"tell us abt roman in military school," i'm asked, and they expect me to be normal?

covid muddled thoughts, BUT.

i have one answer to this that’s like useless little hcs i’ve accumulated after reading anecdotal stories from people who went to military schools — shit like me thinking roman joined a rifle squad & is a surprisingly good shot, or that military school is where roman starts his career as a repressed homosexual, cause like, it’s gay, but it’s not gay gay, or that he knows how to do laundry and make a bed and mop a floor cause everyone had to do clean-up duty on a roster, or that it’s where he developed an eating disorder, or that one of the main reasons he hates st. andrews is because the rigid schedule means he’s spent his entire adult life utterly incapable of sleeping past 8am, like. don’t they realise they’ve ruined his whole hedonist boy prince thing? — and then another answer that’s me chewing glass thinking about military school horror stories & how roman would’ve been lonely & how it was most likely a place where the roy name meant very little. like it’s a unique experience the other kids didn’t get where roman gets to live as a kid in a collective rather than Logan Roy’s Son™, and he most likely wasn’t well-liked in that collective. i mean, one of the things that kept popping up in the anecdotes i read was the way students were used against each other to maintain obedience; like, one kid fucks up, the whole class is punished. i can imagine that being the case, only i don’t think roman would care about how his actions impact anyone else, so it doesn’t stop him from acting out, you know?

what i mean is like. your brother’s off at college and your sister’s a little bitch and your parents are divorcing and your dad sends you to military school. you don’t ask to go. your father tells everyone you did. he tells you it’ll toughen you up but you know what that really means. it means you’re being sent away because there’s something wrong with you. it means you’re being sent away to be fixed. 

you’re miserable before you even get there, or you think you are, but it’s so much worse than you imagined. they shave your head when you arrive and give you a uniform that looks like it’s been stripped from a fucking cartoon character and they treat you like shit. your name doesn’t exempt you from the hazing; you’re roman fucking roy and you’re above all this bullshit but no one else seems to know, or care, or want to. you’re expected to fall in line. you’re expected to act like all the other fucking normos. you’re expected to know how to. it’s meant to fix whatever’s wrong with you.

none of the other boys like you. they don’t even pretend to, not unless they think they can get something from you. none of the staff like you, either. the teachers fucking hate you. you never learn your lesson. you refuse to learn your lesson. there’s no fucking lesson to be learnt. you’re not a team player. you’re a troublemaker. you’re a clown. you’re a moron. you’re small and you’re weak and you’re sick and you’re broken and you’ll never amount to anything. but you don’t flinch when you’re screamed at. you smile when you’re hit. you’ve had worse from better people (you’ve had worse from people you love). you’re not going to cry so some state school reject can jerk it to his power fantasy. you’re roman fucking roy and you’re above all this bullshit. only you’re not. and you’re miserable. and your family’s miles away. and you’re lonely. you didn’t think you’d be so fucking lonely. and you still don’t know what’s wrong with you.