A/N: AHAHAHAahahahhaha talk about late to the party with Starbucks huh?
anyway, this is meant for Mad's AU challenge but I'm a day late huhuhuhuhuhuhu SORRY! :((
the title is taken from the song 'You and I' from the musical Bare: A Pop Opera (which you guys should totally watch cause it's amazing)
This story is set in the thirties by the way.
When Beck is one, his parents promise him the world, in as much as a pair of people can promise anything to a baby who can't even understand them. However Margaret and Benjamin Oliver do make another promise to themselves right after; that their kid will never want for anything. Beck Oliver looks up at his parents' faces and manages a short giggle.
On the other side of the city, where the mansions crowd together and stand tall and grand like the rich, high society folk that live in them, a young woman musters up the courage to knock on the door of the largest house on the street, her hand resting atop her enormous belly. She feels her heart rate pick up as she hears footsteps coming from within and she hopes and prays to whoever will listen that it will be him that answers and not some maid. He does. The moment he opens the door he takes one look at her and feels his blood run cold all over.
"Shit."
A month later, Jade West is born in an apartment that Harold West rented out years ago so that his wife would never know why he always came home so late. The moment Jade comes out her parents look at each other and come to the silent agreement that they can't keep her.
Harold West is one of California's top lawyers, with a trophy wife, three children, and a reputation that should be as iron clad as the contracts and gag orders he makes for his clients. Eve Rourke doesn't have the money to support the baby girl, and even if she did, her lifestyle isn't conducive to raising children, not with strange men appearing at her door ever other night.
So they two wait a few weeks and then drive off together to the Los Angeles Home for Abandoned Children. They both make sure she is warm inside the baby basket before knocking on the door and then turning to leave. They don't turn back to make sure the door was opened.
.
When Beck turns six his parents die. It was a car accident, and no one's fault really, but Beck stops talking that day.
He is sent to live with his father's sister and her husband. And although they put on a show of being willing to take him in, he knows his Uncle Jonathan's business is suffering along with the rest of the economy, and that the family barely has any money as it is. The night he moves in he hears his aunt and uncle discuss raising a child when they can barely put food on the table.
Two days later, his relatives take him aside with tears in their eyes and his bags packed behind them. When they start off with an apology, his little six year old eyes look down at his shoes and refuse to look up for the duration of the explanation. Although it's hard to ignore words like 'orphanage' and 'unsure'.
After they drop him off, it's with the promise that they'll visit every week and though he nods, a part of him knows that it was a lie.
.
When Beck is seven and Jade is six they meet.
Beck is the quiet boy, who only talks to the headmistress and the orphanage's child psychologist but not to the other kids. No one can get him to talk, and after his first month all the children just stop trying.
It happens in the gardens, where all the kids are brought out to play for the afternoon. Beck is sitting on one of the stone benches nearest to the door when he hears a loud ripping sound followed by a very loud scream. The entire garden goes quiet as everyone's eyes turn to a pale dark haired girl holding what looks to be the head of a stuffed giraffe in one hand and a pair of safety scissors in the other. On the ground in front of the brunette is a small red head clutching the rest of the giraffe's body, tears welling up in her eyes as she looks from the decapitated toy in her arms to the girl in front of her. After a beat, the red head starts crying. Really hard.
Beck feels the corners of his mouth turn downward into a frown, it's at that moment that the brunette catches his eye and the glare on her face is so deep that he wonders if she was born with a perpetual scowl. Averting his eyes, he means to run back inside the orphanage and stay holed up in the boys dorms for the rest of the afternoon when he hears her yelling at the small red head to quit crying and grow up. It's this more than anything that gets him to his feet.
Before he realizes it himself, he's already walking toward them and stopping in front of the brunette while the rest of the children watch intently. When she looks back at him, her glare this time is deeper and scarier than it originally was, the effect compounded by the cold blue of her eyes.
"What?" she demands, her voice shrill but pronouncing each letter like clear cut glass.
He stands his ground and looks her in the eye, his tiny hands closing into fists at his side. "Leave her alone." He says quietly, his voice sounding foreign to his own ears.
