Dedicated to: Haniel7

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He swiveled his high backed leather chair to face her, a smug grin plastered on his face.
He couldn't be thinking that right now, could he?
"Toxic, that's insane!"
She instantaneously protested.
"I can't dance, and even if I could, where would I find a partner whose limbs I wouldn't tear off?'' Any guy who had the misfortune of dancing with her would have to be prepared for his arm to be ripped out of its socket at the first little twirl; it wasn't even a joke- she's broken the wrist of her ballet instructor two minutes into her first lesson as a child. Andromeda shuddered at that horrible memory. Toxic brought his folded fingertips to his thin lips, as if oddly amused by her plight.

"And don't you need to be prestigious or royal or something before they even let you past the gate?" She rattled on, nervous doubt filling her the more she considered the weird possibility of going in as a dancer. Meanwhile, Toxic's grin kept growing more smug. She knew that look. It was the look he bore when he had a brilliant scheme just waiting to be unveiled, which was pretty often.
"I could never pull that off." She grumbled. His eyes lit up, obviously relishing in her self-doubt, something she hardly ever let others see.
"Not by yourself you couldn't." His arrogance steamed off him with every syllable.

"Maybe I could get in."
She contemplated to herself.
The chance did exist that she wouldn't even have to step close to a dance floor. She felt she just need to get in, kick ass, and then get out; but then the fear hit her again; the last time she'd faced those beasts, she had pretty much lost her life. She knew she could just call her father, explain everything, and he and the league would take care of those speeders without much trouble, but even now Galaxy Girl was much too prideful to go running to dad for help. She'd never live that down, and she'd be "daddy's girl" or the helpless damsel for the rest of her life.

I do need help on this one, but who could help? She pondered.
If Toxic thinks I'm going to ask that douche-bag Dauntless for help...
She shuddered at the thought. Anyone but him.

"What are you getting at?"
The Hero questioned curiously, though dreading the answer.
"What if you knew someone...?" He teased her question with another question. Propping her elbow up onto his armrest, she leaned closer in, her ears peeled.
"Someone who could get you in. Someone who as of this current second, you more or less trust. Someone with the funds to pull it off. Someone who you can't dismember, who speaks Italian, and who is a world class ballroom dancer."
He paused for a moment.
"Theoretically speaking."
Said the villain with a slight shrug.
She tried to think up someone who ticked all the boxes he'd mentioned, but her mind drew a blank.

"Who!?" She finally gave in and asked. "Wow, you really are blonde."
He shook his head. "Me!" Toxic finally exclaimed, jabbing his thumb at his chest. Galaxy's eyes nearly popped out of her skull in surprise.
"You can't be serious!?" She laughed, pushing the kitchen chair away from his desk she stood up. His eyes locked onto hers, this seemed like a serious moment to him. For once, he didn't look smug, and he wasn't laughing.
"Oh God, you are!" She sucked in a breath. We are not having this conversation. This is not happening. "Toxic, what are you thinking?" She shouted. "No, No! You are my Nemesis. You can't help me!"

He crossed his arms and rolled his eyes at her theatrics. Women were such a handful "Why not?" Asked the tall genius. "Just because! It's not how things are supposed to work, I mean if anybody ever found out you and I went together to Rome, to ballroom dance...." She grimaced. Toxic pushed his chair back and stood up defensively.
"So what if on the slim chance that we fail, they do find out? It can't get any worse! I mean come on, you are defeated, dead, and I'm washed out! Career wise, what more have we got to lose?!?" He slammed his fist down hard onto his desk. The Villain was dead serious about this. Turning away from him, she ran her hand over her face in frustration; there was really no point making a fuss about the situation; she could see no other way out. She sighed as she turned back towards him. His arms were crossed, a clearly impatient look on his face.

"Why do you want to help me with this? Didn't bringing me back from the dead use up your entire life supply of good deeds?" He cracked a small smile at that last remark.
"True, good has never really been my style. I have never been one to want to play hero, but by doing this; I'd have killed two birds with one stone. Follow my thinking..." He held up a hand to list reasons off on his long, slim fingers.
"One, I'd be providing you with another chance to defeat the speeders and that gives us both our dignity back. Secondly, it will give me the rare opportunity of studying you first hand for a longer period than usual, and that will help me with future traps..." admitted the bad guy openly. She knew there had to be another reason.
Like cold water, the truth was poured over her. Toxic wanted to watch his rival like one of his lab rats till she slipped up. She crossed her arms in suspicion. "How do I know you won't just betray me, or try to kill me while my back is turned, so to speak?"
Toxic shook his head.
"Though flattered, I can't believe you'd think that low of me." He reached out and placed his hand upon her shoulder leaning down until he was at eye level with his lifelong arch rival. "When I kill you, and it will be me who kills you..." He assured. "I will do it to your face, I won't sneak up behind you. You will see me coming." He spoke with such reassurance in a tone that managed to be both menacing and compassionate at the same time. He removed his hand from her shoulder, allowing it to lie loosely by his side as he continued.
"But until the defeat of the speeders, and you BETTER defeat them... I suggest we call a truce." Toxic held out one of his ungloved hands for her to shake. Her stomach tightened and she wondered what on and off earth was she getting herself into. There was no sanity in the proposition, but it didn't seem like she could call any shots right now. "Ugh, what the heck; like you said, what have I got left to lose?" Galaxy Girl found herself sarcastically depressed as she slid her small but rough hand into his.

