i hear the revolution.

INSPIRATION.

Rosa Diaz - Brooklyn 99

Kat Stratford - 10 Things I Hate About You

Faith Lehane - Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Mandy Milkovich - Shameless

Akane Owari – Danganronpa

Arya Stark – Game of Thrones

Kim Kelly – Freaks and Geeks

Kyo Sohma – Fruits Basket

BACKGROUND + CLICK FOR BIO.

pre-gallagher.

her parents were young as hell when they had her so she was raised by her grandma in her earlier years ! claire gets a lot of her values from her grandma, mainly her biting sarcasm and devil-may-care sort of attitude. she tells claire stories of her grandfather, who was a champion boxer and it ignites claire’s interest in the sport from a young age. she grows up without a tv and plays outside a lot.  

her grandma dies when claire’s about eight years old and she goes to live with her mom, who spends the money from the will about as fast as it lands in her pocket. her mom dates a lot of unsavory dudes. 

she and her mom actually grow quite close over the years, but a lot of times it’s claire taking care of her mom and not the other way around. the entrance to their trailer is like a revolving door for shady dudes and her mother drinks too much and sort of acts like an overgrown teenager, never ready to let go of her youth. claire learns a lot of responsibility and independence as a result of this. 

her mom finally lands a dude that seems like a genuinely nice guy that makes her want to settle down and become a housewife. claire likes seeing her mom starting to act like an adult, and their lives start to turn around. he’s rich and they wind up moving in with him after the wedding, but things change shortly after, and he reveals a darker, more manipulative and abusive side of himself. 

he takes claire out of her passion, boxing, because it’s not ladylike enough, and he starts talking to claire’s mom about boarding school. it’s then that he starts fighting your mom more physically as they disagree.

the climax of the drama is when he hits claire ( she’s sneaking around and still boxing ) , but claire knows how to hit back hard. claire’s mom gets caught in the fray, it’s a huge fight, and claire nearly kills the guy ( tbi for sure. ) 

as a result of the incident, claire is recruited to a spy prep school in new york at age 16, her sophomore of high school. claire’s angry and closed off, and has a difficult time making friends in high school. but she does go through a lot of anger management and such. 

gallagher academy.

YEAR ONE: claire gets adjusted to school at gallagher academy, determined to prove herself among some of the world’s best. she quickly gains a reputation for her prowess in combat and spends long hours in the gym training. she slowly starts to open herself up to the idea of making friends. 

YEAR TWO: even though claire’s made friends, she still keeps secrets about her past, keeping her guard up. she receives letters from her mom about a new guy she’s seeing, and an invitation to her mother’s wedding. she ignores it. she and her mom still haven’t spoken since she was sixteen. near the end of the year, she gets a postcard that her mom is moving to iceland, but she does nothing about it. 

YEAR THREE: ( where our story started ) 

boys come to campus and claire feels like she has to fight harder for her reputation as THE BEST, isn’t pleased with their presence due to a longstanding distrust when it comes to men. 

claire’s ego is boosted after she’s been chosen for a MISSION, to explore the abandoned boys’ school, blackthorne academy. there, she and mary sakamoto discover that it was a school for assassins. explains why claire keeps getting her ass kicked – these boys have been trained to kill. 

witness protection kids come to campus, resulting in the death of one of them and gallagher student, amelia taylor. claire feels helpless as a result, always thinking of herself as a protector and gallagher has always been her stronghold, her safe place, and it all feels threatened. 

claire has a falling out with a friend and feels super alone with all this shit going on and winds out reaching out to her mom. i wrote a self-para here, but her mom invites her to come stay for the summer. 

when a brotherhood member is discovered on campus, she teams up with a group of...unlikely allies, and sneaks into the sublevels to kick his ass. his current status is unknown, and he’s quite possibly dead. either way, as far as she knows, they were never caught. 

claire visits her mom in iceland for the summer (details here) and they sort of mend things. she meets her moms new husband and actually likes him. 

PERSONALITY.

DETERMINED – when claire sets her mind to something, she will stop at nothing to accomplish it. she’d probably even risk death to accomplish her goals, she simply can’t accept failure.

HARD-WORKING – claire can pretty much always be found in the gym, trying to make herself better. it’s honestly a running joke how often claire is working out, but there’s a basis in it. honestly, claire thinks her only value is her muscle, so if that’s what she’s good at, she’s going to be the best. she’s that kid in your gym class that’s going way too hard for no fucking reason like calm down. 

BRAVE – there’s little that claire fears, and even her fears don’t generally stop her from accomplishing her goals. you could chalk up some of her bravery to determination, but she’s been through enough that she doesn’t really stop to consider what she’s going to lose. so maybe it’s also stupidity!

