Author's Notes: I've seen people explore this episode from many angles, but I haven't seen anyone try to keep the events mostly the same, but change the aftermath instead. Kind of like the episode from The Loud House "No Such Luck", I thought it would be more compelling to explore how such an event would affect the family structure after the fact, instead of trying to erase the episode, fix the events within, or pretend that it was all some bad dream or something. I've also added in a dream sequence and the Professor reflecting back on his own past bad behavior in the episode "A Very Special Blossom".


Chapter 1

Let's Go Home

The city of Townsville... where we peer in our girls sitting in the waiting room of the local Townsville's Dentistry, two of these girls gazing smugly at one in particular who has probably seen much better days as far as her appearance, her head hung low with her hair in a state of disarray and her teeth even worse.

Buttercup has been punished pretty severely for her pearly white plundering, getting quite the thumping from every villain in Townsville she'd robbed of their teeth, just for the money the Tooth Fairy would give her. She also had to face the wrath of quite a few other convicts she'd devoid of their teeth. It left her in quite a bit of pain, but she didn't think she had the right to complain about it. Not right now.

Instead she risked a glance at her father, Professor Utonium, seeing that he was reading or at least pretending to read a magazine in his hands, his gaze seeming unimpressed, even as they were seemingly focused on the words in front of him and not his daughter in general.

When he did shift his eyes towards her, Buttercup attempted to flash him a nervous smile, revealing a mouthful of her smashed, missing teeth. Instead of making a comment on this, the Professor arched an eyebrow at her, not really giving her any leeway or sympathy. This made Buttercup drop her smile.

"Well Buttercup," the man sighed, staring down at her with blatant disappointment. "I can't say I'm proud of you. But I do know this lesson will teach you one thing:" He reached underneath the couch the quartet of them sat on, producing a giant sack of cash that looked awfully familiar.

Buttercup gasped with the reveal.

"... the value of a dollar."

So this meant that her sisters had revealed to him everything, including the money she had previously tried to keep hidden underneath her bed. The jig really was up now. Bubbles smiled with satisfaction from behind her.

"Yes," The Professor continued on boldly, carrying on as Buttercup sagged with depression. "I think this will just about cover your dental bills."

She received a loud raspberry from Bubbles for this bad stroke of luck.

Even if a small part of her knew that she deserved this after everything she had done, she still couldn't help but feel hurt at all that hard work going to such a waste. If this didn't teach her that crime didn't pay, then nothing ever would.

"So much for that punching bag!" Blossom sang from behind her, throwing even more darts Buttercup's way as the girl levitated herself miserably in front of the examination room door, ready to just get this torture-ahem, procedure-over and done with. Once she went through the door and it slammed shut behind her, one could hear the loud sound of drilling in the background.


"And because you've been such a good girl," The condescending-sounding dentist told her, talking to her like she was a baby, "Here's a wowwipop!"

Buttercup silently accepted the tiny candied stick of green apple flavor, while Blossom jokingly whispered in her ear: "Here is a sucker for the little sucker." Bubbles giggled beside her, hearing the exchange too.

Of course Buttercup was the "little sucker". A sucker for falling right into the trap they'd set for her, hook, line, and stinker. Oh, she could just hear those words again now. Blossom feigning shock as she spoke to the "Mayor" over the phone. "Girls!" she had called out, putting urgency into her tone. "The Townsville Museum's prehistoric collection of priceless pearly whites is about to be plundered!"

If she hadn't been so greedy for cash, Buttercup wouldn't have acted so brashly and been confronted by all those angry villains, wanting to give Buttercup their receipts for all the needless pain and suffering she had caused them.

If she was being honest with herself about this whole thing, she probably should've seen a confrontation like this coming sooner or later with or without her sisters' help, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with when it finally happened. She even tried to find a way out of it, looking to her sisters for assistance, but all they did was cross their arms in front of her and tell her in a noncompromising manner:

"Sorry Buttercup. An eye for an eye."

"And a toof for a toof!"

And that was that. Despite her attempt at a nervous chuckle and a sheepish smile at the angry crowd of her victims, she could only see stars in her vision for the next several minutes, the beating she received for her crimes both swift and painful.

Buttercup now had an ice pack held against her swollen mouth and she couldn't have said anything back even if she wanted to, simply wanting to get out of this office as soon as possible. Eventually the Professor granted her this with his merciful words of "Girls, let's go home."

The three of them piled themselves up into the back of the family station wagon, getting into their booster seats and fastening their seatbelts. Buttercup still remained silent. That is until the Professor started driving and then directly began questioning her.

"Buttercup," The man started, adopting a weary, exasperated tone. "Why do you do things like this?"

