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Hopped off the plane at L-A-X
I forgot to mention in Tuesday's trivia post that the song running through my head during Buttercup's monster ownage scene is Nat King Cole's "Aquellos Ojos Verdes." Love it in context, especially with Butch getting all mentally invested in the fight.
Transition to today's tfr post! We'll make it a Greens one, kids :D
There's the tiniest bit of significance to this one. I wrote it back in 2007 after I hadn't written for a long while and sent it off to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mathkid to beta. I got a very important e-mail back. It's hard for me to go into detail about why it was so important... but it just got me really thinking about character motivation and making that a key part of even the smallest little fic. You can be technically decent and stylistically competent, but those things alone do not a great story make. History and meaning count for a lot. Neither of those things have to be explicit, but at the very least they should be present if you really want to set your stuff apart.
Anyway, there's my vague history behind today's tfr post. I had plans for the better part of a year to flesh this out, but had a lot of trouble coming up with something that didn't feel contrived/tacked on. Plus, I was getting more and more sucked into writing TEF, at which point most everything else that I could've been working on became much less compelling to write.
(I still really like the title, though - Force of Habit.)
Funny how easy it was to fall into old habits. And through buildings.
The conversation could’ve started with something like a “Well! Where have you been?” or a “Oh my God, I haven’t seen you in ages! What have you been up to?” but the relationship being what it was, words weren’t entirely necessary.
So when Buttercup had walked out of Malph’s (her mind on dinner and paying rent), her first inclination on seeing Butch at the soda machines had little to do with exchanging verbal pleasantries.
She dropped that evening’s dinner and charged.
Force of habit directed Butch to grab the nearest soda machine and hurl it at her.
Seconds later they were in the skies, the dusk a cacophony of green blasts and barbed glares as the townsfolk fled with impressive swiftness from the chaos unfolding above them.
After several minutes of near-misses, Butch finally hurtled into her, slamming her through the roof of the store to a few feet well past the tiles, scattering plaster and cement every which way.
Old habits.
***
***
Slightly dazed but conscious, Butch leapt off of her and steadied his footing outside of the small pit a few feet away. “Is that how you greet old friends, Buttercup?”
She edged up on her elbows, dust caking her body. “‘Friends’ nothing. Go to hell. Or back to whatever hole you’ve been in.”
“Oh, you noticed?”
She clambered out of the pit and glowered at him. Because of course he had to imply with every last word that she was remotely interested in him. Which she wasn’t. At all.
“Without you around, my life’s been very peaceful for the past couple of years,” she responded icily. “I was hoping you were dead, I was just disappointed I hadn’t been the one to kill you.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re so over-possessive. For your information, I was in Europe, educating myself on the finer…”
And of course he paused here, his eyes glazing over and glittering at a not-so-distant memory.
“… ‘points.’ The finer points of European women.”
Buttercup’s lip curled. Because any woman who found Butch the least bit appealing was a complete and utter idiot.
Of course, Buttercup was not one of them.
She wound up like a pitcher and shot a blast of green at him, an effort he dodged with unnatural grace.
“You won’t win any friends by shooting them, you know,” he casually said.
“I don’t really think that matters, so long as I win,” she growled back.
He fired a shot through the ground, and she took off as the earth split beneath her.
“You’re always like that,” he shrugged, shaking his head. “You know that’s the reason I left for Europe in the first place?”
“Because you’re a pussy and you couldn’t take the ego-bruising?” she snarled, in a sore mood; she had unwittingly glanced at the lower half of his torso in those jeans and he had totally made her do that on purpose, damn him.
“I’m not sure if you’re in denial or just really stupid,” Butch said incredulously as he watched her floating above him. His arm whipped out behind him, grabbed a part of the bread shelf, and chucked it at her. She fired a blast, annihilating it, but Butch had taken advantage of the distraction to zoom up and grab her by her feet.
***
***
They toppled to the ground again. Of course, being superhuman, their “topple” birthed another tiny crater in the floor of the grocery.
Buttercup wound up on her back again, which wasn’t terribly comfortable, considering she’d done it twice now. The edge of Butch’s back curled up into her vision as he propped himself over her, and she was watching the line of his back, and just, just…
ARGH. Damn him!
Those sharp green eyes were suddenly looking at her, and he said, “Don’t you get sick of this? All this beating around the bush? It’s like foreplay for the past fifteen years or whatever, but a lot more painful and a lot less appealing.”
She grit her teeth and punched him in the gut, hard, and sent him flying. He landed somewhere with a loud crash and an Oof sort of noise while she leapt to her feet.
