Of all the days in John's life that he would like to remember, his twenty-first birthday was definitely the top of the list. While he had no doubt about it being a great day, even if there were bad aspects to it that he had been told about time and time again, he would at least like to have some first-hand knowledge about what exactly made it so great. All he knew was that it was a day of many changes in his life, the least important being that he was finally able to drink outside of the comforts of his dad's house (although he never drank at the house to begin with). Then again, those other changes had started sprouting their roots for months before the day he turned the big 2-1 came around, and as long as he could wrap his head around those, not having memories of the day he celebrated becoming legal drinking age wasn't that much of a problem.
Everything found its beginnings when school had its holiday break the winter before. People who went away for college had come home for the season, and for a month, the sleepy little Washington suburb where John lived was going to be lively again with its college-age population back around. He knew he very well could have been one of those returners, but due to his lack of really knowing where he wanted to go in life anymore (things that had happened in high school made him question his career path), he had stayed around home and gone to school there instead. His dearest half-sister Jade, however, had been one of those ambitious souls who fled to the most expensive college she could get a full ride scholarship to, and thus she was one of those students coming home for the holidays.
Their father, always the busy man, was unavailable to go to pick up his daughter from the airport upon her return and put John in charge of making sure that Jade got home in one piece, or else he would be kicked out and expected to actually work on top of attend his community college classes. John agreed to the task set before him, half because he had really nothing to do except chum it up with his pals online on the day she came home, half because every time he went somewhere out of the suburbs, he had a good experience. The second thing rang true on this endeavor, and he wasn't even expecting it to.
As he drove to the airport on that sunny December day, a stray thought crossed his mind, one that John had never really liked pondering except when he was lying in bed after hearing his friends all talk about the subject. He was twenty years old, with his twenty-first birthday quickly approaching, and he had never kissed a girl in a romantic way. Hell, he had only ever held hands with his sister, and that was because their dad made them whenever they went somewhere up until they were teenagers. And he couldn't help but think that maybe, just maybe, Jade would be coming home and telling stories about all the guys she had gotten to know on a deeper, not-just-friends level at the prestigious science college she was going to.
The fact that his nerd sister may have gotten anywhere with a guy made John's blood boil. It made him angry, even though this was his older sister that he was thinking about, and he had no reason at all to get angry about her life and her decisions. Maybe it was the comparisons he always made of himself to her, or maybe it was the fact that someone so nerdy and focused on her education could have possibly done anything romantic with anyone, but there was definitely something present that John didn't like.
And, as far as he was aware, there was not a thing he was ever going to be able to do about it. How would a guy who had never kissed a girl be able to tell his sister who may have kissed a guy that she wasn't allowed to do that? He wouldn't, that was for sure, not without being called out on his behavior and told to drop the subject completely. Besides, he thought, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel to try and calm himself, there wasn't a chance in the world that she had kissed anyone. There were three things that were universally understood as truths and completely necessary: death, taxes, and the unattractiveness of the kids living in the Egbert household.
He took a deep breath. No use in working himself up about something that was unnecessary, after all. Besides, the parking lot at the airport was always a place that needed total concentration, and he wouldn't be able to focus on other drivers if he was getting angry about his sister and her locking lips with anyone. If anything, he should just watch the other drivers and not thinking about anyone kissing anything. Except maybe the guy beside him kissing a brick wall because he just cut through like three lanes of traffic and nearly ran into him. After the cursing and honking at that inconsiderate driver subsided, John took another deep breath and mentally prepared himself for what was going to happen. He was going to see his sister and be happy that she was home again and most definitely not bring up anything even somewhat romantic.
It was a good plan, and it was a plan that John had every intention of following through with. However, like all good plans, there was something that was going to stop it from being executed to perfection, and he would have to try his hardest to make sure that he could avoid that law of life. He parked the car without incident, made it to the correct pick-up area inside of the terminal without any trouble, and actually had a good handful of minutes to spend before Jade's flight would be arriving. That meant that he could relax a bit, maybe grab something to snack on at one of the overpriced shops in the terminal, and get everything off his mind.
