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! Remember, reviewing is free ;)
While the first five full minutes of their dinner may have been an awkward mess—in, and Camille couldn't stress this enough, no small part due to Nathan—the next thirty of it is spent discussing shopping plans, which includes a lot of talk about Nathan "atoning for his sins," so to speak. Victoria elaborates on the matter by voluntelling Nathan that he is to be their chauffeur and be the designated Bag Carrier.
The date the three of them agree upon is next week, and it looms tangibly in the distance. In the meantime, Camille finds herself inundated with social obligations. It's been so long since she's last seen Nathan that suddenly spending nearly every waking moment with him can be exhausting. On top of that, her fledgling friendship with Victoria (and Victoria herself) demand attention. If Camille finds Nathan, the angry, angsty teen boy with whom she's been friends for practically her whole life tiring after a few years of little to no social interaction, then the experience of befriending another woman—let alone one who fills the preppy-mean-girl-shaped hole in Camille's life—is practically killing her stone dead.
Saying that Camille isn't well-versed in what's considered "commonplace" in a friendship with another woman is a gross understatement. She hadn't ever thought that the stereotypes of women gossiping and braiding each other's hair and doing each other's nails and makeup could be true. But it's all real, except that Victoria's short haircut doesn't allow for braids, and they aren't so plebeian as to touch each other's feet; there are people for that.
It still baffles—and bothers—her that Victoria is a summation of YA literary clichés, an amalgamation of Vogue and Marie Claire and Seventeen all wrapped up in the visage of an angry pixie with pearls. It's all so…surface level. Maybe it's the fact that she knows Nathan better than she knows herself, knows him deep in her bones, knows what he's going to do before he does. Maybe that's what makes her long for something…more from Victoria, but if nothing else, Victoria is extremely private, and Camille knows that these sorts of connections—this sort of trust—takes a long time to develop.
So Camille grins and bears it, even if she'd rather be out on a hike, around taking photos, or about reading one of her novels.
By the day they're set to go shopping in Portland, Camille's nails are short and neat, her hair is smooth and softer than it's ever been, and her skin seems to glow. For as much as she might complain to Victoria about how long it took to achieve each individual piece of the puzzle, in the end she finds that the sum exceeds the parts; it's amazing what a little work has done for her appearance. And, as Victoria points out, Camille has to start preparing herself—both physically and mentally—for the wedding. With the former having been more or less accomplished, Victoria says, Camille can start to think about the latter, though Camille isn't precisely sure what Victoria is referring to.
Once Victoria has found the address for the first shop (of six, in case they really can't find anything) and Nathan has nearly backed into the family car ("it was an accident, I didn't mean to hit the gas so hard, I swear") they leave Arcadia Bay. Nathan blasts rap with the windows down. It's still a little chilly for Camille's tastes, so she spends the journey laying down in the backseats, wrapped in his jacket, trying to see if it's possible to hypnotize herself with the passing greenery, which soon morphs into brick and steel.
It's a nice day, so they park in a narrow spot in the parking garage (which Nathan fails to pull into not once, not twice, and not even thrice, but four times, total) and walk around Portland. Camille insists that they make a pit stop at a tea store, and Nathan and Victoria agree through eye contact alone to indulge her. The meaningful looks they cast each other don't go unnoticed by Camille, but she chooses to put them out of her mind. There's no use in worrying about something that she might never understand, and since Victoria insists that Nathan is like an annoying little brother to her, Camille decides to take her words at face value.
She doesn't even know why it bothers her so much.
At the first shop, Victoria finds The One, a beautiful lilac dress that makes her look even more like Tinkerbell's long-lost (and grumpier) sister than ever. Even still, she says she should wait and explore her options. She asks the lady at the desk to hold the dress for her so that she can come back for it later if, she insists, she decides she wants it, because who knows what she might find elsewhere. She even finishes her statement by looking down her nose at the now aggrieved looking cashier.
The lady hadn't even had a chance to lose the dress, and yet Victoria had put the fear of Chase in her. All Camille can think is that she would hate to be on Victoria's bad side.
The second, third, and fifth stores also end up being busts for Camille—and they'll never know about the fourth, because they'd been barred from entry for having a bag of "food items", aka Camille's loose leaf tea selection. Nathan had promptly threatened to call Mr. Prescott, and Victoria had been compelled to go into Damage Control Mode, because Portland isn't Arcadia Bay, and the Prescott name means next to nothing here. Victoria tried to usher Nathan away as though he were a senile man reminiscing about the good old days when the sun hadn't yet set on the Prescott Empire. Camille had begrudgingly let the other girl put an end to the situation; personally, she'd been more than willing to hear Nathan's Draco Malfoy, my-father-will-hear-about-this speech. Instead, she settled for watching Victoria's slight frame wrestle with Nathan's lankier one for almost three full minutes, until Victoria's voice was hoarse from restrained whispers and her face was puce with irritation. All in all, it had been pretty amusing, if not a little embarrassing.
