(AN: This was written for a ginormous fic challenge I'm taking part in on LJ. I've been working on a much longer Licky/Gos piece for a year and a half and it's still nowhere near done, so in the meantime, you can all chew on this little bite-sized morsel of my favorite DWD pairing. (Yes, I know it's crack.) XD
Darkwing Duck and all related characters belong to Disney.)
…………
Gosalyn was ten years old and in the fifth grade when it started happening.
It. It being that strange phenomenon that overtook all crazy adults, but kids seemed to be immune—until now. It being that mania that was suddenly making all the girls in her class get giggly around the boys.
Except for Gosalyn.
She didn't find Luke, the boy all the other girls in her class couldn't look at for five seconds without turning away with either embarrassed giggles or shrieks of delight, anything to get worked up over. He was just a boy, nothing more, nothing less.
She didn't feel any fluttering or embarrassment around Honker either. He was her favorite boy in the class—after all, they were best friends and extremely close to each other after all they'd been through—but he was just that, a friend. To consider him in any other light was just inconceivable to her.
She had wondered, for awhile, that since she was such a tomboy that maybe inside she really was a boy and would act more like a boy does around a girl… but she soon realized that that wasn't true either. The "pretty" girls who always flipped their hair and smiled around the boys did even less for her than the "hot" boys did.
It was alright, though, she thought. No one makes eyes at me, and I don't make eyes at anyone, and I don't want to.
But she still sometimes wished she had a mother to talk to about these things. She still sometimes wished she had a mother to ask if it was normal for her to feel—or rather, to not feel—like this.
She wished she had a mother to talk to about the flutters she did get.
He wasn't anything like the boys at school, nor like the men in the "Hottest Man of the Year" magazines. He was a grown-up. He was a bad guy; nasty, conniving, evil. He wasn't even bound to normal mortal limitations, because he was one hundred percent liquid.
And yet Gosalyn kept tagging along with her dad on his nightly missions, talking him into letting her despite his apprehensions, but always feeling disappointed on nights that they didn't run into the Fearsome Five.
She got a flutter in her stomach when she saw them. A flutter of fear, yes, but there was something else, too. Something that showed its full intensity when she looked the Liquidator in the eyes.
He was powerful, he was cunning, he was… the perfect villain. Oh, sure, Negaduck might have been the most fearsome of the Five, but she always felt that Licky was the most dangerous. He was water. Water was unstoppable. Water was Mother Nature's greatest destructive force.
Gosalyn was amazed by him.
What was that flutter she felt? It felt wrong to her, in part because it didn't feel wrong. If it had just been fear, that would have been perfectly acceptable. But fear was not a wanted emotion; it was not something you wanted to feel again and again. And yet her flutter was. Gosalyn kept tagging along with her father—with his permission or otherwise—wanting nothing more than to see him and feel the tingle in her spine.
He saw her, just for a moment, one night. And she saw him. He was busy battling Darkwing Duck; she was hiding both from the villains and her father, who didn't know she was there. Their eyes met for just a split second.
She saw recognition light up in his eyes, and that excited her. Scared her, yes, but also excited her.
He had once called her an "enterprising individual". And he seemed to remember that.
Had any other villain—any other person, really, besides her dad and Launchpad—praised her so? And even with Darkwing and Launchpad, there was always the added "but you need to stay back where it's safe anyway!" afterward.
It was just a split second, but Gosalyn wondered if they had been "making eyes". Even though his eyes were far different from hers, completely made of water.
She wondered if that fluttering really was a crush.