Pairing: Mr. DelmasxAntea. I was going to so something all cute and nerd!love for this? But Idk, it got away from me and turned into what I usually do (because, like usual, I wrote it while falling asleep at the keyboard). I like the idea behind what I ended up with though.
Ps. Go read SnowPrincessMossy's latest fic. It's amazing and filled me with the need to write sad, prevented love. Love you Snowy~
Jean Pierre Delmas was not perfect; of this he was well aware. It was not a fact that he was proud of, per say, but it wasn't one he was going to deny. However, for any and all faults he may have had, there was one trait he possessed of which he was very proud: Jean Pierre Delmas remembered people.
He remembered the first teacher to ever really have an impact on him.
She wasn't even really a teacher—she was a teacher's aid, standing at the front of an auditorium full of university physics students who could care less where they were or what they were learning and they drooled across their desks. Despite her audience's clear lack of interest, the aid had taught every lesson with unyielding enthusiasm, instilling within Jean an unexpected urge to be just as steadfast in the pursuit of his own goals. The very next day he'd changed his course of study from science to teaching.
Twenty years later his first act as a school principal would be to hire the aid as head of his science department, and wonder if she knew he was one of the first people expected to call her Ms. Hertz.
He remembered his first best friend.
They'd met in grade school, both of them sitting at the back of a history class hidden behind their books, playing the class fools as they waited for math lessons to roll around. For a short time they'd competed for the best test grades in trigonometry and physics, until they realized the other was the only person smart enough to join them in intelligent conversation. And even though attending different graduate schools would eventually erode their equal intelligence, they would continue to maintain the tightest of friendships.
Years after he seemingly just disappeared, Jean Pierre would continue to call Waldo Schafer his closest friend.
And, of course, he remembered his first love.
Pink haired, petite of build, and busting with a kind of intuitive intelligence that made her more than a match for both him and his best friend combined; the new girl sitting across from him in physics class became a crush the likes of which he would only experience once in his life. Everything about her was attractive: she has blindingly brilliant, her smile glowed, her sense of humor was impeccable, her body swayed and curved in all the right places, she loved cats, she thought comic books were awesome.
And she liked him back.
And yet they would only date twice, two wonderfully awkward dinner-dates filled with halfhearted ice breakers and prodding unproductively at their food. However, as terrible as the dates had been, the second had ended on an oddly perfect note. With Jean as of yet incapable of purchasing a car of his own, they'd been left to walk back to her house. The walk, in what was almost the dead of night through an empty city park, would turn into one of the most magical nights either teenager would ever have with another person.
But Jean was too nervous to seal the night with a kiss at her door, and the next day she couldn't quite manage an 'I had fun last night' from him, and so she'd moved on, locking wits and lips with someone a little less socially awkward.
Eventually Jean would move on, meet someone new, marry, have a daughter. But, like the teacher's aid and the boy sitting beside him in history, Jean Pierre Delmas would never forget his first love.
And, although she'd moved on to the man he'd called friend, he would never know that Antea Hopper never forgot her first love either.
