Title: Don't Ask Too Many Questions
Summary: There are consequences to making deals with a devil. Some consequences are more obvious then others. Dark Heart/Christy one-shot.
Disclaimer: Hah, I own nothing of the Care Bear franchise and make no money from this little piece of fiction that does not earn a dime.
Warnings: This is almost on the level of Gothic romance one sees in such as Dracula or Frankenstein. Also, a year was important to gain development between characters and obvious continuity errors in the movie.
Dedication: To some of the very few good writers in this section, but mostly to Anonymous who requested this months ago and has not stopped bothering me about it. I hated every moment of writing this.

-:-
For a solid week, ever since the pep rally, I've been painting watercolors of trees that have been hit by lightening.
-Speak.

Camp had ended with Christy being recognized as Camp Champ. That boy she had met had been telling the truth, despite how absolutely bizarre it was that he could even dothat with just that brittle snap of his fingers and a condition of a favor for a favor.

He had not been back to see her that summer, not that she could tell…not that she could really see, but…

Speed and strength, cartwheels, swimming, being able to run faster than she had even been able to in her life was uneasy to get used to, though, so she'd had to rely heavily on staying close to John and Dawn until the end of the summer. They had wondered at this new strength inside her, but hadn't commented on it, just feeling happy for her and inspiring her confidence with this newly discovered brightness in themselves. She had wished to know what had gotten them to just start not caring at all about what the other children in the camp thought about them constantly losing or falling over themselves or the insults thrown their way, but…she hadn't asked. She hadn't thought it was right that she had a secret (one she wasn't ready to divulge at that time, in that summer, if ever) that she wouldn't share, but wanted to ask for their secret without anything in return.

"We'll write letters. We'll see each other again next summertime."

"We promise! And we have your phone number."

So she had finished the summer without knowing the full potential of her new talents except that she often won challenges with that tall, blonde boy whenever he insulted John or Dawn or became so full of hot air that it needed to be wrung out of him through humility. She found a dark part of herself enjoying these few times when he fell to the ground in exhaustion when she no longer broke a sweat, and sometimes, in the night and the dark settled around the woods, she would wonder at a twig snapping outside of a cabin or a hoot of a large bird and think oddly of that redhead boy that had snapped at her and provoked her first cartwheel.

Going home to spend the last few weeks of summer at her house actually only seventy miles from the camp grounds—for her; John and Dawn lived in a place with ten thousand acres of golden wheat and hay that was as different from the green, lush woods as night was to day and required three nights taking a bus to get there—had given her ample opportunity to think more on her situation, anticipate the next summer, contemplate that boy (if that's what he was; he gave off the persona as something more than that—those red eyes gleaming) and if it might come to pass that he would call on that favor even away from the woods.

She assisted around the house much more in those last humid weeks of summer, days passing along with her noticing on occasion how she could get to the market to buy milk just before the store closed close to midnight because of this knew speed and she never got that feeling she used to, when she had to pass those town houses with teenage boys trying to buy beer, that made her anxious and uneasy. Fear had its belonging where it used to before meeting that boy, but it occurred to her as something that wasn't that important. Like knowing that a fly somehow got into the house, but she didn't pick up a switch to squish it because it would be dead from age in a week anyway. She could avoid the fear like she could avoid the fly; with a passing investment in the knowledge that it would come and go just as swiftly.

"Do you remember when you guys told me about those little cubs you took care of? What did you mean by you didn't mess it up?"

"Oh, right, we never really told you about that, did we?"

"…We didn't really think you'd believe us."

"Tell me anyway."

Christy had kept the promise to John and Dawn to keep in touch, even when school came around and all of them were working through their last year of junior high each. When they had told her about the Care Bears and Care Cousins…even over the phone, there was a brief moment of strange emotion that she was pretty sure wasn't her own. She believed them, like it wasn't out of the question or the possibility of truth, and more then that she had congratulated them for their success and swiftly hung up the phone, making an excuse that it was her dinner time (when in truth neither of her parents were ever home to cook dinner). When the phone clicked into its cradle, she had felt a splitting headache and proceeded to go outside onto her porch and sit on the steps with her head between her knees.

There was a dizzying sensation within the following months, even during school when she beat everyone in gym without really trying at all (the red shirts and sweats they were required to wear in physical education leaving her with a giant headache and stomach cramps, forcing her to take in air and hold her breath every few minutes until well after lunch), that came up if ever she considered over her time at camp and the bizarre feeling of connection between her meeting with that strange young man and True Heart with John and Dawn on the same day. She felt horrible for weeks afterward for reasons unknown and at night it grew worse because she was unsettled to feel whispers from outside her window and experience nightmares she couldn't remember anything about except for the color red.

She didn't really have friends, so when things got especially tough, she called or wrote to John and Dawn, who gave practical, as well as welcomed advice on Christy's school and extracurricular activities that the mousy haired brunette didn't speak of as often as she might—she didn't speak of it really, unless one of the twins really pressed her; because the talent wasn't Christy's own. Guilt had settled into her bones that was like a stigma and wouldn't leave, no matter if she sometimes considered just calling out into the night some evenings, see if she could summon that boy and get the talent removed.