That was a lot easier said than done, he knew, and while finding a close snack counter was easy enough, there wasn't anything to do aside from sit like a lonely loser and play on his phone while he ate his bag of chips he had ended up spending five dollars on. He regretted forgetting to bring some sort of game with him, and with his phone being necessary in case something happened and he couldn't find Jade, wasting the battery on it wasn't an option. That meant that he was going to be people watching, something that would have been infinitely more fun had he not been thinking about his lack of love life only a little while beforehand. From where he sat he had a good view of the people waiting by the exit of the secure area, and with every plane that landed, more happy couples and families were being reunited right in front of him.
Tears were shed. Children screamed. People were lifted off the ground and spun around. Everything was so much like on TV or in the movies, and it made John honestly a bit sad. He wasn't asking for much as he watched all these reunions, but he did want to find someone out there who would hold a sign while they waited for him to come back to them. He wanted someone who would bring their children to come pick him up at the airport, someone he could kiss passionately while they held each other tightly and swore never to let go again.
John was twenty years old and never really had an interest in women. The only girl he had ever really known in person was Jade, and they were basically two halves of the same person—and she had warped his image of what other women were like. Yeah, they may have been beautiful and not so into their education as his sister was, but deep down, he figured all women were smart and overbearing and bossy, just like Jade. But these guys, the ones he was watching taking part in the reunions, they seemed so happy to be in love.
He had to get his mind off of romance, and quick. He didn't need anyone, he was perfectly fine living his life the way he was, with no female intervention. John looked down at his chips, focusing on reading the label on the bag for a moment, before he looked back up to see if Jade was there yet. The sooner she arrived, the faster he could escape this place and all the love that was flying through it.
Across the walkway, standing against the wall looking like she did that regularly, was a woman, one that looked close to John's age. Her light brown hair half hung down her back and could be seen pressed up against the wall behind the crook of her back, the other half over her shoulder in a braid. She was looking in the direction of the exit to the secure area, which meant that she was only there picking someone up, something that (to his surprise) saddened John. He blinked a few times as he watched her play with the braid she had made, all while she waited.
There was an odd fluttering feeling that made its home in the pit of his stomach, one that he hadn't really felt before. He looked back down to the chips, hoping that taking his eyes off that woman would make the feeling go away, but all it did was make him think about if she was still standing there or not. When he glanced at her once more, he saw that she was looking in his direction, not necessarily at him, but over by him. He checked his surroundings, seeing if there was anyone else of interest beside him, but there was no one except an old man, and John was fairly certain that the beautiful lady across the way wasn't staring at a guy easily four times her age.
That meant that either she was hungry, or she was looking at him, and since John felt that he was about as attractive as a cooked carrot, it must have been the first option. As he watched, she looked away again, fiddling with her braid as she did. Whatever followed, he wasn't sure, because a wave of people came walking between them and he was unable to clearly see her over any of them. Which, honestly, that would have been fine with John if he wasn't so interested in this woman, but his interest inspired him to get up, grab his chips, and try to walk over to her to share with her the snack he had bought himself.
He was about halfway across the walkway when he saw her again, her arms wrapped around someone who seemed to look just like her, while someone with long, dark hair had their arms around both of them. His stomach sank a little, before he noticed that all three of them were girls, and the only ones of them that were kissing were the one he had found himself smitten with and the one who looked like an older version of her. That meant this was a sibling thing, not a romantic thing.
It meant he had a chance.
Or, at least, it could have, but someone grabbing him stopped all thoughts on the matter. "What, did you forget you were supposed to be looking for me?" Jade's voice asked right in his ear, as she squeezed him tightly. "Of course Dad sent the only person who wouldn't actually look for me."
"Oh, hey, Jade." John's voice, muffled by his sister's shoulder that she was pressing him into, sounded a bit downtrodden, as he tried to keep watch on that beautiful girl he had been interested in, but when he found where she had been standing, he saw that her and the others were walking away. The only saving grace he had was, as Jade hugged him tightly, he wasn't really expected to talk, and therefore he was able to hear one of those girls say a name that he hoped with all of his soul belonged to the beauty he had been watching.
