Boring, yet obligatory author note: I have so much crap to do, and I should totally not be writing for-fun fic. But I did. I can't undo it. I don't care.
Discliamer: I don't own Grace. If I did, you can bet she'd have had a lot more to do for the last quarter of the series.
Five Things Grace Polk Would Tell Her Therapist (If She Didn't Think Therapists Were All Full of Crap)Grace has nightmares. Almost every night, her subconsciousness spurs her awake and haunts her dreams with images that would make Dali and Bosch jealous. She's awoken in the middle of a panic attack more than once, but she doesn't talk about them. She draws the images with a black sharpie in a thick sketchbook she keeps under the bed. She's not sure if the drawings make sense to anyone but her, but it doesn't matter, because she's not showing them to anyone. Ever.
She can't remember when the dreams started, but she doesn't remember ever not having them. The world within them has always scared her, but she isn't about to admit to it. Sometimes, she stays up all night just so she can avoid going back to them.
She can't remember the last time she had a restful night's sleep.
She used to want to be just like her mother, when she was younger, before she knew what her mother was. She still remembers the early days of her youth, the days before she learned it was possible to identify liquor based on smell, and what musical her mother's nightly performances came from.
She remembers when her mother would let her play outside in the rain, even though she almost always got a cold. Her mother would tell her stories and sing to her and as far as Grace knew, it was because she loved her. Sometimes, she'd give anything just to make those memories go away.
Sometimes, Grace is afraid of leaving high school, because she's terrified that once she enters the real world, she'll find out that she really is everything Price and his fellow authoritarians think she is. She doesn't want to be the lost cause everyone around her sees, but sometimes she wonders if everyone sees it because that's what is really there.
Grace doesn't have a best friend. She has a guy she hangs around with and a girl she makes fun of for being crazy. Sometimes she calls them out on their idiocy (because, really, they're both kind of idiots), but they never call her out on anything. Not really. Sometimes she kind of wishes they would, because that would mean they actually cared. Or noticed.
Every time she comes within sight of Luke Girardi, Grace remembers that she is in love, and it scares the hell out of her. For the first time in her life, she catches herself smiling for absolutely no reason. She's happy and it freaks her out, because if her life has taught her anything, it's that every moment of happiness soon flickers and fades away, and the pain resurfaces. It is, after all, the only constant to human existence, other than pi. She knows that with every smile, every laugh, every moment she doesn't completely hate her life, he drifts further away.
But she knows that's not true. He would never run away from her, not even if she tried to make him. That's what scares her so much, because Grace knows it's the last thing she deserves.