Friend! With your kind encouragement, and apropos my more-or-less annual reread of [citation needed], would you be inclined to speculate about what we might find this version of Lucy and Flynn doing several years on, in this somehow darkest academic timeline?
Yrs with eternal gratitude for the fluff, in solidarity re: academic AUs for competent women and disaster men, etc. etc.
This is not a sequel so much as a verse reboot and/or AU of an AU to the evergreen academic-frustration classic of mine, [citation needed]. Updated for these times because of reasons.
Lucy has been staring at the Word document for almost twenty minutes, and her eyes are somehow even more crossed than they were at the start. Possibly this is because she is presently engaged in the dullest and most soul-crushing administrative task known to mankind, not to mention the stupidest: running search + replace on every instance of “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” or any other variant thereof that currently exists in her half-finished grant proposal, lest it cause some government fascist somewhere to wet their pants at the dread realization she might be daring to teach accurate history to children. She would dearly love to just hit the bricks and not perform this extended ritual of appeasement at all, but she already lost several projects in the Bonfire of the Grantities earlier this year and she can’t afford to go another six months without a replacement proposal. That tenure review board keeps creeping ever closer, the hot breath of doom on the back of her neck. Pretty soon she’ll wake up at midnight and find them under her bed.
Then again, Lucy thinks grimly, this is her last chance to get out of academia before it really is too late and the sunk-cost fallacy kicks in with a vengeance, so she can do something more rewarding and lucrative with her life. Like, say, becoming a used-car salesman or working at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. She already applied for an additional part-time adjunct role at Cal State because in the dark, dark year of our Orange Turd 2025, a full-time assistant professorship at a prestigious university is barely covering her bills. She’s really trying to scrounge up extra teaching and/or remotely degree-relevant work before she just gives up and begs for a few weekend shifts at Starbucks with the rest of the criminally underpaid academic precariat. Lucy knows she’s lucky to have this job, which is really more like three jobs because they won’t hire a new tenure-track history professor (she’s on the search committee; they have finalized the ad three times; each time they are assured it is going through and then mysteriously denied permission to post at the eleventh hour) and can’t hire a new departmental administrator because somehow, they haven’t figured out that offering $40k a year in the Bay Area is clinically insane. But God, at what cost?
She grits her teeth, replaces “diverse history” with “complex history,” wonders if this is now good enough to slip past the Gestapo, and pushes back her chair. She desperately needs some caffeine, and she leaves her office, wandering down the hall toward the faculty lounge. The university floated the heretical idea of cutting the complimentary coffee supplies (We Must All Think About The Budget; Everyone’s Job is Retention) until it threatened a full-blown riot, and Lucy puts a pod into the Keurig under a stern sign warning everyone not to take more than two a day. She leans against the counter, mentally running through her to-do list. Grade twenty-five papers for HIST 1500 (a minimum of fifteen will be AI-generated); revise her syllabus for spring quarter; patiently answer monumentally illiterate student emails (Hi Mrs. Preston How do I register for clas???); check the print proof for her journal article; actually start reading the book she agreed to review (it’s not due until March, what’s the big hurry); draft her assigned section of the fifth Departmental Strategic Plan of the last two years (what happened to all the others? Don’t ask!) about how they will Implement Integrated Excellence Across The Changing Higher Education Landscape, and –
“Well, well. Why the long face, Lucy?”
– and then, then, she will finally, finally get to kill Garcia Flynn, because she’s been so good this year under a monumental amount of unceasing bullshit and she so richly deserves it. She pretends not to have heard him for as long as possible, though her shoulders have snapped tight like a bear trap. Finally she says, “Professor Flynn.”
“Professor Preston.” He grins, because of course he does, and saunters in. Openly ignoring the two-Keurig-a-day sign, he empties the dregs of his last cup, pops in two of the flavored hazelnut pods, and leisurely presses the cappuccino button. Lucy almost has to admire this splendidly petty passive-aggressiveness, like a cat spotting an expensive vase on a high shelf and sparing no effort to knock it to the floor one inch at a time. Over his shoulder, Flynn adds, “Why so serious?”
Great. He’s the Joker. He thinks he really, actually is the Joker, and she’s on the verge of turning into it herself. “Nothing,” Lucy grits out. “I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh.” Flynn regards the progress of his drink, takes it out, licks off the foam while maintaining direct eye contact with her (oh, she’s going to report him to HR so hard one of these days) and raises one eyebrow. “You seem thrilled.”
