Author: McKay
Rating: PG-13 for occasional cussing and slashy themes.
Spoilers: Anonymous. Mild for all of S1 but reading this fic won't give anything away. Mostly it's stuff you'd have seen in the teasers.
Summary: Joan is starting to turn Grace's world inside out.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters or anything having to do with Joan of Arcadia. And if Barbara Hall and company would just hook up Grace and Joan, I wouldn't have to be writing this at all. And all views on politics are intended to be Grace's, not mine. So if you disagree with them, realize that I might also. Fiction, dude, remember that.
Feedback: Is appreciated. Flames will be posted all around the Internet with your name attached so people can laugh at you. Then I will send out my chocobo to maim you. Kiwano likes the feel of human flesh beneath his talons, don't you, boy? And we both despise flamers.
Author's notes: Please don't bitch to me about how Joan and Grace aren't gay. It's not my problem if the concept of "fan fiction" is too complex for you to grasp. Yes, this is in the dreaded second person, but it didn't work in the third person, and first person seemed too intimate for Grace. I figured if Grace were to tell a story about herself, this is how she'd do it. You don't have to like it, feel free to complain about it, but that's the reason why. If I write the second part, it'll be in the third person. Thank you times a million to Leah, Kimberly, Joy and especially Jodi for the help.
Draft completed July of 2004, between seasons. In my mind, Joan and Adam had broken up over the summer, due to events during the final episode.
Adam has gone for the night. He's taken Iris to...you weren't really listening, but you assume someplace ostensibly as far from trendy as humanly possible. You don't know where Rove's gone, but you know Rove. What's the anti-trendwhore to do when the anti-trendwhore suddenly becomes trendy? But wherever he's gone, he's taken that annoying caterpillar of a girl with him, so it's all good for you. You'll be civil, as civil as you get, because Rove, for some inexplicable reason, likes her, but you'll never like her. You're not determined to dislike her. You're just familiar with the odds. But you'll put up with her because Rove likes her. And so will Joan.
You're not sure why Joan cut him out. Not your business, not your concern, and you really shouldn't care.
This isn't to say that you don't.
There's not much regarding Joan that you are certain about. You have yet to figure out why you're friends with her, how she broke into your circle, or whatever it is when you have two people who aren't a couple. You're a triangle now. Or you were. Now you're...a quadrangle? A square? A love trapezoid?
Not that love is what you're experiencing here. That's just the word one tends to apply to geometric analogies.
There are so many things you're not sure of. Joan being the most glaring example. She's everything you're anti, and yet...she's not. You hate thinking like that, but that's the only way you can think of Joan. Joan isn't anything, yet she's everything, and there you go again. She's not even a dichotomy, she's an impossibility.
She's a cheerleader who scorns cheerleaders and then throws any shot at that oh-so-coveted popularity to help the bitchiest of the flock when she was found out. She debates but she has no politics; she sides against yours and with them, without ever really changing sides. And yet without politics, she knows where she stands on social issues, she knows who needs her help and she helps them because ishe wants to/i. Isn't that essentially the definition of "Liberal"? At the same time, you wonder what the hell is wrong with her. Even you have to recognize this dog-eat-dog (and god what a tired cliche that is) world this is.
And she still looks at Adam with that puppy devotion, with that misguided love, and then with total disdain, contempt, even anger. She manages to look furious when he's with Iris, but when he's without her she ignores him. She's in agony without him, but she'll have nothing to do with him.
There's no figuring Joan out. You'll keep trying because as much as you hate to admit it, she fascinates you, and because really there's not much better to do during the long school days, but you don't understand a single damn thing about her.
All you know is that all's right with the world because she's in it.
Are you in love with her? A pointless question and one you don't think about. Are you actively lusting after her? Well, you downloaded the panty shot, knowing what it was, and then you realized after the fact that you didn't want to see it. You didn't really want to see anything she doesn't invite you to see, infuriating little that that is. Is that love? Or just proof that you're not as bi as you thought? You don't want to see her naked, you just want to see in, learn those monumental secrets she pretends she doesn't keep. Which is almost ironic coming from you.
You never believed in souls or in the idea that we were more than grotesquely self-important sacks of RNA and DNA trying to convince ourselves that our existences have meaning, until you met her.
You want to know why. You want to know how Joan has such a powerful hold over your universe. You want to know why, when she spits your name in your face when she's exasperated or even furious, you get that most foreign urge to giggle. You want to know how a girl can unite something as fiercely apathetic and cruel as a gym class over jumping rope of all asinine things, if only for a moment.
You want to know why her smile feeds yours, even when you're trying your hardest to scowl or at least keep your poker face, how it has that ability to...how does that drivel go, "light up a room?"
You hate cliches, even when they're apt.
So for now, all you know is that the light of the universe shines through Joan, and that Joan's smile lights up the universe.
What is she?
