Will you be my answer now to everything?
Be my answer now to everything
So I feel less alone.

- Something to Believe by Cartel

Their first meeting is a lost tape filmed two and a half years ago when they first entered Hollywood Arts.

A tape that sits in the rather large cardboard box in front of Sikowitz's classroom labeled "Emotional Blackmail". The class eyes it warily, and their teacher looks at his audience, bemused and gleeful, like someone who knows a big, juicy secret. Like the drama teacher he is, he lets the tension in the room build before he does anything. Tori and Andre exchange looks and theories as to what the box really is full of; Robbie and Rex engage in a heated debate about how the former will react to 'emotional blackmail'; Cat claps her hands and yells, "Video tapes!"; Beck looks on passively; and, probably not taking it anymore, Jade hollers, "Get on with it!"

Sikowitz clears his throat and rubs his palms on what appear to be his pajama bottoms. He gestures to the box and smiles widely. "This," he says with a flourish, "Is a bunch of your old videotapes from when you guys were new to Hollywood Arts. I was… er… locked in the video archives late yesterday and I decided to be productive, so I sorted through all the old footage and found just the right ones to blackmail you with. I mean, show you in class, so you could see if there are points on which your younger self could have improved in. Who better to judge your work than yourself, huh?" His grin widens even more. It's evident he is infinitely proud of this idea. Unfortunately, his class only has half of the enthusiasm he does for the plan, because all it elicits from them is a groan. (Except from Tori, who is relatively new, and has no embarrassing two-year-old footage to worry about.)

As if he takes encouragement from the response, he hauls the TV out from the side and sets up an old tape player. "First video!" he says eagerly as he pulls out a random tape from the box. He pushes it into the player, and it takes a moment, but the video shows up onscreen, of Robbie and Rex eating alone in the little boys' room and Sikowitz coming to terrorize him – that is, provide him with an improv situation on the spot. "You and your puppet are in an argument about socks!" comes Sikowitz's prompt, and a much younger Robbie and Rex begin to squabble about unmatched, striped, and plaid socks.

Jade cannot bring herself to pay too much attention; anything that involves a conversation about socks could hardly hold her interest for very long, compounded by the fact that it was Robbie delivering it. She finds picking at the chip in her black nail polish far more interesting, so she does that instead while Sikowitz pauses the video and grills Robbie on 'what he could have done better'. So far, the teacher's attempt to make actual use of the videos with which he terrorized unsuspecting Hollywood Arts newbies years ago seems to be working with everyone but her.

A few more boring videos are played, and then Sikowitz puts in another one. As before, Jade does not pay attention at first, before she hears a familiar line that strikes a chord in her memory. "Jade! Pick a random boy in the Asphalt Café and convince him you've liked him for a while, and ask him to go out with you!" Sikowitz's voice goes. She knows exactly why this improv scene was what he gave her. Two and a half years ago, she was the 'weird kid'. The loner. The girl who talked to no one. It was going to be a challenge to convince anyone she had a heart, much less that she had been liking them for a long time now and that she wanted to go out with them.

Her steely blue gaze shoots towards the screen, her skin paling even more, if that is even humanly possible. It's that video, she thinks. There's a flicker of a smile on younger Jade's face, and a look of determination in her blue eyes. Yes, she remembers that feeling. That I'll impress Sikowitz feeling. I'll show you how good I am. The feelings she knew up until Tori Vega had come along and pulled that rug from under her. There on the screen, though, is a Jade West without insecurities. Confident. Determined. Willful. The younger version of herself looks around, scoping the crowd for that 'random boy'.

In the present, her current self looks around until her eyes settle on one particular boy. Beck's face stares at the screen passively, revealing nothing. She looks away. Maybe she's the only one upset by all this. It figures.

The younger Jade, with brown hair and a bright expression, has settled on a target. She strides up determinedly to a boy at the counter, who is in the middle of ordering a cheeseburger. His dark, floppy hair is familiar, as is his lean frame, tanned skin, and flannel shirt. But to the Jade in the video, he is the perfect stranger and she slides right up to him. She beams up at him with a million-watt smile and says, "Hi," in a voice so sweet it almost sounds disembodied from her, from the girl no one knows to be sweet.

This throws the boy for a loop. "H-h-hi," he stutters out, unsure of how to react. Whether this is because he is naturally jumpy or simply because he has no idea why this particular girl has come up to him despite all the rumors that she is allergic to human beings is unsure.

Sikowitz seems to snicker from behind the potted plant he hides behind.

Jade tucks some brown hair behind her ear as she looks up at the boy shyly. Shyly! Imagine that. She plays with a necklace hanging from her neck as she says, "Um…" but there's nothing uncertain about the sound. It's carefully planned and it's working, because the boy stares at her with rapt attention, the fact that he's still in line to pay for his burger forgotten. "I was sitting over there," she says as she gestures to a space halfway across the café, and then turns her attention back to him. "And I saw you here, and I wanted to come up and talk to you. If that's okay."

The puzzled look on the boy's face does not leave. "Sure," he says quietly, as he runs a hand through his dark hair, stressed by the whole situation. "But why?" he finds that he cannot help but ask.

