Winx Plot Holes, Riven's Ego, and Other Preposterously Huge Things
LadyNightSky
A/N: A series of drabbles, most in the (abbreviated) 5+1 format. Open for requests—tell me what pairings you want, what topics you want, what genres you want, etc. etc. I want to try my hand at everything.
Rating: T for sexual innuendo, dirty humor, general snarkiness and language.
Disclaimer: Not mines, not at all.
Chapter One:
One Time Bloom Wanted to Kiss Riven But Didn't, and One Time She Did
For Stills and Photographs, Who Wanted Some B/R Up In This Shiz.
Thank you for being the best beta ever and inadvertently teaching me science and also not being pissed that I constantly bother you!
I.
Bloom really, really needed to use the bathroom. At that moment, she would have traded the contents of her bank account, her fairy wings, Kiko, hell, even the chance to give Baltor a nice knee to the—
Well, the point was, she really needed to use the bathroom.
The streets of Magix were starting to doze off, the buildings quiet and dark, like sleepy monsters who had devoured their fill of virgin sacrifices for the day (including the former occupants of her wallet), and were now content to hunker down in their caves until the next course started. Every door was shut tight, and lurid signs reading CLOSED, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PERSECUTED taunted her from every window display.
She could almost hear their voices in her head. Need a restroom? they said snidely. Well too bad! We won't open for you, nuh uh, because your micro-bladder is definitely your problem, freak. FREAK. Where we come from, in the Land of Really Snarky Signs, you would be an outcast. A virtual leper. Shunned, driven out by every respectable, large bladder-ed sign…
She checked her purse again, but there was absolutely no money left with which to use the public transporter. Like or not, she would have to walk back to Alfea—not too bad usually, but absolute torture after ten Fairy Island Ice Teas and one huge banapple smoothie, even in theory.
She considered turning herself into a dog for a moment. The streets were filled with hydrants…
Gods, Bloom! she reprimanded herself, cheeks turning bright red involuntarily. Get a grip! You've got more self-control than this. You're one kick-ass, universe-saving, Dragonfire-having fairy. You can handle a few miles and a full bladder.
"Yes, yes I can!" she declared loudly, trying to convince herself that this was a good idea.
"You can what?" a very familiar voice asked, sounding rather more amused than she was used to.
She spun around, the blood shooting right back up to her face, and there was Riven, straddling his hoverbike on the street next to her, looking just a little less brooding and pissed and tear-your-still-beating-heart-from-your-body-gladly than usual.
Bloom let out a few choice words, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
"Is there a problem, Princess?" he drawled, somehow managing to cross his arms and keep his bike upright at the same time.
Bloom let out a few more choice words, his clear amusement making her, in her embarrassed, urgent state, very irritable.
"Alright, then," he said with a shrug, and revved his bike. "I'll be off."
He revved it again, looking straight ahead, but she caught that mouth-twitch-amusement thing going crazy on the side of his jaw.
She glared. "You look like you have a nervous disorder. Or like your face is just itching to run away from you. I can sympathize."
That only made the twitch worse.
She sighed. Riven seemed to be in a remarkably good mood. He hadn't bitten her head off about her less-than-kind remarks yet, and he was obviously waiting around.
And she really needed a bathroom.
Grudgingly, she pasted a cheery, apologetic smile on her face. "Hey Riven, before you go, would you mind giving me a ride back to Alfea? Please? It would be a huge favor. I would owe you."
That smug ass gave it an extra long minute of faux-consideration, complete with chin stroking.
"Please?" she tried again, forcing the words out through gritted teeth.
"Oh, why not," he said, turning so that she had a prime view of his uncharacteristically mirthful magenta eyes.
Bloom was rather taken aback to find that, when the facial muscles he used for scowling were relaxed, Riven looked rather young…and…harmless.
She looked again, and decided that no one who had muscles that size—muscles that were currently bulging out from under his shirt, replete with scars—could ever look exactly harmless, but this was as close as she'd ever seen him.
"Get on," Riven said, gesturing to the small bit of room left on his bike. "You know the drill."
She swung one leg over the hoverbike and hoisted herself up, settling as far away from him as she could, even though she knew she'd have to scoot forwards and grip his waist eventually.
