Try Happiness

Summary: So I was prompted to write a story about Tasha going on a date. It transformed into what you see below, which isn't so much about dating as it is about an evolution of relationships, lol. Consider this a giant Tasha character study. I love Tasha sooo much, and it was a great opportunity for me to expand on her character and the headcanon I have established for her. Hope this works for you, F. Thanks for the prompt. xo

"Let go of me, Alex!"

"Natasha, don't do this—"

"Don't you dare call me that!"

She's an idiot. That's the only explanation Tasha Zapata can give herself, the only thing that makes any real sense at this point, for having let this go on as long as it has. She knows better—she's always known better—then to let herself get caught up in someone. That kind of blind devotion is reckless, dangerous, stupid. When you did that, you signed a contract for a piece of yourself, your heart, that you'd never get back once they left, and they always did. Everyone always does.

But a small part of her had thought, for a false glimmer of a moment, that Alexander Villarreal was different, that he'd be one of the ones that stayed. He'd been the safe harbor in her life when she'd needed it most, a place to seek shelter, a reprieve from the fucked up reality around her. So that's why she can't stand it when he says her full name, because her brother Noah was the only one who ever had, and Alex knows how much she hates being reminded of it. Alex knows his dead best friend would have cussed them both if he could see them now, the last piece each of them had of the boy they knew, fighting in the street outside their childhood home.

So that's why this hurts, forcing herself to walk away, because it's not just her that she's breaking, and it's not just Alex—it's him too.

"Tasha, baby—" Alex tries to grab her arm again, desperate, stricken "—I'm sorry. Please, talk to me, don't just walk away."

"We did talk," Tash shakes him off. Hot, angry tears sting her cheeks, and her body shivers, partly from the cold, partly because she's so pissed she can't see straight. "You seriously thought moving across the country to fucking California wasn't a big deal? You said that Stanford was the last resort. What happened to Harvard, Alex? To Yale? Any of the law schools on the east coast would have worked, anything here! You know I can't leave New York, I've got three more years at Columbia. You promised—"

She can't finish the sentence, she can't make herself, because saying it confirms it. Saying it makes it real. It means that promises were another thing to be broken, just like everything else.

God damn him.

They've been in a slow, downward spiral for months, and this is it, she thinks, the final fight that will do them in.

"I had to do it, Tasha." He pleads, standing alone in the snow on the sidewalk, looking so much smaller and fragile than he ever has before, "You know how hard I've been working for this, you know how important this is to me, to my family. And I'm doing it for us—" she hates that word, hates it "—It's always been for both of us." Alex fixes his dark eyes on her, tries to beg her back to him like he's done so many times before, except she's not a naive seventeen year old girl anymore, and it won't work this time. She's done letting him justify his selfish bullshit with his good intentions. It's taken her until now, three years after the fact, to realize who Alex is; someone who takes and takes.

It's taken her even longer to realize who she is, and it's not this. She's done giving everything she has to him.

"C'mon, Tasha," Alex steps a little closer, trying to follow her up the stairs to the front door of the apartment, trying to close the distance between them, "what would Noah say, huh? What would he do if—"

"Fuck you, Alex," Tash's tone is livid, it's damning, "Fuck you, and get the fuck away from me—now!"

She watches the fire fade and dim and die in his eyes, until all that's left is a solemn, broken recognition of what's in front of him. She watches him give up on them—on her—without even trying, years of their lives going up in fire and smoke in a matter of seconds. Alex meets her eyes, tries to find his voice, the right words, but there's nothing left to say, at least not anything that could possibly make it better. The damage is done, and this time Tash can feel the sense of permanence, the finality in it, knowing that this isn't something either of them will be able to fix.

Standing there, watching him walk away, part of her wishes he would have fought for her.

But she can't be surprised, either, because no one ever did.

Tash has always been the grounded one, the one to set down deep roots so that she could weather storms. She detests change, loathes unpredictability, is always over calculating and always, always in control. She's the one in the family everyone is always proud of, the star student in high school who got a full ride to college, the funny little sister who can do no wrong, her alcoholic mother's pride and joy. You're special, Natasha. That's what they always said.

That's what she wants to believe. She wants to think she's capable of being all those things everyone wants her to be.

Except spiraling out of control, being none of those things, giving into temptation, has never been more appealing.

She buries Alex with all the other skeletons in her closet, she throws herself into her school work and studying and discovering the night life of a New York college student. She discovers herself, and years of self-imposed fear of judgement, of shame for being attracted to women, suddenly becomes obsolete. So it's not just men Tash is bedding, but women too. It's empowering, liberating, even if she doesn't openly advertise her sexuality—old habits die hard, especially for her. She stays out too late, and drinks too much, and goes home with too many strangers. And somehow she still manages to pass her classes by the skin of her teeth. She still finds the energy to function in society, always on the edge of the chasm, without anyone else ever knowing the difference. It's a blessedly exhausting, mind numbing experience. She revels in her new found freedom, in the anonymity she has here in this place where no one knows her, where she can be whoever she likes for whoever she pleases.

