Disclaimer: I don't own anything

This was it. It was all over. They were all going to die. Kook looked back over his shoulder and saw that the flaming building was slowly crumbling to the ground. He had most of his friends running in front of him, calling out his name, but his head felt numb and he couldn't hear a word they said. He just stood there and watched the building burn. The villain was dead, and that should've reassured him that things were going to be okay again, but he knew deep down that they weren't. Not without Thorne.

He didn't mean for it to happen, and sometimes he would wonder why it had to be him who had to suffer through all of this. The curse. The war. The losses. And it was all because of him. The thought clawed through his head as he began to run, his lungs on fire and heart stopping every time his feet touched the ground. All his fault. All his fault. All his fault….

It had all started on an unassuming summer day that began like any other. Gildar was drowning himself in the mirror, Shaiden was assaulting unsuspecting passer-byers with her ninja moves, and Tinkor was tinkering around with crazy looking gadgets. Kookaburra was alone in his room, as usual, practicing different maneuvers to take down attackers.

"Mmph!" Kook flew backward onto his bed as a giant glob of slime exploded against the wall and flew back towards him. Covered in goo and head aching from knocking against the headboard, he sat up, glaring at the Slime Gun by his side. "Damn. Why doesn't this thing work right? I'm following all of Tinkor's instructions."

"Did you put the powder into the mixture before you fired it?"

Kook jumped, his heart skipping a beat, and turned toward his door to find his friend, Thorne, standing in the doorway, the same detached expression on his face as always. He blinked and looked back at the gun.

"Did I… what?"

Thorne strode over to the bedside and picked up the gun, tipping it upside down so that its contents slipped out. The large clumps of glop plopped onto the floor, each one making an unappealing sound as it hit. Thorne shook his head. "You didn't."

He then walked over to the cardboard box the gun had come out of and grabbed a small paper bag from inside of it. "This stuff here. You were supposed to pour it into the slime so that it wouldn't clump like that. See?" He dumped the powder onto the clusters of goo on the floor and they immediately began to liquefy, creating what might've passed off as being a very small, green pool.

Kook was dumbfounded, if not a little embarrassed, and replied to that by saying something ingenious like, "Oh."

Thorne shrugged. "Yeah, well, Shaiden and I had the same problem. Tinkor really needs to look over his instruction twice before handing them out."

"Uh, yeah. Sure."

Thorne patted him on the shoulder. "Looks like you've got a lot to clean up. See you at dinner?"

Kook blushed, though he wasn't sure why. "Yeah, sure. See you then."

Thorne nodded and left the room, leaving a confused and slightly frustrated Kook behind. Once he was sure that he was out of earshot, Kookaburra stood up and stomped his foot. "Dammit! Why him? Why not Shaiden or Knightriss?" He kicked the gun on the floor as hard as he could before collapsing back onto the bed.

From underneath his pillow, he drew a beautiful golden locket; one that had once belonged to his mother. When opened, the locket displayed a picture of his mother, who had luscious blonde hair and intellectual blue eyes, and his father, who was a burly young man with a scruffy brown beard and resembled a lumberjack. On the opposite side of the picture was an engraving that read;

Robin and Jay Blue. Love eternal.

Kook scoffed. Love eternal, my ass. No matter how many times he assured himself it would never happen to him, every time he looked at the picture, he was reminded of his horrible family curse. You see, legend has it that hundreds of years ago, one of his ancestors got into a little spat with the evil witch of his time. Now, as all spats with evil witches go, the witch cursed the poor fellow. She declared that if he were to ever find himself in love, that his lover would face a horrible, twisted, painful demise by the hands of none other than himself and leave him with constant reminders of his agony. And so it happened. The man got married to a beautiful young maiden and they had one child; the constant reminder. For, no sooner was the child born than the woman died at the house because of an intruder that her husband was too deep asleep to stop. He never did forgive himself, letting his grief out on the poor child as she grew older. Ever since then, the curse was passed down from generation to generation, torturing the family to the brink of insanity. Unfortunately for Kook, it didn't seem to be letting up. His mother, Robin, had fallen victim to its torment when her husband dies in a car crash. A car crash that she caused.

Kook scowled and wiped a tear from his eye. After all of these years of trying to prevent the same thing from happening to him, here he was, falling in helplessly love with his best friend like a teenage girl with a crush. It just wasn't fair! He couldn't kill him. He just couldn't. Kook closed the locket and stuffed it back under his pillow. "I'm not going to fall in love," he murmured as he stood to walk out the door. "Never. And I'll make sure of it if I die trying." And die trying he might as well have, for what happened next he would rather have been dead than experienced.

-jumpingjaxx13