"You should speak up shrimpy, I can't hear you." She taunts, dangling the giraffe head in front of his face for emphasis.
He looks from her to the small red head still crying on the ground and feels his face work its way into a glare. "I said leave her alone!"
His voice this time is loud enough that it echoed across the expanse of the gardens, all around him he could hear the other kids gasping and murmuring to themselves. This is the first time that any of them have heard him talk.
In front of him, the brunette gives a self-satisfied smirk before she turns to look at the other kids in the playground. "See, I told you I could get him to talk!" she shouts triumphantly.
All around her, the other kids are murmuring in astonishment and a few feet away, Beck sees an African-American kid in cornrows pass something that looks like three lollipops to a small kid with glasses and a mass of unruly curly hair
Beck blinks in shock, and before his mind could process what just happened, the brunette holds her hand out to the small red head in front of her and pulls her to her feet.
"You can stop crying now, Cat." She says, handing the decapitated giraffe head to the red-head who was now wiping the tears from her face.
"I still don't think you had to kill Mr. Purple just to win a bet with André." The red-head blubbers, taking the head and trying to stick it back on to the rest of the body.
"Well it worked didn't it?"
As the two start walking away, the shock wears away enough for Beck to jog after them. "Wait!" he grabs the brunette's hand just before she and her red-head friend can get to far.
"What?" she asks now, although her voice is more exasperated than angry or taunting like it was a while ago.
"That was…a bet?" He manages out, staring from her to the red-head to the other two boys they seemed to be walking toward.
"Yes" she manages with a roll of her eyes as she keeps walking without even bothering to see if he can keep up. "I bet André and Robbie all their candy that I can get you to talk before we hafta go back inside. I won."
"But, why?"
She stops walking and motions for the red-head to walk ahead of them. Crossing her arms, she turns to face him and fixes him with a hard stare, her blue eyes boring into his brown ones. "Listen kid, you've been here for like, a while now and all you do is mope and act all quiet. Meanwhile all the other kids won't stop talking about how quiet and mopey you are. It was getting on my nerves, so I figured if you stopped being mopey and quiet, everyone'll finally stop acting all dumb and talk about something else."
He feels like he should be mad or offended, but he's surprised to find that he doesn't feel any of that. As a matter of fact it feels as if something was lifted off his shoulders. Without meaning to, he gives her a small smile.
"I'm Beck."
She looks him up and down before shrugging her small shoulders pivoting around to walk back toward the red head and the two boys. "Jade." She calls over her shoulder, "now keep up, Cat wants to play hide and seek before we hafta go back inside!"
.
When Beck is ten and Jade is nine the orphanage throws her a birthday party, like they do for all the kids. Everyone is in their best outfits and the headmistress and staff even took the trouble of blowing up a few balloons and having the bakery across town deliver a small chocolate cake just for her.
The moment Cat and Beck remove the blindfold from her face and she is greeted by everyone at the dining room, she takes one look at everything and suddenly tenses. Beside her, Beck can sense that something is wrong, before he can ask her, however, she grabs a fork from the table and stabs the nearest balloon. The resounding pop is loud enough that it makes everyone jump and some of the smaller kids start crying. Jade takes that opportunity to push past him and run out into the gardens.
From where they're standing, Beck can see the headmistress and the staff shaking their heads and trying to get crying children to calm down. He thinks he sees Lane, the orphanage's child psychologist, mutter something like 'every year' but the crying is too loud for him to hear anything. Turning on his heels, he runs out to the gardens and looks around frantically until he sees a small figure a few yards away, leaning against the red brick wall that separates them from the rest of Los Angeles.
When he reaches her, he sees that she had stolen the gardener's shears from the toolshed and was now deliberately hacking at one of the bushes that lined the wall. When she looks up at his arrival she immediately shoots him a glare, "don't bother."
"Just tell me what's up."
"I don't wanna."
He rolls his eyes at how stubborn she's being but decides to sit down beside her anyway. He starts worrying away at a leaf that landed on his lap from her incessant hacking when he hears her sigh of resignation.
