4. Dark
Bubbles still slept with a night light. It wasn't a force of habit, like Blossom said, or a deliberately annoying act, like Buttercup thought. She kept it because she was still honestly terrified of the dark.
It was okay when she was asleep; her dreams were usually full of sunshine and puppies. But whenever Buttercup stole her night light and hid it so well she couldn't find it for a week, she had nightmares. Awful ones, full of all kinds of terrible things. It wasn't the dark that scared her so much as the possibilities of the dark, the metaphoric symbolism of it (Blossom would be proud). She wasn't like Buttercup, who threw everything she had into a fight, and she wasn't like Blossom, who used a carefully controlled amount. She was the sweet one, the one who was never taken seriously.
She hadn't asked to be a hero. She hadn't been asked, upon her birth, what she wanted to do with her life. She protected Townsville because the poor people needed it. They expected it. She didn't mind helping them out, but it wasn't what she wanted to do her entire life. It was exhausting, to be frank; Townsville was never perfectly safe for longer than five minutes. A new disaster happened every day, be it a new monster, a three-times-convicted-three-times-escaped criminal aiming for a fourth conviction, or a stubborn pickle jar. Sometimes, Bubbles just wanted to get away from it all for a few years.
That thought itself made her blush. It was stupid to want to walk out on her sisters, on the town she swore to save, but it was always there, that niggling desire. Other times she just wanted an unlimited supply of monsters to exhaust herself upon. If she wanted to, she knew she could probably take over the town and run it with twice the capability of the Mayor (the poor guy was well into his nineties; Miss Bellum was more the Mayor now than he was). And twice the iron fist. The problem with being a superhero was that there was such a thin line between "hero" and "villain". Blossom didn't think so, but Bubbles knew better. What was so different between her saving the town for her own glory and someone robbing a store so his family didn't starve? The thief had more honor than she did; he was probably more of a hero than she ever would be. Sure, it was wrong of him to do that, but wasn't it just as wrong for her to be only thinking of herself?
Not that she did, but the possibility, the darkness, was always there. Her worst nightmares were when she was facing herself, looking just as she always did except for that smile. It was nothing more than an upturning of her lips, an empty expression except for the burning fire in her eyes. She always woke up in a cold sweat after those dreams and padded down to the training simulation for another face-off with Level Eleven, now so easy it was absurd, but there was something comforting in mashing the fake monsters to a virtual pulp without even trying. She'd named them, too; Philip always went first, scratching for her side, then Bugsy snapped at her ankles, and so on. Level Eleven served as a constant reminder. It was there she first learned how "hardcore" she could be, and where she learned how easy it was for her to fly off the handle if she wasn't careful.
Buttercup always talked about her "dark side" like it was something hovering just under the surface, like if she slipped she wouldn't be able to stop falling. Buttercup was stronger than that, surely; surely her dark side wasn't any worse than Bubbles felt hers was. Blossom never mentioned having one, but everyone had a little badness in them. Everyone had a dark side. Even Bubbles. She couldn't be all sugar all the time.
The trick was to keep her bitterness from taking over her sweetness.
A/N: I wanted to take a sneak peek at the inside of Bubbles' head with this one. I found out some interesting things. I keep saying this, I know, but forgive the trailing and indecisiveness. Somewhere around thirty I should hit the flow stage. Maybe earlier if I work harder. ;)
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