Title - Ice Breaker
Summary - "It's three in the morning, you're drunk, half-naked, and I'm on the verge of calling the cops." BLUES.
Endgame Pairing(s) - blues (greens, reds)
Rating - T, no explicit content
Status - ongoing; in-progress
Important Notes - hah HA AHA.
man i missed writing. all the suffering. the cramped fingers. LOVE THAT SHIT.
i hope you all enjoy this lil story i whipped up.
i wrote this whole thing out and then i realized that i wanted to continue it, so look forward to one or two more chapters. or more. idk.
Disclaimer - who owns the Powerpuff Girls? not me. (lookin' at you, craig)
~1~
Have you ever had a moment where everything goes blank? Where your eyes go completely out of focus and you're left staring at… nothing. At nothing. Everything you think you see is blurred and fizzed and blended together like mixed cake batter. Except, it doesn't really taste delicious. And it feels like crap. And you're trying to look and squinting your eyes so hard that your head pumps with pain, but you still can't see a damn thing.
He should wear his glasses more often.
The last thing he remembers before passing out from his headache is a girl, holding up a pepper spray with trembling hands and crazed eyes looking at him as though he was a mad murderer.
In some ways, there are a lot of things he killed tonight.
His liver. His head. The mood.
…
He wakes up looking through pale blue curtains just above a warm yellow couch. The curtains were pushed aside to allow some moonlight in and were tucked behind the couch to keep them in place. Very neat. His droopy eyes look to walls, which he notices are a slightly paler color of blue, dotted with white spots. He chuckles goofily. They look like tiny bubbles. Or even stars in the daylight. How stupid.
He hears little pats on the ground somewhere he doesn't care to look. A lamp on either side of the couch is lit. He grunts, raising to his elbows, which he feels are very sensitive and sore.
He groans loudly when he hears a fridge door close. He fists his hair, hoping that the pressure of pulling it will soothe the headache. Instead, it worsens. "Butch… Butch, man, what did I fucking tell you about barging into my apartment without asking me…" He feels his face warming up and his vision goes blurry again. He cries out softly, putting his face in his hands as his tears wet his palms. "What did I tell you…" he whimpers.
He hears the footsteps coming closer, sounding lighter than he remembered. When he looks up, he doesn't see his tall, bulky brother, but a short blonde girl, staring at him like he's insane. "Are you… okay?" she asks him uncertainly.
"I… What are you doing here, Bubbles? I thought you muh… moooved out of Townsville a loooong time ago."
She sighs. He's still slurring and it looks like he hasn't gotten sleep in weeks. "Boomer, dear, I live in the apartment right below yours. And I have been for about two years now."
"No fucking kidding!" he says, but he actually sounds surprised. "Are you for real?"
"As real as it can get," she mutters, eyeing the way the covers that she'd neatly placed on him were now messy and disheveled and drooping onto the carpeted floor.
It's then that he notices that she has something in her hand. "What's that thingy?" He points at it.
She holds it up for him to see. It's just some square thing wrapped in brown paper towels. He frowns, disappointed. He'd hoped for something a bit more exciting.
"It's an ice pack," she says. He just stares at her with this little glower and she almost finds it funny.
She walks over to him and sits on the edge of the couch, just beside his waist. He squirms away from her and mutters, "Ew" and for a second she can see him as he first was; a five year old kid who just wanted to blow up stuff and destroy a couple of girls.
But times have changed.
And now he's a twenty one year old kid who still wants to blow up stuff and destroy a couple of girls in different ways.
Bubbles pushes the thought aside and leans forward to press the ice pack onto his forehead as he lies on a throw pillow. Before it even makes contact with his skin, he scrunches his nose up like he's already in pain, and shimmies himself further into the couch creases like it's some type of opposite magnetic force that's pushing him away. He whips his head to the side, saying a defiant, "No!"
"Boomer," she says his name firmly, and revels in the way he flinches. He turns his head back and closes his eyes, waiting for the impact.
When she finally lands the ice pack on his head, he shivers, in a way that's far too adorable for her to see. He sighs, finally relaxed.
"Hey," he slurs, as she holds the ice pack while he keeps moving, "What am I doing… Down here, I mean."
