Author's Notes: I started this fic a little while ago but got stuck on it around the "whiplash" line (as you'll see). Then jjohnson_00 over on the megamind_movie LJ made a comment that helped jolt me out of my rut:

Story Idea or Prompt: What kind of conversation did Tighten have with Roxanne between kidnapping her and before he broadcasts his challenge to Megamind?

It'd be interesting if he questioned her about her relationship with Megamind, made some comment about how girls always go for the "jerks", said cruel things to humiliate her, etc.

So thank you, jjohnson_00 for helping me reach the finish line with this!

Special thanks to arrowtibbs, mira_silverpaw, and valoscope for preliminary read-throughs and confidence-boosting

Definite spoilers for the whole movie. This is set between the scene where Roxanne confronts Tighten herself and the scene where Tighten calls Megamind out from prison. For some reason, this fic desperately wanted me to write it in present tense. Hopefully it adds to the feeling of urgency and doesn't confuse anyone.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the word order, with the exception of quotes taken directly from the movie, which all belong to DreamWorks.

Time to Choose

Hal – Tighten – Hal grabs her unceremoniously around the waist and rockets into the air, and Roxanne has never been more terrified in her life.

"Well, i-if I were Metro Man, Megamind wouldn't be kidnapping you all the time, that's the first thing."

It's all she can do to keep her eyes open. She wants to know exactly where she is at all times. She's thankful that Hal doesn't know about the bag and her aversion to it. She has always hated that part of her repeated kidnappings, and she's already freaking out enough without it. The air above Metro City is frigid, and her tank top is doing nothing to ward off the chill. She's been kidnapped literally hundreds of times before, but never like this.

And a tiny part of her, gaining ground by the minute, thinks that some of this is her fault.

"This is the first time we've hung out socially, and it's when I'm about to destroy the city!"

She had never gotten to know him – had never tried. She may never have been outright rude to him, but she had made it clear, she thought, that she wasn't interested in hanging out with him outside of a professional setting. Somehow, he had still gotten the wrong idea. Maybe if she had gotten to know him, she could have let him down more gently, and then he wouldn't be throwing this colossal, city-wide tantrum.

This seems to be a trend recently: none of the men in her life is turning out to be who she'd always thought them to be. Hal was a madman, drunk on power. Metro Man was putting himself before everyone else in the city. Bernard... wasn't really Bernard, and she hadn't known the REAL Bernard well enough to tell the difference.

"Oh, Bernard... I didn't know you... had... feelings. Are you okay?"

And Megamind...

Hal stops short, and Roxanne nearly gets whiplash.

"Whoops. I guess we're here."

"Y'know, I don't get it," Hal says, and Roxanne notes that they're just floating above the city with no destination in sight. For a second, her heart races as she remembers the evening previous.

"That was a close one. You almost DIED!"

Hal continues without her prompting.

"The guy has been kidnapping you over and over for years, Roxie. He's as evil as they come! But you're going out with him anyway. Argh! Why do girls always go for the JERKS?"

As he rants, his arm tightens around her until she can hardly breathe.

"You're hurting me," she manages to gasp. Megamind never hurt her. Knocked her out, tied her up, threatened, boasted, swung her around, shoved guns in her face, but never – NEVER – hurt her. The realization hits her so hard it would have knocked the wind out of her if she'd had any left.

"Am I?" Hal sneers. "Consider it part of my payback for all the hurting you've done to me!"

And he drops her.

The blessed air rushing to fill her lungs is expelled just as quickly as she screams hysterically at the pavement rushing up to meet her.

He catches her at the last possible second and, God help her, but she clings to him for all she's worth as he ascends again, terrified that he's going to let her die the next time. The gesture only seems to anger him further.

"Is this what I should've been doing all this time? Huh? Do you get off on being in danger and then being rescued? Metro Man was only your public boyfriend and you had Megamind on the side?"

Roxanne can't say anything. She can't dignify that with a response, because it's the single most ludicrous thing she's ever heard, and it's not right at all. But every time she tries to talk to him, she seems to make her situation all the more precarious, and she really, really doesn't want to die today…

But he's so far off the mark. Here he is, telling her how little she knows about him, when he's just as ignorant himself when it comes to knowing her. The constant cycle of kidnapping and rescuing is definitely not her idea of romantic, nor has it ever been. Never mind the fact that she was never Metro Man's girlfriend in the first place. As for Megamind… She'd fallen for "Bernard" because he was normal. Because he made her laugh, and he made her feel like there was something good left in the world even though Metro Man wasn't there – so she'd thought – to protect it anymore, and…

"The city's parks restored to their original glory. The streets the safest they've been. The banks re-opened. Has something happened to Megamind? Has someone tamed this monster?"

