Disclaimer: I own Victorious. (Just kidding.)
Chapter 6
Beck wakes up with a crick in his neck and the sun beating down at a terrible angle right into his eyes. He looks at the clock by his bed and it reads 10:55am. Fuck. I'm late for school! He scrambles to get up, get off his bed, but somehow he had gotten himself tangled in the sheets and ended up pretty much with a mouthful of carpet.
"Aw…Jesus…" He mutters to himself as he extracts himself from the blasted sheets and pushes himself to a sitting position. He takes a minute for him to get his bearings and realize that today, was in fact, Saturday. He groans and rests his head on the side of his bed and rubs his elbow, he was sure to have a bruise. He's somewhat rested, as last night's sleep was deep enough and he went to bed super early. He yawns anyways.
Eventually he pulls himself to a standing position and looks around his trailer. He should probably clean it up a bit, the place was pretty rank. He doesn't know how Cat stood it last night.
Cat. He wonders how she is, and then wonders why he cares. He shrugs it off.
He fishes around for something clean to wear and realizes he's pretty much out of wearable clothes and Poptarts and so he sighs as he realizes he needs to go in the house for reinforcements. He catches a whiff of himself and decides a shower is probably in his best interests, too.
So that's how Beck finds himself sporting a laundry basket under his arm banging on his kitchen door because his family seems to like to forget that he lives on the property, too. He hears shuffling and eventually the lock slides open. Finally.
He pushes open the door and sees his whole family in the kitchen finishing their breakfast. Well, gee, thanks guys. His mother smiles at him, his sister makes a comment on how ragged he looks (which he ignores) and his father doesn't even look up from the paper he was reading. Typical.
"Beck! Please, get a plate, honey. We've already had our fill." His mother offers him.
Beck looks at his father who still hasn't acknowledged him and sighs. "I have laundry to do." Lame cop-out.
His mom looks nonplussed. "I'll take care of that for you." She says as she moves to grab his basket and is already on her way to the laundry room before he could protest.
"But…" He begins to think of an excuse but decides ten minutes with his 'family' won't kill him. He sits down at his old spot at the table and loads a plate up with French toast, eggs, bacon, and fruit. Stale Poptarts be damned.
He eats in silence until his mother comes back into the room empty handed. "Should be ready in about an hour." She smiles and sits, sipping her coffee.
He loves his mother. He does. She likes to please everyone, which doesn't work out too well for him when he and his father disagree. His mother usually tries to stay neutral but eventually ends up siding with his father every damn time. Marriage does crazy things to people. Yeah, it fucks 'em up.
He looks over at his older sister. She was alright. When she wasn't talking. She was two years older than him and should have been in college already, but was taking a year off to 'find herself.' Beck called bullshit on that one as soon as he heard it. She just wanted to stay home and party. But of course, she can do no wrong in their dad's eyes. If Beck even tried that one, he would've been kicked out and shipped off to military school. Oh, military school. His dad threatened him with that one a lot. When he spoke to him.
Lately, his dad had just resorted to not speaking to Beck when he could help it. He didn't understand why he wanted to go to Hollywood Arts or why he couldn't be the perfect son in the perfect all-American family or why he didn't want to just be a doctor, or a lawyer, like him.
His mom broke him out of his reverie. "Beck, dear. How's Jade?" At least his mother tried to make an effort when he came for these occasional meals with his family which was only when he needed something in the house. Usually he tried to sneak in for showers and stuff when he knew they weren't all gathered somewhere and he kept up a steady diet of junk food and fast food garbage. But there was the occasional time when he happened to stumble upon a happy family moment.
"We broke up." He says simply, taking a sip from the juice his mother poured for him. No need to go into the gory details. This seems to get his father's attention because Beck could tell he was no longer reading the newspaper, just staring at it and listening to the conversation.
"But, why?" His mother asks, trying to seem concerned but he knew she was happy in the inside. Well, hey, so was he.
He shrugs nonchalantly.
"Is there someone else you have your eye on?" She asks innocently.
He stops chewing for a moment. Funny you should mention that. His mother must have picked up on his hesitation, because she probed on.
"What's her name?" She is genuinely curious now.
Tori Vega. "Nobody. Mom, I'm not interested in anyone right now." This sounds fake even to his own ears. His sister snorts and he doesn't pay her any attention. He sees his dad shake his head.