With a snort, he pressed on the power, and the bike was off, sailing through familiar streets that quickly merged into forest as they hurtled down the road to Alfea. The twin suns was barely hanging on to the rim of the planet now, setting the trees aflame with light until they looked like dancing flickers of fire, blurring past at a bewildering rate.
The only way to stay on was to clutch Riven, and she pressed her cheek flat into his back without a second thought, watching the fire dancing past. The first time she'd been on a hoverbike, it had almost made her ill, but now she loved the way the world became a jumble of sound and color and howling wind. When she was riding on a hoverbike, watching the world go by, somehow, everything seemed incredibly simple. Only sound, color, and wind.
If Riven's muscles tensed at her touch, she didn't notice.
When they got to Alfea, it was dark. The twin moons had replaced their brothers, and the school was lit from inside, the silhouettes of hundreds of chattering girls visible in their dorms.
The hoverbike came to a stop right outside the gates, and Bloom slid off, grabbing her bag out of the storage space and slinging it over her shoulder.
Riven eased his tense muscles, and cracked his back for good measure.
Bloom blinked, and a comment about how bad that was for your bones was on the tip of her tongue, but then he was looking at her, and there wasn't any mirth in his eyes anymore, and the comment died away.
"You're going to miss curfew," she pointed out after a beat of uncomfortable silence. He was still looking at her, now with a slight frown.
"Yeah," he said, and finally looked away. He revved the engine.
"Hey," she called, before he could hit the power. She put a hand on the handles of his bike, stopping him for a moment, leaning in so that she could see his expression. The frown was still there, but now with an overlay of something almost…
…wistful?
Except that Riven didn't really get wistful, that she knew about.
She cleared her throat.
"Hey," she said again. "Thank you so much for the ride. I owe you. Seriously. I owe you." And my bladder does too, she added silently, cursing the stupid blush that rose into her cheeks at the thought of the reason why she had needed his favor.
"Yeah, you do," he said, plainly, like a statement of fact.
"So…anytime you need a coffee, or someone to do your science homework or…" she trailed off, one hand gesturing weakly in the air. "Hit me up."
"I know how you can pay me back," he said, very seriously. He leaned in closer to her, as if she couldn't hear his voice, as if they weren't the only two people there in the weak moonlight, at the edge of the road.
As if he wanted to tell her something.
But he said nothing else, and she was starting to feel something strange coiling up in her gut that had nothing to do with her need for a bathroom.
"How?" she asked slowly.
Again, he said nothing. He was watching her with dark, serious eyes. Waiting for something, she guessed.
But what the hell was he waiting for? she asked herself, searching her suddenly scrambled brains for an answer.
And then something weird materialized in her mind.
Was he waiting for her to kiss him?
She thought back quickly. The two of them bantering on the street. The two of them pressed tight on a hoverbike. The two of them standing there in the moonlight, tense and quiet and awkward.
Holy crap!
She blinked, and it was with quiet a bit of effort that she stopped her jaw from dropping to her navel. She started to speak, but Riven was turning away, looking a little angrier than he had a moment before, impatient and a different kind of tense.
"See you around," he said brusquely.
And then he was gone, little more than a blurry shape heading up the road from which they had come.
II.
Bloom was sitting very still. There was a spider—were they even spiders if they had 13 legs?—crawling torturously slowly across the table, towards the essay she had laid out on the coffee table.
If there was one thing that Bloom hated—besides Icy, steamed cabbage, unintentional wedgies, and the way her skin burned at even the slightest suggestion of sun—it was spiders.
Gods, it was close.
She pondered running into another room, but that would mean taking her eyes off this hairy little atrocity, letting it roam free, terrifying the innocent.
No, she had to kill it.
She swallowed hard. Eight of the spider's legs seemed to twitch as it scuttled ever closer, looking for all the world as if it were crooking a finger at her, taunting her. Come on, you pansy little fairy…I can take you!
As she was trying to decide what the best way to end its monstrous little life was, a textbook came flying out of nowhere, crushing it and, luckily, also obscuring its corpse, which she was sure had burnt a malicious, evil little hole into the table.
She looked up, startled.
Riven was looking at her grimly.
"Did I get it?" he asked, plopping down onto the couch across the table from where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor.
"Yup," she replied, tentatively lifting the textbook. It was heavy and bore the weighty title of The Basic Principles of the Physical Dimension and an Introduction to Knowing the Universe.
She quickly flung it at him, knowing he would catch it before it smacked his nose into his face, and covered the corpse with a tissue.
