LOCATION: UTONIUM RESIDENCE

TIME: 4:30 PM

Brick's POV

Let's focus on you first. I didn't hear that a lot growing up with my brothers and Him. For the most part, I was the oldest growing up in a single parent home, so all the responsibility of a second parent was pretty much thrown on my shoulders. That meant dealing with everyone else's shit first and all my problems last, if at all. I didn't want to make Blossom feel that way either, she was exactly like me in that instance. But I also wanted to be selfish for a little while, I wanted to soak in that comfort and not worry about another person's problems for just one fucking minute, and Blossom seemed happy to give me that.

No one was home at the Utonium household, meaning no one was there to bother us as we lied in Blossom's room curled up on her bed. Despite the location, circumstances made the moment incredibly not sexual. In fact, Blossom and I had pretty much traded off crying for the first half hour or so and then we'd fallen asleep for a little over 45 minutes which was rudely interrupted by my sudden need to pee. Now we found ourselves just laying there side by side, me playing with one of Blossom's hands.

Bloss was the first to talk. "You said you got into a fight with Mojo. Can I ask what it was about?"

I turned over so I could look at her while I spoke and leaned my head against one of my hands, keeping hers held in my other one. My fingers entwined and unraveled with hers over and over again met with brief interludes of our fingertips brushing against one anothers'. The words fell out of my mouth without hesitation, my mind finding no reason not to share every last detail with the powderpuff next to me.

"He was asking about you."

"Me?"

"Yeah."

"And that upset you?"

"No," I quickly began to clarify, "it was his prying that annoyed me. And then he started talking about how you would be a good influence on me and basically reminded me of how this town thinks of us as nothing but the shit beneath their feet, so…"

"That's not true," she tried to reason.

"C'mon red, let's not lie to each other. I've done some pretty shady things in my past, I grew up with two major criminals as parents, people expect my brothers and I to be assholes who go around committing crimes and kicking puppies."

"The past is exactly that. You're not some little shithead kid anymore, people will eventually go back to minding their own business."

How harshly would you judge me if the bad things I've done weren't that far in the past though? How bad is too bad for you, red?

My jaw clenched as I thought about whether or not it was the best idea to tell Blossom anything about who I was in Citiesville. The stupid part of my brain insisted it wasn't that bad of an idea, that she would like me despite the worst parts of me.

"I'm not a good person, babe," I began down the path of possible self destruction, "part of me hates that Mojo was somewhat right. He didn't need to say it, but even he knows that at some point one of us, my brothers or I, is gonna blow up. And I'm afraid it's gonna be me." Her head laid back against the bed and her hand left mine, moving to play with the necklace hanging from my neck. My breathing grew shorter the closer she came to my neck, but I kept speaking. "Back in Citiesville, there was this kid. He spread some rumors about Butch taking steroids and it got around fast to a couple of the teachers. They were afraid that the Chemical X in his system would make the drugs wear off faster and make it harder to detect in a drug test. So for the next three months they would pull Butch out of class in front of everyone to make him take surprise drug tests, they put him on mandatory probation and banned him from playing on any of the sports teams for the rest of the year, and they did random searches through his locker and bag in front of everyone. They never found anything, because he wasn't on steroids of course - who the hell would even believe he had to take any when he had superpowers - but it ruined his rep. Any potential scouts had that information about the rumors divulged to them and so no one wanted to touch him, a bunch of our friends got pissed and ditched him because they thought his enhanced abilities were already considered cheating enough, and because he wasn't playing on the football team they had to put some freshman in to take his place and they lost the season so he somehow got blamed for that too. It ruined his entire year." I swallowed hard, flashbacks of the rest of the story coming back to me. "So, I did some digging and found out who the rumors originated from, I caught the kid alone walking in the parking lot one day, and I jumped him."

"You've always been a little more violent than-"

"I broke his jaw," I stopped her, "fractured his wrist, broke one of his ankles and an arm. They had to rush him into surgery because they were afraid one of his three broken ribs might've punctured a lung and they needed to stop the internal bleeding before it got any worse."

Blossom didn't have anything to say about that. There it is. The silent judgment.

"The only reason his parents didn't sue or file a report was because he was too afraid to rat out who did it to him. And he wasn't the first or last person I'd beaten up, he was just one of the worse ones."

