Hey all! Oh my goodness. I missed you guys!
Don't worry, I haven't abandoned you. Though after 2 and a half months with no update, it probably seemed like it! I simply wanted to take the summer to improve upon the coming chapters (including this one) as well as finish an original writing project that I'd been putting off for years. (Also, if you were paying attention, you probably noticed I snuck in a one-shot called 'Into You' about a month ago, hehe. My first one-shot on this site, in fact. Maybe the first of more?) And with 2 awesome beta-readers in tow, I have returned with chapter 17! Woohoo!
Thank you for all of the love you guys showed this story while I was gone, super appreciated as always. Grateful high fives for everyone!
This chapter, like I said probably at least 5 times before, is different from the rest. The general bulk of it is 1 scene. And boy, is it heavy. Blossom returns as our main narrator...for the most part. The gravely serious tone of it, as well as the '1 day' aspect of it, was loosely inspired by The Breakfast Club-all sorts of viewpoints, opinions and personalities coming together as these ex-superhero college kids get super real about who they are, what they are, and what they're going through.
As for that bizarro ending scene from the unknown POV at the end...you'll get answers in chapter 18, I promise you. Hang tight.
Also, special thank you goes out to my wonderful beta TeenQueen661 for her help in figuring out that this chapter needed a little extra something added for it to shine! Thanks girl!
So without further ado, here's chapter 17!
Warning: This chapter contains references to suicide, as well as themes of death and mild language.
Disclaimer: I do not own any characters, settings, or properties from The Powerpuff Girls.
Sorry for any errors!
Chapter Seventeen
"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom." –Leo Tolstoy
-Blossom's POV-
Everything surrounding us was still frozen.
These days, my sisters and I had become subjected to mostly observing the outside world through the windows of our home. Though things outside should have cheered us up to an extent, there was no modicum of happiness outdoors. The sky was slate grey. Plants and grass on the ground were still dried and shriveled up, trees' branches still barren and knobby. The cold kept any of our neighbors from spending much time at all out in the frigid air.
Everything dead. No signs of things ever coming back to life. Considering what we were dealing with now, it only seemed fitting that the world outside still looked like this.
Things lately had been bleak.
My sisters and I had begun to lose our appetites. The voracious, empty hunger I had nearly always felt in the morning had started to wane. It lessened to the point of only wanting a few bites of food before I already felt full. When I continued to bite and chew, it felt like chewing wet cement.
For about two days, or three, the three of us tried to eat anyway to satiate any worries Professor and the boys had. But eventually, we told them what was going on with our appetites. They told us to continue to try to eat. To do our best to get the food down. So we continued to try.
Several days later, one morning, after Bubbles forced down breakfast, she barely made it to the bathroom in time before it all started to come back up. Having scarcely eaten anything and not being affected, Buttercup and I jumped from the table and ran after her. I was the first to make it to the bathroom, and I slid to a stop in the doorway at the sight of Bubbles bent over the toilet seat.
Slowly, she turned her head in my direction, her blue eyes wide. Her hands clutched the white porcelain seat in a vice grip. She said in a quiet, scared voice, "…Blossom?"
Hearing Buttercup approaching behind me, I quickly broke from the door frame and came to Bubbles. When I stood behind her, I immediately halted, immobilized, my eyes locked down on the toilet bowl in horror.
The chewed bits of food were drenched in black.
From the great reduction in appetite, and then this new obstacle of rejecting some foods, the three of us began to lose weight.
It wasn't quite noticeable yet, but with Professor keeping constant record of our weights along with other important details he monitored every day, he made sure to tell us. He said he would start us on a nutrient drip soon, so that at least we could get the nutrients we needed and we wouldn't feel so weak. As he told us this, I wondered, silently, if it would ever be possible to not feel this weak ever again.
But I didn't voice this question aloud. I didn't dare.
On the other hand, the boys' health had begun to decline as well.
Headaches and nose bleeds became frequent for them. Nightly Chemical X drips, as we had been getting, became a requirement for them too. The Professor asked them to sleep in the basement hospital ward a few nights a week so he could keep close watch on their declination and symptoms. Their appetite hadn't been touched yet—but we knew it wouldn't be too far off.
One day, early March, after the boys had eaten dinner and my sisters and I had two or three bites of chicken soup before we gave up, the six of us gathered in the mostly dark living room, just one lamp lit across the room. Professor left us to our own devices, departing back down to his laboratory dungeon. All six of us, instead of trying to squish onto the small white couch, opted to sit on the floor instead.
We all sat in a circle. Sitting this way reminded me of Thanksgiving, when we'd sat on the floor just like this, playing a board game with not a care in the world. The sick sense of irony hadn't missed any of us—there was a thick uneasiness filling the entire room as we settled down onto the floor.
We had agreed to all come in here to have a discussion. But as soon as we sat, the room teemed with silence. No one said anything. We just sat on the carpet, avoiding each other's gazes, avoiding the inevitable agony having this discussion would bring.
The time for all of us to release the most unutterable things had come.
Brick was the first to finally break the grave muteness that had overcome all of us. "Well," he started, folding his arms and taking the time to look at each of us. "Let's just get this over with. Someone has to break the ice, and it looks like it has to be me. So, here it is: We're all gonna be dead soon because of the very thing that we're made of." He halted, looking up at the ceiling as if saying those words had physically pained him. "I don't know about you guys…but does this make sense to any of you?"
