A/N: Took a few months to get this one out. Long story short, I've been incredibly stressed and busy lately. I actually wrote more in the last few days than the past couple of months because I finally got to go on a staycation that gave me room to write. Hopefully, the drought ends here.

A/N (18 JUN 2021): Made Blossom's eyes glow red while she's overclocking her heat ray. Simplified Buttercup's 'mean' sentence.

Chapter 146: The Stairway

The City of Townsville. Sky. Tenements Area

24 MAR (Friday) 1989. 1552.

Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup flew across the sky of Townsville as fast as they could, leaving behind not just bullets and anti-air missiles, but also everything they knew. Blossom had come to after getting caught in the blast of a missile and was flying under her own power, but with the three of them compromised by more Anti-X, they could barely fly at half their cruising speed.

They had flown in a random direction. With Blossom incapacitated for the first half of their retreat, Bubbles and Buttercup had simply picked a direction on the fly and blast off. Somehow, they ended up in the Tenements Area, where many of their missions had taken place.

"We need to rest," Blossom suggested as they flew over the carpet of dilapidated apartments and grey, dirty streets. There were no helicopters of any kind in the area, and almost no police squad cars - surprisingly. The USDO had no presence here either. It was a lucky break they sorely needed.

Looking at her sisters, Blossom saw that neither of them seemed to disagree, so she began descending. They followed.

Picking the tallest apartment building, Blossom and her sisters landed on the roof. It had begun raining, with small droplets pattering on the concrete floor of the roof at first, before walls of rainwater forced the Girls into the building. Exploration was out of the question due to their wanted status, so they decided to squat on the topmost stairs.

The wind howled its way into the stairwell, blowing past the Girls, freezing them and making their condition more miserable than it already was. The squalor they found themselves in had few equals, with dead cockroaches and rats built up over the winter on some steps, coated by deep layers of dust and filth. The light above was barely working; most bulbs were dim, and one was flickering, as if all of them could give out at any moment. Water was beginning to seep in from the cracked threshold between the roof outside and the stairwell inside.

Predictably, Bubbles began weeping, loudly intermittently and falling silent sometimes. Buttercup groaned at Bubbles' display of weakness; being more detached than her sisters from 'Dad', who she knew wasn't actually her father. Blossom's eyes were turned to the dead vermin on the steps of their new refuge.

"Wha-what are w-we going to do?" Bubbles cried, barely able to string together a proper sentence. "D-daddy- he's dead."

"He's not dead!" Blossom flew into a rage. The idea of Dad dying was unthinkable. He had always been there, the rock-solid foundation of their short existence despite his relative frailty. Bubbles wailed louder in response, feeling more miserable now that she had been shouted at.

"You saw him, Blossom!" Buttercup stood up abruptly from her step. "He's dead! Normal people like him are like putty."

"He's! Not! DEAD!" Blossom yelled back. "He's not! And he's not just normal!"

"Yeah, whatever. This place stinks!" Buttercup said, literally and figuratively. "Why do you have to choose this place for us to hide?"

"Is that all you care about!?" Blossom yelled at Buttercup at the top of her lungs, incensed beyond her own understanding. "You stink!"

Blossom and Buttercup began their fencing with words, with the vast majority of the exchange something to do with being 'stinky'. Bubbles didn't join in; she was too busy mourning.

It didn't take long for things to escalate, with Blossom driven by sadness and anger at Buttercup's bluntness while Buttercup having lost herself and forgotten her long-term revenge mission. Buttercup had tackled Blossom to the ground, which consisted of broken steps, and they both rolled down the stairs, barreling down and knocking Bubbles off her feet. They fell on the landing half the stairs down, and Blossom hit her head against the wall. The sound of skull against concrete was all too audible.

Buttercup could barely resist smiling as she got up and watched Blossom cry; it would take much more to injure her, but the pain was unpleasant.

"Oh gosh, I'm sorry, Blossom," Buttercup said, but she did not mean what she said. She had finally remembered to play the good sister and blend in with the rest of them.