"I know you're the toughest fighter and I know you like to play rough, and as long as you weren't hurting anyone else, I have never tried to stop you from being who you are but why would you go so far as to do what you did to harm so many people, all for something as petty and rotten as greed? I never would've expected something like that out of you. I truly expected better. Blossom and Bubbles didn't try to knock out other people's teeth when they got their allowances and a visit from the Tooth Fairy."

Of course they didn't. Blossom and Bubbles were the perfect ones. They never screwed up, at least not like Buttercup. Buttercup wasn't perfect; she was just a mistake.

"So the more teeth that you lose..."

"The more monies you get!"

"You could make a LOT of money that way!"

Perhaps Bubbles and Blossom hadn't performed the actual deed, but they had arguably planted the seed. The Professor still had her in one aspect though; only Buttercup had been weak enough to follow through on such unsavory actions. She alone had sinned.

And she didn't even have an answer as to why she even did.

"I don't know." Buttercup said quietly, still holding her mouth in pain. The Professor didn't like this answer at all.

"You don't know?" he pressed her. If he didn't know the reason for her behavior, how would he even begin to go about fixing it?

"I'm sorry, Professor." She said even more quietly, her voice shaking slightly.

He sighed in response. "I know you are, honey. Things... just got out of hand. If I'm being honest here, this is partially my fault too. I should've caught on to what you were doing far sooner, and I should've put a stop to it before it could snowball into this big of a problem. I guess I've been too absorbed in my work lately. I don't know..."

Shaking his head while lost in his own thoughts, he pondered other things.

"Heck, maybe I should've held off on the golden dollars in the first place. Greed is a rotten thing, just like a cavity, and I know how easy it is to get carried away with temptation like that. Heck, that was the whole reason behind my awful attitude towards those Pro Excellence 2000 golf clubs."

He winced as he remembered how shamelessly he had acted towards them. How he had jumped up and down and salivated like a baboon as Blossom presented the clubs to him on Father's Day, and how he didn't even care to question her on where she had even gotten them. Buttercup and Bubbles had to do that for him. Professor Utonium, morally upstanding guardian and role model he was supposed to be, didn't even care. It was quite easily his worst hour of parenting, and because of his overly materialistic standards, Blossom had been driven into crime, stealing a set of Pro Excellence golf clubs just to make him happy.

Perhaps he was guilty of the same thing with Buttercup. He hadn't made her do what she did or go as far as she did, but he hadn't done anything to stop it either. He wasn't even aware of her exploits until again, his kids had to pick up his slack for him and tell him what was going on themselves, and even then, he had been way too late to do anything about it except deal with the fallout of such a disaster.

Perhaps he had failed his daughter here as he had failed Blossom back then.

While he was reflecting upon and lamenting his own mistakes, he didn't quite realize that Buttercup was doing much of the same thing behind him in her backseat. He didn't realize the truly staggering amount of self-doubt and loathing she was feeling right about now.

"... so in the end, what I'm trying to say, is that I hate how you had to get hurt just to learn this very lesson. I don't like that it happened, it didn't need to happen, and it probably wouldn't've happened if only I had been more mindful and vigilant. So... I'm sorry you had to suffer, honey."

Buttercup fought hard to bite back her tears. Even though the Professor was giving her an understanding response, it didn't make her feel any better about her own self-esteem. No matter what, she felt she was doomed to keep disappointing him. She never could make him as proud as Blossom or Bubbles.

She was the problem child. The troublemaker. The one bad apple in their perfect, upstanding family.


Since Buttercup had just had a dental operation, she couldn't eat solid foods for dinner. Instead she had mashed potatoes and blended soups, but as if to make up for all that, she was spoiled for dessert, the Professor giving her a questionable amount of sweets that were also nice and soft. Pudding, ice cream, a a milkshake, Jell-O.

She thought she knew the reason why. The Professor noticed her depressively dreary mood and was doing his best to try to cheer her up and to prove to her that he still loved her, despite her disappointing actions before. Buttercup appreciated the sentiment, but she didn't feel like she was really worth it anymore.

Normally, a chocolate milkshake like this with all the fixings of hot fudge and whipped cream would've been a dream come true for Buttercup, but for now, all she could do was silently sip her treat through her straw, making not a single expression of delight or inherent pleasure. Instead she simply looked dead; her eyes vacant and hollow.

She never said a word throughout dinner and even Blossom and Bubbles were starting to look worried, sharing guilty expressions as they realized how mean they were unintentionally being before. No matter what Buttercup had done before, she was still their beloved sister. They really had no right to make fun of her pain before.

