A/N: Completely separate one-shot from "Youth and Immaturity".
Also, titling - lawl.
Also, your reviews are so amazing and supportive. They're better than like, coffee.
The first time Buttercup killed someone, Blossom stopped time. Well, stopped may have been overstating it. One moment, Him's twisted, infant clone had morphed its arm into a cruel, arcing blade and was swinging it downward over Bubbles' head, and the next – time was inching along, a tenth of a frame a moment.
Buttercup hadn't even realized she was moving until she was literally inching forward through space, watching the warped events unfold around her. In the palm of her drawn-back hand, a green crackle of power was breathing to life. And Buttercup realizes then that she's already made all the tough decisions.
'Buttercup,' Blossom's voice flows through her head like water. 'Buttercup, you can't.'
'I can.' Buttercup thinks. The angle of her elbow continues to close, like a tightening spring. Her fist draws a line with It's temple (and she's thinking in 'It's' now, but she doesn't know if that is something she'd been doing all along, or if she only just started when she realized what this was all coming to – what she'd have to do).
'Buttercup, think!' Blossom pleads. 'This is a line we never cross and you're crossing it. It'll hurt you. It'll change everything. Or, it should.'
Buttercup's jaw tightens. 'Then,' she shoots back viciously, 'can you do it?'
Blossom's voice goes silent as a morgue.
The power in Buttercup's palm surges in reply.
'I know what I'm doing,' Buttercup thinks, still hard and cutting as diamond. 'I know what this means. And I'm doing it because I'm the only one who can. So you don't have to.'
'So I-?"
'Just who do you think,' Buttercup's fist shoots forward, fingers forming a pointed apex, 'I'm doing this for?'
Not for Townsville. Not even for humanity. Those reasons were Blossom's reasons, and they were a lot harder. Complicated. Throwing all sorts of moral shades and grays. Buttercup's reasons were simpler, she knew. Easier.
In the last moment, He turns and looks at her. Red, bloodshot eyes lock onto hers, showing a knowledge that lacked fear. Buttercup's hand goes through the eye socket, rupturing and destroying everything its path.
And Blossom doesn't, or can't, speed time up again.
Maybe Blossom wanted Buttercup to live with this moment. Maybe Blossom was punishing herself.
'I'm saving you,' Buttercup thinks as her hand enters and blasts through the brain. 'From having to do this.'
Her hand clears the back of the skull and the clone slumps its entire weight onto her arm. Unmoving, its one intact eye is still gazing, still locked onto hers.
She wishes Blossom would fucking speed time up again, because her body feels thick and unresponsive and she hates it. It isn't until Bubbles floats up from underneath and places a hand on her tense shoulder, that Buttercup realizes Blossom already has.
Buttercup lowers her arm and the thing – the body, falls from her like weight shed. And yet, as it falls a different, immeasurable burden settles on her shoulders.
She doesn't look at Blossom. She knows her sister is crying. And if she sees the tears, she doesn't know that she'll physically be able to handle the resentment budding in her heart. Besides, she doesn't want to face the distance in her sisters' eyes. Their judgment. At her side, her bloody hand curls into a fist.
"Buttercup-"
"No!" Buttercup snaps, recoiling. The harshness of her voice startles even her. "Not yet."
And before they do anything, she takes off. They don't stop her, call her name, or come after her.
And she isn't sure how she feels about that.
[X]
It takes her until she's practically there for her to realize where she's going, and a distant part of her mind raises a surprised flag. Why here of all places? She hadn't even been back since…
Buttercup shakes the thoughts out of her head, trying to clear way the fragments, the floating haze. It all feels like a lifetime ago. Everything does. She lets her body continue leading her to the peak of the un-named volcano, stopping only when she was hovering over it, gazing down into the red core that would have seared the vision out of any normal human's brain. She bakes in heat that would have peeled the skin of any non-Chemical X body. She let the heat play cat and mouse with her nervous system, permitting the pain to grow until all her bodily instincts begged her to run, fly, salvage herself. She let it get to that point, and then forced herself to go deeper, embracing the pain.
She stays for what must have been hours, gazing into the hypnotic ocean of lava and light. She lets time turn into a huge, immeasurable thing against which she feels like a speck of irrelevant existence, of a faint pulsing of pain against the backdrop of infinity.
Night comes and goes and comes again.
And then, when it felt like solitude would open up and swallow her whole, a hand claps rudely over her eyes.
"Guess who?"