His mom gives him an 'oh please' look. But he doesn't budge so she gives up, not without a "mhmmm, right."
His father says something for the first time. "Well, he shouldn't spend all of his time worrying about girls, anyways, Carol. He should be focusing on—" He stops for a minute and Beck knew he was going to say 'school' until he remembered that he hated Beck's school (and Beck's ambitions for that matter). "—other things." He finishes up lamely.
Beck rolls his eyes and stands up in a hurry. He's had enough of this conversation and these people. "Well, thanks for the food mom." He doesn't look at their faces as he makes his way up the stairs to his old room. He shuts the door behind him and lets out a breath. He could only be around them for so long before he suffocated. He roots through his drawers, hoping he has some clothes left over in here. He's surprised when he opens a drawer and sees a bunch of clothes that he was missing now folded and clean and put away. He's confused for a sec, like what kind of paranormal activity shit is going on, until it occurs to him that his mom probably did it the last time he needed his clothes washed. His heart goes out to her for a second. She'd never stop hoping that he would make up with his dad. But that would never happen. They were just too different. (Alike.)
He grabs a shirt and jeans and boxers and steps into his bathroom, locking the door behind him. He looks at his reflection in the mirror and sighs.
Thirty minutes later he's freshly showered and gathering up the clothes in his drawers and his freshly washed load from the dryer to head back to his trailer. He stops to grab a couple of bags of chips and a pack of soda (and a few beers). A guy's gotta eat.
He slips back out the kitchen door without being seen.
After Beck puts away his clothes and straightens up his trailer he is out of meaningless tasks to distract himself with. He had some serious shit to figure out. But he realizes he can't really do much else until he talks to Jade. So, he grabs his keys, steels his nerves, and makes his way over to her house.
Surprisingly, he hasn't been to Jade's all that often. He'd only been inside about three times and he mostly had just picked her up when they went out. They usually just stuck around his trailer when they were together, anyway. She lived in a nice enough neighborhood. It occurs to him that he probably should have called first or something as he pulls up to her house but, oh well. He puts his game face on and walks up to her front door.
He knocks three times and silently hopes no one answers.
He waits about four minutes and is about to rejoice in his stroke of luck and walk away, but then she opens the door. Damn.
"Beck?" She squints, as if she can't really tell it's him. "Come in…" She steps aside to let him pass by.
"Are your parents home?" He asks, just kind of because he needed something to say.
"No," She grunts as she steps into the living room. "Sit down," She orders as she retires to the armchair.
He chooses the couch across from her and for a second she's silent and finally he gets a good look at her.
She looks, to be quite honest, pretty terrible. Her hair isn't brushed, she has no makeup on, her eyes are red and puffy like she'd been crying, (though he doesn't want to dwell on that) and she's in her old pajamas. This was so weird.
"So?" She says with a hard edge to her voice. Ahhh, there she is.
"I'm not here to get back together with you." He blurts. He went with the blunt approach, he guesses.
"I know." She sighs.
"You know?" He questions.
"Cat told me. Last night." She looks around nervously, as if this is broaching a bad subject.
"Oh, yeah. She said she came on your behalf. What was that about? She seemed really upset after I said I wouldn't get back with you." He figures if anyone knows why, it'd be Jade, because obviously they were together at some point last night.
"That's just Cat being Cat. She's weird." Jade says lamely.
"Bullshit."
She sighs again and begins to speak. "You don't need to know everything about everyone, Beckett. She went to talk to you last night for me because she thought it'd be better for… everyone if we were together again. Don't ask me why," Because I'm not going to tell you. He hears the rest of her sentence loud and clear even if she doesn't voice it.
He figures he'd find out eventually. "Well, I guess me and her are sort of friends now." He doesn't know why he tells this to Jade. He just kind of felt like she should know.
She looks surprised, and a little uncomfortable. "Why?"
"She needs a friend." He levels her with a stare.
She squirms. "We all need friends, Beck…"
He says nothing.
"I'm sorry." She says and it breaks the silence just as well as if she'd dropped a metal pot on a tile floor.
"You're sorry? For what?" He asks incredulously. Jade didn't apologize. Like, ever. He feels like he should get this on tape or something.
"That shit I pulled at lunch yesterday. I probably shouldn'tve done that. It was... stupid." She says finally, breaking eye contact.
He is so shocked it's almost laughable. Jade was seriously apologizing and she seemed to mean it. This was surreal. In fact, this entire visit she'd been acting really out of the ordinary, sort of how Cat was acting really strangely last night. A random thought hits him. "Are you stoned right now?"