LOYAL – it’s really challenging for claire to form connections, but when she does, she latches on. when she cares for someone, she really cares for them, and she’s pretty ride or die. this sort of loyalty can be a burden for some of her friends, because she can be somewhat overbearing. 

ANGRY – claire’s probably best known for her anger, it’s like she walks around with a fuse waiting to be lit at the slightest inconvenience. funnily enough, her training has made her better at controlling it, but she’s still known to snap. 

RECKLESS – claire often acts impulsively, says the first thought in her mind, does the first thing she can think to do in order to solve a problem. act first, ask questions later is usually her mantra, and sometimes it saves her ass – and sometimes it comes back to bite her in it. 

DISTANT – claire finds it hard to open up or form connections with people, not often readily sharing her feels with people. she’s really averse to personal questions but she’s gotten better about sharing things about herself since making more friends at gallagher. still, she’s somewhat hard to get to know. i will refer you to this musing. 

BRASH – she’s pretty cocky to a point that often comes off as rude, but the positive spin on it is that you’ll always know where you stand with claire. whether it’s good or bad, she’s up front, but most people she trains with are probably sick of her arrogance. 

HEADCANONS/RANDOM FACTS.

can usually be found exercising. she’s really into sports and fitness and prior to the berlin internship, she used to spend her summers working at summer camps for athletes-in-training. she’s a pretty good coach, and tutors some of the other students that need help with their athletic prowess, although she’s described as a bit intense.

identified as bisexual until fairly recently, realizing that she doesn’t care or have much interest in romantic relationships with men ! so, now she identifies as a lesbian. 

cannot sit through a movie to save her life, claire’s easily distracted and bored, always needing something to do. she didn’t grow up with a television set in her home either, so she hasn’t seen many movies and is a little out of touch with all things pop culture. 

takes pictures like a mom, if you ask her to take a photo of you it’ll probably a) be a little blurry, b) have her thumb in it, or c) both.

really likes podcasts! she listens to them a lot during her workouts, while she runs the track, or anything else. claire’s not exactly known for her intelligence ( among the astronomical iqs of other gallagher students at least ) but she can spout some knowledge on things you wouldn’t expect. 

generally a hard-ass but she’s a softie around animals, particularly dogs or cats, but catch her cooing and talking in a baby voice around puppies, she’s like a completely different person, pretty much. 

drink of choice is whiskey, neat. 

PART ONE: CHILDHOOD.

The trailer that Claire spent the back half of her childhood in never felt like home. Maybe because trailers are made to be temporary, or the fact that if she accepted that this was where she belonged, she’d have to give up hope.

It’s normal Maggie Walsh to be out late, Claire’s usually cleaned up the kitchen and tucked herself into bed by the time her mother comes in the door – but she’s not sleeping. She’s always had trouble with that, brain bouncing around from one thought to the next until eventually she hears the creak of the door.

Her mom’s home.

She hears the usual stumbling, the clatter of dishes falling from where she’d neatly placed them on the drying rack. Maggie’s drunk, Claire’s sure of that. Ten years old and she knows what it means to be so drunk that you can hardly see straight, that the words you say under the influence are a different reflection from the person that you really are. She inhales deeply and crawls out from under the covers to check on her. Ten years old and she knows the steps: Help her take her makeup off, make sure she sleeps on her side, glass of water on the bedside table, trash can on the floor. Maggie is only twenty-six years old herself now, not done with her childhood by the time that Claire was born, not ready to be a mother. Claire’s had to figure it out most of it herself.

“Mom?” Claire knocks on the door lightly, plastic cup full of water already in hand.

“Don’t – don’t come in!” Maggie sputters, and Claire’s confused. She defies her request and opens the bedroom door the rest of the way. When she sees her mom, she drops the cup on the floor, small hands curling into fists.

“What happened? Who did that to you?”

“I told you not to come in here, Claire,” Maggie repeats, but Claire has always been on to disregard commands. She learns at a young age that authority only means older than you or some assigned title, not that they know best.

“Who did that? Why?” She repeats her questions. Despite being mature for her age, it’s hard for Claire to wrap her head around the black eye obscuring Maggie’s face, and the swelling on her cheek.

“It doesn’t matter,” Maggie sighs, dejected as she flops down on the bed. Even in her state, she knows that there’s not much use telling Claire to back off or go away once she’s decided that she’s not going to. Her little girl is a spitfire, strangely enough reminds Maggie a lot of her own mom, like living with a miniature version of her. Maybe that’s why Claire wins most arguments. “Come here.”