"I got dumped here when I was a baby ok," she begins, her snips with the shears growing stronger and more erratic. "The headmistress could never track down my parents and none of them found any birth records in any of the hospitals that looked like it could be mine. All they had was a name tacked to my baby basket. So every year they celebrate the day my parents decided I wasn't worth keeping and dumped me here and call it my birthday."
She punctuates the last sentence with a particularly loud crunch from the bush as she angrily chops off the main trunk, allowing the shrub to keel over in front of them. When she sets the shears down, she's panting from the exertion and there's a pale pink tinge to her cheeks.
He looks at her for a while, at the hurt on her face that he knows she's trying to pass off as pent-up anger.
"You could pick your own birthday you know." He says, bumping her shoulder with his to get her to look at him.
She rolls her eyes at the suggestion and scoffs it off, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. "That's dumb."
Beck shrugs off the scathing remark, he's used to her by now. "I'm going inside for cake, you could come along if you want. It doesn't have to be cause it's your birthday—or not your birthday, sorry."
When Jade still doesn't reply he shrugs and gets up, she needs the space and he knows it. As he walks back towards the house he feels a prickling sensation on his nape and knows that she's watching him.
.
When Beck is thirteen and Jade is twelve, most of the kids their age have already been adopted.
Every time a couple comes over with the hopes of trying to adopt a child, Beck notices that Jade makes it a point to act her meanest that day. She talks back or takes out a pair of scissors and cuts up the other children's hair, or scares the smaller kids into crying. He had asked her about it once, a few years back. She had looked at him for a beat before saying "I don't want parents." Then quickly standing up and walking away. That was the last time they ever talked about it.
Now they're outside, watching a cab drive away with Robbie Shapiro in it. He was the last of their small group of friends to get adopted, and now it's just Beck and Jade.
"You think we'll be here forever?" she's still watching the cab drive away, her chin cupped in her hands while her elbows rest on her knees.
He tries to think about it, about eventually turning eighteen and then being sent by the orphanage to some workhouse because he's too old for them to care for. He thinks about working in one of the factories until he grows old and eventually dies. The idea sends a bolt of panic through his body.
"No."
Jade looks at him for a moment, waiting to see if he'll say something more, when he doesn't she faces the direction of the driveway again, the cab long gone by now. "When I get out of here I'm going to be an actress."
The confession comes out of nowhere and he doesn't know what to make of it. "What?"
"An actress. Like Greta Garbo or Loretta Young in those movies that Headmistress makes us watch every Thursdays. I want that. I wanna be talented and rich and so famous that everyone will forget I ever came from this place."
He imagines her on a stage or on a movie screen, her eyes staring off somewhere as she says a dramatic line and suddenly he can't imagine her future as being anything else. "You'll definitely be famous."
From his peripheral vision, he sees the corners of her lips pulling upward slightly at the thought. When she turns to look back at him he offers her a smile. They stay in companionable silence for a long while before she speaks again. "What about you?"
"I don't know," he tries to push down the panic of realizing he really doesn't know what he wants and instead places an easy smile on his face and leans back, "Definitely not gonna be here."
They both chuckle.
"What about your aunt and uncle?"
He rolls his eyes at that, they had stopped visiting him about two months after they had first dropped him off and honestly, he wasn't even surprised. "I'm pretty sure they've forgotten all about me. Which is fine, I don't need them."
When she doesn't say anything he pushes on, "All I know is, you're gonna be famous and I'm not gonna be in some factory somewhere and that's a promise."
.
When Beck is fifteen and Jade is fourteen he kisses her.
It's his birthday and they're the only big kids left in the entire orphanage, so much so that they're practically part of the staff, helping to take care of all the small children. It's nighttime and they're talking by the front door.
He doesn't know what brought it on, all he knows is that he's watching her describe the blood spurting out of the chicken that the cook had taught her to butcher for the first time when something like gravity pulls him forward and suddenly their lips are touching. Jade freezes immediately and he thinks that he blew it, that she's going to push him off and then punch him hard like what she did to Jeff Davies the day he accidentally spilled water on her shoes. Before he can pull away and start apologizing like hell though, he suddenly feels her angle her head slightly and kiss him back, her eyelashes fluttering shut against the bridge of his nose.
