Chapter Text
Joan went into this with two possibilities in her mind. She had been given courage and resolve by the knowledge that, no matter which would come to be, she would see the conclusion to all she had pursued over the year tonight. Her highest hopes become a reality: the eyes that had so often glanced directly over her head, the arms that so often reached for another, would finally land on her. Either that or she well and truly fails and embraces the solitary life she was meant for.
If she were as honest with herself as she pretended to be, there would be the admission of shame at how much she wanted it all. To be seen, held, appreciated, and wanted in turn. It was pathetic. Something she sneered at in those shitty romcoms people grabbed on date nights. The fact she had privately watched them all too was unimportant. It was selfish, not noble, not something that led a woman to war with head held high.
She had been so ready to leave, to spread the icing and place the cherry on the final layer of rejection. She could already feel the chill of the night air that would embrace her as she slipped out unnoticed, already see the orange streetlights that would guide her home as her head hung low, and her heart lower. All those things she had stooped to in her desperation, all for nothing.
And then he came out. Had the nerve to sit and talk to her at her loneliest and most vulnerable moment. Had the audacity to act like an actual human being with thoughts and feelings after being nothing but a stupid horny douchebag for years. At least then he'd been simple, his motivations easy to understand. The mutual knowledge that he didn't care about her beyond being a body with some tits and she cared for him even less was solid and comfortable, without pretence. A single shred of decency was apparently all it took to utterly destroy that foundation and fell Joan of Arc.
He had taken down the clear boundaries of failure and success she had set out for the evening. Abe was not hers, but she had wanted his eyes on her, and they certainly were now. What else was there to expect from her decisions than the mixture of surprise, confusion, betrayal, and something more on his face. It wasn't just him though, dozens upon dozens of eyes watching, judging, condemning her. She half expected the burning on her cheeks to swallow her whole.
And there was JFK right beside her, his smile lazy and contented under the gaze of almost everyone he knew. Joan was reminded of the cat she once had, the look in its eyes as it triumphantly lay a dead bird on her doorstep, successful in its long, relentless pursuit. Toots had accidentally fed it washing powder instead of cat food one day, a nasty sight to come home to. Kennedy had tugged her black ribboned pigtail, tried to kiss her at the funeral, and then sulked around his foster dads until they took him to play basketball instead. Kennedy always got what he wanted in the end.
Spoiled jerk.
Kennedy's words, although filled with sexual innuendo, had been true. Nobody had expected the evening to end like this. But as Joan's thoughts returned to the present, she found that it was far too quiet, unnaturally still, too much for her to excuse it as surprise. The Clone High school populus was many things, but it did not have a long attention span. Surely one of them would have done something, or some distraction would have arisen.
Not an eyelid twitched, not a breath was taken. Joan recoiled in horror as she realised she was surrounded by perfect sculptures of flesh. She reached out to the side, and her fingers met a limb that was stiff, and had no warmth to offer. Yet corpses did not stand, and how would she have survived when the others had not? It made no sense.
The lights were all wrong too. Faintly buzzing electric lights usually blared cold light down from their high metal chains. But strange shadows were cast across the faces of her peers by the flickering orange that filled the room.
There was a gentle sigh behind her. She had not made a sound.
“Ugh, Je n'arrive pas à croire que je doive utiliser le langage des cochons.” the voice said, quiet and bitter.
A creeping chill down the bones of Joan's spine forced her to lurch completely upright from where she had curled into herself. The voice was unnervingly familiar, but felt completely and utterly wrong to hear unbidden. Wracking her memories only surfaced the tinny sounds of camera speakers playing back to her. This voice was completely absent of that distortion, and was further changed by its accented lilt. It had not cultivated her own carefully apathetic drone, instead holding a dangerous amount of intention and conviction in each syllable, a passion she could only even attempt to summon in her very strongest moments. This was a voice people would follow, one that could lead.
Joan had spent years imagining Jean D'Arc, a shadow in the pose of the virgin Mary looming over her. Their shadow only darkened by wreaths of holy fire arcing in a halo around them. Flames which glinted off of the pristine surface of an armour and sword into Joan's eyes, blinding her.