There.
Rather satisfied, she looked up again. "Thanks!" she said brightly. "What're you doing here?"
"You owe me a favor," he said gruffly, an odd gleam in his eye.
Immediately, she felt that nauseating little something curl back into her stomach, resting peacefully somewhere between her liver and her spleen.
"I…I do," she said. "What have you got in mind?"
He lifted the textbook. "Pages 69 through 153."
Immediately, the something evaporated, and she was left feeling a little off-balance, and more than a little annoyed.
Quickly tamping both emotions down—she did owe him big-time—she took the textbook out of his hand, and flipped to the appropriate page.
She scanned it up and down. At least they had already covered this in class, so she would be able to skim. "Do you want me to summarize?" she asked, flipping to the next page, and looking at him inquisitively.
"Yup," he said, and she couldn't help but notice that he didn't look very happy.
"Cheer up, you have a night free of homework," she grumbled, his irritation suddenly reviving hers.
"Yup," he repeated.
Her lips tightened. "So…I'll just get to work on this. I'll drop it off at Red Fountain tomorrow by transporter."
"Good," he said, and got up to leave.
He was halfway to the door before she stopped him with a hand on his arm.
The moment her skin touched his, the something was back, and this time wiggling frantically in her gut.
Christ, Bloom, she chided herself. You're going to make yourself sick. This kind of stomachache cannot be normal.
"What?" he asked, seeing as she had fallen silent for a moment.
"Er…" she trailed off. That queer feeling, leaving her grasping for something to say, had vastly overshadowed the original reason she'd stopped him—her offense at not being thanked.
"I've got to get back," he said impatiently, and that brought the ire right back into her.
Eyes flashing, she opened her mouth to retort, but when she looked into his face, she saw something.
This time, she really couldn't stop her jaw from dropping to somewhere near her navel…
…because Riven was pouting. He was pouting. Like a small child that had been denied candy.
It was freakishly adorable.
"Bloom," he snapped, seemingly unaware that she had phased out for a second. "I've got to get back. What is it?"
Now that she had seen him pouting, she could recognize the little pull of childish pettiness and sulkiness in his tone.
"I…I just…" she floundered, completely at a loss for words, still staring at the little, but definitely there pout on his face. Before she could stop herself, she blurted out, "Why are you sulking at me?"
Taken aback, he flicked his eyes quickly towards her, and then composed his expression. "I'm not."
But it was too late. She'd followed his gaze, realized what he was staring at.
Her lips.
Understanding was roaring through her veins, warm and comforting and giddy.
"Oh ho," she said, unable to stop from sounding absolutely gleeful. "Oh ho!"
"What?" he said, completely losing his cool. The pout deepened, and he crossed his arms defensively across his chest, tapping one foot on the floor in an erratic beat.
"I'll tell you what," she said, almost chortling, her eyes bright blue with knowing. "I know why you're sulking!"
"Wha—,"
But before he got the word completely out, she had silenced it with her lips.
"You were pouting at me! It was adorable!"
"I was not pouting, you crazy pixie. It's not my fault you're incredibly thick and couldn't take the first hundred hints. I was just…I was just…"
"Pouting!"
FIN.
A Really Long A/N You Don't Have to Read: In all probability, no one who's reading this right now will remember me, but I quit the Winx fandom in August 2007 (heh, I'm BAACCCKKK! *cackle*). At the time, I was into writing really fluffy fics with a very different style than presented here. Between 2007 and now, my writing style changed a lot (if you're interested in why/how/fics I wrote that show transition, see my profile for my other account), and with it, my outlook.
I've got a few dark fics lined up, so this is just a funny little fluff bunny that's been hanging around my head, and that I thought would ease my transition back into Winx. I cranked this out in about an hour, so let me know what you think can be improved :D
I mean for this to be a collection of one-shots, and I will be taking requests, so leave me a pairing you'd like to see, or a prompt, or something along those lines, please!
A note about this chapter: I've been warned that I will be flamed about how Riven is written in this fic, and also about the pairing. 1. Riven can't possibly be angsty all the time, it's gotta be rough on the poor guy. Think about all that strain to his facial muscles—and who better to relax those muscles around than his little crush? Speaking of which, 2. if you don't like Bloom/Riven, sorry, life's tough; request what you want for next chapter! :D
R/R, THANKS GUYS.