Heightened Tensions- Chapter 16

Blossom watched the professor quietly as he examined the fuse box in the garage, a fluffy white sweater wrapped tightly around her body. She jumped rhythmically to keep herself warm, and exhaled a deep, warm breath into the air, watching it fizzle away into tiny floating sparkles of her own organic ice, intensified by the powerless chill.

"Well?" she finally asked quietly, unable to take the strained silence between them. The professor didn't answer her right away, but continued his silent search, training the flashlight on the open compartment before him. It took a few minutes before he finally acknowledged her question.

"It seems as if all the fuses fried out at once… strange…" he said off-handedly, but his voice was strained thin like a wire tightened to its fullest. Blossom felt her interest perk up at his response.

"All of them?" she asked in disbelief. "How is that possible?"

"I don't know," the professor said, sighing heartily. He closed the fuse box with a soft snick and deposited the tiny black flashlight into his pocket. "Must have been a really big power surge, that's the only real explanation…"

"Er-, is it, though?" Blossom asked quietly, gazing silently at her father. He turned to face her, one eyebrow raised.

"Well, I know what you're thinking, and I'll tell you right now, I'm not really sure if it's true," he said carefully, folding his arms. The professor turned his gaze to the darkened ceiling, as if in deep thought. When he didn't speak for five minutes, Blossom decided to return to her own revelations.

"Well, what if it is? Do you know what that could mean? She could have some serious power in her control… she forced me out of her room without even touching me."

The professor looked back at her quickly, his face questioning but his gaze soft.

"She pushed you out of her room?" he asked.

"Well, in a manner of speaking, yes… but she didn't touch me. She just came towards me, screaming for me to get out. You could really hear it in her voice too, she meant it," her voice finished weakly, like a dying out afterthought.

The professor walked past her to the door back into the house, and Blossom followed him back into the kitchen, where the early evening gloom was just starting to settle over the house in a dense fog of murky blue. He walked to the counter, grabbed the car keys from the hook near the hotline phone, and jangled them at Blossom, who sat herself down at the table. She shivered, but shook her head quietly to signal to him that she wasn't in too good of a mood for car drives.

"Maybe it'll help you clear your head," the professor said affectionately, waving the keys once again in her line of vision. She could have easily blasted them from his hand with her eye lasers, but quickly decided against it, thinking that perhaps it was too harsh.

"Well… I've been meaning to ask you something, another question," Blossom said quickly, peeling the frilly sweater off her shoulders. She threw it over the back of the tall, plush arm chair to her right, the stitched white patterns blending with the stark opalescent cushioning. She lowered her eyes down in concentration, and proceeded to shake the frumples from her hair.

"Okay, but I want to get this done before it gets too dark-"

"You had one of your looks again…" Blossom said frankly, cutting into the professor's speech. He dropped his shoulders in a perplexed manner and stared, but Blossom merely returned this gesture, her chin resting in her upturned palm.

"How so?" he said sweetly, the corner of his mouth sliding up in a lopsided grin of mischief.

"You know, that look you get," she waved her hands in the air to emphasize her words. "It's whenever you figure something out…"

"Oh, you mean when I was in the living room?"

"Yes."

"Ah. That."

"Well, what did it mean?" Blossom asked, impatience rising in her tone, but suppressed enough to hold back the impression of a bad temper. The professor nodded and put his keys down on the table, the jangling metal odd sounding in the frigid air of their kitchen.

"I… had just been thinking… well, I went down to the lab, you see… and looked through a few of your files," he said carefully, his gaze wavering to different points in the room, everywhere except on Blossom. She wasn't sure if he was doing this on purpose, or if he was literally too deeply in thought to keep his eyes focused.

