Jade Unexpected

- Disclaimer: I do not own Victorious or any of the characters, nor do I own any of the products that have been or may be mentioned.

- Author's Note: So this is my first fanfiction in a long time and it's my first as part of this fandom. It was very much spawned out of watching a marathon of the show. I really like it but I just wanted to give the characters some depth and thought it'd be fun to see it through Jade's eyes as she's such a private character.

Also there's a tiny bit of Tori/Jade towards the end so if femslash offends you then you should turn around now. I think I'll end up continuing this but I suppose it all depends on how I feel about it and how you all feel about it.

And lastly I have no beta so I apologize for any and all typos, poor grammar, inadequate punctuation, etc.

Jade sees a lot more than anyone would expect her to, though to be fair no one expects much of her other than a deeply intimidating glare and a snappy comment. The tough face she puts on in front of everyone has led to her being left alone a lot which means she has a lot of time to sit back and just watch, her favorite pastime.

She notices how Mr. Sikowitz tries to act slightly more normal around their English teach Ms Donavan and she laughs under her breath when his attempts at normalcy just turn out more abnormal. To be honest she thinks it's rather endearing the way he tries and tries but she obviously doesn't let that show. She also sees the smile on Ms. Donovan's face as she watches Mr. Sikowitz leave and hopes she'll give the guy a chance one of these days.

Little does anyone know but Jade often stays after school to get help in Math (which she'll never admit) and to help paint scenery for some of the school plays (which if word ever gets out she'll kill everyone in the club). It's on these days that she hears it, the sound of music floating from one empty room at the end of the east wing of the school. An empty room where Andre sits for hours on end practicing piano, guitar, trumpet, kazoo, and any other instrument he can get his hands on.

Everyone thinks his talent comes easy to him but she sees him shake his head when he misses a note and yell at himself for not doing it perfectly. No one sees the hours of practice he puts into becoming a natural at everything he does, Jade does. But she'll never tell anyone this though she hopes everyone will realize it and applaud him for all his hard work.

She's tried to but she can never listen to Trina talk, it's difficult to listen to her prattle on and on (and on and on and on) but she does take note of little things Trina does which hint that there may be something more to Hollywood Arts High's Queen Bee (at least in her own mind). She notices that Trina's always playing with her hair, not as a habit or as a nervous twitch but because she's constantly trying to fix it (majorly insecure).

And most admirable is the way she's always looking out for Tori. The way her attention is focused on Tori when they're walking together (even though she seems completely self-absorbed), the way she slows down when she hears her sister being talked about, and the most obvious (so obvious she doesn't understand how no one else has noticed) the way Trina is always on the first floor conveniently passing by all of Tori's classrooms even though all of her own classes are on the second floor.

Jade hates the fact that she actually likes Robbie's stupid puppet (and that she knows his full name but refuses to call him by that cuz it'd give her away). No one knows that she's actually known Robbie for almost as long as she's known Beck, that they all went to elementary school together and that she and Robbie used to be really good friends.

She doesn't even know why she let that friendship fall apart but she does know that she regrets it. She's one of the few that sees Inner Robbie (the Robbie that's actually very intelligent, witty, and talented) hidden beneath Outer Robbie (the exact opposite of all that other stuff). After knowing him for so long Jade can always sense when he's about to lock up, the subtle frown that paints itself on his face, the way his brows furrow, and the way his entire body slumps down. She'll never tell anyone that she wishes she could give him the one pep talk she knows he needs to perk up.

Oh Cat, Cat, Cat, Cat. Her bright mood is so infectious that Jade can sometimes barely contain the smile when the girl blanks out and returns to reality with a comment about her brother or a random piece of useless trivia (which she'll never admit but she always looks up those little grains of knowledge and they're always true). Though Jade is barely surprised because Cat is deceptively smart.

She's the only one that notices the amount of time Cat spends in the library either walking through the stacks or sitting at one of the computers, but always reading something or another. One day it'll be knitting and the next day it'll be Sun Tzu's 'The Art Of War' (though she's not completely sure Cat understands it as at one point she was reading it upside down). She desperately wants to call Cat on her hours on the library or give her the nickname Ms. Wikipedia, but she can't do that because then everyone would know she cared enough to look.

