Chapter Text
Remus handed his planner to his study hall teacher as soon as he got out of his fourth period with a request written in for him to go to the 10th year government classroom. The teacher read over the hall pass section for that day, already with scratchy letters showing the place, time, and reason, only waiting for the teacher's signature.
"Don't you usually wait until 3:00 to set up GSA?" The teacher asked with a raised eyebrow as he dropped the small book onto his open laptop to grab a pen from his cup of stationary.
"Yeah, but there's a new kid coming. I heard he doesn't start till next Friday, but he wanted to check out the club and meet some people first. I want it to look nice for him, pleeassee!" Remus whined as the teacher scrawled in his initials and handed the book back, shooing Remus from his room.
"Thank you, sir!" He beamed as he turned to run back to his seat, bumping into one of the empty desks on his way. The other three people in the study hall laughed at him as he grabbed his hip in pain. With his bag over his shoulder and his penny board under his arm, Remus rushed out with a two-fingered wave.
"I'd better not see you skating in the halls again!" The teacher called past the closing door.
"You won't see me," Remus called with a laugh before the lock clicked behind him.
Once past the window, Remus dropped the board and stepped on smoothly, gliding down to the stairwell. He stepped off and slid down the railing, wiping off the back of his black uniform slacks when he landed at the bottom. His penny board carried him to the government room and he opened it with the spare key the teacher gave him. It was empty since Mr. Sanders always left after 3rd period, which was his last class. It was a small room with far too many desks crammed in it. Remus stacked all but eight of them on top of each other on the outside of the room and arranged the rest in a loose circle. Patton kicked the door with a stack of canvases loading down his arms, and Remus perked up and opened it for him.
Patton sat the stack of paintings on one of the desks and let out a big breath. Looking from the sides of them, there were fourteen in total and each was a different color of the rainbow.
"I had to kinda rush the last two," Patton said as he took the first two off the top of the stack gingerly, "They're still wet, so don't touch or bump them or anything." They were both purple, one picturing a large lavender purple S and a royal purple background of butterflies and flowers, and the second with a lavender A and royal purple skulls and eyes, "I got everyone's requests done though. Your green flames and purple skulls," Patton listed out as he sat them on the ledge of the chalkboard with some distance between them, "Roman's red roses and yellow crowns. My pink clouds and purple butterflies. Janus's yellow snakes and orange eyes. Remy's green smoke and orange trees and leaves. Logan's blue beakers and atom-molecule-thingies. -And last but not least, Emile's red and pink gemstones! "
"That's totally a Steven Universe thing," Remus smiled as he remembered Emile talking about the show during their last few meetings and seeing all of their monochrome paintings spelling out in a rainbow "Welcome To GSA" with unlettered canvases marking the spaces.
"Oh, definitely," Patton quickly agreed and stepped back to admire the set in full, "I hope everyone likes them,"
"They look great, Pat!" Remus beamed and Patton hummed before turning away contentedly to help Remus finish setting up. Patton shrugged his backpack off into his usual spot in the circle and took a couple of books out before pulling out a plastic tray of partially crushed mini cupcakes and setting them on one of the double-stacked desks along with a handful of snacks he found in the bottom of his bag. Remus said he was going to go get drinks out of his locker, and Patton had barely told him it was okay with him that he heard one of the teachers call Remus's last name.
"Rosi! Am I going to have to take that from you?"
Patton giggled and finished the setup. In the time it took Remus to go to his locker and back, Patton had put little table covers over the desks, hung their poster on the chalkboard, and had the rainbow glass-cling in the door's window. Roman had come up and tried the door handle as he texted someone from theater and almost hadn't come in when Patton opened it for him.
"Thanks," He mumbled as he sat next to Patton's right, one seat from the head of the circle, his back mostly to the whiteboard. It wasn't until he finally put his phone back in his pocket that the bright colors in the corner of his eye caught his attention and he realized the extra decorations Patton had brought, "Wait! Those look amazing! That is just... so perfectly all of us! We can't take those home, they have to live here!"
The phone hooked to the PA system on the teacher's desk rang and Roman and Patton looked between each other than to the phone.
"Do you want to-?" Patton gestured Roman over, and he practically dove over the desk to pick it up before whoever on the other side hung up.
