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Here's how it goes. Once upon a time there was a villain, a hero, and a girl. They went to school together, and the villain was bad, and the hero was good, and the girl was rescued as much as she was kidnapped, so with all things considered, life wasn't that bad. But one day, the girl opens her eyes and looks, and she does not recognise the two boys standing on either side of her.
It's what nobody reports in the news about disasters. "And then everybody goes home, changes their socks, and the world carries on." There is no end to the story, and the smells of leaking fuel, burnt metal and the fuming chlorine from the city fountain wash so easily from Roxanne's body, it's hard to believe that she won't get a call at 8 a.m. from Hal asking her if he can buy her breakfast at a hotel or something. Everybody eats, right?
She is thirty. She went to high school with Megamind, which means she's known him for about sixteen years. More than half her life. She has only cared about whether he lived or died for the last twenty-four hours. A month, if you count the time she spent with his assumed identity. She's not sure if she can. There were bits of him that shone through, felt real. But Bernard was constantly backpedalling, avoiding topics, hedging his bets. It had been cute, he'd seemed awkward and shy, and that had appealed to her. She hadn't seen the difference, between his personality and the lies he was telling to hide his identity.
How many versions of a person did you have to see, to know them? Her heart had raced, as she'd wrapped her arms around him, knowing he would come for her. But it hadn't been him, it had been Minion. Surely you'd know. Dump a guy on a street in the rain, date him for a month, spend every week writing news articles about him, spend every day sitting in the same room as him in high school, you'd think she'd have been able to tell.
It's like vertigo. It is seriously like being thrown up in the air, over the top of an office building, and feeling clumsy and weightless as the world fails to make sense. Knowing that you'll never feel the ground again, until you die.
She bites her nails, and crosses her naked legs under herself. Sits in underpants and a clean singlet, in her living room, with scraps of paper from research that was a complete waste of time strewn around her. Bits of string hanging in the air. She'd liked the string. The string was a great idea of his. It worked, when you wanted to sort things together, and you didn't have the time to file them.
It's not so much any of the different faces he's worn, she's been in television for years. She's worn some faces of her own, to get through the day. It's not that she could spend most of her life so close to the love of her life, and not figure it out. She has also accidentally put her underpants on outside of her stockings. Some days, you just operate on auto-pilot. It's that on top of all this, she had thought she had him in her arms, and she didn't. She thought she'd watched him sacrifice himself to save her life, she'd gone through all of the feelings that involved, and she should have known, and she hadn't.
She picked an article on Megamind's reign of terror up from her coffee table. It was one thing to know that you could never truly connect with another person. That there was this cage of flesh and blood and bone, of the folds in your brain and the electric patterns of your synapses, so many small impassible worlds between self and other. It was another thing to love so utterly completely, and feel it.
She stared down at his elated, cruel grin in the photograph that led the article. He was posing beside City Hall, with a big blue paint-brush in hand. This image wasn't real, and this man in her head wasn't real. Bernard wasn't real, and Minion wasn't real, and Megamind the Villain wasn't real.
What if she was wrong about this, too? What if she was wrong, and she broke both their hearts?
She covered her face with her hand, and rubbed at that itchy spot just where the edge of her bangs brushed against her forehead. She didn't know what to do. She called him.
She could imagine him, as the phone rang. Maybe he was having a shower. He'd probably need one, after the day they'd had. Maybe he was at a work-table with a welding torch, repairing Minion's robotic suit. Maybe he was sitting in his swivel chair, looking up at his wall full of big ideas, and thinking about how they had all come crashing down around him.
“Roxanne!” He didn't pick up the phone, so much as explode down it with enthusiasm.
“I can't sleep,” she said. It was easy to slide into another self. To pretend that the week hadn't happened, and Bernard was at the other end of the line.
“Too much excitement?”
He sounded the same. Same voice. She really should have noticed that. She had fallen in love with that voice of his. It made her stomach do flips.
“You could say that. How's...” Bad idea. Brain, mouth, engage the filter. “How's Minion?”
“Minion, oh. He's fine. I suppose you would want to know about him, given his dashing rescue of your person.”
Okay, so maybe she did know him. Just a little. She knew the little signs of fear and pain that would have crossed his face. How he'd shake it off with a theatrical eyebrow, eyes never leaving her, like he was kind of hopeful she'd save him from himself. Scared that she'd do what he expected, and agree with him, and reject him.
“Never mind, ugh! Can you really be this insecure?”
He holds his breath. She can imagine he's all eyes and ears, hardly daring to hope. It makes her melt inside, how everything is so new to him. It breaks her to think that she's part of the reason why he's been so isolated.
“I can't see any reason I should feel secure, you see. My girlfriend dumped me just yesterday night.”
She nods, and knows that he knows she'd be nodding. That he knows her well enough right back, somehow. She feels connected, she feels cocooned, talking to him. “Oh? That's pretty rough.”
“Yes,” he says smoothly. He's mostly putting on an act of confidence, but there's this little lilt to his voice. He knows he's in. He's an arrogant asshole, and he's milking it. “So as it happens, I'm in the market for a good time. You wouldn't happen to...”
