Author's Notes: I'm starting to be a fan of car talks, LOL. But this will be the last of them.

Chapter 7

I Thought You Didn't Like Me

"Well, this is definitely a case of non-accidental injury, but the question is, did she actually get the injuries from crimefighting?"

Wednesday shook his head. "Unfortunately, no." He replied grimly. "She got them from an assault. A group assault, at a museum."

The nurse frowned with understanding. "I noticed she was distressed when I started asking about the origins of her bruises." It was clear she was hiding information from the caretaker, refusing to go into any specific details and refusing to make eye contact with the hospital worker.

Things only got worse for her when she did start to get into details—details of being picked up by her hair and smashed face-first into the ground. Of being grabbed and thrown against walls. Kicked in the face while she was already down. Held in place by one person while another ceaselessly punched her until teeth came flying out.

There was even a moment where she stopped answering entirely, her eyes clouding over as she stared out at nothing in particular, being unresponsive to any calls of her name or outside stimuli for the next several seconds.

"Buttercup?" The nurse called, watching the child suddenly become blank in the face as she trailed off in the middle of her disclosure, her mind seemingly far away.

The child didn't answer.

"Buttercup?" Now even Mr. Wednesday joined in, calling out to her with concern, but she still wouldn't answer any one of them. Her eyes were clouded over and she almost looked to be on autopilot, not showing any signs of acknowledgment to the outside world or what was going on around it.

She even started to lean forward a bit, stuck in a trance that didn't even have her looking out for her own safety.

The nurse's voice eventually became white noise, replaced instead by the choked cries of her own voice as they were mixed with the relentless blows of the rioting criminals, her saliva slowly mixing with her own blood and the teeth that she spat out across the floor...

It took the grounding physical touch of a hand on her shoulder and a fourth call of her name for the girl to finally snap out of her reverie, the child's body snapping back to attention with her eyes widening in surprise. She seemed startled, and above all, confused.

Both parties were looking at her with an extreme amount of worry in their faces, and it especially looked out of place on the straight-laced Mr. Wednesday.

"What... what happened?" She asked, feeling genuinely confused that she did not remember.

"I was asking you a question, sweetie, and you were starting to answer it, but then you faded out. Are you alright?"

"I... think so." It didn't really seem like it though.

A nurturing hand started to stroke loose strands of black hair out of her face, the woman changing her demeanor entirely from what it had been. "Well I think I've got enough info for now, kiddo. You don't have to worry about me asking anything else."

When she finally came out of this stupor, she made a jolt as if awakening from a dream and truly did not seem to recall what was being said to her during this period of time or what was going on around her. It was very worrying.

"Are the police involved?"

"I don't know if they are but I am." The truant officer ran a hand underneath his fedora hat over his white, aging hair. "And if that episode back there was anything at all what I thought it was, then she'll need some form of counseling."

What it looked like a classic case of dissociation, a coping mechanism for those who had endured a great trauma to try to protect them from pain. To see it happening to such a little girl left a haunting impression on the man. Things weren't looking good. Not at all.

"I think the most important thing to do right now is to make sure she's in a safe and supportive environment, and then I'll let her talk at her own pace. I won't force anything out of her, not while she's like this."

Buttercup Utonium played with the box of Children's Tylenol Pain + Fever Relief medicine that she had in her hands. They were back in the man's old, bulky brown station wagon and she was back in the backseat, having her seatbelt on without argument this time. Mr. Wednesday and her had gone to the pharmacy to pick out this particular medicine for herself, looking to alleviate the child from both the pain she had in her teeth and the slight fever she had. He'd also bought some clothes for her at another store, including a light brown jacket to wear to better suit the weather. She couldn't keep walking around in her pajamas all day, but even still, she kept being surprised at his acts of generosity.

"Something on your mind, Buttercup?"

"Yeah. Why are you being so nice to me? You don't even like me."

Wednesday expressed genuine surprise at this, but it was the mildest form of it since the flat affect in his face never changed. "Who said I didn't like you?" He asked, raising an eyebrow that she saw from the rearview mirror.

"I dunno." Buttercup shrugged. "You're always frownin' all the time, so I just figured you didn't like anyone."

The man made a noise, weighing that particular conclusion in. "Understandable." He finally conceded. "I don't exactly express my emotions very well. I know it can make me come across as some stuffy old grump but despite how I look, that doesn't mean I hold any form of dislike for you."

"You coulda fooled me."

He sighed. "It's not like I haven't gotten that before. People telling me I carry an... unpleasant air. I suppose it comes with the line of work I do. That's not very pleasant either."

"Yeah," Buttercup was wondering about that. "What is it that you do, besides making sure kids are going to school?"

"I work with families. Groups. Communities as a whole. People who just need help in general, whatever form that may take. In addition to being a truant officer, I'm also a social worker."

"Cool." She guessed. This was the first time she had even heard of the word "social worker" before and she could only go off of his short description of what a social worker was supposed to do. It kind of sounded like what the girls did; helping people, but on a far more... personal scale.

Wednesday went on to amend his original statement a little, bringing up something that he did dislike about the girls as a whole, but not for who they are but more how they tended to solve things—mainly with violence. "I suppose if there's one thing I wish you'd do a little differently... it's that I sometimes wish you girls could go a little easier on the people you consider bad guys. Not all of them of course. Not the major offenders or the supervillains, but the... pettier ones. Beating people up and throwing them in jail is easy—taking the time to try to understand what makes them tick and what drives the crime in the first place is a lot harder."

