Chapter 23: Merida's POV
Where Merida spends the time she should've been studying for her finals getting into gambling and losing all her earnings.
A/N:
How have I gone three whole chapters without editing a single thing QwQ Somebody hold my perfectionist heart for me, I'm sobbing.
It was about mid-May when Merida decided that finals were invented by someone who wanted to torment her specifically. This, she reasoned, was a perfectly normal and logical conclusion to draw, given the circumstances.
Either that or all the exam stress was finally catching up to her and she'd found another bucket of misery to pour into whatever pool of emotions she mentally laid at the bottom of.
It's not that she'd gone back to not paying attention in her classes again. She'd paid enough attention that year to write down notes and learn a thing or two. But her shorthand was awful and her writing looked like chicken scratch, and half the time she'd forgotten which notes to bring to which classes so they ended up being mismatched, misplaced, and not all that useful for learning anything from. The homeworks she'd scrambled to put together were with her professors, so she couldn't study from them either.
For finals, knowing "a thing or two" just wasn't going to cut it. There was no other choice. Merida had to study.
Her one saving grace was the fact that Clary let her borrow old textbooks again, that way Merida could find and read only the important parts. Her roommates were helpful and explained things if she asked, but half the time Merida either napped, messed around, or stared blankly at the lake window instead of at her textbooks, while the other half she'd spend feeling sulky and jealous about how well her roommates and the rest of her House seemed to be managing while she'd be lucky if she absorbed a chapter in a day. After a week of this, Merida exiled herself to the library to be miserable with the rest of the unfortunates who wouldn't or couldn't study in their dorms either.
Surprisingly, she met two familiar faces there.
It was always after lunch. Merida would sit at any one of the big tables, and sooner or later she'd hear the sound of Hiccup complaining as Jack led them both to sit with her.
"Every day you bring me here and every day I have to deal with it." Hiccup sat heavily, heaving his bulging satchel onto the table with a loud thud. "Don't you know how heavy all of this is?"
Jack flopped down into the seat next to him, one arm slinging around Hiccup's shoulder. "Still holding onto the theory that if I didn't come find you before lunch, you'd probably stay holed up in your room without food or sunlight or human contact until the finals ended, and I think that's sad. And I already told you I'd be happy to carry your books for you if you asked."
Hiccup stared at him, unimpressed. "Last time I left you alone with my things, you somehow found a way to make yourself and all my things float to the ceiling."
"Well, it's not my fault you keep weird stones in your bag, so maybe don't do that."
Hiccup didn't bother with a reply, instead putting on a pair of earmuffs and opening a book. Jack turned to Merida.
"So, what've you got today?" Merida held up her Transfiguration textbook. "I see. Want me to help you study?"
"Sure."
He did not help her study. They instead end up getting side-tracked with trading jibes, sharing childhood stories, and playing a seemingly unending number of tabletop games that Jack kept pulling out of his pockets, because apparently he was just as bad as Merida when it came to study sessions. But that was something she could live with. Even if she barely got anything done for finals, at least she didn't have to sit and feel sorry for herself.
After the fifth time she lost at cards in the same hour, she decided to take back that thought.
"I cannot believe you! You're bleeding me dry!" Merida threw down her cards, glowering at Jack as he surveyed her share of the candy she'd bet and lost.
Jack stuck a caramel in his mouth and shrugged."It's your own fault you're bad at cards."
Merida huffed, blowing the hair out of her face. "I am not. You just keep getting all the good ones."
"Guess I owe you a thank you for shuffling the deck and giving them to me. Thank you so much, Merida. You are the most generous person I know," he said, smiling a smile that deserved to be smacked.
But Merida would not do it, because she knew what he was doing. He was trying to rile her up and she refused to fall for it. She was better than that. Really.
For lack of anything better to do, Merida crossed her arms. "Why are you here, anyways? To be a pest?" She grumbled.
"Aw, don't you like my charming personality?" he asked, chin propped on his hands and batting his eyes.