"It's okay, sis." Blossom said lowly, attempting to place a hand over her back, stroking it up and down. Buttercup reacted neither negatively nor positively to this. She was perfectly flat. Her gaze was empty. It was frightening to witness. Even Bubbles joined in now with a more tearful expression and a more overt gesture, hugging Buttercup from the side.

"Please don't be upset, Buttercup. We forgive you."

And yet she couldn't forgive herself. She didn't feel like she belonged in this family anymore. She was nothing but an aberration. A third wheel. A liability.

Still unsmiling, she got up from her seat, headed to her room, and put on her pajamas without ceremony before resting her weary head for bed. It would be the last time she ever slept in this bed.

Her sisters soon joined her about an hour or so later and they were trying to say something her, but Buttercup pretended to be asleep and blocked them both out.

Behind her closed eyelids, she dreamed of all her previous mistakes and all the things she had done wrong before.

"Maybe if someone hadn't pushed Bubbles into the school..."

That's right. It was her who had started that whole thing. That disastrous, destructive, demolishing game of tag across the entire cityscape. She was the one who wrecked the first building by shoving Bubbles into the Pokey Oaks Kindergarten school. If she hadn't done that, who knows what would've happened. Maybe things wouldn't have gotten as bad as they did...

Buttercup saw herself shyly handing Ace a soda pop after the teenager had successfully fed her his "misunderstood" spiel, the sleazy gangster accepting it all with a smirk on his face. "You know kid, you're not so bad. You can hang out with us anytime."

She had allowed herself to form a crush on a gangster. Someone she should've known would've meant her no good, and yet she bought his lies and sob stories anyway. She just couldn't resist the appeal of a "bad boy". A punk. A thug. Perhaps the two of them had something in common. Ace was a bad kid and Buttercup was a bad kid too. A bad daughter and a bad sister. A good sister wouldn't have allowed her other sisters to be put in danger by that nefarious gang. A good sister wouldn't have nearly allowed them to die because she put her trust in someone so evil. She could still their screams in her nightmares, the outcome not always as pleasant as it had been in reality.

What could have been. What could've have been...

"You recklessly endangered people's lives!"

"Did not!"

"And failed to follow orders!"

Even though she didn't want to listen back then, Blossom was right. She'd nearly gotten a senior citizen killed, all because she wanted to do things her way and didn't want to follow or listen to Blossom for once. She'd thrown that water tank at that giant turtle and the turtle went sailing over an elderly lady on a mobile scooter. She wasn't nearly fast enough to avoid the falling creature and if it wasn't for one of her wheels, she would've been crushed flat, killing her in a gruesome and irredeemable manner.

"You know Buttercup, you may be clean, but your attitude sure is rotten!"

She had refused to take a bath to the point of creating a nearly septic stench. Her family could smell it and eventually even the whole town could smell it. She turned everyone against her. She was thrown out of the house when she refused to clean up her act and she got the whole populace of Townsville to chase her out of the city with torches and pitchforks, the Mayor himself demanding that she either take a bath or take a hike.

The only reason she even agreed to take the stupid bath was when even a monster was repulsed by her stench. And if she couldn't fight monsters, she didn't know what she would do.

So much trouble she had caused, all because she wanted to be a defiant little brat and test the rules laid out for her.

"EAT THIS PASTE EATER!"

"None of this would've happened if you apologized in the first place!"

Elmer. The glue. The monster. Buttercup putting everyone in danger with her selfish, mean-spirited behavior yet again...

"Sure, sure. Just gotta comb out a few tangles."

"And get rid of a…couple of…knots!"

It could be argued that both Bubbles and Buttercup were responsible for butchering Blossom's hair, but it was Buttercup who first ripped out a huge chunk of her red orange locks simply because she was too brutish, impatient, and bullheaded to try to comb a knot out the proper way. Blossom suffered a day of humiliation because of her. No wonder she was so satisfied to see Buttercup similarly suffer after her dental visit. This was payback for everything she had done. How could she have been so blind?

By the time the early morning came, she'd already made her decision. Waking up before her sisters, she'd grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote down what she felt she needed to say, and set the note down at the feet of their bed. Once they had woken up, they would realize why she had left. Maybe they wouldn't even try to look for her.

Next, Buttercup took what she thought that she needed with her. It was really only one thing. In her despondent state, all she could think to cling to was her blankie, tip-toeing downstairs to take it from the basement lab.

Since she was a child, she only did what she saw in the cartoons. She didn't bring food or money or anything that could've sustained her for long. She didn't change out of her pajamas or brush her hair. She had no real concept of the true "essentials" and her body felt a lot sorer than it did yesterday, filled with new bruises and marks that hadn't been there just a day before from the beating she had taken from all those baddies.