The person standing at her bedside was just a girl. She could even have gone to Joan's school. Her hair was unwashed and unbrushed, her pale skin was stained with soot, and the shabby material of her tunic hung too large on her skinny frame. Narrow eyes and a set jaw warned against casting judgement while sitting in a spot of shame, but that same face, near identical to her own, had probably screamed in pain as she died.
Joan's thoughts were sliced in twain as Jean spoke once more “May we skip the awkward introductions? I’m sure you have gathered who I am.”
“Ah, yes. Yes I know you. How could I not know you? You’re me! Well, not me. But I guess not not me? I-”
“Yes, yes. We both understand. Can you rise without-” her eyes flicked to the bedsheets clutched in Joan's white knuckled fingers “complications?”
“Oh, uh, yeah, sure”
Clothes had been tossed in every direction in the frenzy of impulse, and she had no clue where they had landed. Not that it mattered, she was not going on a wild naked hunt for them in front of the original fucking Jean d’Arc. She had already embarrassed herself enough. The best she could do was shimmy off of the bed and make a crappy toga that with every movement threatened to drop. How did Caesar manage in these things?
Now that they were on the same level Joan could not help but notice that the other was just that little bit shorter, her frame just that little bit more skeletal and sharp. On anyone else it would seem waifish and frail, but here it seemed as though she herself was the blade that cut men down. Her sunken cheeks were not a weakness, they were a warning. But Jean's expression had lost its harshness, softened by the new wistful distance in her eyes.
“My mother and I were very different people, it was against her that I fought my first battles. They remained some of my hardest, perhaps because winning too had its costs. She would spit like a curse upon me that my own different daughter would be much the same, that I would one day feel her pains in turn. I thought my death had defied her prediction” Pupil bored into pupil, eye into eye, drilling down through Joan’s cornea directly into her brain “I should have known better than to think she could have been wrong”
“I'm sorry” the words fled her lips like a paper pellet from a straw at the grassy knoll. They felt petty and small in comparison to the sheer gravity of what she had done.
Jean blinked “Quoi?” her nose was wrinkled in confusion that Joan could not understand.
“Your legacy. The whole thing I was made for. Literally my only expectation and I managed to completely fuck it up, I may as well have trampled and spat on it.”
“How?”
“Huh?”
“You heard me. How?’ She took a step forward, closing into Joan and shortening the comfortable space between them. ‘How exactly did you 'fuck up' my legacy?”
“Well for starters I completely abandoned the whole religion part, God never bothered to respond to me so I ditched it. There was that whole thing with the retainer and the radio but …” she trailed off in front of Jean's unimpressed expression.
'Yes, ok. What else?”
“Any time I tried to lead, or approach the holy battle idea from the battle end, it never worked, not in the long run anyway. Nothing I've fought for has ended how I wanted. This was my last attempt to fight for something and now I've- I-”
How do you explain to a chaste saint that you jumped at having sex with a guy you don't even LIKE on a spiteful whim? “I must be a real disappointment.”
“Stop. Stop it. Mierde, you think I give a shit about any of that? You think getting what you fought for is how it works? Do you remember how my fight ended? No. It was a war, you do the best you can, and take what comes out of it. Self pity or loathing does nothing to help that. Even after you have done what you thought you had to do, and afterwards it did not seem like it was right. Even if good men died. That was war. That was life.”
“Oh. Well-”
“Not done.” Another step, just a hair too close, but Joan couldn’t go backward, she wouldn’t have another defeat on the same night. “Why would you be upset for existing differently than me? You are living a life I never got to. That peace, that technology, that surplus of supplies? That is a different existence to a barren field of blood soaked mud. The laws of battle have changed, and you fight in your own way. I am proud enough of that.”
Proud? The word stole the strength from her knees and shoved her back onto the bed.
“And that whole chastity thing? Religion was a factor, I will not lie, but there was not much time to think of such things while staving off death for yourself and your men. And how would I break it without revealing myself? Without being bound to the will of a mortal man rather than my father in heaven? How could I in good conscience subject myself to possible heartbreak that could not only doom myself, but all those behind me? I could not afford such things as love.”
The grim line her lips had been drawn into pulled upward into a smirk as Jeans attention was drawn to the bed behind Joan
“But all things considered, you could have done worse.”
