Title: Tracing the Past
Pairing: Bliv, Blaine DeBeers & Olivia Moore
Summary: AU-esque fic focusing on Blaine and Liv's past, before becoming zombies.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Nothing is.
Author: Treesh Aradia
Prompt No. 019, Effort
First
She might not have remembered him from before, but he certainly remembered her. Olivia Moore was not someone one could forget.
It made his years in Junior High difficult.
Having expectations - DeBeer expectations - bearing down on him like the jaws of a Chinese Finger Trap, and a father who took upholding and maintaining their position in Seattle's circle of Elite very literally made it difficult for Blaine to just survive school. The first time he sees her was something reminiscent of the water fountain scene in the movie 'Great Expectations', and no, not the recent remake but the 90s version with Ethan Hawke. She was as aloof and cold as Estella – the femme fatale, ambitious, tragic character in Great Expectations – only more intense.
"Oh, sorry, did you want a drink?" The brunette stares him down, eyebrows raised. Not that he would ever tell her, but his nerves were wrecked. He was a nameless, faceless student who kept his head down and tried to study as hard as he could - he has already started prepping materials for his Yale admission essay, and she was very… attractive. Her heart-shaped face and arresting eyes, now assembling a frown at his quiet staring, was too daunting for young Blaine.
"Uh," he mutters ineffectively. At fourteen, that was the death knell to his fledgling heart.
"Never mind," she leaves, making sure not to touch who she thinks could quite possibly be a socially inept oddball.
Yes, want to grab a real one, milkshakes, with me later after school? would have been the appropriate response. Or a better one, at the very least. If current Blaine could slap him in that moment in time, he would.
If current Blaine were to ever ruminate on the past, he would have shaken Blaine and asked him to get his head out of his –
Current Blaine would not have squandered a moment to lay it on the line. Especially not if Senior DeBeers was going to enroll young Blaine in a better private academy a month after Blaine's first meeting with Olivia Moore.
Second
It took Blaine nothing at all to secure an invite to the boat party. A few years of disappointing Senior DeBeer (yet somehow managing to stay just below daddy's radar to not get disinherited), getting a new set of friends and his own business line courtesy of substance dependents, Blaine was practically its Guest of Honour.
Who needed to matriculate into a Trade School? He was a party A-Lister. It is with this metamorphosis from faceless Blaine into confident, suave entrepreneur that had Blaine going up to the familiar, arresting face.
He knows her, he just needs to place her. And suddenly the cloud of uncertainty clears. The fountain plays heavily in his mind as he steps up to her, wits prepared and sharpened – waiting to impress, waiting to make a connection with the pretty girl from school.
Only, it turns to ashes. It was a big disaster.
She does not take his quip and nonchalance for its intended purpose. She bites back, like some avenging arch angel. Maybe she had one too many bad encounters with guys like who he supposedly was. He takes it a little too far with the keeping her with him routine.
The drink wakes him up and the resounding loud-ass screams really wakes him up.
Metamorphosis rarely suggests regression, but the Utopium he ingested naturally shuts his system down.
He needs to get to her, needs to help her. His sight reddens and he reads her wrongly, devastatingly so. There was a way out and –
And he has let her go, hurt her if the scratch was anything to go by.
Third
When he wakes up, he remembers the boat and he remembers himself. It is only when he is halfway past Exit 15 that he remembers her, and slows his car.
I find it strange
That you're wondering in this place
I thought it'd change
But the more it stays the same
He cannot say this is how he pictured their first real conversation would go, but he's been pegged as that privileged high school jock who is only in it for booty and money – well, not entirely true, but he wishes she remembers him, the old him and started to like –
Never mind.
It is with some effort that he leaves the office, shedding the Old Blaine off once and for all.
When he sees her, he will be prepared. And he hopes she will be too.
Which one of us will look away
Say the words that we don't say
Have I been taken by you one more time
My, my...