Fic: Real Person Fiction | cw rps | jensen/jared
Real Person Fiction
Fandom: cw rps, and a bit of popslash
Pairing: Jensen/Jared, Sandy
Comments: I need to say, first off, that I did not come up with this idea. This fic is heavily inspired by Not Based on A True Story, and all the best bits are taken from there. Sort of. No real people were harmed in the writing of this fic. I don't usually do dedications because it's kind of creepy, but this is kind of a creepy fic and so, Sunday, this is for you. This is very personal and I have no one to blame for mistakes except myself, because I was too scared to get it beta'd. And now, I'm going to post before I chicken out.
Summary: Jensen and Jared are popslashers.
Things are always easier when you're writing them down, but sillier too, somehow, and sometimes you think that you're just not capable of writing anything true or meaningful because you're so intent on writing for other people all the time. You know what they expect from you, your style or whatever-crack and drunken fumblings and a little bit of angst as long as it's funny, and it should all end in a big pile of hot sex that ensures at least ten comments from people wanting to have your brain babies when what they really mean is that they want your dick. You can't really blame them for that, though. It's a nice dick and you're quite fond of it yourself. You suspect you'd love it even more if you were a sex-starved thirty-something single woman, overweight and living with her mother and or twelve cats.
You try to explain the whole thing to Jared in your next email, but you end up on a tangent about your roommate Steve and his girlfriend and how you suspect that he's secretly gay and that's why things never work out with his relationships, so you never end up getting to the part about the writing process and the expectations fandom seems to have of you. A lot of people love you and some of them hate you, but a lot more just think of you as the guy who writes the hot porn. Jared sees through the bullshit in your email because he always does, and you only hate him for a second while you're reading. Just a second, because Jared is the best friend you've never met and you feel closer to him than anyone else in fandom or real life.
You’re the only two guys in popslash and even though he's not much of a writer, he gets it. He has at least as many fangirls as you do, so he gets it.
Okay Jensen, truth time. Stop bullshitting and pretending that this is about your roommate when we both know it's really about you. Have you ever even been with a girl? No, seriously, have you? I'm not trying to be mean, okay, you know I love you, and that's why I'm saying this. You need to think about this shit. It's not about fandom or your roommate, it's about you. So just think about.
I sent you the thing by the way, it should be there in a few days. And yes, fuck you, I am nervous, so just maybe don't say anything about it right away. Unless it's good, and then you can IM me the second you get it. Back to the grind… remind me again why I thought grad school would be a good idea?
-Jared
You don't hate him, you can't hate him, it's pretty much physically impossible for you to hate him, but you allow yourself to be angry at him for just a little while and you don't answer his email. You know exactly what your silence will do to him, too, because sometimes you're just that manipulative and gross, but on the other hand, you're twenty-six and you work at The GAP and write fanfiction and you haven't had sex in two years that wasn't a drunken one-night hook up, so it's not like you have anything better to do. You're pretty pathetic, you think, but you have to stand up for yourself sometimes. You're bi, or at least you say you are, and you don't like it when someone tries to imply that you're not. Jared can go fuck himself if he wants to think that you're just gay. Even if it's maybe true.
Jared is actually bi, though, or so he claims. You've never had a reason to doubt him. He had a girlfriend once, for about a month, and you were happy when that ended. He hardly got online at all and he completely missed the fic you wrote for JuC Day-the really amazing time-shifting alien clone AU, which wasn't derivative at all, no matter what that bitch from the metafic discussion boards seems to think. But Jared, he missed it completely because of the girlfriend, who you privately refer to as Cunty McFuckface, and only managed to leave feedback two weeks after you posted it. By that time you couldn't care less about the fic, but Jared and the Cunt had broken up. He told her he was bi and she couldn't accept that. Jared was really upset about it, you remember, so he probably actually does like girls, and you think it's a good thing you can't afford the long distance charges to discuss these things over the phone because there's no way you'd be able to keep the smile out of your voice.
