn't fucking funny."
"I'm not laughing!" she cries, feeling sick. "Megamind, that is—completely horrible, oh my god, but this isn't a joke; I do hear you when you sing! I am telling the truth!"
Pain flashes behind the rage on his expressive face. "Stop."
"Maybe I don't broadcast like you can," Roxanne tells him, desperate to fix this somehow and thinking if Wayne was involved with the birdseed thing she will never speak to him again. "Maybe that's why you never heard me. Or, or maybe I don't have a soulmate, I don't know. But god, Megamind, I—I don't think the songs are funny; I don't think this is a joke."
(But other humans think they're a neat trick, she remembers. At parties. At getting-to-know-you games in school. She feels belatedly awful about using them to entertain, but—well, how was she to know they bore some kind of cultural significance? She thought she was hallucinating! She won't do it anymore, now that she knows, that's for damn sure.)
She reaches for the ropes binding her ankles, but Megamind freezes and drops a hand to his gun. Roxanne lifts her hands away, her heart aching.
"Okay," she whispers. I love you, she wants to say, but she can already see how well that will go over right now. "But…but Megamind, the songs in human languages…those don't sound anything like your other singing. How else would I know them?"
"Oh, please. You're smart; you've clearly done your research," he says, still in the same low, angry voice, resuming his restless pacing. "Clearly. The prison for the criminally gifted is one of the highest-security in the world; it's home to people from all over this planet; it isn't hard to assume I would know folk songs and lullabies from my uncles after growing up in my birdcage."
"Water!" Minion announces, clanking back with a bottle of it and tossing it to Roxanne. "Drink. And then show me." His expression is very grim.
She nods, trying to gather her wits, trying not to burst into tears at—all of it, everything, really—Minion is angry and Megamind is angry and Roxanne is angry because 'kinda sensitive about the bird thing' is not even close to a comprehensive trigger warning, Wayne, what the genuine screaming hell. But she doesn't have a whole lot of room to be angry about that right now; mostly she's just—horrified and full of regret and—frantic to be understood because she has one chance to get this right or she'll never see them again—
"I, I learned how to do this when I was a kid," Roxanne says, her voice trembling. "I've gotten better since then, I…I still can't do all of them, but…here, let me try…"
And she takes a drink of water and puts her fingers in her mouth and, to Minion's total shock, she sings, you are in my mind all the time; you are in my heart, deep in my heart; you are in my bones, in the core of my spine; when I sleep you're here lying under my head—
Megamind stops pacing and joins her, singing the countermelody. There's rage in his eyes at first; his hands are clenched into fists at his sides; he means to trip her up, Minion thinks. This isn't surprising.
But Roxanne never falters. She keeps to her melody despite the countermelody's multiharmonic dissonance. She knows this song well, she knows it well; her articulation and intonation are perfect and (oh holy shit, Minion thinks, oh holy shit) Megamind keeps singing as his hands slowly go loose at his sides, as his eyes go wide and shocked.
He sings like it's being dragged out of him, sending his warbling, fluting notes into the huge echoing space of the battledeck with tears streaking his eyeliner down his face, because when I sing, I hear your harmonies; when I speak, I hear your voice; when I walk, I feel your steps under mine; dream you walking by my side—those are the words, but no, he doesn't, he never has; Minion knows this.
Megamind's face crumples entirely and tears dump down his cheeks but Roxanne's eyes are closed and she doesn't see. She keeps on singing. So does Megamind, even though he has to slide down to sit on the floor because his legs won't hold him.
Minion stands with his mouth open, stunned speechless.
If I knew that I was in your mind, if I knew that I was in your heart—if I knew that you would come back to me, I would sit and wait—I would stay so still—
If you were here, we would have hands; if you were here, we would have lips—if you were here we would sing—we would sing a new song, voices rising—sounding against the sky—
That's when Roxanne trips on a note and inhales the wrong way, sucks water into her trachea, and the song breaks into a storm of coughing. Well, she thinks, gulping water from the bottle until she can get her breath back, so much for that. But Megamind sang, too; that's…hopefully a good sign? Is that a good sign?
Then she looks up. Megamind is huddled on the floor by his controls, his knees to his chest and both arms up over his face, shaking violently.