"Roman Rosi, Vice President of the GSA, how can I help you?.. Remus is at his locker right now. I can come down, our Decoration Director, Patton McCarthy, can come down, or we can send Remus down when he gets back... Alright, we'll let him know when he gets back. He shouldn't be too much longer! Thank you!" Roman sat the phone down and beamed over to Patton, "He's here! Remus said that he'd escort him, so he'd better get his butt back here soon,"
"And the rest of them! We're gonna look kinda pathetic if there's all of three of us. Even seven out of the whole school is a little daunting,"
A screech could be heard as Remus turned too fast and his wheels caught on the tile. He ran through the door and kicked his board across the room before anyone could catch him. Under his arm, he held three boxes of juice pouches and sat them on the table with Patton's snacks.
"You got called to the office, Remus," Patton told him, and he ducked out of the window, "For the new kid. He's here," He laughed as Remus straightened and fixed his tie that he had tugged down.
"I'm gonna run him through the school before classes let out. While I'm on the tour you better get the other four here! Be right back!" Remus told them sternly with a contradicting comical shake of his finger. Roman got started summoning the others to the little room as Remus started for the lobby. On the bench outside the main office was someone Remus didn't recognize. He didn't look all too different from the rest of the puny freshman though, but he wasn't in a uniform, so Remus took his chances.
"Hey, are you the new kid?" Remus asked before the kid noticed him come up. He went from all hunched in on himself to slinked back into the bench away from Remus, looking almost scared, "I'm Remus? Head of the GSA? I was told I was meeting someone transferring here that signed up for GSA? Glad you can make it to an early meeting! Uh... Handshake?" Remus guessed as the other didn't respond. He held out his hand and the kid stared back at him wide-eyed. Hesitantly, he put out a shaky hand and Remus jumped at the opportunity to shake his hand and yank him up out of his seat.
"Great!" Remus beamed, "Grab your bag and let's get on with the tour! A few of the other members are adding the last finishing touches and getting everyone down there for you. We got about fifteen minutes before classes let out, we should be back there before the halls fill up,"
Remus started his tour with the math and computer sciences wing. He pointed out the teachers he had taken as a freshman to give the new student an idea as to where he'd probably have to be heading. On their way in and out of the math wing, they passed the government room. Remus guessed he would recognize it if he looked in the door's concealed nook from the rainbow plastered in the window, but he didn't point it out. From there they passed the lobby again to go to the cafeteria and the gymnasium. The career course wing always had a variety of smells that made it most noticeable: hay and "horse shit" Remus identified the agriculture stretch despite the only animals in the barns being cows, goats, and pigs, sawdust with metallic undertones from the carpentry and machine tool shops, motor oil from the automotive room and a general grungy smell from the electrical engineering and ROTC rooms crammed at the end of the hall.
"If you're going to snap and beat the shit out of someone, do it back here," Remus advised, "There's only one camera, and once you pass the jarhead's lockers it's just their word against yours if you come out looking even,"
"I get the impression that that doesn't help you much,"
"You catch on quick," Remus smirked down at him proudly, but replied with a quip, "but if I were you, Tiny, I wouldn't fight at all. Some of my buddies could kill you like that," The snap of Remus's fingers seemed to scare the sass out of him. Remus picked back up with his cheery bus-director tone to bring them out of the secluded wing and point out the odd classes on the other side of the hall, again only focusing on their right.
"And on our way out we have the oddballs. Pre-calc and calc room that didn't fit in the math wing, then the capstone bio-med class, I forget what it's called, but the teacher can't take the stairs anymore, so they moved him down here and put physics in his old room with the other sciences upstairs, and finally, the other class that I've never taken and I've only seen like five kids take. The mystery room. I don't know, there's like ten computers in there, but it's not computer science,"
The upstairs tour was relatively quick. They went back to the cafeteria and up the staircase at that end. At that end were the sciences, then English classes immediately followed by foreign languages. The middle staircase divided the language wing from the odd electives and fine arts. Finance and business classes took the first two doors on the right and psychology and an extra ROTC room on the right, then the art room on the left and the theater room on the right, the abandoned home economics class capped the end of the hall at the last set of stairs.
"Right there's the elevator for anyone in wheelchairs or for if you break your leg," Remus pointed down between the stairwell and the home-ec door, "If you hear a ding get out of the way, basically. The principal told me to tell you 'Don't slide on the stair railings'," Remus said as he sat on the railing and did the exact opposite. The new kid ran down the stairs to keep pace and they laughed with each other as he let out a huff of air.
"If you look back there, Remus peaked around the short hall packed with folded risers, "That's the band and chorus room. There and the cafeteria during theater practices are the only places we can work with the girls' school across the street. Wanna go take a peak? We only work with them on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays after school. In fact, I'm skipping remedials for percussion, so the BD might be glad to see me?"
"BD?" The other questioned.
