A/N: This is a No Zombies, High School AU. I was sure I remembered Tara's dad saying he had been in the army, and I used that fact to build up a lot of Tara's characterisation in this fic, but then when I re-watched Live Bait it seemed I was mistaken. So, for the purposes of the fic, her dad was in the army, having retired a short time before the start of the fic, so her character is a little different, obviously a little younger (maybe 16/17) and with more of an emphasis on the insecure parts of her personality that we saw in 4B. Hope it comes across ok.

Title is from Bulletproof Heart by My Chemical Romance. Hope you enjoy!

The first time Tara meets Beth Greene, it's in math class, which seems like as a good a place as any to meet a person except that Tara hates math and so associating it with any good memory at all seems just a little bit…wrong.

It's her third day at yet another new school—her dad's promised that this is the last time, that they're staying put, but she's not convinced of that at all—and she'd arrived five minutes late because she'd gotten lost, so when she finally entered the classroom, it had been with her trademark scowl and a glare for any one who'd dared look at her. She'd taken the only available seat, too worked up and anxious to pay much attention to the person sitting next to it, and had tried to focus on what the teacher was saying.

She doesn't really get the concept, but she does her best to apply it anyway, copying down the triangles and then trying to work out the missing dimensions.

She's erasing her workings out for the third time, getting increasingly frustrated, when the person next to her—she gets a flash of blonde hair in her peripheral vision as she stubbornly keeps her eyes on her book—leans over and whispers, "You're using the wrong formula."

The voice is soft, the accent thick but not harsh, and Tara can't help but look up. The girl sitting next to her is smiling, and not a mocking smile but a genuine, helpful one, and Tara blinks at her. "Huh?"

"The formula," she says, pointing at Tara's work book. "You need to use cosine for that one, see here? Then you'll get it right."

"Oh," Tara says, and she looks down at where the girl's pointing. She's right, and Tara changes the formula and completes the diagram. "Thanks," she says, and she looks back up at the girl. She's pretty, Tara thinks, with a faint dusting of freckles over her nose and a cute little braid in her ponytail.

"I'm Beth," the girl says, big blue eyes looking at her.

"Tara," she says back, and then she smiles without even meaning to.

It's been a while since Tara had a friend; two years, maybe three. Two moves ago, anyway. She'd given up on them after that, had built up walls to keep people out because it hurts less in the long run. She'd only be leaving anyway, she reasons. She always ends up leaving.

The truth is, Beth's one of those people who Tara normally dislikes on principle. She's sweet and kind and genuinely nice, traits that Tara finds inexplicable on a good day, but somehow Beth gets under her skin. The day after they meet, she pops up next to Tara in the hallway, smiling like she's pleased to see her, and just falls into step beside her on the way to English. She talks, not too much but enough to make it clear she's exactly where she means to be, and Tara answers back in as few words as possible because there's a warm feeling in her belly and she doesn't trust it at all.

Beth does a lot of that, it seems, turning up when Tara least expects it. She's sitting alone in the cafeteria three days later, poking half-heartedly at whatever the hell her lunch is supposed to be, and then suddenly Beth's sliding in beside her, chattering about how she can't believe their Spanish teacher dropped a test on them without warning.

"What are you doing?" Tara asks suspiciously, because people don't sit with her at lunch. They give her a wide berth if anything, nudging each other as they pass.

"Eating lunch," Beth says, pulling out her pack-up and crunching on a carrot stick. "What are you doing?"

"What does it look like?" she snaps, and then she frowns, regretting the harshness of her tone. "Why are you sitting here?"

Beth shifts to the side a little, looks at the seat of her chair. "Was someone else sitting here?" She looks back up at Tara as she shifts back into her seat, a mischievous little half-smile on her face.

There's an uncomfortable prickling on the back of Tara's neck. "No," she mutters defensively. "It's just…people don't sit with me."

"Well I am."

"But why?" she persists, unable to let it drop.

Beth snags a fry off Tara's tray. "Maybe I'm trying to be your friend."

"I don't need a friend," Tara mumbles, but she shoves her tray closer to Beth anyway.

They share the rest of the fries, and Beth tells a funny story about her dad trying to catch a sheep, and Tara thinks that maybe she might want a friend after all.

Beth sits with her every day at lunch after that, and Tara doesn't let herself acknowledge the fact that it's becoming a regular thing. She gets her lunch, sits at that same table, and inevitably Beth appears, brown paper bag in hand, and they end up sharing their lunches. Beth chatters a lot, as if she knows that Tara never knows quite what to say and wants to make it easier on her.

"Do you always talk so much?" Tara asks her one time, when Beth pauses for breath.

"Nope," Beth says, her voice light. "Just when I need to." She grins at Tara, and then offers her the open bag of chips.

