A/N: Whoa. Once I started re-watching every version of this show/movie I could find, I spent the whole week with Menken's music stuck in my head. On Saturday, it was Feed Me. On Monday, it was Don't Feed The Plants. For the last couple of days, it's been Dentist. So far, I've had three plot bunnies involving adapting the Faust legend the story plays on. But in the end, I decided on this one, playing on the theatrical "happy" ending of the 1986 musical movie.

Plot: Last time we saw Seymour and Audrey, they were finally going to live Audrey's dream, but they didn't know about the tiny little Audrey II in the garden. Now it's 1974, and they've been married for almost fourteen years, while their preteen daughter is starting to grow distant from them. But shy and having little trust in her friends, Juniper Krelborn spends most of her days confiding in the flowers. So what happens when one of them goes to respond to her?

Dislcimer: I do not own any of Roger Korman's original characters, or their adapted versions for the musical or 1986 movie. I do, however, own Junie.

"Junie! Junie, you've got five minutes until the school bus comes, honey!"

I sighed, looking at myself in the mirror. I looked as depressing as always. Long limp dark hair with a ribbon keeping it out of my face but still trailing down my back (no matter how well I brushed and washed it), boring blue check dress for school with boring black ballet flats, scrawny freckled neck, skin-and-bone legs, and a pale face. I always wished I got my Mom's looks. If I was to be honest, I loved Dad just a tiny bit more than Mom, but he was never around on weekdays. He went to the city for work and I was never up early enough for him to do any more than say goodbye to me. Mom mostly stayed home and did all the chores. And now-

"Juniper Krelborn, if you don't get down here now, you're going to have to walk to school and I won't be sorry for you!" Uh-oh, Mom was starting to get mad that I had been stalling. One more minute without an appearance and she'd bring out Renee, my middle name.

I glanced at myself one more time, and then hurried out to the main room. At least there was one feature I got from my Mom – blue eyes. Dad had brown eyes and he once told me he'd had glasses since he was ten. I was now eleven and still no glasses.

"Sorry, Mom. " I said meekly. "I got a little sidetracked making sure I looked right."

Mom's stern face softened. She knew how important it was to look right in this day and at my age. "You've got about two minutes to get to the gate." She gave a sigh. "Well, at least you didn't try to cut it as close as yesterday."

I rolled my eyes out of Mom's sight. It was way too dorky to be more than a minute early for the bus, but there was no way I was going to say that to her. I'd get the "I just want you to get the good education that your father and I never got the chance to have" lecture. Pfft. So what if they'd grown up in some downtown ghetto in the city? They'd managed, hadn't they, living in a two-bedroom bungalow with a flowery garden, having our own washing machine and a long line to hang out our clothes, an iron – our grill at the back, a twelve-inch colour TV...seriously, I'd be happy with that. And even though Mom wasn't a modern women like most of my friends and the other girls in our class were planning to be (she mostly cooked, cleaned, did the shopping and not much else), we still had enough money from Dad's job to get by on top of all our mod cons.

Well, at least it wasn't the "your dad is the most hardworking person out there and does his best for us every day" lecture, that I got every time I asked for things like the new denim shorts my friends were wearing out of school, or wanted a new board game to play. For whatever reason, though, Mom didn't usually give me that lecture when I wanted makeup. She didn't let me go outside in anything more than lip gloss, eyeliner and occasionally concealer if I was particularly spotty, but I was allowed pretty much anything I wanted as long as I didn't wear it outside. I'd once tried to go over to one of my friends' houses with navy eyeshadow on, and Mom almost went berserk (I thould mention here that half the kids in my class lived within six blocks of us, so if I ever wanted to play with one of my friends I could just go a few houses down and knock on a door).

Oh well. Right now, I was makeup free and jumping onto the bus to sit with my friend Kim.

"I wish we had classes outside." I sighed, looking out at the bright blue sky. "It's not fair, keeping us in with this kind of sun."

"Have you forgotten that it's super cold?" Kim teased. "Seriously, Junie, it's March. I guess we have to wait until April for spring to actually kick in." (I should mention here that only teachers – and my parents when they were mad – called me Juniper. I was mostly Junie to everyone else – Mom and Dad called me that when I was little, and it stuck, which was probably good – yeah, only Dad would give a daughter a plant name and have it not be a flower).

"Whatever." I shrugged. "It's sunny, though. That makes it warmer."

Kim was one of my many just-in-school friends. Sometimes we'd see each other out of school, but it was mostly if the other kids on the surrounding blocks wanted to start a baseball or soccer game, so that was most everyone. I had playdates with a few other kids, but I never really felt that comfortable with my so-called friends. I could talk about some things with them, but there was often stuff I really needed to talk about that I didn't feel I could tell any of my friends about. I used to tell Dad everything on the weekends, but it was getting to the point where it was stuff you didn't tell your parents, either.

I didn't feel like I could make any new friends that I would be able to trust with everything. Even when a new kid joined the class, I was far too shy to befriend them. I had all kinds of thoughts in my head and emotions, but I was actually pretty quiet, at home and at school. Once I'd even heard Mom telling one of her friends on the phone how lucky she was to "get a quiet little angel for a daughter", because I always did my homework and I was always very polite and nicely dressed, even though I couldn't possibly look pretty.

And on top of that, even when I did make her or Dad angry with me, I was always genuinely sorry, even if I wasn't sorry for the reason I'd made them mad (like today – I wasn't sorry I'd taken my time getting outside, but I was sorry Mom had been cross with me).

I looked forward most of all to when school was over and my homework was done. Dad got home at five, and we'd always get to talk before dinnertime. After that, I'd have to either go and play quietly in my bedroom or watch television (or if it was light, I was allowed to go and play on my trampoline outside) – but if I watched TV, then I'd have to watch my parents cuddling. Ew. But the hour between dinner and Dad getting home was always my favourite part of the day.

Still, that didn't compare to afternoons when I didn't have homework and weekends. That's when I could finally go and talk to my one confidant (I wasn't allowed out after dark apart from Halloween, but during the day I could be outside all I liked).

I knew it sounded silly, but my one confidant was the garden. It was pretty and a nice large open space – Dad kept it neat but beautiful and worked on it every weekend, and the flowers seemed...just sort of open. Like they'd listen to everything I had to say. And Dad always reminded me that plants were alive, so that meant I was talking to something that lived and grew. They didn't talk back, of course, but I felt like I could trust them in a way I couldn't trust my friends. And apart from that, I just liked lying in the sun and thinking about nothing.

And this particular day was a Wednesday, so I'd have homework to do. I wondered if I might still be able to get ten minutes to talk to the flowers this afternoon.

I know, so sue me, exposition dump. I tried to weave a bit of "regular morning" into Junie's life. I'm trying to portray 1970s life accurately. Audrey's a bit old-fashioned in her dreams, but Junie mentions a lot of her classmates' mothers work. The kids are free-range most of the time...I looked up a lot about suburban life in the 70s and to think, a lot of toys and morals were pretty scary back then. Seriously, look it up. Second hand smoke, alcoholic pregnant women, lead-painted baby toys...