Roxanne's heart jumps into her throat and she pulls the knot on her ankles apart in a few short seconds so she can scramble over to him and pull him into her arms, spikes and high collar and all. "Megamind," she whispers, shaky and afraid. "Megamind, oh."
He goes totally rigid when she touches him but she puts her arms around his back anyway, hugging him under his cape and his spiked mantle, and holds onto him with all her strength. His knees are still up to his chest but he's small enough under all the spikes that this isn't terribly difficult.
"But," he chokes. "You can't—you can't—"
"I'm sorry," she tells him, frantic, tears in her voice, "I am so, so sorry, I had no idea it would hurt you like this—I had to tell you somehow, and, and I didn't think you'd wait for me to explain if I just said it; I hoped if I showed you—but—Megamind, love, I'm sorry—"
She twists a hand in his cape. She's been kidnapped enough times to know how to trigger the safety on his shoulder array: one sharp yank and the mantle pops free, and then Roxanne can bundle her arms tighter around him and hide her face in the smooth curve of his neck.
"I don't think it's funny," she chokes out, voice still raspy with water. "I promise I'm not laughing, and—and what happened to you was horrific, oh my god, I'm so sorry—and I don't know what the words mean and I can't do all your songs, but I, I can do a few of them. And I do want to know what they mean, I want—anything you'll give me, everything you'll give me about this—Megamind, I'm pretty sure you're my soulmate, too, and—even if you aren't, even if it's one-sided, I do love you."
He lets out a sharp, broken kind of noise and pulls back. Panicked, Roxanne clutches at him, but apparently he's just trying to pull his spiky arms out from between them so he can wrap them around her. She strokes a hand up over the back of his head and turns just enough to press her mouth against the cool skin of his jaw, rocking him from side to side as he cries, as the dark brittle thing in his chest shatters apart like glass.
"I didn't, I didn't think an-anyone could ever," he finally gasps into the space between them. "And you-you, you heard me, you heard me, I—Miss—I—all these years—"
"I know," she chokes, dragging her fingertips against his leathers like she'll be able to twist them in the way he has his hands tangled in her sweater. "I know."
"—you heard me," he gasps again, "you heard me you heard me you heard me—"
She has no idea what convinced him, but she's too dizzy with relief to question it. "I did, I did, I—I'm so sorry you couldn't hear me singing back, I'm so sorry you thought you were alone this whole time—
"And I, I don't know if—maybe you are alone, maybe you are, but I hear you and, and I think I started falling in love with you that time you got so offended at me for criticizing your welding; I don't know if you even remember." He sort of jerks in her arms, at that, but Roxanne can't seem to stop talking. "And I didn't think about it for the longest time, I never thought about what I'd do if you ever got really hurt, but I—I woke up and Minion was singing and I haven't heard Minion sing in years, and he sounded like he was crying, and you—you were quiet for days and then I heard you and," she swallows, "I was so relieved, Megamind, you have no idea; please kiss me—"
She barely gets the words out before he's crushing his mouth to hers with both his hands in her hair and her sweater dragging up her back where it's caught on his gloves. He kisses her like he'll never need to breathe again, like this is breathing, and when Roxanne opens her mouth to him he tastes like smoke and metal and freshwater tears. She presses her hands to his narrow back and cleaves to him, desperate to have her mouth on him, desperate for him to believe her—he seems like he might but she can't be sure. Eventually she brings her hands up to cradle his head the way he's holding hers, and she rubs her thumbs in little circles on his skin and keeps kissing him until finally he breaks away and shoves his forehead against hers, panting into the space between them.
"Please believe me," Roxanne chokes.
"Yes," Megamind gasps, nodding or nuzzling against her, tears still dripping off the end of his long nose. "Please forgive me?"
"Yes," she says, pushing her head against his, her mind in a whirl. Honestly, she can't think of anything to forgive but if he wants her forgiveness, he has it. "Megamind, I'm so sorry, I should have just said something first—warned you—"
He gulps. "No," he tells her, "no, you couldn't know. I'm—also sorry, I—this is you, it was you; I trust you—well, mostly, but I—I should have known you weren't trying to hurt me, I—hoped you wouldn't, I—"
She shakes her head. "I can't blame you at all, I had no idea about any of that, if I'd known I never would have done it that way."