"Are you okay, Blossom!?" Bubbles yelled, afraid that, in her ignorance, Blossom might have been injured in the sisterly scuffle.

"I'm really sorry, Bloss," Buttercup added again. She offered Blossom a hand as her supposed leader sat up, still clutching the back of her head. Glaring at it, Blossom took it anyway, still trying hard to search within herself for the capacity to forgive Buttercup. All sorts of words were exchanged in their verbal duel, and none of them were kind. In short order, Buttercup had blamed Blossom for everything, including their current predicament, Professor Utonium's supposed death and their deception by the Amoeba Boys, on top of all the disasters of the past.

After sweeping off dead cockroaches, dust and trash off their dresses, the Girls got settled down again, avoiding more filth and rainwater as they tried to enjoy what little respite they had earned from running away.

"What do we do now?" Bubbles asked again, after she had calmed down somewhat, having run out of tears. She looked at Blossom, who was equally despondent, with bloodshot eyes.

"As much as it is… urgh… cool to have our own place, we can't stay here forever, Bloss," Buttercup said, trying her best to change her tune.

Blossom had been staring into the wall, searching the cracks and holes on it as if she was divining it for answers. In her yearning for the past, she saw Dad's face on the wall - missing him already every second, her mind a storm because she was uncertain if he had survived that smoke grenade to the head.

"You're right, Buttercup," Blossom replied forlornly.

"But we can't go back home, can we?" she was lamenting lethargically more than brainstorming for solutions.

"I miss Dad already…" Bubbles added.

"Me too," Buttercup followed along, even though she felt little to no attachment to the likely-dead Professor Utonium (who was definitely not her father).

Their 'discussion' had gone nowhere, much less bore any fruit. Blossom continued to stare into space, still stuck in the past, especially in that flashpoint when her entire world broke down when Dad took a smoke grenade to the skull. Bubbles sniffled from time to time, holding back tears now that she was building up a reservoir full of it again. Buttercup, who was bored, played with the dead cockroaches and rats on the steps, pushing them here and there with her feet, or tossing them into the cascading stream of rainwater and watching them get washed down into the darkness that was the floor beneath them. With no adults to guide them, productivity was an impossibility.

Little did they know that they would soon be motivated once more by adults to do something, other than sitting on the filthy stairs of a half-abandoned slum apartment.

It came as forewarned by the sound of police sirens at first. Buttercup had heard it first, but she didn't care, and when it came within Blossom and Bubbles' earshot, they dismissed them. The USDO's siren had a distinctive, dreadful tone to them, unlike that used by the police.

But then it became louder, and louder, until it was just right outside the building.

Blossom had been the first to have the foresight to check what the commotion was all about. Running out of the stairwell, into the rain and back to the roof, she peeked over the edge… to find dozens of squad cars and SWAT vans surrounding the apartment. Bubbles and Buttercup came up behind her, the three of them huddled close together like sheep in a forest.

"Are they coming to help us?" Bubbles asked, trying her hardest to see whatever ray of hope she could imagine to be there.

"It doesn't look good…" Buttercup muttered.

Blossom was torn between her sisters. The USDO was after them, but did that mean that the TPD was hunting them as well? The two groups of people were very distinct groups in Blossom's naive mind, and although she was right to think that, she hadn't considered many things that would make a difference.

They had been attacked before by evil policemen, but that was last time. It could be different this time. It was different this time. She could just about make out that they had normal eyes.

"Are they friendly or not?" Buttercup continued pestering Blossom.

"Only one way to find out," Blossom said, before leading the Girls back down the stairs.


The City of Townsville. Suburbs. The House.

24 MAR (Friday) 1989. 1616.

Everything was a blur. The moment Professor Utonium opened his eyes, he felt lost. A figure loomed over him. Was this the second time he had to wake up in this state? Or was it the first? His mind felt like scrambled eggs; even Newton's three laws were lost to him at the moment.

The figure got closer. He panicked and knocked away something long that he thought was a weapon but turned out to be someone's arm.

"Professor! It's fine! Everything's fine!" the figure said. The professor crawled away on his back. What was he even lying on? Whose voice was it even? Even the voice sounded scrambled to him.

