Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Oh, baby, listen, college is scary as fuck from the outside, it’s the nature of the beast.  I promise, I really do, after that first terrifying week or so of adjustment, it gets easier, you learn the rhythm, slip into it.  College is fun, once you get a finger on the pulse of it, whether you’re someone who likes to party or someone who thinks a movie marathon is where it’s at.  But the adjustment is inevitably a little rough, so I’d say the first step of dealing it to remind yourself that you’re going to be one freshman in a whole cadre, and every last one of you is going to be just as stressed.  If someone seems calm about it, it’s not that they’re more of a grown-up or less homesick, it just means they’re a better liar.  Take a deep breath, let yourself freak out, and remember that you’re going to be okay.

Some other tips for dealing:

• Try to make at least one friend on the first day, even if making yourself walk up and talk to them is absolutely terrifying.  I’m not still friends with the people from that first day, we grew apart, but having someone to sit with at meals that first week, someone to share sarcastic looks with during the hideously awkward ice-breakers, someone to actually look for in a crowded room rather than standing around like a stump?  It makes life a hell of a lot easier.
  
• Skype exists!  Skype is great!  If you’re homesick and you want to Skype your parents every single day, do it!  Shit, I’m going to be a senior next year, I haven’t been home for more than three weeks since last winter, I am planning for after college and grad school, and I still video-call my parents at least twice a week when I can.  If anyone tries to give you shit, literally just stare at them like they’re speaking another language.  It shuts people up damn quick, and you don’t even have to do anything.
• Related to the above: your relationship with your family is going to change.  You’re going to be on your own, living your own life for the first time, and it’s inevitably going to have some effects on your relationship with your family, especially your parents.  Don’t be afraid of it, and be willing to set your own boundaries if you feel like you need to.
• Bring your favorite books and movies, and for fuck’s sake bring a stuffed animal or a favorite poster or something to give your room some life.  Dorm rooms look like prison cells, it’s depressing as fuck, cover that white cinderblock shit up.
• Bring some comfort food with you to your dorm room, even if it’s just a bag of Hershey’s Kisses or something like that.  In fact, bring some comfort food for yourself and then bring something sugar-loaded to share with the riff-raff.  The affection of college students is easily bought with junk food, it’s an instant friend-maker, and having something familiar and comforting really will help.
• Don’t expect your roommate to be your best friend.  I mean, they might be, or you might go through a LOT of roommates, and expecting them to be your best friend right off the bat will just set you up for disappointment.  My first roommate and I rarely spoke more than pleasantries, my second arrangement was a quad, my third arrangement was a triple, my fourth arrangement was the same triple with a roommate swapped out, and now I have my roommate who I adore living with and who is my entire social circle.  There might be a lot of shuffling around and that’s fine.  It’s normal.  
• This is more general, but DO NOT live in a quad.  A triple was pretty strained.  The quad was intolerable.
• Make friends outside your room.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  It’s hard to feel homesick and out of place when you have other people around, even if you aren’t going to be bestest friends forever.  Tips for making friends include:
• Crack a joke.  Laughter causes a flood of dopamine and seratonin, the feel-good chemicals in your brain, and that person will associate the pleasant sensation with you.
• Feed them junk food.  I am so fucking serious, I bought the friendship of a PA (my school’s floor-by-floor equivalent of an RA) with a chocolate chip cookie.
• Join a club.  Ready-made group of people who share at least one interest of yours.  Statistics are in your favor that at least one of them will be tolerable.
• Nothing bonds a group together like shared suffering, so if you have a particularly awful teacher, sit down with your class at lunch and bitch with them.  Same applies to a particularly difficult class or a catastrophe.
• On that first day (and this is going to sound bad) look for the easiest target.  You see a kid sitting alone at a table?  Take two deep breaths, brace yourself, and just fucking sit down with them.  Have a remark prepared, if it helps, something like “Can you believe the icebreaker they made us do” or “Holy shit this is a lot of people” or “Hey I like your shirt.”
• Basically, you’re going from an environment where you have people to one where you don’t.  So GET PEOPLE.  It’ll help.
• This is a chance to reinvent yourself.  Take it.  Be honest with what you like and dislike, because doing your first impression as yourself will net you better friends than otherwise.  Don’t feel obliged to have the TV college life with partying and drinking and drugs if you don’t want it, you aren’t doing college wrong if your version of Friday night is movies ‘til morning rather than dancing ‘til dawn.  Conversely, college really is a chance to kind of explore your life a little.  Kiss people, if you’re into that.  Learn a new language.  Try something you’ve never tried before, even if it’s just joining a new club (if you’re curious for recommendations, I suggest D&D because I’m a fucking nerd).