"Uh, huh?" Blossom urged, unable to bear his pauses. She wanted to know what was going on with Buttercup, and wanted to know now. She watched the professor with curious at tentativeness. "Lots of strange things have been happening around her…"

"Yes, and that's just what I'd set out to understand… but when I looked through all the past data charts, nothing pointed to any sort of conclusion. I really don't know what's happening…"

Blossom felt her heart sink at his words, her hopefulness at the Professor being able to provide some sort of wisdom quickly fizzled away into nothingness. He'd been her last hope for finding some sort of answers, and if he didn't know anything, then certainly nobody else did. Perhaps prayer was a good option at this point, despite the fact that absolutely none of them were religious.

Not religious eh? Do you have any idea who you're fraternizing with?

Shut up!

Blossom tried hard to ignore her conscience, but was finding it hard to ignore the grumbling of discontent in her stomach. She wanted to tell someone, she really did, but for some reason she couldn't bring herself to say anything at all. She knew it was foolish of her, and downright reckless, because if anything were to happen then it would be entirely her fault for not being more careful. Yet, at the same time, something kept telling her Him wasn't going to hurt her… She wasn't sure where these feelings of security were coming from, but she couldn't shake them out of her mind, no matter what she did.

But at that moment, she had to ignore it all. She had to push Him out of her mind, because the professor was staring at her blankly, his face showing the fact that he knew something was up. For a few tense seconds, Blossom was almost afraid that somehow he knew, just by the nature of his gaze. She returned his stare dolefully, for some odd reason taking in a very exotic character to her father's face that she had never noticed before.

"You okay, honey?" He said finally, his voice very hushed as the room continued to darken in the winter evening. Blossom snapped out of her silence and shook all of her former thoughts aside, for the moment at least.

"I'm just worried, that's all. It seems as if we can't get any peace anymore. If it isn't one thing wrong, its another. I think we've had exactly one straight month where this house has been normal, maybe not even that," Blossom said, her voice heavy with exasperation. She suddenly felt very tired, and with the abnormal absence of light in the house, her fatigue only grew. She sighed, and pursed her lips, glancing back down onto the table.

"Well, I do have a theory at least, about Buttercup, that is," he said finally, his voice more confident now that he was speaking of something a little more uplifting. Blossom looked back at the professor, and nodded eagerly.

"Allright, then, let's hear it…"

"Well, If my hypothesis is correct, Buttercup's sudden weight loss could be a culprit in what's been going on."

"Uuuuuh…. Huuuh," Blossom dragged her syllables in a tone of baffled disbelief, unsure if she was comprehending what the professor was getting at. She looked down at the table, furrowing her brow as if working through the calculations in her head.

"My point is, every cell in your body if reinforced with Xantium, I mean every cell. It's possible that the sudden decomposition of the cells in her body disperses the Xantium particles into the air, thus creating somewhat of an energy field around her, the particles in a constant state of decay…"

For a second Blossom thought he was done, hoping to get a chance to take it all in and sift through the information, because at that point, she was quite confounded. Yet, he wasn't finished after all,

"And sudden surges in that energy is caused by her violent mood shifts. You notice it only happens when she's angry. The natural Xantium you three radiate when riled up is only amplified, in Buttercup's case, because of the fact that the Chemical X in her own body is at a constant state of decay. This is all as a result of her… depression. You're mental health has a significant effect on how efficiently the chemical works through your body. Make sense?"

"I, er- think so…" Blossom said quietly. It was somewhat of a relief to have some sort of an explanation, no matter how farfetched it sounded. Yet, she wasn't sure if she totally bought it. She had her own theories, that she wasn't sure if they were true, but knew they were certainly more desirable then what the professor had to say.

"But then again, that is just a guess. Who knows if that's correct… I just don't know what's happening to your sister lately. I tried talking to her, but… well, you saw what happened." Blossom nodded, and sighed.

"But, I was also thinking professor… what if its this special power she's been ranting about? What if she actually is developing something and the transition is screwing with her brain. I remember when my ice breath first came, I was sick for three weeks, unable to keep any food down…"

"Yes, that was certainly a bad couple of weeks wasn't it?" they professor said seriously, but there was a small flicker of a smile on his face. Blossom felt her own lips turn up into a grin.

