fic: Turning Fiction Into Reality
Title: Turning Fiction Into Reality
Ship: Anoop Desai/Megan Joy Corkrey, merusa/fallforyouagain
Word Count: 4,500
Rating: R, for sexual situations and a little strong language.
Warnings: None.
Summary: Anoop finds his fangirls and his mojo, and slowly falls in love.
Author’s Note: This is an odd story. It started off as crack!fic, written for the ontd_ai member fic meme. It's still pretty much crack!fic, even though it developed a plot and legs as it went along. Unbetaed and written in about two and a half hours. Read at your own risk. :)
Prompt: fallforyouagain and merusa humor fic. They're actually the real Megan and Anoop and enjoy messing with everyone's mind.
Disclaimer: This is NOT REAL LIFE. This is a work of fiction, written for entertainment purposes only, and the author is not making any money off of it.
Anoop didn’t get to know Megan that well while they were on the show. He’d wanted to - who wouldn’t want to know the breathtakingly gorgeous woman who could make anyone laugh within minutes? (Anoop sometimes wonders just what the producers were thinking, putting eight horny young guys in the same house with five of the most beautiful women on the planet. Especially when three of those women were off limits due to matrimony and age, dumping all the sexual tension on Alexis and Megan’s shapely shoulders.)
But circumstances had intervened, and Anoop never did get to know Megan well before she was eliminated from the show. Chief among those circumstances was the fact that Anoop was rather quiet and shy, and Megan loved to flit and flirt among them like a brilliantly colored butterfly. Her favorites were Kris, who she made blush approximately eighteen times a day, and Adam, who would simply quirk an elegant eyebrow and give as good as he got. Anoop had neither the blushing nor the flirting talent, so he watched from the sidelines.
At least he’d never made a fool of himself to her, he thought gratefully in retrospect, like poor Matt. Matt had been smitten at first glance, and had tried all his best moves on her for the first couple weeks. It had taken continued rejection, and finally coming upon her making out with a drunk Adam one night, to drive him away in spurned dudgeon. Anoop rather thought the songs he’d heard Matt banging out on the piano over the next couple of weeks might have been written with that whole situation still fresh in his memory. Ironically the songs weren’t half bad, and they made Adam snort in laughter whenever he heard them (which was hilarious if he was drinking out of his ubiquitous water bottle at the time).
When Megan gets kicked off Idol, though, Anoop notices the difference right away. It’s quieter in the house, less filled with laughter and random bits of song and flashes of golden hair. He finds himself looking up at the breakfast table after telling a joke, expecting Megan’s radiant smile to be looking back at him, and instead being confronted with Danny’s sleepy, unamused eyes. He starts going to bed earlier, because it’s just not as fun watching a video with the others in the front room without Megan there to insist on a horror movie and then make them all laugh with her snarky commentary. He begins to stress more about the show, because Megan’s not there to ruffle his hair and mock-punch his chest and demand he lighten up. In quiet moments, he lets himself admit that of all the people who’ve left the mansion, she’s the one he misses most.
///
In time, he gets kicked off the show himself. He goes home and mopes around his house for a while, but after a couple of weeks his mom refuses to make him any more cookies and disconnects the television in his room. “You need to stop being depressed,” she tells him. “Just because you didn’t win doesn’t mean that you can’t make an album and be a music star. You have fans all over the world who love you and want to buy your music. Now stop sitting on your bottom, take out the trash, and start writing us some music!”
He makes a face at her, though inside he’s grateful. He really didn’t want to go back to grad school, not after his world horizon got so much wider so quickly. Music really is his passion, even though he does love learning things and memorizing geeky trivia. Both grad school and American Idol taught him that, and he’s not looking back.
It’s his mom’s comments about his fans, he thinks, that stay in his mind and lead him to start searching around on the Internet one day. Who are these fans? Are they mostly in India, he wonders? Maybe he could try to get a tour started over there, though he doesn’t yet know what he’d sing. Before he gets an agent and starts figuring out licensing and marketing and all that stuff, though, he really just wants to know what the fans have thought of him all this time. What songs work? What don’t? He’d been a little wary of looking on the Internet while he was actually on the show, knowing only too well how he took criticism personally, but now he has nothing to lose.
It’s actually kind of a guilty pleasure, looking at random strangers fangirling over him (or fanboying, he supposes, although he kind of assumes girlparts unless the person explicitly states otherwise). He starts out on the official American Idol website, where he’s rather ridiculously pleased by the fact that his forum has more posts than anybody else’s except Adam’s. (Adam’s, of course, is in the lead by a factor of like 10 over everybody else’s.) But he finds the official site a little much, particularly when he comes across a group of people talking about his dick. That’s just a little bit too far for his tastes - now every time he sees a fan of his, he’s going to wonder if they’re looking at his crotch. Not cool.
Afterward, he can’t remember exactly when he finds it. Probably the second or third day, as he’s idly surfing around. He’d remembered at some point that he’d used to have this online journal thing, livejournal, which one of his girlfriends in college, Melissa, had been really into. Too into, if you asked him. She’d left it open one day when she went to take a shower and he’d seen (accidentally! he’s not the suspicious or snooping type!) that she’d been reading very graphic pornography about Harry and Draco from the Harry Potter books.
Anyway, when he thinks about where fangirls might live, he remembers that old girlfriend and heads over there. Of course he doesn’t remember his old username, as it’s been a couple of years, so he has to think of a new one. This unexpectedly turns out to be difficult - he obviously can’t use his name or anything close to it, or he’d get stalked (Adam’s kissing photos getting out had taught him to avoid that sort of danger), and he can’t think of anything witty or interesting.