"It makes no sense," Boomer answered his brother, eyes and voice hollow.
"At all," Butch finished. His low voice was tinged with wrath—it matched his tempestuous eyes.
"I feel like I'm going crazy," Brick continued, his voice raising with panic and frustration. He looked at all of us again, crimson eyes wide. "Am I dreaming? Is any of this real? Am I losing my mind?"
I answered him next, voice calm. "I wish I could tell you that this was some fever induced nightmare," I told him. "Believe me. I've wished it a hundred times."
Bubbles said to me, "You're not the only one." I risked a glance at her. I couldn't handle her drained expression for more than a second or two. It was the polar opposite of her usual sweet youthful brightness. It made her look years older. I looked away.
Brick started again, his voice filled with the same frustration. "If we were just going to fall apart, if we were just going to end like this…what were we even doing here in the first place? Why even exist at all?" His hands folded behind his neck, the way he always did when he tried to calm himself down. I watched his eyelids slide shut, watched him try to breathe slowly.
Boomer, boldly, was the one to answer his seemingly rhetorical questions, staring at his brother under a heavy brow and the tangle of his light hair. "I guess anyone could ask themselves that. Even humans."
Startling us all with the sound of her voice for the first time since this discussion started, drawing all of our taken aback gapes to her, Buttercup remarked through a clenched jaw, "At least humans weren't made in a lab." All of us blinked at her for a few seconds, shocked at both her unexpected contribution and the words she'd said. She had conformed to our group discussion plan, but she had settled down in her spot on the carpet tense and hostile, like a coiled cobra. I knew it would only be a matter of time before she would strike.
After the moment of surprise passed, Butch countered, leaning back on his palms, "At least you weren't made in a prison cell."
"The toilet of a prison cell," Brick corrected him, the slightest bit of a shadowy grin on his lips. Then a moment passed and it disappeared, his lips twisting downward into a grimace again. The brief moment of the group's amusement abruptly faded as well, giving way to the grim atmosphere once more.
Silence choked the room again.
This feeling, this overwhelming feeling of hopelessness pressing in on everyone on all sides, had been something that hadn't gotten any easier to bear. It wasn't any normal kind of sadness—it was grief. It was the grief of six people who knew their time was nearly up, that there was nothing that they could do about it.
We grieved for ourselves, for each other. We grieved what basically had already been lost.
I didn't know if it was the despondent mood in the house, or the reality of our circumstances crushing in on me, but the confession came out from its buried place deep inside of me for the first time since the afternoon that Professor had said it to me. "You know we're sterile, right?" Met with stark silence and stares from all of them, I elaborated, "We're all sterile. Professor told me that a few months ago. I didn't know before, but…" I trailed off, not knowing how to finish that sentence. "Even if we were to live long enough, none of us would ever have children. Our bodies are too hostile of an environment to hold life in them." I paused, the air inside me heavy. I looked at all of their stunned faces, seeing them processing this new information. Then came out the hefty question that had secretly festered in me ever since the revelation of this knowledge. "What are we?"
"We're science experiments," said Brick, not wasting even one second to answer me. His voice was cold. Stark. "That's all we are, and that's all we'll ever be."
I couldn't say I disagreed with him. And to be perfectly honest, I think I'd been thinking this answer all along, somewhere deep inside of me. I'd just been too terrified to face it.
Choosing to build upon my question, Boomer spoke next, his once normally calm eyes now hard and pensive and distant. "We're the only ones of our kind. We have no hope of reproducing. So what happens when we're gone?"
"What do you mean, 'our kind'?" Butch refuted with a hard dry laugh. Boomer looked at him cuttingly, obviously feeling slighted. Butch went on in a disparaging manner, "There is no 'our kind'. Do you think we're some sort of species? We're not even technically alive!"
I held up a hand, trying to de-escalate the oncoming argument between them. "Now, I wouldn't say that," I cut in. Dry, I added, "We're not dead yet."
Butch shot back at me, meeting my eyes across the circle sharply, "Yeah, but we're gonna be. And how do you think we'll be buried? Like saints? No. We'll be as good as toxic waste in the ground." At what he'd said, my throat tightened. I didn't respond. I couldn't.
"Don't say that," Bubbles said to Butch in a brittle voice.
"It's true, though," Brick replied. His voice was much calmer now. But it was calm to the point of near emotionlessness. He said brusquely, "We're synthetic. We were never meant to be here on this planet, like the rest of the living, organic beings here. We aren't made of carbon like them. We won't turn to dust when we die. We'll just disintegrate into toxic black mush."
As I listened to his answer, feeling the hollow aching in me grow, I realized he was right. It was something I had never thought of, even despite every other torturous thought I'd had lately, but as soon as he said it, it'd made sense.
It never had occurred to me that we were something that was against nature itself, but by definition, that was what we were. What we always would be. My throat stung—I tried to force it back down, steeling myself against the urge to cry.
Breaking the stillness, Buttercup spoke up again. "What are we really here for?" Her tone was icy. Hostile. We all turned our gazes to her. "If we're not human, what is the point? What is our purpose?"