Above all else, let yourself freak out.  Cry all over someone before you leave for school.  Tell people how much you’ll miss them.  Admit to the people you meet at college that you’re freaking out.  Bottling up the stress will just make it really hard to adjust.  So panic, and then breathe, and remind yourself that you’re going to be all right.

And here’s my obligatory medical addendum: bring a first aid kit and maybe google how to treat a cut or a scrape or something.  It’ll make you popular to know how to do basic adult things like that.  Also, do what you want, it’s your life, but I’d advise not going to class hungover (meaning drink on weekends), and remember that if you or your friends do anything especially dumb, the EMT’s are not there to narc on you, please come clean to them.  Don’t mix uppers and downers, and it IS possible to OD on caffeine.

Go forth, baby, because you’re going to be fine.

Actually I have NOT answered that, and I am VERY EXCITED about this thesis, please pity my roommate.  

A few things you need to know to explain this whole thing:

• my college requires every student, regardless of major, to do some kind of thesis project to graduate;
  
• my college started as a liberal arts school/social experiment, and would probably let you summon Satan for your senior thesis as long as you could justify it (”Oh, sure, professor, I understand that you’re concerned about that intricate circle of blood on the floor of the art studio, but I have here the proof that this is part of my combined thesis on the history of religious ritual and Ancient Greek, are we good here?”);
• my college generally expects that their science majors (like myself, pre-med track) do an experimental thesis, but my explicit criterion for majoring in the pre-med track was that I not have to do a goddamn year-long experiment;
• I am a history nerd, specifically military history and obscure details that no one else cares about; and
• I have basically constructed an entire thesis around my desire to
• talk about medicine
• talk about history
• title it with a Princess Bride quote

So I’m doing my thesis on the history of battlefield medicine (probably going to have to cut that down, preferably in such a way that I still get to talk about the Revolutionary War, which is my pet obsession) and I’m going to title it “Only Mostly Dead” because I’m an irreverent little shit.

My thesis adviser already gets a little long-suffering with me and I’ve only turned in the preliminary proposal.

OH FRIEND, I HAVE PLANS.  Specifically those plans involve Grantaire’s current lack of air-bending expertise and Bahorel and Joly/Bousset playing peanut gallery.  I got you.  If people want to submit bending puns go for it, although I can’t promise that all of them will get used.

Oh God, that’s right, that fic exists.  For those of you who are new to the party, it’s this, and I haven’t updated it in literal months, for which I am formally sorry.  In unrelated news, yes I am a bastard, and Agony Inc. is my new favorite thing, I will be tagging all upsetting writing as such.