All of a sudden the sprinklers in the building went off, and within seconds the two of them were soaked. Buttercup shook the water out of her eyes and focused her gaze on… on…
On Butch, clambering out of the dairy section, spilled milk dripping along the line of his neck down, down, down, mixing with water and drenching his clothes so they clung in a million indecent manners to his skin—
No no no no NO.
Buttercup squeezed her eyes shut and brought her arms back to power a blast, but Butch suddenly thudded into her, grasping her wrists. Her eyes flew open and were instantly drawn to the sopping strands of hair that dangled in front of his eyes.
“Stop that!” she snapped at him without thinking.
His brow furrowed in confusion. “What, and let you hit me?”
She gave him a steely look and declared, “YES.”
He rolled his eyes again and announced, “You see? That right there? That’s the sort of thing that drives a man to Europe.”
“I wish you’d stayed there,” she spat venomously, furious with herself for just now realizing that she wasn’t struggling to extricate herself from his hold. She planted her feet and swung him overhead, but lost her footing on the slippery floor, so they both landed on the ground that was looking less and less like ground and more and more like debris.
“You know what?” Butch grumbled, his speech muffled by said ground. “Let’s start this over.”
He let go and stood, shaking himself out a bit, while Buttercup immediately flipped over and tensed her arms to strike.
He ran a hand through his milk-sodden hair and asked, “You got a boyfriend?”
The question caught her completely off-guard. “… What?”
“You seein’ someone? Bumpin’ uglies? What, you deaf or something?”
“What do you care?!”
“You wanna go get a drink sometime?” he put forth, raising his arms in a half-shrug.
***
***
Slack-jawed, Buttercup gaped unblinkingly at him for about four moments before she sent green rays shooting out of her eyes so he wouldn’t see her blush, because then he’d get the wrong idea and she’d never hear the end of it.
The smoke from the sizzle of her eyebeams cleared, and of course he was nowhere to be seen. She jerked her head in one direction, then another, then yelped in surprise as his arms draped around her, waving a bottle of wine in her face.
“Chenin Blanc. You a fan? Although it tastes a hell of a lot better in France, I’ll have you know.”
Her eyes went wide with shock (and fury, mostly fury, she told herself), and she snatched the bottle from his hands, smashed it against a toppled shelf nearby, and spun around, aiming its neck sharply at his face.
He held his hands up in surrender. “Or we could just do shots, whatever. You like B-52’s?”
“Go to hell,” she growled, and edged closer.
His gaze flickered from her to the shattered glass in her hand, then he took off towards the opposite end of the store. She flung the bottle aside and shot off after him, blinking the sprinklers’ spray out of her eyes and angling abruptly when he landed.
In the spirits aisle.
She stopped and hovered, staring at him in disbelief as he inspected the rows of (amazingly enough) intact bottles. He plucked one out and waggled it at her. “How about tequila?”
The bottle suddenly exploded in his hands, and he cast her a dirty look as the glow in her eyes subsided. “You know, you don’t have a good enough reason for destroying all this good alcohol.”
Wordlessly, she seized the nearest one and chucked it at him.
He caught it by its neck and examined it. “Champagne? Ugh, you can take that back,” he said with contempt, and dropped it on the floor. “What else you into? Movies? Um… movies? ‘Cause I gotta be honest, I’m mostly into drinking.”
“That would explain the amount of brain activity that goes on with you,” Buttercup said flatly.
Butch put his hands on his hips and cocked his head at her, a pose which she found utterly unattractive because thank you very much that is all I have to say on the matter.
“You’re going to be difficult. Fine. I’ll just pick you up tomorrow at seven. We’ll do dinner, or some—”
A couple of bottles smashed at his feet and he jumped back. Buttercup was hurling bottle after bottle at him, and somewhere off in the distance an alcoholic cried a lot.
“Go—to—Hell!” she shouted, because what the Hell was he getting at, asking her—no, telling her to go out with him? Bullshit! Complete and total bullshit! As if she would! As if she cared about that stupid idiot of a man—I mean, guy—no, Goddammit, what-the-hell-ever! Damn him!
“Yeah, I love you too!” he snapped back, arms raised to shield himself from the glass, and her eyes blazed and her cheeks burned and she rushed forward, fully intending to pummel the bastard into near-oblivion.
With unprecedented foresight he practically snatched her out of the air as she shot toward him, and as she froze for a split-second in bewilderment, he swung her around, dipped her, and kissed her.
Her hands instantly began pounding against his chest in the most embarrassingly girliest way possible, and she hated her brain because that was all she could think of to do. This was all some wicked, terrible plot to distract her, with his teeth and his lips and oh my God was that his tongue…?