Tonight she's decided to be the last girl in the bar.

Over the course of the evening she's made friends with the attractive female bartender, Virginie, a foreign exchange student from France who's been in the states for years on a student visa, working nights when she's not in class. It's well past last call and the doors are locked, and windows drawn for the night, but the two of them sit at the vacant bar top under the neon lights with an almost finished bottle of crown resting between them. Virginie is funny, quick witted and catty. She's beautiful, and her sometimes crude and crass sense of humor reminds Tash of the pieces of herself she misses. And Tash likes it, she likes her, and tonight—with the help of the liquid courage coursing through her bloodstream in obscene amounts—she likes her more than she probably should.

"Go on, show off," Virginie gestures with her hand, "finish it up."

Tash is all too willing to oblige, because she needs it, she needs to be inebriated tonight so that it's a little easier to live with herself in the morning. She takes the last draw on the bottle of crown and slides it out of the way, turning on her stool and pulling her hair out of the pony tail at the top of her head, she rolls her shoulders and stretches in the just-right-way to keep Virginie's eyes on her. Her knees invade the other woman's space, until she's not even an arms length away. The other woman watches her with a coy smile and tempting green eyes, and Tash can feel the air around them, thick and heavy, threatening to suffocate her.

Even though she's been playing her cards just right the entire night, all for this very moment, Tash is reminded with a tinge of self-consciousness that she has no idea what she's doing.

She doesn't know what she wants. She hasn't known for a really long time.

But Virginie is different, this is different, and she wants that, whatever that is. She wants it so badly she can taste it.

"You're beautiful, y'know that?" Virginie tells her, leaning closer, reaching up and pushing the long, dark waves of her hair from her face.

That's all it takes, it's all the permission Tash needs, and before she realizes what either of them are doing she reaches for Virginie, cups her face with her hands and finds her mouth with her own. Virginie's hands are in her hair, pulling Tash closer, pulling her under so hard and fast it makes her head spin, and the kiss quickly morphs from cautious to ravenous. And Tash surprises herself, because she kisses her back, she begs for more with her tongue, her teeth grazing hungrily at Virginie's lips as they assault her own. She all but crawls into her lap, nearly falling in the process, and the intensity of moment is unceremoniously interrupted by her not-quite-sober coordination.

But despite that, there's something wonderfully perfect about the gracelessness of the chaos. They break apart in a tangled mess of limbs and laughter and breathlessness, and for a moment Tash can lose herself in that, in the sound of someone else's happiness. She forgets what it's like to feel it for herself.

It's not until the next afternoon when she's able to think clearly that she really considers any of her decisions. Picking her clothes up off the ground as they're trailed through Virginie's apartment, strewn like a war path from the bedroom to the front door, all while realizing that she's slept through two of her classes, she starts to wonder if it was worth it.

She knows how the rest will go. She'll sneak out, and make the drive of shame home. Maybe she'll go back to the bar tonight, where both of them will pretend like nothing happened. And maybe she'll stay till after close again, and maybe they'll go home together one more time, but at the end of it all Tash knows that's all it is—a few hours of reprieve from her life in someone else's bed. It's an escape, just like all the other exploits, regardless of whether they were men or women. Exploits, because she can't call them lovers.

It's not about love.

And that's how it should be, she thinks, because anything more than what she gives them would be too much. This way is less painful, because instead of being the one who gets left, she's the one who leaves instead.

Her senior year at Columbia is her best year and her worst year. It's the best because it's the year she meets Allison Knight. It's the worst because two weeks before graduation, she ends up in the back of a cop car in handcuffs. However, all great friendships have unconventional beginnings, so there's some comfort in that at least.

"I told you that slashing his tires was a really, really bad idea," Allie points out as they sit together in the back seat of a cruiser outside a Manhattan precinct, inspecting her hand cuffs like they're some sort of novelty. "Almost as bad as punching him."

"You said he was a dick," Tash shrugs, still scowling, examining her knuckles, "and dicks like that deserve a lot more than black eyes and slashed tires."

Allie laughs, a real, loud laugh from deep in the back of her throat, and Tash can't help but shake her head and roll her eyes, because in hindsight it isn't funny at all, especially given their current predicament. It was by chance they wound up sitting next to each other that night, and it was Tash who agreed to pretend to be Allie's girlfriend, to get the over aggressive, asshole ex-boyfriend off her back. It was an all too easy act for Tash to put on, the bonus being that Allie was both funny and gorgeous.

It's when said ex-boyfriend put hands on Allie after too many drinks that Tash lost her shit.

Natasha Zapata does not play.