When he’s finally at his wit’s end, his eye falls on an anagram book nearby, one of his latest obsessions. He won’t claim to be a word nerd like David Cook, but he does like words a lot. Putting them together and taking them apart again is interesting, and a good way to kill some time while you wait for people to stop doing countless takes in the studio recording room and give you a turn. (Adam is actually not the worst offender. Lil and Danny are, however, impossible.) He thinks for a moment, then laughs, writing “R. U. Sane?” on a piece of paper. These fangirls are probably not, and every time they see his username it’ll be a subliminal reminder to them to get a life.
After scrambling it for a while, Anoop ends up with “nerusa,” which has a rather good flow to it. The only problem he has with the name is that it’s bookended with a “n” and an “a,” which feels too close to his own name to be a suitably undercover online handle. Finally he settles on flipping the “n” into a “m” for “me,” and then registers merusa before he can have any further second thoughts.
All that unexpectedly difficult work has made Anoop determined to find the home of the fangirls. When his mom comes in an hour later, bringing him some gajak and a glass of milk, he tells her he’s doing “online market research,” which sends her away impressed (and makes her forget to tell him to take out the trash again, which is a plus). In a way, though, he tells himself, it is market research.
Finally, in hour three, he hits the jackpot. From the crazies at ohnotheydidnt, he finds a link to a brand new livejournal community called ontd_ai. It’s funny, it’s bright, and it’s just on the right side of crazy. And the best thing is, it’s absolutely full of just the sort of people he wants to reach - smart young women who love American Idol. Smart, because they’re more likely to look beyond Adam’s glitter and Kris’s cuteness to someone like him; young, because old fangirls creep him out, sorry; and women, because girls don’t have the money to buy CDs and women do (also: women, because fanboys kind of creep him out too).
He finds out these vital statistics from a “friending meme” they’ve so helpfully started right away. He feels like he’s on the ground floor of a movement. And when he sees someone called “Shawna” post that her favorite Season 8 contestant was himself, he takes a deep breath, looks around his room to make sure nobody’s watching this supremely narcissistic thing, and goes for it.
He even posts himself, using the ex-girlfriend’s name, which he thinks is more hilarious at the time than he does afterward, when people keep calling him by it.
And then he’s fully launched into the storm.
///
Over the next couple of weeks, as finale rehearsals kick off and Anoop gets sucked back into the swing of American Idol, he still manages to keep up with the community. He makes friends, and learns online lingo, and spends his downtime stuffing his hand in his mouth trying to keep from laughing at the latest macro. These girls are all just so funny, and irreverent, and sarcastic! He wishes he knew a girl like that in real life - all the girls he’s dated turn out to be high-maintenance, insecure, whiny, and completely without a sense of humor.
He knows he’s got it bad when people start noticing the change in his mood. Michael teases him about finding a new girlfriend, and Adam says something approving about his aura changing and something about his horoscope that Anoop really doesn’t understand. (But Kris chimes in and seconds Adam, so he supposes Adam’s probably not just pulling his leg.) Allison says bluntly that she likes the “happy Anoop” better than the “mad Anoop,” which he thinks is way oversimplifying, but whatever, she’s only 17.
It’s Megan, though, who shoots a considering eye at him, and Megan to whom he finds himself spilling the whole story, late one night over too much vodka. He rather thinks the vodka was Megan’s idea to get the story out of him - she’s far too much like the girls on the community in some ways, he thinks, as he fuzzily tries to explain badfic and what a “big ding dong” macro is. It’s beyond him in his inebriated state, and he’s frustrated, banging his hand on the table. Megan just laughs at him, throws back a shot, and says, “Obviously, the solution is for me to join this online lair of yours.”
This doesn’t sound like a good idea to him. “It’s my place, not yours. I found it first.”
“So? If you can pretend to be a fangirl obsessed with yourself, I can pretend to be a fangirl obsessed with myself.” Some vodka’s ended up on her finger somehow, and she licks it absentmindedly. Anoop’s eyes follow, transfixed. “It should be fun.” And she’s grinning wolfishly at him, and he really doesn’t think this sounds like a good idea.
She pats his knee consolingly. “All right, fine, I’ll pretend to be a fangirl obsessed with both myself and Adam Lambert. That should help me fit in - all the girls are obsessed with Adam.”
“Why are they?” he whines at her. “He’s gay, and that’s fine, that’s great, but he’s obviously not going to do anything with them.”
“He did something with me, you’ll remember,” she informs him. He starts to gape, but then she shoots him an exasperated glare and says, “The making out, Desai, get your mind out of the gutter.” She swirls her finger around the top of the vodka bottle. “He’s a fucking good kisser, actually,” she says absentmindedly.
It’s probably in that moment that Anoop first realizes that he’s got it bad for Megan Joy Corkrey. All he wants is to pull her to him and make her forget every name but his, breathe her in, make her drunk on him instead of on vodka.
As it is, however, all he can do is groan and thunk his head into the counter. He feels her fingers thread themselves into his hair and stroke, feather-soft. “Aw, poor baby. I’m sure the online fangirls will come to the tour and cheer you up,” she says, laughing. “Since they can’t get Adam.”
He just lets his head rest there. He doesn’t want online fangirls, as fun as they are. He wants the woman next to him.