Buttercup's body reacts even if her brain doesn't, at first. Her elbow drives back, hard. Meanwhile, her thoughts skip surprise and fear and jump straight to recognition. Even as Buttercup swivels around to swing a vicious punch to her would-be-assailant's head, she's already recognized him by the texture of calluses on his thumb against her temple.
Butch catches her fist without any serious effort – which in and of itself tells her how out of it she must be. He tosses her blow to the side like an empty beer can to a curb. "Sloppy," he says.
Buttercup looks at him, light-headed and a bit nauseous. "Butch."
He raises those cruel eyebrows at her – as if asking if she needs verification on that.
Buttercup struggles to pull herself together, but her brain runs like a wobbly record. Rowdy Ruff Boy. Here. Enemy. Split lips. Swollen eyes and fingers. Burning breaths. The scar around his left eye. The cruel crookedness of sneering smiles. Butch.
"What are you doing here?" She settles on that, because it seems reasonable.
Butch wipes a line of sweat from his forehead, and she realizes absently that she'd drenched and dried out long ago – salty flakes and crystals are dusted all over her skin. Butch shrugs. "Well, call it a hunch. After searching every other possible crevice of the planet, I figured maybe you were here."
Buttercup frowned. Butch – looking for her?
The pieces click together slowly. One at a time. The first real emotion Buttercup feels again is annoyance. "Did my sister send you?"
"Well, yeah."
Buttercup laughs. It is not kind. Nor does it really sound healthy. Her vocal chords are dried out and underused. They scrape together like an old man on an oxygen tank.
"So she can't even leave me alone for a minute. Typical Blossom. Always sticking her perfect little nose into everything."
Butch frowns at her. It's the first fault line in his no-fucks-given act. "I mean… you've been gone for almost three weeks."
That takes a while to sink in. Her first thought is that Butch is a liar, or he's confused. Maybe both. It wouldn't be the first time.
"Your sisters are royally losing their shit. I think Blossom and Brick are searching Pluto right now."
Buttercup tries to remember the number of nights that had passed. But it's hard to pull apart in her brain. Memories stick together like molasses, and if she tries to sift too much, the things she's been burying in heat and pain start poking their ugly heads up from to the surface… Buttercup shuts her brain off. Butch must see the blank expression fall across her eyes, because he takes the opportunity to slap her, lightly, on the face.
She thinks his palm lingers just a bit longer than it needs to – but maybe that's just her imagination.
"Slow," Butch says, a bit softly. "You really got fucked up, huh?"
"Wow, fuck you too." Buttercup starts to pull away, deeper into the volcano's heart. Or she would have, but Butch catches her wrist and holds it. She really has gotten slow. Her skin is red and raw and sensitive from days of nothing but slow burn, and Butch's grip is like acid.
"Come on," he says. "Get out of this fucking shithole."
Butch draws her up to the lip of the volcano, but no further than that. Buttercup lets him without putting up too much of a fight. She knows it should be awkward and painful for them to see each other like this – here of all places. But instead, it just feels like falling into exactly what they'd had in the past, whatever you wanted to call it – relationship, benefits… thing. This was a place where she and Butch had been close. And somehow, through the thick dead feeling cloaking her mind, it feels natural to be here with him again.
"You ever think that like volcanoes are just the massive zits of Earth?" Butch asks after some silence (he'd never done well with it), throwing a rock into the red sea below. "Like, if you were to zoom out, and think of Earth's surface as some dude's skin, volcanoes would be just huge fucking zits getting ready to explode."
"Dude, that's gross."
Butch offers her his reckless grin. Buttercup is still confused as to why he's here. And, now that he's found her, why he hasn't left to report back to their siblings. Missing for three weeks.
"So, Blossom asked you to help find me?" Buttercup says slowly, trying to make sure she has it right.
"Not me, directly." Butch says, poking around for another rock to sacrifice to the volcano god. "I'm pretty sure Pinky has never so much as made eye contact with me, directly."
"Who blames her," Buttercup says without thinking, falling to the motions of the way they used to talk.
Butch gives her the finger, still looking for rocks. "She asked Brick for help."
Oh, Buttercup thinks. Now it made a kind of sense at least. "So Brick ordered you."
Butch hurls a stone into the lava, watching as the red swallows it whole. He shrugs. "Leader man says."
"Well you can tell both our leaders that you found me. And I'm fine. And to stop freaking out."
"Why don't you tell them yourself?"
Buttercup blinks. The thought of her going back – or ever seeing her sisters again hadn't come to her. It simply hadn't been in the cards. The idea of it sounded normal out loud, but somehow felt foreign to think about. She wanted to reject it.