"Band Director. But, conveniently, his name is Brian Dice so-," Remus shrugged as he rang a cheap doorbell outside the door. They could hear a speaker in the room ring loudly and someone shouting. A minute later someone ran around the corner and opened the double doors to let them continue through the hall into the actual room. Around the corner, true to his word, a director stood behind a podium with a fiberglass baton trying to get six people with drums harnessed to their fronts to follow his beat. He turned when the trio came in and Remus and the other rushed back to the section.
"Remus! Where have you been?" The teacher asked as he looked to finally give up and fell back into the seat behind him, dropping his stick on the stand.
"Giving' newbie over there a tour," He gestured back to where the freshman stood in the entrance looking like he was willing himself to blend into the wall. Remus followed the person who opened the door back to the other percussionists and waited as he put on his harness again. His posture didn't falter as he dropped the quince on his shoulders, and the new student was assured that Remus's statement about his "buddies" wasn't an exaggeration. Remus grabbed a pair of sticks out of the bag on the side of the other person's quince and hit them together to establish a tempo. The group played out a cadence, surprisingly not made awkward by Remus's playing the quince with someone else and upside down as they stood face to face with it between them.
"Then why are you here?" The director boomed over the music. The whole scene made the new kid flinch at the sheer level of noise, but it stopped when Remus hit the rim of one of the bigger heads three times.
"Maybe I'm trying to recruit him to the band, maybe I wanted to flirt with Andy, or maybe I wanted to show him how cool Mr. Dice is," Remus said when he dropped the spare drumsticks into the bag, and he winked at the person he had been playing with, "Anyway, there's my practice for lessons today. I'll get him back!" Remus raised his hands in mock defeat as the director raised his eyebrow at him, "Come on, don't want you to get swept away in the mass exodus," Remus waved the kid out of the room with him, and when they walked out of the band stairwell they were close to the GSA room.
"Pop Quiz!" Remus said and pointed to their left when they were in the middle of the main hall, "What's that way?"
"Math and computers,"
"And you aced it! That would be your nickname, Ace, but I'm reserving it for someone. This is really just like all the other small private schools, nothing new if you came from anywhere similar. Now, two doors down, not the band, is the government room, which is where we host GSA!" Remus stepped into the enclave and unlocked the door. Inside was a mess of rainbows. Everyone had come, to Remus's surprise.
"Here he is!" Remus exclaimed as they walked in, "I brought some drinks, and Pat brought some snacks for today in the back. He also made our lovely new banner up front of the fourteen canvases, which turned out incredible! Everyone grab something to munch then grab a seat,"
A few made niceties as they got their refreshments and claimed their spot in the circle. Remus was the last to sit in his place at the head of the circle as he went around and straightened all of the posters around the room, theirs or not, wondering how Patton hadn't caught them as the decoration director. It had started as one of Mr. Sanders' that had fallen, but once he was looking he quickly decided he had to fix all of them.
"Now the dreaded 'Get to know you games'!" Remus said when he settled, "To let the little guy here get to know us, let's give him a little intro of each of us. Start with your name, position,"
"I'm a-"
"Remy! Not that position!" Patton cut the other interrupter off with a barely suppressed giggle.
"Name! Position! Other Clubs! Why you're here! Anything else! We'll have questions at the end!" Remus laughed out, and a few of the others joined in on his laughing, but Remus took a breath to compose himself before he continued "I'll go first! I'm Remus Dux Rosi. I'm the President of our GSA that's modest in size but not in mind. I'm also the percussion section leader of the marching and concert bands, and I play trumpet in the jazz band. I'm queer. Just... Yes, correct. Genderqueer, Sexuality-queer, Fuck-you-queer, all of it! I'm glad you're joining our school and our club. Next?" He gestured to his left to someone who look identical except in haircut and demeanor.
"I'm Roman Prince Rosi. Vice President and the voice of reason to my brother's unreasonableness. I'm one of our theater's most experienced performers, a linebacker on the football team, I'm a starter on the basketball team, our baseball team's best pitcher, and I'm rather active in the yearbook committee. The only reason I didn't get president is that I have too many coinciding extra-curriculars. Year-round theater and yearbook with sports on top of that made GSA take the backseat. I can be gay while doing all of the other stuff anyway," Roman waved off the demotion noncommittally, "Oh yeah, and I'm gay. Next?"
"Alrighty, so I'm Patton McCarthy, and I'm the Decoration Director. I made those paintings up on the chalkboard. I'm the president of Youth in Action, I do AP art, teach private lessons after school and help with the freshman art classes during school. I'm the resident Aro! Otherwise, I lean more towards guys. Glad to see you show up! Lo?"