The softness of it was surprising against her own callused one.
"Wait, you can ballroom dance?!?" She asked, the notion finally hitting her, and the image of the terror of Stark City prancing around felt like such a blasphemous thought in her mind.
"Yes. Last night I watched every single episode of Dancing with the Stars, so via my ionic memory, theoretically I am a multi mirror ball trophy holding champion." Replied Toxic.
"Wait? Her eyebrows furrowed. Something didn't add up.
"OK, I get the whole you're so smart you can learn whatever you see thing, but how did you manage to watch all the episodes in one night?'' She asked. His fingers motioned as if he were clicking an imaginary remote.
"I had it on fast-forward, duh." Toxic replied as if it were a stupid question that everyone should know the answer to. "Wow. OK." She couldn't help but be impressed.

"Isn't it too late to enter though?"
She couldn't wait to hear how he figured this one out. Galaxy Girl knew Toxic and his ways better than anyone. She realized he'd known that his nemesis would eventually go along with this crazy scheme, and had begun to hatch his plans days ago. "Technically yes." He smiled like a kid who was just about to blow out his birthday candles. The hero found it quite adorable. "Oh but I do love technically." He said with a grin before continuing. "True the system is solid, and true the competition did officially start two days ago, but where technology fails me, people... people never do." He said, gleefully sticking his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat.

"There is a spot being held for the team of the Baron Tomlinson Dumas and the Duchess Catherine Von Strep, an engaged couple from the small, relatively unknown island country of Vanuato; due to their jet being continuously delayed by freaky bad weather." His nodded towards his lab. She could hear the faint whirring of one active machine.
"Toxic you didn't..." She scolded. "I did." He replied smugly. "But I destroyed that one." She said, talking about the Weathanator he once held Stark City In the throes of.
"Not the prototype." He answered, still smug. "But the people of the island..." She started to argue but he cut her off. "Are perfectly fine. Only the Airport has been targeted."
His explanation calmed her fears of islanders caught in man made tsunamis or mudslides.

"Go on.'' She gave in.
Toxic continued his rather intriguing story. "With a few bribes to the royal maids, I planted rumors of Catharine's father searching for other, wealthier suitors for his daughter's hand, and that convinced them to elope; then all it took was to intercept the explanatory email to the contest Judges, and an all-expense paid honeymoon to an isolated internet free island near the Bahamas. Their plane left just seconds before the bad weather struck." He explained as if it were a piece of cake. "So you are suggesting we masquerade as this royal couple?" Asked Galaxy.

"Yes." A one word reply was all she got. "OK, but won't people know we are not them?" She raised a valid point. "Oh Galaxy, it's cute when you think I haven't thought of everything. Jet leaves in an hour your Highness."

After checking to see if his bots had loaded everything into the cargo hold beneath his self-piloting jet, Toxic motioned for Galaxy to board. She was leaning against the door of the hanger, cautiously watching the Villain order his robotic creations around. Ducking under the wing she studied the plane over before shrugging and marching up the staircase. Once they were both seated inside the cozy, but luxurious aircraft, the hatch closed and the plane began to take off. Toxic quickly buckled his seatbelt and slid the blinds over his window, not daring to look down at the ground which he knew to be disappearing further and further away from beneath him. "Still petrified of heights I see." She laughed, mocking him. "Well I'm sorry, the laws of gravity actually apply to some of us." He retorted with a scoff, which earned him a smile from her.
"Should have dissected you while you were unconscious, figure out how you do that."
He quipped.
"Yeah, good luck with that. " She smirked. Knowing full well that no amount of dissection or experimentation would ever be able to explain how it was that they could do what they did.

