I don't own Victorious or any of the characters! They're slightly OOC here, but given the circumstances of the story, this is how I anticipated them to behave. I just had an idea and ran with it.

I don't know when it happened exactly. Or how. One day I looked back on the life we were living, and it had turned into one of those TV shows that depict teenagers as being completely fucked up. You know, the partying, the drugs, the generally messed up view of the world. But then I'd think about it and I'd come to the conclusion that was exactly what we all were: fucked up.

It was the summer before our senior year of high school when I came to the cold realization that there was something terribly wrong with all of us. But that was also the time that I realized that I really didn't know if I cared anymore. I figured I would die someday, and what little difference it made to me if it was tomorrow or in forty years.

There had been a party. A big one, right before school was to start again. I can't remember who hosted it, and it really didn't matter.

I had been in the middle of a conversation with Beck, though his slurred speech hardly registered to me as I watched him drink straight from a bottle of whiskey. I had been much more concerned with the lit joint in his hand that I so casually slipped from his fingers and in between my lips. I inhaled deeply, feeling the smoke fill my lungs and I held it there, nodding my head like I was actually paying attention to what Beck had been saying.

Cat came sauntering by, giggling like a madwoman as she fell into my side. Instinctively, I wrapped a protective arm around her waist to hold her up. Her eyes had looked at me, but I knew she hadn't really seen me. She had took up the bad habit of taking pills. Whatever she could get her hands on. Whatever would make her float by all of the terrible things that was going on in her life. She had placed a gentle kiss on my cheek before withdrawing from my hold and moving to a different room. I watched as she went on, and that was when I saw her: Tori Vega.

She had been standing out on the porch, and I watched through the sliding glass door as she lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. I tried my hardest to remember when it was that she started smoking, but my memory failed me because suddenly I had a strong desire to be what her lips were touching so delicately.

I took one last hit from the joint before passing it back to Beck, and excused myself from the conversation without a word. I heard him call my name, clearly confused about my abrupt departure, though I ignored it.

I held the smoke in my lungs as I walked, only releasing it into the air when I felt myself getting light headed. I slid the door open and approached her rather determinately. She didn't notice me until my fingers were plucking the cigarette from her lips and filling the empty space with my mouth. She tasted like ash, and surprisingly enough I didn't mind because there was the faintest taste of mint mingled with it.

I had anticipated resistance when I snaked my empty hand around her neck, but instead I had been met with an equal passion.

The guy that she had been talking to made a few noises of discomfort before finally getting the picture to leave the two of us alone. When I heard the door slide shut, I finally allowed myself to retreat from the kiss. I didn't chance a look in her direction, instead I leaned against the railing and looked out onto the beach that the house overlooked. I realized that I still had her cigarette in my hand and I took a drag. She leaned next to me and casted me a sideways glance.

"Since when did you start smoking?" I had asked her as I passed back the cigarette, though my eyes remained locked on the crashing waves.

I heard her laugh as she accepted her cigarette again, "Since when did you start caring?"

At that point, I finally looked at her. It always pained me that she could think so highly of me, and yet still truly believe that I disliked her. At the same time, I couldn't stand the thought of her actually knowing my true feelings. Her eyes mirrored that same distraught look as she took another casual drag from the cigarette. She flicked the ash off the deck with a quick twitch of her thumb. She redirected her attention back to the ocean as she cleared her throat.

"You look thinner." I had commented, not really anticipating an answer. I caught on months ago that Tori had developed a problem, and I couldn't quite figure out how no one else had.

"So do you." She retorted so quickly, I had actually been caught off guard.

It was a stalemate in my eyes. Neither of us really had a good enough reason to care about the other, not after everything that had happened.

"Things have really fallen apart, haven't they?" I heard her small voice say after a long moment of silence. My eyes slid over to her, though hers remained fixated in front of her.

"Come on." I had said, tentatively taking her wrist and leading her off the deck and down the lit walkway that lead to the beach. We ditched our shoes where the grass died off into sand and made our way to the water. A now dying bonfire had been set up a few feet away from where we stood.

"What happened to us?" She asked as she watched the waves lap at her feet.

I let out a sigh, "I don't know, Tori."

"Beck is still in love with you." She said as she lit another cigarette and passed it to me.

"Andre's still in love with you." I replied as I accepted it.

She scoffed as she lit another, "He shouldn't be. Not after what we did."

"They aren't saints in the situation either." I said casually.

"It killed me. You know that, don't you?"

I took a deep drag and held it in my lungs as I thought about what she had asked, "What did?"

"Lying. To both of them. To everyone, actually." She said as she kicked at the water.

"I never asked you to do that." I replied coldly.

Another scoff, "You never asked me much of anything, and yet I would have bent over backwards for you."

"Some people might call that pathetic." I said quickly, though guilt soon seeped in once my words were out there.

"And some people don't even give a fuck about you anymore, Jade."