Claire walks closer to the bed, kicking the cup aside on her way for no reason other than to kick something. She crawls into bed next to her mom and looks up at her, waiting for more of an explanation or literally anything but silence. 

“I don’t know why I keep looking for a happy ending. I leave you home alone, I come home like this...not helping either of us,” Maggie presses a kiss to the top of Claire’s head, runs her fingers through her daughter’s hair. It’s so soft and Claire is so little, she can’t help but look at the spilled cup on the floor with a pang of guilt. “I’m sorry,” she adds, voice choked up and words a little slurred. Tears squeeze out of the corners of her eyes when she closes them, hugging her daughter closer, “I’ve blamed you for my fucked up life for so long...that’s not fair.”

Now, Claire is only ten, but those are the kind of words that you remember forever. Still, she smiles. “It doesn’t have to stay fucked up. It can get better,” a childish spark of optimism in her heart that hasn’t yet been put out. It makes Maggie smile back though, kissing her daughter on the top of her head yet again.

“I like that,” she says, and they fall asleep curled up beside each other. Claire sleeps soundly, thinking that it’s possible. Things really could get better, and for a while, it seems like there really is a sort of shift. Maggie starts cooking, cleaning again, and she doesn’t even stay out so late. That’s when she meets Martin.

He seems better than the rest. Until he isn’t.

But Claire does her job as her mother’s protector, just as she’s been doing all of her life, and it’s that event that jumpstarts the rest of everything that happens next.

PART TWO: GRADUATION.

Claire’s come to the formal conclusion that graduation ceremonies are a waste of time. There’s all this build up, everyone’s so excited, and then you have to sit around and wait for your name to be called so you can spend two seconds walking across a stage while everyone claps. She would have skipped it entirely if her mother hadn’t already come up, and if she knew that people were going to insist. The small talk afterward is even more agonizing than the ceremony itself. It is sort of painful saying goodbye to everyone, and it occurs to Claire that there’s more people that she’s going to miss than she ever expected.

“Callum and his mother are here,” Maggie points out.

“And?” Claire rolls her eyes. Seeing Callum again to begin with had brought up a lot of old feelings, and generally, even though they’d resolved things, she tries to avoid him whenever possible.

“Well, it’s probably weird if we don’t say hello, at least, right? I’m going to say hello,” Maggie interjects, “he’s such a sweet boy.”

Claire’s eyebrows rise on her forehead as she crosses her arms over her chest. “Go ahead then,” she sighs, “I’ll wait right here.”

“Claire,” Maggie draws out her name with a withering stare, but Maggie has never been able to establish that sort of authority with Claire that would prompt any inclination of obedience, so Claire just shrugs her shoulders, unimpressed. She’s not going to budge. “Fine, I’ll be right back.”

Claire’s done her best to put the chapter of their life that includes Martin out of her mind when rekindling things with her mother, and she certainly doesn’t want to stand around making small talk with his other ex-wife, trying not to look at Callum with his matching jawline, trying not to remember everything she hates. It all comes back in a flash. The horrible cracking sound that her mother’s head had made when it connected with the wall, the blood on the marble floor. They say you don’t remember trauma properly, that your memory doesn’t work quite right, but she will never forget the way her fist connected with Martin’s face : like a puzzle piece, like it BELONGED there, and she’d done it over and over again until she heard sirens.

And yet, Claire can’t deny that it’s a part of her life that got her here, where she is today. She thinks life is shitty and random, and that not everything has to happen ‘for a reason.’ Still, she’ll catch Kass’s eye across the room and see her smiling so brightly that it seems impossible not to believe in something. Claire can’t help herself anyway – she smiles back. No one has ever been able to produce Claire’s smile in its truest form the way Kass has, unashamed of being so happy to look at someone. She once thought the idea of looking at a person and seeing your whole future was ridiculous, that you’d have to be stupid to put that much of yourself into someone, but it isn’t like that at all. All of it was unintentional, like by the time she realized it, Kass was already everything. And she feels so safe with that thought that she doesn’t mind at all.

“Am I interrupting something?” A figure steps in front of her, cutting off her line of sight. She’s not really fond of being snuck up on, so she opens her mouth to say something snarky when she’s met with the gaze of Lisanna Harlin, one of last year’s mentors. Her daughter, Elisa, is there, but she’s not graduating, so Claire’s confused by Lisanna’s presence.

“No, Ms. Harlin,” Claire says, though there’s a spark of indignation in her words that practically goes hand in hand whenever an adult commands authority.

“Lisanna is fine,” she says with a light laugh, like she’s amused Claire’s greeted her this way.