Galaxy Girl and her rival were both Alpha meteorite human hybrids, both of their fathers were once regular humans who had come into contact with a small radioactive meteorite that had struck just outside of Stark City in the 80's. The glowing hunk of space debris had given off a molecular altering form of radiation, which had a massive altering effect on human chemistry upon contact. Adam Avis, Quarterback for the Stark University Sabertooths, had been out for a jog on the wooded trails located just on the outskirts of town, and had stupidly touched the glowing Rock.
Toxic figured that his father's decade-old enemy must have touched it right after the crash, because Adam had absorbed the majority of the radiation, giving him the powers of flight, seemingly limitless strength, and invulnerability. Mastermind had always assumed Captain Galaxy became sick or nauseous during the transformation and fled the scene, because it wasn't till years later that Toxic's father had been able to piece the puzzle to discover with amazement, Captain Galaxy's true identity.
Stephen Stockman, the down on his luck former rich kid, and university's part time technician was actually the one to track and locate the Meteorite after it had initially hit, contact with it causing Stephen to absorb his own share of the alien radiation. Whereas the first surge affected the physical aspects of the body, as seen in the burly blond super male that is the Captain, the second surge affected the mental aspects of its victim; making Stephen the smartest man alive; five times smarter than the then smartest natural human on earth. Both Toxic and Galaxy Girl were human hybrids, her more than him; due to his super powered mother, but in the end that just evened out the playing field out for them.

Toxic's mother Romana; code named the Ghost Dancer was taken from her gypsy camp as a small child by the Soviet military during the cold war. The empath was brutally experimented on and then trained as an assassin and spy. From what little Toxic could get out of his father about her, at her job she was the best. Mastermind rarely spoke about her, and though he was one of the three people Toxic could not read the guilt of, you didn't need powers to see it.

"Im surprised you want to take the jet. I figured you would just fly to Rome yourself." He changed the subject.
"We would have gotten there at about the same time." She replied. "Well, in this plane you might have actually beaten me to it." Her voice filled with humorous self-deprecation. "Interesting..." Toxic had calculated her flight speed before, he'd just never applied it to continental travel.
"Oh, I guess I probably shouldn't have told you that..." She spoke with sudden regret.
"Well you started, you can't stop now." He said with a grin.
"Fine..." She gave in. "Though I can fly across this ocean, it takes me about 8 hours to do it, and that's 8 hours of constant top speed flying, so when I do eventually arrive, it's 7 hours later, I'm hungry, tired and my hair is an absolute mess."
That last part made him grin.

"Here." Said Toxic, sliding a lime green folder across the small table between them. Galaxy Girl flipped it open to find it was a brief on the Royals they would be masquerading as. Carefully she began to study every word, mumbling some of it under her breath to help her memorize the words and persona of the supposed Royal.
"Alright boy genius, this all looks well in order but there is just one little hitch." She worried.
"And that would be?" His head cocked sideways. "We don't look anything like these people." Galaxy pointed to the picture stapled in the corner of the page of the smiling couple.
"For starters they are older than both of us, in their mid-twenties, and she's a redhead." The Hero pointed out.
Toxic sighed, "Nemesis, I do think of everything you know?" He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two thin, flesh colored wristbands.
"Give me your hand."
He asked and she indulged, placing her palm on the space of table in front of him. He snapped the band onto her wrist, using his thumb and forefinger, he squeezed the sides of the bracelet and with a faint beep, and it disappeared, blending with her skin like a chameleon.
"Go look in the mirror." Toxic encouraged, nodding towards the planes tiny bathroom.

After shooting him an odd look, she rose from her seat and made her way to it. Glancing into the mirror, she was pleasantly shocked to see the face of the stunning Countess staring back at her. She brought a hand to her face, everything matched, right down to the dainty beauty mark above her eyebrow.
Toxic's slid into the tiny space next to her, keeping her eyes on his reflection, she watched as it he squeezed his own wrist device and his face shimmered with silver particles for a second, before the specs dispersed and then settled, revealing the face of the handsome Baron. Short, neat brown hair framed his wide, masculine face.
"I have to say it." She started "I am impressed." She turned to look at him for real, but her brow furrowed in confusion when she instead saw the face of Toxic staring back. Confused, she glanced at the mirror again, but found the hazel eyes and sun kissed features of the island Royal in the reflection. "How come when I look at you I see actual you?" Questioned Galaxy Girl, worried that the device had malfunctioned.
"The devices are linked, obviously." He shrugged. After a few more moments of curious cross-examination, they returned to their seats. Opening his laptop, Toxic began reading through an online Italian dictionary.
"What are you doing?" His travel companion asked.
"Learning Italian." He replied as his eyes scrolled over at the speed of 50,000 words per minute.
"Don't worry, I didn't forget about you." He tossed her a large book with a bright yellow cover. "Italian for dummies?" She read aloud. "Is this some kind of joke?" To which the Villain just smiled. "Yes, actually it is."

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A/N: Happy Saturday Guys!
There will be a bonus chapter posted on Wednesday. :)
Hope you guys enjoyed.
-QueenOfGeeks.