He strained his eyes, trying to focus his sight a little more, but he wasn't Blossom, and could only make out the white of a lab coat, same as what he was wearing. Was he wearing a lab coat, still?

It was dull at first, but the pain in his head became sharper as his vision focused itself. The professor reached for the source of that ungodly pain. His fingers brushed against cotton. A first-aid band. It'd brought back memories. The Girls. The windows were smashed. A grenade flying through and clocking him in the head, and then it was lights out.

"Not even a fracture as far as I can tell in these dreadful conditions," the voice from the lab coat before him said. The professor looked up. The face attached to that voice came into focus. It was Medical Director Simmons, ever ready to get his hands dirty despite being the head of the USDO's medical department. "I'll still have to take you in for an X-ray, if you'd allow me."

The professor did not reply, unless breaking down into tears could be considered as such. Doctor Simmons patted him in the shoulder, but when he saw that it wasn't enough, sat down next to the professor, embracing him as a father would as the professor cried into his shoulder.

It was no different from waking up to find oneself in purgatory. To the professor, his entire life was all but gone - Selicia was dead or missing, and for all he knew, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup had already been hunted down and destroyed just like the previous subjects he had attempted to save. Everything that reminded him of his nicest memories of his time with his new family was in shambles - The House had sustained even more damage and abuse.

History was repeating itself again.

"You're upset about the Girls, aren't you?" Doctor Simmons guessed correctly.

"Are they… Are they gone?" the professor asked, his words dripping with as much misery as tears were dripping out of his eyes.

"Gone from here? Yes," the doctor said. The professor's heart had jumped into his mouth when he said it. For one awful second, he'd thought that his greatest fear was confirmed. "But gone from the world? No."

The professor wiped his eyes and sucked in a deep breath, counting back in decimals from pi. It barely helped.

"I have to go and get them," the professor mumbled, basically slurring because he was still a little out of it. He tried to get up and had great difficulty doing so. The doctor pulled him back down.

"I don't think so, Upton. I still haven't ruled you out for concussion and brain damage yet," Doctor Simmons said.

"I'd rather tear my heart out than leave my Girls out there!" the professor yelled.

"They haven't found them yet, professor!" the doctor yelled back, suddenly more akin to bear than old man. "If an entire organization of trained operatives can't locate the Girls, what makes you think you can?"

"I… I know them…" the professor said, partly in denial and partly in disbelief that he was, once again, unable to help his kids. "I love them. I've been with them every step of the way. I know what they're thinking."

"As much as I hate to admit it, the power of love just isn't that strong," the doctor said morosely, before standing up once more. He walked towards the circular windows before him. It was only then that the professor realized that he was in the Girls' room, and that he had been unconscious on his Girls' bed. "Even if General Blackwater found them, I don't think he'd even tell you where they are."

The professor wiped his face with his hands; he had only just realized that he was sweating like the rain.

"Then what do I do?" he said.

"Stay alive, stay safe and keep the hope alive," the doctor said. "Bide your time. You may not be able to help them now, but that could change. You're not alone in this."

"Alone? Loneliness has been my companion time and time again…" the professor mumbled, still stuck in the depth of despair.


The City of Townsville. Tenements Area. Shady Palm Apartment 5.

24 MAR (Friday) 1989. 1621.

"Officer Valentine. Status, over," a STARS team leader's radio came to life as she and her team of four ascended the decrepit stairs of the old apartment building. How anyone could live in such a place was beyond her. Even now, there were screams of anger and agony coming from the various rooms of the building, of domestic violence or crime unreported and ultimately unheard. But the Powerpuff Girls, who had gone rogue, was the priority at the moment.

"This is Officer Valentine. Approaching tangos. A few more foxtrots up, over," she replied on the radio, her shotgun pointed upwards. Her teammates, Aiken, Speyer and Sullivan, were forming wings behind her, with two of them armed with Duranium anti-material rifles. Why the USDO insisted on modelling them after the unwieldy anti-material rifle platform was beyond her - it would have been a complete death sentence to carry it in close quarters combat, especially against enhanced individuals, had it not been for its ability to injure them.

