College wasn’t the clean slate Pidge thought it would be. She came in with the reputation of the Katie Holt — genius, Green Paladin, war veteran. Professors whispered about her IQ, classmates expected her to be a quirky prodigy with big glasses and an awkward smile. Instead, they got someone who had burned the “good girl” mask years ago.

She swore like a sailor, rolled her own joints in lecture halls, and kept a flask in her jacket pocket. She didn’t apologize for showing up to labs reeking of weed or with a hangover that smelled like whiskey and cheap beer. And when anyone dared to look at her sideways, she’d sneer: “Yeah, I survived an intergalactic war. What the fuck did you do?”

Her piercings glinted under harsh fluorescent lights — three rings in her ear, a septum ring, and a silver bar through her tongue. Tattoos covered her forearms and ribs: constellations, binary codes, and jagged inked scars that mirrored the real ones across her body. Every mark was a rebellion, a statement that she belonged to herself, not the expectations others pinned on her.

Pidge hooked up with girls like it was routine — quick, messy nights in dorm rooms or after parties, lipstick smudges staining her neck. She was openly, unapologetically queer. Pride month meant rainbow flags taped above her bed and a string of hookups, but it also meant rage: rage at the years she hid it, rage at the war that left her broken, rage at the memories that still made her wake up in cold sweats.

Her PTSD came in waves. A fire alarm could send her spiraling into battle flashbacks. Loud parties were both a distraction and a trigger — she’d chase the numbness in a bottle, grinding through migraines and cramps that left her curled on the floor. Being on her period made everything worse: her body wrenched with pain, her head pounding like Galra cannons were still firing. She’d light up, drag slow smoke into her lungs, and curse the universe for giving her another war to fight every month inside her own skin.

She still met up with her old teammates — Shiro, Keith, Lance, Hunk — all of them orbiting the same campus like satellites clinging to the last of Voltron’s gravity. The reunions were bittersweet. Sometimes they laughed, sometimes they drank until they blacked out together, sometimes they sat in silence, haunted by ghosts only they could see.

But she hated the Galra. Despised them. It wasn’t politics, it wasn’t reasoned out — it was carved into her bones. The blood, the screams, the ships falling apart in space — every migraine felt like a reminder. Every Galra she saw, even allies, sparked a primal disgust she couldn’t shake.

She was taller now, sharper, her tongue as cutting as her mind. The kid who once nervously tucked her hair behind her ear was gone. In her place was someone dirty-minded, razor-edged, quick to laugh at something crude, and quicker to snap at anyone who tried to box her in.

Katie “Pidge” Holt had survived war. College, for her, wasn’t about finding herself — it was about showing everyone she wasn’t about to shrink for their comfort.

Even when she bled, even when her skull split with migraines, even when her body and mind betrayed her, she refused to be small.