Author: fraidy bat

Rating: T

Pairings: Olivia/Viola, Viola/Duke, Sebastian/Olivia

Summary: We see things from Olivia's POV, and all may not be well.

Disclaimer: I do not own anything from She's the Man. None of it belongs to me.

Notes: There will be minor departure from Olivia's POV in this one. Do not be alarmed; everything is under control. :)

Chapter 6

I didn't even have to open my eyes to know that I was in a bed that wasn't mine in a room that wasn't mine. The sheets weren't as soft as the ones I was used to, and the slight sweaty sock smell definitely wasn't something one would find in my room. This was a boy room, a very boy room.

Sebastian's room.

Holy shit.

I sat bolt upright, eyes snapping open. I instinctively checked the bed I was in to see if anyone else was there; no one was. It seemed I was alone in Sebastian and Duke's room at (I glanced at the bedside clock) 10:51 AM. I threw the covers aside, preparing to get out of there, when I suddenly thought to check that I wasn't in any sort of state of undress. Looking down, I was immensely relieved to find that I was still wearing the jeans and designer t-shirt from the night before. I had slept in my clothes, and from the looks of the empty sleeping bag on the floor next to the bed, I had slept alone. At least I hadn't managed to do two incredibly stupid things in one night.

The moment of reassurance was brief. As soon as I figured out where I was and what I was doing there, the events of the night before came rushing back. Cesario's, the concert, the confession in my room, the kiss…

"Why did I do that?" I muttered to myself, putting my head in my hands.

"Do what?"

Startled, I emitted an odd squeak. Sebastian, standing in the doorway with a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste in his hand, chuckled at me.

"Sorry, didn't mean to scare you," he said kindly, tossing the toothbrush and toothpaste into a drawer.

"It's okay," I said in a small voice, not sure how to proceed after everything I'd done the night before.

"Sleep well?"

"Sebastian, I…"

He sighed and took a seat in his desk chair. "Olivia, I want to say something here, okay?"

I nodded, bracing myself for whatever was coming.

"I want to tell you that I'm…I'm sorry for how I acted after you said you wanted to break up."

"No, Sebastian, don't be sorry—you had every right—"

He put a hand up to silence me and smiled sadly. "Just let me finish. I like you, a lot, and things started out really great between us, but—I knew that something was different these past few weeks. I thought maybe I was too into my music, or there was another guy…"

Gulping, I gripped the edge of the blanket next to me.

"So when you said you couldn't be with me anymore, I wanted to fix it, whatever was wrong. I thought if I just worked at it, everything would be cool and I wouldn't lose you." Sebastian looked away, shaking his head. "But when you said that you're in love with…with Viola—I knew it was really over. That's why I didn't want to see you, and why I just walked out like that. It was too hard to look at you and know that the thing I'd been afraid of since the beginning had finally happened. But I was still an ass for ignoring you."

"Since the beginning?" I asked, unable to stop myself.

He nodded, smiling again, but now it was more than sad. It was sympathetic. "Viola never told me any of the details, but I knew how you felt about, um, Sebastian, before you met me, and there was always this little nagging worry rolling around in my brain that the amazing, hot girl I was with would eventually realize that I wasn't really the person she liked after all."

"Sebastian, you need to know that I really did like you, but…" My voice faltered and broke, and I felt like crying, but there had been far too much of that going on recently, so I held it in.

"Olivia, I get it," he said, and even though he was obviously hurting, there was no bitterness in his words. "You can't help the way you feel—none of us can. Yeah, I could be angry at you and never talk to you again—and honestly, I was tempted—but after last night, there's no way I could still be mad." He paused to give me a look so full of compassion that I would have burst into tears if I weren't focusing all my energy on not crying. "I guess I didn't really understand how much this was hurting you, too."

"I'm so sorry about coming here last night and dumping all this on you—" I blurted unceremoniously, unable to keep it in anymore. "I don't even really remember what I said."