• There’s actually tentative plans for this to be a sister-fic, but since it’ll obviously take me a millennium to write that, here: Superhero Adjunct Drinking Night, facilitated by Natasha Romanoff (who won’t hear argument that she’s a superhero, and therefore part of the problem) and enabled by Pepper Potts’ gold card.  It starts after Natasha comes and gets Claire to help her fish Clint out of a dumpster, and when Natasha turns up not a week later Claire’s first response is to grab her first aid kit.  Instead, Natasha waves her down, hands her a jacket, and steers her out of the apartment and drives to a bar—it feels more like a kidnapping than getting drinks with friends, but Natasha generously pays for drinks all night, and Claire could stand a few more kidnappings like this.  This proceeds to happen about once a week for two months, at which point Claire gets a call from an unknown number on her personal cell, and a polite voice asks, “Would you mind if I accompanied Natasha to your girls’ night tonight?” Pepper proves to be a riotously funny drunk, with enough stories about her time as Tony’s PA to keep them laughing too.  The next time Claire treats Jessica for acute failure to demonstrate the common sense God gave a squirrel (technical terms) and sees Malcolm silently working up a stress ulcer, she invites him out with them—he gets juice rather than liquor, but he’s witty and wry and only a little starstruck, all in all a good addition.  Karen is the next addition, after she spends a full hour shouting at Matt while Claire stitches him up, and it’s lucky that she doesn’t bring Foggy that first week, because there’s a deeply awkward moment where she and Natasha eye each other like feral wolves and greet each other by strange names.  “Vasilisa,” Natasha says, “I thought you were dead.” Karen bares her teeth politely and replies, “Natalia, I thought you were a better spy.”  Pepper looks up at the ceiling like she’s praying for strength and orders an entire bottle of vodka, setting it between the two other redheads like an olive branch.  All is calm, after that, although the two are eerily alike, dark gallows humor flecking their speech.  Foggy comes, the next week, then a woman named Candace who drops into a chair like she belongs there and introduces herself as ‘an ex of an X-Man’ and snickers at their faces, then a dark-haired twenty-something in glasses who complains about Asgardians, then a cranky blind woman who refuses to talk about her roommate…. It snowballs pretty bad, is the point, and it gets to the point where Pepper is comfortably dropping a grand on drinks.  Claire likes it, though, it’s the most normal thing she’s handled lately.
• Also: she’s not sure how anyone finds out about Superhero Adjunct Drinking Night, but apparently it’s sovereign, because through mysterious happenings there’s never once an attack or other disaster on the night in question, even though they’re a perfect target for any enterprising villain in the mood for hostages. “Mysteries of the life,” Claire says dryly.  “Another round of tequila, I think.”

• Claire definitely sees Steve Rogers in her preferred grocery store.  Actually, she sees him in her preferred grocery store a lot, so much that she corners him and interrogates him about who made him follow her.  He looks pretty alarmed—for a six-foot-plus brick house, he does ‘alarmed’ remarkably well—and sheepishly admits that if he gets groceries anywhere closer to the city center and the Tower, he gets accosted.  Hell’s Kitchen is a little out of his way, but apparently it’s worth it for a few minutes of peace.  Claire huffs, grabs the cheap box of cereal he’d tossed into his basket, and informs him that if he’s shopping on seventy years of back pay he can afford to get the name brand stuff that doesn’t taste like paper.  They see each other about every other week, and Claire works really hard not to laugh at his offended tirade about bananas.

• Claire’s pretty much over the shock of having someone knock on her bedroom window, which is inaccessible by human means and on the fourth floor besides, but she’s used to having it happen at night, not three in the afternoon.  But she opens it, lets the person—people—through and starts working up to a lecture about how she gives them a phone number for a reason before she realizes that it’s just Peter, sitting on her floor, apparently uninjured and dressed in civvies and dripping dismally onto the carpet from the downpour.  “You could’ve been seen,” she says automatically, and he slants a look up at her through the floppy locks of wet hair falling into his face—it’s pouring, and has been for hours, so it’s unlikely anyone was exactly paying enough attention to see a kid crawl down a building.  “Mind if I hang out here for a couple hours?” he asks, and when she doesn’t answer immediately he flicks his hair out of his face, looking uncomfortable, and adds, “Um, it’s the anniversary of my uncle’s death and my aunt’s not home and I…didn’t really want to stay there alone.”  Claire sighs and throws a towel at his face, and walks out into her kitchen, calling back to grab some dry clothes out of her closet before he gets her couch wet.  She’s no great shakes in the kitchen, but she can make tea, so she does, the chamomile blend Abuela gives her in vast quantities as a remedy for stress.  Peter sits on her couch in sweats that are about four sizes too big—most of her spare clothes are for people who aren’t nineteen—and drinks the tea in silence and watches a Harry Potter marathon on TV while Claire lays out her first aid kit and sorts through it on the floor.  When she joins him on the couch, he leans his head onto her shoulder and falls asleep, face twisted into a frown and his hair drying into cowlicks.  She sighs, the deep, from-the-soles-of-her-feet, why-does-this-happen-to-me sigh she perfected after the second time Matt called her, and shifts them so that Peter’s head is in her lap and her hand is in his hair. It eases the frown, so maybe it’s okay that this specific thing is happening to her.