“Can I...help you with something?” Claire asks, mostly curious about how long this interaction has gone on. While she’s friendly with Elisa, she was Kass’s roommate last year, they’re not exceedingly close, so she’s not sure what else Lisanna would have to say to her other than maybe a polite hello.

It’s more than a polite hello. Lisanna Harlin works for Lexon Corp in Durham, North Carolina, a private military company that provides armed guards, bodyguards, and guns for hire. They’re the sort of place that would be looking for the best of the best in combat, and they have a bit of a reputation for hiring Gallagher girls. Claire had given up on the job search months ago since the video went out, in fact, she’s had a job lined up for graduation already : at a boxing gym in D.C., where the scene isn’t too bad. It was suited to her, but not exactly the sort of thing that her Gallagher education had prepared her for. Lexon Corp? Everything her rigorous love of January boot camps were tailored to. And they want to interview her.

A month later, Claire’s sitting on the cusp of a completely fresh start. It wasn’t easy to backtrack on the plans that she and Kass had made together, knowing how much was changing for the both of them, it had been nice to have the stable idea of an apartment together on the horizon. Now, she’s a four hour drive away, and she goes home to her one-bedroom studio in Durham after rigorous training throughout the day. But she’s grateful for the chance to work her way back into the field, and she can remember what Lisanna said to her when they gave her the offer.

“We’re aware that with your history that we’re taking a chance on you, Claire,” Lisanna said. “But we think the reasons that made other agencies look past you are exactly what makes you an asset. You care about your jobs, the people that you’re involved in, and you’d have a partner’s back until the bitter end. You listen to your intuition, trust your gut...and above all else, you have follow-through. I’m excited to be able to offer this position. Don’t prove me wrong.”

Claire swears that she won’t.  

PART THREE: KIPTYN.

Kiptyn isn’t supposed to be in the left hall closet. 

In fact, he’s not supposed to be awake at all. But who can sleep the night before their birthday anyway? Sure, he’ll be thirteen, and that’s probably old enough to have gotten over the magic of it all, but...he’d still been lying awake with excitement, the anticipation keeping his eyes open for hours on end. Well, that and the video game he’d been playing under the covers, but he’d obviously only been playing it because he couldn’t sleep in the first place.

Then he started thinking about the left hall closet and the conversation that they had at dinner the other night. In Kiptyn’s defense, Dahvia – his younger sister – had totally started it and he was an innocent bystander. After all, Kiptyn’s old enough to know that they don’t bring up Claire to mom, because it just puts her in a mood and then you can forget about doing anything else for the rest of the evening. But Dahvia’s ten, practically a baby, and she doesn’t know any better.

“Hey, mom? What sort of accident did Claire die in? Nina asked me at recess and I didn’t know,” Dahvia pipes up, before she’s even properly sat down. Kip visibly cringes. He’s older, wiser, knows this won’t go well. Still, he dares to look at his mom’s face and he notes the faraway look in her eye, like she seems to experience a bunch of things at once. Kip notices how even though her eyes are glassy, she doesn’t cry. Though sometimes, their mom will just cry randomly, like two weeks ago when he asked for help with his Spanish homework and she couldn’t even help him finish the first worksheet.

“It was a car accident,” she says stiffly, “eat your dinner.”

Kiptyn kicks his sister under the table and flashes her a look that says : Great. Look what you did, ruined dinner. Dahvia sticks her tongue out at him.

So, he knows that he’s not supposed to be in the left hall closet because he could ruin many more dinners, but he’s here anyway. He’s been thinking about it ever since they sat in silence for the rest of that half hour, and he’s come to the conclusion – his mother was lying. Because all sorts of things make their mother cry, like a bowl of mac and cheese or Spanish class, or motorcycles, and she won’t let Kiptyn take boxing lessons though his friend Robert is and he thought it sounded really cool, but she doesn’t have any problem with cars or driving, and also, she’s never told them a single thing about Claire except that. They aren’t allowed to know anything about her, especially not anything true, so Kiptyn is pretty sure that’s a lie. There’s just something just weird about it.

So, in the middle of the night before his thirteenth birthday, he looks up a video on how you pick locks and then he figures it out on the door of the left hall closet. He’s there for at least forty-five minutes, practically ready to give it all up when he hears the clicking sound, and then it opens. His first thought is : Woah. This is a load of junk.