Abruptly, the fingers leave his hair. “Well, then, you can stay here with the booze. I’m going to go sign up for that online community and find the porn about Adam and Kris.”
By the time he gets his head turned to try to talk her out of it, she’s already gone.
///
Waking up the next morning, he doesn’t immediately remember everything that happened the previous night. He drags himself around rehearsals, with Allison telling him he needs his mojo again and Danny telling him sanctimoniously to lighten up on the alcohol. He flips Danny the bird behind his back, which makes him feel a little bit better.
By the time he remembers to check the community, he’s too busy in the finale and the post-finale furor to look around too deeply to see if Megan followed up on her threat.
That suddenly changes about a week after the finale.
"Ovaries go wow" is one of Megan's pet phrases. Anoop drops his head in his hands, then reaches for his phone.
///
It actually turns out much less badly than Anoop had anticipated. In fact, it’s actually kind of fun. Having a second undercover Idol on the community means that there’s someone to laugh at inside jokes with him, someone to trade coded messages with, someone who knows just how crazy some of the theories get and how close others come to hitting dead on.
Some of the best moments happen on anonymous posts, when they take turns posting lists of “inside information,” using community lingo and calling themselves “people who know things”. They have strict rules that they hold each other to - one thing on each post must be completely true, one must be mostly true but tweaked in a funny way, and the others should be as hilarious as they can get them.
Anoop finds out that Megan’s sense of humor is close to his own, and that she laughs at his most of his jokes, even when they’re not all that funny.
They act like juveniles sometimes, competing to see who can act the most over-the-top fangirlish about themselves. They flirt shamelessly, the Internet (and the community atmosphere) giving Anoop the confidence and daring to say things he would never have dared say in person. They even collect the most horrible fanfiction and send it to Kris and Adam - anonymously, of course, but to their private emails so they’ll be sure to read it - then spend days laughing on tour when Kris blushes every time he sees Adam.
They have to stop that particular game when Anoop notices Kris get an onstage boner just from looking at Adam. That’s just not fair to do to any guy, he tells Megan, remembering Kris’s frantic attempts to tug down his too-tight shirt. He doesn’t tell her that he’s had the same problem himself sometimes, standing in the wings during the bottom 6 group song, watching her sing with Lil.
The community grows, and he feels like a proud father sometimes. He has a whole set of fans now. When he goes out to meet the fans at the buses before and after shows, he sometimes hears someone mention the community, and when he does, he always has to hold back the smile that wants to come bursting out of his lips. And when one gorgeous “bench” (he has to stop himself from saying that in conversation nowadays, and it’s getting really difficult) asks him to take a picture with the community sign one day, he can’t hold back the smile any longer - it comes spilling out onto his face.
If Anoop is the proud father, Megan is the fierce mother. She defends the community’s reputation among the other Idols, to the point where Anoop’s kind of surprised the others don’t guess the secret. Anoop lets her take the lead there, content to keep gently steering Matt away from finding the comm - if that boy ever got on, they’d never hear the end of it.
Eventually the whole community vs. Danny fight sorts itself out, which soothes the waters and is a great relief to Anoop. Not only is it a nice break from the tension, but he feels personally proud of himself. July 9th, the long epic day of tweeting #sophiasheart over and over to get it to trend for Danny in honor of Sophia, is one of their rare off-days. Instead of spending it relaxing, or going out with the other guys (Megan is off with Ryder), he sits grimly in front of his laptop for hours, sending tweet after tweet under his fake Twitter accounts. In addition to working on it himself, he cracks the whip over his fangirls.
Minutes after the whole thing started:
Bringing it to Danny’s attention (because what’s the point of the effort if it isn’t noticed?):
Cheering up the community and rallying the troops:
Cracking the whip:
///
After the Sophia’s Heart episode, he settles back and watches his baby community in its adulthood. With the tour in full swing, he no longer has the time to pay as obsessive attention to it as he used to, but he’s still on there rather more than is perhaps good for him. Megan laughs at him for it, but she’s nearly as bad.
The laughing is actually probably because he’s running porn memes, but he tries to ignore that fact. In a few lone moments he remembers that he should actually be horrified about all this porn being written about himself and his friends, but he can’t really bring himself to be anything but amused (and, as he’d never admit to anyone but himself, occasionally turned on). The community’s been a bad influence on him that way - he finds himself choking back laughter when Kris’s arm lingers around Adam’s waist a moment too long, or when Matt stares lingeringly after Kris, or when Adam kisses Kris’s forehead. It’s all he can do to keep himself from snapping pictures and anonymously posting them to the community. The only thing stopping him is that Megan would see them and kick his ass.
The fic about him and Adam does make him jittery around Adam for a day, just because he’s honest enough to admit to himself that Adam’s a very sexy guy and being kissed by him would probably be amazing. Not that he would ever admit that to anyone. Actually, the community has created a whole subsection of his mind in which he dumps “things Anoop will never admit to anybody.”
It’s the porn written about him and Megan, however, that makes his heart speed up.
Somewhere along the line, he realizes one day, she became one of his best friends. He doesn’t know when it happened, exactly; he thinks it developed over comment threads, through private messages, in the spaces between the words of private jokes. The community picks up on it, teases them, says they’re falling in love.
Anoop doesn’t know about Megan, but he thinks it’s possible that he might be falling in love with her. The word-lover in him draws the connection between “falling” and her username, fallforyouagain, and he bites his lip in frustration.