After clearing my throat, I answered her, trying to sound leveled and calm once again. "We're super heroes. We're meant to protect people." It was the only way I knew how to respond. It was the only answer I'd ever known, the answer to everything I had based my entire life around. The answer I had to cling to.
She snorted in disdain, obviously displeased with my answer. "Yeah. Right. To protect those humans that hate us and look at us like we're some freakish anomaly. Half the time they didn't even appreciate what we did for them, always found something to pick at or complain about or accuse us of." She folded her arms, aiming a muted glare at me. "Some purpose."
Something inside of me soured at her use of the past tense. 'What we did for them' instead of 'what we do for them'. Why did that bother me so much to hear? It wasn't like it wasn't true.
Brick commented, "They never quite understood us, did they?" He paused, looking up from staring at his socked feet. "We were always outsiders to them."
I said, "Maybe we never quite understood them, either." I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Achingly. "Not until now."
"Not until it was too late," added Brick, bleak.
Bubbles, out of nowhere, asked all of us, "What if we weren't dying?" The rest of us, staring, waited for her to elaborate, startled at her sudden question. She went on, "I mean, what if we weren't dying, but we would never have superpowers again and were just like humans?" An even longer pause passed as we continued to stare at her. "What would we even be doing with our lives then? Who would we be?"
Silence stretched on as all of us considered this new, almost taboo question. It was a question I had never dared to let myself think, and I was sure that everyone else felt that way, too. But this would have been our reality if our bodies weren't destroying themselves, so it would have been something we'd have had to deal with.
Almost half a minute passed before I was the one to scrounge up the courage to answer her first. "I'd be a scientist." Slowly, I added with the ghost of a weak grin on my lips, "Just like Professor."
"I'd open up a bakery," Bubbles said next. There was a sad sort of smile on her face, too. I thought of the hundreds of cakes and the amazing cupcakes she'd made during middle school, high school and the years since. I didn't have an ounce of doubt that her bakery would have been nothing short of a city-wide sensation—maybe country-wide.
Butch was the next to speak, not smiling at all, but staring off as if imagining something. "I'd have my own garage. Restore old cars, make them like new." A tinge of resentment touched his last sentence.
"I'd be an artist," Boomer said after his brother, then shrugged a little emptily. "I don't know what kind I would be. Guess I would've had to figure that out first."
"Whatever kind of art you'd do, you would be wonderful at it," Bubbles said to him softly. She reached toward his hand to squeeze it. He squeezed her hand back, offering her a small soft, grateful grin.
Another beat passed before Brick finally admitted, after I prodded him with my gaze, "I'd be a coach. Or a teacher." Pause. "Maybe a professor."
The rest of us slowly turned to look at Buttercup, who had been silent since the subject of conversation had changed. Seeing all of us looking at her, she heaved a tired sigh. "Is this for real? Are we really doing this right now?"
"Yes," I replied bluntly, not liking her attitude. We were all being honest and open here. That was what this group discussion was for. She had been slightly honest too, for a few short moments. Why wasn't she willing to answer this one hypothetical question?
Buttercup rolled her eyes, exasperated. "Fine. I'll play along with this little game of make believe." Her head lolled to the side as she sighed again, this one longer and more drawn out. Then, in a subdued voice, she said, "I would have my own dojo. I would either be a Wing Chun instructor or a Taekwondo one." She looked directly at me, raising her eyebrows dryly. "Happy?"
Strongly feeling like anything I said would just provoke her further, I said nothing, only blinked at her with a carefully vacant expression.
Boomer spoke next, thankfully changing the subject. "You know, those creatures we fought in November—the ones with the three circles on them…we're just like them. They were made of something almost like Chemical X, and then they disintegrated. And now we're doing the same thing. Did you ever think…" he trailed off. Paused heavily. Then cautiously, he asked us, "What made them the 'monsters' when in reality, they were just like us? Doesn't that make us monsters, too?"
Like a scene from a film, the battle between us and the 50 white monsters in Townsville Park played through my head as clearly as if it had just happened. I thought of how we took each creature down, one by one, as if they were ants. Ripping them to literal pieces like they were cardboard. Like they were trash. Like they were nothing. The image of myself ripping one of them in half with my own bare hands was particularly prominent. Thick, opaque black gushing through my fingers and running down my forearms—the same black that now came out of my nose and out of my stomach.
Then, the memory skipped forward—I thought of the way that the remaining monster army had all died by themselves, dropping down to the earth one by one. The flying ones falling out of the sky, not unlike how Buttercup had fallen out of the sky as we were fighting Him's nightmarish illusions.
The most vivid image I had from the end of the big Townsville Park battle was the gaunt, fanged, four-legged creature that had fallen down dead on the ground right next to Brick and I. Tiny black eyes sightless. Black pouring out of its' throat and onto the dead grass like a fountain. Dead before it probably even realized it.
Brick was the one to respond to Boomer's question to us all, cynicism coating every word. "We're not human, that's for damn sure."
I thought now of how it felt to watch all the creatures die. To watch them just fall to the ground as if they had never even moved. "Why did we think we were above them when we were just like them?" I asked the group in general, my voice sounding withdrawn. Defeated. "What gave us the right to believe that?"