He was going to have to keep that name in mind until he could get home to look her up, to see if she lived somewhere nearby or something. It was a task that seemed easy enough, if the part where John was going to be subjected to Jade talking about her semester for the whole ride home, and if she so much as mentioned one thing that he would get distracted by, then the whole mission was a bust. "Is something wrong with you? I'm, uh, not hugging you anymore, so if you wanted to move so we can go get my bags…" John jumped back, looking at his sister in shock. Had he really just spaced out while she was hugging him? "Okay, yep, something's wrong with you."
"Nothing's wrong with me! I was just thinking about something, that's all." He put his hands up in a defensive position, forgetting that he was holding a bag of chips, which he saw Jade eyeing suspiciously. "No, these chips aren't drugged."
"I wasn't going to ask if they were. You're going to let me have some, aren't you? I've been on an airplane for the past three hours, and airline food is more overpriced than those had to have been." She laughed and he gave a sigh of relief, handing her the bag so she could take a few chips. "Thanks, John. Now let's go get my stuff before they lose it. I don't want to not have clothes for break."
There was no sense in arguing with Jade's point, because she knew how airports worked better than John did, with all the flying back and forth from school that she did. They made their way through crowds of people down to the baggage claim, her talking to John and him pretending to be listening as he searched through the people for just another glimpse of that woman from before. She was overtaking his thoughts, and all he had done was maybe make eye contact with her once. He didn't know what love was, but he felt like he had fallen deep into its grasp at first sight.
"Something must really be up if I'm telling you about a Nic Cage movie marathon they had on campus and you're not responding," Jade snarkily said as she tapped her brother's shoulder, causing him momentary panic. "You're being weirder than normal, and I'm honestly worried to know why."
The words sort of spilled from John's mouth before he had the chance to come up with some elaborate lie to throw her off: "I saw a girl and I can't stop thinking about her." It was the absolute truth, and he sounded a lot like a lovestruck puppy as he admitted it. "I think I know her name, too, but what good's her name if I haven't actually met her."
"How do you know her name if you haven't met her?" They had stopped walking, another large crowd of people impeding their progress, but this was the crowd surrounding the baggage claim that Jade needed to be at, so her question was left unanswered as she braved the mass of people to get her bags. While she was gone, John made no attempts to even care about where his sister was, looking around solely for that woman to maybe actually get her name from her this time.
He spotted her a few baggage claims away, one that was much less busy. Whoever had been the reason she was at the airport, they must have flown on a smaller plane or something, he thought, before deciding that this may have been his only shot to get the name from the source. Without worrying about what Jade would think, he walked past the conveyors that weren't in use, and got within a few feet of the brown-haired woman with her hair half braided before someone interrupted. "Yo, you comin' or not?" the dark-haired girl who had been hugging her before asked, catching the attention of the girl right as John reached out to her. "Come on Vris, we ain't got all day to be hangin' around here. You know how your sister is, all bitchy and shit when she gets home from school."
The woman rolled her eyes, flicking her braid over her shoulder so that it hung alongside her loose hair. "Whatever, Meenah. You know as well as I do that we don't care how she acts."
The name she just said in reference to the darker-haired one sounded oddly familiar to John, but he shook that thought from his mind. She wasn't the one that was important. The one that had been referred to as "Vris" was. "But I guess you're right. Might do us some good if we don't have to hear her whining the whole way home."
"That's the way I like it. Now let's blow this place before she realizes we're not with her." Meenah (that was her name, wasn't it?) motion for the other woman to follow her out, and before John could stop her she was gone, her beauty escaping John's grasp yet again, this time without the chance of a miracle happening to bring them together once more.
"John, what are you doing now?" It was Jade again, having found him with her bags in tow. Wordlessly, he pointed at the two ladies who were most of the way to the doors, trying to aim his finger more at the one he didn't really know the name of. "Oh, is one of them the girl you've got a thing for?" He nodded. "I've got some news for you."
It wasn't the reaction he was expecting and looked at her like she had just told him something outrageous. "News for me?" he repeated, raising his eyebrows up over the top of his glasses. "Is it that I'll never get to see her again? Because I figured that one and don't need you to break that to me."