The increased swelling of her mouth didn't help matters either, and she could start to feel the beginnings of a fever coming on. What happened in the next half hour then shouldn't have been a big surprise at all.


Townsville's local park. That was where she ended up having to take a rest on the park bench. She was really in no condition to go any further and it didn't take long for an adult to find her. If you were looking for kids, this was one of the first places to look, and it wasn't very inconspicuous at all. The only thing that threw her for a loop was the elder who ultimately ended up scoping her out.

It was actually that bitterly impassioned, motor-mouthed truant officer, Mr. Jack Wednesday who ended up finding her. The man who always wore that stern, no-nonsense expression and who looked like he hadn't smiled a single day in his entire life. He wore the same beige, formal clothes. That grey fedora hat and that swirly red tie. His crisp office pants and suit.

She didn't really know what to make of him the first time she saw him with the Gangreen Gang. He seemed pretty mean by the way he spoke to Ms. Keane outside on the playground, and she remembered a dodgeball being thrown at his head which had made her laugh.

And now here he was again in Townsville Park, staring at the girl on the park bench with the swollen face, fat lips, broken teeth and purple eyes, holding an ice pack against her cheek miserably.

Buttercup didn't know what to say to him to explain her condition. Why she was here or why she looked so pitiful. She didn't think she could tell him even if she had the words. So she just stared back at him, glumly, looking anything but the "toughest fighter". Now she only looked like a sad, lost little girl.

He didn't say a word either. Didn't go on some garrulous, long-winded lecture about why she was gallivanting around town without a parent, or still in her pajamas, or why her hair wasn't brushed.

He just took in all the purple and red bruising on her body, not just under her eyes or her face but around her neck, on her chest and arms. He tipped her chin, silently observing her swollen cheeks and her broken and/or missing teeth.

Buttercup didn't know what he was thinking the whole time he was doing this. The man had a poker face that could put others to shame. Behind that stony expression, what could he possibly be feeling? Did he understand how Buttercup had gotten to the point that she did? Was he aware of her exploits? If so, what were his feelings towards her? Was he disappointed in her like the Professor? Was he angry with her? Was he even capable of experiencing emotions like that or was it all just strictly business with him?

All she knew was that after he was done with his inspection and removed his hand from the bottom of her chin, he looked into her eyes and said only one thing,

"Let's go home, Buttercup."

And she obeyed without question, bowing her head and sighing in defeat as she scooted off of the bench to follow the man. As a truant officer, he was probably here to fetch the girl and bring her back to her family. But how did he even know she was here? Was it because her father called Mr. Wednesday after Buttercup's runaway episode, or was it just a luck of the draw?

Either way, Buttercup prepared herself to walk—she didn't really feel like flying—but Jack Wednesday scooped the girl off of her feet and carried her in the crook of his arm. Buttercup didn't complain. Normally she would, but she was sore right now and in a great deal of pain, not just from her teeth but from all the other places the town's villains had thrashed her.

They walked away from the park to a rather bulky brown station wagon and when Mr. Wednesday took out his keys and the car clicked, Buttercup realized that it belonged to him.

He walked around to the back with the girl still in his arms and opened the car door. There was already a child safety seat in the back and he gently placed her into it, fastening the seat belt for her. Then he'd shut the door, still wearing those vague stern eyes.

As she sat in the back of the car, waiting for the man to get into the front and start the engine, Buttercup wondered to herself how many other kids were escorted from this very same position. How many others did Jack Wednesday work with, taking them wherever he felt they needed to go?

It was an idle thought, and one she didn't hold onto for long as she felt and heard the car rev up to life, ready to go.

It wasn't long before they hit the road, her eyes dully watching familiar places go by. A feeling of deja vu came over her. It always came down to this. Buttercup was always the sibling who needed the more forceful approach to make her behave in the way people expected her to. She was stubborn and brash in a way her sisters weren't and this made her more resistant to proper conduct.

She wondered if it was because she wasn't intrinsically good. If it took outside forces to constantly steer and sometimes strong-arm her in the right direction, did that mean that behaving well wasn't something that came naturally to her?

Either way, she didn't really feel that it mattered. She was going home now and everything would go back to the way it always was. At least now she would try her best to be a better daughter. A better kid.

She waited for the inevitable, counting down the landmarks until they pulled up to the driveway of the Utonium residence... only for Wednesday keep right on driving, far past her family home.

Her eyes widened, almost ballooned, yet the man didn't look lost or confused at all.

"Wait," she told him, her words being garbled past her swollen jaw. "I shought you shaid we wuh going home."

"We are." He said simply, his eyes remaining on the road.