"Stop. We are not like them," Brick disputed, "you know that. We're not monsters. Maybe we're made of Chemical X similar to theirs, sure. But we have the conscience to realize when we're doing right and wrong. We have the awareness, the choice. They were programmed to kill. That's all that they were for. They didn't even have self-awareness. They were just biological robots."
"You mean like we used to be?" Butch asked his brother after a moment.
Brick turned to look at him, shaking his head and scowling. "No. Not the same thing."
"How?" Butch stared at him, eyes severe. "Mojo created us and brainwashed us to destroy the Utonium sisters. How is that any different? How could we know—know for sure—that the monsters wouldn't have eventually developed the way we did—the way we developed our own personalities, our own goals?"
Brick didn't answer his brother—he didn't seem to even want to. He just stared down at the floor, silent.
Boomer continued in the vein of where his brother had left off, sounding haunted. "And what gave us the right to take that small, minute chance of development away from them? We saw them as evil, but objectively, isn't what we did evil, too?"
"No." Bubbles was shaking her head, already rejecting the very idea. "Don't even say that. Those things aren't the same."
"How do you know?" Boomer was staring at her, his gaze desperate. His voice had risen slightly, not with disagreement, but with fear. He seemed to want to believe her more than anything.
She met his fear with assurance. "Because we were protecting all those humans in the city," she answered, frowning and sounding one-thousand percent sure of herself. "We were protecting all of them because they can't protect themselves. And that could never be evil. Never."
Once, I would have immediately agreed with what Bubbles said, without question. But these days things that I had once thought I had understood made no sense to me anymore. Up was down, right was left. And I was living, but all I could think about was death.
I said to the room, moving the subject along after the uneasiness had gotten too thick, "Even if we're more like humans than those things were, humans have an average life expectancy of 70 years. We didn't even get 20."
Everyone let this fact sink in. I could almost hear the words echoing inside everyone's heads. Not even 20. Not even 20. Not even 20.
Who would've thought that the Powerpuff Girls and Rowdyruff Boys would only live to be 19? Not me. Not anybody.
Butch said next, breaking through my increasingly spiraling thoughts, "I feel like something out there is laughing at us." He paused with a bitter, twisted smirk that was at odds with the resentment in his eyes. "Hell, probably the whole Internet is. Those keyboard monkeys. I hate them all."
"They'd probably come in here and destroy us themselves if they could," Buttercup muttered. Then she added, cynicism practically dripping from her dry lips, "If only they really knew what was happening now."
Our disappearance from the public eye had not gone unnoticed. It started out as small, quiet theories on the Internet—then it expanded, leaving the Internet and moving to word of mouth, and by then, the media train had gone off the rails again.
It turned out that the seemingly harmless, jaded counter girl at Pop's Ice Cream & Gelato hadn't been so harmless after all—days after my public nosebleed incident, security cam footage of it found its' way online. I was clearly visible in it, as was Brick, and so were the thin black rivers running out of my nostrils and dripping off of my face. Within a week, the footage had gone viral—80 million views worldwide.
Things had spiraled rapidly out of control, quicker than we could manage it. We couldn't go a day without being part of some new sensationalist headline about why the Powerpuff Girls and Rowdyruff Boys hadn't been seen in weeks—why my nose had been dripping black.
So, knowing any excuse we could come up with wouldn't have been believed anyway, not this time, we did the next best thing—we hid.
Professor kept the televisions shut off these days, and our Internet-accessible devices were banned from use, rendering them all into nothing more than black mirrors. As well, we stayed indoors exclusively now, with all the drapes on the windows closed. If anything at all, once in a while we could go out into the fenced backyard for a short time, if we were quiet and didn't attract attention. But the news vans parked across the street from our house were enough of a motivator to not leave through the front door.
What was once our asylum had become our vacuum-sealed tomb.
Boomer was the one to answer Buttercup after another long beat of no one saying anything. "It's better that they don't know for now," he said. I didn't think any of us could disagree. After all, it couldn't stay secret for much longer. One way or another, the truth would come out.
Unprovoked, Bubbles commented to Buttercup and I, almost conversationally except for the emptiness in her voice, "You know, it's our birthday soon. In a month and a half."
Buttercup coughed, and it almost sounded like a laugh. It was probably meant to be one. "We'll never make it that long," she muttered.
Bubbles blinked at Buttercup, then she asked no one in particular, her face pinched and her voice quivering, "Is this what we deserve for wanting to just live normally? To live at least a little bit like everyone else?" Her last question came out the quietest. "Do we deserve to die this way?"
"Maybe," replied Brick. There was another heavy silence at his answer. He continued, almost wryly, "Maybe we're just immoral scientific experiments that were never supposed to exist as long as we have. Maybe we're just living proof that playing God in a laboratory is fucked up."
I couldn't explain why, but irrational anger flared through me at what he'd said. Immediately, I disputed, "But that's not what Professor was doing. We were an accident."
Buttercup immediately cut in. "Somehow that makes it even worse." She stopped for a moment, a strange look crossing her carefully impassive face momentarily, then she added, "I mean, you have to admit it, we've lasted pretty long for a bunch of mistakes." She hooted once. A loud, humorless, angry laugh. I stared at her, not answering. Bubbles fell into a quiet.
