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xxi. university au

A/N: University AU: In which Elliott is a broke engineering student, Brady studies kinesiology, and they both just want to get their Master's already.

Randomly generated dialogue:

"You've already decided."

"This may be the end, but we'll never know until it's over."

"That noise will haunt me until I die."

---------

"You can't avoid your thesis forever."

Brady, from where he'd buried his face into the crook of his elbow, slouched over the tabletop in frustration and only hoping that wasn't true, mumbled, "Yes, I can."

"Yes, you can," Tripp amended much too easily. "If you don't want to earn your Master's."

All the countless hours he'd studied, all the student debts that had accumulated over the years, all the effort he'd put into edging closer and closer to earning his degree would be for nothing if he gave up now. Brady couldn't just up and quit, no matter how refreshing an idea that was.

That is, until he thought about how his mother would surely have more than a few things to say about that if she ever caught wind of it. She had, of course, paid for his undergrad years that would be quite useless without a graduate degree to match, unless Brady was in dire need of a framed thirty-thousand-dollar coaster.

So dropping out in the face of impending stress wasn't really an option for him, as much as he sometimes desperately wished it was.

Like now.

Brady lifted his head from the table to look at the blank sheet of paper in front of him, then to Tripp imploringly. They'd been sitting in the library for about an hour now, and still Brady didn't have a clue as to what he should do. It was really saying something that he was asking Tripp for help, who knew just about nothing about kinesiology and even less about what hadn't already been researched, but anything was worth a try at this point. "Help me. Please."

"Okay," Tripp said after a moment. "I know what you should do."

"What?"

"Call Veronica, because I am out of ideas."

Brady scoffed and gave him a dry look. "What do you mean you're out of ideas? You haven't even given me one."

"The university's funding your research, right?" Tripp asked, though it sounded like he already knew the answer. "Why don't you just do some experiments without creating your hypothesis yet, and see if there are any patterns in your findings?"

Between the two of them, Tripp was more often the one with the streak of genius.

"And," he continued, "because I'm the one who came up with this brilliant plan, I get to be excused from any and all kinds of experiments you're going to conduct. Also because I have zero interest in finding out how unfit I really am. Honestly, I got winded jogging up the stairs to get here, I'd just like to live the rest of my life in denial."

"Fair enough," Brady agreed without so much as a moment's thought. He suspected that they would all involve quite a bit of coordination, which Tripp quite clearly lacked in.

But even if Tripp wasn't interested in participating, Brady didn't doubt there'd be multitudes of students on campus who would be. Especially since he had a slice of the university's funding at his disposal.

***

It wasn't until Cho was waving the flyer in front of his face that Elliott, not for the first time in his life, although perhaps the most seriously, considered getting a job. Not that he'd never had one before, no. But biomechanical engineering didn't leave him eight hours a day for himself, much less for a steady source of income. That was largely the reason he'd gotten fired from one of the campus coffee shops, and the same reason he was reluctant to apply anywhere else.