In that moment Beck Oliver swears he has never felt more amazing in his entire existence.
When he pulls away he stares at her long and hard before running back inside. She doesn't move.
.
When Beck is seventeen and Jade is sixteen they've had a lot more kisses, and longer ones at that.
Right now they're hiding in the janitor's closet, lips moving against one another and bodies pressed together so tight they're not sure where one ends and the other begins. When they break off for air he takes one look at her flushed face and her bruised lips and her bright eyes that have already darkened considerably and the words come out before he can stop them.
"Run away with me."
"What?"
He grips her arms tight, the excitement brewing in the pit of his stomach. "Run, with me! Right now. We could leave right now and never have to come back to this place." He looks at her expectantly and has never been surer of anything in his life when she suddenly pulls away from him and leans against the opposite wall of the closet, her expression guarded.
"No."
The answer feels like someone just drenched him with a bucket of ice cold water. He tries playing it back in his head, like maybe he misheard her, but all he hears is the same two letters on loop echoing in his mind.
"Jade, I'm turning eighteen next year, and they're probably going to send me to a workhouse or something, and then you'll turn eighteen the year after that and they'll do the same to you. We'll never see each other again. We have to do this."
Something in her face clicks and all of a sudden both eyebrows are raised and her eyes have turned cold. "And what'll we do Beck? Run away with no money? Live on the street until you find some small job, get an apartment and try to make ends meet until we die?"
Every syllable cuts through him but she doesn't stop.
"I told you," she continues, "I wanna be famous and rich and an actress, not some runaway orphan. I refuse to leave this shithole just to land into another one!"
"We can make that happen," he insists, trying to push away the horrible feeling spreading throughout his body, "I'll look for a really good job, and you'll go to auditions and we can work it out. It'll take some time but—"
"I'm not running away with you Beck!"
It feels like she had just taken out her favorite pair of scissors and cut him in half. The silence that descends between the two of them is heavy, practically suffocating.
"Look," she crosses her arms in front of her chest and starts staring at the bucket beside him, refusing to meet his gaze, "I've been talking with headmistress and there's this theater along the Main Avenue that's always looking to hire someone to do the cleaning. She agreed to make a few calls and get me to work there next year. I'll start off cleaning and work my way to the stage from there. I don't need you."
The confusion and pain in his gut morphs into something that feels a lot like anger, "When did you decide this?"
"Yesterday, when I talked headmistress into making the call for me."
"How come you never told me?"
The glare she sends him is cold and filled with spite and he realizes absently that it looks just like the one she gave him when they had first met. He watches as she reaches into her pocket and pulls out an opened envelope. Shoving it into his hands, she pushes him aside and strides out the janitor's closet, slamming the door shut in her wake.
He stares after her in confusion before turning the envelope over and taking out the letter inside. It was from his aunt and uncle. His uncle's company had finally bounced back from the Depression.
They were coming for him in three days.
.
Beck is still seventeen and Jade is still sixteen and they haven't talked in three days. The longest time they've never talked. The entire orphanage is outside to wave him off and Beck is all packed.
When his aunt and uncle do arrive they descend upon him in an instant, his Aunt Sarah crying and apologizing for all the years that they had to abandon him while his Uncle Jonathan simply claps his shoulder and smiles at him. When they start ushering him into the car, he turns around to look at Jade but only catches her back as she turns around and walks into the house without even looking at him. He feels like he's been punched in the gut but he gets in the car anyway.
When the headmistress and the rest go back inside they find that Jade has destroyed half of the girls' dormitory.
.
When Beck is nineteen his uncle starts grooming him to be the heir for the company. It starts off simple, his uncle talking to him about business on the breakfast table and then takes him to see the company factory every weekend. He tries his best to keep up and be interested but often catches himself just going through the motions.
A few weeks later his aunt introduces him to a girl named Tori and he's glad to find that she's nice and funny and pretty even. Then his uncle drops the subtle hint that her father is one of the riches business investors in the state of California and all of a sudden Beck knows the real reason why his aunt and uncle wanted him back in their lives.
