Fic: What She'll Remember
Title: What She'll Remember
Fandom: Victorious
Word Count: ~1,000
Rating: pg13
Prompt: Jade (Jade/Beck)
Recipient: smells_corrupt
Spoilers: Through 4.6, “Tori fixes Beck and Jade”; implied future
Characters: Jade/Beck(/Cat), Tori & brief allusions to Andre & Robby
Summary: Jade’s thoughts during the performance
A/N: Happy December! I'm sorry, darling - I'm not sure what this is. Hopefully you like it!
[Jade looks out at the crowd]
The mic stand was really all that mattered to Jade. So cool and sturdy, she caressed it and she knew half the audience was turned on. Hell, she was. There was nothing like being on stage - singing on stage - to get Jade’s blood pumping. She went into hyper-focus. The edges of her vision blurred. She threw herself into the moment, she was there, just there - on stage. It didn’t matter much if the audience was three people or thirty people or three hundred people (she had passed it all up before and she’d probably do it again, for love), it never really would. She couldn’t see all those people anyway.
What she sees is Cat dancing. And so she sings harder, harder. She watches Cat dance faster, faster. She leans into the music and propels her voice forward. She needs Cat to dance. Where was Cat all day, anyway? And the thought worries her. Because she should have known. She needs Cat to listen. And so she sings.
“Do you miss him?”
Cat considers, humming to herself, her small leg thrown over Jade’s thighs, her fingers tangling up Jade’s hair. “I don’t notice anymore.” There’s a pause and Jade tries to pick out the song that Cat is humming into her shoulder, but drops the line, rubbing the smaller girl’s shoulder absently. “Do you?”
Jade looks up at the ceiling, barely making out the glow-in-the-dark stars she and Cat applied to her ceiling years ago - - it’s so late in the night, they cast hardly any glow, “Not as much as I thought.”
They fall asleep in the same moment.
What she sees is Tori singing along. With the stupidest look on her face, she knows every word and sings with her eyes closed. And does that surprise anyone, really? So she sings louder, louder. She almost starts laughing. She almost pulls the brunette onto the stage with her. She almost forgets where she is.
“It’s a confessional.”
“To Beck?” Tori’s eyebrows furrow and Jade smiles (just a little).
“No. To me,” her voice is softer than it used to be - she wonders at that lack of edge. She only needs it so often now.
And Tori doesn’t really understand, but her eyes soften and she smiles. And maybe Jade doesn’t fight the Tori-squeeze half as much as she used to, but does that matter? And they sit over the piano - sometimes with Andre and sometimes without, they don’t need him as much as he thinks - and they pour her onto the page.
What she sees is Andre and Robby dancing along. And her mind crystalizes on that. She sees the four of them in front of her and her life is so very there in that moment. Right there on that stage, Jade sings the words she wrote to the people who will understand them the most. And yes, she sees him to the left of her, standing apart, smiling that smile that sends shivers down his spine and she smiles at him, she teases him - but today isn’t about winning his smile.
The first time they both end up in the janitor’s closet at the same time, Jade genuinely thinks about getting Sinjin to write up a split custody plan. Only it’s so normal it doesn’t hurt. They both just sit in silence for the first couple of months. Almost like they always had. Only somehow with less tension now.
And then they start talking. Normal. Talking. About classes, about Cat, about Tori and the guys, about Sinjin’s latest antics, about how worried they are that Robby will not give up Rex.
The first time they both laugh together she doesn’t allow herself to stop them short, she lets the laughter build up and pass naturally. As if it were the most natural thing in the world to sit on the floor of the janitor’s closet laughing about a joke they both shouldn’t have made.
When - a few weeks later - she ends up in his lap, her bra unhooked, a hicky on his shoulder; it doesn’t feel awkward at all. It feels like the most normal thing they’ve ever done. And she feels almost like a weight has been lifted. When she straightens herself, nips at his nose, and stands up - they both know neither is going to say anything to anyone else.
No one notices or remarks. There’s nothing to remark upon. They’re the same as they ever were. Only something is so different, Jade’s not even sure how to describe it. The itch in her skin is gone. She’s no longer terrified of losing him - she doesn’t possess him anyway. And it feels better that way.
And she’ll never really be able to explain why - after all that time of building themselves back up, of working around each other, of re-learning and fitting back into each other - why she never told him about this song. When he kisses her on the stage and she smiles so full a smile usually reserved only for him, with no malice or sarcasm or wit attached to it it’s not because she was singing for him.
He sits close to her beside the stage as they watch Tori perform, their fingers twirled around each other’s just like always. And it feels like a bad time, but Beck’s never really been good at timing - it’s something they’ll always have in common.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it? Everyone else knew all the words, you even sang it for Rex.”
Jade doesn’t skip a beat, she just kisses him softly with a little bite at the end that makes him suck in his breath, “It wasn’t about you.”
She can’t remember seeing him as she performed that day, until the end. Until he was right there on stage with her. And that felt best.
Because all she really remembers is singing. The feel of her dress against her skin, the hard floor pounding the bass beneath her feet, the cold metal of the microphone in her hand, the way the mic stand kept her grounded when her body felt as though it would explode and leave her aching and raw and exposed, the feel of her hair weightless as she flipped it to and fro. What she saw in that moment, with her hair flying around her and the blood pumping through her veins, were the people that supported her - the ones she’d always see. But what she remembered was just the moment of being alone.
And damn, it felt good.
ps- dearest, darlingest flist; I am a *terrible* spammer today. I promise to be less obnoxious tmw.