"Yes, they were, and what I'm trying to say, is that I remember how terrible I felt when it happened. I felt so weak and useless… and not to mention soooo sick that I just wanted to die."

There was an abrupt silence then, one that neither could trace to a source.

"Maybe we just have to wait and see…" the professor said finally, ending the quiet stillness in the kitchen. Blossom nodded again. "But I think I will just go ahead and make her start seeing someone. Maybe I can talk to a counselor at school… I just don't know…"

"Well, I'll watch her, professor. Bubbles will watch her too. We're always aware of her, so I think we'll know if anything serious turns up."

"I know, I just don't like seeing her like this. It makes me nervous," the professor said softly, for once, casting his own bleary gaze down to the floor. The whole ordeal was becoming quite emotionally taxing for all of them, and Blossom could only wonder if there was any way to solve it at all. Buttercup had always been stubborn, but in her currently, overly-violent demeanor, would more drastic actions need to be taken?

Yet there was something nagging at the back of her brain, something that she couldn't quite pinpoint on the map of her own confuddled thoughts and feelings. Buttercup's change had been so sudden, almost overnight, like some sort of great strangling hold had been placed over her that she couldn't fight. She was spiraling downwards on an endless track, that from Blossom's perspective, only ended in disaster. And the conductor of that train was keeping Buttercup from getting off. She'd always been a fighter. Nothing had ever gotten to her for this long.

But it was now, and Buttercup, despite all of Blossom attempts to be a caring, affectionate sister, was not getting better at all. In fact, she was getting much worse. Blossom only hoped that Him would keep his word and watch her, for he could keep a much closer eye on her than Blossom ever could, yet-

There was also something Blossom found quite strange about that. For Him had showed up on the same night Buttercup's psych suddenly snapped in two, and somehow, he'd known that something was wrong. Yet, he always seemed to know everything about them no matter what, so she wondered if that had any relevancy at all. Blossom had always half suspected that he spent a majority of his time spying on them, studying them, and he'd known about Buttercup because he'd been watching. Surely he wouldn't have anything to do with it? What would he have to gain?

You…

That isn't true!

Why don't you think about it? Or has he got your own brain gripped so tightly you can't even think for yourself anymore?

!!!

Blossom whimpered and dumped her head onto the table, smashing her forehead into the hard surface, trying to jostle her mind to a grinding halt. The professor leaned back sharply in alarm, and for a few scant seconds he didn't even move. Nothing moved in the stillness of their ever-darkening kitchen.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm just so confused! I don't know what to do!" Blossom cried, her voice muffled by the mere fact that her lips were half pressed against the gauzy, cottony placemat. She felt the professor ruffle his hands through the hair at the back of her head, and a second letter a soft peck at her crown.

"Don't worry too much. Everything will work out, maybe you are right about everything, and this whole mess will be over before you know it," he said, and he stood from the table, grabbing the keys where he'd dropped them. Blossom wanted to say that she hoped everything would be okay, but couldn't muster the strength to move her lips.

Soon, the professor quickly mumbled a goodbye, and started to the door. Blossom remained in the kitchen till he returned home, her head still jammed against the table, and a few times she thought she fell asleep.

Blossom walked alone to her room that night, somehow not even noticing that her sisters were horrendously late. She was tired, and suddenly very upset, feeling the absence of Buttercup's watchful eyes on her back. It had stopped a long time ago, but Blossom was just now realizing how much she had taken it for granted, and now felt sorely lost without it. At least, if Buttercup had still been watching her, she'd never have had to deal with Him in the first place.

She dreamed of Buttercup, holding a knife at her own throat, her hands strangely deformed as she gripped onto the handle of the blade. There was a sadistic smile on her face, pointed canines, and her flashing green eyes were glowing more than they should have been. Blossom could swear that they were slanted, with perfect, long black eyelashes as their frames. She almost looked like a demon.