.
When Jade is eighteen she leaves the orphanage and true to the Headmistress' word gets sent to work as a cleaning lady for the theater along Main Avenue. The moment she walks in, they hand her a mop and a bucket and tell her to get started on the stage before the show that night. It's hard work but for the first time in her life, she doesn't complain about it.
.
When Beck is twenty he's already working for his uncle and on some days the voice of his thirteen year old self echoes in his mind. I'm not gonna be in some factory somewhere and that's a promise.
The irony definitely isn't lost on him.
On the weekends his aunt keeps inviting Tori over and then leaving them alone, trying to be subtle about everything. Not that he minds really, he finds that he likes spending time with Tori, as a friend. She's nice and fun to talk to and doesn't throw a screaming fit when she gets angry. There are times though, when he'll look at her and suddenly wish that she wasn't Tori with the high cheekbones and warm brown eyes but someone else with pale skin and electric blue eyes.
He excuses himself every time that happens.
.
When Jade is nineteen the understudy for the lead actress accidentally breaks her leg after a puddle mysteriously appears on stage.
As the director starts worrying about not being able to find an understudy in time for the show that night, Jade walks up on stage in a moment of bravery and pig headedness belts out the chorus to the song that the leading lady is meant to sing at the end of the play. The director and everyone is floored is stunned into silence and when she finishes singing everyone around instantly breaks into applause.
She is cast as the understudy immediately.
.
When his uncle starts dropping hints that Tori and her family's support could really help the business last, Beck can't say he's surprised. It's why you wanted me back, after all, he thinks darkly as Uncle Jonathan gives him a big wink.
"Our company could be up there with the greats Beck, and Tori is a real catch isn't she?" His uncle finishes with a clap to his shoulder and suddenly the weight on Beck's shoulders feels all too real.
Even though Beck knows what they want him to do, he can't really bring himself to reply.
.
After months and months of understudying, and singing in the chorus line, Jade finally gets cast as the lead in her first play and it's great. For the time she's been there, she's gained a reputation for being an ice queen and bossy and turning down every guy who even glances her way. But she's the greatest actress they've ever had and every time she performs she brings the entire room to tears so in the end, people just accept her for it.
On the eve of their premiere, the director knocks and asks to come into her dressing room.
"You nervous?"
She rolls her eyes and continues to apply her make-up, "Please."
He chuckles nervously, everyone is always a little nervous around her, "Uh, just wanted to say good luck for tomorrow. And uh, I got an offer from this booker friend of mine, if tomorrow's a success we may go on the road. Touring you know. In theaters."
She applies the last swipe of her eyeliner and then turns around just enough to raise an eyebrow at him, "anything else?"
The fear in his eyes is amusing and hilarious at the same time, "No, no that will be all. See you at the dress rehearsal."
The moment he slams the door shut, Jade finally allows herself to smile. She can already see her future and it's beautiful.
.
That night, his aunt hands him a pair of tickets.
"I thought you and Tori might like to see a play tonight," she says, her eyes twinkling with so much insinuation he's surprised she doesn't just blurt it out in the open. He stares at the tickets, runs a hand through his hair. So it comes to this, he thinks to himself as heads on to his room to get ready.
When he picks up Tori, she smiles brightly at him the moment the door opens and he thinks that maybe this could work. Tori will never be her but she was his friend and maybe he could bring himself to love her enough. Enough for her and enough for his aunt and uncle.
As they take their seats in the audience he starts planning how he should go about it. After all, their entire relationship had 'business' written all over it. Did her parents also tell her to expect it? Should he even bother to ask? Was there even a romantic way to say 'hey everyone expects us to get married in order to keep the money flowing so why the hell not?'
The moment the curtains are raised however, his entire mind goes blank.
He doesn't believe it at first, and he blinks several times to make sure it's not just his mind playing tricks on him on the night he was supposed to propose to his not-really-girlfriend but when she opens her mouth he knows for sure.
He's shocked and proud and stunned and a number of other things but the only thing he really feels is his heart hammering in his chest and the memory of her lips on his when she was sixteen and he was seventeen.
