Okay, I'm following the trend of apologizing before a fic starts. First, because this is a really late flashfic for jannikajade; it should have been finished and posted between April 22nd and 24th (stupid conference commitments). Second…well, this fic went into a rather strange direction. It's almost an "indirect" Dasey, but not usually in the way we mean when we say that. Hopefully, people still enjoy it. Prompt at the end.
Piecing Together the Scraps
She was where he thought she'd be, on the couch surrounded by bridal magazines, catalogs, and planning books. Almost every Saturday since he proposed, he'd find her surrounded, making notes. And the Saturdays she wasn't treating wedding planning like a final exam, she was out shopping for the event.
He blamed her matron of honor and her mother for the insanity. But especially her matron of honor. A lot of things - good, bad and ugly - could be laid at the feet of her matron of honor.
That day, as he approached his fiancée, he was a little surprised to see her flipping through a scrapbook. A scrapbook that had nothing to do with a wedding, no less. In fact, it looked like a scrapbook centered around high school.
"What are you looking at?" he asked
She'd jumped a little at that, "Honey, you startled me!"
He apologized and kissed her quickly for good measure, because that's what guys were supposed to do. Then he repeated, "What are you looking at?"
"A high school scrapbook."
"But those weren't your school colors. Come to think of it – some of this looks familiar."
"I should hope so," his wife-to-be snorted, "as it was your high school. This is something that my matron of honor left accidentally when she dropped off the latest bridal stuff."
"Accidentally?" he asked as he raised an eyebrow. "Your matron of honor is practically Wedding Planner Barbie-"
"Be nice," his fiancée warned with her 'I mean it' voice.
"I'm just saying that I doubt this was accidental."
She shook her head. "No, I actually think it was accidental. Sure, Casey's usually crazy over-planned and super organized, which is why her husband still calls her a keener, but she's been a little scattered lately. I think it was an accident. I'll need to call her and return this."
"But only after you've looked through the whole thing, I take it?"
"Absolutely," she agreed with a smile as she turned the page in the scrapbook.
Her smile faded to a look of thoughtfulness as the couple gazed down at a page that was more purple than white. "How did we not see this coming? Them coming?" she asked after a few minutes. "Especially after the university tour stories."
"They didn't get it themselves after those university tour stories."
"Of course they didn't. They were in a weird place, a combination of denial and obliviousness. But I've never been oblivious and I would think you were finally over all of your denial. So how did we miss this?"
He shrugged as he looked back at the scrapbook. The University of Western Ontario, or Western as everyone in the area called the university, hadn't been a place the matron of honor or her now husband had remotely considered for college, all of those years ago. It was way to close to home, after all. But it had been the first place they toured together. "I'm not sure it was our fault really. Besides, what happened at UWO was on purpose, after all."
His fiancée smiled, "'I had to protect my step-sister,' Derek said when I asked him about it."
The young man laughed as he remembered the beginning of the fight all those years ago, "And Casey responded with, 'Annoy his step-sister, more like. Seriously, Derek, you couldn't think of way to get those guys to back-off except slinging an arm around my shoulders and calling me "hot stuff" and "babe" for the entire tour? And what made you think I couldn't take of myself?!'"
"And then Derek smirked and said, 'Yeah, I should have just let you babble them to death.'"
Looking up from the scrapbook, she laughed before realizing something. Blinking in surprise, she asked, "But you weren't there when I asked them about the trip. You heard about that fight?"
"I was there – just not at the table with the three of you, obviously. Even in the very back of the place you could still hear them shouting at each other."
"They were kinda loud, I guess."
He shrugged. "We were both used to it. Even all those months later I could still remember what their fights were like."
They both grew quiet for a moment, thinking about intense fights that set of step-siblings used to have in the past. After a few moments, the female turned to the next page in the scrapbook. "Oh, look," she said as she turned the page. "This was from the UT trip." She frowned a little as she noticed picture of four people. There was a younger version of herself, her matron of honor, her matron of honor's then boyfriend, and her matron of honor's now husband. Even in the picture the stepsiblings seemed more focused on each other than the people with them. "Wow."