They were getting close. Officer Valentine held up a fist. The entire team stopped. She could hear an argument upstairs, high-pitched and shrill and childish, which was characteristic of the bioweapons in question.

Her fist turned into a wave. The STARS team continued the ascend. She had been serving with her team for a while - they had been imported from another city's STARS department - and they knew each other's thoughts implicitly.

One more floor. Time had slowed to a crawl; it felt like forever. They were at the foot of another flight of stairs when they saw those glowing eyes above them.

They were pink, baby blue and lime green. In any other circumstances, Valentine would think they looked cool, such as in a shopping mall or at the park. This time, though, they were downright menacing.

She had heard of what the bioweapons were capable of. She had been briefed the day STARS was formed to combat some of the more outlandish criminal elements of the city. The Powerpuff Girls were supposed to be on their side - until a couple of hours ago. It had been spoken, in hushed tones, that it was possible that the Powerpuff Girls had joined the dominant criminal gang in the city.

"This is the police! Drop your weapons and lie face down on the ground!" Valentine ordered the erring bioweapons. She could barely see them due to the dimness of the stairwell - the lights were poorly maintained, if at all, in the apartment. But she could see that they weren't floating in mid-air like they tended to do, and the blue one was leaning close to the pink one and whispering something in her ear. But what was more alarming was that they were pretty well armed, though the guns were just the tip of the iceberg.

"Do it! Do it now! Get down on the ground!" Aiken, who was next to her, ordered as well. "Get down or we'll shoot!"

"You're really, really mean," the green-eyed one growled coldly. There was too much hostility in that voice, more than what should be found in a young voice. It'd honestly sent a chill down Valentine's spine.

"This is your last warning: surrender or we will use force!" Valentine ordered the Girls one last time.

It all went wrong from there. The pink one floated forward, about to speak. The guys were jumpy and afraid and unnerved by the location and the bioweapons they were sent to apprehend. Someone fired a shot, and it all went downhill from there. The shot was immediately neutered by a pink bubbles around the one known as Blossom.

The green one fired a laser beam, slicing someone in the knee, Valentine did not know who in the chaos. She herself returned fire, but the shots from her shotgun shells were scattered ineffectively against Blossom's pink shield while everything unfolded quickly and decidedly not to her advantage: there were blue and green streaks darting past her, and she knew what it meant. Her squadmates were taken down before they could fire any further Duranium rounds. Before she could react any further, Valentine's counterpart had tackled her to the ground and wrenched her shotgun out of her hands, tossing it aside.

The tiny little Powerpuff point man had a hand on her neck. Her eyes glowed brighter pink, as if charging up. It grew brighter quickly, terrifyingly fast that Valentine didn't even have the time to feel terrified.

"Do it, Blossom," Valentine heard the green one say. Was it Buttercup? The STARS officer had merely skimmed through the file on the Powerpuff Girls. Those three words had sent a chill down her spine; a kid had just requested for her death, in a manner colder than even some adult killers she had arrested before.

"Kill her," Buttercup egged Blossom on again. From the corner of her eyes, Officer Valentine could see the raven-haired over-empowered child digging into a wound in her arm and pulling a Duranium bullet out with a grunt. "She tried to kill us and we didn't do anything wrong."

"Blossom, no!" the blue one, as if an angel sitting on Blossom's shoulder, exclaimed upon hearing the green demon egging her on. "We can't! Dad- he wouldn't want this!"

Valentine couldn't breathe. She had never been this afraid before, not even when she was in the special forces as the only woman in her unit, deployed behind enemy lines. The pink Powerpuff on top of her seemed to glow brighter than ever in the eyes, and the pink glow had turned red, and it was getting so hot that Valentine's sweat wasn't cold anymore. She could've sworn she could begin to see the skull underneath the super-powered child's face - until she couldn't.

The bright red glares disappeared as the pink-wearing kid seemed to power down, seemed to regain composure.

