Blank Slate
Five times Beck Oliver felt emotion.
Beck/Jade
There was a baby, resting in a solitary crib, short, messy hair covering his dark eyes. The two ladies around him were whispering 'no one knows where he came from, we don't know what to do with him' and the baby could do nothing but gurgle absently, comprehending none of what was happening around him.
"He's precious," one of the ladies gasped, covering her mouth with her crimson fingernails. "It's honestly a pity that... you know. Does he have a name?"
"Beck," replied the other lady with a small frown. "That's what it says on his blanket, at least. Beck. Odd name, perhaps, but I can't say it's the oddest thing about him. He's never cried, you know, never once. Even if you scream at him he won't cry. He just sits there and stares at you with those dark eyes, and it would be rather creepy if he wasn't so adorable."
"I've never seen one of those before," replied the first. "Will he laugh?"
"Not that I've seen," said the other. "It's almost as if he has no emotion at all. It could be a side effect of neglect, I suppose - he has learned that crying gains him nothing, and that there's no point to it. Perhaps also he has never had a reason to laugh, and thus has never learnt to."
The ladies stared forlornly at the small baby, who simply gazed up at them with his dark eyes, his tiny feet kicking back and forth. He didn't cry at the unfamiliar faces, didn't laugh even when they contorted their faces, just blinked up at them.
"Strange child," whispered the first.
The baby, Beck, blinked again.
The baby grew up, just as all boys do, but he grew up in an orphanage, in the solitude of a room with white-washed walls and a single window. He scarcely smiled, and no one within the confines of the orphanage had ever seen him cry - not when he skinned his knee, scarlet blood dripping from the open wound, not when he got in a fight with his friend, not when he lost his privileges for stealing food. The other children in the orphanage seemed to cry at every given opportunity, craving the attention that they had never before gotten, but not him, never him.
The first time they ever saw him offer a real smile was when a little girl marched up to the orphanage, hand in hand with a boy who couldn't have been more than two years old. Self-importantly, she stepped up the information desk and said, "Excuse me, is this the baby shop?"
"Whatever do you mean?" asked the woman who stood at the front desk with some confusion.
"You know," said the girl with a roll of her eyes. "My friend Cat said that her auntie had a kid she didn't want, and she sold her to this baby shop 'cause she couldn't take care of her any more. And anyway I just got this new brother, well he's a creature really, but I don't like him any more so I want to give him to you people to sell and someone else can take him."
The woman at the front desk exchanged a horrified look with the woman who positioned herself in the corner, but it was little, emotionless Beck who came to their rescue. "Silly, you can't sell babies!"
"Then what are you doin' here?" the impotent child said with an angry look on her face.
"It's an or-phan-age," Beck replied, enunciating each syllable in a childlike way. "If mommies and daddies die or can't take care of their kids, they bring them here. But you don't want him to come here. He needs to be home with your mommy and daddy and you too, cause you're his big sister."
"So I can't sell him?" The girl looked fairly disappointed.
"Nah," Beck said with a grin (a grin? The ladies looked at each other in shock).
"Can I trade him for you instead?" the girl asked with a strange look on her face. "I think I'd rather have you at my house than some stinky baby that poops all the time." The child at her side frowned and squinted up his eyes, making the girl grimace. "See what I mean?"
"You can't trade your siblings, silly," Beck told her, but he laughed (a real laugh). "Once he's grown up he'll be a lot better, you'll see."
"Kay," the girl said gruffly, and then, with a call of 'thank you for your time' over her shoulder, she was out the door, still tugging the young child behind her.
It was about another year after that incident that Beck finally got to leave the orphanage. He was adopted by the Oliver family, a nice man and woman with the inability to have children of their own and a nice, spacious house. They were practically the all-American family, and the ladies at the orphanage just knew they would take amazing care of their little anomaly. Beck, however, wasn't so sure.
"Where am I going?" he asked, no hint of fear in his voice, only uncertainty.
"You're going to be with a family, Beck," the lady explained, giving a look to the pitiful young boy, his dark hair still all messy and his eyes still as empty as they were when he was just a baby. "People who will love you and take care of you, okay?"