"Of course not. The only reason I haven't chased you off yet is because I'm trying to leech all the candy out of you, obviously. If you wanted your personality appreciated, you should've gone and shared it with your House." Merida paused, her head tilting. "Why are you here, anyways? Why aren't you studying with your Housemates and keeping them company?"
"Because I've been keeping them company, and letting them borrow my things, and doing whatever else to help them with school all year. I think it's about time they learned to help themselves for once. I'm sure they can handle studying for finals. I believe in them."
"No you don't."
"No I don't. Okay, fine, the real reason is because they'll take all my notes and I will not see them again until next year, and Hiccup has his own notes, and you're so far behind on your studying that you can't get any use out of mine."
If it weren't for the fact that everything Jack said was completely, utterly true, Merida would've seriously considered thwacking her textbook over his head. Or stealing back her candy, it'd serve him right.
But instead all she could do was sulk. "As if you're even using your notes," she mumbled at her textbook.
She managed to read half way down the page when a shiny wrapper rolled into her sights and bumped against her nose. She blew it away, only for Jack's finger to nudge it back to her.
She looked up. "Why?"
"Because you look sad, that's why."
"I don't want your pity candy," she said, but Jack would not be deterred. He poked the toffee against her lips until she opened her mouth and tried to bite his finger.
"You know what would be nice right now?" Jack said, casually dodging her second attempt at biting. "Seeing this friend of mine named Rapunzel. She wouldn't try to bite me."
Merida paused, blinking at him. "Wait… did you say Rapunzel?"
"I did. Do you know her? I haven't seen her in a while."
"If she's in Ravenclaw, then yes, I do know her." Merida sat up. "If I remember correctly, I think she's in her dorm right now."
"I'll go get her, then." Jack made to stand up. But then Merida caught his sleeve.
She shook her head. "You don't want to do that."
Jack raised an eyebrow. "Why not?"
Because Merida knew that Rapunzel had recently subscribed to the special brand Ravenclaw philosophy of "creative learning", which meant learning what she wanted to learn through any medium she found suitable. And that really did mean any medium. Last Merida had seen, Rapunzel had been using a combination of finger puppets, yarn art, and color- coded pencil shavings to interpret her subjects. Merida had yet to figure out how that worked.
Instead of getting into all that, Merida sighed, "Listen, I am very sure that if you ask Rapunzel to come with you, she will be happy to. But if you sit her at a desk and put a textbook in front of her right now, she will cry. Don't do that to her. Just trust me on this."
"…That… okay, yeah, that makes sense. I can see that." Jack grimaced. "Yeesh, didn't know it's that bad already. Maybe I'll visit her later."
"You do that. I'm not coming." Merida shivered. "Tell Rapunzel I said hello."
"Why aren't you?"
"Oh, Rapunzel? I know her."
Both of them looked at Hiccup. Hiccup, who'd taken his earmuffs off and was in the middle of a long, back-cracking stretch, arms pushed out over the table and eyes screwed shut. Merida had asked him about the earmuffs once; he'd showed her how he'd sewn a silencing spell into it, and although that'd been interesting enough to listen to her eyes had glazed over when he'd gone into more detail about the mechanics behind it. Hiccup blinked up at them and, seeing their faces, shrugged. "Met her in the library once or twice. She talks a lot, but she likes Nessi, and she's nice, so."
The reptile in question had been preoccupied with a ball of light Hiccup had created for her. On hearing her name, she poked her head up. Hiccup reached over and stroked her spine, earning a happy chirrup from her.
"Excuse you. Rapunzel's more than nice, she's one of my best friends." Jack said, then pointed at Merida. "Also, you didn't answer my question. Why don't you want to go?"
Merida looked at him in disbelief. "Do you really have to ask that? This is Ravenclaw House."
"So?"
"Haven't you ever been there? Or heard about it?"
"No, but something tells me I should've gone there sooner." Jack pressed his hands on the table, leaning forward. There was a kind of curiosity in his eyes that could only mean trouble. "What's going on in the smart house?"
