The Best Friends You'll Ever Have | 16: The Day the Earth Turned Upside Down

[luxken27]

Chapter Title: 16 | The Day the Earth Turned Upside Down
Prompt: #051 - Club Meeting
Universe: Canon
Genre: Romance
Rating: T
Warning: N/A
Word Count: 2,171
Summary: Charlie Thomas is nothing if not persistent.

Links: FF.net | DW | LJ | AO3

Written for baseballchica03, for the 2014 fandom_stocking holiday exchange.

So I was re-watching the BSC TV series one day (as you do), and I came across this:

"" (Watch on YouTube)

and voila, a fic idea was born!

Suddenly, I wondered where Janine was off to in such a hurry, that she wanted to condense one of Claudia's excruciatingly slow homework sessions into a mere hour. And since I was jonesing for some OTP!fic, why not go to the fanon staple garden and pluck a cliche? =)

I just love the idea of Charlie and Janine secretly (or not-so-secretly, but it has to start out secretly, LOL) getting together, and one of the easiest/most logical ways to do that would be by Janine tutoring him in some subject that she excelled at. I thought back to my own high school years, and calculus was the hardest math that was taught at my school (narrowly beating out trigonometry). I took it when I was a senior, so I plopped my character into the same situation. It seems like one "gets" either algebra or geometry; it's rare to find the person who intrinsically understands both, or at least that's been my experience. Hence Charlie's running commentary on the classes he's taken so far and which ones he's nearly failed, LOL.

In the purest sense of my alt!OTP, I do think that Charlie would have to be the one to make the first move. I put Janine in the same sort of category as Daria and Sesshoumaru in my head - brilliant, but emotionally blunted. For all her book smarts, Janine is somewhat hesitant at navigating the social scene. I think she has a full understanding of it, and the various levels of 'power' that the different groups of kids command, but she doesn't really want to bother with wading into it. I was the same way in high school - I found my people on the fringes and I stuck with them, but for someone like Janine, who doesn't have much in common with her classmates, I think she'd feel quite lonely, and would look forward to college as her chance to get away and find her people.

So she's out here, doing her own thing, and it surprises her (and scares her a little) when Charlie starts showing interest in her. She met her canon boyfriend through mutual classes IIRC, and though Jerry was a jerk, I never really got the sense that he was all that different from her, socially. And the fact that Janine is the one who dumped him tells me that she doesn't have low self-esteem. She knows what she wants, and she eventually extracts herself from the situation when it becomes untenable for her. Jerry's reaction says more about him than about her, and he acted like a real jackhole in SS#15. Bleh. Janine can do a lot better than him.

Because Charlie is Charlie, basically the neighborhood's big brother, I think he would be quite gentle with her, and would be willing to ease her into the idea of a relationship, given their differences. He genuinely likes her, but his status among his classmates gives her pause. Is it too good to be true, a guy like him falling for a girl like her? She knows the stakes, and for a moment there at the end, she doubts his intentions. I think that just comes with the territory of being an outsider, on the fringes, and being able to observe how some cliques abuse others. Charlie proves to her in the end that he is sincere, and Janine allows herself to become excited about their impulsive date.

Here, I portray her as lapsing into the ultra-SAT-vocabulary because she's nervous. She's not comfortable in a BSC meeting, and only less so when the conversation basically dies the minute she makes her presence known. She deals with her discomfort by hiding behind her words, knowing that Claudia hates it when she speaks to her that way, but also wanting to make clear that her engagement that evening is not something that will be broken. I don't think Claudia cares what her sister's pressing meeting is, and maybe Janine's choice of words has something to do with that, overwhelming her so that she doesn't ask questions. Hmm... =)

baseballchica03 seemed to enjoy her fic, which makes me very happy ♥ She is my Charlie/Janine writing idol, so I definitely wanted to impress!! It was a lot of fun to dive back into this pairing, and it turned into a bit of a lovefest with my other fandom_stocking gifts. I was so excited while on this little writing blitz, because I can't seem to keep my mojo for any sustained period of time. Hopefully posting this stable of f_s gifts will help it along, especially since the CA Diaries exchange deadline is coming up soon!!