By the final store, the glint of determination in Victoria's eyes has whittled away to nothing—Camille can tell because Victoria doesn't even smack Nathan for sighing nearly three dozen times before they've even entered the store. Normally, Victoria would be pecking at him like an angry bird by now, but she just seems exhausted. Camille hadn't known it was possible for the spiritual embodiment of Regina George to become sick of shopping, but it's happened. She doesn't even seem to be enjoying the experience anymore, instead tossing dresses at Camille and examining them with a critical eye rather than appreciating the quality of the fabric or the richness of the color as she had previously.
Victoria has been staring at a certain dress and the way it hangs on Camille's frame for a solid five minutes when finally, Nathan snaps.
"Why the fuck are we still here," he bemoans, burying his slightly—always—shaking hands into his hair. "She looks great, Vic."
Camille, who has been mesmerized by the way his knee seems to vibrate up and down, finds herself concurring.
Victoria does not. "We—" she huffs, "did not come to Portland, go to six different stores, and try on a hundred different dresses for Camille to just look 'great!'" she says in a rush, the words coming out in a half-screech, half-squawk that has Camille, in turns, terrified and amused.
But when she puts it like that, Camille can't help but think that maybe she's right. "Yeah, Nate," she says for lack of anything better to say; Victoria's argument was sound and they all knew it.
He takes a brief break from looking like he'd like to be drowning himself in the nearest body of water to stick his tongue out at her. "Five minutes," he says. "You have five minutes and then we're leaving no matter what."
As much as Camille appreciates his patience today, this won't do. They're so close. And Victoria is pretty close to snapping once and for all, too.
"Nate, please."
He refuses to look at her, fully aware that she'll end up getting her way if he does, and Camille, fully aware of this strategy, leaves the safety of the dressing room door frame to kneel down beside his chair so that he's forced to meet her gaze anyway. Then, her bottom lip juts out, and brown eyes imploringly meet blue. He lasts a second. She times it mentally, and it's only a second.
"Fine," he grumbles out.
She uses his knee as leverage to stand, gives it a break from its side job as a bouncy castle. "Thanks, Nate."
He shakes his head like he's given up some vital part of his masculinity in allowing himself to be swayed by her, and Victoria merely observes the interaction with keen interest.
Camille dusts off her own knees. "So, I was thinking," she begins, hoping this will make all involved parties slightly less irritated with the current state of affairs, "maybe Nathan should head back to the first store and pick up your dress, Victoria?"
Victoria immediately vetoes the idea. "No. No fucking way. Nathan doesn't know the difference between plum and eggplant, and that cashier," she says cashier the same way one might say janitor or public restroom, "might have mixed up my dress."
"Doesn't plum have more green in it?" Nathan asks, probably just to be an asshole. Camille knocks her knuckles into his shoulder in warning.
Victoria falls for the bait, anyway, quite literally stomping her foot. "See?" She shoots him another Look, this one full of exasperation. "No," she decides, "I'll go pick up my dress." She points to the slowly dwindling pile tucked away in the dressing room. "For all that Nathan doesn't know colors, he is a good judge of fashion, so he'll pay attention from now on—and I don't just mean leering, Prescott, or I'll kick your ass—and help you pick your dress, okay?"
Before either of them can object or question her in any way, she's gone.
Nathan and Camille share a look, one of mutual understanding that—
"And," Victoria bursts back into the small space with all the gravity of a dying star, "don't even think about not trying on all of them."
Camille's shoulders sag, the part of her that was hoping to squeeze in some photography this afternoon relinquishing, once and for all, said hope. There are fifteen dresses left and donning each steadily feels more and more like a chore, and though she slogs through them with all the enthusiasm of someone watching a movie that's already been spoiled for them, she does slog through them, so that's saying something. She even tries on the dresses that she knows from a glance she won't like, either because of their color or their cut. Others reveal themselves to have too-short-to-be-appropriate hemlines, or too deeply cut décolletage only once she tries them on. Despite his wolf whistling, even Nathan agrees that some of Victoria's choices are questionable, considering the context of the event.