"Well, mostly you just bawled all over my shirt for a really long time. Don't worry, Duke figured it had something to do with our stormy breakup and left to sleep on Toby and Andrew's floor. You sort of said a few things about the concert and about, um, Viola, but again, mostly crying. You seemed really tired and messed up, so I put you to bed. You passed out so fast, it was like you'd had six shots of tequila or something."

Sebastian was really smiling now, and I couldn't help but smile back. "I don't deserve you, Sebastian Hastings."

"No, you really don't," he said, very seriously, before smiling again. We both laughed a little, and I sighed.

"I should probably go back to my dorm. Maria might be wondering where I am."

"Yeah."

There was an awkward silence that hung heavily in the air between us until Sebastian leaned toward me with a cautiously curious expression.

"So…did you really…kiss my sister?" he asked, eyeing me carefully.

My face must have been bright, flaming red, because it felt like every spare drop of blood in my body had rushed there all at once. "Oh my god."

Sebastian's sympathetic smile was back. "Yeah, you said something about that last night in all the crying, and I guess—I guess I just wondered if it was true, and I can see by your reaction that it, uh, is."

"Oh my god," I said again, hiding my face with my hands.

"Olivia." Sebastian stood up and came over to me. He laid a hand on my shoulder. "I won't lie and say that I don't wish we could still be together or that this won't be hard for me, but I…I care about you a lot." He laughed softly to himself. "I can't believe I'm actually going to say this, but I really do hope that we can still be friends."

I forced myself to look up at him. "Really?"

"Really." He took his hand off my shoulder and stepped back a bit. "I would rather be your friend than be nothing to you at all. So, if you need someone to talk to…"

I stood up and gave him a quick hug before starting to look around for my shoes. I spotted them by the door, and when I had them on and had fixed my hair a little so I didn't look as much like a train wreck as I felt, I turned back to Sebastian. He gave me a jaunty look and half a smile.

"Well, if it has to be someone other than me, it might as well be another Hastings. Keep you in the family, and all that."

I wanted to find the right words to leave him with, something to explain all of my mixed up feelings, but the simplest sentiment turned out to be the best. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said, and before he looked away, I thought I saw him blinking away a tear or two.

Viola Hastings could not have cared less about the principle of supply and demand. At least not right now. The teacher droned on and on, but she hadn't caught a single word all period. Mondays always dragged horribly, but this was no normal Monday. This was the Monday after the weekend when the world had turned upside down.

Viola was vaguely aware of the bell ringing. Students began pouring out of classrooms and into the hallway. Viola floated along with the current, still lost in her thoughts. Eventually, a familiar pair of strong hands took her by the shoulders and pulled out of the river of humanity. Duke Orsino smiled warmly at her and enfolded her in an embrace.

"Hey, babe," he said, releasing her so they could walk to the cafeteria. "How was econ?"

"Good," she replied absently, knowing full well that she had no idea how econ was. She'd been there in body, but her mind had been very far away from economics. Her mind seemed to have gotten stuck in Saturday night, and no matter how hard she tried wrenching it back into the present, it wouldn't budge.

Don't think about it.

Have to. Can't help it.

Well, then just don't think.

It was lunchtime now anyway, and not thinking should have been easy. One of the side effects of playing for the Illyria boys' soccer team was that most of her friends were jock guys. Hanging with them never seemed to require many brain cells, and she was grateful for that today. Principal Gold handed her the usual apple and sandwich with his usual unnaturally cheery air, and Viola felt hard pressed not to think. Principal Gold's face led her brain down a certain lane in her memory, a lane that ended in front of his office with Viola picking up scattered schoolbooks that belonged to—

Stop thinking.

She plopped into a seat between Duke and Andrew at their normal lunch table. The guys were already engaged in a lively conversation about which soccer referee was the most ugly. Viola laughed at Toby's joke about an unfortunately placed mole on one ref's face. She felt better already, more relaxed. Ugly referees and facial blemishes would get her through this. The conversation soon disintegrated into a minor belching contest that began to try Viola's patience. She loved these boys to death, especially Duke, but sometimes their intense testosterone levels made her long for a little estrogen to balance everything out. She had Kia and Yvonne, but they still went to Cornwall and weren't around all the time. The only female friends she really had at Illyria were Eunice and—

You're thinking again.