The pounding on his chest faded into clutching at his shirt, and she swore that once she finished kicking his ass she would go see the nearest psychiatrist about getting meds to counter this crazy mental illness she had that prevented her from reacting correctly when she was clearly being attacked.
She also needed magic things to guard against witchcraft, because he had cast some sort of crazy evil spell that was making her moan.
Not only that, she was losing control of her body. One of her arms wove up around his neck and she clutched desperately at his hair, and her horrid, wretched, traitorous mouth was working feverishly against his, as if she didn’t kiss him in the lewdest possible manner she would spontaneously combust on the spot. Damn him and his crazy evil spells! Of… evil! Seriously, damn him!
He suddenly swung her up out of the dip and pushed her against the glass cabinet where all the fancy liquor was stored, taking a deep breath while she dimly admired his soaked t-shirt and pecking her on the lips before he stepped back to study her.
Her knees wobbled a little as he stepped away (damn him damn him damn him) and as she stared at him staring at her with heavy-lidded eyes she did not think life could possibly suck any more than it did at that very moment.
On his mouth was painted the hint of a triumphant little grin, and she was obviously going crazy because there were two things she wanted to do to it, one of which was kiss it and one of which was… um… kiss it, ok, so yeah, she was probably clinically insane by this point.
“Way to break the habit,” he said admiringly, in a deep and husky voice that was very sexy and that Buttercup hated very much.
She grimaced (finally, FINALLY she’d regained her senses) and bit, “Fuck you.”
His grin morphed into a full-fledged smile, and he moved forward to drop another kiss on her cheek, meanwhile distracting her with all that sprinkler water shimmering down his pretty (ugly, pretty ugly, she corrected herself) neck, and whispered darkly in her ear, “Second date, sweetheart.”
She felt like she was choking (out of anger, anger) when he stepped back and took off into the moonlit sky.
She tried vainly to not admire his ass on his way out.
---
The double "***" lines in between some sections were supposed to be flashbacks to that history between them that I couldn't get to work. The history I was trying to work with was basically Butch becoming conscious of their sexual tension when fighting, waiting for Buttercup to come around to recognizing it as well, and then getting frustrated and leaving when it became clear that that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Man, he sounds OOC, doesn't he? No wonder I couldn't get this to work.
Transition to today's tfr post! We'll make it a Greens one, kids :D
There's the tiniest bit of significance to this one. I wrote it back in 2007 after I hadn't written for a long while and sent it off to
mathkid to beta. I got a very important e-mail back. It's hard for me to go into detail about why it was so important... but it just got me really thinking about character motivation and making that a key part of even the smallest little fic. You can be technically decent and stylistically competent, but those things alone do not a great story make. History and meaning count for a lot. Neither of those things have to be explicit, but at the very least they should be present if you really want to set your stuff apart.Anyway, there's my vague history behind today's tfr post. I had plans for the better part of a year to flesh this out, but had a lot of trouble coming up with something that didn't feel contrived/tacked on. Plus, I was getting more and more sucked into writing TEF, at which point most everything else that I could've been working on became much less compelling to write.
(I still really like the title, though - Force of Habit.)
Funny how easy it was to fall into old habits. And through buildings.
The conversation could’ve started with something like a “Well! Where have you been?” or a “Oh my God, I haven’t seen you in ages! What have you been up to?” but the relationship being what it was, words weren’t entirely necessary.
So when Buttercup had walked out of Malph’s (her mind on dinner and paying rent), her first inclination on seeing Butch at the soda machines had little to do with exchanging verbal pleasantries.
She dropped that evening’s dinner and charged.
Force of habit directed Butch to grab the nearest soda machine and hurl it at her.
Seconds later they were in the skies, the dusk a cacophony of green blasts and barbed glares as the townsfolk fled with impressive swiftness from the chaos unfolding above them.
After several minutes of near-misses, Butch finally hurtled into her, slamming her through the roof of the store to a few feet well past the tiles, scattering plaster and cement every which way.
Old habits.
***
***
Slightly dazed but conscious, Butch leapt off of her and steadied his footing outside of the small pit a few feet away. “Is that how you greet old friends, Buttercup?”
She edged up on her elbows, dust caking her body. “‘Friends’ nothing. Go to hell. Or back to whatever hole you’ve been in.”
“Oh, you noticed?”
She clambered out of the pit and glowered at him. Because of course he had to imply with every last word that she was remotely interested in him. Which she wasn’t. At all.