"What?" he asked, a little worried by her tone.
"I think…I think I now see why everyone was so confused that day. I mean, I did act a little like an older sister to her boyfriend. And the two of them? No siblings, step or otherwise, look at the each other quite like that."
"You never did tell me about that trip."
She sighed. "It wasn't my happiest moment in college. I ended up screaming at Derek, too. It's like I thought what had happened was his fault."
"What happened?"
"Well, I had just started my freshmen year at UT. So, of course I was excited when my boyfriend called and told me he was coming to visit. Derek even mentioned that he was being considered for some hockey scholarships. If he got a hockey scholarship, more than likely he would come to UT and we wouldn't have to do the distance thing anymore. Which made me feel better, because 'the distance thing' killed my previous relationship."
"Okay. And?"
Sticking her tongue out at him, she said "Have a little patience."
"Okay…and?"
"Well, then Derek dropped the bomb. His 'annoying keener of a step-sister' wanted to look at UT as well. He complained that Casey 'went on and on about the lit program or something. And musical-poetry boy wants to come, too. Nora thinks it's a great idea if we all come together. So say that it won't work and I can leave her here.'
"I, in my complete short-sightedness, said that it would be wonderful to have them all there, so they all came."
"That doesn't sound too bad."
The woman he was to marry soon shook her head. "You would think. But they were arguing from the moment they set foot on campus. And when they weren't arguing? Well, that was worse."
"How could peaceful silence be worse?"
She snorted, "It was definitely silence; I wouldn't call it peaceful."
"What in the world did they do?!"
She sighed. "First, there was the Ultimate Frisbee problem. In walking across a field so that I could show Casey the library – the guys couldn't have cared less – a rogue Frisbee came sailing our way. She and I didn't see it. But my boyfriend did. And what does Derek do? Pushes Casey out of the way. The Frisbee hit me in the face."
"How did he explain his behavior?"
"Oh, Derek laughed and said, 'Is klutziness contagious? I mean, I honestly expected you to catch that.'
"And Casey, from the ground, groused, 'Oh, so you pushed me into a pile of dirt because you thought I was a klutz?!'
"'Nah," he said to her, 'That was just for fun,' And argument number three of the day started."
Moving some of wedding planning stuff so that he could sit, he tried to think of what to say, "Well, just one incident –"
"It wasn't one incident, and that wasn't even the end. During their argument, the owner of the Frisbee came up to get his toy. After taking it from me, he turned to MY boyfriend and said, 'Hey, man. Sorry about almost hitting your girl. Killer reflexes though. Pushing her out of the way was inspired!'
"'I'm not his girlfriend!' Casey insisted, clearly annoyed at the time.
"But before Derek could concur with the truth, the Frisbee guy clapped him on the back and said, 'Ouch. In the doghouse, huh? Sorry about that, but next time, you might want to attempt the whole rescue thing without her ending up on the ground.'"
"So some guy thought your then boyfriend and his stepsister were an item? Annoying, but so what?"
"It would have been a 'so what' if I had been that one guy. But it happened everywhere. When we all ran into members of the hockey team and Casey commented that she didn't see what the big deal was about some hockey thing, the team members turn to Derek and say, 'You have got to teach your girl more about the game!' When Derek scoffed after Casey gushed to a professor about some modern Canadian writer, the professor laughed and said, 'My wife doesn't get Harlow either. But I married her anyway. The things we put up with for the ones we love, huh?'
"And, then, in the absolute kicker, during the fight they got into in the middle of the party later that night, someone actually shouted, 'Why don't you take your girl to a room and just jump her already?!'