Butch hit her again, on the other cheek. The blow was light, but still hard enough to plant a little, pink sting in her raw skin.
"The fuck, Butch," she snaps, touching at it with her fingertips.
He smirks. She thinks she sees a glimmer of something like relief behind it. Another hallucination, maybe.
"Go home, loser." Butch says, and there's no joke in his voice.
She wishes there was. Butch's seriousness is uncommon, and gives her no avenue for escape. And if going home after what she'd done was the next step, then –
"I can't."
Butch rolls his dark, green eyes.
Normally, she'd want to punch him in the face. This time, she only wants to sink back into the red solitude she'd immersed herself inside for so long.
"That's the tard-est thing I've ever heard. And I've said some pretty fucking dumb shit."
Buttercup sits hard on the ground, suddenly. She crushes her head between her knees and wraps her elbows around her shins. She wishes she was alone. "Go away, Butch." She sounds smaller than she's ever sounded in her life.
Beside her, Butch is very still. He doesn't move at all.
"I said, just fucking leave. Please." She wishes she hadn't said it as soon as she does. Please never got anyone anywhere with Butch.
After a long stretch of silence, he sits down next to her. Close enough to feel his nearness. He throws rocks into the volcano. He shuffles. But after what feels like forever, he's still sitting there, waiting.
[X]
"Did they tell you?" She asks finally, her voice creating an echo between her knees.
She thinks he won't answer at first. Then he says, plainly, "Tell me what?"
Buttercup snaps upright, wild. "Don't fuck with me! Either they told you, or they didn't. And if they did, don't fucking make me say it!"
Butch scowls at her. "All Pinky said was that you'd been gone for almost three weeks, and she was freaking. That's it. She was too hysterical to get anything else across, actually."
Buttercup doesn't believe him. She doesn't fucking believe him. Butch is a liar. He always has been. And she – she –
"Buttercup," Butch says, thumping his fist softly down on the top of her head – the way he always used to do back then, and hadn't done since. The gesture calmed some frantic, animal part of her that she hadn't even realized had been taking control. "Dude, what the fuck happened?"
She stares into his eyes, and the words just won't come. They fill her and they fucking terrify her. And it turns out it's okay, because somehow Butch seems to do what she'd never thought he would have been capable of doing ever - he puts it together without so much as a single spoken word.
"Oh," he says. "Uh, was it your first time?"
And just like that, it's all undone. Buttercup doesn't know how he fucking understands. But he does. And now she's here with Butch.
"Of course," she says. "I didn't… I didn't even think twice."
Butch doesn't seem disgusted. He doesn't even seem surprised.
Why would he be? Buttercup asks herself sardonically. He's probably done it before.
(And it strikes her as ironic that she's been here before, under very different circumstances, in considerably less clothing, and thinking the same exact thing about Butch but for something entirely different. But it's only a fleeting thought. She barley realizes she's had it before it's gone.)
"Of course you didn't. You wouldn't have done it if you'd needed to."
Buttercup tames back her instinct to recoil from him. Does he sound almost… proud of her? The idea of that disgusts her and makes her feel thin.
"So you killed a bad guy," Butch says, all casual. A verbal band-aid that doesn't do a thing to help her gaping wound.
"Don't just say it like that. It's different for you, you're a Rowdy Ruff Boy. You wouldn't understand. For you it's probably like brownie points."
"What's your point?"
"My point is that I don't fucking want to see you right now. So leave."
"Well you sure as fuck don't want to see your sisters. So until then, you're stuck with me."
"What, so now you want to be my babysitter?"
"You'd rather I went home and told them where you are? Because they're gonna ask if I go back. And then it's going to be them sitting here instead of me."
"You could just not be a dick and tell them to leave me alone."
"Hi, have you met me? My name is Butch – AKA, the biggest dick you've ever met." He throws in a lewd wink for good measure. Some habits never die.
She might have sniggered at that once. Today, she wants to scream at him until his ears bled. Or hers do. She wants to hit him. She wants to beat the fucking shit out of him. But she doesn't. She can't quite get traction on the sentiment. She feels weak and watery still. Something in her is broken. And Butch can see it.
"You have two choices," he says after a moment, the nastiness gone from his voice. "Go home or entertain me."
"I'm not up for a fight, Butch."
"Who said fight? I just want you to tell me a story."
"What story," she sighs.
"Tell me what happened three weeks ago."
Buttercup goes dead silent and stares soberly at the black, scorched earth beneath them. "I told you already," she said. "I killed something." The words felt foreign and heavy in her mouth. But somehow, the fact that they'd already been said by Butch made them easier – smoother. "I killed Him."