There are so many things Lucy wants to say to that, very few of which she should, as they lean side by side and sip their respective university-allotted beverages in uncongenial silence. She is well aware that it is a terrible idea to suborn a fascist government’s secret police to one’s personal likes and dislikes, but she has had the deep and shameful thought that if they took one look at Flynn, decided that he was a threat to national security, yanked his work visa, and threw him out of the country for good, surely it couldn’t be the worst thing in the world. (Look at him. He’s a walking threat to national security.) Except a few days ago Flynn, who can apparently read minds or some shit, randomly made a point of conveniently informing her that he’s actually a U.S. citizen (his mother was one. Good to know). Not that it would necessarily stop ICE, but still.
Besides, Lucy can’t for the life of her figure out why Garcia fucking Flynn, who could have literally any job he wanted at any institution in the world, is staying here, in America, even in a blue state with a governor willing to stand up to the Turd Reich. He could take that dual citizenship and zip safely back to Europe with the rest of the American academics fleeing in droves, get a well-funded position at a glossy institute in Geneva or Vienna or other gorgeous European city, and never think about any of this again. It makes her even more jealous of him than she already is, and she bites her mug hard enough to make her teeth click – which somehow (see: read minds or some shit) he picks up on. “Come on. I’ve got some time before my meeting with the dean. Let’s chat.”
“Meeting with the dean?” Lucy eyes him sidelong. “Why do I get the feeling it’s because they want to have another stern talk about your teaching style? What did you do this time?”
Flynn shrugs, with an utterly magnificent lack of fucks given anywhere in the perceivable universe. “Smashed the laptop of a student using ChatGPT in class. Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t break it, just knocked it to the ground.”
“You what?”
“Well.” Flynn shrugs again. “I told everyone at the start of the quarter that if I caught them using it in any way, I would do exactly that. The student thought I was joking. I was not joking. He used ChatGPT in my class, he regrets that fact. That is his tragedy and not mine.”
Lucy opens her mouth even wider. Nothing comes out. As unspeakably irritating as everything about Flynn is, she can’t help but be a little – well, jealous, again, obviously. Flynn can get away with doing things like that because he’s a) a man, b) six-foot-four, c) cannot be fired by anyone in any way that matters, and d) insane, while Lucy would be marched up before the Faculty Executive Board disciplinary committee before she could blink. She feels some prickly urge to lecture him about his male academic privilege like a proper feminist killjoy, but Sarcastic Sasshole McGee would just laugh at her. Oh, she hates him.
(She really, really hates him. Seriously, she does.)
“That’s… interesting,” Lucy says at last, with more than a little irony. “Aren’t we supposed to be preparing students to succeed in an AI-transformed workforce, so they keep begging us to make our AI policies just a little more lenient, please please please? Because you know, it’s the future?”
“They’re welcome to ask me.” Flynn raises a combative dark eyebrow. “And I am equally welcome to ignore them.”
Lucy wants to ask what he plans to do if they press the issue – break into the vice-chancellor’s house with an axe, probably – but doesn’t really want to know. She makes an indeterminate sound, drinks the rest of her coffee, wonders if she should go back to her desk or jump out the window, and is grimly on her way back to face her bounden duty when Flynn strolls after her. “Let me know,” he adds casually. “If you need any help with the little fuckers.”
“I realize our job is frustrating, but I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to call our students little fuckers. Even in private.”
“Uh-huh.” He grins crookedly, unrepentant as ever. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Lucy stops short and looks up (annoyingly far up) at him. “Honestly, Flynn, why? You could have any job you wanted at any university anywhere, and you’re just strolling around causing chaos for the fun of it? Because this is all a big joke to you, you can leave whenever you want, and what? You don’t care that the rest of us have to stay here and pay our bills with this and try to get tenure when I don’t even know if I want it anymore, in a discipline and a field that’s collapsing around our ears, we’re being dragged into an authoritarian nightmare and American higher education is being systematically dismantled along with fifty years of scientific research, the liberal arts will basically disappear and – ”
Her chest is heaving, she really didn’t mean to yell that much, she does not need to have a breakdown on the fourth floor of the Arts and Humanities Building, and Flynn looks mildly pole-axed. As if when it comes to any emotions beyond sarcastic anarchy dick, he is instantly in deep water and flailing hard. “Lucy,” he says at last, sounding – different. Almost human, though she isn’t going to go that far. “I didn’t mean – that’s not why I’m here.”
“Oh?” Lucy rubs the cuff of her blazer furiously across her eyes. “Then why are you here?”
Garcia Flynn opens his mouth. Garcia Flynn shuts his mouth. He looks at his watch, avoiding her eyes. “Well,” he says. “Unfortunately, it’s time for my meeting. I’ll talk to you later.”
And with that, leaving Lucy high and dry in the hallway, at the end of what is somehow even more unsatisfying an encounter than usual, he goes.