And he’s right. There’s boxes upon boxes of paperwork, old clothes. Some things start to click, like when he finds a pair of worn boxing gloves with Claire’s initials embroidered on them. His favorite thing that he finds is the fattest scrapbook he’s ever seen – his mom always makes them, there’s one for every year of his life. Dahvia’s too, they love looking at them. The cover of this one, though, says Italy 2021. It’s all pictures of his mom and Claire, probably in their early twenties. Kiptyn mostly notices his mother’s smile, how he’s only seen her look like that a couple times in his life and yet it looks so EASY here, like she wears it all the time. It’s so strange to him. He sets the scrapbook down and crawls toward the back of the closet. His eyes land on two leather folders with gold embroidery, and he opens up the first one. In big letters at the top : GALLAGHER ACADEMY.

It’s a diploma.

This certifies that Kassandra Sutton has satisfactorily completed the…

“What are you doing?”

Kiptyn yells out like a child, not having heard anyone creeping up on him. He claps his hand over his mouth as if to shush himself. “The door was open! I don’t know how, but I just...noticed it was open and wanted to make sure that...no one was stealing your stuff!” he grins sheepishly, hoping that he can ride on the high of his birthday week to get him out of this one.

“It was just...open?” his mother looks down at him with raised eyebrows before brandishing a twisted paper clip between two fingers. The one that had formerly been stuck in the door. His guilty expression widens, he can’t help it.

“Okay, I might know how it opened,” Kiptyn admits. He hesitates for a moment, before he realizes that he’s ALREADY in trouble, he might as well just come out with it and pray to the birthday gods. He holds up the diploma with her name on it : “What’s Gallagher Academy?”

Kass’s sigh is heavy and deep, accompanied by the amount of exhaustion that comes with raising two curious kids by herself. After Claire died, she moved her family to London to be closer to their aunt and away from everything that reminded her of Claire. She never told her children why. From hiding that world from them, the world that took so many people from her : her father, her ex-girlfriend, and the love of her life. She swore that she would never lose her children to it, too. But Kiptyn looks up at her with wide eyes, desperate to know about his mother and his past, and Kass also knows what it’s like to have part of yourself missing due to family secrets that are being kept from you. He is practically a teenager now. So, she relents.

Kass doesn’t go into all of the details, of course. Just that Gallagher Academy was a school for spies, and that’s where it all started. Kiptyn already knew that his moms met in college, so it’s the spy part that’s most interesting to him. She talks about Claire with a light in her eyes he’s unfamiliar with, how she was one of the best fighters in their year, that she grew up with such a talent in the ring that she probably could’ve gone pro if her life had gone in a different direction. She talks about how they had to part ways after graduation, because Claire got a job in North Carolina and she got a job in Washington, DC, but they made it work, and both got very accustomed to the four hour drive – though it was sometimes closer to three for Claire, because she always drove too fast, even on this big, black motorcycle which Kass swears that she hated. She tells Kiptyn about how they got married, the way she’d almost moved to England for a dream job and that long distance threatened to drive them apart again – until Claire chased her down in the airport with a ring and proposal.  

She also talks about how Claire really died : the abridged version. It was an overseas mission where they’d been cornered, and Claire risked her life to save the rest of their team. There were no other casualties, and the information they were able to bring back helped stop the terrorist organization they’d been chasing to end them for good. Kass tells the abridged version for her son, gives Claire a hero’s death. In some ways, it was. She doesn’t mention the ways that Claire was consumed by the case, it was an organization hellbent on killing spies and it likely reminded her of the brotherhood. Kass had been worried about the case the whole time, because it felt like Claire was taking it too personally. In the end, she may have been right : because Claire had let it take her life in order to close it. She also doesn’t mention that such a sacrificial death means that her wife died fighting alone, swinging her fists until her very last breath. But still, she was all alone.

She had no choice but to take her kids as far away from that life as possible.

Kiptyn tries, but he doesn’t really remember Claire. He’d only been three years old when she passed away, and before then, she’d been so consumed by her last case that she was barely present. Still, he thinks she sounds badass.

He falls asleep on his mother’s shoulder that night, looking through the scrapbook of pictures from their trip to Italy in 2021. He’s animated for the first part, pointing out buildings and asking questions, wonders if Claire was sweating in all that leather, but he slowly starts to drift off. He wakes up on the couch the next morning, no trace of the book or any of the other papers he’d hauled out of the closet the night before. He looks at the closet and there’s an extra padlock. Figures.

It comes up in little ways, like a private joke that he has with his mother, like she’ll say something and flash him a secretive smile. He likes that, and he understands that this is a big secret that he has to keep. It doesn’t come up again until his fourteenth birthday the next year, the summer before high school. It’s a strange letter in a manila envelope, sealed with some expensive red wax, his name written in fancy calligraphy. The most attention-grabbing part, however, is not Kiptyn Sutton-Walsh in big cursive letters. It’s the return address :

GALLAGHER ACADEMY.