The day after Buttercup recieved the news of Wesley's death, she dreamed.

She was on a ship. The roll and swell of the waves moving the deck was unfamiliar, but she knew it intuitively.

"Are you dumb, boy?" A hand caught her on the side of the head and sent her sprawling. She looked up numbly and saw a dark-eyed man looking down at her with a scowl on his face. "Pay attention to your teacher or I may have to kill you in the morning." As he said this, a peculiar sort of smirk graced his lips. Then he quickly turned and strode away.

Buttercup watched him until a sharp sting on her cheek made her jerk her attention back to the side, where a burly man stood. He was holding two swords, one held out hilt-first to her, and one with the blade pointed down at his feet. Buttercup realized two things at once.

One, shockingly, was that the man had just hit her on the cheek with the flat of his sword, and the second was that he expected her to take the sword held out to her.

"Come on, boy," said the man, impatiently, "the Captain didn't spare you to lollygag around."

"The Captain?" She felt like she had been sucked into a whirlwind and spat out in a place where she didn't belong.

"The Captain, boy! Captain Roberts!"

A surge of fierce hatred went through her and she grabbed the sword. Roberts wanted her to learn the sword, did he? She would learn it to his peril.

She was halfway through the lesson when she woke up. At first it set her teeth on edge to not be able to finish, to have her revenge be thwarted, but then she woke up more completely and laughed at herself. Seeking revenge in a dream, how laughable, and how...pitiable.

But the next night she dreamed the same thing, and the next night the same, and at last she began to believe that what she dreamed might be to her benefit. What if, after all, she should find some way to meet Captain Roberts in person? Wouldn't he be surprised at her skill with the sword? Thus she comforted herself and as each day passed, grew more confident of her skill.

Finally she deemed herself ready, and leaving her room for the first time in days, set out to find her father's broadsword, which had hung on the wall, unused and forbidding, for as long as she could remember. Her plan was simple enough. She would take passage on a ship, and hope that it was attacked. If it was not, then she would take passage on another, and yet another, until she had her chance and came face to face with the dread pirate Roberts.

She met her first obstacle in her parents, who were delighted to see her again, but horrified at her wish to take her father's sword down from the wall (she had no intention of telling them why she wished to do so, she was not, despite all evidence to the contrary, stupid). They wailed and moaned as if they feared that she wished to do herself harm with the sword. Buttercup looked at them in disdain. Surely they realized that if she wished to harm herself there were much easier ways to do so?

Eventually she got her way, as she always did, and the sword came to rest in her arms.

Here she met her second obstacle. It didn't feel right, not as the sword in her dream had felt. It hurt her uncalloused hands to grip it, and its weight was too much for her to easily lift. At first she thought that it was merely this sword which would not work for her, but after frustrating practice after practice with a stick she was forced to acknowledge the truth.

The knowledge of swordplay that had come so easily to her in her dreams didn't translate into the real world.

She fell into such a rage that self-destruction looked worthwhile. She flung herself onto Horse, who was startled at this most un-Buttercup-like behavior, and set him galloping headlong through the hills surrounding the farm.

That was how she met Humperdink.

When he told her that she was to marry him, she almost denied him, courting the destructive impulse that had made her go riding in the first place, but then she looked at him more closely.

She saw a petty, cruel sort of man, petty, cruel, but strong, stronger than she was, perhaps strong enough to kill the pirate that had killed her lover.

That was when the second plan was born.