The final dress in the pile is a subdued blue number that daringly shows off the vertebrae from the nape of her neck to the middle of her back. It's more reserved than Victoria's other choices, with even the color seeming muted, nearly drab, but it suits Camille in personality and in style, and that's good enough for her.
Nathan's immediate reaction leaves much to be desired; he takes in the front with a blank expression, then, as he had for all the other dress, gestures for her to do a slow spin and show him the back. When she's facing him once more, his expression is even harder to read.
She hopes that it's a good thing she can't tell what he's thinking sometimes, and not a sign that maybe they aren't as close as she thinks they are, as she thinks Nathan and Victoria are, Victoria who can silence Nathan with a glance sideways, Victoria who winks at Nathan when she thinks Camille isn't paying attention.
"I think this is the one," Camille starts, hoping he'll agree, both so that they can leave and because she really does like this dress. It's understated, but elegant enough that she's sure her mother won't have a fit.
Who knows what her soon-to-be stepfather will think.
And honestly, she doesn't even care, except for the grief it'll cause Nathan and Teresa and her mother.
"Nathan?" she prompts, snapping her fingers when he still doesn't respond. "What do you think?"
Because even if he doesn't like the dress, he looked so deep in thought just now that he must have been thinking about something, must have—
"Yeah," he agrees, rather anticlimactically.
Camille huffs a short breath. "After all the time we've spent looking, you're giving me a 'yeah?'" she hisses in a tone that is reminiscent of Victoria. She hopes he knows that it's also a threat to tattle on him to the other girl.
She doesn't bother allowing him to reply, whirling back into the dressing room. She feels heat flood her cheeks but is unsure what she'd been expecting from him. What should he have said? She doesn't know, but certainly something other than 'yeah' would have been nice. Victoria would have had the right compliment, would have prompted Nathan to give the right compliment—
Fuck.
She has a bigger problem. Or, as circumstances might have it, a smaller problem; the zipper is at an awkward angle and she can't quite reach it. In other words, she needs Nathan. Great.
"Nathan?" she calls hesitantly, unlocking the door so that she can poke her head out at him.
He grunts in reply, barely looking up from whatever it is that he's typing on his phone.
"Need help," she mutters, embarrassed, and watches as his fingers freeze.
"You need help...?" he trails off, eyes startlingly bright.
"Yeah," she says, biting her lip. She coughs slightly. "Um, getting—getting the dress off?"
It's not a question, but it comes out like one anyway.
Why is this so embarrassing?
"Getting the dress off," he repeats slowly, as though he hasn't heard her.
She knows he has.
Asshole.
Her flush spreads to her ears, because when he says it like that, it sounds so much less innocent than she'd meant. "Y-yeah." She clears her throat. Twice. "Sorry."
A wry smile creeps over his lips, but all he does is gesture for her to go back into the room. He closes the door behind him as he joins her, and there's a note of finality to the door clicking shut that makes her fingers tap against her thighs in anticipation. When they make eye contact in the mirror, she thinks her heart nearly leaps out of her chest, because there's something about this, something about him right now that is just so—
She can't even put the feeling into words.
Nathan takes his time familiarizing himself with the fastenings, and now that Camille thinks about it, she's not entirely sure how she managed to get the dress on to begin with. A similar thought must pass through Nathan's mind, because his brow briefly furrows, and his tongue pokes out to lick at his bottom lip, one of his many nervous habits.
It's then that she notices how much taller he is than her, how he towers over her, how his lashes cast shadows under his already dark-with-exhaustion under eye, how cute the curl that curves over his forehead, refusing to be tamed, is.
He isn't sleeping well again, is he okay? Is he still having those dreams?
He begins with the fastener that disguises the end of the zipper, and Camille nearly jumps when one of his fingers grazes her bare skin as he bunches the fabric together and then apart again. He mutters a quiet sorry, and then his right hand is braced against her back, finger tips against the same skin he'd only accidentally touched a few moments prior, and her breath is caught in her throat, and then… then it's over. Her dress is suddenly unzipped all the way down to the small of her back, and that's that.
Except it isn't because his eyes meet hers in the mirror and then he's turning her around, his knuckles tracing a path back up her spine and she shudders and—
"I got the dress!" Victoria calls from the hall.
Camille is so startled that she trips into Nathan, their feet entangling in a mess of limbs, and as she frantically tries to separate his legs from hers, they end up smacking into the mirror, causing her to let out a loud oof as she's suddenly pressed chest to chest with him.
"Nathan, Camille?"
The door opens, and from behind Nathan, all Camille can see is Victoria's smug smile.
"Isn't this…cozy."