That gets Butch's attention. Before this moment, she hasn't been completely sure if he wasn't just waiting to get this chore done with before he buzzed off to do whatever (or whoever) he'd really wanted to be doing this evening.
"Not Him, Him. A part of him. A spawn He made. But it was still a separate creature. It had a heart. It had a brain. I shoved my hand through it." (She sees that he's impressed and she deliberately ignores it).
"Why'd you take the shot?" Butch asks. "Did Pinky, I mean, did Blossom…?"
"No," Buttercup says. "No, she didn't. She couldn't."
Buttercup's gaze goes from her thighs to the milky blue twilight above them. Another night moving in to take over the sky. Butch's profile is rimmed-red by the volcano's glow and sits like an anchor in her periphery. He is a strange, burning contrast in her field of vision.
It occurs to her that he's the only one here with her. He's the only one listening. And she can tell by his uncharacteristic silence that he isn't going anywhere. And Buttercup finds that – as long as he doesn't try to take her home – she doesn't really mind all that much. It is impossible to disgust Butch. To surprise Butch. Piss him off? Yes. Hurt him? Judging by the number of loose twats he'd burned through after they told each other it was over, she suspected yes. But she would never see what she'd pictured in Blossom's eyes in Butch's. And the knowledge of that was somehow like the first step on solid ground after being lost at sea for years.
"Have you ever done anything for Brick when he didn't order you to do it?"
"I ordered him a stripper for our last birthday."
"No, not like that. I mean –" Buttercup sighs in frustration, fingers clenching and dragging patterns into the black, ashy earth. "Have you ever done something that he didn't order you to – like when it mattered, when he didn't – or when he ordered you not to?"
Butch was looking at her, she could feel it – could see it in her periphery as she kept her gaze on the nascent stars – faint smatterings of light that were beginning to be unearthed by the dark.
"No," he says.
"Right." Buttercup smiles, bitter. "Because we're the muscle, the fists. They call the shots and we follow through. We don't make our own calls. We might fly off the handle sometimes, every once and a while. But for the most part, we just hit what they tell us to hit, get our kicks off that and go home bloody."
"You resent her for that?" Butch asks. She can hear him connecting some dots, thinking he understands what this is about now. (And he does, in part – because in this way, Buttercup and Butch are the same, but that isn't why she's here now. That isn't why she can't bear to think of Blossom's face, or going home again).
"Yeah, but it's easier for us to be like that. It's better. I… I killed Him for her, even though she told me not to. Because I knew she was wrong. It had to be done. Blossom knew it. I knew it. And if it wasn't me, it would have to be her. She would have had to do it because she's the leader and she's responsible for us, but it would have completely broken her. She's too good to ever… you know. I knew it. So I did it instead."
Butch is still looking at her, but differently now. She is in a place that he doesn't understand. "It' won't break you," he says. "You're stronger than Blossom."
"You mean I'm darker," Buttercup corrects. "I'm not strong. If I was, I'd have gone home already. But I don't. I can't. I don't want to see her face."
"I thought you said you did it for her." Butch sounds confused now, a bit frustrated.
Buttercup doesn't really blame him.
"I did. I'd do it again. But at the same time, I resent her. I'm angry at her."
"Because you had to do it for her?"
"A little," Buttercup admits. "But mostly because… I know she'll look at me differently for it. I killed someone. I'm… a murderer – even if it's for the good guy's side. I killed and it disgusts her. Her. She was the one I was trying to protect. And she'll still hate me. I… I'll lose her. And I hate her for that. It's not fucking fair."
Butch is silent for what feels like forever. And she's mostly grateful for it. She doesn't remember the last time she was this honest – with anyone. She'd taken the deepest inside part of her and exposed it, even though it felt raw and delicate. It was also true, like the tiniest, most fragile bones.
Above them, the stars shone dry and white. Maybe I should have gone there, she thinks. She doubted they could have ever found her. But you wouldn't have, something says to her, a tiny voice somewhere underneath all the desires to flee. You knew, you hoped that this would –
Butch bumps a fist to her shoulder, a replica of his left hook – the one that had knocked her out once. The one she'd warned her sisters to never get caught behind. She'd sworn that once it had partially dislodged her brainstem, forcing Chemical-X into overdrive to repair the trauma. Except this time there's no force behind it. This time Butch connects with her shoulder and stays there – definitely longer than he should have. But Buttercup doesn't shake it off, even when the fist opens and Butch's palm spreads over her skin. His hands are rough and calloused, exactly as she remembered them to be. He hasn't changed at fucking all, she thinks.