…Oh. She had. The improvement in Metro City's condition over the last several weeks suddenly made a lot more sense. And he'd done it all because she'd told him, without knowing it was him, how upset she was about everything…

Hal's voice once again interrupts her musings.

"Man, Roxie, I've really had you all wrong. All this time, I thought maybe, if I was nice enough, or cool enough, or something, you'd realize that we were meant to be together. How could I be so stupid?"

He puts on a burst of speed, and Roxanne clenches her teeth as her stomach gives an unpleasant lurch. He continues to rant at her as he flies around, seemingly aimlessly, and Roxanne finds herself tuning his disturbing ideas out as she latches onto the less dangerous but still very troubling problem of her… whatever it is she has with Megamind. If she's going to die, which is increasingly looking to be the case, she wants to do so with her feelings sorted out.

She's had more than enough time to cool off from the initial fury she'd felt toward him last night. She's still angry – he's simultaneously broken her heart with his lies and put the city in peril by enabling Hal to become a super-powered psychopath, neither of which is an easily forgivable offense – but her anger has been tempered a smidge by the knowledge that Metro Man is, in fact, still alive. Speaking of which, where IS he? Is he really just going to let Hal kill her? She doesn't know what to believe anymore. She's starting to believe, with a sinking feeling, that she really is in this all alone.

Hal seems to have made some decision. His flight path is less erratic, and an eerie silence falls over her, broken only by the wind whistling past her ears.

She thinks harder.

Megamind lied to her. This is an indisputable fact. But Roxanne is beginning to think that the lying was less malicious in its intent and more done out of a perceived – with good reason – necessity. He had known she would never be with him knowingly. She'd already spelled out the reasons why – the abridged version, of course, as his offenses prior to taking over the city were too numerous to count.

"You destroyed Metro Man, you took over the city, and then you actually got me to CARE about you!"

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Despite everything he's ever done to her, he has gotten her to care about him. Roxanne is finding that that's a difficult feeling to turn off. All of Bernard's little quirks, all the things she'd fallen for… those hadn't been lies. Roxanne knows this, although she's been trying to deny it since yesterday. But knowing the context as she now does, someone as isolated from society as Megamind would have such idiosyncrasies. Only a short time ago, Roxanne would have claimed that he'd brought that isolation upon himself by being such a villain. But today's revelations about how little she really knows about the most prominent men in her life makes her question even that.

All her life, she's been confronted with absolutes: good and evil, yin and yang, hero and villain. But it's becoming more and more apparent that things just aren't that simple. She has always believed in what she said to Bernard – to Megamind – that night at the museum, that heroes weren't born, they were made. Now, she thinks, maybe being a hero – or a villain – is a choice. Metro Man chose to be a hero… and now he's chosen not to be. Hal was supposed to be a hero, but he's chosen to be a villain, instead. Once upon a time, did Megamind, too, make his own choice?

The answer comes to her amidst the chaos of the city and her own mind, tugging at the very core of her heart.

"Okay, now you tell me something. Something you've never told anyone."

"Well… in sh-school, none of the other kids really liked me. I was always the last one picked for everything."

When Hal stops this time, Roxanne hardly notices. He dumps her none-too-gently on the top of what she vaguely registers as Metro Tower, and he leaves her there. She's still numb to the world when he comes back seconds later with a road sign he's yanked out of the ground, and remains that way as he uses it to fasten her to the spire. He vanishes again, and the next time he returns, it's with a news camera. Roxanne sags against the crude metal bonds and regrets a lot of things in a very short span of time.

Hal has the camera pointed at himself with a steady hand as he switches it on, broadcasting live.

"Megamind!" he says menacingly. "You and I have some unfinished business. I'll be waiting at Metro Tower. Oh, and just so you don't get cold feet…"

And now, the camera is on her, as it has been so many times before. This is Roxanne Ritchi, reporting from her own deathbed.

"Come on, Roxie!" her cameraman-turned-captor sneers at her. "Call for your hero to come rescue you!"

Roxanne raises her eyes, and does.