"I don't know, Christy. I'm just no good at literature like this. Shakespeare was bad enough, but Faust? It's ten times worse!"

"Dawn, come on, it's not that hard. It's pretty simple, really."

"Okay, then what's it about? You've read it already, so you tell me something that could help so I don't fail. Please?"

"…It's just about overcoming evil, even though the evil was requested and brought into the life of the main character. Sure, the guy got his wishes, but in doing so, he found why it couldn't make him happy."

"But I still don't get how he can wrangle his way out of a pact with the Devil…"

When Christy found out she would be going back to camp again the following summer (her parents told her just after New Year's, completely out of the blue because they might not have remembered otherwise since they were going on a long business trip for the seventeenth time since she came back from camp the first time; the snow still on the ground and freezing air covering the environment) she found herself seeing the boy again—everywhere.

The first time, it was like it hadn't happened at all. She had been walking home with groceries for that evenings dinner (she wasn't afraid of the young men at the rode house anymore; she'd actually beaten two of them down after they'd tried something in October on Halloween—thick and humid red and orange leaves falling down on them afterward like a joke from some demented, but non-ill bearing spirit) and tripped because of ice underfoot. Her bottom had ended up soused and she'd had to fumble around at the side of the road to pick up the bread, meat, noodles that had fallen from the bag. The road happened to be made of tarmac—not dirt, like the one she would have to turn off on to get the rest of the way home—and so her glass milk bottle rolled away from her when she went for that.

The milk would have gotten away if there hadn't been a figure walking in the opposite direction of herself that had bent over (face shadowed, long scarlet sorta-trench coat, as much of a smirk as could be ascertained by the light of the clouded over moon) and made it stand up. Scuttling over, she'd picked up the whole percent milk and when she'd bent back up to present a grateful response to this (the thank you on the tip of her tongue) he'd somehow gotten all the way down the lane and disappeared onto another street.

She thought nothing of it, until her next track meet at school and she'd seen his actual face in the bleachers right up and seconds after she'd crossed the finish line. She'd beaten all the other kids (two years older, some taller, three of them with poor attitudes directed her way that she noticed weren't in school the next five days following the contraction of pneumonia among all of them), regardless of her parents not being there. She'd actually smiled at her victory and received a large red ribbon from the coach at the finish line.

The next times she saw him mounted up to exactly eleven, not including the previous two where she had a more clear perception of him, which altogether amounted to thirteen. A paranoid person would have suggested this strange young man was a stalker. This is also what she thought (she wasn't paranoid until she was pretty certain she'd seen him outside her house one night when she'd forgotten her AP Chem. homework on the deck and dropped her bag on her foot, looking down from the pain, looking up to find nothing but a fat red robin flying away, little feet skimming over fresh spring flowers) until the very last time she saw him.

"This is so great! We can't wait to see you again next month!"

"Yeah, I can't wait either. It's been pressing on my mind since my parents told me and…other stuff's come up."

"What other stuff?"

"…Nothing. Just life. Don't worry about it."

A month before it would become unbearably hot in her town and school was officially out, she saw the red haired boy with the demonic fire eyes perfectly in place, standing still just as she was walking along the river that was the long way back to her house where she would enjoy a quick dip while still in her clothes and then head home to enjoy being soaking wet in her air-conditioned house. He appeared as if he had been waiting for her, in the shadows under the bridge that stood over calm waters, in the exact clothes she'd seen him in before he'd granted her wish. She had looked him right in the eye and he had smiled, and then waved at her.

The not-so-entirely surprising happened right before her eyes.

She'd waved back and then his smile had turned into something more surreal, more genuine. And then she'd blinked—blinked, which equaled a jiffy, which is something like one in one-thousandth of a second—and he'd moved from leaning against the sickly looking tree that had been there probably since before God was a boy, arms unfolding and a strange reaction going off in the air around him. It was both beautiful and terrifying when his eyes seemed to catch fire and the seams and molecules of himself emptied into some kind of cyclone that reflected red in all its forms.

The wind that he turned into stripped the tree of its green leaves, that battered Christy in the face and entangled in her hair, before the cyclone itself brushed itself against her, passed against and through her and ascended upwards into the clouds that had begun to gather overhead.

She had watched the red disappear into the black clouds until there was nothing of its essence or color left. She was numb and amazed all at once and noticed not when rain broke out in waves as she walked home. His name somehow came to her in the weeks following her last sighting of him, though she never mentioned it out loud.

In the end, when she got on the bus to camp, she decided not to mention anything to John and Dawn about Dark Heart. If she didn't ask them any questions about the Care Bears (she'd barely asked anything about them over the year, she didn't have to now that she was seeing the blondes again), they wouldn't ask her anything about how she was suddenly Camp Champ.

Questions just complicated things.