When they kicked her out of the bar for dropping him to the ground in a fist fight, she'd resorted to alternative methods of making sure the sorry fucker got the message; leave Allie alone, or deal with her new best friend.

"Aren't you a little worried?" Tash asks, shifting in her seat, wondering how it is that Allie seemed completely unfazed by the fact that they were fixing to have a permanent mark put on their record for assault and destruction of personal property. Well, not her, but you, Tash thinks ruefully. She'd spent most of the ride here worrying about various things, like being denied graduation or not being able to pay her mom's rent if the law firm where she worked part time found out about what had happened. You had to go and lose your temper, didn't you Zapata?

"I'll tell you a secret," Allie waggles her eyebrows, leaning to look out the fogged up window of the police cruiser, her breath clearing the glass, "you see that officer at the top of the steps?"

Tash leans over the seat, balancing herself against Allie's shoulder until she can squint and make out a unformed figure, flanked by several others, mingled at the front of the precinct, stuck in conversation. They don't seem to be in a big hurry to get to their two prisoners.

"Yeah?"

"That's Police Commissioner Bratton."

"Jesus," Tash turns her wide eyes on Allie, who's still grinning, "and that's supposed to make me feel better?"

"Yep," Allie nods, her grin now full blow shit-eating grin, "because he's my dad."

Tash settles back into her seat at that, head tilted, all the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. The realization dawns on her slowly as she connects the dots between Allie and the most powerful man in the NYPD standing just outside the cruiser they're currently stuck in. Allie is all too pleased with herself, sitting smugly in the seat next to her without a care in the world, just like a kid who's used to getting away with murder. And Tash would be lying if she said she didn't kind of dig it.

"Your dad?" Tash narrows her eyes, and if it weren't for her hands being handcuffed she would have crossed her arms too for the full sass affect. "So the whole time I was panicking, you knew we'd be fine? Christ, Allie!"

"Yes, the whole time you were freaking out, I knew we'd be fine," Allie laughs, unable to keep a straight face, raising her hands and wiggling her fingers at Tash to tease her, "we might have to spend a night in lock up, for posterity, but trust me," she reassures, "you don't have anything to worry about."

Tash raises her hands too, and flips Allie off with both middle fingers.

Allie only bursts into laughter again at that, no offense taken, and when Tash looks back on this years from now, she'll probably remember that being the moment she realized just how much she loved her.

"Thank you, by the way," Allie says after a moment of silence, all jest gone, replaced by something far more serious and sincere. Her bright green eyes peer at Tash through the shadows, lit up by the occasional headlights of the passing cars along the street. "You didn't have to do any of what you did. It was more than any friend should have done, really. More than anyone has done..."

"You don't have to thank me," Tash tilts her head, "I would have done it for anyone, and I'd do it again for you, cop car and all."

"It was kind of fun, y'know," Allie leans her head back against the seat and replays the night's events in her head, "watching you drop Mike to the ground is probably the highlight of my year. Just saying."

"It was fun," Tash agrees, "a pretty good first date, actually," she adds, eyes brows raised, flitting smirk in place, "and definitely the most exciting one I've ever been on."

Allie smiles at that clear from across the back seat, and Tash can't help but smile back.

"We should do it again sometime," Allie suggests, "but without the getting arrested part."

"Deal," Tash nods, closing her eyes with a sigh, but for once it's one of contentment.

"So does that mean you'll keep me warm tonight when we're freezing our asses off in our cell?" Allie asks jovially, way too happy about their prospective sleeping arrangements, but this time it's Tash's turn to laugh at the woman sitting next to her.

Allie's energy is infectious, and not even Tash—the woman famous amongst her peers for her resting bitch face and snarky attitude—is immune to it. And if she's honest with herself, she can't remember the last time she's laughed this much, and it feels really, really good. It feels right, normal, and that's something she's been missing for a while now.

Maybe, Tash thinks, this could be the start of something new. When you spend most of your life learning to look for the worst in everyone, learning to prepare for the worst, and to protect yourself and the people around you at all costs, it makes letting other people in hard. It makes letting go hard. But maybe the universe brings you exactly who you need, right when you need them, and this time that person just happens to be Allie. Maybe, just maybe, instead of hiding from it, Tash can learn to live with it instead; with the possibility of happiness.

"Yeah, Allie, I think I can manage that."

AN: let me know what y'all think! I had a lot of fun writing this but I'm always grateful for feedback! Tasha is MY GIRL, I fucking love her. She's my spirit animal. She's a really strong person, a really kind, genuine person, and given the other diversities of the Blindspot characters already, I really felt that given what little we know about her, her early childhood was probably not the best, and she probably went through some shit. I have a whole entire world for her I've written in my head, so I hope I can share that with y'all at some point. Anyways, that's why I love her, because she always gets back up, and even when she makes the worst decisions she never stops trying to find ways to fix it. Winners don't quit, yo. xo