"It's three in the morning, you're drunk, half-naked, and I'm on the verge of calling the cops."
At this, he opens his eyes. She's looking back at him, expressionless.
"You could be charged for breaking and entering," she adds.
"Wha…" And then he looks at her front door, just a little ways from the living room entrance. The door's hinges are broken and bent, and there's a fist-sized hole through the middle. "Woah." He stares at her in wonderment. "I did that?"
She lightly slaps his bare shoulder. "Don't be proud of it! I have a new peephole thanks to you. And this time, strangers can look in!"
He laughs, his voice deep and slow. He's so, so tired, so tired he could take a nap in the middle of Rockefeller Center during Christmas Eve. He did that once. His ears were ringing the moment he was woken up by a police officer on a tall brown horse.
He remembers Bubbles was there, too. It was a school trip. Yeah. He strayed from the group and sat on the thick ledge of a flowerbed, among hundreds of bustling people moving from place to place, talking and laughing. He hadn't gotten any sleep that night after Butch told him some scary story about a dead pirate who haunted the souls of innocent kids ("He finds where you sleep, where you live, and then, while you're sleeping, he cuts out your heart with his ghostly sword!" Butch said to him. He'd always been full of shit.)
But Boomer thought of this story as he sat on that ledge. He thought of having his heart cut out. It would hurt, that's for sure. He fell asleep nonetheless, but a police officer woke him up not much later. Bubbles came rushing over, panting, and he could hear the click-clack of her boots on the cement. She stood there, red in the face, her curly pigtails dotted with snowflakes, and said a quick hello to the officer.
"Boomer!" she said, "We were all looking for you." She reached over and grabbed his wrist, pulling him off the ledge and onto the floor. "Come on, they're waiting."
And as she pulled him through the crowd, the only thing he could hear was the sharp sound of her boots. He wondered if the pirate had already cut his heart out. And he realized that Butch never told him where the pirate put the hearts, or maybe, who he gave them to.
He doesn't realize he's spacing out until Bubbles' warmth is taken from him when she stands up and leaves the ice pack in his hands. "What's wrong?" he asks.
"I'm tired, Boomer," she says, rubbing her forehead, and he's so stricken by this moment. She looks so mature here, so serious, like an adult. She has a hand on her hip like she needs it for support and she's tapping her foot like a mother, and he feels desperate all of a sudden.
"Hey, wait," he says hurriedly, accidentally throwing some covers off as he sits straight and faces her. The ice pack thuds onto the floor. Bubbles' hands drop and her mouth forms a thin line as she glares at him. It takes a moment for him to see through the dim light of the room that her cheeks are as red as a strawberry lollipop. He feels cold the next moment, and that's when he remembers that the only thing he's wearing is his jeans. But he doesn't even care.
"Can you stay with me a bit!" he asks, but it comes off as though he's stating a fact. His balance wavers somewhat and he plants his hands on either side of him to keep himself up, facing her.
She looks to the side like she doesn't know what to say - maybe she really doesn't - but she scowls, probably at herself, and says, "Yeah, fine. I'll stay until you fall asleep, if it makes you feel better."
Before he can stop himself, he giggles, feeling his stomach woosh like the waves of the ocean. She eyes him weirdly, but smiles, and kneels on the floor in front of him.
"I wanted to ask, anyway, even though you're still certifiably drunk-"
"What? I'm fucking sober, woman!"
She ignores his claim, which was proved false considering the way he slapped a hand over his mouth because he just spat out a curse, and continues, "How did you get drunk tonight?"
He goes silent. For a second, she believes that maybe she asks something a little too personal, but he snorts a laugh and leans back into the couch. The transparent curtains wisp again his messy hair, which she noticed was hanging over his eyes. She wants to see his eyes, see what emotion they conveyed. She'd always been able to do that.
"I was, uh," he says quietly, like he doesn't want to be too loud, "I was out with my… my brothers. We had a couple of drinks and everything was fun and stuff. I even, I even made Brick smile, ha."
Bubbles smiles at this, and at how his face shines when he says it. She leans forward a little, waiting for him to keep going.
