Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at

http://download.archiveofourown.org/works/6823735.
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Published: 2016-06-08 Words: 1349

Original Work
Original Female Character/Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc, Original Female Character(s)
tw: fire, Prose Poem, POV Second Person

how to love joan of arc

by starsdvst
Summary

First. Before it starts. You should know: eventually, she is going to burn alive.
Eventually, she will burn you down with her.

Notes

inspired by sady doyle's essay 'running towards the gunshots: a few words about joan of
arc'.

See the end of the work for more notes

First. Before we begin.

Before the camera turns on, before you meet her in a boxing ring or in your best friend's bed or a
dirty back-alley behind the bar full of smoke and regrets and whiskey, before she grins and her
eyes light into golden fires, before you kiss her for the first time and feel at peace in the middle of
the flames that lick up your back, before she licks the lipstick off your lips and you fall in love,
before the moment that you are finally sure that she loves you back in the truck your bastard father
gave youBefore all of it.
First. Before it starts. You should know:

Eventually, she is going to burn alive.

Eventually, she will burn you down with her.
The thing that she will love the most about you will be that you believe in her.
Later- we must discuss what happens down the road. The one moment all of this is leading up to,
the catalyst of it all. You do not want to. You do not, will not, want to. But we must discuss what
happens Later.
Later, by the way, means After. After they strip her of everything.
After the King who demands proof of her virginity. After the arrow in the neck. After the Church
that will put her on her knees in the dirt. The stripped body. The shaved head. The questions
questions questions questions. The slurs that will follow her wherever she goes. The Cage. The
Chains- the hands he puts on her and how she will say No. No No.
How he will continue to touch. She will jump out the tower window to escape and will not die.
This is about what happens after.
No one will believe her.
No one- no one. These voices. This cause. This charging hope in her chest, fanning the spark in
her heart. A reality that is so strong that she has accepted it as fact all her life, but no one knows.
No one believes. It is a lie. It is untrue. It is not real. No one believes.
Except for you.
It will be this. The moment that you tell her "no, I believe you" when she tells you that she has
heard God, even though you are Muslim and she is Catholic and neither of you have attended
your respective places of worship for years.
The moment she stares up at you, those golden eyes wide and suddenly vulnerable, and the way
she whispers, you do? as if she never dared to hope that you would.

When she cries, let her. Hold her. Let her be weak. Let her crumble and collapse. Do not let her
become a statue so strong that it cannot bend under things sometimes. The breaking, when it
comes, will be easier to bear like this. You can stave it off. You can make her strong.
Let her cry. Let her weep. Let her dissolve into tragedy every night inside the circle of your arms.
Let her be more human than she is saint when she is with you. Do not make her a martyr to love.
She is a girl, young and strong and so so beautiful. Just like you.
And when morning comes When morning comes, let her get up, put her armor back on, sheath her sword, and walk back out
into those battlements. As martyrs must.

When she burns, do not cry.

Instead, take up the sword she leaves behind. Bare your teeth. Run wild into the riots, slashing and
burning all that is in front of you. Yell her name proudly as you do it, scream her cause. Don't
hesitate for a fucking moment. Don't mourn. Don't weep. The longer you wait the more her body
rots.
Sing it, like it's a battle cry. Shout it as if you would die if you kept it waiting longer in your throat.
Scream, "this is for Joan of Arc!"
She put so much of herself in these battlements. She poured her molten soul, the color of her eyes,
the angry way her jaw would clench and grind, down into the people she was protecting. The
brown kids, queer kids, the girls barely surviving the aftermath of abuse that fucks you up- she put
herself into them. Don't let these last, precious, brittle parts of her die too.
Do not let the pyre they put her on burn down the barricades she built. Do not let her be a martyr
with a futile, wilted cause.
Let her be the first sign. Let her be the smoke, not the flame. Let her live forever in your cause,
immortalized in history books, hold her up as a savior and never once let a moment go by when
she is forgotten. Let her be a deathless thing, a figure prayed to at every altar. Let her become
forever.
There is no slaying of a deathless thing. They've killed a lot, but they can't have this. They have
taken her flesh, they have taken your heart, they have taken the taste of her lips when you're
drowsy and in love, they have taken the softness of her dark skin, the spark of her golden eyes.
They can't have the memory of it too.

Years afterwards, after all is said and done, they will call her a saint. Saint Joan, they will say, the
best of all. The Church will praise her. Thousands of children being confirmed by the Catholic
Church will take her name, and you will meet one of them.
Her name will be Lacey. She is the granddaughter of your friend's, and you are her mother's
godmother. You've started going to the mosque again.
You are sitting together on the porch, and she says, "I learned as a child in religion classes that
when Joan died, God was angry. That she was so good, so pure, so right and wonderful and holy,
that the fire would never touch her really, not her soul, could never touch it. My religion teacher
told me that there was a sign- a dove, I think- that came down from heaven, and that lay on her
corpse and wept, to show what a terrible thing had been done there."
And you say, "That's not what happened."

"First- first they shot her. Seven shots, all aimed at her limbs, so that it would take a long time to
die.
She was still alive when they put her on the pyre. Still screaming. I was trying- trying- to get
through the crowd. Trying to get to her. She was screaming all the while, never stopped untiluntil, well. She died. Did your religion teacher tell you that?
And then- then they took her and they put her on the pyre and they burned her. And it smelled

sweet and she was screaming. And then she was dead. They took her off and she was all burnt,
but she still looked- still looked human. And then they put her back on the pyre and burned her
again, and again, over and over. Until she didn't look human anymore.
When they were done, they threw her body in the river. They never found her body. I never got to
bury her. There is no grave for Joan of Arc."
Here is the truth: there is no grave for Joan of Arc.
Here is a question: if something is not buried, is it truly dead?

It's going to be alright. Eventually.

It doesn't end well. Things never end well for either of you- that's not how things are supposed to
go. She ends in a burst of fire, and you don't end at all. That's the way things go.
But that doesn't mean you can't love her like time's running out (it is). It doesn't mean you can't
kiss her softly and feel something unlock in the place where your love lives. It doesn't mean you
can't spend eternity in love before the ending.

Here is yet another truth, before you go: this is only the beginning.

End Notes

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