He knows there’s no real reason that he shouldn’t just say it, shouldn’t just ask her out, but her divorce isn’t finalized, and despite all the flirting, she’s never actually made a move on him.
He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. He lets himself fall into the whirlwind of the tour, keeping his laptop always with him, filling his spare moments with the community. It’s still fun, it’s still great stress relief.
Slowly, though, ever so slowly, it’s starting to get old. He doesn’t want to talk to the 100x100 picture of Megan anymore, he wants the real living one in his arms. He wants to kiss her and make love to her and turn fiction into reality.
He clicks “reply” again, hits “post” again, skims down a list of comments again - and all his eyes really see is golden hair, an open smile, laughing eyes. Megan. His Megan.
///
It’s a day like any other day.
The others have gone in some room close by for dinner, before the show. Anoop’s trying to quickly finish up something on the community, and then he’ll join them. They’re in Glendale, Arizona, and it’s incredibly hot, but other than that nothing’s different about this day.
There’s no warning before Anoop hears Megan’s sigh of exasperation behind him. He doesn’t turn. “I’ll be right there, Megs, just finishing something up,” he says.
She taps her heel. He can hear it thunk. “Is it community stuff again? I swear, Anoop, you’re on there more than me, and I thought I was bad.”
“Yeah,” he says absentmindedly, after checking over his shoulder to make sure there aren’t any other Idols in the room. Despite the community’s rehabilitation in the eyes of their tourmates, he still doesn’t want to risk any of the others deciding to join. “It’s a slow day, I’ll be off in just a minute. Just checking these drabble fic prompts.”
She huffs. “Oh come on, you can do that later! I think there’s tri-tip at dinner?”
Tri-tip sounds pretty good. He clicks out of the entry, starts to cast a quick glance over the main page to see if anything new has popped up.
Suddenly, he feels Megan’s breasts press into his shoulders, as she leans over the back of the couch. He instantly freezes. This is the best distraction she’s come up with yet. Much better than tri-tip.
“Just get off already!” she huffs at him jokingly, reaching her slim hand for the top of the laptop. He swivels it away to keep her from shutting it. “If the community’s slow, you have absolutely no rea…”
She cuts off in the middle of her word, and he warily turns his head. He finds himself at eye level with her very fetching neck, which is just begging to be kissed. Before he can act on the impulse, however, she leans further over the back of the couch, closer to the laptop screen.
He tries not to look at her ass, arched over the back of the couch, tries not to think about what he wants to do to it. Her hair is swinging by his nose, smelling of perfume and hair product and sunny days. He wets suddenly dry lips.
Megan is paying no attention to him, however. Her eyes are narrowed at his laptop screen. Right now, however, Anoop could not care less what the community is up to at the moment. Tagsplosion, creepypasta, even a Kradam kissing macro, nothing is as interesting or as alluring as the beauty he could envelop with his arms in one smooth motion.
Well, maybe not a completely smooth motion, since his arms are currently full of laptop. But he could drop it in a second - no, that won’t work either. His laptop is his baby. Set it aside - but by then she’ll probably have just laughed at him and sauntered away, that beautiful ass swinging as she goes…
Her eyes suddenly come away from the screen and focus on his, so close. So close. She must see something in them, because hers widen a little, before the corners of her mouth tug into a small smile. “Why, Anoop,” she says, not purring or breathy or any of that nonsense, just a low voice that goes straight to certain parts of his anatomy.
Then she’s leaning down the couple more inches, and shit, it’s awkward at this angle, with her bent in two over the back of a high-backed couch, and him twisted all around at the waist with a laptop humming on his lap, but none of that matters, because Megan’s kissing him, at long last, at long last.
Her lips are soft, and a little slippery with lip gloss, and when she breaks away he tries to follow, even though that’s going to end up with him in a pretzel. She smiles down at him, then straightens up, and Anoop feels the re-constitution of his personal space as if it was a physical loss.
Megan keeps smiling at him, softly, and he can’t think of anything to say. He thinks he might be smiling like an idiot, but then he might also be intensely staring without an expression on his face at all. He can’t seem to get his mind to communicate with his facial muscles long enough to ask them.
Then Megan turns, and his eyes automatically drop to her ass, and that’s not fair to women, he knows, but he’s an ass guy, he won’t lie. Besides, she’s leaving him, and after this whole long flirtation, it looks like all he’ll ever get to do is look.
But then instead of walking out the door, she turns left. Instead of continuing to give him flirty side-of-the-eye looks through her eyelashes, she walks around the side of the couch. Instead of pretending she doesn’t notice when she catches him staring at her, she sits down next to him.
Anoop may be gaping. He’s still not sure.
Megan reaches out and gently pries his hands off the laptop, takes it away, sets it down on the coffee table. “The community will live without you for a few minutes, Anoop,” she says, turning back to him. “They’re only talking about zombies right now anyway.”
If anything could pull him out of this moment, that might do it. “Zzz…zombies?” he asks.
“Zombies,” she repeats. But then that goes straight out of his mind, because Megan is slinging a leg over his lap and putting her hands on his shoulders, and as Anoop’s own hands come up to her waist, she breathes into his mouth, “Zombies are all well and good, but I’d rather think about other body parts than brains right now, wouldn’t you?”
And yes, now he knows he’s smiling. He’s grinning up at her, and then he’s tangling a hand in her long, beautiful hair, and he’s pulling her down, laughing, into a glorious, wonderful kiss.