Tempting fate, Viola swept the cafeteria with her eyes. She pretended that she wasn't looking for anyone in particular, but she was. She caught sight of Malcolm, acting as much like an idiot as ever, but the person who would normally be in Malcolm's general vicinity at any given time (the person Viola was not actually looking for, of course), wasn't anywhere to be seen. Viola breathed a sigh of relief and tried to get back into whatever was happening with the boys at her table, but her mind had anchored itself to Saturday night again. She sensed that it was a losing battle, and she might as well think it out and get it overwith.

How did I not see this coming?

Viola laughed bitterly, realizing how naïve she'd been to think that simply revealing herself as a girl would make any awkward complications disappear. She was reminded of the conversation in the bathroom with—

Oh hell, just think about her and stop being such a coward.

With Olivia. When Olivia had expressed her feelings for "Sebastian." Viola was completely caught off guard by that, but she shouldn't have been. As a girl, Viola should have known exactly what Olivia was really doing when she asked Duke out. She should have picked up on all the signals Olivia was broadcasting loud and clear in Viola's direction during those two weeks. Viola had noticed Olivia watching her when she thought "Sebastian" wasn't looking, she understood that Olivia had indeed "given her the nod." She listened carefully when Olivia disappointedly asked why she wasn't "Sebastian's" type. She heard Olivia's cute little giggle whenever "Sebastian" said something funny. The setup with Duke to make "Sebastian" jealous should have been as obvious as a neon sign in a dark room, but Viola had been clueless. All the little signs and signals coming from Olivia had not gone unnoticed, but they simply hadn't stuck in Viola's mind as being important. Viola was so wrapped up in her own personal mess that she hadn't processed the information available to her, and she paid for it with the shock she got in that bathroom.

She paid for that same naïveté again on Saturday night. Viola felt an impulse to smack herself on the forehead, but remembered that she was in the cafeteria, surrounded by people who had no idea what was happening in her head. She reluctantly went back into the memory of Saturday, turning everything over in her mind.

Olivia likes me.

Even thinking that sentence frightened her. And made her intensely angry with herself for being such an idiot. She should have been more considerate of Olivia's feelings in all of this. Olivia was right; Viola never truly apologized for her big lie. She had assumed that her brother Sebastian's presence would heal any wounds instantly, and Olivia and the real Sebastian would live happily ever after. If she had just addressed the obvious issues that would result from a situation like hers and Olivia's, maybe they wouldn't be in the tangled mess right now.

Viola wanted to be mad at Olivia for disturbing the status quo, for rocking the boat and upsetting the balance of things. She wanted to blame Olivia for not being satisfied with Sebastian. She wanted to vehemently disagree with the assessment that Viola and "Sebastian" were more similar than she thought. Viola wanted this to be someone else's fault.

But it wasn't. And Viola couldn't do any of those things. She was pretty sure that Olivia knew she hadn't disguised herself as a guy to hurt anyone, but the damage was done. Feelings were hurt, people were hurt—and Viola had the awful premonition that more would be hurt before this was resolved. More than anything, she wanted to go back to the way things were. She wanted her friend back, and even though it had only been a couple days since Olivia's very personal confession, Viola was anticipating feeling the loss of someone so important to her. There had to be a way to fix this.

But how?

Viola had no idea how to deal with this and still keep Olivia as a friend. She felt the burden of responsibility for the situation, and it worried her. Sebastian's involvement in this thing worried her, too. What Duke would think if he found out and how it might affect their relationship, that worried her.

But the thing that worried her the most, the thing that she still refused to think about in the middle of the cafeteria with her boyfriend sitting right next to her, was the three or four seconds of insanity on Saturday night. Three or four seconds in which—

Don't go there.

In which Olivia kissed her—

Don't.

And Viola didn't push her away.

Stop thinking.

Just stop.