This time the scoff came from me as I looked at her, "Fuck, Tori. What are you saying? That all of this," I motioned behind us to the house where our friends were doing Lord knows what, "is our fault? Is because of us?"

"I don't even know anymore, Jade. I don't even know what happened!"

"I'll tell you what happened: Cat couldn't keep acting like nothing could touch her, so she had to do something to really keep her from reality. Robbie is so self-loathing that the only thing that could keep him from killing himself is being so high that he doesn't even know who he is."

"What about Beck? Hm? And Andre?" Tori insisted.

I shook my head, "Beck's been drunk since he was sixteen. He just stopped hiding it. Andre just likes having a good time." I said as I laughed cynically.

Tori shoved me once I finished my list of our friends, "Is this just a fucking joke to you?" She seethed.

I barely had the reaction time to keep myself from falling into the water, "Fuck. Are you kidding me? What about you, Tori?" I asked once I regained my composure.

"What about me?" Tori asked, and I could see she was trying her best to seem as though there wasn't a damn thing wrong with her.

"What happened to you? I can't even remember the last time I saw you actually eat something. And the smoking?" I asked as I held my cigarette in between us for emphasis, "What's that going to do to that voice of yours?"

I could see the tears streaming down her face in the flickering light of the flames off to the side.

"What about you?" She asked coldly.

"Don't." I snapped in a warning tone.

"It's July, Jade. What are you doing wearing long sleeves?" She asked condescendingly. I knew she already knew the answer to that.

"Well, we all have our vices." I said as I cleared my throat and looked back to the water.

"And what are we supposed to do when our biggest vice is each other?" She asked rhetorically.

"You know exactly what you have to do." I said softly.

"What?" She asked.

"Quit me. Cut me out of your fucking life so we can get over this and move on."

"What is there to move on to, Jade? It's like none of us even know each other anymore. I just can't help thinking that if we hadn't-"

"Fine. We shouldn't have been fucking behind their backs. I'll give you that. But don't you dare blame yourself for the way that everyone else turned out." I said, my voice shaking now.

She let out a sigh as she flicked the butt of her cigarette into the sand and wrapped her arms around her thin body.

I took another puff from the cigarette as I contemplated what I should say next, "That wasn't how I anticipated everyone finding out, you know."

"You wanted people to know?" She asked me, and I couldn't help smiling at the sound of pure shock in her voice. There was even a little bit of hope, if I wasn't imagining it.

"Yeah. I did. You know, we didn't do anything wrong, Tori. We just got caught up in all the shit. Everything that happened would have happened regardless of what you and I did behind closed doors." I said as I took a few steps back and sat down on the dry sand. She followed suit and I watched as she shivered in the cool breeze. I shrugged out of my zip up and wrapped it around her shoulders. I instinctively wrapped my arms around my legs to hide what I had been doing to myself.

"Was Beck mad when he found out?" She asked softly.

I shook my head, "I think he saw it coming. We both knew that we were over a long time ago. Just too afraid to admit it to each other. He'd been sleeping around too, I guess. What about Andre?"

"Furious would be a better way to describe it. He wouldn't speak to me for a week, and when he finally did it was just him asking me over and over again how I didn't stop him when he started falling in love with me. Like anything I could have said would have stopped him." She said with a laugh.

I let out a light laugh until I heard stirring behind us. I turned quickly to see Beck and Cat making their way through the sand and over to us. Cat looked sleepy, like she was finally coming down from her last trip as she clung desperately onto Beck's hand. Beck still seemed a little drunk, though no where nearly as bad as before.

"Mind if we join you?" He asked as he got closer. Tori and I both shook our heads as we watched them sit on Tori's side.

We sat in a very comforting silence as we watched the sun start to peek slightly out from the horizon. Tori leaned her head on my shoulder and I let out a soft sigh as I gently placed my cheek against the crown of her head. I felt her hand sneak its way around my arm as she gently traced my scars.

There was more movement coming from behind us and I didn't even have to turn around to know who it was. Robbie was suddenly seated beside me with a rather loud smell of weed clinging to him. Andre appeared next to him with a beer bottle in his hand. He twirled the glass around with a concentrated look on his face.

The sun was rising now, lighting up the trashed beach as well as what I could only imagine to be the disaster of a house behind us.

"I'm so sorry." Tori choked out. I hadn't even realized that she had been crying, though I felt her tears bleeding through my shirt and onto my shoulder. I pulled her closer to me and kissed the top of her head.

"We all are." Robbie said quietly.

"We'll be okay, right?" Andre asked. All of us snapped out of our own thoughts and looked to our friend.

"I hope so." Cat whispered and I watched as she buried her face in Beck's neck.

"Of course we will." Beck said reassuringly as he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close.

That was the night that I realized maybe we weren't hopeless. Maybe we still had a chance. Not to go back to the way things were before, obviously. But to move forward and become something better.