"I'm Logan Alexandar, the PR Director. I'm taking a full run of AP classes and I'm on the basketball team in the winters and the baseball team in the springs with Roman. I'm what makes this a GSA and not just a GA, but they seem happy to have me. I'm more than excepting of everyone here and am more than willing to do what I can to help you out of any dilemma you come to me with, related to the organization or not. Janus?"
"I'm Janus, the Treasurer, which basically just consists of reminding Remus that he still owes me $450 for fixing his car three years ago,"
"I have bought you that back in food!" Remus defended from almost the other half of the circle with an accusatory finger.
"According to my tally, you still owe me $129.75 in milkshakes," Janus shrugged, "but other than that, I work with Logan on the rougher PR stuff and perform in the theater with Roman. I am... none of your business to put it bluntly. Next?"
"Okay, he's the mean gay, and I'm the bitchy bi apsec, Remy Barker. I'm the group's dealer; you need a hit, hit my line,"
"Wait, if that's what this is I'm out," The new kid quickly stood from his place two desks over and reached for his book back like that was the final thing to push him over his final line into bolting just as Remy pulled ten bottles of five-hour energy out of his crossbody bag.
"Caffeine dealer! Chill!" He said, annoyed, "I go to other people for that," He laughed, and the other slowly sat back into his seat, "I'm too busy for extra-curriculars. I complained to the guidance center until they let me double up my pathways, and I have a couple of jobs, mainly at a coffee shop, but I stop into Youth inAction with Pat once in a blue moon. Pretty much anything to get me out of the house for as long as possible. Last but not least, Sweetpea," He looked to the person next to him with adoration in his eyes.
"I'm Emile Picani," The last indoctrinated member started, "I'm some kind of ace-spec and nonbinary, but like Patton, I usually prefer masculine people when I prefer anyone. I don't really have an official position in the group, but I really like coming here on Tuesdays! Everyone's super nice once you've hung out with them a few times," He beamed over to the new kid, "So, what about you?"
"I'm... a bit nervous, honestly,"
"Well, would you rather start with the questions? Ask us whatever you'd like!" Patton offered optimistically.
"Yeah, sure," The kid started, "Uh, how long have you been painting?"
"Oh, I've messed with so many mediums it's hard to say. I would paint over sculptures I'd made, but, the way I did it, it was mainly solids and the actual curves give you the shadows and highlights. I've had people say spray painting things, like some of Remus's boards, doesn't count, and hard graffiti is kinda taboo around the private schools and such. But I guess I started really getting into acrylic on canvas a month ago?"
"You only started a month ago?" Remy yelled as he looked over the paintings on display closer, "I thought you always did that, like, on the side?"
"No, I'm pretty new," Patton laughed with a shy smile.
"Remy, what are your majors?" The new student asked as Patton slinked away from the inspection of his works.
"Engineering and computer science," He said with a peace sign, still distracted by the canvases, "They go together great if you have a math brain,"
"Cool, and, um, Logan? Are you actually the only cishet that would join?"
"Yes, and that is, unfortunately, why I'm the Public Relations Director. Remus use to take up that responsibility as President, but as two-thirds of our issues deal with the rampant homophobia in the school, it didn't do anything but worsen the situations. We've collectively found that I'm as close as we have to a 'middle man' between the GSA and the rest of the school,"
"This is the most boring Q 'n' A ever," Roman complained.
"That just because the focus isn't lasered on you, dearest," Janus teased with a wave of his fingers at Roman. That seemed to spur the new kid on with his next, more invasive question.
"Are you two dating?"
"Hell no!" Roman yelled over Janus's calm agreement with him.
"Well, then, that's as interesting as I'm willing to make it," he ended with a laugh and deep breath, "What are your questions for me?"
"What school are you transferring from?" Remus asked from his place on his left. The boy stilled and looked ready to bolt again. Remus was getting ready to say it didn't matter when he was waved to stop.
"I'm from the, uh, girl's school across the street,"
"What's a comfortable name we can call you?" Emile asked politely, "And any pronouns you use?"
"He/him's fine, thanks, but I don't really use a name right now. Usually just my online moniker, but that's the only place anyone will talk to me, so it's fine I guess,"
"We can call you that if you'd like. A name's a name all the same," Roman shrugged from across the circle, "What is it?"
"Anxiety?" He said nervously.
"Nice to meet you, Anxiety," Roman said with a burning genuineness, "Welcome to GSA,"
Anxiety looked around the circle to the seven people he knew would be the only seven people that would talk to him until they graduated or he dropped out or had to move to a school where no one had seen him go into the school across the street every day for eleven years. The overworked and ungovernable, as they showed themselves to him now.