She just stares at him before breaking out into a fit of laughter. He joins her for a second as he notices how weird this situation is. Here, they are, laughing like old friends. But the smile slides off his face. They've never been friends. They probably never will be.
"She's not that bad, Oliver." She says unexpectedly after she calms down. There it was again, his last name. But she didn't seem angry, so he rethinks the whole using his last name only when she's pissed off thing.
"Who, Cat?" He knows Cat isn't that bad. At times she was a little overwhelming, but not completely unbearable.
"No. Not Cat. Vega."
He doesn't know what to say to this. So he says nothing and looks at the wall above her head.
"I think she'd be good for you." This girl was just full of surprises today.
He looks back at her and she has a blank face on, but he must have let something slip on his own, because her features visibly soften just the tiniest bit.
"I could see that you two were good together. From day one. That's why I treat her like shit. But… if you love her, I'll make an effort. For C—uh, you. For you." Beck was so baffled, he didn't even pay that much attention to her little slip up.
"I don't…" He weakly begins to protest his feelings but she stops him.
"Beck, I know you. Regardless of how our relationship was, I was still with you all the time for two years. I can read you so easily, you don't even know. And I know you love Vega. And that's okay. You need her." She finishes, and he gets a glimpse of why he fell in love with her all that time ago. She was real.
He realizes that his distaste for Jade had subsided substantially rather quickly. He didn't wanna jump her bones or anything, he was way over that, but he thinks, maybe one day, they could be acquaintances. Or something.
"She has Andre." Is the only thing he can think to say to her, as his head was spinning too quickly for him to focus.
"But she loves you." She says bluntly.
He doesn't protest because he heard it for himself. But somehow, hearing it from an outside party, especially one such as Jade, just makes it that much sweeter to him. He guesses if he can't have her, he at least has that little piece of knowledge. She loved him back, if only for a little while.
"Why are you being so…not Jade-like?" He asks, because he'd really rather change the subject.
She chuckles. "Don't get used to it."
He smiles.
After a few minutes of just staring at each other in semi-awkward, semi-comfortable silence, he stands up. "I should get going." She walks him to the door.
She opens it for him, but he hesitates for whatever reason.
"Don't take too long, Beck. Or you'll lose her."
He's standing there, next to her, trying to control the emotions that come bubbling to the surface. He exhales slowly and nods. When he's sure he won't betray anything he's feeling (although he knows it's futile, she knows him better than he ever gave her credit for) he looks over at her. This would be the time to hug if they were friends, or kiss if they were going out, but they are neither one so he mutters a "thanks Jade" and makes his way down her walkway. He stops to look up once more at her door when he reaches his car, sort of expecting her to be standing there watching him go or something, but he isn't really surprised to see the door closed and Jade nowhere in sight. He gets in the drivers seat and pulls away from her house. Yes, he may not detest her quite like he did before, and today he's seen a side of her she'd never showed him when they were dating, and she knows things about him he'd really rather she not, but he knows it was a one time thing. She'll go back to being bitchy Jade, his ex-girlfriend from hell in no time.
Even so, as he drove under the California sun, he couldn't keep her last few words from echoing in his mind.
Don't take too long, Beck. Or you'll lose her.
You'll lose her.
That thought hurts him more than it should.
A/N: Now that that's over... I can't decide whether I hate this chapter, or love it. Or like it a little. I don't know. I don't like the first part. Lame. But I kind of had fun writing Becko's talk with the Jademonster. Because, she has a point. She does really know him. Whether he likes it or not. And it'd make sense that she was a total bitch-a-roni to Tori. Because even she could see Bori was clearly the better couple. :) She's super OOC, but that's because shit went down the night before. Could she possibly be all upset for the same reason Cat is? Hmm.. I don't know... :) Chapter 7 we get some Robbie action. Maybe a little Rex, too.
You know the drill. Thank you so much for the feedback. But I just really want to say I didn't know what to expect posting this story on FF because I've never actually posted on this site. I'm just a creepster who reads FF religiously. But all the love I'm getting I do really appreciate. So much! Everytime I see an email saying I have a story alert/favorite or author alert/favorite or a review for this story it makes me super happy. It feel like I'm doing this for a purpose, ya dig? Alright. I'm done.
Stay perfect, lovelies.