The Best Friends You'll Ever Have | 4: Explanations and Complications

[luxken27]

Chapter Title: 4 | Explanations and Complications
Prompt: #094 – Tension
Universe: Pre-canon (The Summer Before)
Genre: Drama
Rating: T
Warning: None
Word Count: 1,611
Summary: Janine Kishi begins seeing Charlie Thomas in a whole new light the summer before sophomore year.

Links: FF.net | LJ | DW | AO3

Dear BSC fandom: I love you. Seriously. You guys are fucking awesome.

This was inspired by, and written for, snarky_imp, my partner in crime for all things BSC and Sweet Valley. She was in need of some fluff, and I was in need of a muse primer, and voila - this fic happened. And just in time for Valentine's Day, to boot! =)

I think I'm getting better at this whole skimming-between-fandoms-at-random thing. I've spent most of this short year concentrating on my Kids Inc stories (perhaps to my detriment :-/), yes, but I had a few random bursts of inspiration for other fandoms and I followed them through. This is one of those bursts.

I think it helped that the idea came quickly, forcefully, and was mercifully short. I've wanted to get back to my longer Charlie/Janine fic for a couple of days now, and apparently my muse just hadn't quite had enough fluff, even with the 10,000+ words of Kiss Me. It wasn't until I found out about snarky_imp's woes that everything coalesced, though, and literally in the space of a day, this idea fleshed itself out. I hadn't even thought about the BSC prequel, The Summer Before, since I read it last year, that's how far out of left field this came to me.

I think of all the girls' stories, I like Claudia's the best. Maybe its the hapless romantic in me, I don't know ~ but it was most interesting, to me, to see how she dealt with the drifting of her friendship with Kristy and Mary Anne, since it was kinda the two of them versus her. Claudia's friendship with Stacey definitely ranks high on my list of favorite BSC things, especially in early BSC canon, so to get this glimpse of Claud before her BFF stepped into her life was fascinating.

I'm also a big fan of it because it involves her relationship with her sister. Janine invites one of her classmates, Frankie, to Claudia's twelfth birthday party, because she has a crush on him. Frankie doesn't seem to notice or care, because he immediately makes a beeline for Claudia and doesn't leave her side - at the party, or after. Janine is upset, of course, and ends up giving Claud the silent treatment for most of the summer because of it. Claudia's relationship with Frankie becomes the center of her universe, overriding concerns not only about her sibling bond with Janine, but her entire family's dynamics, and her friendship with the now very-babyish-seeming Kristy and Mary Anne.

I decided to take this triangle from a different side, and - knowing how much snarky_imp likes the ship - bring in some shades of Charlie/Janine. Now, this was not a ship I had when I read the books as a kid, or even during the first wave of nostalgia I had for the series about five years ago. It was only when I came back and really plowed through canon and starting hanging around the fringes of fandom that I got into this ship in a big way. [Having rekindled my love for Kids Inc and their teenage protagonists probably helped settle my focus on the actual teens of the series, instead of the baby-sitters themselves, or their much-younger clients.] Though my 'original' story is more of my head-canon about how and when they might've gotten together, it was fun to play with the idea of laying the foundation for this pairing waaaaaaaay beforehand.

I'm a sucker for platonic-to-romantic relationships (as evidenced by, well, nearly all my stories to date :P), and its the little things that first make the heart race that really get me. I just love all those subtle looks and smiles and lingering eyes, LOL, and its the perfect sort of thing to write at the very beginning of a potential romance.

The idea that maybe it wasn't just Frankie's inherent interest in Claudia that kept him away from Janine for the duration of the summer came to me in two lines of dialogue:

“Why Claudia?”

“Because I didn’t want to get pounded, okay?” he burst out.

Hehehe...I already really enjoy the idea of Charlie being a protective older brother towards his siblings and his siblings' friends (shades of this awesome fic by one of my favorite Charlie-centric writers), and I thought - why wouldn't that extend not just to Mary Anne or Claudia, but to all the neighborhood kids? They'd grown up together, after all ~ and, especially after Charlie's expanded role in his family in the wake of his father's desertion, I can totally see him closing ranks around those he cares about.

Janine included.

I was really surprised and pleased with the response this fic received not only from snarky_imp, but from the entirety of the babysitters100 comm. Charlie/Janine is an alt-pairing minor-character ship, so to have so many people enthusiastic about it really blew my mind, LOL! There were lots of thoughtful comments mixed in with the squee, which I really appreciated - maybe there's hope for finding other meta-lovers yet? :)

I'm hoping to channel some of this goodwill into work on the longer fic, which is about halfway finished at this point. It was so much fun to read through the canon again for all the character notes, and a little enthusiastic feedback goes a long way, so *crosses fingers* I'm certainly not going to turn my nose up at a busy and productive muse, considering how rarely this happens, LOL!!