"Nope, it's not that." Again, he acted as if what she was saying was completely outlandish, and he implored her for more. "John, if that was who I think it was, she lives not too far from the house. We went to school with her."
Now something was being said that was very odd and weird, and his reaction was to shake his head. "Your glasses must be busted or something. I've never seen her before in my life—and before you use the 'our class was three hundred people big' excuse, I've looked through the yearbooks. No one in there was that beautiful."
Jade laughed. "Well, we did definitely go to school with her. Now can we go so I'm not lugging all this stuff around with me any longer?" She knocked one of her suitcases into him and it broke him from his bit of confusion just long enough to take his sister out to the car and get her bags into the back seat, but once he was driving and very nearly forgot to stop at the toll booth to leave, Jade knew that she needed to discuss this further with her brother. "You really don't remember her, do you?" she asked, looking at him while he tried to focus on the road before them.
"Not at all. Okay, maybe I didn't really pay attention to the girls in our class, because why should I? I didn't want to date any of them! But I think I would remember someone looking like her. Which I don't." He wanted to close his eyes and think about her beautiful face that he only caught glimpses of, the way she draped that braid over her shoulder, the dark honey color of her hair, but he couldn't. That would require not driving, and he was sort of the one who was behind the wheel. Dwelling on her memory would have to wait until he could get home and to the safety of his bedroom.
Er, that was to be able to bury his face into his pillow and muffle his screams on the matter, not to do anything else. Just seeing a very pretty girl that he may or may not have been smitten with wasn't going to inspire him to do anything else. Jade saw that he was struggling to pay attention to what he was doing (that, of course, was driving), especially when he nearly ran off the road, and she needed to distract him somehow. "Well, from what I saw, she seems to be a lot less insecure about herself. Maybe that's it. Maybe she was just too much of a withdrawn, hidden person back then for you to notice. But we definitely graduated with her."
"I'd remember her though!" Having to correct where he was steering, because he was drifting into another lane, John was adamant that he never had seen this girl before in his life. "I'd remember someone like her, someone just so beautiful…"
"Obviously you missed what I just said. She wasn't all that beautiful in school, but it's been a few years and she's different now." That was when Jade dropped her voice, hoping that this next tidbit would be enough to put an end to the conversation. "Besides, she's out of your league. I've seen her posts online. Her and that girl she was with—"
"Meenah. That girl's name was Meenah."
"—whatever. Point is, they're a thing. Like, every picture that Vriska posts of herself has that other girl in it." She shrugged, leaning back in her seat as the cogs in John's mind processed that bombshell. "So don't start creaming your pants over a girl you don't remember going to school with, because she isn't interested in someone like you."
He was silent for a few minutes, just trying to understand what Jade was saying to him. There was no way that she was a lesbian. None. Why else would she have made eye contact with him while he was sitting at that snack spot? She wouldn't have, not unless she was interested in the dweeb of a guy that he was. "I'm sorry, can't hear you over the sound of the fact that she looked at me." He made sure to emphasize the last three words.
"I'm looking at you now. Doesn't mean I'm into you." A laugh escaped Jade. "Okay, that was a bad example. Of course I'm not into you. We're siblings."
"You're just guessing that they're together, anyway. From pictures." So maybe Jade was right about them having gone to school together, if she had a way to see that beauty's (her name was Vriska, wasn't it?) pictures online, but just because she was right about that didn't mean that she was right about anything else. "There's no proof otherwise."
"They were together at the airport, weren't they? Doesn't that seem a bit weird to you?" She was trying to get into his head, trying to get his thoughts off this woman he seemed to have fallen in love with too quickly. Last thing she wanted was to go her entire winter break from school listening to her brother go on and on about how much he wanted this girl. "Let me guess, you're trying to come up with some way to say it doesn't seem weird."
He was. "Yeah, of course I am. I don't want to think that they were together. I want to think that maybe I'll run into her again and not be interrupted by someone coming home, or someone coming to get her to leave." John had to focus on the road now, as he started getting closer back to home where the traffic picked up. He couldn't think more about Vriska or Meenah or what felt like his first crush on a girl ever. He had to think about getting his sister back to the house safe.
