Disclaimer: If you recognise anything, I don't own it.

AN: This is set during The Initiation, before, well, the initiation. The poem is my own, so I dedicate this story to the girl who inspired it. As far as I know, she really was ordinary.

Thanks also go to cyanide blue, whose story Go Ahead prompted me to finally write this little idea that had been going around in my head for a while.

You're Deborah Armstrong, and you've never needed anyone.

Girls hate you and boys fear you – you're proud and fierce, untouched and untouchable and god damn it, you like it that way. You've never needed anyone –

- and if you did, it sure as hell wouldn't be Cassie Blake.

Nick sits and smokes behind you. You pretend to write your essay.

There's nothing special about Cassie Blake. Nothing. So what if she's a half-blood, so what if she's Diana's pet – she's nothing. She's just another ordinary Outsider.

And I want her.

You hate it, but it's true. At first you thought nothing of her, and then one night you had that dream, and suddenly you could think of nothing but her.

Plain blue eyes, half-dreaming, half-asleep. Plain brown hair, unless you count the colours - because there are about a million colours in her brown hair. Plain skin, plain clothes, plain and ordinary everything. And yet.

You don't speak, though once she said Excuse me, and you said Sure.

Maybe it's because you're the dark one, you think, maybe it's her ordinariness that fascinates you. Maybe its because you're the one who hurts and hurts and laughs and is wild and cannot be controlled, maybe that's why you want this little white mouse.

You say nothing to her, but when she enters a room you watch her, and you watch her until she leaves. Faye thinks you're trying to scare her. She thinks its funny.

You think you're going crazy.

You've never thought of girls before, and you don't think of girls now, but you think of Cassie constantly. You wonder what perfume she uses and what her hair looks like when she wakes up. You wonder what she'd look like in your bed, in your arms, what she tastes like . . .

And then you go outside and you ride your bike as fast and as far as you can until you scare even yourself.

You can wait it out. In a couple of short years you'll all leave high school, and you'll do whatever you do here, and she'll probably go off to college with the other Outsiders, and you'll never see her again. You tell yourself that it won't hurt when it happens, not like thinking about it does now.

Your paper is covered in twisting black flowers, sharply thorned, and in your spiky scrawl you've written her what you now realise is a poem.

fuck you, bitch - i don't even like you

follow you round the room with my eyes

flick your fucking hair like you're so great

it brushed me once and it was like silk

yeah and you're so stupid with your lazy looking eyes

oh god, your eyes . . .

and your loser friends with their boring little lives -

i could fascinate you with my dreaming -

i want you

oh i want you . . .

You're Deborah Armstrong, and you've never needed anyone.

But God, how you want Cassie Blake.