"What about Mojo, then?" Boomer's voice was dreary as he asked it, as if he already knew the answer. "What does that make him?"
"He was playing God, that's for sure." Brick had an almost humorous look on his face. Maybe it would have been humorous if it weren't for the rage that remained in his stormy ruby eyes. "He always thought himself to be a god, the furry bastard. He probably thought he was creating some sort of revolutionary creatures when he made us. Little did he know what messes we would turn out to be."
"Understatement," Butch said vacantly.
We all agreed to stop for a few minutes, dispersing and taking a break to leave to get water, use the restroom and give our emotions a rest for a time. After maybe ten minutes, we reconvened in the living room, gathering back in our circle, sitting down in our same spots. The break would prove to be needed, considering the conversations that immediately followed.
Almost as soon as we had settled down again, Butch abruptly blurted out to us, "Remember when I tried to kill myself? In high school?"
Everyone froze. Dark silence pulsed for a moment or two. The room palpably churned with discomfort.
It was not something any of us liked to bring up. That time in our lives was controversial for all of us, and complicated. Junior year of high school was what ended up bringing all of us together, but the means had been very difficult and painful for everybody.
For Butch, trying to stay out of Buttercup's life had been so difficult, so impossible, that he had attempted to end his own life with a gun to his head. Even knowing back then that a bullet wouldn't have killed him, he had still tried. Buttercup was the one who had kept the attempt from unfolding—had literally slapped the gun out of his hand—and over the top as it was, it was what finally led the two to be together, the realization that staying apart would kill them both.
Buttercup never talked about it. I think that it still terrified her to think about, even now. So that was what made her answering him before anybody else did all the more surprising. "I could never forget that day." It was the first time any emotion had leaked into her carefully composed voice since this whole discussion had started.
It was low, underneath the surface, but it was there—old, pungent burden. The sound of it stunned the rest of us into respectful soundlessness. Instead of saying anything, I watched the way Buttercup's eyes had locked onto the fluff of the white carpet beneath her, the way her muscles had stiffened up. The way she was staring—it was almost like she was seeing through it.
Maybe the slightest reminder caused her to relive those moments all over again. Maybe that was why she never talked about it.
Butch continued uneasily, face pensive. "I never really…thought about death. As a possibility. If it had actually worked. It sounds stupid, I know, but it's true." Between every other sentence, his furrowed brow would twitch as he stopped, in deep thought. And as he did, it occurred to me that this was maybe the first time he had talked so openly about this. "That day, I was so out of my mind with sorrow that I wasn't thinking straight. I wasn't thinking about what dying would've really been like. About what would happen afterwards." He shook his head then, as if snapping himself out of a reverie. His teeth clenched together as he said, "but I didn't know sorrow then. I thought I did. But I had no idea." His lip curled, bitterness passing over his face.
I knew Buttercup wouldn't reply this time, especially with the far away, vacant look in her eyes now, so I did instead. "To be fair, none of us have ever had to think about it. Not this way." I let out a soundless sigh. "I suppose that's why we've been so unprepared. All of us." My mind went briefly to Professor. Slaving away down in the laboratory, inventing more solutions for our snowballing health issues and looking for a cure that we all knew likely didn't exist.
When Butch spoke again, not necessarily responding to me but speaking to everyone, the strangest look was on his face. It looked like it was caught between fear and…guilty hope. "I wonder what it will feel like." He looked up, looking at each of us in our spots in the pow-wow. "Do you think we'll be lucky enough to just fall asleep and never wake up?"
All of us stared back at him, collectively terrified at even answering his question.
A few more beats passed, then Butch said, "Sorry. Shouldn't have asked that." The strange expression—the fear and the hope—had immediately left his face. His usual guarded one replaced it. "Just forget I said that."
I shook my head at him, even though I still felt the remaining, prickly echoes of shock at what he'd said. "Don't be sorry." If anything, besides shock, I was also weirdly, morbidly gratified in a way that someone else had asked such a question. It made me realize that I wasn't the only one thinking of questions like that.
"It was a perfectly reasonable question. Even a great one." Boomer, who was next to him, reassured his brother. He reached to gently pat his shoulder. "It's just that I don't know if anyone has the guts to answer it."
Butch nodded slowly in dour understanding, his lips pressed together in a tight line. He fell back into a stony silence.
Brick, likely feeling the change in his brother's demeanor, changed the subject once more. "Here's another question to consider. Do any of you think there's a heaven? Not just for humans, but also for things like us?" He switched his gaze to each of us in the circle, one by one. "Let's just say there is a God out there. Do you think he gives a shit about our existence?"
Discomfort passed through the circle yet again. "I don't think now's the right time for Sunday school talk," Buttercup commented with the same dryness that she had used before Butch's confession.
"Come on. I'm serious." Brick paused, looking at all of us again. "Admit it. Haven't you ever wondered?"
I replied, "No. I guess I never have." I halted. Then I swallowed hard as I admitted, reluctant, "Maybe I was too afraid to." Religions of any kind had never been of interest to me. But I had to admit that, at this point in time, Brick's question intrigued me. It also terrified me. It terrified me so much that I buried it, hoping it would never return.