Most would expect Beck to be the one she pays most attention to, the one she watches the most, but it's in fact the exact opposite. He's her boyfriend, but more importantly he's her oldest friend. She knows everything there is to know about him, the fact that he'll never admit that he cries easily during romantic comedies, that he is endlessly entertained by escalators, that he really lives in the driveway to avoid his mother's endless tirade against him and his dad, that he needs her help because despite the fact that he always listens in class he gets mixed up and flustered easily despite his calm demeanor.

And of course she knows that Beck doesn't really love her. It's not a huge revelation or a big secret to her and it's not something she spent nights crying over when she realized it. It's something she's grown to accept, mostly because she doesn't love him either. She knows that they both love each other, just not in that 'the hills are alive, over the moon, heels over head, shot to the heart' kind of way people are supposed to. She loves her like someone loves someone they've been friends with a long time, that's why she finds it so hard to break up with him, she's worried that since they've been acting this charade for so long that the end of them as a couple would mean the end of them as friends (which is why she hated Alyssa Vonn, she thought the slag was trying to take her best friend).

No one will know how insecure the idea of her losing him as a friend makes her.

And while she wishes that these people were the first ones she noticed, that these thoughts were the first that invaded her thoughts when she would sit back and watch the daily happenings of life they aren't.

She wishes that the weird Ballet couple in her science class danced out of step through her head all day. She would rather have thoughts of exactly what it was the metal art class had propped up in the cafeteria distracting her all day. Hell, she'd even rather be thinking about how the hell she was supposed to know that the interpretive dance troupe was trying to act out Finding Nemo.

But these weren't the thoughts that invaded her thoughts, these weren't the people that took up a permanent residence in her thoughts. It was just one person, one endlessly annoying person who won't exit her thoughts and Jade doesn't even want to begin to theorize on why that is.

From the first day she saw Tori Vega, Jade knew that this girl would have her barely divided attention. The way she smiled made Jade perk up in her seat, not because of how Beck was entranced by her, but because of how easily Jade could read her, how open the girl was, how if you just looked you could see all the emotions on Tori's face on that first day: the nervousness, the fear, the sense of not belonging, the desire to hide.

All things Jade remembers once feeling herself before donning her armor of indifference and dry wit. Jade also notices the way Tori looks at people in the same way she does, analyzing them, watching them, trying to read them and because of this she panicked. She panicked because for once someone was trying to read her and she didn't like it, that and the way that Beck became so focused on her lead to her coffee ending up on Tori's head.

She hated herself for it after, for making the girl's day a living hell but it seemed that Tori Vega had this ability to make her crazy and irrational. Maybe it was because of the way that even though she could tell Tori was never completely sure of herself, everyone always seemed completely sure of her, that she could do what was put in front of her.

Maybe it was because when she stayed after school she'd occasionally pop her head in and see Tori getting tutoring, how she'd see her test herself by asking one hundred questions and if she failed she'd ask a hundred and one. How she'd hear her voice traveling down the halls as she trained her voice in one of the auditoriums in the west wing of the school.

She's the only one to notice the pep talks Trina gives her right before every performance because of Tori's pre-show jitters (something everyone thought she had worked out after the big showcase but Jade saw that she still freaked and occasionally still needed to be dragged kicking and screaming to the stage).

She sees Tori secretly checking the science fiction books out of the library, watches her bop her head to the death metal no one would expect her to like, and has seen her roll her eyes as Trina tries to tell her about the latest fashion trends or newest celebrity news out of whatever the magazine of the day is. And she pays special attention to the moments when Tori is quiet, when she's alone or when everyone around her is chatting and she's silent and just doodles in her notebook. The way she bites her bottom lip in concentration and erases something before trying again.

Much like herself Tori isn't as she seems. Everyone thinks Tori is perfect and bubbly and nice but Jade's seen her struggling with her own work, her own self-doubt, and her own expectations. She's seen all these qualities and quirks that Tori hides from others and she knows that while others may be attracted to Tori because of what they see, Jade knows that she's hopelessly attracted to her because of what they don't see.

It scares Jade, so she puts up an even stronger barrier between her and the girl much like her but not like her at all. A girl that for all her insecurities and attempts to hide parts of herself isn't afraid of putting herself out there, Tori isn't afraid of the possibility that her flaws will be discovered or that she's making herself more vulnerable to being hurt. It's a type of bravery Jade wishes she has and Tori's the kind of girl she wishes she could have.

But of course, Jade would never admit this to anyone. Especially her.