The community would be proud.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Comments are appreciated. :)
You can find my fic masterlist here.
Ship: Anoop Desai/Megan Joy Corkrey, merusa/fallforyouagain
Word Count: 4,500
Rating: R, for sexual situations and a little strong language.
Warnings: None.
Summary: Anoop finds his fangirls and his mojo, and slowly falls in love.
Author’s Note: This is an odd story. It started off as crack!fic, written for the ontd_ai member fic meme. It's still pretty much crack!fic, even though it developed a plot and legs as it went along. Unbetaed and written in about two and a half hours. Read at your own risk. :)
Prompt: fallforyouagain and merusa humor fic. They're actually the real Megan and Anoop and enjoy messing with everyone's mind.
Disclaimer: This is NOT REAL LIFE. This is a work of fiction, written for entertainment purposes only, and the author is not making any money off of it.
Anoop didn’t get to know Megan that well while they were on the show. He’d wanted to - who wouldn’t want to know the breathtakingly gorgeous woman who could make anyone laugh within minutes? (Anoop sometimes wonders just what the producers were thinking, putting eight horny young guys in the same house with five of the most beautiful women on the planet. Especially when three of those women were off limits due to matrimony and age, dumping all the sexual tension on Alexis and Megan’s shapely shoulders.)
But circumstances had intervened, and Anoop never did get to know Megan well before she was eliminated from the show. Chief among those circumstances was the fact that Anoop was rather quiet and shy, and Megan loved to flit and flirt among them like a brilliantly colored butterfly. Her favorites were Kris, who she made blush approximately eighteen times a day, and Adam, who would simply quirk an elegant eyebrow and give as good as he got. Anoop had neither the blushing nor the flirting talent, so he watched from the sidelines.
At least he’d never made a fool of himself to her, he thought gratefully in retrospect, like poor Matt. Matt had been smitten at first glance, and had tried all his best moves on her for the first couple weeks. It had taken continued rejection, and finally coming upon her making out with a drunk Adam one night, to drive him away in spurned dudgeon. Anoop rather thought the songs he’d heard Matt banging out on the piano over the next couple of weeks might have been written with that whole situation still fresh in his memory. Ironically the songs weren’t half bad, and they made Adam snort in laughter whenever he heard them (which was hilarious if he was drinking out of his ubiquitous water bottle at the time).
When Megan gets kicked off Idol, though, Anoop notices the difference right away. It’s quieter in the house, less filled with laughter and random bits of song and flashes of golden hair. He finds himself looking up at the breakfast table after telling a joke, expecting Megan’s radiant smile to be looking back at him, and instead being confronted with Danny’s sleepy, unamused eyes. He starts going to bed earlier, because it’s just not as fun watching a video with the others in the front room without Megan there to insist on a horror movie and then make them all laugh with her snarky commentary. He begins to stress more about the show, because Megan’s not there to ruffle his hair and mock-punch his chest and demand he lighten up. In quiet moments, he lets himself admit that of all the people who’ve left the mansion, she’s the one he misses most.
///
In time, he gets kicked off the show himself. He goes home and mopes around his house for a while, but after a couple of weeks his mom refuses to make him any more cookies and disconnects the television in his room. “You need to stop being depressed,” she tells him. “Just because you didn’t win doesn’t mean that you can’t make an album and be a music star. You have fans all over the world who love you and want to buy your music. Now stop sitting on your bottom, take out the trash, and start writing us some music!”
He makes a face at her, though inside he’s grateful. He really didn’t want to go back to grad school, not after his world horizon got so much wider so quickly. Music really is his passion, even though he does love learning things and memorizing geeky trivia. Both grad school and American Idol taught him that, and he’s not looking back.
It’s his mom’s comments about his fans, he thinks, that stay in his mind and lead him to start searching around on the Internet one day. Who are these fans? Are they mostly in India, he wonders? Maybe he could try to get a tour started over there, though he doesn’t yet know what he’d sing. Before he gets an agent and starts figuring out licensing and marketing and all that stuff, though, he really just wants to know what the fans have thought of him all this time. What songs work? What don’t? He’d been a little wary of looking on the Internet while he was actually on the show, knowing only too well how he took criticism personally, but now he has nothing to lose.
It’s actually kind of a guilty pleasure, looking at random strangers fangirling over him (or fanboying, he supposes, although he kind of assumes girlparts unless the person explicitly states otherwise). He starts out on the official American Idol website, where he’s rather ridiculously pleased by the fact that his forum has more posts than anybody else’s except Adam’s. (Adam’s, of course, is in the lead by a factor of like 10 over everybody else’s.) But he finds the official site a little much, particularly when he comes across a group of people talking about his dick. That’s just a little bit too far for his tastes - now every time he sees a fan of his, he’s going to wonder if they’re looking at his crotch. Not cool.
Afterward, he can’t remember exactly when he finds it. Probably the second or third day, as he’s idly surfing around. He’d remembered at some point that he’d used to have this online journal thing, livejournal, which one of his girlfriends in college, Melissa, had been really into. Too into, if you asked him. She’d left it open one day when she went to take a shower and he’d seen (accidentally! he’s not the suspicious or snooping type!) that she’d been reading very graphic pornography about Harry and Draco from the Harry Potter books.
Anyway, when he thinks about where fangirls might live, he remembers that old girlfriend and heads over there. Of course he doesn’t remember his old username, as it’s been a couple of years, so he has to think of a new one. This unexpectedly turns out to be difficult - he obviously can’t use his name or anything close to it, or he’d get stalked (Adam’s kissing photos getting out had taught him to avoid that sort of danger), and he can’t think of anything witty or interesting.
