Fic: Sway My Way (Elementary, Joan/Carrie)

[lilacsigil]

Title: Sway My Way
Fandom: Elementary
Written for: fandom_stocking
Recipient's name: scintilla10
Rating: Teen
Pairing/Characters: Carrie Dwyer, Joan Watson
Word Count: 2800
Notes: Thanks to st_aurafina for betaing and scintilla10 for requesting this for Yuletide AND for fandom_stocking so I had time to finish it!

Summary: A history of Carrie and Joan, and maybe a future, too.



The thing that Carrie likes best about Joan Watson is that Joan is always in control. They're friends, more in the sense of a group of friends than anything closer, but when Joan puts about that she's looking for a roommate, Carrie doesn't hesitate. Living with Joan Watson is going to be great.

Joan close up is no different from Joan at a distance. She is level-headed, thorough and orderly in a way that Carrie desperately wants to be. Carrie has always been the genius, the performing brain, cheered on by her entire family to perform greater and greater feats, and med school had been a shock to the system. She dragged herself through the first two years by sheer brainpower alone before she found herself an adequate study routine, and yet here was Joan, everything colour-coded and organised, her day timetabled and her mind clear.

Carrie copies Joan. She learns to speak in that low, direct way that can be intimate or commanding or both; she examines her wardrobe and trades in her brights for greys; she gets organised in a way she never has before and nearly dies of bliss when Joan declares her the best roommate she's ever had. All of this taken into account, Carrie shouldn't be startled when another med student asks her if she's got a crush on Joan. Carrie denies it out of sheer surprise, but the next morning when their shift is over and she and Joan are eating the crappy, half-warmed pancakes from the cafeteria, a sunbeam somehow manages to break through the low morning cloud and alight on Joan, through the dingy window.

Joan can't see it, of course, but Carrie feels like she's in a movie, one godly finger of light reaching out to touch Joan, pointing at her to tell Carrie, "Yes, her. Yes, this one."

"Have I got something in my hair?" Joan asks. "Hey, you're staring. I better not have something in my hair and you didn't tell me."

Carrie swallows her mouthful of pancakes and covers quickly. "No, I was just thinking about that patient in Ward 304 with the perforated diaphragm."

The light moves on, but Joan doesn't need that to shine. "Yeah, that's going to be a tricky one. You think it was from the hernia surgery he had last year and no-one wants to admit it?"

"He didn't report breathing difficulties until May this year, though." Carrie feels astonishingly awake, ready to solve all the hospital's problems herself, present them to Joan on a silver platter, bask in her admiration.

Both of them excel as interns and both are accepted as surgical residents. They share the tiny apartment for another two years, and Carrie never tells Joan a thing. They work hard, and often in opposing shifts, and it's never the right time. Carrie has a few casual boyfriends – so does Joan – but no-one really want to get heavily involved with a surgical resident and Carrie can't blame them. Instead, they end up in one big social group of medical students and young doctors, but that doesn't mean Joan is lost in the crowd.

Joan wins the group's Inaugural High-Speed Macarena competition and Carrie laughs until her face hurts.

At the start of their third year of residency, Joan finds a real boyfriend, Liam. Carrie hates his guts for no good reason: he's kind, funny and generous with his time knowing that Joan can't be with hers.

"Why don't you like Liam?" Joan asks, more than once.

"I do like him," Carrie insists, or, "I don't know, there's just something about him."

Her instincts prove correct when Joan moves out to live with Liam. Carrie and Joan have the closest thing to a fight that they've ever had.

"You've always hated him, haven't you?"

"I told you, Joanie, I don't care! This is a lot of disruption in a very important year, that's all I care about."

"Every year is an important year."

Carrie stares her down. "Yes. Every year. Every day of every year."

Joan still moves out. Carrie intends to find another roommate, but she never gets around to it. The rent is doable with a little help from her parents, and she doesn't want to think too hard about why she sleeps in Joan's old bed half the time. All she cared about after a long shift was getting sleep, and when she wasn't sleeping or studying, she made sure she was out of the apartment.

Joan's tidiness doesn't stick with Carrie, and neither does the muted wardrobe, but her ruthless scheduling does.

Carrie makes it through the surgical residency with glowing reports, and walks straight into a job. So does Joan, and the sheer headiness of finally – finally – being qualified sends them out drinking.

"Joanie, I love you," Carrie blurts out, and Joan laughs in delight.

"I love you, too!" But she doesn't mean what Carrie means, doesn't even pick it up.