“Without you around, my life’s been very peaceful for the past couple of years,” she responded icily. “I was hoping you were dead, I was just disappointed I hadn’t been the one to kill you.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re so over-possessive. For your information, I was in Europe, educating myself on the finer…”
And of course he paused here, his eyes glazing over and glittering at a not-so-distant memory.
“… ‘points.’ The finer points of European women.”
Buttercup’s lip curled. Because any woman who found Butch the least bit appealing was a complete and utter idiot.
Of course, Buttercup was not one of them.
She wound up like a pitcher and shot a blast of green at him, an effort he dodged with unnatural grace.
“You won’t win any friends by shooting them, you know,” he casually said.
“I don’t really think that matters, so long as I win,” she growled back.
He fired a shot through the ground, and she took off as the earth split beneath her.
“You’re always like that,” he shrugged, shaking his head. “You know that’s the reason I left for Europe in the first place?”
“Because you’re a pussy and you couldn’t take the ego-bruising?” she snarled, in a sore mood; she had unwittingly glanced at the lower half of his torso in those jeans and he had totally made her do that on purpose, damn him.
“I’m not sure if you’re in denial or just really stupid,” Butch said incredulously as he watched her floating above him. His arm whipped out behind him, grabbed a part of the bread shelf, and chucked it at her. She fired a blast, annihilating it, but Butch had taken advantage of the distraction to zoom up and grab her by her feet.
***
***
They toppled to the ground again. Of course, being superhuman, their “topple” birthed another tiny crater in the floor of the grocery.
Buttercup wound up on her back again, which wasn’t terribly comfortable, considering she’d done it twice now. The edge of Butch’s back curled up into her vision as he propped himself over her, and she was watching the line of his back, and just, just…
ARGH. Damn him!
Those sharp green eyes were suddenly looking at her, and he said, “Don’t you get sick of this? All this beating around the bush? It’s like foreplay for the past fifteen years or whatever, but a lot more painful and a lot less appealing.”
She grit her teeth and punched him in the gut, hard, and sent him flying. He landed somewhere with a loud crash and an Oof sort of noise while she leapt to her feet.
All of a sudden the sprinklers in the building went off, and within seconds the two of them were soaked. Buttercup shook the water out of her eyes and focused her gaze on… on…
On Butch, clambering out of the dairy section, spilled milk dripping along the line of his neck down, down, down, mixing with water and drenching his clothes so they clung in a million indecent manners to his skin—
No no no no NO.
Buttercup squeezed her eyes shut and brought her arms back to power a blast, but Butch suddenly thudded into her, grasping her wrists. Her eyes flew open and were instantly drawn to the sopping strands of hair that dangled in front of his eyes.
“Stop that!” she snapped at him without thinking.
His brow furrowed in confusion. “What, and let you hit me?”
She gave him a steely look and declared, “YES.”
He rolled his eyes again and announced, “You see? That right there? That’s the sort of thing that drives a man to Europe.”
“I wish you’d stayed there,” she spat venomously, furious with herself for just now realizing that she wasn’t struggling to extricate herself from his hold. She planted her feet and swung him overhead, but lost her footing on the slippery floor, so they both landed on the ground that was looking less and less like ground and more and more like debris.
“You know what?” Butch grumbled, his speech muffled by said ground. “Let’s start this over.”
He let go and stood, shaking himself out a bit, while Buttercup immediately flipped over and tensed her arms to strike.
He ran a hand through his milk-sodden hair and asked, “You got a boyfriend?”
The question caught her completely off-guard. “… What?”
“You seein’ someone? Bumpin’ uglies? What, you deaf or something?”
“What do you care?!”
“You wanna go get a drink sometime?” he put forth, raising his arms in a half-shrug.
***
***
Slack-jawed, Buttercup gaped unblinkingly at him for about four moments before she sent green rays shooting out of her eyes so he wouldn’t see her blush, because then he’d get the wrong idea and she’d never hear the end of it.
The smoke from the sizzle of her eyebeams cleared, and of course he was nowhere to be seen. She jerked her head in one direction, then another, then yelped in surprise as his arms draped around her, waving a bottle of wine in her face.
“Chenin Blanc. You a fan? Although it tastes a hell of a lot better in France, I’ll have you know.”
Her eyes went wide with shock (and fury, mostly fury, she told herself), and she snatched the bottle from his hands, smashed it against a toppled shelf nearby, and spun around, aiming its neck sharply at his face.
He held his hands up in surrender. “Or we could just do shots, whatever. You like B-52’s?”
“Go to hell,” she growled, and edged closer.
His gaze flickered from her to the shattered glass in her hand, then he took off towards the opposite end of the store. She flung the bottle aside and shot off after him, blinking the sprinklers’ spray out of her eyes and angling abruptly when he landed.