“Yes...?” If he's going to draw this out like torture, she's going to play just as good.
“... Know of anyone single, would you?”
Her heart lurches. She's like a little girl, in the schoolyard. Oh, pick me! “I might,” she says. She should have a phone cord, or long hair. Something to curl around her fingers.
“Oh, well. You'll have to pass my number on.” He's chuckling, and this game between them has never been this good.
But mentioning numbers, that reminds her. “You are going to give Bernard his phone back, aren't you? Tell me first, so I can help you save our texts and put them on the new one.”
“New one,” he says, unimpressed. “You called to tell me that you, a mere human, can navigate a piece of technology with more ease than a master genius inventor.”
She snorts. “Don't forget, incredibly handsome genius inventor.”
“Oh, yes!” He sounds like he's swooning.
“If I knew you'd swoon over yourself, I'd have —” she's not quite sure how that sentence is supposed to end. Luckily for her, he's never one to let her finish a sentence.
“I'm not swooning over me. I'm swooning over you swooning over me.”
“Oh.” A heartbeat. The phone is hard plastic against her skin. It's as close as she can get to him and it's not enough. She's been stripped of all pretenses. “I miss you.” It has been literally less than an hour since he dropped her home.
“Me too,” he says bashfully. “Hey, look. The thing is. I want to be the good guy, but I'm not sure... you'll have expectations. Everyone does. I'm not... I can't fly. Naturally, I mean. If I wanted laser eyes, I'd have to... oh! Goggles!”
“Hold it!”
He laughs sheepishly. They both know what he was about to go and do.
“But seriously, Roxanne, even if I'm not actively destroying the city. If I'm doing good for the city, I'm not the heroic type.”
She stretches out, back on her couch. “Never said you were,” she says.
“I can't be a hero. I saved you, sure. But it was pretty much just me making up for my own rotten mistakes.”
She shrugs. “I know. I'm still glad we're alive.” And a lot more than that, too.
He dances around the topic. “So, I mean. I'm not going to be actively bad, but on the other hand, it's not like I'm made out of sugar-canes and eye lasers.”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “I know the drill.”
He laughs before he can catch himself, and then he pauses, and then he allows himself to laugh again. She's already looking forward to next week, or next year, when they can laugh about those memories without him having to stop and make sure that it's okay to do so. Without her wondering if every hesitation is guilt, or fear, or just a knee-jerk reaction, developed from living a double-life.
“I don't want you to be my hero. If you've gotten past the hair-pulling stage, and the dangling me over a pit of burning coals stage, I don't need one. You're the only person who's ever made me helpless.”
“And Hal,” he says, dejectedly.
“That was your fault too,” she teases him. “But listen to me. If I wanted anyone to save me from you, I'd be calling them. Right now.”
She waits for his reaction. He waits for her to hang up. She's biting her lip, and clenching her fist, and wishing she didn't know him as well as she did.
“... Okay, fine. I guess I was being a bit childish, too,” he says.
“It's about time. The size of your brain, I'd kind of hoped you'd be the one to beat me to it.”
The next silence is comfortable. They're both tired. She can feel the different memories of him, all folding together until it makes sense. She knows who he is, and who she is. She'll never be able to crawl inside his brain and know him inside out, but that's part of the point. The line between self and other, the impossible unknown, it's what makes life worth living. She will never run out of things to learn about this man. New facets of their life together to discover.
“Hey,” she's lonely, and she's tired. This is her excuse. “Do you eat?”
“Huh? No, I take all of my food intravenously. Minion has a kit set up in the corner.”
She blinks. “I'm tired. Was that sarcasm?”
“No,” he says. It was sarcasm.
“Anyway. Breakfast. Do you eat it?”
He must be looking at the phone like he thinks she is stupid. “Yeeeeeeees,” he says.
“Well, here's the thing. I eat breakfast too. So maybe we could, you know, eat it together sometime.”
She can see where Hal gets it from, his winning personality and approach. She is so overwhelmed by the sheer mechanics of getting this thing moving, when it should be so easy, when she's so tired, and so ready for this to be something more already. But it's not creepy, because it's not all in her head. She's read the signals right, and Megamind is at the other end of this phone call.
“Ahhhh, I get it,” he says. “Sometime like tomorrow morning. I could get up early.”
“Really, really, early,” she agrees. “Like, 2 a.m. That's in the morning.”
“It's 1:30 right now,” he points out. She can hear his keyring jangling.
“Yes,” she says, and she hangs up the phone. She's not going to make breakfast, she's too tired and that's just stupid. She'll drag him into her bedroom, and wrap her arms around him, and fall asleep listing all of the ways that she knows he is real.
Warm skin. Heartbeat. Tentative shy fingers. Smell of leather. Green eyes. Most of all, the way he's holding on to her like he's scared. Like he's making his own lists about her in his own distant world, all of three centimetres away from her own.
So scratch that, here's how it goes. Once upon a time, there were people. Circumstance was cruel and kind, and in a seething ocean of mixed metaphors, inside a bigger ocean of archetypal role-playing, somehow, those people managed to get along.