Boomer asked the next unspeakable question. "Do you think we have souls?"
"Of course we do," Bubbles said to him softly. Her voice was bleak. There was barely any light left in her eyes. But even still, she continued arguing for our very existence. "If we didn't, how would we be able to feel? We feel things just like anyone else. Anger. Sadness." She paused, regarding all of us one by one. "Love."
"Hormones," Brick cut in flatly. "All different chemical balances in the brain. Illusions. Emotions don't actually exist."
Bubbles leveled her dull blue-eyed gaze at him across the circle. She tightened her arms around her knees, and she turned up her chin at him. "I don't agree," she simply said.
"Okay, but it's not a matter of agreeing and not agreeing," Brick argued with her, frustrated, "it's scientific fact."
Bubbles replied again, tone unruffled, "I don't agree that it's fact."
I turned to stare at Brick. I felt incredulity spread across my features. "Do you really believe in that, Brick?" I asked him.
He turned his annoyed gaze from my sister and turned to me, wary, quirking up one eyebrow. "In what?"
"In what you just said." My eyes narrowed slightly, regarding him uneasily now. "That emotions don't really exist."
"It's science, Blossom. It's fact. You understand," said Brick. He held my gaze impassively. "Don't you believe that, too?"
I held his gaze, frowning and shaking my head in answer. Where had this come from suddenly? Did he honestly believe something like that? Even knowing what we felt for each other? I believed in science. One-thousand percent, I did. But I also believed in love. And he was the one who made me believe in it.
"No?"
"No," I said.
He paused for a long time, holding my gaze even longer, the annoyance gradually fading and being exchanged with an empty sort of despair. "Then maybe I don't know," he finally admitted. He gave a short, stiff shake of his head, and his eyes dropped to the ground, releasing mine and becoming blank. "I don't know anything anymore."
At the unnervingly out of character appearance of surrender on his face, my heart gave one rough, unmerciful heave. Slowly, I scooted closer to him, stretching my hand out to meet his and take it gently. I lifted it to press a gentle kiss there, comforting and soft on the back of his hand. Saying nothing, I held his hand between both of mine, hoping he heard more from me with this simple action than with anything I could've said.
Maybe none of us really knew anything for sure anymore. What we had always known to be true, our very ways of life, had begun to fall apart at the seams. But maybe it had been presumptuous of us to think that we had life all figured out, anyway.
Human or non-human. No one ever really has things figured out. Maybe it was for the best that we finally realized this now.
Another natural lull in the group's conversation stalled, and during the silence, Buttercup shifted. She reached into the pocket of her sweatpants for something, and pulled it out. A small box of cigarettes. At the sight of it, my stomach clenched in cold astonishment. Where had that come from? Next, she reached into her other pocket and pulled out a lime green colored lighter.
I was unable to stop the question from erupting out of me. "Buttercup, since when do you smoke?" I'd asked it a little sharper than I'd intended.
Buttercup took out a single cigarette from the box, putting it between her lips and letting it hang there. She flicked the lighter on, a small flame coming from it, and lit the end of the cigarette. She replied tersely, the cigarette bobbing on her bottom lip as she spoke, "Since recently. I've been doing it for a while, you've just never seen me do it. Seeing as we're imprisoned these days, though, I really have no other choice but to do it in here now." She put the lighter away and took a long, careful first drag.
Buttercup had never smoked before. Why was she doing it now? Of all times, why now? I watched the end of the cigarette light up as she dragged, staring at it like it was diseased. I couldn't put my finger on exactly why, but the sight of it had made me so furious. I asked aloud, flummoxed, "Why?"
As she spoke this time, smoke flowed from her mouth like a veil, fanning out over her face in a sheer curtain and then undulating towards the ceiling. "Why the hell not? I'm dead anyway." She looked at me, green eyes as vaguely challenging as they were dull. She took another drag and then said, smoke flowing, "Try and stop me, Red. Take it out of my hand. Go ahead. I dare you."
My jaw worked as I held her gaze for a few more seconds, then I dropped my eyes away from her, angry and fed up. I shook my head in disgust. "You are unbelievable." My heart was racing in its' slow, human-like way.
She sputtered another choke laugh. "Am I?" She took yet another drag, leisurely and indifferent.
I was trembling. I continued, my anger increasing and the volume of my voice growing with each word, "You know something? You are really unpleasant these days. I've been doing everything I can to avoid you, just like you've been doing. Your negativity makes me feel even sicker than I already am."
Bubbles' interjected, voice shaking with her hurt, "Stop! Don't fight!"
Buttercup, ignoring Bubbles, laughed another choking laugh at me, even louder and even more scornful. "Oh? Well, excuse me for not feeling like I had to be fake and peppy when I'm dying," she said the word with such force and poison that it echoed in the quiet room. It made me flinch. She partially folded her hands together in a mocking pleading gesture, her eyes wild with her growing unhinged temper. "I'm so sorry, Queen Blossom. How would you like me to act? Optimistic? Like a saint? Or would you prefer that I pretend like nothing is wrong, like you've been doing? Cleaning the house up and making everything perfect? Is that what you want?"