"And I keep drinking and looking at them, and it feels nice. Really nice. I almost felt like a different person. Haha!" Despite his cheery laugh, she can see tears leaking down his face and trailing down his neck. She is momentarily dumbstruck. "A different person," he says again, "One that could actually make them happy." He starts laughing again, but his laugh is so strangely genuine.
She gets up and sits next to him, but he doesn't move an inch. "You think you don't make them happy?"
He doesn't answer the question, and instead looks forward, looks at the hole he punched through the door and the hinges he broke. "I did that," he says dully.
She is confused for a moment, but she shakes her head and then asks, "How did you get here if you were so drunk?"
He turned to look at her. She was much clearer to him now, sitting there in front of the window in the moonlight. Her was still so curly, and she still had them in pigtails. It was the only thing that didn't make her look like an adult. He could almost imagine tiny little snowflakes stuck in her curls.
She wrinkles her brows and blushes when she realizes he's just staring at her. "I'm serious," she says, and it drives a surge of irritation through him, "You were so drunk when you broke in; there's no way you could've just-"
"I knew exactly what I was doing," he protested, but in all honestly, he doesn't really know if he did. He remembers having a brief, fleeting thought of her when he was walking through the doors of the lobby.
Oh, yeah. She lives here, too.
But he remembers going through his door, and trudging toward his couch, and-
Wait… Her door is the only one with sunflowers drawn in the front.
Oh. He'd completely forgotten…
Might as well wish her a goodnight or something. She wouldn't mind if I stopped by, would she?
And then he punched a hole through the sunflower.
"I knew exactly what I was doing," he repeats. He suddenly feels a wave of nausea and clutches his stomach, taking a deep breath.
She notices this, and then points to a bucket that he hadn't even noticed before. "If you need to vomit, do it in there."
"No, no. I don't need to… I'm fine."
She looks at him, mildly concerned. "It's there if you need it anytime soon." She inhales sharply and sighs again, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. He watches her. "I have to go to school tomorrow…"
He'd forgotten that she was still in college. "Sorry," he splutters, trying to work out what to say next.
She brings her head back up and lays a hand on his shoulder. His skin starts to tingle and the nausea is back again, but it feels different this time.
"You should sleep," she tells him. She puts her hands on his chest without thinking, intending to push him back, but she freezes there. It strikes her then how tall he is; even sitting beside each other, she has to look up at him a bit. She finds this funny for some reason, and she can't stop herself from releasing a squeaky laugh.
It surprises him, and he laughs with her, albeit awkwardly. He lays down and he finds that he's been exhausted this whole time when the back of his head hits the soft throw pillow. Bubbles stands up so that he can stretch his legs. He yanks the covers over himself and goes into a fetal position, and she feels compelled to laugh again.
She's reminded again just how cute he is when she notices how his hair is now pushed away and she can see his whole face. Well. Not whole. His shoulders are hunched and he's covering his mouth with the sheets, eyes half-lidded and staring again at the door past Bubbles.
She takes a moment to reflect; she may not exactly be close friends with him, even after all this time, but their like-hate relationship is something that she realizes she wouldn't really want to lose. And then a thought comes to her.
He's stupid-drunk right now.
She giggles and covers her mouth, blushing like she just told herself a terrible secret.
"Hey, Boomer," she says, and he drags his eyes to her. She grinning ear to ear. "I've got a secret."
Biting back a yawn, he drones, "What is it?"
She kneels toward him, cupping one side of her mouth even though there are no other people around to hear. She whispers, "I like you."
It seems as though time stops then. The wind quits its howling and the curtains relax, and all she can hear are his soft breaths. He's asleep.
But she still finds it funny. She covers her mouth so that she won't wake him, gasping and snickering into it. She stands up, looming over his sleeping body, and for a moment she feels like a giant.
She takes a step back, thinking of tomorrow, and then she quietly bounces to her room just past the kitchen.
As he hears her bedroom door click shut, Boomer smiles.
~fin~
aaaahhhhhhhhhhh snap.
guess who's back? this bitch right here.
well if i'm being totally honest i might go on another forty year hiatus and then come back and say the same thing but whatever. let's live in the moment, dudes.
pLS REView
h&k ;*