So you're manipulative and kind of a bitch and maybe a bit self-deluded, but when you get home from work that day to find a small brown envelope in your mailbox, you know exactly what it is and you feel like a total asshole for not replying to his email. His careful block letters on the front of the package and the fact that he spelled your last name wrong; the shooting star NSYNC sticker in the corner where the return address should be and the note inside, written on a piece of torn-out notebook paper with soft edges and deep creases, as if it had been folded and unfolded many times.
You open it and feel like an asshole, read the note, which says nothing and everything in that typically clueless Jared way, but what you really see is the handwriting, slanted and messy and unfamiliar, barely legible and so very Jared. He's the type of guy who gets to the end of a page and uses the very last inch to write that he's running out of room, and you sort of love him for that even though you normally find that sort of contrivance really annoying. But it's Jared, so, yeah. It's Jared.
And then there are the pictures he sent, finally, after almost a year of waffling back and forth about it. You've known Jared for almost three years but you've only been really close since Star Wars, which was a year and two fandoms ago, if you can even count Final Fantasy or Marvel as actual fandoms. He was big in Harry Potter and you were always sort of jealous of that because he's really not much of a writer, but he was a guy and that was before you were really being you in fandom. You've never admitted it to anyone, not even Jared, but you sockpuppeted as a high school girl for your first year in fandom as a sort of experiment, testing the waters, but you kind of hated it because the only people who would talk to you were other high school girls who thought being Snaco shippers made them avant garde and special. Sometimes you still post to the old Harry Potter comms as drusillaxxx, but pretending to be a girl got boring really quickly so it's not often. Once a month, maybe, just to keep tabs, just to see what people are saying about you. The real you, that is. People like to tell Drusilla things they'd never have the balls to say to you.
So it's been a year, almost a year of having some form of contact with Jared every day except weekends, when he doesn't like to get on the computer at all, and you're close, you're really close. You love each other, you think, as much as you can love someone whose face you've never even seen, and now you're about to see his for the first time. He's seen pictures of you-the real ones, not the ones of Steve that you post to your livejournal and say is you, because you'd rather people not know what you really look like. Not that you're ugly, because you're not, but you like to be careful. Fangirls can get pretty fucked up. You've gotten threats before, weird emails from girls you thought were cool and it turned out you were so so wrong about that. But you know how important it is that people think you're a real person, so posting pictures of Steve is the easiest way. You’re even in some of the pictures you post, from Halloween parties and the time you dragged Steve to a sound check party. You got to stand right next to JC and he seemed pretty dazed by you, actually. You maybe could've given him your number but probably, he's not really gay, it's just that you're actually really attractive regardless of gender. Besides, then you'd have to stop writing about him, and you don't really want to. No one inspires you like JC does.
Jared is the only one who knows which one is really you. You turn over the stack of pictures and look at Jared for the first time. The pictures are terrible, old things from high school dances and college formals with ugly dresses and ill-fitting suits and it's all so hetero and disgusting, but Jared is beautiful. He's tall with dark hair and wide eyes and dimples-fucking dimples, for real. He's utterly beautiful and you think, Oh fuck. You sort of feel like crying. He wasn't supposed to be beautiful.
*
You email Jared right away, after you've carefully gone through each photo half a dozen times, taken scissors to your favorite one and cut out the girl hanging off Jared's arm. You can still see a little bit of her in the photo and you think maybe later you'll scan it and fix it up with Photoshop, but this is good enough for now and you pin it to your inspiration board above your desk. Jared's the only real person on the board.