Butch had partially gotten up from the floor, poised to cross over to her. He warned, "Buttercup, stop. Right now."
"Take it easy," Brick said to her at the same time. Incredulity and outrage was plain on his face, like he couldn't believe she was erupting out of the blue like this. But I had seen it coming. Anticipated it from the very moment we had sat in this circle. It had taken longer to build up than I'd thought, and she had gone straight from avoidance to lashing out quicker than I'd thought that she would, but nevertheless it had been inevitable. With the way she'd been isolating herself from the majority of us lately, it was bound to happen eventually.
Buttercup acted like they hadn't even spoken. In one fluid gesture, she lifted her pant leg and snuffed out her cigarette against her knee as if it didn't even hurt her, leaving a bright red scorch mark on her bare pale skin. Then she hurled the unlit bud directly at me.
Shock rippled through the room and the others shouted, and I turned my face away as the cigarette came sailing towards my face and hit me on the cheek. The circle dismantled all at once. Butch rushed up behind her, grabbing her by her shoulders and keeping her in place. Brick was suddenly next to me, arm around my shoulders and half between me and her, protective stance in full effect. I felt Bubbles on my other side, kneeling, ready to separate us if she had to, mirroring Boomer's exact ready stance on Buttercup's side.
I kept my eyes away from Buttercup as she continued her rant, voice becoming louder and louder, "Tell me what you want, Blossom. Tell me which neat little spotless glass box you want to lock me up inside. Tell me all about how you would like me to be, since you've been doing that for our entire lives already. Tell me, oh great leader, how perfectly pristine you would like for me to act. How clean and prim and goddamn chipper you'd like me to be, the way a Powerpuff Girl is supposed to be."
Very slowly, I shook my head. "Stop now," I said. My voice was barely a whisper. Her words were like knives all over me, sinking deeper and deeper. "Please."
Buttercup, with Butch's hands still restraining her by her shoulders, stood up and stalked over to me with him in tow behind her, her eyes staring down at me like they wanted to tear through me. Boomer stood as well, rushing to stand between us, his hands open toward her and forcing her to stop. Stop she did, but she never even glanced at him—on a mission, her menacing glower remained on me.
Like a speeding train coming off of its' tracks, tumbling and folding and imploding on itself, she railed ahead at a deafening volume, bellowing, "Well guess what, Red? You can take all of your crazy, impossible, neurotic expectations of our perfect superhero lives and shove them up your ass. Because within a small amount of time, the Powerpuff Girls are not going to exist anymore. They are going to die. They are going to become a speck of dust in the vast, sprawling universe. And in the end, nobody is going to remember how perfect we acted, and how flawless our image was in the media, and how lovely we were. For a small amount of time, they're going to remember some girls and boys with superpowers that saved people now and then. But in a hundred years, none of that is even going to matter. All the people who loved us will be dead and long gone. We'll just be one sentence, or maybe two, in some kid's history book. And that's all we'll be. An insignificant, minute sentence that will never encompass everything we accomplished in our entire lives. An insignificant NOTHING."
The room throbbed with the last screamed word, which had been the loudest out of the entirety of the thunderous rant, and the silence that followed it seemed to draw out for ages. Long, empty, terrifying.
I was staring back at her as she stared down at me, huffing hard, quaking, red in the face, green eyes tortured and enraged and broken, yet they were fuller of life than they'd been in weeks.
Finally, cold, I spoke. "Are you done?"
Buttercup, quiet, looked me full in the face for a long time, eyes ferocious and searching fiercely for something in my stare—anger, probably. And that moment confirmed what I already knew. She had been looking for a fight.
That was how Buttercup dealt with things. Fight the pain away, smother it with rage. She had antagonized me purposely, saying everything that she knew would hurt me, hurt all of us, so that I would scream back at her and she could scream at me again and her agony would go away for the moment. It was the only thing I could do for her now, I realized. And I wasn't going to give that to her.
Of course what she'd said had hurt me. If I hadn't had a solid grip on the knowledge that this was what she was doing, what she said might have destroyed me if I'd let it. But I wasn't going to enable her self-destructive, unhealthy coping mechanisms. I refused.
And seeing my complete defeat, my complete emptiness at her entire provocation, seemed to finally do her in.
Buttercup's legs collapsed, coming down from her adrenaline fueled recklessness. She sat back on her heels, the blood draining from her face with all of the ticking rage. She looked away from me. Replacing her rage was a cold, hollow anguish all over that she didn't even bother hiding.
Kneeling down to meet her, gentle, Butch caught and encircled her in his arms, hiding his face against her hair. "There we are," he whispered to her. "That's enough now." As always, he was the one to bring her back down to Earth again. She slumped forward, catching her face in both of her open trembling hands.
Everyone sat down once again, the circle of honesty from before essentially spoiled now. Quiet stretched on for another few minutes, everyone recovering from that brutal exchange between us, once again avoiding gazes and not saying anything. Brick only tightened his hold on me.
Then one very quiet voice came from beside me. "You're wrong, you know." Bubbles. I turned to look at her. She seemed to be speaking to Buttercup alone and was observing her, her face ignited with a resolve that I hadn't seen on her in weeks. She asked Buttercup, "Why wouldn't we be remembered? How could we not be?" She shook her head slightly. "Do you think there's ever been anyone else like us in history?"