"But what if they don't like me?" he inquired, his insecurity evidently leaking through. The lady's heart simply broke for the young boy.
"They will love you," she told him, ruffling his messy hair and taking his hand to lead him out to the car. Beck clung tightly to her hand, his ragged nails digging into the skin of her palm.
He didn't seem so sure.
No one would have thought that Beck, the Oliver child, the one that had been so graciously taken in by the two Olivers, was maladjusted. He was fourteen now, and the typical all American boy at that; he played for the football team, had a girlfriend with pretty blonde hair, made good grades in school, and joked around with his friends. So everyone on their block was surprised when he moved out of their house into an RV.
His explanation was just that he was ready for some independence. This, in itself, wasn't surprising; he'd been on his own, practically, since he was a baby, and he most certainly knew how to take care of himself. It was just that everyone had thought that he loved his adoptive parents more than anything. He wasn't much like them in personality - adopted children usually aren't - but they had rubbed off on him and showered him with as much love as possible, love that everyone thought was reciprocated.
"I just need some time alone," was what he told everyone.
Five days later he broke up with his girlfriend, Brianna. Ten days later the truth came out.
There was a girl involved, of course; there usually was. This particular girl was a shock to everyone, though. She had chestnut hair streaked blue, sharp eyes, and a bad attitude. She also had a little brother who was not much younger than her whom she had once tried to sell.
Ironic, really.
But he seemed to have taken quite the liking to the dark-spirited girl. They held hands practically everywhere they went, kissed in public, sometimes even more than that; he would seem to unconsciously sling his arm around her shoulders, his hand on her waist, almost as though it were a reflex. Everyone wondered how someone like him, though, could date someone like her, someone that took such a negative stance on the world and everything in it, someone who could not, by any standards, be considered normal. She was not the All-American girl. His parents did not approve. It was hard to envision what he saw in her.
But he knew, and he heard, and his anger boiled.
It wasn't until the young boy was at a party (along with his girlfriend, the lovely Jade West, as she was called) that he finally went off, much to the shock of everyone around him, because in the space of a few years, not much had changed. He was still incredibly hesitant to show emotion; an occasional smile was the best he could muster.
That was why his (seemingly irrational anger) shocked everyone.
"Hey, Beck," said his next-door neighbor, a blonde boy named Jason with a smile full of perfect white teeth, greeted him. "And hello to your, um..." He grimaced. "Your plus one."
Jade looked as if she was going to say something - her eyes were alight with anger, and her hands balled into fists - but Beck, for once, spoke first. "Are you trying to imply something?" he questioned, quite the big word for the usually simple boy.
"Of course not," said Jason with a satisfied smile. "Just that I didn't really think you'd bring, you know, her here. Considering this is like, a party for the teens in this neighborhood... the normal ones, you know? The ones that are actually normal people and not freaking ugly ganks."
Jade looked as if she was going to rip his head off; however, Beck beat her to it.
"That's my girlfriend," he hissed, his dark eyes boring down into Jason's. "That's my girlfriend, you hear me, and I don't care if you like it or not, but you're not going to talk to her like that. No one is. She's the most gorgeous person I've ever met and anyone - anyone - who took the time to get to know her instead of falsely judging her would know that, all right? Just shut the heck up and leave us alone. Or, you know, better yet - we'll leave."
Now this was quite the controversial decision, considering the fact that Beck was usually very popular in his neighborhood, especially since he was an attractive young man. But despite everyone's pleading and Jason's insincere apology, Beck dragged his girlfriend out of the party.
Once they got to the streets, Beck smiled at her sheepishly and ran a hand through his hair. "Sorry about that," he said with a small shrug. "I just got sick of it, I guess. I probably shouldn't have gone off like that."
"Hey, if I'd gone off, I would've dumped that whole bowl of punch on his head," Jade informed him seriously. "How funny would he look with red punch running down his face?"
Beck laughed and slung an arm around his girlfriend. "So funny, babe."
The door to his RV swung open at eleven o' clock at night. This had become a fairly common occurrence; his girlfriend was a fairly demanding person. She swooped in, eyes dark, hands on hips. "I called you, like, five times."
There were times when his lack of emotion came in handy. Dealing with Jade was one of those times. He threw up his hands. "Sorry, babe. Phone's dead."