You email him right away, but you don't say anything about the photos. It feels like something you need to keep to yourself for now and besides, you're not really sure what you'd say. You remember the first time you sent Jared a picture of yourself-a real picture, and not one of Steve that you happened to be in the background of or something. You remember how disappointed you were by his reaction, which was pretty much the non-reaction of, "Dude, you're fucking HOT, why didn't you tell me you were hot??" and you think this is a big step for Jared. It's a big deal for him because as protective as you are of your identity online, he's even worse. He had a stalker once, though, so it's kind of understandable, a guy from Harry Potter who lived in Palo Alto too and kept trying to get Jared to meet up with him. Jared kept putting him off and putting him off until the guy snapped and went pretty much psycho. You still have the emails Jared forwarded to you from that time, and sometimes you read them when you want to remind yourself that you're maybe pathetic, but at least you're not David levels of pathetic. Not on the outside.
Your reply to his email has nothing to do with the things he said because you're still not really ready to talk about that, especially now that you have the pictures, so instead you tell him about this new idea you have for a fic about Chris and Justin on a Long Way Round-esque motorbike tour, "only it'll end up being JuC, of course, because yes." Ten minutes later he's IMing you to say, "Because yes!! And then Justin can send JC all these postcards from all the random villages and shit they go to."
"And it'll turn out that actually, JC's not even at his Florida house and he never gets Justin's postcards but Justin thinks he has and they're soinlove anyway, and JC didn't need the postcards but they're nice to have anyway."
"TOTALLY. And Chris will be like, This was my plan all along! Worship my awesomeness!"
"And they will. Do you think it's too serious? Are people going to be all, Where's the crack?"
"No, because there will be some hot porn to make up for it. Right? RIGHT??"
You look up at the clock and it's almost two hours later, it's almost time for you to go to bed but you really don't want to because now you sort of have an outline for this fic and you've got this scene in your head, this image of Justin sitting in the grass by the side of some country road in Russia or something, dry grass sliding through his fingers as he talks about nothing while Chris fiddles with something on his bike. A loose something, you'll fill that in later when you have the time to do motorbike research, but anyway, you have to write this now or you'll forget, you'll lose it.
Besides, Jared's on the west coast and he's not going to bed for another couple hours, so you might as well stay up, you think. It was only a day and a half of not talking to him, but now you're almost mad at yourself for doing that and you don't know why you're like that sometimes. Jared doesn't deserve it, he really doesn't. You look at his picture hanging on your wall, at the little blinking light on your computer screen indicating that he's talking to you. You open a word document and begin to write.
*
One of the most annoying and endearing things about Jared is his complete and utter lack of computer knowledge. He found fandom almost by accident while he was on leave for a quarter from school because he'd fucked up his knee in the division finals game against Washington State, got slide-tackled and the kid got kicked out of the game but Jared's knee was already screwed by then. He'd found Harry Potter fic by accident while looking for porn and never looked back, and when everything shifted over from the boards and mailing lists to livejournal, you set up his journal for him because he couldn't figure out the "prove you're human" codes and kept timing out his sessions. He kept the password you gave him and you could log into his journal if you wanted, read the locked entries of the people on his friends list that aren't on yours. You've done it a few times, but you always feel really bad about it later. People never say anything good about you where you're not supposed to be looking.
The day after you finally tell Jared that you got the photos, he asks if you can scan them and post them for him. But like, really filtered. Can you set up a filter that's just us and sandra_dee and chad and alise and those people?
You sort of want to tell him no, but you can't think of a good enough reason besides that you don't really want to, which isn't really a good enough reason at all, but it's the only true one. You look at the picture on your wall, Jared and half of the bare arm of the girl he was with, his white slice of smile and the way her fingers curl around his bicep. You look at it and think that you don't want to share him, that you want to keep this for yourself because you're the one he trusted enough to show his face to, but if you do what he wants and post them, it's not yours anymore. It's not for you.
You say, "What about the Stalker? What if someone shares the pics and she finds them? Do you really want her knowing what you look like?"
"Good point," he replies. "Maybe just email them to sandy and chad then. Just to be safe."