She's been at the school maybe three weeks when Beth steps up her game a little. They've got double gym, and Tara's stopped halfway round the cross-country track to duck behind what looks like a disused shed for a much-needed smoke. She's lost in her own thoughts, and suddenly long fingers are curling over her shorter ones, snagging the cigarette and Beth's looking at her with her eyes all crinkled up as she takes a drag. Tara's so surprised that she chokes on her lungful of smoke, because Beth seems like such an archetypal good girl, daughter of the good Christian vet, and this is entirely unexpected. Beth arches an eyebrow at her, her cheeks hollowed out as she takes a drag, as if to say that she knows exactly what Tara's thinking. The trouble is, Tara half-thinks that Beth always knows what she's thinking.

Tara knows how people see her, what they think when they see her thick eyeliner and her nose ring, her battered leather jacket and her permanent scowl. She knows how they see her because that's exactly what her intention is, to keep people out.

There's something about the way that Beth smiles at her though that tells Tara that she sees right through her, right through the walls and the cold-bitch façade she's worked so hard to build, and it scares the crap out of her but somehow she just can't say no to her either.

They smoke together in silence that day, and the following week when Tara peels away from the rest of the class as they near the shed, she doesn't have to look back to know that Beth's right behind her.

It's the first really warm day of spring, and Tara's walking home, hands shoved into her pockets and music playing too loud, loud enough so she doesn't hear the footsteps behind her. She makes an embarrassing sort of squeak when Beth startles her by grabbing her shoulders from behind.

"Hey!"

She pulls her earphones out, trying to still her pounding heart. "What—" she gasps out, and then stops, breathes. "What did you do that for?"

"Just trying to scare you a little," Beth says, her voice teasing. "C'mon." She grabs Tara's hand and turns her back the way Tara's just come, and before she knows it they're crammed into a booth at the little coffee shop in town with three of Beth's friends.

"Iced coffee and air conditioning," Beth says. "We do this every year."

It's awkward as hell, and Tara sits in-between Beth and one of the other girls, her shoulders curled in, looking down at her hands and rubbing at the scar on her palm from when she fell off her bike one time as a kid. She doesn't know why Beth brought her along, and worse than that, she doesn't know why she let her just manoeuvre her here without so much as a question. She's getting used to Beth's company when it's just the two of them, has started adding her own snippets of conversation to Beth's, but here with these other girls that she doesn't know, somehow the words she needs just won't form in her head.

"…Tara's really good at English, right Tara?" Beth's voice filters through, and Tara jerks her head up a little too quickly.

"Um," she says, and her throat is tight, like it's almost closed up. "What?" Her voice comes out all strangled, and she can feel the heat rising in her cheeks.

Beth grins at her like she hasn't even noticed. "I was just saying, you're really good at English, and Rachel really needs help with studying for her mid-term, and I bet you could do that, right?"

"Um, I guess," Tara says, glancing across the table at the brunette who she vaguely remembers Beth introducing as Rachel. "I already did most of it last semester."

"Oh, that'd be awesome," Rachel beams back at her. "I'm going to Beth's on Friday to study, maybe you could come?"

Tara looks at Beth, who nods, and then back at Rachel. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I can do that."

Beth lives on a farm, and Tara knew that already, but she's not really prepared for the scope of it when Beth's mom drives them up to the house. She gets out of the car, turns right round in a big circle, and marvels at the fact that she can't see another house for miles. It's so peaceful.

When they get into the house, she stands awkwardly in the hallway as she takes it all in, takes in the kitschy furnishings and the traditional décor, the way it's somehow light and airy, like she's seen in magazines, but also cosy and welcoming at the same time. It feels lived in, like Beth and her family are somehow built into the very foundations of it, like there's a symbiotic flow from family to house and back again.

It feels like a home, in a way that no house she's lived in ever has.

"My mom made cookies," Beth says, breaking Tara out of her thoughts. "Here, gimme your jacket."

She hands it over, and then Beth leads them upstairs, passing several doors—"that's Shawn's room, he'll be back later, and Maggie's, she's still at college"—until they get to the end of the hallway and what Tara presumes is Beth's room.

Beth's room feels strangely like an extension of the rest of the house, but with her own unique stamp on it. There's a vintage metal bedstead up against one wall, piled high with cushions and a bedspread with ditzy flowers on it, but there's band posters stuck haphazardly above it in a way that jars with the rest of the furnishings. Tara glances across to the other side of the room to where Beth's got clothes hanging from the top of her closet door, and then she spots a guitar on a stand in the corner and a pile of sketchpads on the desk. Yes, she thinks. It's definitely got Beth written all over it.

They sit together on Beth's bed, Rachel in the middle and Tara and Beth huddled on either side, and although they start off talking about the English project while they eat the cookies that Beth had brought up with them, they quickly veer off the subject and end up just chatting instead. Beth's talking about maybe starting a band, and Rachel's got a dance show coming up, and Tara says she's probably going to take her niece to the zoo at the weekend.

It feels a little weird, just sitting chatting with them, almost like something out of a teen movie, surreal like Tara could get yanked out of it at any moment. Yet somehow, she doesn't feel the risk quite so strongly as before, feels like maybe she can find a comfortable medium where she has friends without getting in too deep.

She should have known it wouldn't really be that simple.