The next morning, Carrie rips the old timetables off her wall and sells the two single beds cheap to some guy who'll take them away, buying a double instead. If it's her apartment, she's going to live in it, not just exist in half the space.

Later and at another hospital, Carrie hears that Joan has been suspended. She tries to get back in touch, especially when she hears that Joan's broken up with Liam, too. This patient can't be the first patient who has died on Joan's table; Carrie herself has lost three over the years. She's sure it's Joan's fault only in the sense that sometimes fate kicks you in the teeth: Option A and Option B appear equally applicable, you pick the wrong one, the patient dies. Suspension is a deliberately harsh choice by a hospital board trying to look responsible and Carrie can't even imagine Joan the Civilian. They meet briefly, but Joan is anxious and fidgety, taking Carrie's reassurances and throwing them away. Seeing Joan like that makes Carrie anxious herself, and she doesn't call again. Joan doesn't call either, and when Carrie's phone is stolen from her locker she doesn't email to get Joan's number. Somewhere out there in Carrie's imagination, Joan is still the best of surgeons, standing above the constant tide of sick and wounded, perfectly in control.

Twice Carrie thinks she has seen Joan – once walking along the street in the distance, once in a coffee place near the hospital – but both times she's wrong. When Joan really is there, right in front of her in the hospital corridor, she wonders how she could have mistaken her. Joan is still a glowing filament, so bright that she leaves an afterimage. After Carrie has paused and reassembled herself, she can see that Joan's face is harder and more closed that Carrie has ever seen, even though her quick movements and intense presence are unmistakably Joan. Joan who has left medicine, Joan who is not a doctor. Apart from that one searing fact, Carrie has no idea what they said to each other, and with more than a decade of practise, immediately puts the whole encounter out of her head when she sees her first patient of the day.

Joan isn't gone, though. Carrie sees her again and again that week, somehow shining through her sombre garments, that patient she's caring for – Carrie doesn't consciously decide he's a patient, but she knows it nonetheless – babbling on and on. He has the look of a recently released psych patient, or maybe someone fresh from a long stint as an inpatient, which makes Carrie desperately worried for Joan. What is she doing, this Joan who is not a doctor? Joan who interfered in Carrie's case and saved a life? Carrie tracks her down and thanks her, but she is just the same as she is at the hospital, closed off behind folded arms, everything that Carrie knows as Joan attempting to lock herself away.

It takes three days for Carrie to call. She expects to leave a message – since when has any doctor answered their phone promptly – and remembers too late that Joan isn't a doctor anymore.

"Joan Watson."

"Joanie? This is Carrie Dwyer. I know we just spoke a few days ago…"

"Carrie, yes, I remember." Joan's voice is as distant as her body language, so Carrie surges forward: being tentative never overcame anything.

"I'm buying the apartment we used to share. Come over when you have time and see it."

That cracks Joan's shell a little. "I remember that place. You still live there?"

"I never really had time to move. They remodelled most of the building and combined our old place with the apartment next door a few years ago, and now they're selling. The whole area is gentrifying like crazy."

"Isn't there supposed to be a recession on?" Joan mutters, and Carrie takes that as a yes.

"I'm off tomorrow after six. Come over then, I'd love to see you." Carrie hangs up before Joan has a chance to refuse.

Carrie still expects a last minute refusal, and checks her phone at every opportunity, though to be honest, she doesn't have too many opportunities. It's a busy day, and her last surgery runs late, so she doesn't get home until after seven. She's pretty sure Joan will have taken the opportunity to leave, and doesn't see her out the front of the building as she approaches through the rain.

Instead, Joan's sitting on the interior stairs, holding a brown paper bag.

"Your key still works, Joanie?"

"I don't have that anymore! Mrs Feliciano from downstairs remembered me and let me in to wait. Hey, look, there's an actual working elevator now."

"Yeah, they fixed up everything. Come on." Carrie's feet hurt. She pushes the button and Joan comes over to join her, as quick as ever.

"I brought tea, but I should have realised you'd be late. It'd be cold by now anyway."

"So you drank it?"

"Why waste good tea? I've still got some cookies in the bag, at least. Macadamia choc chip."

Carrie is oddly touched that Joan remembered her favourite cookie, even though she knows Joan remembers everything. The elevator arrives and they ride up in silence.

Joan looks disoriented for a moment when the door opens on the eighth floor because they're at the wrong end of the hall for the stairs she used to climb, so Carrie catches her elbow to steer her the right way. Her bony elbow is warm in Carrie's hand, even through her coat.