"Brick…" her voice was so small now. She'd stopped messing with my necklace. I waited for her to say something, anything else, but she didn't.

"I'm not a good person, Bloss. I've never claimed to be. But I've never hated myself more than right now, sitting here, telling you one of my many shitty mistakes." I leaned my forehead closer to hers until they were touching. Please don't pull away. "I lied to Mojo, I told him we hadn't committed any kind of crimes since we were younger, but the truth is...we've done so much bad shit, we just rarely got caught for it. Petty thievery here and there, small run ins with the cops catching us for loitering, but nothing big. But Citiesville is lenient with that kind of shit and here in Townsville they're not. I'm afraid that I'm gonna blow up one day and I'm gonna do something that makes you look at me like I'm the worst person in the world. I'm afraid of proving Mojo right, of disappointing Him, of putting my brothers in a position where they feel like they need to back me up and getting them into some kind of trouble. I'm afraid of losing control."

In a completely unanticipated twist of events Blossom, instead of turning away and kicking me out like I thought she would, wrapped her arms around me tightly and pulled my body down to meet hers. Every crevice, every inch of skin, pressed together. My head moved on its own accord and became buried in between her neck and shoulder. "I'll help you, I'll help you," she whispered over and over and over again, until I believed her. "You won't lose control."

"I almost murdered Poindexter for calling you a name." I pointed out, somewhat jokingly.

It worked, Blossom let out a light laugh and it made the conversation seem a little bit lighter for a minute. "I almost murdered Poindexter for calling me a name. But I didn't, and neither did you. You were a bad person before with intentions that weren't entirely moral but also not hard to sympathize with. You get mad about people hurting the ones you love, you just act on it violently and we can work on that. You've done bad things, that doesn't make you a bad person, not if that's not who you want to be."

My arms tightened around her waist, wanting nothing more than to show her exactly how much her words meant to me. If Blossom thinks I can be a good person, then there just has to be hope, right?

"Is it ok if I stay here for the night?" I was surprised at my own question, following it up with a series of stutters, "I mean can I sleep on your floor? I-I wouldn't, like, bother you or anything, like I wouldn't try and pull something. Not that you're someone I wouldn't try and pull something with, just- just not in the way it's being insinuated. Jesus fuck," I took a deep breath to calm myself down, "I just don't want to face Mojo or Him."

Blossom fucking giggled. "You can stay here for the night. I don't really wanna be alone anyways. Buttercup and Bubbles won't be home until late and I just went through a terrible breakup with my boyfriend of three years."

"Holy shit, you were with that asshole for three years?" She shook her head at my question. "Can I ask you something personal?"

"Go for it."

Our original position resumed, lying on our sides, hands intertwining, but this time my fingers found their way to her face every so often, tracing the outlines of her features. "Did you love him?"

"At the beginning maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it was just what I thought love was at that time." She didn't look me in the eyes. "I thought he was smart and sweet. And he was cute, and everyone said we'd look good together. Dexter and I, on paper, made a lot of sense. And then somewhere around year two something just changed. I noticed things more, how he acted toward others, how arrogant he actually was. I think I just became bored following in his shadow. I wanted something exciting," her eyes briefly flickered toward my own, "and nothing about him excited me."

I want to kiss you so bad right now.

"He was so boring," she continued.

That's because he didn't know the right ways to please you.

"And predictable,"

He was so out of his league with someone like you, red.

"And he never cared about what I wanted, or noticed at least,"

I would notice. I do notice.

"This was a long time coming. I was just too scared to pull the trigger on it." That seemed hard for her to admit. "He was passionate about a lot of things, science, math, history; but he wasn't passionate about me, and that's all I ever wanted."

If you were mine, no one would hear the end of it.

"I like you, Brick," my eyes shot up to meet hers, not understanding in what way she meant it, but hoping, hoping, "you might not like who you are, but I do. And if having all of the good parts of you means I have to take the worst parts as well, that's fine with me."

Scared shitless, I didn't make a single move as her lips brushed against my cheek, lingering for what could be considered an unreasonably long time. That fear of disappointing her grew even bigger after that. All that I wanted to say back got caught in my throat, so instead I whispered back, "I like you too, red."