Onesmartcookie78
Summary: "Jamais Vu": an expression often defined as being the opposite of deja vu; that is to say, the feeling of experiencing a situation for the first time, despite logically knowing you've been through it before.
Enter Camille Villeneuve, who thought she was normal and for most of her life, she was. Well, other than her childhood best friend's dad suddenly marrying her mom. That was pretty weird. And then she turned eighteen and suddenly things are a lot stranger than she ever could have dreamed.
Disclaimer: I don't own Life Is Strange. I only own my Original Characters!
A/N: Thanks to everyone who favorited and followed! Keep in mind that I update things based on the response that they're getting in terms of reviews, so if you would like to see this work updated more quickly than some of my others, please make sure to review! You can follow and favorite once, but you can always leave more than one review ;)
I don't like to withhold chapters for reviews, but I'm also not as interested in writing something that's receiving no resposne.
She thinks their relationship changes around when they turn eleven and Marie—sorry, her mother—insists that Camille attend boarding school. In all fairness, a lot of the wealthy families in Arcadia Bay send their children to boarding school. Even Nathan will be going to boarding school.
Being out of the house and away from Mr. Prescott should be good for him.
The difference is that Marie Villeneuve had chosen to send Camille to her alma mater. In France . Marseilles, to be precise.
And away from Nathan and Mr. Prescott, Nathan who needed her, Nathan who relied—
Camille knows her mother just wants the best for her. But she isn't sure why "what's best" has to mean being an entire continent away from her best friend.
Which, obviously, is her dog, Gloria.
She makes this joke to Nathan, who scowls in disbelief, his arms crossed, hair sticking out at odd angles as it curls in on itself. His scornful expression is marred by his pajamas, so instead she giggles, laughs at her friend who just had to be one of the last people to see her off for her early morning flight. She laughs until she starts crying, and his scowl falters long enough for him to rub at the back of his neck before reaching for her.
"Jeez," he says, "if you wanted a hug, you should have just asked."
She writes Nathan as frequently as she can, sending him emails and handwritten letters alike.
Sometimes his replies are genuine, others they're written in a shaky hand that belies his struggles. Sometimes they're even tear stained.
He starts having dreams, terrible dreams of a giant storm ready to destroy them all.
Through his descriptions, Camille swears she can see what he does. It's with terrifying accuracy—the kind that makes her nervous—that the image of the storm whirls through her imagination.
His emails are somehow more erratic than his letters. Sometimes he's happy, vibrant; everything is beautiful and perfect and he's doing well without her. Others, he's melancholy, casually brooding in a way that makes her heart ache. He sends her photos to accompany his emails, black and white pieces that sometimes border on disturbing, challenging her idea of what constitutes art.
His photos are sharp, inspired, and despite the content, his technique is so good that she can't help but want to be better too.
It becomes more difficult to find the time to write him, as they get older. They maintain their email correspondence, but give up on snail mail save for birthday cards. She keeps all of his previous letters anyway, bundles them up with red string and stores them in her bedside drawer.
The difficulty is in part due to her classes, but also because of Nathan's inconsistency. He swings like a pendulum more frequently than ever, and his depressing messages turn into long disappearances during which she can't get a hold of him at all. When they're fifteen, he vanishes from her inbox for an entire year, and he doesn't even make an appearance when she visits home for Christmas. She still emails him her photography, which is light, fragile, airy compared to his own gritty realism. She hopes he looks at it and remembers that there's still good in the world, the way that when she looks at his, she remembers life really is dark sometimes.
Still, he doesn't reply, and Camille is more alone than ever.
Nathan and Gloria and Teresa had been all that Camille had. All that she had wanted, in fact; she'd always had trouble interacting with girls her own age, had always been more comfortable in a room full of adults than in the lunchroom without Nathan at her side.
Nathan himself had tended towards asocial, often drawing in on himself, disassociating from those around them. The difference was that he had been capable of throwing on the charm, competent at pretending; he could be gloom and doom one moment, and casual charisma the next.
But not in between. Never in between.
Camille isn't like that. Camille isn't like Nathan. She feels disconnected, somehow; like no matter where she is, she doesn't belong.
She buries herself in schoolwork to make up for it, but no matter her grades or her achievements, her loneliness fails to fade. None of it makes up for the Nathan-sized hole in her heart. More than anything, she worries about him. She isn't angry or sad or disappointed. She's concern personified. Especially when Teresa, who now takes care of Gloria and her mother, tells her that Nathan has been attending a lot of parties lately, that the townspeople either think he's an asshole or crazy. Rumor has it that Sean Prescott's looking for someone to prescribe his son medication rather than for therapists.
It doesn't surprise her, and she aches for home.
The only good thing to come of her current arrangement is Principal Bisset, who happens to be one of Camille's mother's old friends. She invites Camille to tea a few times, tells her about what Marie had been like when she was younger, about how Marie had immigrated to Portland fresh out of university so she could study law. Camille's grandparents had apparently been furious with this development, which was likely why Camille would never meet the Algerian side of her family. But Principal Bisset had mentioned little to nothing of Camille's father, and as interesting as her stories are, Camille longs for more.
She longs to see her grandmother, who she's visited maybe twice in her whole life. Grandmother belongs to the Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribe, as had Camille's father. But it isn't like Grandmother and Marie ever spoke: in fact, Grandmother had always blamed Marie for his death. It probably hadn't helped that Marie wasn't Native American, hadn't been married to Ben, and had ultimately supported his decision to leave the Tribe.
In all fairness, as far as Camille is aware, Marie blames Grandmother for Ben's death too. The truth lies somewhere in between: the official story is that he'd been killed by a drunk driver on the way to the hospital. He'd been coming from Grandmother's house.
She supposes she holds a piece of the blame, too, for having the audacity to be born on that day.
But that's the official story. Because even though Grandmother and Marie have never spoken to Camille about Ben, it's common knowledge that her father had been a private investigator, and that some suspected his death hadn't been an accident after all. She's probably supposed to care about this, about the man she shares DNA with who is dead, but she's never known him, so how can she mourn? How can she mourn what she's never known?
It's only two days after her sixteenth birthday —from the sixteenth anniversary of his death— that she receives a literal engraved invitation from her mother.
Dear Camille,
You are cordially invited to the wedding of Marie Villeneuve and Sean Prescott on—
She stops reading.
And for the first time in over a year, calls Nathan.