"Everyone kept saying they were a couple, and the only attempt they made to set the record straight came from Casey. And only that first time. I spent most of the time saying that the two of them weren't together. It was frustrating. But, Derek was still my boyfriend. He still kissed me goodbye. And he told me I was worrying over nothing." She shrugged. "Maybe I was worrying over nothing, or maybe everyone at UT saw something even that early that I couldn't."
Before she got too depressed over what she didn't notice as an UT freshman, he quickly turned the page in the scrapbook. "Boston College," he laughed. "Three guesses as to whose list this one was on."
"I don't know," she replied. "They do have a hockey team, after all. I don't think they are on the level of UT, but Derek could have had an interest….He never talked about Boston, though. Casey did. In fact, now that I think of it, she's the one who mentioned in passing over one family dinner that BC had an ice hockey team."
"I wonder why she brought it up?" he asked, trying to keep his opinion out of his tone.
Obviously, it didn't work, because his fiancée leveled him a look. "Don't start. Casey was too freaked about the whole university application process to have been plotting anything at all."
"You know her better than I do," he allowed.
Deciding not to press the point, she turned to another page in the scrapbook. A few minor schools, at least in the creator of the scrapbook's opinion, were all on the next page. Brown. University of Texas at Austin. University of Virginia. The only thing interesting about that page was the inclusion of a handwritten note that read, "Freaked about all of these Thomas Jefferson refs."
"That's not Casey's handwriting," he pointed out.
"No, it's Derek's," his fiancée confirmed. "I wonder what it means. Wasn't Thomas Jefferson one of the US presidents or something? What does that have to do with the university application process?"
"Isn't a better question, why did Casey save it?" he asked.
She stared at him for a few minutes before silently turning to the next page. They blinked when they got to the next page. It seemed to be a huge clash of colors, until they realized it represented two schools, NYU and Columbia.
"Casey actually considered NYU?" he asked, surprised.
"Derek thought he could get into Columbia?!" she blinked, even more surprised. "As an international student?"
"Maybe that's why they didn't really talk about that trip," he guessed.
"Maybe…but, Derek complained about some stupid song stuck in his head for weeks after they got back. I thought it was some kind of US pop monstrosity until we were sitting around his house with his family and he managed to guess the musical 'Wicked' right in Pictionary. After Lizzie awarded us a point, he muttered, 'Stupid song was finally worth something.' It stuck in my mind as such an odd thing to say. Maybe they went to see something-"
"On Broadway, together?" he asked. "Casey would have had to drag him by his leather jacket to a matinee. And if she had, he never would have talked about it."
"True," she agreed. After thinking about that for awhile, she turned the page.
"Wait, I'm confused," he said as he and his fiancée gazed on another purple and white page. "Didn't she already make a page for Western?"
"Yes, but this is for Northwestern…University?" his fiancée read in an uncertain voice from the top of the page. "In Evanston, Illinois? I guess that puts it somewhere in the States, then."
"Why were they looking at this Northwestern, anyway? Does it have a hockey team?"
"Not to my knowledge. Maybe they went to see it for her. Though I'm not sure why."
"I don't remember them mentioning their visit Northwestern," he shared.
"I don't either, now that you mention it," she agreed. Looking down at the scrapbook lay-out she said, "There is a date here, looks like some time in November. November-" His fiancée suddenly paused.
"What is it?"
"Well, in thinking about it, when I was home for Christmas that year, I remember talking to Casey about the university search. She said, it had given her a lot of food for thought, in ways she hadn't anticipated. And then she asked – Wow, I can't believe I never put it together before!'
"What?" he asked, impatient, "And then she asked what?"
"She asked, 'Is it possible for everyone to be wrong about something? You know like the guy everyone thinks is gay is really just a straight guy who is really comfortable in his sexuality with good fashion sense?'
"At the time, I said, 'Um, Casey? A guy like that is probably gay.'
"'Okay, okay. Different example,' she rallied at the time. 'How about figuring out relationships, then? You know, when everyone says two people should get together or that a guy must be in love with a girl? They can be completely wrong, right?'
