|sightless|
|( or: as blood stains ice blonde)|
So, for whatever reason, I couldn't get this idea of out my head: Beck losing a girl in the past who committed suicide. It kept nagging at me and I sort of went with it and it ended up being Bade. Give me your honest thoughts; I do warn you, there is dark material ahead. If you do not believe you can handle it please do not read.
Beck knows - the moment she opens the door in quiet manner so unusual - that something's wrong. She's standing there with brown hair curly and dyed with tendrils of black, eyes sunken deep into their sockets. Red lines criss cross her eyeballs, wrapping around her pupils like crimson snakes; she's intoxicated again.
"What are you doing here?" Beck wonders. The mere sight of her sends the hairs on the back of his neck springing to attention; she's so similar to the other one - the one he swore he wouldn't think about anymore.
"When am I not here?" Jade grumbles. She collapses onto the couch beside him - the tiny one shoved into the corner of the cramped room - and flicks the cap off the bottle of beer sliding from her fingertips. She gulps down one mouthful, now two, never faltering. Her eyes roll back into her head - and oh god he's seen this too many times.
Beck sighs, runs a hand through his long black hair. "I'm not holding your hair back if you puke." Memories slide through - holding back blonde hair while she vomits, watching her slowly fade away - and quickly blinks them away. This is Jade, damn it; this is the present, not the past.
"You will." It's not a question.
Beck doesn't even flinch as Jade rests her legs on his lap, the front of her beige boot teasing his crotch; she's a bad girl and wants something he'll normally give her.
"I know," he mutters. She steals the controller from his hand and mutes the black and white comedy playing on his grimy TV. Together they watch faces contort on the screen and wonder, just wonder. It's one of the many things they can actually tolerate about each other.
"Aren't you go to ask me if I'm hungry?" Jade asks. She's giving him the look but it's tempered by the bloodshot rings marring her irises. To accentuate his observation she takes another gulp of beer and Beck watches several drops slide down her chin.
Beck rolls his eyes, "Are you hungry?"
"Don't be so melodramatic," Jade snaps.
"Well excuse me - " Beck begins.
"Just shut up and bring me a burrito." She glares at him, stroking a spot under her chin and unleashing a feral growl; sometimes he wonders if she's really human, or just an animal trapped in a two-legged body. It would answer so many questions.
Jade is still glaring at him and with a huff Beck sets off for the kitchen. They're always like this: She thinks he's insensitive, he asks her what she would like, she tells him he's overreacting, he begins to retort and she silences him with a glare that means I'll leave you if you don't obey me right this minute.
Sometimes - he would never admit it - Beck worries that she actually might, you know, leave him.
He remembers a letter on his parent's doorstep - because it was before he'd emancipated - with the words you were supposed to save me written in blood, remembers black suits and an elegant wooden box with her initials on the side, remembers stroking her blonde hair; then he shoves the burrito into the microwave and sets it to cook for one minute.
He shouldn't be remembering - he thought he buried her with everything else in the past.
"Where's my burrito?" Jade is glaring and the timer is beeping and his head is whirling. He sees the way Jade's eyes sink into her skull and the screaming desperation hidden behind a layer of false bravery.
Beck knows the signs; he remembers, although he shouldn't. (Maybe he never tried to forget.)
"Here." Beck slides the plate with a burrito on it at Jade. He sinks back into the couch, watching the figures pass silently across the TV screen, tries to collect his thoughts. His eyes sneak down to look at her fingernails. They're plain, not even glossed. Jade always paints her nails black, lets them chip so she looks like she just wants to go and kill herself; but Beck knows, he knows that's her way of saying everything is normal.
But now - she didn't paint them and something is horribly wrong. Beck remembers shaking fingers and bruises blossoming across pale skin, hidden by icy blonde hair, hidden by brave smiles and kind laughter, hidden by her lips pressed against his as they shifted closer together in his old Toyota years ago.
"You look like you've just watched Disturbia," Jade says.
"Who's hurting you?" Beck asks.