In the spirits aisle.
She stopped and hovered, staring at him in disbelief as he inspected the rows of (amazingly enough) intact bottles. He plucked one out and waggled it at her. “How about tequila?”
The bottle suddenly exploded in his hands, and he cast her a dirty look as the glow in her eyes subsided. “You know, you don’t have a good enough reason for destroying all this good alcohol.”
Wordlessly, she seized the nearest one and chucked it at him.
He caught it by its neck and examined it. “Champagne? Ugh, you can take that back,” he said with contempt, and dropped it on the floor. “What else you into? Movies? Um… movies? ‘Cause I gotta be honest, I’m mostly into drinking.”
“That would explain the amount of brain activity that goes on with you,” Buttercup said flatly.
Butch put his hands on his hips and cocked his head at her, a pose which she found utterly unattractive because thank you very much that is all I have to say on the matter.
“You’re going to be difficult. Fine. I’ll just pick you up tomorrow at seven. We’ll do dinner, or some—”
A couple of bottles smashed at his feet and he jumped back. Buttercup was hurling bottle after bottle at him, and somewhere off in the distance an alcoholic cried a lot.
“Go—to—Hell!” she shouted, because what the Hell was he getting at, asking her—no, telling her to go out with him? Bullshit! Complete and total bullshit! As if she would! As if she cared about that stupid idiot of a man—I mean, guy—no, Goddammit, what-the-hell-ever! Damn him!
“Yeah, I love you too!” he snapped back, arms raised to shield himself from the glass, and her eyes blazed and her cheeks burned and she rushed forward, fully intending to pummel the bastard into near-oblivion.
With unprecedented foresight he practically snatched her out of the air as she shot toward him, and as she froze for a split-second in bewilderment, he swung her around, dipped her, and kissed her.
Her hands instantly began pounding against his chest in the most embarrassingly girliest way possible, and she hated her brain because that was all she could think of to do. This was all some wicked, terrible plot to distract her, with his teeth and his lips and oh my God was that his tongue…?
The pounding on his chest faded into clutching at his shirt, and she swore that once she finished kicking his ass she would go see the nearest psychiatrist about getting meds to counter this crazy mental illness she had that prevented her from reacting correctly when she was clearly being attacked.
She also needed magic things to guard against witchcraft, because he had cast some sort of crazy evil spell that was making her moan.
Not only that, she was losing control of her body. One of her arms wove up around his neck and she clutched desperately at his hair, and her horrid, wretched, traitorous mouth was working feverishly against his, as if she didn’t kiss him in the lewdest possible manner she would spontaneously combust on the spot. Damn him and his crazy evil spells! Of… evil! Seriously, damn him!
He suddenly swung her up out of the dip and pushed her against the glass cabinet where all the fancy liquor was stored, taking a deep breath while she dimly admired his soaked t-shirt and pecking her on the lips before he stepped back to study her.
Her knees wobbled a little as he stepped away (damn him damn him damn him) and as she stared at him staring at her with heavy-lidded eyes she did not think life could possibly suck any more than it did at that very moment.
On his mouth was painted the hint of a triumphant little grin, and she was obviously going crazy because there were two things she wanted to do to it, one of which was kiss it and one of which was… um… kiss it, ok, so yeah, she was probably clinically insane by this point.
“Way to break the habit,” he said admiringly, in a deep and husky voice that was very sexy and that Buttercup hated very much.
She grimaced (finally, FINALLY she’d regained her senses) and bit, “Fuck you.”
His grin morphed into a full-fledged smile, and he moved forward to drop another kiss on her cheek, meanwhile distracting her with all that sprinkler water shimmering down his pretty (ugly, pretty ugly, she corrected herself) neck, and whispered darkly in her ear, “Second date, sweetheart.”
She felt like she was choking (out of anger, anger) when he stepped back and took off into the moonlit sky.
She tried vainly to not admire his ass on his way out.
---
The double "***" lines in between some sections were supposed to be flashbacks to that history between them that I couldn't get to work. The history I was trying to work with was basically Butch becoming conscious of their sexual tension when fighting, waiting for Buttercup to come around to recognizing it as well, and then getting frustrated and leaving when it became clear that that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Man, he sounds OOC, doesn't he? No wonder I couldn't get this to work.
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I think you have mentioned this wrt Buttercup before somewhere. Something about a post of your TEF playlist, I think. IDK, it sounds familiar.
FIGHT FIC YAYYYY. And hahahaha I love that Butch is a snarky little bitch here XD
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