"Why did you come here?" He asks after a moment, his hand tightening slightly on her, as if to keep her from flying away.
Buttercup shrugs under his hold, and answers him honestly. "I don't know. Maybe because I could always tell the truth here."
And that's an awkward as shit reminder to bring up at this stage. What they'd done here. What they'd said here. But Buttercup is too beyond teenage relationships to care about it right now. Honesty had always been something their relationship had in bounds – too much even, she thought sometimes.
"Maybe because you and Brick are the same as me and Blossom."
Buck exhales sharply, and it passes as a kind of laugh without humor. "Brick is twice the dick that Pinky will ever be," he says. "And I think you're a much more fuckin' complicated sister than I am a brother."
Buttercup smiles, glancing at his red outline. She's not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that she can't make out the details of his features or his expression, he is just a collection of hard red outlines: straight nose, curved cheek, and spiked hair. The shiny red crescent scar over his eye.
"Hey," Butch says roughly – the way he used to speak whenever he was being serious. His hand moves up her shoulder to her neck and comes to rest around its nape, fingers moving beneath her hairline. With his other hand, Butch reaches out and smears his knuckles along her face. She feels the wetness on her cheek – it takes her until then to realize that at some point, she started crying.
And she thinks Butch might kiss her.
She's never cried in front of him before. Not even when he'd ended them and left, saying bullshit things to her like 'Think you're just too fucking good for this' and 'We will never get this to fucking work' and she'd said lies to him like 'Fine'.
Somehow, it's only when it doesn't matter anymore that she's let him see her tears.
Butch pulls her forward. And his lips on hers are softer than she's ever remembered them to be. Unlike every other kiss she'd gotten from Butch, this one is completely calm – void of any violence or games or hurt or sexuality. There was only Butch on the other end of it – assuring, accepting. If it weren't for all the history that stood behind it, she would have almost called it platonic. When he breaks it, she feels calmer. Tired. Like he's taken something from her, to carry.
They sit in the silence and in the heat. Then, Butch stands. She thinks maybe he'll finally leave her alone. "Maybe it's all switched around in your head," he says.
"What?"
"I mean, maybe it's not that Pinky's image of you is lowered. Your image of her is too high. She's not as fucking pristine as you think. She's got the hots for Brick for crying out loud. I'd say that tight-up Princess can handle loving more than a little bit of dark, no matter what she'd like us to think. Besides," he adds, "when she came over for our help, she was crying."
Buttercup looks up, searching for Butch's face. But he has his back to her. It's completely dark now, and the stars are brilliant white clusters of light behind his head.
"I don't know your sisters very much. But I know siblings. And I know you. It wasn't the face of someone who never wanted to see her sister again. And it wasn't the face of someone carrying out some mechanical sense of duty either. Maybe you should look Blossom in the eyes before you make and judgments about what you'll find behind them... But, fuck, what do I know?" She can tell he's grinning at her, even in the dark, even not facing her. "She's your sister."
Buttercup is looking up at him like he might be salvation – in the last place she'd ever expected to find it. Or maybe she had, she thinks, and that is why she'd brought herself here. You knew, you hoped.
"Next time, if you still haven't moved, I'll bring you a quarter pounder with cheese. Extra pickles, right?"
Then he rockets off into the night, a viridian comet against the stars.
[X]
As it ends up, he doesn't need to bring her that quarter pounder. Somehow, after he leaves, Buttercup finds her way back home. It takes her another half a day, but when she walks in through the front door, the Professor drops the phone and the map he'd been pouring over and runs to her, clobbering her into a hug before she can even make it through the doorway. He starts crying almost immediately, while Buttercup notices for the first time that his carbon-black hair has started graying around the tops of his ears. She thinks its cool that he'll gray from the temples like a badass instead of going from the top like a wussie.
Her sisters follow not long after, super sonic hearing attuned to the sound of the Professor's sobs like freakin' homing devices on crack. Blossom takes a little bit longer than Bubbles, who had only been searching South America. The Pink Puff had in fact, been combing nearby asteroid belts.
And then they all start fucking crying on her. As in, literally on her, soaking her clothes and hair with tears. And Bubbles squeezes them so hard that the Professor's vertebrates start crackling. 'Why do you smell like sulfur?' The blue puff sniffs. And Blossom takes her green sister's head in her hands and holds it there, foreheads touching, nose tips skimming wet. And Buttercup stares into Blossom's brimming pink eyes, her own hands shaking at her sides.
And Buttercup finds there only what Butch says she would.
She finds there –
Only love.
-Fin-