When he’s finally at his wit’s end, his eye falls on an anagram book nearby, one of his latest obsessions. He won’t claim to be a word nerd like David Cook, but he does like words a lot. Putting them together and taking them apart again is interesting, and a good way to kill some time while you wait for people to stop doing countless takes in the studio recording room and give you a turn. (Adam is actually not the worst offender. Lil and Danny are, however, impossible.) He thinks for a moment, then laughs, writing “R. U. Sane?” on a piece of paper. These fangirls are probably not, and every time they see his username it’ll be a subliminal reminder to them to get a life.
After scrambling it for a while, Anoop ends up with “nerusa,” which has a rather good flow to it. The only problem he has with the name is that it’s bookended with a “n” and an “a,” which feels too close to his own name to be a suitably undercover online handle. Finally he settles on flipping the “n” into a “m” for “me,” and then registers merusa before he can have any further second thoughts.
All that unexpectedly difficult work has made Anoop determined to find the home of the fangirls. When his mom comes in an hour later, bringing him some gajak and a glass of milk, he tells her he’s doing “online market research,” which sends her away impressed (and makes her forget to tell him to take out the trash again, which is a plus). In a way, though, he tells himself, it is market research.
Finally, in hour three, he hits the jackpot. From the crazies at ohnotheydidnt, he finds a link to a brand new livejournal community called ontd_ai. It’s funny, it’s bright, and it’s just on the right side of crazy. And the best thing is, it’s absolutely full of just the sort of people he wants to reach - smart young women who love American Idol. Smart, because they’re more likely to look beyond Adam’s glitter and Kris’s cuteness to someone like him; young, because old fangirls creep him out, sorry; and women, because girls don’t have the money to buy CDs and women do (also: women, because fanboys kind of creep him out too).
He finds out these vital statistics from a “friending meme” they’ve so helpfully started right away. He feels like he’s on the ground floor of a movement. And when he sees someone called “Shawna” post that her favorite Season 8 contestant was himself, he takes a deep breath, looks around his room to make sure nobody’s watching this supremely narcissistic thing, and goes for it.
He even posts himself, using the ex-girlfriend’s name, which he thinks is more hilarious at the time than he does afterward, when people keep calling him by it.
And then he’s fully launched into the storm.
///
Over the next couple of weeks, as finale rehearsals kick off and Anoop gets sucked back into the swing of American Idol, he still manages to keep up with the community. He makes friends, and learns online lingo, and spends his downtime stuffing his hand in his mouth trying to keep from laughing at the latest macro. These girls are all just so funny, and irreverent, and sarcastic! He wishes he knew a girl like that in real life - all the girls he’s dated turn out to be high-maintenance, insecure, whiny, and completely without a sense of humor.
He knows he’s got it bad when people start noticing the change in his mood. Michael teases him about finding a new girlfriend, and Adam says something approving about his aura changing and something about his horoscope that Anoop really doesn’t understand. (But Kris chimes in and seconds Adam, so he supposes Adam’s probably not just pulling his leg.) Allison says bluntly that she likes the “happy Anoop” better than the “mad Anoop,” which he thinks is way oversimplifying, but whatever, she’s only 17.
It’s Megan, though, who shoots a considering eye at him, and Megan to whom he finds himself spilling the whole story, late one night over too much vodka. He rather thinks the vodka was Megan’s idea to get the story out of him - she’s far too much like the girls on the community in some ways, he thinks, as he fuzzily tries to explain badfic and what a “big ding dong” macro is. It’s beyond him in his inebriated state, and he’s frustrated, banging his hand on the table. Megan just laughs at him, throws back a shot, and says, “Obviously, the solution is for me to join this online lair of yours.”
This doesn’t sound like a good idea to him. “It’s my place, not yours. I found it first.”
“So? If you can pretend to be a fangirl obsessed with yourself, I can pretend to be a fangirl obsessed with myself.” Some vodka’s ended up on her finger somehow, and she licks it absentmindedly. Anoop’s eyes follow, transfixed. “It should be fun.” And she’s grinning wolfishly at him, and he really doesn’t think this sounds like a good idea.
She pats his knee consolingly. “All right, fine, I’ll pretend to be a fangirl obsessed with both myself and Adam Lambert. That should help me fit in - all the girls are obsessed with Adam.”
“Why are they?” he whines at her. “He’s gay, and that’s fine, that’s great, but he’s obviously not going to do anything with them.”
“He did something with me, you’ll remember,” she informs him. He starts to gape, but then she shoots him an exasperated glare and says, “The making out, Desai, get your mind out of the gutter.” She swirls her finger around the top of the vodka bottle. “He’s a fucking good kisser, actually,” she says absentmindedly.
It’s probably in that moment that Anoop first realizes that he’s got it bad for Megan Joy Corkrey. All he wants is to pull her to him and make her forget every name but his, breathe her in, make her drunk on him instead of on vodka.
As it is, however, all he can do is groan and thunk his head into the counter. He feels her fingers thread themselves into his hair and stroke, feather-soft. “Aw, poor baby. I’m sure the online fangirls will come to the tour and cheer you up,” she says, laughing. “Since they can’t get Adam.”
He just lets his head rest there. He doesn’t want online fangirls, as fun as they are. He wants the woman next to him.