"And you didn't charge it because?"
"Dad's borrowing my charger," he explained, turning back to his homework (which he had, in fact, delayed until the last minute).
"You're too nice," Jade snorted, but honestly he knew that was one of the qualities she liked about him; he balanced her out in inexplicable ways. She threw herself on his bed and laid there, her eyes trained on the ceiling, so he set his pencil down and laid down beside her. She rolled over, eyes wide, to look at him, and then in a voice softer than her usual voice, whispered, "Beck, how come you never get angry with me?"
It was, most assuredly, an odd question, not the typical thing for Jade West to say. He raised an eyebrow. "Do you want me to?"
"No, idiot," she mumbled, her eyes trained on the covers. "I was just wondering, because everyone in the entire world seems to get angry with me, even when I'm actually attempting to be nice, which honestly they should, like, worship me for, cause I never do it, but you never get angry with me. Ever. And you calm me down and stuff, like when I'm angry. So why don't you get angry with me?"
He hesitated, a million explanations running through his head about his lack of emotions and his neglect as a child, but the only reason, the only explanation, for why he hadn't up and left yet, was probably the only thing she wanted to hear - and the only thing he wanted to say. So he said it. "Cause I love you."
He had never said the three words before, ever, and they left a tingling sensation on his lips and a heart fluttering within his chest. Was this love? he wondered. Watching her, though, watching the smile that tugged at the corner of her lips that she quickly fought to suppress, watching her and thinking that she was, quite possibly, the cutest girl he had ever seen, despite her tough persona - it could be nothing but love.
Perhaps this was almost the way that his adoptive parents loved him, and the way that his real parents never had.
"Love you too," she whispered, and he kissed her lightly on the nose, reveling in the feeling he got every time he so much as glanced at her. If this was love, if this was what caring for someone truly meant, he never wanted to let it go.
It was during one of their short-lived breakups that Beck felt the oddest emotion of all. Now of course Jade got jealous often enough - she was the jealous type - but no one could recall ever seeing Beck get jealous of anyone, not once. Not until the annual school Black & White Dance.
Typically, Jade wore black every day, but she showed up at the freaking Black & White Dance in red, of all colors, and on the arm of the school's most popular boy, Masen Carter, of all people. No one thought anything of it, other than to stop and comment on Jade's obvious disdain for the rules ("Can you believe it? On the one day she's supposed to wear black, she doesn't. The nerve of her!"). At least until Beck Oliver walked over to her, arms crossed, scowl on his face.
"Didn't think you were coming," Beck told the girl in red, forcing a smile.
"Didn't want me to see you with Vega?" she retorted, crossing her arms across her (admittedly large) chest.
"No," he replied defensively, and then, "Why are you here with him?" He jabbed a dark finger at Masen.
Jade looked like she was going to retort, but Masen cut her off, a smirk gracing his handsome face. "Jealous, Oliver?"
"Course not," Beck replied but, much to everyone's astonishment, his face was heating up. "You two can go and have a grand old time. See if I care!" But he still did not budge from his position right in front of them, and his face burned with heat.
"Oh, believe me, we will," Masen whispered, and, as Jade turned her back, he finished with, "You know, you've always been in the way, Oliver. Jade's the sexiest piece of... in this whole school. But she's mine now, and I plan on using that to my advantage."
Masen ended up with a black eye and a bleeding nose, and the whole dance stopped dancing to gasp in astonishment at how Beck Oliver had just cracked, publicly at that, in front of everyone. But later that night Jade and Beck were seen dancing together - and after that, making out in a corner - so it seemed that everything in their relationship was just fine again.
The baby who had lain silently in the crib had blossomed, grown, and now it seemed that his bursts of feeling revolved primarily around a single human being, Jade West. She was a gank at times, and sometimes she got on his nerves more than anyone in the world, but she made him feel, made him love in ways like never before, made him human in ways he never thought possible.
And, honestly, he was grateful.
A/N: we just don't kNOW I JUST WANTED TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT WHY BECK IS THE WAY HE IS AND IT TURNED INTO BADE. that's it bye.
also please review and don't hate me for this thanks.