"'Sure,' I said at the time. 'I mean, my brother Kevin's wife talks about believing that for the British royals. When she watched the royal wedding for Charles and Diana all those years ago, she says she thought they were in love. Most of the world did. And the world thought they were right for each other for awhile, even.'
"'Exactly!' Casey had seemed really relieved when she agreed with me. 'They are just wrong. It's probably just some cultural thing anyway.' I would have asked more about it, but she started asking about my first semester, and, since Derek didn't seem to be super interested in me discussing school, I jumped in fairly quickly to talk about how everything was going."
He blinked as he took in all his fiancée shared. "Do you think someone said something to them at this university, too? Or maybe they were mistaken for a couple again?"
"Maybe. Just maybe."
"They did these two schools at the same time, too," his fiancée remarked later as they neared the end of the scrapbook. "Weren't they in the same city or something?"
"Oh, yeah.," his fiancée nodded, "Casey told me that she had scholarship interviews at both schools – for University Scholar at one and for the Dance department at the other, I think. I think the film department at the second school was offering Derek money too."
"What I don't understand," he said as he looked down at the first page devoted to the trip, "is why Casey used an ad for a basketball game as a background for this page. She's not really that into sports. I mean, she learned to appreciate soccer and hockey, because she loves people who play or played them. But basketball?"
"I don't think she's highlighting the basketball game. See?" his fiancée pointed to the top of the ad. To the right of the words 'Black and Blue' were blue and red ribbons tied together. To the left of the words, there were black and gold ribbons tied in a similar fashion. "I think she used it because it featured both schools. I guessed they had a
rivalry or something."
He snorted. "That figures. Those two would have to cap their university tours in a place with a built in rivalry. One more excuse to pick a fight."
"And they did love their battle of wills, didn't they?"
"Hey, take a look at this! It's a note from a Tanya. I wonder why that's there?" he asked.
"It seems like she stayed with Tanya when they went to visit, but-" she fell into an uncomfortable silence.
"What?" he hesitated to asked, but she had such a look of concentration on her face.
"Well, just listen," she said as she began to read the note included in the scrapbook. "'Dear Casey. It was great getting to meet you. I really enjoyed showing you around the campus, even our lake – beautiful and smelly as it is. I'm sure your little sister could definitely figure out what was wrong with it. I really hope to see you in the fall. And don't worry. VCU's not more than fifteen minutes away, counting waiting at stoplights. You'd get you see your film major boyfriend all the time. Good luck and Go Spiders! – Tanya."
"'Your film major boyfriend?'" he said after a few moments.
"Seems students at one of those schools thought they were dating, too."
After that, they finished flipping through the book in silence, not sure how to take what they were beginning to put together.
"Huh," he said as she finally closed the scrapbook.
"What?" she asked
"Did you notice that most of the schools that they looked at were in the States?"
"Yes. And?"
"Well, don't you think it's a little odd that the both wanted to leave the country…and that they were considering some of the same schools?"
"Oh," she said softly as her eyes grew wide. "Do you think they knew something before…before the university trips?" she asked sadly.
"No," he honestly replied. "Sure, I'm not Derek's biggest fan, but you liked them both. You still like them both, which I think means they couldn't have it in them to be that mean and devious."
"Consciously."
"Consciously? What do you mean?"
"I mean, I don't think they did it on purpose. But I wonder, if maybe – just maybe – a part of them wanted to be somewhere where they wouldn't be known or judged so that they could explore the possibility of them."
He shrugged. "Well, whether it was planned or not, that is what happened, isn't it?"
"Yeah," she agreed as she closed the scrapbook. "And we should have seen it coming a mile away."
- the end -
I am not revealing who the narrators are intentionally. They can be whomever you need then to be for the story to work for you. Here was the prompt:
Casey and Derek are visiting colleges. Everyone they meet keeps assuming they're a couple. Dasey. Obviously. Feel free to include any other characters you want.