Work Text:
You're on the anonmeme, looking for clues. You don't track it. You can't, like you can't track the blindfold meme. Having an account is too great a risk.
So you just visit the posts while they're open, using all the proxy servers at your disposal. But the delicious account hasn't been updated in days and you worry: has the show lost its appeal? Are fewer people interested in writing about your creations?
Because you know, when the kinkfic dies down and the picspams slow to a trickle it means your fans are moving on. Of course you have people tracking this. Innocent -- or perhaps quite perverted considering "tracking kinkfic" is in their job description; you just hope they're not writing the stuff during hours they bill to your account -- maybe-innocent young account coordinators at some blandly named media services firm that's very, very discreet.
But can Polly and Anyssa and whatever the other ones on your account are called be trusted to care enough? They're just paid to care about it. For you, this is your life.
Not just your work. Surprising perhaps that a weird little cult show got so popular, a crazy idea that took getting the casting just right to take off. That moment of victory when you saw the first dailies, saw the chemistry from the table reading translated to the screen and thought "Yes. It's going to work. I'm gonna be able to tell the stories."
No one knows it's more than work for you. No one. You don't sleep. Well, maybe an hour or two a night. But since before the pilot was shot you've been up nights, building buzz.
The first few dozen people on the message boards: all you. That first short Wincest fanfic posted hours after the pilot aired: you. The original Demian: you.
You didn't just have a show bible, but you had a secret book, a hidden journal: your show sockpuppet bible. Which characters on which message boards and which blogging services were supposed to say what, like what, do what.
It's amazing you haven't had a nervous breakdown since the show took off. You were so excited when actual real people, ones who weren't you, started showing up and arguing not only with various iterations of you but with each other.
You let it go to your head. A little. A lot.
For a while you started getting lazy, sleeping three, four hours a night. But then during Season Two and its dip you realized that was stupid, that was unimportant. You'd have to stay committed, stay the course if you wanted, really really wanted the show to stay on the air.
So it was back to the boards, the troughs, the Pit. Hundreds of thousands of words of bad fanfic you cranked out during those nights, fuelled by coffee, adrenaline, and fear. Epic arguments, long-winded meta, all to promote and help keep your seemingly silly show about a pair of misfit hunters of urban myths and rural folklore going.
Because you had a duty. Have a duty. To tell what is. To put it out there in the world. To have it reach people, those with the wits to understand.
They'd laugh at you, the studio execs, your actors, your friends, even the most rabid fans, if they knew. How important it was. To tell these stories, to share the truths you know about the world.
Sure, they're bowdlerized and cryptically presented, but for those with eyes to see, they tell the truth. Not fairytales or fantasy, but truth about the darkness that surrounds us. Except for a few the studio insisted on, all these fables, creatures, horrors: real.
They don't know. They don't know what lives just under the surface of their normal little lives. Most of them, if they did, they'd run straight to the nearest loony-bin, asking to be locked up. Not that they'd be safe there, they should know that from watching the show.
Because they don't have your knowledge, your experience.
They never came home from school to find mom wedged between the fridge and the pantry door, curled in on herself and clawing at her skin because she'd seen a spirit. They never heard dad tell mom not to worry, she was being foolish and a stay at County Health would put her right again just before the kitchen table flew up and smacked him in the head.
And most importantly, they never got help like your family had.
You remember it like yesterday: the sun low in the sky and the beat-up midnight blue Dodge Challenger rolling to a stop in your driveway, a man and two kids getting out.
The kids are bigger than you. One's a surly, pimple-faced boy, who spits on the ground and takes a grungy duffel filled with who-knows-what out of the trunk. The other kid, closer to your age, is a gumsnapping tomboy with skinned knees. You can only really tell it's a girl because of the lank pigtails held back by chipped Strawberry Shortcake barrettes.
The man though, the man is big and reassuring. He stubs out his cigarette, holds out his hand to your mom and says, "Hello Mrs. Kripke. My name's Hank Morrison and I'm here to take care of your problem."
You're on a meme for a show called Supernatural. It isn't about Chuck's life, or Sam or Dean's or any fictional character's. It's about the truth that's out there. You hit preview, then submit, and close your browser.