She lingered on his chest when the alarm went off. It was the incorrect response to the stimuli, but Buttercup didn't care. The skin-to-skin contact was what she craved lately, and she wasn't going to leave him so easily.
Butch's fingers traced along her arm, her shoulder, and gently found their way into the hair at the nape of her neck. She stirred and curled into him, drawing her knees up his thigh and into her chest. She remembered a time when she couldn't stand the boy currently nuzzling her hair. She remembered the first time they shared a bed and how they'd barely even touched. Now it was impossible to forget how he felt all tangled in her legs and wrapped up in her sheets. She couldn't forget how alive he made her feel even when she was falling into sleep, completely dead to the world. No matter what kept them apart, be it a Townsville crisis that called Buttercup away, or a mission Butch and his brothers were running, they clung to each other like magnets in bed, Buttercup glued to Butch's chest as if they needed each other to breathe, and in a way they did. As their missions got heavier, lengthier, and inevitably more dangerous, it was this time together that kept them going—kept her going. These days she needed Butch's presence to survive as much as she needed sleep itself.
She'd drifted off against his chest, and he hadn't tried to shift her off in the night. For just a few more seconds that's where he planned on keeping her and where she intended to stay. Even above the sirens growing louder in the distance and the Hotline, ever obnoxious, demanding her immediate attention, she could hear Butch's steady heartbeat beneath her. She was desperate to commit it to memory because she knew once she left this place, he would not be here when she returned.
Leaving was the hardest part. It always was for them. They resolved to say no goodbyes—not even "see you later". It was easier to leave known things unsaid and disappear, missing each other all the while. That subtle hurt would continue for days until their business was done and Buttercup would come home to find Butch asleep in her bed, beaten and bruised but healing, aching for her touch.
A gentle squeeze on her shoulder said, it's time to go. Her light kiss in response said, I know, I'm going. But as soon as she pulled away, she instantly felt the cold, and every cell in her being screamed and whined at her to knit herself against the man she felt so strongly for. Instead, she forced herself toward the Hotline, its flashing red light cutting through predawn haze and casting an eerie glow across her cheekbones, and answered.
And without a second thought, she was gone.