He's floored by how gorgeous she is, still pale and dark haired but now more statuesque than he remembers, her costume hugging her dips and curves in all the right ways. What really gets him though is how he can still tell the exact color of her eyes even from a distance.
Jade.
The moment the final curtain goes down, he turns to Tori and looks her dead in the eye.
"I'm really, really sorry Tori." He says, hoping his expression can convey to her everything he doesn't have time to say. He takes her hand and kisses it before getting up off of his seat and running off to the direction of backstage.
Jade is in her dressing room, the rush of her first standing ovation just dying down. Everyone is congratulating her and just this once she smiles back at them without even a hint of mischief or malice. Stan, their director, is ecstatic. The moment the curtain went down he had hugged each and every one of them and hasn't stopped going on about all of them going to tour and how they'll all be famous and rich and when the door finally closes she thinks she can get a moment to herself.
She places her head on her dresser and closes her eyes, a huge smile still on her face. She thinks that this must be what flying feels like. That's when she hears the door open again. This time even her good mood isn't enough to hold in the sudden flare of irritation.
"What?!"
She looks up at her mirror and the sight of Beck standing by her doorway is enough to get her to freeze in place. He looks out of breath and just as beautiful as she remembers. Suddenly all the feelings and memories that she locked away for five years come rushing back and she feels lightheaded.
When she regains her composure, she swivels around in her chair and stares at him with one eyebrow raised, her arms crossed in front of her chest.
"What are you doing here?"
At the sound of her voice, Beck feels a smile break across his features. Even after all those years she's still the same, still harsh and mean and probably the most difficult girl in the world to get along with.
"You were great."
"Thanks."
Beck approaches her slowly until he's seated on one of the couches in front of her mirror. "Just hear me out ok? And if after, you still want me gone, then I'm gone."
She feels like she knows where this is headed and some part of her screams at her to just ask him to leave now. That part, however, is being drowned out by the other voice in her head, the one that kept her up every night thinking about him since she was sixteen.
"You have five minutes."
The relief across his face sends a familiar ache across her chest and dammit, she thought she would have been over him by now.
"You remember before?" he begins, "that day in the closet?"
Her hands clench into fists from where they're crossed in front of her chest but she wills her expression to stay smooth. "Yeah."
"I made you an offer then,"
She can't help the disbelief that courses through her veins. How could he ask her that? Especially now after she's finally reached everything she's been dreaming of since she was a kid. Her face turns into a scowl and she turns her chair away from him to face her mirror again. "Yes and the answer is still no. And I can't believe you have the nerve to come in here and ask me that after all these years."
"That's not why I'm here!" he cant help the way his voice rises in volume, only Jade could ever bring out this side of him. "This isn't about that, if you just let me finish-"
"Of course it is!" she screeches, standing up and jabbing a finger in his chest, "After five years of nothing you think you can just come over here and ask me to run away again? I'm telling you right now that if you think I'm about to give up my career just to see if we can bring back what we had before then you're dumber than I thought!"
"God, do you ever listen to anyone except yourself? I'm trying to tell you that I got it all wrong!"
That silences her, and she sits back down on her chair, staring at him. "What?"
"I got it wrong before," he says with a shrug, "I asked you to run away with me, but I got it mixed up," He rakes a hand through his hair and offers her a sheepish smile.
His words aren't making any sense so she can't help the tone of irritation that laces through her words, "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I'm the one running away with you this time."
That's all their relationship's ever been really, him running after her from the moment he was seven, and when he saw her on that stage that night, he realized there was nothing he'd rather do for the rest of his life.
She tries to takes a moment for the words to sink in but he's already taking her into his arms and pressing her lips against his and she can't help the fact that her arms wrap around his neck instinctively.
When they finally pull away, she gives him a smirk and her blue eyes glint mischievously.
"Well it took you long enough."
.
He's twenty one and she's twenty
.
A/N: I'm actually not happy with how this turned out. Eurgh. It's so cheesy and something out of a soap opera and Beck seems so OOC and UGH I'm sorry you guys. :(
Feel free to comment and I promise I'll try to edit it and make it better some time in the future!