Abruptly, the fingers leave his hair. “Well, then, you can stay here with the booze. I’m going to go sign up for that online community and find the porn about Adam and Kris.”
By the time he gets his head turned to try to talk her out of it, she’s already gone.
///
Waking up the next morning, he doesn’t immediately remember everything that happened the previous night. He drags himself around rehearsals, with Allison telling him he needs his mojo again and Danny telling him sanctimoniously to lighten up on the alcohol. He flips Danny the bird behind his back, which makes him feel a little bit better.
By the time he remembers to check the community, he’s too busy in the finale and the post-finale furor to look around too deeply to see if Megan followed up on her threat.
That suddenly changes about a week after the finale.
"Ovaries go wow" is one of Megan's pet phrases. Anoop drops his head in his hands, then reaches for his phone.
///
It actually turns out much less badly than Anoop had anticipated. In fact, it’s actually kind of fun. Having a second undercover Idol on the community means that there’s someone to laugh at inside jokes with him, someone to trade coded messages with, someone who knows just how crazy some of the theories get and how close others come to hitting dead on.
Some of the best moments happen on anonymous posts, when they take turns posting lists of “inside information,” using community lingo and calling themselves “people who know things”. They have strict rules that they hold each other to - one thing on each post must be completely true, one must be mostly true but tweaked in a funny way, and the others should be as hilarious as they can get them.
Anoop finds out that Megan’s sense of humor is close to his own, and that she laughs at his most of his jokes, even when they’re not all that funny.
They act like juveniles sometimes, competing to see who can act the most over-the-top fangirlish about themselves. They flirt shamelessly, the Internet (and the community atmosphere) giving Anoop the confidence and daring to say things he would never have dared say in person. They even collect the most horrible fanfiction and send it to Kris and Adam - anonymously, of course, but to their private emails so they’ll be sure to read it - then spend days laughing on tour when Kris blushes every time he sees Adam.
They have to stop that particular game when Anoop notices Kris get an onstage boner just from looking at Adam. That’s just not fair to do to any guy, he tells Megan, remembering Kris’s frantic attempts to tug down his too-tight shirt. He doesn’t tell her that he’s had the same problem himself sometimes, standing in the wings during the bottom 6 group song, watching her sing with Lil.
The community grows, and he feels like a proud father sometimes. He has a whole set of fans now. When he goes out to meet the fans at the buses before and after shows, he sometimes hears someone mention the community, and when he does, he always has to hold back the smile that wants to come bursting out of his lips. And when one gorgeous “bench” (he has to stop himself from saying that in conversation nowadays, and it’s getting really difficult) asks him to take a picture with the community sign one day, he can’t hold back the smile any longer - it comes spilling out onto his face.
If Anoop is the proud father, Megan is the fierce mother. She defends the community’s reputation among the other Idols, to the point where Anoop’s kind of surprised the others don’t guess the secret. Anoop lets her take the lead there, content to keep gently steering Matt away from finding the comm - if that boy ever got on, they’d never hear the end of it.
Eventually the whole community vs. Danny fight sorts itself out, which soothes the waters and is a great relief to Anoop. Not only is it a nice break from the tension, but he feels personally proud of himself. July 9th, the long epic day of tweeting #sophiasheart over and over to get it to trend for Danny in honor of Sophia, is one of their rare off-days. Instead of spending it relaxing, or going out with the other guys (Megan is off with Ryder), he sits grimly in front of his laptop for hours, sending tweet after tweet under his fake Twitter accounts. In addition to working on it himself, he cracks the whip over his fangirls.
Minutes after the whole thing started:
Bringing it to Danny’s attention (because what’s the point of the effort if it isn’t noticed?):
Cheering up the community and rallying the troops:
Cracking the whip:
///
After the Sophia’s Heart episode, he settles back and watches his baby community in its adulthood. With the tour in full swing, he no longer has the time to pay as obsessive attention to it as he used to, but he’s still on there rather more than is perhaps good for him. Megan laughs at him for it, but she’s nearly as bad.
The laughing is actually probably because he’s running porn memes, but he tries to ignore that fact. In a few lone moments he remembers that he should actually be horrified about all this porn being written about himself and his friends, but he can’t really bring himself to be anything but amused (and, as he’d never admit to anyone but himself, occasionally turned on). The community’s been a bad influence on him that way - he finds himself choking back laughter when Kris’s arm lingers around Adam’s waist a moment too long, or when Matt stares lingeringly after Kris, or when Adam kisses Kris’s forehead. It’s all he can do to keep himself from snapping pictures and anonymously posting them to the community. The only thing stopping him is that Megan would see them and kick his ass.
The fic about him and Adam does make him jittery around Adam for a day, just because he’s honest enough to admit to himself that Adam’s a very sexy guy and being kissed by him would probably be amazing. Not that he would ever admit that to anyone. Actually, the community has created a whole subsection of his mind in which he dumps “things Anoop will never admit to anybody.”
It’s the porn written about him and Megan, however, that makes his heart speed up.
Somewhere along the line, he realizes one day, she became one of his best friends. He doesn’t know when it happened, exactly; he thinks it developed over comment threads, through private messages, in the spaces between the words of private jokes. The community picks up on it, teases them, says they’re falling in love.
Anoop doesn’t know about Megan, but he thinks it’s possible that he might be falling in love with her. The word-lover in him draws the connection between “falling” and her username, fallforyouagain, and he bites his lip in frustration.