"Bubbles—" I started, and what I was meaning to say next, I didn't know. But Bubbles interrupted me anyway.
"I'm serious," she interjected, looking at me now. Her eyes were wide and sincere. "Really, Blossom. Besides the boys, has there ever been anyone else exactly like us?" She didn't wait for my answer. She shook her head resolutely. "No. People tried, though. They've tried to create more of us. More like us. And they failed every time. No matter what, they couldn't get it right. They could never get our powers right, or our personalities. You know why?"
She'd leveled the last question to everybody. We all stared at her, not knowing how to answer.
Knowing we wouldn't be able to answer, she answered for us. "Because we're fate." Shakily, unsteadily, she began to stand. Boomer came quickly to her side and offered her his hand. She took it, standing up all of the way.
She continued, "We were fated to be here. Blossom—you, me and Buttercup were created by accident. Yet, through that accident, we turned out to be perfectly balanced, perfectly opposite little girls. Girls that would learn and grow and get older, and would be fated to save the world hundreds of times. You call that an accident?" Bubbles turned her eyes to mine. She had begun to tear up, but her face wasn't sad. Her features looked more hopeful than I had seen them in months. Hope radiated from her in palpable waves, stretching up and out and filling every corner of the room, permeating every dark crevice. "There are no accidents. There are no coincidences. We were fated to protect people. And we have done that so many times that I couldn't even count them."
The room had fallen silent once again—but this time, it was in reverence. Every pair of eyes stared at her. Even Buttercup had come out of her slumped posture, lifting her face from her hands to stare at our sister in rapt wonder.
Bubbles went on, "Maybe we've all done our part. We've already accomplished what we were here to do. But some people on this planet—some humans—can't even say that. There are so many people that leave this Earth without ever having fulfilled their potential, their true value to this world, and their dreams. But us, all of us—we can say that we have already. Do you realize how rare that is? How remarkable that is?" She met each of our gazes again. One tear escaped her right eye, rolled down her cheek, but it disappeared into her radiant smile. The smile that, with everything in me, I couldn't understand could be so genuine and captivating in a time such as this. But as always—if anyone could, Bubbles could. "No one could ever forget us. No one ever will. Just by existing, we've changed so many people's lives, touched so many of their hearts. And even after we're gone, that will never go away. Ever."
Carefully, Bubbles sat again, right in front of me. She reached out to wipe a tear from my face, a tear that I hadn't even realized was there. Then, she took both of my hands in hers and looked into my eyes. "Don't you ever forget how important that is." She turned, facing the rest of our group. "All of you. Never forget." She turned her eyes to Buttercup in particular, looking at her with such compassion that it physically tugged at my heartstrings. "We could let this bring all of us closer together, or it could tear us all apart. We have the power to decide how this affects us."
Frail, with a gaze that was shattered, Buttercup responded with a raw whisper, "I have no power left."
Bubbles said, "Only because you're letting it win." Very slightly, she shook her head once, with a finality that said she would not be argued with. "Don't let it."
Shortly after Bubbles' beautiful words of wisdom and faith for all of us, all of us left the living room, retiring to our respective rooms and beds.
We had decided to end our scary, uncertain, painfully honest group discussion on a somewhat hopeful—if maybe in some ways, childlike—note. It was for the best, we decided. Especially if any of us had wanted to get any rest at all that night. Or ever again.
Some childlike innocence couldn't hurt us at this point—maybe it was the only way we could escape from the suffering for even just a little while.
And just as well, Bubbles' words echoed in my mind as I lay in bed later that night.
They had given me one last push—one last thin thread that would keep me hanging on. Not that we'd have any way of knowing if they would, but I hoped, hoped beyond hope, that her lovely words would prove true.
That the city of Townsville would never forget us, just as she said. That this generation would raise children, and they would tell their children, and then their grandchildren, stories of the superheroes that had once flown the skies of Townsville, arresting thieves and destroying monsters and keeping the world safe. The heroes that they could always depend on, the heroes that rarely let them down or let anything hurt them.
The heroes they loved.
-Unknown POV-
Words.
Can't…don't…gone.
Brain. Shrink.
Hands…paws…claws…hands…remember.
Them. Fault. All. Pay. Deserve. They…why…me…instead…
Destroy.
Remember. Remember. Remember. Cannot…forget…me.
Must. Not. Forget…who…me…am.
Not forget. Not forget words. Not forget walk. Not forget run. Not forget…invent.
Not forget. Not…not…
Words. Gone.
Me.
Gone.
The songs for this chapter on the Losing Control playlist are: Winter Valley by Phildel, Midnight by Coldplay, Breathe Me by Sia, Last Hope by Paramore, and of course, Born to Die by Lana Del Rey. For explanations for each of these songs, and for songs for other chapters, check out my livejournal!
As well, I'll be writing a sort of...explanation, behind-the-scenes, why-I-even-wrote-this-story type of entry soon, so if you like that kind of stuff (or you're just curious about what inspired this story in the first place) keep an eye out on my lj for it.
Not to worry: chapter 18 will come sometime in September. Maybe even early September? We'll see!
Feedback or comments are always appreciated!
-MsButterFingers