He nods, tightens his fingers in her hair.
He still feels sick and vaguely panicky—his mantle is gone and Roxanne is so close and human contact does not typically end well for him, no matter how he craves it—but this is Roxanne. Her hands are soft and warm on his skin, her hair is soft and warm in his fingers, her body is soft and warm in his arms. He isn't trapped, she doesn't want to trap him, she's holding him. This is. He's being held. This is okay, he's okay, he's wanted this so badly for so long and now he has it and he's going to be okay.
"Can I ask what made you realize?" Roxanne asks, her voice thick.
"It—that song," he says, trying to calm down. "That song occupies a narrow range of articulation, but it is—one of the more complicated ones, tonally. I expected the harmony to throw you off as soon as I started, but—you kept singing. Perfectly in tune." He shakes his head. There's no way Roxanne could maintain a complex melody in a language she has to use water and fingers and breath for against an equally-complex countermelody unless she was truly familiar with the piece. No way, not unless she grew up hearing it, as Megamind did. "And you sang it the way I do," he adds. "There's a scoop in the third line that I…well, it's distinctive."
He leans back to look at her face, and Roxanne slides her hands down to cup his cheeks. She blinks at him a couple times, then gives him a wobbly little smile. "Your eyeliner is smeared all down your face," she says, laughing a little, rubbing the dark tracks with her thumbs.
Megamind snorts, returns her wobbly smile. "So is yours." Then he leans in and brushes a kiss over both of her eyes before finally pressing his lips to her forehead the way he's wanted to ever since she told him his welding was sloppy nine kidnappings in. (She started loving him then, she said; that was when he started loving her, too.) She has her arms around his shoulders again, and when he starts to sit back, she pulls him into another hug, shoves her face down between her arm and the side of his neck.
This is actually happening, he realizes suddenly, this is actually happening. Roxanne heard him singing and she learned a way to sing back, she's—he has a soulmate, she's his soulmate, he has a soulmate and she heard him and he found her.
He inhales sharply and scoots closer to her, wraps his arms around her and cuddles her in against him, head spinning, heart thumping painfully.
"I love you," he tells her, his voice low and very shaky, and feels her hands clench against his back.
"I love you, too," she mumbles into his chest. "Megamind, I love you, too."
Stunned, he brings his chin down to rest on her shoulder, staring into the middle distance as he tries to get his head around all this. He belatedly remembers Minion, and looks up—Minion jumps a little when Megamind catches his eye, and then he makes a sort of backwards-pointing motion, mouths, I'll go? Talk later? Megamind nods a little, and Minion nods back. Dinner? he mouths, pointing at Roxanne. Megamind nods again, and Minion gives him a thumbs up and then makes himself scarce.
Megamind holds onto Roxanne, absently petting her and trying to get used to the unfamiliar sensation of being held like this. It's soft. He likes it.
But eventually his legs start to cramp up, so he has to sit back and then get to his feet. He tugs Roxanne up after him with both hands.
"Well," he says, a little shakily, clearing his throat. "We'll have to take a raincheck on the evil scheme for today. I'm…far too wrung-out for evil right now." He swallows, takes a deep, shuddering breath, and releases it. Lifts his eyes to Roxanne's face, hopeful. "Stay for dinner?"
He's rewarded with a slow smile and a nod. "I would love that." And then she steps in and—hooray, oh—pulls him into yet another hug, her whole body pressed to his, and Megamind curls himself around her, holds her close against him until he finally does feel her start to pull away.
Roxanne steps back, but Megamind doesn't mind because there's something light and fluttery inside his chest, now, something that flares bright and strong when Roxanne tangles her fingers with his and squeezes his hand. He isn't sure if it's his soul or his heart; whatever it is, it feels…nice. Warm. It feels like a safe thing.
"I am so glad you found me," Roxanne tells him. "You can't hear me but you found me anyway, that's incredible."
Megamind arches an eyebrow in a move that would be imperious if not for the shy way his eyes are shining and says, "I think I know the other half of my soul when it scolds my welding," and Roxanne bursts into laughter as bright and strong as the warmth building between them and within him, and—there is no such beauty as where you belong, Megamind thinks, and he rises up and follows her as she leads him home.