He knows there’s no real reason that he shouldn’t just say it, shouldn’t just ask her out, but her divorce isn’t finalized, and despite all the flirting, she’s never actually made a move on him.
He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. He lets himself fall into the whirlwind of the tour, keeping his laptop always with him, filling his spare moments with the community. It’s still fun, it’s still great stress relief.
Slowly, though, ever so slowly, it’s starting to get old. He doesn’t want to talk to the 100x100 picture of Megan anymore, he wants the real living one in his arms. He wants to kiss her and make love to her and turn fiction into reality.
He clicks “reply” again, hits “post” again, skims down a list of comments again - and all his eyes really see is golden hair, an open smile, laughing eyes. Megan. His Megan.
///
It’s a day like any other day.
The others have gone in some room close by for dinner, before the show. Anoop’s trying to quickly finish up something on the community, and then he’ll join them. They’re in Glendale, Arizona, and it’s incredibly hot, but other than that nothing’s different about this day.
There’s no warning before Anoop hears Megan’s sigh of exasperation behind him. He doesn’t turn. “I’ll be right there, Megs, just finishing something up,” he says.
She taps her heel. He can hear it thunk. “Is it community stuff again? I swear, Anoop, you’re on there more than me, and I thought I was bad.”
“Yeah,” he says absentmindedly, after checking over his shoulder to make sure there aren’t any other Idols in the room. Despite the community’s rehabilitation in the eyes of their tourmates, he still doesn’t want to risk any of the others deciding to join. “It’s a slow day, I’ll be off in just a minute. Just checking these drabble fic prompts.”
She huffs. “Oh come on, you can do that later! I think there’s tri-tip at dinner?”
Tri-tip sounds pretty good. He clicks out of the entry, starts to cast a quick glance over the main page to see if anything new has popped up.
Suddenly, he feels Megan’s breasts press into his shoulders, as she leans over the back of the couch. He instantly freezes. This is the best distraction she’s come up with yet. Much better than tri-tip.
“Just get off already!” she huffs at him jokingly, reaching her slim hand for the top of the laptop. He swivels it away to keep her from shutting it. “If the community’s slow, you have absolutely no rea…”
She cuts off in the middle of her word, and he warily turns his head. He finds himself at eye level with her very fetching neck, which is just begging to be kissed. Before he can act on the impulse, however, she leans further over the back of the couch, closer to the laptop screen.
He tries not to look at her ass, arched over the back of the couch, tries not to think about what he wants to do to it. Her hair is swinging by his nose, smelling of perfume and hair product and sunny days. He wets suddenly dry lips.
Megan is paying no attention to him, however. Her eyes are narrowed at his laptop screen. Right now, however, Anoop could not care less what the community is up to at the moment. Tagsplosion, creepypasta, even a Kradam kissing macro, nothing is as interesting or as alluring as the beauty he could envelop with his arms in one smooth motion.
Well, maybe not a completely smooth motion, since his arms are currently full of laptop. But he could drop it in a second - no, that won’t work either. His laptop is his baby. Set it aside - but by then she’ll probably have just laughed at him and sauntered away, that beautiful ass swinging as she goes…
Her eyes suddenly come away from the screen and focus on his, so close. So close. She must see something in them, because hers widen a little, before the corners of her mouth tug into a small smile. “Why, Anoop,” she says, not purring or breathy or any of that nonsense, just a low voice that goes straight to certain parts of his anatomy.
Then she’s leaning down the couple more inches, and shit, it’s awkward at this angle, with her bent in two over the back of a high-backed couch, and him twisted all around at the waist with a laptop humming on his lap, but none of that matters, because Megan’s kissing him, at long last, at long last.
Her lips are soft, and a little slippery with lip gloss, and when she breaks away he tries to follow, even though that’s going to end up with him in a pretzel. She smiles down at him, then straightens up, and Anoop feels the re-constitution of his personal space as if it was a physical loss.
Megan keeps smiling at him, softly, and he can’t think of anything to say. He thinks he might be smiling like an idiot, but then he might also be intensely staring without an expression on his face at all. He can’t seem to get his mind to communicate with his facial muscles long enough to ask them.
Then Megan turns, and his eyes automatically drop to her ass, and that’s not fair to women, he knows, but he’s an ass guy, he won’t lie. Besides, she’s leaving him, and after this whole long flirtation, it looks like all he’ll ever get to do is look.
But then instead of walking out the door, she turns left. Instead of continuing to give him flirty side-of-the-eye looks through her eyelashes, she walks around the side of the couch. Instead of pretending she doesn’t notice when she catches him staring at her, she sits down next to him.
Anoop may be gaping. He’s still not sure.
Megan reaches out and gently pries his hands off the laptop, takes it away, sets it down on the coffee table. “The community will live without you for a few minutes, Anoop,” she says, turning back to him. “They’re only talking about zombies right now anyway.”
If anything could pull him out of this moment, that might do it. “Zzz…zombies?” he asks.
“Zombies,” she repeats. But then that goes straight out of his mind, because Megan is slinging a leg over his lap and putting her hands on his shoulders, and as Anoop’s own hands come up to her waist, she breathes into his mouth, “Zombies are all well and good, but I’d rather think about other body parts than brains right now, wouldn’t you?”
And yes, now he knows he’s smiling. He’s grinning up at her, and then he’s tangling a hand in her long, beautiful hair, and he’s pulling her down, laughing, into a glorious, wonderful kiss.
The community would be proud.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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