Fandom: Friday Night Lights
Title: Paper Dolls
Spoilers: 2.2
Summary: Tyra knew exactly how beautiful she was.
A/N: Many thanks to the fabulous xlightof_love for the beta.






Tyra knew exactly how beautiful she was.

In the movies, the girl never realizes how pretty she is, and she’s the more charming for it. But Tyra always knew, and she secretly suspected those innocent movie girls didn’t really exist. How could you not see the face staring back at you in the mirror, or the way heads turn in your direction whenever you walk into a room? Contrary to popular belief, beautiful doesn’t mean stupid.

Her mother always told her how lucky she was, how many doors her pretty face would open. Tyra could remember being five years old, brushing her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and thinking happily to herself: blonde hair and blue eyes, just what boys like best. Those words had come from somewhere.

But over time she learned to resent her face. She was like an unwitting honey-trap, luring men in with her creamy skin and pillowy lips, but that’s not what she wanted. She didn’t want to seduce guys, trick them into thinking they liked her when what they actually liked were her perfectly-placed curves. And she was a magnet for less hapless victims, mercenary boys who only laughed at her jokes because they were thinking of what a pretty little notch she’d make in their bedpost. Every guy fell into one camp or the other; the only difficulty was in figuring out which one.

Sometimes she looked at the ugly girls in the halls with the same kind of envy she saw in their faces when they looked at her. They’d never have to wonder if their boyfriends wouldn’t have looked at them twice if they hadn’t been the prettiest girl in school. When a guy stuttered when talking to them or finally worked up the nerve to kiss them, they knew that guy was seeing something deeper than skin. That had to be nice.

When a guy showed interest in Tyra, she just assumed it meant he was a shallow pig deep down. And whenever she succumbed, surrendering to the soulful eyes of a broken boy or the golden promises in the story of a traveler passing through, she was inevitably proved right.

When the little quarterback’s friend started staring at her, mouth hanging open when she passed by as if he were some goddamn cartoon character, it was just more of the same. One more stupid boy dazzled by an outside she couldn’t control anymore than he could, an animal transfixed by a shiny object.

Part of her wanted to scream at him to stop, because he didn’t know her. And she doubted he cared to, because those wide eyes of his sure as hell weren’t admiring her intellect.

But it made her a little sad, too. He didn’t know her, and just once she wanted someone to look at her that way because they did.

But then… he was funny. And he was kind and he was smart, and somehow he wormed his way under her skin. Maybe it was the night he had held her together when she felt like she would have flown apart into a hundred thousand pieces, and or maybe it was the way he got her the help she never would have been able to ask for.

She felt the moment it all shifted. She had tried to apologize for the vicious words she’d flung at him in a rare moment of total and raw vulnerability, but he didn’t accept her artful smile and limpid eyes, which had never failed her before. It was as though seeing her broken open had made him immune to her pretty face.

And when he fought back – not with hateful words like she had done, but with passionate, loving ones – she felt something gathering momentum in her chest the same way it was building in his voice.

Someone who will recognize you for the smart and beautiful and caring woman that you are.

It was like he had given words to the catechism of her heart, beautiful buried in the middle of the sentence like it barely mattered or meant something entirely different, and when he looked at her as he said it, she felt, for the first time, like someone was looking at her. A better version of herself, of course – someone smarter and more caring than she really was – but she realized that was the person he saw. She was more beautiful in his eyes than she was in the mirror, and it had nothing to do with the way she looked. The realization shook her to the core, and the feeling lingered with her for days after that, like a secret, this little spot of warmth that crept up on her in quiet moments and sang through her veins when she lay in bed at night.

She’d never really understood that saying, looking through love’s eyes, but she began to. She saw the way people looked at them, frowns of confusion creasing their foreheads at the unlikeliness of their pair, but she no longer saw the disparity. He was more handsome to her everyday – lit up from the inside by strength and goodness – and she felt daily more plain, like the ugly girls who knew they were loved for themselves, because of the way he looked into her instead of at her.

When he undressed her for the first time, trembling hands running reverently over each new inch of skin, she felt comfortable in her own body for the first time. Sex had always been an ordeal of mixed vanity and insecurity, but his eyes had laid her more naked than this so many times that it felt like a return home instead of a step forward.

When he fell asleep beside her, one arm slung across her stomach, she looked at him and tried to remember a time when he’d been ugly to her. She reached out and touched his face softly. It was true, his eyes were a little small, too close together. He had bad skin and a big nose and two bottom teeth that overlapped. She could still see all of that, but it no longer seemed ugly at all. He was gorgeous to her.

When he opened his eyes to find her staring at him, his fingers crept across her neck and into her hair, and he laid warm lips against her forehead before pulling away to look at her.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and she held her breath in sudden anxiety, waiting with a painful ache in her chest for him to touch her face.

But his hand settled over her heart, and she closed her stinging eyes, burying her pretty, perfect face into his neck as she felt his arms come around her.

“You too,” she said softly, ignoring his scoff of self-deprecation.

It was the first time she hadn’t hated that word beautiful.

It was the first time she’d kind of loved it.



-the end