Joan was sure her face matched her hair, she could certainly feel enough heat for that to be the case.
“Though I never did understand your infatuation with the tall one.”
“Well he-” Joan began to justify
“I also don't particularly care.”
A growing annoyance at the constant interruptions was slowly fizzling to life beneath the blinding starstruck feeling of meeting everything you were supposed to be, the mould you were created to fit. The orange light had intensified, now creating a glow against the metal walls. A grey haze had gathered on the ceiling, and the beginnings of a crackling sound teetered on the edge of her ears.
Jean stared upwards, eyes wide in alarm. Tiny specks of embers had relit on her frayed sleeves.
But all Joan could feel was the cold on her bare skin.
“There is not much time” Jean said, her posture tensed in preparation for an enemy that was not physical enough to be fought,
“Well, what did you want to say?” Joan pressed
“I don’t know! I never actually got the chance to speak with you until now.” another puff of smoke rose into the air as Jean threw her arms upward.
“You’ve been watching over me?”
“Of course I have, we all have. There’s nothing like a disturbed grave to grab your attention.”
“All? So ghosts are real? The afterlife is real?”
“I thought my presence had already made that pretty clear. That is not what is important right now. We cannot squander the little time we have.”
“Ok, then tell me. What do I do now? I did everything to get together with Abe but everything is different now. Where do I go from here?”
“Why the fuck would you think I know?”
It was too bright.
Joan had to squeeze her eyes shut after peeking even a sliver of it.
Bit by bit she acclimated
White. It was all white.
Joan was awake, in a bed, surrounded by white curtains, under a bright white light.
A steady beeping filled her ears.
She felt AWFUL. Like every muscle had been scrunched together tightly for years and then wrung out to dry.
She took a glance down at the white robe she was wearing.
Ah. This was a hospital.
Why was she in a hospital?
She tried to think back. There was her last rejection, JFK on the staircase, Abe's expression as he looked at her, and then she was here.
Hey, that beeping was getting faster.
A nurse flung the curtains surrounding the bed back, revealing a slightly larger white room, and looked down at her
“Another one woke up!” she called out into the doorway
Another? What happened?
“Great! That's 13 recovered” A voice called back “do the standard checkup, then continue your rotation, I’m sure we’ll get more coming-to soon enough.”
Joan pushed herself up slightly and willed her throat to work “Where is everyone else?” she croaked. Her voice sounded all scratchy and dry, and felt even worse.
“Don't worry honey, everyone is fine.” The nurse said in a saccharine sweet voice that grated on Joan’s nerves. “Just drink some water and relax where you are so we can check if you are all good to go.”
That was entirely unhelpful and not what she asked, but thanks.
A slender hand with sharp painted nails squeezed her shoulder, and she had to bite down the urge to lash out. Minutes passed filled with fluffy reassurances and what practically amounted to babytalk. The mature thing to do would be to accept it and follow her advice. It killed her to down the pity-water under her close watch, even as it soothed her parched tongue.
The nurse turned around to pick something up, by the time she had turned back around the bed was empty, the few droplets left in the abandoned plastic cup soaking into the sheets.
“Abe? Gandhi?”
Damn her legs for being so stupid and slow, refusing to listen as she tried to drag them forward.
“JFK?”
She wasn’t sure if she actually wanted that call to be answered. It didn’t particularly matter as room after room passed filled with people she did not recognize or particularly care about.
“Cleo?” At least it would be someone she knew.
“Ugh, of course you are the first person I come across. Not even the little bald freak. Jimmy? Georgie? Who cares.”
An answer. God, she had never been so glad to hear that bitchy drawl. Though as she approached the figure in the bed she could easily have believed it was somebody else, some uncanny lookalike. Though she doubted anyone could project disdain as convincingly over every other emotion as Cleo.
The person in the bed was clean faced, but even when living in the same room as her, Cleopatra had always gone the extra mile to ensure that any imperfection was hidden. She was up and artfully painted long before Joan was awake, and only took her makeup back off once the lights were off. She must have gotten good at doing so, because there was never any indication of spots from specks of makeup left on too long. It was like seeing a Persian cat shaved of its fur, seeing Cleo deprived of her designer clothes. It was all so wrong. The most annoying part was that she didn't even look that bad. The shadows and freckles that had never before been visible only added more intrigue to her appearance. She, for the first time since infancy, had seemed like more than a glorified Bratz doll. She looked human. And tired.