• This is how Claire Temple meets Frank Castle, AKA the Punisher, AKA a dead guy: she gets a date.  She goes on the date.  She brings the date back to her place.  She finds a tall and menacing guy standing outside the door of her apartment building, dressed in a long coat and a shoulder holster and a black eye under his military buzz cut.  He stops her date with a look like steel and offers Claire a file without a word, and she takes it, because that’s what her life is turning into these days.  The file is either a threat (unlikely, because Buzz Cut Man is armed and hasn’t directly threatened her yet) or something that someone thinks will help her (more likely, because Buzz Cut Man is glaring at her date like he’s pissed him off personally rather than standing there and looking pale and scared), so she opens it because either way, it is what it is. It turns out that the file is a terrifyingly complete background check on her date, all the way back to grade school and annotated by three people, and includes his marriage certificate, with a post-it note in Karen’s tidy handwriting that says ‘no divorce in the works.’  Claire sighs—the guy seemed like a pretty bad lay anyway, too narcissistic—and closes the file.  “You,” she tells her date, “go home to your wife and ask for a fucking divorce if you’re going to sleep around anyway.  You,” she tells Buzz Cut Man, “can come inside and I’ll give you some ice to put on that eye.  And tell Karen and Natasha that I can vet my own dates.”  He mutters something, and stands to attention when she arches an eyebrow at him. “You can tell them,” he repeats, and she snorts.

• And a sneak peek of the next chapter, if I ever have time to write the damn thing: Claire has a lot of friends in the medical field, and even though she hasn’t spoken much to this particular friend since undergrad, the Organic Chemistry bond is real, so when her friend calls, Claire answers.  Her friend helps run a women’s health clinic that offers abortions and has been facing increasingly aggressive harassment, not to mention their financial problems, and she’s been calling around looking for anyone, anyone at all, who’s willing to help protect the women trying to get into the clinic.  Claire’s response is “Well, I’ll see what I can do, and I’ll come up on my next day off.” And then she calls Jessica, because Jessica knows everyone, and explains, and Jessica’s whole response is “Leave it to me.”  So when Claire goes up to help out on her next day off, she’s more than a little surprised to find Captain America, Luke Cage, and Colossus all standing in front of the doors and looking solemn.  Not nearly as surprised as her old friend, though, who’s talking to Natasha and Kitty and a blonde woman—is that Trish Walker, Claire wonders, making a mental note to invite her to the Drinking Nights—and looks about a second from fainting.  
  
• “Claire, who the fuck are these people?” her friend hisses when the protesters start turning up and Steve, Forties charm in full swing, offers his arm to the first girl he sees, shooting a venomous look over her head at the closest sign-bearing man.
• “Uh,” Claire says blankly as she catches a familiar pair of figures on a nearby roof—one horned, one sleek and bright red and blue.  “My…friends?”

Oh my God thank you so much, I’m glad you liked it!  Honestly I think I’m still in shock from how popular that thing got, I keep expecting to wake up.  But, if you are interested, there’s more ExR fic here, and more of my writing generally here, and I’m always taking requests for headcanons/ficlets/other stuff!

I just got out of Beyond last night and I am DRUNK on the Star Trek thing right now.  LET’S GO.  I did a little more with the crews than the ships but like.  Yeah.

• The thing about exploring space is that it’s big, but not infinite.  So sooner or later the final frontier pushes right up to the raggedy edge of a galaxy far far away.  Specifically, a ramshackle ship at the outermost edge of Republic space.  (They’re on a sort of ‘remember the good old days when the three of us plus Chewie and a couple droids were on the fucking run’ sort of trip.  Han doesn’t know why he’s doing this but sure, Leia, for old time’s sake, something like that, and Luke just looked at him and blinked and somehow the farmboy eyes still work on him after all this time.)  The Enterprise sees it on its radar and…well, to be completely honest, Spock takes one look at the readings and announces that there appears to be a ship in distress.  They go investigate—the Enterprise makes the Falcon look like a slightly haphazard guppy beside a sleek and shining whale, a sheer wall of matte white kissed with space dust.  (Inside the Falcon, everyone has a completely independent moment of holyfuckingkriff we’re going to war again before the polite text hail comes through and the ship translates the message.)

