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

5 Headcanons AU Meme

Prompt from @littlestartopaz​: Max and Lessa role reversal?  (Reminder that Max and Lessa are the main characters of my novel Polaris, explained in more detail here.)

• Okay so, in this world, Max grows up Margaret Stone, with long hair and makeup and heels and money.  She wants to strip off her skin.   Lessa, full name unknown, on the other hand, is on the street at eleven and picked up by Sebastian McCoy, MD, on his way to Polaris’ newest base.  She’s a little too timid to be a revolutionary, at first, but she takes to it like a duck to water after a little bit of an adjustment period.
  
• Lessa never joins Mercury squad, she’s not cut out for life as a spy and she has no talent for hacking.  Instead, when she’s fifteen she joins Mars squad, the strike team, and starts taking point on their operations, throwing bolts of electricity rather than bullets.  She’s promoted to Mars Prime at nineteen, and she has a reputation for being the gentlest professional soldier anyone’s ever met.  
• There’s also a couple of stories about her blowing the power for whole city grids, or turning on the sprinklers in a building and using the water as a conductor to kill everyone on the floor.
• Under Lessa, Ursa Major’s Mars squad gets a new nickname.  Blitzkrieg.  It means lightning war.
• On the one hand, Polaris does a lot worse in this universe.  Having a technopath to network a continent-spanning rebellion is invaluable, and without such an advantage, they lose lives, they lose bases, more than once they almost lose everything.  There is no secure intranet linking their family of thousands, there is no safe way to smuggle those who don’t want to fight out of the country.  Fight or die is the unspoken option given to every new recruit, and those few who are desperate enough to attempt to leave the country on their own learn how true it is.  Polaris is harder, every base dependent on only itself, with no safe way to reach out for help, and its people are angrier, with an ever-growing ‘missing’ list of those who can neither be contacted nor confirmed dead.
• On the other, Polaris does a lot better in this universe, because when Margaret is nine, she discovers that she can make any computer do anything she tells it to, just by touching it.  When she’s twelve, and Lessa is still years from getting kicked out, Margaret starts funneling information from her father’s system onto a private hard drive so encrypted the NSA couldn’t crack it with their best men.  She does research, lots of research, and hunts down a boy at her school whose family is on one of the lists.  She tells him, warns him, and says, “Polaris.  Go to Polaris.  Take them this.”  The moment the hard drive is connected to a Polaris system, their database is flooded with more national secrets than they’ve been able to get in a decade, every block of code signed with a simple MAX.  Marshal North has to sit down, and she laughs and laughs until she’s breathless.
• Margaret is twenty-two and ferocious with being trapped like an animal in a cage when she’s caught up in a Polaris operation.  She gets taken hostage by a girl with long blonde hair and a grim look in her eye, one hand wrapped around her throat as the girl says, “Sorry, Miss Stone, but it is what it is.  Tell your bodyguards to drop their guns, or I’ll put so much electricity through you you’ll wish you’d just been struck by lightning.”
• Margaret bares her teeth and looks as wild as any of the rebels when she says, “If you take me with you, I can get you another load of my father’s data before we leave, and more that I’ve hidden around the city.  it’ll make the hard drive look like nothing.”
• The blonde girl is so startled she almost drops her hostage in a pile on the ground.  “How did you–”
• “I sent the first one.”
  
• “Max,” Lessa breathes, and gives a feral grin of her own.  “You’ve got a deal.”
  

speckeltail asked: okay, so, an au where your ocs all work shitty retail jobs

Oh dear Christ.  Okay, let’s see, I don’t make OC’s for fic as a rule, and my OC’s for my original writing all tend to be really aggressive people, this should be fun.  I’ll just pick five at random.

• Sam Lightworth, Horseman of Death and unwilling Antichrist and my fave: she’s the best salesperson in the house, no one is disputing this, she could sell light switches to the Amish and matchboxes in Hell so they’re not going to fire her, but she’s also on so much probation always.  A short list of highlights from the notes in Sam’s file:
  
• punched a customer in the nose for flicking water at her
• found a customer rifling through the shirts she’d just spent an hour folding and almost broke their fingers
• responded to a crying child by setting him on a shelf and telling him that if he wasn’t good she’d sell him (in her defense, it worked)
• threw a grown man into a wall so hard she knocked him out when he tried to grab her ass (the manager doesn’t know how she managed it and doesn’t WANT to know, okay, he deals with too much shit to ask how she sent someone flying without a finger laid on them)
• was found in store at opening with what looked suspiciously like a hellhound (there is a sign, okay, it’s very unambiguous, no pets allowed)

• Max, no last name, my spy-slash-technopath from this novel: she used to work on the floor but she’s shit at selling things and only slightly better at giving directions, so they shoved her in a glorified janitor’s closet with the security system and told her to keep it running.  She helps make sure there’s never any video evidence of Sam’s antics.

• Gwynion, erstwhile Prince of the Unseelie Court and ex-assassination victim, because we need a guy in here somewhere: he’s very polite, which has him one up on Sam, and very efficient, which has him one up on Max, but he’s also…look, the manager isn’t accusing anyone of anything, but no one ever found that one woman who tried to grope Gwynion, okay, the manager’s not saying she disappeared.  He’s just saying they never found her.  There’s a difference.

• Sephie, from this: honestly Sephie doesn’t deserve this, Sephie deserves better than this bullshit and these coworkers, she is a Normal Human trying to pay rent and she needs a drink.  Nonetheless, she gets along famously with everyone and doesn’t mind working the register since Sam isn’t trusted to do it and Gwynion seems prone to causing equipment fry-age.  Sephie is also gunning for the managerial position when their current boss inevitably caves, and stands to make a tidy sum in the pool given the newest hire.

• Angharad “Harry” Ainsel, from this (parts are noted ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘third’): the new hire.  The manager almost cried when she walked in, because no one who wanders around with that strange bone crown is going to be a good thing.  She’s almost as good as Sam at the sales end of things, but she’s also making people sign things that don’t look like receipts and has offered to exchange two return items for changeling children.  Also, the bike rack is for bikes, and the no pets allowed thing should cover the bike rack, as far as the manager knows, which means the warhorse is definitely contraindicated.

• Bonus sixth headcanon: the manager quits within three weeks of Harry’s hire (with the apparent intent to move to Bangkok or somewhere similarly distant), Harry and Sephie shake hands as soon as Sephie’s signed her new managerial contract, and the Huntsmaster leaves in the middle of her shift and doesn’t come back to work.  Sephie, when asked how she knows Harry and could she get Sam one of those nice daggers she carried, shrugs and says that her girlfriend has contacts.