The hall otherwise looks the same, but when Carrie opens the door to the apartment, Joan stops to stare. "Wow, who knew this place could look so good?" Carrie has a shoe rack by the door, and both stop to shed their boots there.

Carrie dumps her bag and keys on the counter. "It was the timber floors that surprised me. There were four layers of linoleum on top. But yeah, it's all opened up beautifully."

Looking out the window, Joan runs her fingers along the windowsill. "I guess they fixed this window so it closes properly now. My mom was always scared some burglar would scale eight stories up a sheer wall and break in through here."

"They fixed a lot of things."

"Listen, Carrie…" Joan puts the bag of cookies on the kitchen bench. "I only came over to ask you not to call me again."

"You could have told me that on the phone." Carrie thinks she should feel hurt, but she doesn't so much feel hurt as confused. What Joan is saying doesn't make any sense: Joan was the queen of efficient phone calls and taking care of business. She had always told Carrie to get things done as soon as you think of them: don't let them take up your precious mental real estate. "You must have something you wanted to say face to face, if you came all this way." Carrie waited for Joan to speak, but she didn't. "Come on, Joanie, it's not like you to back away from speaking your mind."

"I'm not the same person as I was. Not even the same person as I thought I was." Joan hasn't removed her grey swing coat and her arms are wrapped tightly against her body. She's a small cool spot in the warm colours of the apartment and Carrie isn't sure that she knows who this woman is, either.

"No." Carrie surprises herself with the blunt outburst. "No, if that's all you were, a good doctor, then all the good doctors would be the same. You brought yourself to medicine, not the other way around. You remember how hard it was to get through the internships – it was grinding me down. It was grinding most of us down. But you were always yourself, no matter what they threw at us, no matter how they tried to shape us. I envied that, I admit, but it gave me hope, too."

Joan shakes her head, retreating further into her coat. "That's kind of you, but what do we even know about each other apart from medicine? We studied together, interned together…the first thing you asked me when you saw me was whether I was going after the job you want."

"We were in a hospital!"

"Exactly!"

Carrie sighs. "What are you doing, Joanie? I mean, I don't know why you walked away from medicine, but surely you knew. You're acting like you're ashamed."

"I'm not ashamed! But there's nothing from that old life for me anymore. I'm trying to be a different person. A better person." Joan shakes her head, moving away slightly. "I guess that's hard for a doctor to understand. It would have been for me."

"I wanted to be an astronaut," Carrie tells her, something she hasn't said out loud since she was twelve. "Or at least in research. But this is where I went because I followed you."

Joan's face comes alive, finally, with anger. "More fool you! Why would you do that?"

"I loved you. I wanted to have that confidence you had." Carrie walks over to Joan and puts a hand on her arm. Joan was right: it was hard for a doctor to understand leaving that life, but Carrie had never been as certain as Joan. She remembered getting things wrong: she had only stuck with medicine through that awful first year because the college loans were so huge that she couldn't have paid them back on anything less than a doctor's salary. She remembered being afraid that the biggest choices were the wrong ones, and telling Joan that she loved her, a year too late. "I don't regret following you. I found my strength and my place, and it wasn't a copy of yours. You know, I'm happy with this. All of this. And not because I was afraid to choose something else."

Joan leans into Carrie's touch, a little. "I lost my confidence, and it makes me wonder if it was ever really there. I'm not who I was."

"We're not the same people we were, Joanie. None of us." Carrie puts her arm around Joan, and Joan leans in for real this time. "Stay for a little while. Please."

They end up sitting on the sofa, eating the macadamia choc chip cookies and drinking terrible instant coffee from Carrie's near-empty pantry. They don't exchange a single word about medicine, or anyone they knew from those days, and Carrie hates to think how long it's been since she had a conversation about anything other than medicine or money. With Joan pressed against her it's hard to think about anything but Joan herself; they talk baseball and the city and clothes and Joan and Carrie, and Joan's tense breathing slows into relaxation. Carrie rests her head on Joan's and thinks about the past bleeding into the future.

Joan doesn't stay. "I have to go back to work by eight-thirty." She looks around the apartment again. "Invite me back again. I…I had a good time."

Carrie kisses Joan's cheek and lets her go. "There's always space for you here, no matter who you are or aren't."

Joan smiles, quickly, and Carrie smiles back as she opens the door. The harsh halogen lights are on in the hallway, and Joan is a collection of flat blacks and greys beneath them; Carrie remembers not Joan's successes and schedules, but gold shining on Joan's dark hair.



Sway My Way on AO3