“Don't look at me. I'm horrific.”
Joan couldn't reply, there was no winning. An insult would be taken as hidden envy, and a compliment would be a disguised insult. She had learned a long time ago that Cleo's biggest allergen was sincerity, and an eye roll was the only thing that would properly translate between the two of them.
Something stronger flared behind the mask of disgust.
“I said don't LOOK. You know what terms are in the non disclosure agreement. No eye contact until my hair is straightened.”
And it wasn’t. It was tangled and frizzy from sleep.
“Fine. I guess I'll leave.”
Joan made a show of turning slowly, inching her feet towards the next step. She shunned the shred of dignity clamouring in her head. What? If Cleo got to be dramatic, so did she.
Cleo caved, never one to go without attention, no matter how unpleasant. “Whatever. You've already seen it I guess. You might as well spit out whatever you crawled over here for.”
Skirting around the issue would only lead to her being sucked into the orbit of Cleo-land and all her shallow issues. Cutting to the point was best for all of them.
“Do you remember what happened? Last night, I mean.” Part of Joan, likely that dignity that refused to shut up, insisted that she could still leave, that literally anyone else would be better.
“I remember you fucked JFK. What happened to the whole holy prude schtick?”
Enough venom leached out from between those teeth that Joan could imagine them sharpening into fangs, a forked tongue hissing within. Sometimes she hated being right. The nurses that would force her back to bed seemed more appealing by the second.
“But no, I don't remember.” Cleo continued “We were all in the freezer and then I woke up shivering. You can piece together what probably happened.”
That was actually pretty helpful. How could she not have thought of that? How could CLEO have thought of that?
“Oh … thanks?” Joan couldn't help the surprise and appreciation leaking into her tone.
“I mean, I thought you'd have put it together yourself.” Cleo waved off dismissively.
A backhanded compliment? That was the most pleasant she had ever been to Joan. She was oddly touched
“How was he anyway? I know I really liked it when JFK would lift-”
“NO. No. Bye. I'm going.”
If either girl felt better after the encounter than before, nobody had to know.
Joan set out with a renewed determination, the town hospital was not large, everyone else was surely in reach.
A hand gripped her shoulder and tugged her to one side, surprise and lethargy robbing her of the power to fight back. A sharp sting at the back of her neck.
She woke up again, in that same bed in front of that same saccharine nurse. As though she had never escaped. She willed herself not to move, to close her eyes until she went away. Just a little more time and she could give it another go, find someone more helpful.
“Oh honey, I know you are awake.” She hated that fucking voice. “Come on, you can’t go wandering off like that. You collapsed right there in the hall. It’ll be me that gets in trouble if you make off again.”
Joan could feel the threat and deceit that lurked just beneath the dripping sweetness. She tried to move her hand to feel where the stinging had been, but found that her wrists were bound to the bed frame.
“Just a precaution” The nurse smiled, big enough that her cheeks pressed into her eyes and made her squint, large gleaming teeth on full show between those strained red-pink lips “so you don’t run off again. We don’t want you accidentally hurting yourself, do we?” She squeezed Joan's arm in a way she assumed was supposed to come across as playful. Joan found herself wrinkling her nose in distaste.
“Oh? Is your nose itching? We get that problem all the time here. Let me get that for ya.”
It felt like being lightly petted by a cheesegrater.
The babbling of the nurse quickly melted into a liquid that slipped the grip of her conscious mind, too inane and unwanted for her to put any effort into doing so. The effect slowly slipped outward, the movement of the corridor, the whiteness of her surroundings, soon even the sensation of her wrist bindings floated away from her attention, or was she sinking? Her thoughts were stones in an ocean, she couldn't bring them to the surface anymore.
The nurse was still there, looking down at her. Easily floating on her boat above the surface. Crescent mouth and oval eyes bright in the dim. Growing smaller as Joan fell into the blackness.