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.
You gag on your thoughts even as you think them. You want to keep this, at its most severe, to a simple curiosity. Or a hormonal infatuation. You don't want to pose as a philosopher; you aren't. You don't want to imitate a poet; you never will and have no desire to be. You don't want to paint yourself a romantic; you can't be. But the thoughts and questions and desires don't cease, they're strong, they're loud, they're harsh and they're unavoidable and you know this.
You'll continue to avoid them, of course, but it's not as easy as it once was.
Really, it's impossible, but you never like to admit that you've given up.
You're not like this over her brother. An obnoxiously sweet taste fills your mouth and your stomach lurches as the thought surges through you, previously undetected and certainly unbidden.
You like Luke. He's funny - generally without meaning to be - and he sees the world like no one else does. He sees beauty in the most unlikely places. In morose girls with short hair and sullen faces. He believes in God based not on faith of divinity but his faith in science. He believes in God because of theories he's invented that you can't really comprehend. Faith doesn't translate; it just exists. It's like that person who has bad breath, and no matter how much they swear they brush their teeth, use the stupid plastic scraper thing, floss and gargle, it just won't go away. No one really knows how it got there or if there's any way to get rid of it, and it's the elephant in the room you really can't bring up in its bearer's presence. You have it or you don't. You have faith or you don't. Or maybe you've been brainwashed, or you have a near-death experience, or like Luke and Joan, you're just a little too close to death every day, so you create it. You're still fairly certain that God was created by man so as not to fear the uncontrollable or unexpected, our inevitable mortality. A nice story, like Santa Claus, but a fairy tale when you get down to the reality of it.
You wonder if Joan believes in God. She seems like the type, and maybe those people aren't all idiots. After all, Luke's one of them, and for all his flaws and all the ways you'll never love him, he's the smartest person you know.
When it comes to things science can't touch, though, Adam's probably the smartest person you know.
Him you were in love with once, and you're not too ashamed to admit that. You never brought it up, and times passed, the feelings with it, and they still came and went, but at longer intervals until you just stopped feeling it. That certainly isn't why you can't stand Iris. You can't stand Iris because she's a brat and a poseur and she works Rove like a fucking puppet.
Maybe Rove isn't as smart as you thought. Maybe Joan is smarter than he is after all. It's hard to gauge just how smart she is. She won't show you a single card in her hand.
Maybe that's the proof of how smart she is.
Where did they get their smarts from, anyway? Mom's a nice lady but she's a dip, a sweet little wife and what's that about, anyway? What century is she living in? It's disgusting - and Dad's a fucking cop. Speaking of disgusting. Maybe it skips a generation.
Maybe they're God's work. Maybe that insipid, saccharine phrase has meaning.
They're not alike in any ways they'll recognize or admit. But sometimes when you kiss Luke, you wonder if Joan tastes similar. If they feel anything alike. One thing you know is that Joan smells...oh, god, you will not say "divine." That's ridiculous, absurd. It's also remarkably accurate, but that's not the point.
"Peculiar." There, that does it, and it's much less saccharine. Where Luke smells normal and "nice," nondescript, Adam smells distinctive, but in a way that translates into words. Metal, dust, sweat and smoke. Joan...Joan doesn't smell of tangible things, except for whatever shampoo she used that morning or the night before. Not that you notice things like that. Joan smells of what she knows and what you recognize in her: darkness and twilight, sunshine and dawn, laughter and uncertainty, delight and capriciousness, confusion and contrition, longing and flight. Joan smells of colors and of bright tomorrows, of a lifetime of more, of the promise that all's right with the world because she's in it.
These things are about her, her smell, the light of her. She wears them around her, they flatter and stifle her. Silk scarves and a wooden cross.
And she turns you into this, this pseudo-poet, flowery and inane and rambling, not even the poet that you are, with these words you could never write nor speak, spewing alliterative phrases that mean absolutely nothing, by all the laws of language, they mean nothing, because they are impossible. A color has no smell and a person has no soul, but Joan is starting to turn your world inside out. She's showing you that all of this is possible, not only possible, it is. Maybe it's Joan that makes it so. Or maybe it's always been. You're learning just how much there is that you don't know, and you're surprisingly okay with that.
What you know is that you started writing your ridiculous poetry again as she came into your life. Oh, you know it's crap, you're not deluded, but it's genuine, and it's all for her. You'll never confess to a soul how you smiled the entire way home from school the day she discovered and loved your discarded work about him.
Imagine what she'd think of the stuff you liked enough to keep.
Imagine what she'd think if she learned what inspires you.
Not like it matters. Words are meaningless anyway.
It's not always easy to take in the truth, the world through Joan's eyes. Beauty so raw is often agonizingly, heartbreakingly, unbearably wrenching. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and they say the truth hurts. And that is the truth.
When you write in the world according to Joan, nothing is passive or past tense. Everything breathes and thrums and throbs, pulsates, nothing is ever still. You wonder how Joan sleeps at night. You know that sometimes she doesn't. Those are the nights she calls you, because she knows you don't sleep.
One night when the insomnia becomes too oppressive she calls you, and on some impulse or another you suggest she comes over. You point out that you're both out of cell phone minutes for the month, probably the year, and all you do is sit and listen to each other breathe, occasionally exchanging words. You point out that it's cheaper to do this in person, and she agrees. Your parents are home and asleep; you can take the car without him noticing. Sure, you're morally opposed to anything that runs on gas. No blood for oil. But Joan doesn't live that far from here, and driving will give you something else to concentrate on.