Fandom: Legally Blonde: The Musical
Pairing: Elle/Emmett
Summary: A series of vignettes on how Elle and Emmett's friendship evolved over time. This is not a linear story, but overlapping pieces of ficlets that explore different themes.
Genre: Friendship, romance, fluff.

An Elle & Emmett Scrapbook

Once upon a time…

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Elle Woods and Emmett Forrest fell in love and lived happily ever after. But before that made things complicated and wonderful (usually at the same time), they were first and foremost: friends.

This is a scrapbook of that friendship.

Of First Impressions

Being an only child of an only child, Emmett's early exposure to the wonders of the fairer sex had been limited to the handful of female friends who rolled around the same social circles he did, i.e. they read books, drank coffee and wrote poetry that didn't rhyme. Emmett grew up only vaguely aware of the Pink Fraternity, though there were always in the far fringes of his consciousness where they always talked too loud and dressed even louder. It did not escape his notice that there was always one at the centre of the Pink Fraternity: the blonde with the perfect looks and the perfect body and the perfect boyfriend on her arm.

At the time, Emmett thought of that blonde and her posse as aliens from the fifth dimension, strange and unusual creatures who spoke an entirely different language and practiced bizarre alien rituals. Bradley, Emmett's best friend in junior high, had had a mad crush on their resident blonde, but for the life of him Emmett couldn't see the attraction. Every time Emmett looked at her, he'd had flashbacks to a scarf-wielding Katharine Ross (what? Stepford Wives is a classic), so he was content to let Bradley sigh wistfully for a gal who would in all likelihood be unable to tell the difference between The Shield and Captain America.

At Harvard law, Emmett's student years were not that much of a drought of the blonde phenomena, what with some of the best and brightest having a chirpy sweet young thing on their arm every other weekend. Even so, both members of that brand of couplehood belonged to a social Venn diagram far separate from Emmett's own, and barring that one time in freshman year Emmett caved to a classmate's pushy invitation to join a keg party, Emmett had never been within ten feet of such a bombshell, let alone had a conversation with one.

Seeing Elle Woods for the first time is rather like a seeing a dolphin on a beach.

A chirpy dolphin, all excitable and squeaking and flapping about happily, but a dolphin out of water nonetheless. This first impression, and the analogy that comes with it, proves more accurate than Emmett realises when just like a dolphin out of water, Elle Woods gasps and flounders in the strange new environment she's found herself in. She's a stranger in a strange land, no longer buffered by the comfort zone of the life that'd made her what she is, and rather doomed to drown.

When Emmett throws the lifeline to her, he doesn't know what to expect. A lesser person than Elle would have turned her nose at him; an even lesser person would have used him to further her cause and then discarded him at the first available chance. When he starts this little project, it's mostly because of the dolphin analogy, which quickly turns into a puppy analogy. Emmett could never turn down an abandoned puppy, and despite the warnings he gets about the sort of "person" Elle is, she turns out to have the alarming habit of proving Emmett right and everyone else wrong.

Elle has always been intelligent, Emmett spots that quickly, for it's just that for years she'd honed that intelligence into a pre-ordained destiny dictated to her by her family and friends. But to be honest, her untapped potential doesn't surprise Emmett – because after all, he's travelled that same path of being underestimated, albeit with very different shoes. What does surprise Emmett is that their similar path of proving people wrong turns out to be the first of many things he and Elle have in common.

He'd half-expected them to run out of things to talk about after that time he threw out her vanity collectables; truth be told, he expected her to get bored of him within a week. But the week turns into weeks and the weeks into months, and during that time their vastly different worlds gravitate into something that could be alignment.

At the heart of it is that despite her pepsodent smile and the fact that she can bench-press Emmett's thesaurus collection, Elle is constantly questioning her own worth. She's always thinking of how to try, how to improve, how to do things better, and though she confesses freely to her own impeccable fashion sense, she's always second guessing herself deep down at the core. While they work together on her notes, discussing case files and compiling her reviews, every now and then she looks at him with wide-eyed disbelief, as though craving confirmation that she's doing it right, and that she isn't making a fool of herself.

Even after she puts that first smackdown on Warner in class, and soon after gets Callahan's internship, her eyes continue to dart in Emmett's direction when she thinks no one's watching, and there's that amazement that only he seems to recognize. It's like she only now understands exactly what it takes for people to get where she is, and has trouble believing she could have made it. It's like she's waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Then it does, thanks to Callahan.

Only then does Emmett fully realize just how vulnerable she is. And, just as he has trouble believing Elle's insistence in his own worth ("Hot? How can she possibly say I look hot? She's my friend, of course she's supposed to tell me stuff like that"), Elle returns it in folds and refuses to believe him when he insists that she belongs in this brave new world. It's not that she doesn't believe him; it's just that she believes even more that he cares for her too much to tell her the cold, hard truth.

They're so alike.

Emmett has no choice but to bring in an otherwise neutral party to stop Elle from leaving, and Vivienne delivers in spades. Seems like he's not the only one to have first impressions proved wrong.