Work Text:
Summary: Excerpts from the New York Time's best-selling superlative anthology 'Portraits of Heroism'.
Notes: Woefully unedited.
Collegiate Grief
Charlotte has to explain to her grief-stricken parents that while turning down her summer session at Columbia-and to a larger degree-her full scholarship feels like a betrayal right now, in four to six months (years) they (she) will have gained just the right amount of distance to be able to look back on this moment and think I’m glad we did this, good for us. Calmly explaining that her decision to spend the summer learning Farsi and building houses for low income families on Swellview’s east side isn't a negative reflection on them, but a testament to the myriad methods of ethical and academic prioritization they’ve instilled in her, is a delicate process marred only by her mother glancing up at the ceiling as though she’s being personally victimized by God and her dad actively failing to fight back his tears.
Three weeks after the worst family meeting of all time, Charlotte receives a full scholarship to MIT, (a development which simultaneously pleases and confuses the Boltons) her former safety school that evolves with Pokémon speed with the announcement that Dr. Shelby Steadman, the world’s preeminent particle research\teleportation scientist is emerging from her lab to grace their hallowed halls for one year. (It’s rumored that halfway through Charlotte’s paper on quantum entanglement, the left side of Dr. Steadman’s mouth curls up at a fifteen degree angle, a phenomenon that last took place on October 7th, 1995, thirty minutes into a symposium on symmetric magnetic clusters. This alleged smirk is thought to be at least sixty percent responsible for Charlotte’s spot on the intern research team for the spring semester at CERN.)
Jasper is at NYU DMing five different D&D groups, shining like a super nova in Interpretative Dance class, and shooting a documentary about the Bucketeer community that becomes both the Citizen Kane and the Mean Girls of fandom exposes’. (There is real, raw, and unpleasant Venn Diagram overlap with the bitter, balding remnants of the brony population.) Bucket Boy is released online and gets the big screen treatment at Bucket Con 2022.
Yes, okay, Henry gets into Cal, but not like-not so much because he tries or anything, or because it’s ~prestigious or even because any part of him particularly wants to go. It’s more like campus is super close and it’s one of the first acceptance letters he gets and he’s a little busy trying to prevent the (second) apocalypse to lose days of his life scrolling through the 15.K word document that is Charlotte’s Official List of Collegiate Contenders. His roommate takes Photogram photos of pickles for his largely pickle-based Photogram, his Sociology professor spends like, eighty percent of class plugging the stupid book he writes, and his rat-faced, Herbert of a physics TA straight up calls his class ugly while he’s taking their photo. The low point is definitely the Thursday morning Debbie Putch starts her Criminology report on violent crime statistics in Death Valley with, “So this one time, Henry Hart tried to murder me,” and no one even asks follow up questions? The roomful of semi strangers is just like, “LOL, SOUNDS LIKE HENRY.”
They Skype on Thursdays.
Charlotte is usually just waking up because time difference, Jasper is usually trying to get one of his legs over his head because interpretive dance class. They talk over each other, trying to tell him everything all at once: one of the girls in Charlotte’s lab watches Bucket Boy over the weekend and cries for the first time in like, ten years. In honor of Henry, Jasper’s secondary D&D character is a warrior with really good hair and the ability to pull an infinite amount of meatballs from his scabbard. There’s a minor explosion in the lab on Monday because one of Sagan’s successors left a fork in the microwave. This kid in Jasper’s Language of Film class calls Brazil “a garbage movie” and his professor a) goes off on him for twenty minutes and b) assigns an essay on the impact of Brazil on independent film making. They giggle and hurl insults at each other and sometimes, Jasper puts on Elastic Heart and just freestyles until Henry and Charlotte are legitimately weeping.
It’s the longest amount of time that Henry's week doesn’t suck.
No one mentions the L.A. county news reports which-in addition to political stupidity and local lottery winners- have basically become twenty minute commercials (bookended by sports and weather) for some tall dude in a mask who spends his free time foiling robberies and knocking out car thieves in Monterey Park.