• Okay so…it turns out that Republic Standard and Federation Basic have basically nothing to do with each other, and the universal translators aren’t in the mood to translate an entirely foreign language.  The crew of the Falcon and the Enterprise away team spend a good long while cycling through every language they know (and with Uhura with them, that number is prodigious) before they figure out that there seems to be at least a degree of commonality between Bocce and Ferengi, and between an archaic Vulcan dialect that even Spock barely knows and an equally dated Naboo dialect that Leia knows a few scraps of and C-3PO knows a few more scraps of (Padmé believed in knowing her planet’s history).  They cobble together a pidgin that at least lets them introduce themselves while half the engineering team scrambles to clap together a translator.  (It takes two hours and Scotty is bursting with pride over the thing, which turns Basic into Standard and back again with no trouble at all.)

• First contact with a foreign Republic: pretty much par for the course for the Enterprise, and hey, they have a Senator of said Republic right there, so for Kirk and his crew this is going great.  They have a war hero, a general in the military, and a political figure on hand, in addition to a droid loaded with a massive amount of history and a soldier.  The Falcon’s crew is pretty much exactly the diplomatic cadre most planets send out to meet the Federation, so it doesn’t even occur to them that they’ve pretty much caught the Falcon with their pants down.  The Falcon isn’t a diplomatic vessel on the best of days, and even if it was, the Republic hasn’t made a business of making first contact with anyone in quite a long time. So when a clutch of various aliens—including humans, who aren’t so alien after all, and ain’t that a kick in the head, as Han says—in brightly colored uniforms introduces themselves as members of Star Fleet, representatives of something called the United Federation of Planets…that’s new.  Leia pushes Han out of the way with an elbow, and shuts Luke up with a glance, and does her best to look Senatorly and In Control.  

• By the end of a few hours’ meeting, there’s a tentative alliance drawn up and a friendship in place between Leia and Jim, who, Bones and Han agree, have bonded over being reckless idealists too stubbornly brave for their own health.  Spock interrogates Luke at length about the Force—fascinating, he pronounces at once—and is disappointed to find out that the Jedi have largely been wiped out will all their information.  (Luke, on the other hand, is a little dazed from the rapid-fire queries and thinks that, if all Vulcans are so emotionless, it’s probably for the best that the Jedi never met them, because can you imagine if that was the Jedi standard for emotional control.  Also, Luke is smarter than your average bantha, thanks, and knows a telepath when he sees one, so he makes a mental note to look into testing the Vulcans for Force-sensitivity, if he can figure out how the hell to do it.)  Uhura corners 3PO and commands him to start teaching her Republic Standard.  She makes terrifying progress, and also learns enough Shyriiwook to understand Chewbacca’s careful and kind farewell (C-3PO is in love, he’s never met someone so brilliant in his entire existence, he almost follows her home like a lost puppy).

• Regarding the ships: Jim is very polite about the Falcon because there’s just no point in being rude about other people’s ships when yours is so evidently the best in the universe—honestly, if Han tried to insult his ship, Jim’s response would be a blank expression and “Are you blind?  We can have Bones look at that.”  Han grumbles a bit, but he’s not an idiot, and the Falcon is a damn good ship, he mutters, even if she’s not flashy.  (It should be noted that, here, ‘not flashy’ means ‘occasionally unwilling to hit hyperspeed without some serious antics,’ which is kind of the equivalent of saying, about a car, that ‘not flashy’ means ‘hope you don’t want a second gear that works all the time.’)  So the two captains get along pretty well, because if there’s anyone that Han Don’t-Tell-Me-The-Odds Solo is going to click with, it’s Jim Rules-What-Rules Kirk. Scotty, on the other hand, is apoplectic the first time he hears Han compare the Falcon to the Enterprise.  That bucket of bolts!  Falling apart at the seams!  Compared to his lady!  The Falcon is unworthy to pass through her ion wake! Chekov sees the Chief of Engineering puff up and Jim shoots him a look, and Chekov claps a hand over Scotty’s mouth, towing him out of the room with Sulu.  Han’s back is turned and the nod Luke gives, to say nothing of the hidden smirk, suggests that he won’t be telling, so Jim has avoided, once more, starting a diplomatic incident because of Scotty’s determination to defend the Enterprise’s honor.  This is a fairly regular occurrence, and a large part of the reason that Scotty is on probation from diplomatic missions.

