This fic was originally posted on in 2002, but removed sometime in 2003 because of copyrighted song lyrics I included in the chapters. So I've taken away the lyrics, rewritten all the chapters (edited the overall writing style while retaining most of the original plot details), and am now reposting the fic in its entirety, since it never even made it to the last chapter the first time round.

To all those who haven't come across this fic before, it is essentially an angst-ridden story revolving mainly around teenage Buttercup and Butch, with six main chapters plus a prologue and epilogue.

And to those of you who have read it before, thank you very, very much for your return visit, and I really hope that you will enjoy it, the way I had when rewriting this story (and laughing at myself, unfortunately).

So here goes!

Disclaimer: All related characters and elements are (c) Craig McCracken. The Pendulum weapon featured in this fic is adapted from the manga Shaman King and (c) Takei Hiroyuki.

Rating will go up from the next chapter onwards.

Emerald Evanescence
Prologue

emerald: (n.) a bright green gemstone, often valued for promising good luck, enhancing one's well-being, and its healing power; (adj.) a colour that symbolises faith and friendship.

15 September, 1998

They zipped around each other over row after row of houses, two streaks of green light trailing in their wake. The dying sun dipped slowly into the horizon, washing the sky around it a fiery red, and turning lavender towards the east.

One of the figures suddenly halted in midair and spun around. Her short bob of hair ruffled in the wind as she grinned at the boy behind her. "Can't you go any faster?" she mocked.

A mischievous glint reflected off the boy's dark green eyes. "Then you'd better go full speed ahead," he called back. "Rowdyruff Rampage!"

He sent out a rapid fusillade of optic blasts and energy spheres, but the girl easily dodged every single one of them. At last one of the blasts struck her square on the back; the impact well knocked her out of the air, and she slammed hard into the base of a tree in one of the backyards.

For a moment all was still. Then, with nothing but a pained groan, she pushed herself out of the pit of dirt and flattened grass under her.

"Do you have to be so harsh?" She rubbed her backside furiously, wrinkling up her black pants as she did.

The boy landed on the lowest branch in the tree. He cocked his head as he settled into a crouch with elbows on knees. "Don't tell me that hurts, BC," he said, grinning down at the girl. "You know full well that I didn't give my all just now, right?"

"Thanks for the consolation," she muttered. But at that point of time she was too tired to return his previous attack, or even to hide that same weariness. So she merely leaned against the tree and gazed the house at the end of the yard. It was unlit, even though the sky was turning dark: nobody else was home yet.

The silence between the two of them ensued, disrupted only by the colony of unwary crickets in the surrounding vegetation, warming up and playing a full orchestra in preparation for the night. It was a long time before the boy spoke.

"Check this out, Buttercup. Got it from somewhere outside town."

There was a glint of something that soared down from the depths of the branches, and Buttercup, quick to react as always, grabbed it in a flash and stared closely at it. It was a strange device, almost the length of her lower arm, with two sleek leather straps hanging down from it. A round silver cap the size of a minidisc sat at one end of the device, and right next to it, docked inside a metal U-shaped holster, was a small, diamond-shaped crystal that shone a clear green in the waning light. It was pointed at the centre much like a low pyramid, and unusually solid in its weight as she held it in her hand.

"What's this, Butch?" she asked.

"It's yours, that's what it is. I've got my own too." Butch leapt down onto the ground beside her, and retrieved a similar gadget from his cargo pants pocket. He strapped it into place onto his lower right arm — the end of his dark green crystal pointing out towards his palm — and sneaked her a grin.

"Now watch this," he whispered.

A sharp fling of his arm, and the crystal shot out straight into the air, its brilliant green stark against the blaze of the sunset. The only thing stopping it from flying away entirely was the thin metal cable attached to it at the other end, seemingly endless as it uncoiled from inside the silver cap at breakneck speed with a dull whirr. Its flight was smooth, and swift, and ended abruptly only when the vertex of the crystal struck a falling leaf, and pinned it against a tree almost fifty feet away.

With another twitch of Butch's arm the crystal retracted into the device, the leaf breaking into pieces that fluttered towards the ground. But then the wire slowed down, until only a small length remained outside, dipping and rising like a standing wave in mid-air. The eight-sided diamond floated horizontally at the end of the cable, and pointed straight at an utterly speechless Buttercup.

"Butch!" she breathed. "That's . . . that's just about the coolest thing I've ever . . . Where in the world did you get that?"

Butch just tilted his head as he always did, and raised an eyebrow at her with a small smile as his crystal slinked back into its holster. She fastened the device in her hand onto her arm as well, inspecting the crystal whose power she now knew it held, as she herself did. The power of flight.