Buttercup made a face at this, unable to understand Wednesday's point. "What's there to understand?" she asked mockingly. "Just like there's hot and cold, there's good and bad! That's just how the world is. There's no reason behind it other than that!"

"I know it's easy for you to think that at the age that you're currently at, but there's a lot more to people and the world than that. All I'm asking you to do is to consider someone else's story, even if that person happens to do morally questionable things."

"Why should we? Bad guys deserve to be punished!" Buttercup argued, firm in her conviction.

"No matter the punishment?"

"If they deserve it, yeah."

"So you believe in an eye for an eye?"

An eye for an eye...

Sorry Buttercup, an eye for an eye!

The memory of those words from Blossom made her hesitate. "It's fair." She eventually said, but her face showed signs of doubt. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him.

"Is it always? I think that it can sometimes make the person look like a hypocrite. Think about the death penalty. Is it fair to show a killer that killing is wrong by having his own life taken in return?"

"I... well.. maybe. Or... maybe not."

"I'm not saying there's always a clear answer. Even now, there's an ongoing debate about such an issue. But what I am saying is that things aren't always black-and-white."

"And when it comes to a child," he went on. "There's even less justification. Children need more than just strictly punitive action for them to learn. You wouldn't bite a baby back just because it bit you, right?"

"Well duh! That's just stupid!"

"What if it pulled your hair? Would you pull its hair back?"

"No way! Babies are fragile. And besides, it's not like they know any better. They're just trying to figure things out."

"Right. There are always other factors you have to think about."

So what was he trying to say? Was he trying to make some comparison? Buttercup wasn't a baby. She did know better, which was why she tried to hide her actions away from her family for so long.

"All this grown-up talk is making my head hurt."

Wednesday expressed faint amusement at this. "Well, that's why we bought the Children's Tylenol, right?"

"Aw, shut up." She said lightly, but she was smiling as she said this.

"So, you up for the radio?"

Radio? What kind of stuff could a guy like Jack Wednesday listen to? Probably something that was more boring than watching paint dry.

"Oh great. What are we going to listen to? Some boring talk show?"

"How about you pick the station?"

"Really?" Buttercup asked, lifting her eyes from the fist she was pushing up into her cheek.

"As long as it's nothing with swear words or degeneracy."

"98.3." She answered immediately. That was the main kid's radio station.

Mr. Wednesday obligingly turned the knob to the station and the lyrics she was first greeted with surprised Buttercup to the fullest.

"Open your eyes and take in everything that you see.

Look at all the colors, red, yellow, blue, & green.

We can take an airplane and fly across the globe,

Look down upon the colors, everyone come on, let's go!"

"No way!" Buttercup cried. "They got our song on the radio?!"

It wasn't a rendition that had the original little girls singing the song, but those were definitely the lyrics for "Love Makes the World Go Round" even so.

"You girls made a song together?"

"Heck yeah we did! We used it to stop an evil clown! 'Course we had Bu-..." She stopped herself short of saying her sister's name out loud. For some reason, she didn't feel comfortable bringing her up in name after everything that had happened. "... o-one of my sisters to thank. She was the one who had the whole idea to use the 'power of love' in a song. She set us up on stage and gave us the instruments and everything. Man, if it wasn't for her, I don't know what we would've done."

She now sank into a familiar depression, dropping her head into her hands as she sighed. "Too bad I could never do anything that cool. I always start problems but I never help fix them."

"I don't think that's true." Wednesday stated firmly, even though he couldn't possibly know about anything of Buttercup's family life. "Everybody's done at least one thing cool in their entire lifetime. I bet if you think real hard, you'll come up with something."

At first she couldn't come up with anything, until a moment from her "newborn days" came to her with a surprising amount of clarity.

Rocko Socko was holding the Talking Dog in his large metallic gloves tightly and he wouldn't let go. Buttercup tried as hard as she could to set the Talking Dog free but those gloves just wouldn't budge.

Eventually she let out a cry of pure fury.

"Get! Your! Hands! Off! Him! You! Darn! Dirty! Ape!" She screamed at him, rearing back her fist with a warrior's cry before landing a killer left hook to his jaw. That was the first punch Buttercup had ever landed on somebody and it was a mighty one to say the least.

He definitely let go after that, as the rest of Rocko Socko went flying backwards into a distant building while his large metal gloves and the Talking little dog remained. She had been so frightened the first time she saw the consequences of such a violent action and went on to profusely apologize for it, scared of what she had done.

Instead of scolding her or yelling at her though, Blossom's face lit up with a newfound realization and she shouted, "Buttercup!"

"I-I-I-!"

"You're a genius!"

Surprise overtook her features. "I am?"

Bubbles was similarly surprised. "She is?"

"Yeah! The one way to stop the monkeys, save the town, and find the Professor is to use our powers to..."

That was when she heard townspeople screaming off in the distance from Ojo Tango terrorizing people in his oppressive orango-tank. She put on a smirk.

"Better yet, WATCH!"

And the rest was history.

"Hey, I punched that one guy, Rocko Socko, and gave Blossom the idea of how to save the town!"

"See? Now how long did that take you to come up with? A minute or two?"

Admittedly, it didn't take long at all.

"Okay, I admit. I can be awesome... sometimes."