"You killed my squadmates." Valentine uttered, almost automatically, losing control of herself. This 'Blossom' looked up and around her, as if trying to validate what she said. When the bioweapon leader was done, she glared back down at her, looking a little pissed - though whether it was at the accusation or the confrontation, Valentine wasn't sure.

"Don't make me," Blossom simply said, before finally releasing her neck and getting off her. The weapon in child form was as light as she looked. When her weight was lifted off Valentine, the STARS officer could barely feel it - there was more weight in her fear and apprehension than there was in the bioweapon. "And don't follow us!"

With that, the Powerpuff Girls flew up the stairs, no doubt to escape the police encircling the apartment. It was only after they were long gone that Valentine dared to even get up. Looking around to check on her squadmates, she discovered that they were just as terrified as she was, but also just as alive. One of them was clutching his face, his nosebleed barely apparent. The worst off of the four of them had a deep wound just above the knee, likely made by Buttercup's feared ocular laser emission, but Valentine was surprised - and glad - that her squadmate's leg was still attached to his body.


The City of Townsville. Tenements Area. Shady Palm Apartment 5.

24 MAR (Friday) 1989. 1629.

Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup had darted the other way as fast as they could. They didn't spend another minute, literally, in the apartment they were sheltered in. Unlike the fairy tales they had been fed to them by Professor Utonium, there was no happy ending to be found there. They weren't greeted by friends from the TPD whom the girls, mostly Blossom and Bubbles, had imagined to know their plight and suffering. They were met with hostile force from the TPD who had made them the enemy.

And the Girls knew why. Don Ricci - Bossman - had promised to let everyone know about their 'little' relationship should they step out of line. The Girls were naive, but they knew how to put two and two together. The police had received those photos from Bossman too.

The brief battle had costed the Powerpuff Girls precious Chemical X energy. They flew across the sky, powered on X fumes.

"Where are we going to go now?" Bubbles asked. It was a good question. An excellent one. Blossom had simply flown in the opposite direction of The House once more, her impulsiveness spurred on by hails of bullets from the police encirclement, but she had done so without a clear direction in mind.

"Yeah, where are we going? I'm tired and hurting and hungry!" Buttercup complained, scrambling Blossom's thoughts for a brief moment.

Blossom had stayed the course while she thought about it, and her sisters followed. They were flying at cruising speed out of the city, but the thought of leaving Townsville filled Blossom with anxiety - the city was all she ever knew. Her mind quickly turned back to more familiar territory, going back briefly home, to The House, to the professor.

But The House was out of the question. There was no going back. Especially not when Dad was…

Mom, too, was gone.

Mister Blake, while alive, was stuck in a hospital bed, and the rest of his squad wasn't so lucky.

"Blossom… What do we do?" Bubbles continued asking Blossom helplessly while Blossom was putting together a plan.

"We're going back," Blossom finally said as she wheeled about and flew in the direction of downtown.

"But why? They're just going to put more holes in me again!" Buttercup said while still nursing the wound in her arm.

"We're going to Mister Mullens'. He'll help us," Blossom revealed. Mister Mullens. The name of the detective had lit a spark in Blossom's mind. There was simply no one else left who could help them but him. Closing her eyes, she tried to remember where he lived. Oddly, her memory wasn't as photographic as it used to be, but eventually, she remembered the numbers and words. A mental map of the city unfurled in her mind. She knew exactly where he lived. She'd been there before, once or twice during the quiet months.

"Alright! I like that idea!" Buttercup said enthusiastically, surprisingly, upon hearing it.

"I'd love to see him again…" Bubbles said, though she wasn't as excited as Buttercup. There was something about Blossom's plan. It didn't seem as airtight as how the blue Powerpuff usually perceived her plans. There were too many holes in it, too many things that could go wrong. It was giving her a bad feeling. But there was nothing else they could do, no one else they could turn to. Bubbles knew, deep down, that she could never come up with a better plan than Blossom's.

But Bubbles could hope. Mullens had always been there for them. He had always been a good friend. He would surely be there for them again, and be their good friend once more.

Bubbles could only hope.