She closed her eyes. She tried to imitate how Butch controlled the gadget — with controlled flicks and arcs of the arm it was strapped onto — then threw her arm out towards another red leaf dancing in the sky. It went through the heart of the leaf easily, and she gave a whoop of delight. Butch just kept on smiling.

"You learn pretty fast, don't you," he said.

This time she ignored his compliment. "Why didn't you ever tell me that you had this . . . this machine?" she asked, watching as the wire slid home onto her arm by itself, and turning to look straight at him. "Or at least, you could have asked me along to wherever you found it, right?"

"Touchy." He clicked his tongue as he sat down on the grass, leaning his back against the rough bark of the tree. "I got one for you as well and now you're complaining?"

"I never said that," she snapped.

"But you meant that. Anyway—" Butch took a deep breath as he tried to recall. "I found it by chance. There's this weird old man with a really long brown beard — I don't know, like five feet long? — and he was just sitting at the corner cafe near Clarkesville. Then he saw me flying."

"And?" It was a casually spoken word. But it couldn't hide the way she was hanging on to his every syllable, picturing it all in her mind and wishing she were there. And Butch decided to embellish his story. Just a little.

"He almost conked out when he saw me flying like that, okay?" He rolled his eyes. "Anyway, he beckoned me over once he got his bearings right, and just gave me this big metal case. And he told me to keep whatever it was inside the case, to use them well."

"So you just took it? Even though it could be drugs or stuff inside?"

Butch threw up his arms. "Of course I did think about it for a while — I mean, he really looked like a junkie, what with his mess of a coat and this tatty cap covering like half his face. But there was something in his eyes that told me I should take the case, and so . . . and so I did. And when I opened the case to see what was inside and ask him what they were, he simply disappeared. How freaky is that?

"And I don't even know why it should be me, or why it's these two strange things and not some other super-powerful weapon or anything," he continued, not noticing Buttercup's reaction — or lack of it. But eventually he caught her eye, and grinned sheepishly. "I thought they looked similar, and maybe one was enough for me after I'd learnt what it could be used for. So . . . um, I thought I'd just give you the extra one."

Her face was sceptical. "Really."

He scowled at her. "Suit yourself," he muttered, then went about examining the device closely for a while. "But this gizmo is really neat, come to think about it," he added.

". . . Guess so."

She glared at the still unlit house, ignoring both Butch and the coolness of the device against her arm. Funny how they could stop talking to each other just because of a present they got from some unknown guy, she thought.

"Show you something else, gorgeous." Butch's voice drifted over from behind her.

"I don't care," she mumbled; and then, after she properly digested his words: "Hang on, why the hell did you call me g—"

"Wait," he shushed her. He stood up and hovered a little above the ground, his feet dangling level with her shoulders. With another fling of his right arm the crystal cut through the air like a torpedo; it hit another tree across the neighbouring yard, and quivered half-embedded in its trunk.

Buttercup sniffed. "Hell, I could do that too."

But even before her last word died away she heard a small click, and Butch shot up along the path of the wire at incredible speed. Like an automated grappling hook the gadget pulled him up, and he sailed in an arc to where the crystal was, landing smoothly on one of the sturdy branches of the tree.

And it was a success — not just because he managed to pull off this display, but because Buttercup now stared after him with her mouth agape, her wide green eyes almost taking up her entire face.

He grinned to himself.

"Well?" he prompted aloud. "Can you do that now?"

Down on the ground, Buttercup bit her lip. She had almost wanted to gush at his skills in manoeuvring that little machine, almost admitted that he was smarter than she was in too many things. But she shook her head and cleared her mind of those thoughts, instead gritting her teeth as she mimicked Butch. Her crystal, to her dismay, remained quite stationary.

Butch's silhouette in the distant tree writhed with laughter. "Concentrate, you twit! Do you see that square button thing at the side?"

She was indeed the fast learner that he thought she was — though not before she cursed herself for missing the button before. In no time she was on her way skyward as well, the initial burst of energy from the contraption so immense that she lost her balance, and her world tilted. She had no time to brake — no, she had not learnt how to. And her innate ability to fly had suddenly gone haywire as well.

Thanks a lot, Butch, she yelled at him inside her head.

As she shot past Butch's tree flailing he managed to, at the last possible second, dart up and grab her firmly by the waist. And his hand stayed there even as the two of them landed safely on the same branch.

"Take your bloody hand off already," she spat at him.

He pretended to give a little whimper, but obliged when she threatened to shove him off their perch. Still he couldn't stop laughing, not even when Buttercup spotted the tears glinting at the corners of his eyes, and he gave her no chance to retaliate.