The girl smiles excitedly. "Because I like you! I have since I saw you first day of school," she says simply, adding, "And I'd really like to go out with you sometime."

It might be the hope sparkling in her blue eyes or the fact that she just looks particularly pretty in the light that day, but the boy is dumbstruck. His mouth is slightly ajar, perhaps in shock, before he closes it again. "Y-yeah," he barely manages to get out. "And… scene," Sikowitz's voice is the last word in the video, and the last frame is that of Jade's coy smile and raised eyebrow.

The video pauses at Sikowitz's command, and he looks over at Jade now, her eyes still fixed on the screen. "Well, Jade? Anything you could have improved on in that performance?" he asks expectantly.

She rolls her eyes, finally making her recovery from watching that video all over again. "Yeah," she snapped, "I could have picked a better boy." With that, she picks up her bag and strides out the door, taking care to slam it behind her.

She remembers how the next few hours of that scene stretched on, the part that wasn't caught on tape. She had walked away from Beck after Sikowitz called scene, leaving him standing there more confused than ever. She thinks that's the end of it. Imagine her surprise when the boy turns up at her locker later that day as she's about to head home. "What," she demands, slamming her locker with finality. There's no camera anymore, no teacher to impress, and she abandons faces as quickly as she takes them on. She stares him down, a completely changed person, hoping to God that he doesn't think that the act was the truth. There's honestly nothing she likes better than to be left alone.

"So," he begins, not at all the stuttering mess he was earlier that day, but a suave, cool, and confident boy with a quirked eyebrow and the same expression she herself wore hours earlier: determination. "Ready to go?"

"Go where?" she asks, incredulous. Does he sincerely not get that she was acting earlier?

He shrugs. "I don't know. Coffee? I hear Jet Brew's really good, but I haven't really tried it yet. Who knows, we might both like it," he suggests innocently, even though there's something amused in his voice that makes her think that he isn't talking about the coffee at all. It both irritates and perplexes her.

She loves coffee and needs some in her system right now, but she's not about to tell.

"Listen, stupid," she begins gruffly, using the extent of her fourteen-year-old vocabulary's roster of insults. She shuts her locker as she takes a step closer to him, not intimidated by his smug smirk or his perfect hair. Clearly, she has the upper hand in this if she got him to say yes, right? "Sikowitz ambushed me and made me ask you out. Get it through your thick skull that I don't actually like you."

He smirks again. "Sure I will, if you're more polite about it. What's the magic word?"

She looks at him, genuinely confused he's still here. The sardonic smile returns to her face, though, as she is bound and determined, one way or another, to get him to leave. "'Go find a ditch to crawl into and die in'?" she asks sweetly before she turns on her heel and begins to walk away.

He follows her. "Ooh, close. Wrong, though."

She stops in her tracks, exasperated. "All right, all right! Please?" The last word's said far too loudly, making all the upperclassmen in Hollywood Arts turn to look at the eighth-graders, bemused and all smiles and wolf-whistles and "you go, dude!"s. Jade grits her teeth in resignation as she looks up at him. "Fine. One coffee. And then you leave me alone."

A smile breaks out on his face, and it's ecstatic. "All right. But no promises, because you didn't say the magic word," he says teasingly.

She groans. "Please! Please leave me alone!"

He doesn't.

Two and a half years later, Jade sits on her own at the steps of Hollywood Arts, having quit Sikowitz's class in a fit of anger and refusing to go back and show her face there again for the rest of the period. Or the rest of her life, she considers for half a beat. She hardly notices when someone sits next to her, but when she does, she doesn't bother to look at who it is. She doesn't care who it is, really; she just wants to be on her own right now. "Go away," she all but yells. No one in the hallway turns to look; they're used to the Jade West outbursts by now, after more than two years of putting up with it.

"Did you mean that?" Beck's voice comes from beside her, and she finally turns to look. "Do you really regret… us?" he asks. He isn't looking at her. He's looking at the ground, at his hands, at the wall – everywhere else but at her. He's afraid, she realizes. From the look in his eyes, she knows that he's not sure he wants to hear the answer. Why he should care, she has no idea. He was the one who didn't open the goddamn door, anyway.

And yet she couldn't bring herself to lie to him. "No," she answers finally, stubbornly. Then she snaps, "But don't go thinking that means anything. It just means I'm sick of stupid boyfriends and I consider you a lesson learned." It's a sad thing that her pride always runs away with her. She sees a small, rueful smile on his face and she just wants to take it back, but they've broken up and she feels the need to be as cruel as she possibly can to him just to stave off the pain.

"All right, all right," he says, caving finally. He pushes himself up off the floor and reaches a hand out to help her up. She doesn't take it, but he isn't surprised. She brushes herself off, as if doing so would dust off her vulnerabilities and insecurities. "For the record, though," he says with a nod, "I don't regret us either." And it's his turn to leave her there, alone on the steps.

Looks like she finally got what she wanted, she thinks.

Please. Leave me alone, please.

She just wishes that he either did it that first day, or not at all.

Author's Note: So I wanted to do my own take of how Bade started, and this was the result. I liked the idea of Jade having been the one to 'beg for a date' technically, so this was how it turned out. Hope you liked it! :)

Disclaimer: I don't own Cartel or Victorious.