• Bonus sixth headcanon: Jim is the most fucking Force-sensitive.  They find this out because Luke, still half-trained and a bit prone to error, brushes a brief mental probe across his mind and gets thrown out with all the violence of hitting warp three from a dead halt.  Luke asks where his mental shields came from and Jim gives him a blank look and Luke has a moment of horrible revelation: he’s not only going to have to scrounge up some teaching ability, he’s going to have to comb an entire Federation for Force-sensitives. When the nav officer—Chekov—sees the look of appalled shock on his face and politely offers brandy, with the additional remark that the Captain can have that effect, Luke takes him up on it.
  

HOW COINCIDENTAL, BECAUSE I WOULD LOVE TO SHARE SOME HEADCANONS ABOUT MY AVATAR AU.  For anyone who isn’t aware, these are for my Les Mis Avatar AU, things we lost in the fire, in which Grantaire is the Avatar and the Fire Nation is…well, the Fire Nation.

• Joly and Bousset’s departure from the North Pole was, um…dramatic?  There was a bit of a storm, which ended with a non-bender getting part of an ice structure dropped on him, and of course Joly is Joly and he healed him without thinking twice.  Having been outed as a man learning healing in secret, he was given the option to turn his (not inconsiderable) talents to a more acceptable method or leave.  He took the second option after Bousset settled down to a really good tirade and spent an hour haranguing the elders.
• Gavroche had a group of kids in this universe too, for a little while, street rats he took care of and taught to steal and tried to get set up with enough money to be well-fed and not street rats anymore.  Eponine and her brutal efficiency helped with that, once she found him again–they robbed a passing Fire Nation noble and took every scrap of gold and jewelry on him, and there was a sudden increase in the average age of the homeless in their town.  They make a habit of it, and keep it under Thenardier’s radar.  For a while.
• Cosette’s ship is called the Rose, and no, I’m not telling you who she is, it’s a surprise.  But her ship is called the Rose, and if you know the book well enough to get the reference it’ll tell you something about what kind of ship it is.
• There have been three Avatars since the start of the war, since Avatar Roku died at the hands of the old Fire Lord (not that Grantaire is aware of this detail).
  
• Roku’s immediate successor was a young monk from the Southern Air Temple, a birdlike and intelligent boy with a tight bond to his companion, a flying bison.  He was told that he was the Avatar at eleven, and when the elders of the Temple suggested that they remove him from the care of his mentor, he fled into a storm.
• In another universe, the Avatar state saved him, and he woke up a hundred years in the future.  In this one, he drowned.  It’s a tragedy, one the Air Nomads linger over, but they survive to linger.  In the other universe, they do not.
• The Avatar after the child who drowned was a waterbender from the South Pole.  They didn’t tell her nearly so young–they had learned from the death of the Air Nomad Avatar.  But they didn’t tell her nearly young enough, either, and when the Fire Navy struck, she died, sixteen and scared and fighting for her family.
• In another universe, she brought back the Air Nomads.  In this one, it’s not necessary.  That’s almost like a victory, isn’t it?
• Grantaire hasn’t spoken to any of his past lives in almost a decade, except for the occasional desperate draw on their power and skill.  It’s bad enough to be a disappointment to an entire world of living people, okay, he doesn’t need to face down Roku and Kyoshi and the line of glowing eyes. 
• Every once in a while he wishes he could talk to them, get some advice, maybe a reassurance that he hasn’t completely fucked up, but he can’t face the possibility that they would say he has.
• The Spirit World is a tense place these days, Avatar incarnations milling about and waiting for their newest member to let them through.  Roku is drowning in the knowledge that he died and left this mess behind, and there are more than a few Avatars (including the Air Nomad) who just want to give Grantaire a damn hug.
• Bonus sixth headcanon: Bahorel is a very bad Air Nomad and a very good airbender.  It’s the pacifism thing that he can’t get past, he believes in fighting for what he believes.  You may draw your conclusions accordingly.