HLL: Hello! LOL, fully meant for this to be like 400 words, but...here we are!
Good ol' blues.
Disclaimer: I don't own The Powerpuff Girls.
TWO: Sugar Going Bad.
Sugar. The first.
Didn't that make her the oldest? She'd never feel that way.
People were always telling her that she was sweet. Sweet face, sweet words, sweet laugh. Sometimes, the creeps that skipped class and hung out by the gas station would mutter, "Sweet ass."
That's when she reminded them quickly that sugar is capable of going bad. Very bad, very quick.
Anger for her was strange. The rage never came out in yelling. When she was really mad, she cried. She was always crying. Or that's what her sisters muttered under their breath when her eyes welled up.
Rude perverted boys didn't make her cry. They got well-deserved punches that would make Buttercup proud and Blossom wince with mixed emotion.
But, beautiful boys…
She'd never tell her sisters that nothing seemed as sweet as spotting him across the courtyard. When she got a glance of his blonde hair, her heart flipped.
She was twisted like cotton candy.
His passing laughter brought tears that she couldn't stop. She was hanging out with her friends and he passed behind her, talking to one of his brothers.
He didn't have to start anything or say anything. He wasn't like Butch or Brick. They knew how to start a battle.
He knew he didn't need to bother.
The absence of a defense was enough.
She would make an excuse to dash off and burst out into tears, heart filled with a desire like poison. Her friends would chalk it up to stress from tests, from her intense sisters, or from fighting monsters in the dark hours of the morning. Maybe all of it together. Life must be hard for a super girl.
That's what nobody talked about. How you're supposed to leave sugar in a cool dry place to keep it good.
And that he knew. She knew he knew.
"Don't come around me," she wanted to tell him.
Once, they'd both been late to leave school. Everyone else had gone. He was there in the hallway.
Why?
She'd been collecting a folder after finishing a club meeting. Her hand was resting on the handle of her locker when she turned and noticed him.
The sun had been setting. Lazy rays of soft light cast an orange glow on him. It looked strange against his blonde and blue. Too much.
She didn't have to guess why her vision was blurring.
"You're always crying when you see me," he said. Soft, but gruff. He was the tamest of his brothers. She swallowed. And the most beautiful.
She didn't know what to say.
That he was right?
Her bottom lip began to tremble.
And then she just started talking. Words that she hadn't known were inside of her.
"I guess I can't help it," she told him. "That's what happens when you come around me. If I looked at you too long, I think I might unravel."
She'd never forget the rush of pink to his cheeks. How maybe she'd imagined it, hoped for it underneath the glow of the sunset.
And then she ran because her sweetness was melting away. Her tears were going to turn her into syrup.
That'd been a month ago.
She pressed her forehead against the cool mirror of the girls' bathroom. When she returned to her friends, he was gone. Off with his brother somewhere.
The next day, she stayed late like that time. Just because. To look at the sunset and her reflection to see if you could accidentally mistake a blush in that light. She wanted to know.
A door opened beside her. Her breath caught. Light hair, blue eyes, a recipe for her matching disaster.
She guessed he'd stayed late too.
He took a step past her and stood there. She stared at his sloping broad shoulders, the tears starting to soften the edges of his shirt. Blue, blue, blue. That was his color.
"Bubbles."
It was the first time he'd said her name outside of a fight in years.
"Yes?"
His back stiffened. When he turned his head, as if to look out the window, she saw the warmth of his cheeks. Not a mistake. Not a trick of the eye.
"What you said last time. You said if you looked at me too long then you'd...Well, you know."
A pause.
"Is it just if you look at me?"
His question was a slow whisper. Quieter than she'd ever heard him speak.
The tears came harder.
"That's when I cry the most," her little voice confessed.
His nod was long. The hall was quiet. Her heart was thundering.
"Thank you," he said. "That's what I needed to know."
The next day, she was kicking herself for watching him walk off with ammunition against her. It felt suddenly dirty. Like he knew a secret and hadn't given her anything back. She'd opened herself up.
Too sweet. That's what happened when you were too sweet.
Still she went back to see if she left a piece of herself in that hallway. To see if she could salvage anything from the shiny tile floors.
It was later than it'd been the first two times. Her conversation with a friend had run over. She bit her lip as she walked down the hallway. The cool tones from the approaching evening were so different from the warmth of the sunset.
When the lights turned off, she frowned. The school must've been closing. The lack of fluorescent lighting cast her in semi-darkness.
She headed for the door with a heavy heart. Heavy because she'd been hoping that maybe he'd be here and she could've seen if a blush looked differently at night. Just to make sure since she hadn't imagined it through her tears. That she hadn't imagined they'd shared something. Anything. Even if it was just chaos.
But, there was the sound of a door opening.
And there he was. A shadowy handsome boy at the end of the hall. A boy she shouldn't want.
The tears were coming, but they were slow. Much slower than before.
"I turned off the lights," he said in a voice that was even softer than the one before. "Does that make it better?"
She stood there, mouth opening and shutting, feeling like a struggling fish made from sugar.
He cleared his throat. She could barely see him shifting, walking towards her with an unsure step.
"Could you look at me when it's like this?"
"I don't understand," she said. Her voice was breaking. She tried to stop her hands from shaking. "We're enemies. Why are you trying to make this better?"
The silence stretched for minutes. They plunged deeper into darkness. The light from the emergency exit sign glowed in the background like an ember.
"Boomer," she breathed.
His arms were warm when they wrapped around her. The air in her throat vanished when he buried his head into her hair.
That's when she heard the shortness of his breath, the sniffling nose, the smell of salt.
The sure sign of sugar going bad.
"Because I guess I can't help it either."
They stood for a long time.
"Is it when you look at me? Is that when it's the worst?" she asked.
"No, it's your laugh. When I hear you."
"I've never seen you." Her voice felt foreign, as if she was finally paying attention the way she sounded for the first time. She was blinking over and over. Just blinking. Awed and frozen in his embrace.
"Have you met my brothers? You learn to stuff the feeling down."
"Oh, yeah."
He never let go of her, face still buried in her shoulder.
Her thoughts were raving, wild and mad, when she tugged on the sleeve of his arm.
"Boomer?"
"Yeah?"
"This is bad."
"Yeah."
She listened to the sound of her heart beating and thought about how you can't go back once you've done something.
"Do you want to be bad together?"
Hope you enjoyed! I really like to think of Boomer and Bubbles as the first ones to surrender out of the PPGxRRB pairing. They're too close to their emotions to hide it for long. This is just one idea of them getting together after realizing they both want to cry buckets in each other's presence.