But once they were home and he could get alone, he spent a long while staring at the old movie posters on his walls, hoping that Vriska wasn't a lesbian, and that she maybe had the same interests he did.
A few days later, John was already tired of having Jade back home. Yes, it was nice to know that his sister was under the same roof he was, but it was also a terrible feeling, as she had things to hold over his head that weren't just her school accomplishments. Whenever they were in the same room, she'd bring up that he had fallen in love with someone who never would love him, and he knew his cheeks would turn red as he denied it. But really, she wasn't lying about the "falling in love" part, because he would get butterflies that would overtake his stomach whenever Vriska was so much as mentioned.
He had gotten the idea to find her Facebook profile the day he had seen her, thanks to what Jade had said about it, and while he wasn't going to go and add her as a friend (after all, they obviously hadn't known each other in school, so that would be a bit creepy), he was able to stalk at least her more recent posts due to her lacking security preferences. Jade really hadn't been lying about the fact that all of her pictures made it seem like her and Meenah were, well, a thing. They were kissing each other on the cheek, holding hands, and doing everything like he assumed a couple would be, but there was something odd about it. Something that gave him hope.
That was the fact that Vriska had her relationship status set to "single" and her preference set to "men". Both of those made him question what was happening, if she was denying her relationship to the world or if it wasn't a thing at all. He'd ask, but he didn't know the girl. He couldn't just message her and see what she said about it, like he could with his friends, no matter if she was open about it or not. Based on the pictures she had, she seemed like the kind of person who would be open to correcting misinformation about her love life.
"You know what? I'm out of here. Maybe when I come back, you'll stop bugging me with this." It was right after another bout of teasing, and it was enough to finally push John over the edge to need a long walk to get away from Jade for a little bit. She was having too much fun getting under his skin about the situation, and he needed some space before he hurt her. Their dad wasn't home and he had the car keys with him, so a drive to the mall wasn't going to happen, thus the idea for a long walk that would inevitably find its halfway point at the convenience store at the edge of the neighborhood was conceived.
He grabbed his jacket and house key and left, leaving Jade standing in the house confused about what had just happened, not really sure how to process the fact that her twenty-year-old brother had just thrown a hissy fit and left before her eyes. He walked down the street and cut across a playground, no one around to hear him muttering to himself about how dumb it was that Jade wouldn't leave him alone about things. John was smart enough to know that she was doing it because it was a natural thing for siblings to tease about crushes, but he didn't like it. She should have been supportive of him and who he had fallen hard for.
Dusk was beginning to settle in over the neighborhood when he made it to his destination. The man behind the counter was the same as always, and he greeted John with a wave and a hello, asking him what brought him out at that time. He shrugged and it was enough of the answer for the man, who was used to seeing him around. John wanted to get out of the man's line of sight as fast as he could, because the last thing he wanted at that moment was to get involved in a conversation that would end up with him explaining what was going through his mind and his life. He ducked around the shelves, heading to the back wall where the cases of sodas were.
The least he could do while he was there was buy something and make the trip useful. Looking at all the drinks, John tried to remember what kind of soda Jade liked, to bring her back as a way to apologize for leaving like he had. When he couldn't remember, almost completely because thinking of her reminded him about how mad he was that she had been teasing him, he figured that just grabbing something he liked would be good enough. He pulled out two of the drinks that were on sale and closed the door to the display, thinking about how he should grab some snacks to go with it, but didn't pay attention when he turned to go to the candy aisle, and collided with someone. "Oh shit, sorry," he said, stepping back and hoping that the person wasn't too mad.
The face he had been lusting after for days looked back at him, her lips curled to make some comment but when she saw him, her mouth went to a neutral position, then to a shocked one. "Didn't I see you at the airport the other day?" she asked, looking at him through glasses he didn't remember her having. "The guy with the chips? John?"
He had quite literally run straight into Vriska, and she remembered him.
What a chain of events.
A/N: This is the first of five chapters to the birthday fic I've written for my dear boyfriend kamikaze2007. (: If you're reading this, I hope you enjoy it and will stick around, as it will update every Monday, ending on March 2nd, which is his actual birthday (his 21st birthday, at that).