Author's Note: Written for ppg_hub_drabble on Livejournal September contest for the theme 'da capo'. Based on an idea I've had since 2003 or so...
A Resounding Heart
It always started the same.
And then, one day it didn't...
da capo
Bubbles stared at the words that silently mocked her under the musical notes.
It was just a sheet of recorder music after all, their class assignment to play happy, cheerful music at the Townsville retirement community were the Mayor's mother lived.
They weren't even using any of the detailed scribbles around the notes, those were for big kids.
So why did it matter so much?
She was only six but...
Bubbles squinted her blue eyes into accusing slits, consideration bringing out the natural bulge most of her face over the nearly invisible holes of a flat nose.
But not all six-year-olds had her special power.
da capo ?
The black marks upon the white expanse of paper, so highly magnified by her puffdom sight they were like indentations among woven lines of textured cloth, shivered.
That was the only word for it, if she had ever stopped to give it a word.
If she had, being Bubbles, she might have very well have picked danced .
"Words like me!" She said once to the Professor, twice to Blossom and fifteen times to Buttercup (because she was being a bossy pants and making 'you're crazy' motions)
on the first Wednesday they were alive, and Bubbles' motto in life had held true ever since.
Wherever she went and whatever she saw, if she was around it long enough, just suddenly made sense.
First it was the japanese dramas on the DVDs the Professor got in the mail from his parents every six months and watched at three am that he hid (badly) behind the Christmas presents in the hallway closet.
And then it was the Spanish comics Li'l Arturo had given her for not turning the Gangreen Gang in for shoplifting on that rare day she had a cold
and her sisters were off fighting a monster 'too tough for being a sicky'.
The draw back..that with each newly acquired language came more voices and with it, their hurt.
She felt it like waves that lapped against the beach of mind when she fell asleep. Each nation that she understood needed someone...a hero.
Over and over the desperate hum played like music with an endless beat...
and so she turned to music.
Not that her sisters or the Professor had been that crazy about a bands heartbeat, the drums, being her newest obsession.
But Bubbles only smiled, they would come around.
In the meantime...da capo..da capo...
What did it mean?
The words danced under her gaze...and died.
Bubbles gasped, poking the motionless, everyday, common as paper marks of ink on the paper with a concerned fingerless palm.
da capo
The words didn't stir.
Tears welled up, the bright glow of her streak energy building within them a second before the air over Pokey Oaks Kindergarten flashed in half with a shock boom of flight.
"What does this mean?"
Bubbles asked Fuzzy Lumpkins, the pink monster of a banjo player now halfway into his foot soaking tub in shock.
"Da capo?" Fuzzy spat out a trail of water under her floating mary janes.
"I think itsa one of those fancy hats you all wear while you play. You' be ah plucken' 'n the music 'll say 'thisn' be where you put on that fancy hat!"
"Hmm.." Bubbles pondered, zipping away, sheet music still in hand.
"What does this mean?"
She screamed politely, her echoing voice parted neatly by the sound of Ace's skull hitting the open hood of his junker of a VMW beetle.
"Ow! Pipe down would ya? What's all the-?"
Ace pulled down his sunglasses to the tip of his hooked nose as Big Billy and Snake joined him to hold the paper at ether corner.
"Da capo? Um, well it's French or somethin' it..well it can mean lots o' things, play loud or play soft or-What's it matter to you sugarpuff?"
He stopped, waving an oily wrench a dangerous few inches from her clutched pigtail .
"Don't ya know anything? All the best bands are like me and the guys, they don't need no music, they play it by ear! Gets em' all the babes!"
Bubbles stuck out her tongue in distaste, flying a save distance from what was now an alarmingly level of grease and bro fists.
"I-just-want-to-know-what-you-mean.." Bubbles sobbed into the shivering ripples of her own reflection on the dock of Townsville bay.
The force of her nubbed hands against the musical notes crumpled into angry, ugly crevasses.
"Why is this so important to you?" A voice asked.
Bubbles looked up to see familiar white fur with a trademark black spot.
A little white tail wagged once in greeting.
"Oh, it's you Talking Dog." Bubbles sniffed "I-I don't know why. It's it's just I've never not been able to understand- before.
It's the one thing I'm, I'm always g-good at. Not in a smart way, like Blossom. I, I feel the words. The words-fill my me-ness."
Bubbles bit her lip, taking a stray bedraggled alley cat that had wandered in between them onto her lap matter of factly and petting it.
"What am I going to do if I-if I lose it? If I can't understand anything anymore?"
"Oh, I'm sure that isn't going to happen, you've just hit something a bit harder maybe."
"You think so?" Bubbles asked, sniffling into a hanky Talking Dog had produced from under his collar.
"Heck, I know so! Even I learnt how to talk after all. Well, gotta be going and beat rush hour!"
Bubbles waved with a smile toward Talking Dog's back as the alley cat to leapt from her arms, turning its head.
"What would you like it to mean?" The cat asked, the flash of its red fur and pink whiskers disappearing behind a trashcan before she could say a word in reply.