They're living in Alice in Wonderland, Beck thinks, as Jade's lips spread into a smile so fake he wonders why it doesn't rip her face from her skull. They must be, or why else would his head be spinning and Jade acting so...un Jade?
She looks at him with all the signs that he knows so well: lips bared, teeth gleaming, eyes wide with desperation. She knows, knows with a raving madness, that she's not okay - but then again she's always been self-reliant, shutting out everyone...even him.
"Who says anyone's hurting me?" Jade snarls. She rips up her sleeve, exposing red grooves cut into her skin, blood still seeping and threatening to stain her long-sleeved shirt. "How do you know I'm not doing this to myself?"
Beck remembers a different voice saying the very same thing. For a moment it's like they've traveled back in time to where all he saw was good girls and blonde hair.
"Oh God," is all he can say. "God, Jade, you need help."
Jade takes a bite of burrito and sighs as the boiling cheese begins to burn her chin. "Don't we all?" she says, her eyes tracing the mime-like people on the TV screen.
Beck takes her hand - and beats himself up for not noticing all the scars before. "When?" he asks. He wants to know when this madness started.
"The day you abandoned me for Vega," says Jade in a voice so matter-of-fact it makes him shudder. "The day you left me crying by the roadside."
"You told me to!" Beck hisses, grasps her face with tight fingers. He remembers Tori's lips, Tori's scent, Tori's innocent gaze as she walks off with Andre. His fingers clench, leaving bruises; Jade doesn't make a sound. He wonders if she feels it.
"I wanted you to fight for me," Jade says. She's not fighting him and that's the worst part. His nails piece the flesh of her cheeks and he watches in sadistic satisfaction as drops of blood leak towards her jaw. "We're not together anymore, so I don't understand why my choices concern you."
"We - I -" Beck stutters, unable to organize his unraveling emotions. Everything is spinning and he sees blonde hair floating in the breeze. "We're friends, Jade. I care about you."
He waits for her to snap a violent curse word and dismiss the whole friends comment, but she doesn't.
"I know why this bothers you," Jade whispers, eyes brilliant pits of coal. "I remember how you cried over her dead body as she lay there surrounded by police tape. I remember how you told me that it was all your fault, that if you had chased after her then maybe you could have saved her. I remember you showing me a picture of the night you two gave each other the gift of your virginity, that you sobbed again as you dreamed about holding her and stroking her blonde hair. That's why I matter, Beck. Somehow your little girlfriend is still living in memory through me, and that's all I'll ever mean."
"Don't talk about her," Beck says in a dangerous voice. "Don't you dare talk about her." He tugs on her arm.
Jade takes a sip of beer and throws the empty bottle at him; she watches it hit the wall behind them and laughs as the brown glass leaves strips of white wall visible, like jagged wounds.
"It's not your fault," Jade says softly. "It's not your fault that she couldn't bear life; it's not your fault that she threw herself off of a cliff. It's not your fault - "
Beck explodes.
"It is my fault!" Beck yells. "No matter how many times I try to convince myself otherwise I know I never will. I could have saved her, Jade, but I didn't run after her and that's why she killed herself! And maybe, just maybe, the reason I can't seem to let you go is that you do remind me of her, Jade. You remind me of her, and somehow I believe that no matter what, we're meant to be together!"
Silence. Their hands link without realizing it and Beck lets out a strangled breath.
"Thanks for the burrito," Jade says.
"Anytime," says Beck.
Then they're kissing brutally and tearing each other's clothes off and celebrating in the oneness of it all. And through their oneness comes the whispering trails of memories, memories that slowly drift away and take with it blonde hair and sweet girls.
"If I hadn't been crying over her," Beck whispers when they're done, "I wouldn't have met you. And that would have been the worst catastrophe of all."
Jade trembles underneath him and he feels blood from her cuts seep into his own skin, branding them together. By morning the sheets are blood red and he knows, as he clutches her sleeping body, that these stains are for him.
She's binded up her cuts for him.
(Icy blonde hair is no more and Beck relishes in the present.)
|fin