"You! You should've seen yourself go up like that! What madness! What happened to you, anyway? Couldn't check your speed as well as I did, eh? Eh? But I tell you what — you did great. You did fabulous! Oh yes, that pose in the air, it was a perfect imitation of a dead duck . . ."

By that time Butch had his forehead pressed against the trunk, fists pounding its bark over and over as he went on laughing his pants off.

Buttercup rubbed at her nose angrily. "Just shut your trap, will you?" she retorted. "I bet that was a better first try than you probably had for that trick. Wasn't it, huh? And just shut up already! Shut up!"

She raised a hand, meaning to punch the living daylights out of him. But before she could bring it down he grabbed her by the wrist, and yanked her whole self towards him, until they were facing each other, their eyes inches apart from each other's.

The smile he flashed at her then, she knew, would have made her heart skip a beat or two — were it not for the stray tear of mirth that finally slipped its way down his face.

"You know what I heard from somewhere? I can't remember if it was from a song, or a book, or from some TV show . . . but it went something like this—" He gazed into her eyes, his own dark green ones darting, ever so slightly. "Everything that you see through your tears will always be the most beautiful of all . . .

"And it doesn't matter whether it's within your reach, or within your means, or within your rights . . ." His hand let go of hers, and instead reached out to touch the side of her face.

Buttercup flinched. She was sure he was just trying to throw her off with his blether, yet at the same time she knew there was some underlying meaning to everything that he said.

At least, she hoped there was.

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," she mumbled. Her face, whether in betrayal of her own words or stirred by the touch of his fingers, started to flush a furious pink. "And anyway, I don't think that was supposed to be tears of laughter—"

"Is it?" Butch deliberately pushed his face closer to hers, his voice somewhere in between growling and teasing. "Does it even matter?"

She switched back to her usual denial mode. "Oh, just shut up will you?" she snapped, pushing him off the branch — oh, the fresh air that promptly took his place! — and touching down back in their own backyard, relieved that her powers were back once more. Butch, as though to mock her further, was swinging in the air behind her as though in an invisible hammock, smiling with his arms tucked behind his head. The words he had said to her earlier — and what it could have entailed — seemed to have escaped him for the moment.

"This thing," Buttercup said quickly, turning to inspect the shining crystal in the device on her arm. "It . . . it kind of looks like a pendulum, doesn't it?"

"Yeah. I guess you could call it that, then." He slid off his hammock and over the fence that separated their yard from their neighbour's. "But whatever it is, you gotta remember that I was the one who gave it to you," he pointed out. "Because we're— we're friends, you see."

She snorted. "Friends?" Maybe laughter killed off his brain cells, too.

"Or maybe more than that, if that's what you want . . ." He eyed her slyly, his black hair glinting in the sinking sun as he spread his arms and leapt towards her—

"Perv! Take that!" With a yell Buttercup shoved him back and gave him a good hard punch in the stomach. Butch fell back down onto the lawn and rolled around in mock pain.

"Oh, brother!" he cried, the melodramatic streak in him revealing itself yet again. "Why can't you just be gentler like any other girl your age?"

Buttercup turned away. She suddenly did not want to look at him — not because of his absurdly poor acting, but because of what he had said just now.

More than . . . more than just friends?

Perhaps she should have given in, or at least tried to, now that they were already fourteen.

She sneaked a peek at Butch. He was watching her too, an all too devious grin curling up his face as he propped himself up on his elbow. For once, she noticed that — even after all that flying and shoving around — his hair was neatly combed down, save for that stubborn cowlick, and overall he looked pretty much cleaner than he used to be.

"What?" he asked slowly. "You like the idea?"

A nervous smile found its way up the corner of her mouth, but still she said nothing. She looked away, and instead gazed at the distant quarter of sun still above the rooftops of the neighbourhood.

"You don't mind, do you?"

By then Butch had already stood up and strode over to her, his fingers flitting over the apple green tee she was wearing: a mere fabric between his touch and her waist.

There's no harm assuming. No harm trying, if that's what he wants.

"Hands off and I might recon—" she began.

"Just kidding!" he yelled into her ear. Then, in another bout of careless laughter, he fell onto the ground, hands clutching his stomach from all the stitches. "Did you really think you can stop being a tomboy and all?" he managed to wheeze amidst his howling. "Did you really think that I'm going to like you one day if you start wearing dresses and stuff? That's so not going to work! Ever!" And he went back into his spell of laughter once more.

What had been a violent pumping in her chest now came to a halt as a cold wave rushed over her. All she could do then was stand there, her silhouette against the flaming orange spectacle in the sky behind her, the laughter at her feet fading away, ever so slowly.

Maybe.

So everything was just a maybe.

-tbc-