"Too much." Merida could already see it in her mind, and felt the phantom headache that had followed. "They get up to so much in there. And I don't think any of it was studying. You know Rapunzel, right? You know how she gets about one of her projects? The ideas she comes up with? Take that energy, and make that into a hundred teenagers. I felt like I'd taken a turn into a loony bin's nightmare."
She could vividly recall the multicolored walls, how she'd stumbled out with her eardrums ringing and her hair filled with smoke. "I didn't know if people were trying to invent things or tear the room apart. There were, like, these flying metal monkeys in there. And hummingbirds, and beetles. There were these seniors transfiguring couches, other people trying to play glowing instruments. I think I saw someone bringing their dolls to life. There were explosions. People where singing. It was an absolute madhouse."
To think she'd ever thought her brothers were bad. Even Merida wasn't that bad- at least whatever trouble she got up to was just her being impulsive and reckless and making bad choices, not her actively trying to turn the world inside out. For the sake of everyone she knew, she hoped her brothers never, ever found their way into such a place.
But she'd probably already caused at least a dozen future catastrophes, if the level of excitement on Jack's face was anything to go by. "Now I have to go there."
Jack made to do just that. But then Hiccup suddenly lunged. Wrapping his skinny arms around Jack's neck, he dragged them both down to the table. Hiccup leaned in very close, until they were almost nose to nose, and solemnly stated. "If you will make me suffer, then I will make you suffer."
Jack blinked at him. Then his face split into a beaming smile. "Aww, Hiccup! You think I'm leaving you? I'll never do that! I'll come back! Come here, you big softy, let me just-" And the restraining hold immediately turned into a scuffle, with Hiccup smushing half of Jack's face trying to keep it away and Jack for some reason trying to lick Hiccup's hand.
Carefully edging around them, Merida took the discarded earmuffs and put them over her own ears. She knew for a fact that someone had cast a muffling spell in their direction some time ago, thanks to her and Jack, so at least they wouldn't get kicked out of the library. Probably.
They didn't, and in a few short days, the exams finally began.
Merida handled them the best she could. Meaning, she did not go running out of the exam hall like she wanted to and instead forced herself to scribble down a few answers, some of them likely nonsense, and then spent the rest of her time either staring blankly at her paper or else gazing longingly out the sunlit window.
Or sometimes her eyes would just… drift to Rapunzel, who usually sat several rows ahead of her. It wasn't hard to do. Rapunzel was very easy to notice, to the point where Merida wasn't the only student who stared, and it wasn't even so much for the hair, but for the flowers. Since Rapunzel had figured out how to create them, she'd just kept adding more and more flowers to her hair.
It got to the point where she had gotten in trouble for it, at least a few detentions, from what Merida knew. And for a few days afterwards Rapunzel's hair would be flower-free, but sooner or later, no matter how long, the flowers would come back. They always did. Until eventually the professors had just seemed to give up and left her to it. And so, there Rapunzel sat in the exam hall, nibbling on her pen, a literal walking flower bush.
Merida didn't get to ask her how her theory exams went until much later, but she at least knew that the practical exams were decidedly better. For Merida especially, in Charms and Flying, even in Transfiguration. So long as there was something that relied on muscle memory, then Merida found that she did remarkably better in it.
To her, it felt like the exams went on forever, like all of her summer was running away without her and there was nothing she could do about it. Until all at once, the exams were done.
One minute she stood in the Great Hall after her last exam, the next she was being tackled by her roommates, and then more and more people joined, until she was squished in the middle of what felt like every first year in her House.
The party in the dorms after the exams, followed by the last days she spent running outside in the sun before they finally allowed the students to go home, were the only things she missed from that time.
They were the things she held the closest as she said goodbye to the school. And, strangely enough, she felt a part of her leave her as she left. To settle itself on into the grass and trees and the deep, dark lake full of creatures only her House could see every night before they slept.
To stay where she would find it again. Waiting for her to return.