You still hate it but you do it anyway, because it's what he wants and at least they'll know that you were the one he trusted to begin with, even if he's willing to expand his circle now. Chad is okay but you try not to talk to him too much and you blocked him on AIM a month ago because he's kind of creepy and he's not even in popslash anyway and you're completely uninterested in Veronica Mars. He likes you a little too much and he's always trying to get you to cyber with him, plus, you're pretty sure he's some girl's sockpuppet. But Jared is trusting and he thinks anyone Sandy likes must be cool, too, so you scan the pictures and email them off. It's what Jared wants, so you do it.
They were never really yours to begin with, you think, and take his picture down.
*
Your job is incredibly boring and you spend most of it thinking up new plot lines and jotting down random sentences on discarded receipts because you know if you don't write these things down when they come to you, you'll lose them completely. This is why you identify so much with JC-because he leaves messages to himself on his phone and he sings to himself in airports and doesn't want to lose the very important meaningless mishmash of cowboy cliché noises for 'Space Cowboy,' which you privately think is one of the best pop songs ever written. Well, privately in your own journal, where you write that it's clearly JC's ironic fuck you to Lou Pearlman, because why else would JC ever write such a completely awful and obvious song to begin with? His solo music only proves your point, you think, and after 73 comments from people agreeing with you completely and praising your brilliance, you get one from Sandy that just says, "You're so full of shit, Jensen."
You really sort of hate her. You wish she didn't know your name, but Jared uses it and she reads every comment Jared ever makes.
You're good at your job because girls want to buy clothes from you and you get paid commission if they mention your name, which they always do, but it's not like it's fulfilling or whatever. That's what your writing is for-honing your craft and building a following because you're not going to be a fanfic writer forever. You've already decided that your next big project, maybe for NanoWriMo next year, will be an original novel, a gay love story in the vein of Sleepless in Seattle only with hot sex and characters that don't make you want to barf. As much as you think Cassie Claire is a no-talent, plagiarizing hack, you sort of respect the way she got out of fandom and you're ten times more talented than she is, so.
You spend your lunch breaks on your laptop in the Central Market outdoor square area because you can buy coffee and use their free WiFi. You really sort of hate Sandy and think she's disturbingly obsessed with rimming and has an unrealistic idea of what come actually tastes like, but you're trying to play nice because Jared likes her and you need to stay close, maybe. You don't want to be excluded even though you'd be happy with just Jared, but Jared has lots of friends-Chad and Sandy and Alise, and he's even mentioned maybe going to a con in the spring. Sandy's trying to pull him into Veronica Mars and there's going to be something for it here in Austin. You hadn't planned on going, but Sandy's emailing you all the time now with details, saying, "You have to convince Jared to come, it'll be SO FUN OMG." Attached to the email Sandy sends is an icon she made that flashes between yours, Jared's, hers, and Chad's default icons with a little OT4 tag at the end. It sort of terrifies you, but you think about the photos Jared sent and the note that came with it, the CD he made you for your birthday that you've listened to every day since, because it's beautiful and so completely Jared.
You think about it and hit reply. "I'll do my best," you tell her, "but I can't make any promises."
*
Jared is coming. Marsathon is still a month away and you could give a shit less about the show or the cast, but Jared is coming and every day you get more and more nervous. He sends you his flight itinerary and the subject line is just a string of exclamation points. You try not to talk to him about the visit too much because you're afraid of having too many expectations and being ultimately disappointed. Sandy is coming, too, so it's not going to ever be like you imagined when you let yourself imagine these things, which isn't often.
He posts about it in his livejournal and you obsessively count the number of times he mentions you versus the number of times he mentions her. You try to slide in subtle digs about her fandom background, about her following NSYNC on tour and even auditioning for one of their videos. She's a Lance fan and you don't get it at all because Lance is gay, he's totally gay and he's not even a real blond and he should've come out ten years ago, not that you're bitter. Jared doesn't agree and he's either ignoring your digs at his playground girlfriend (and god, do you fucking hate that inside joke, even more so because you don't understand it but you have to pretend you do, or else people will know you're Out of the Loop) or he just doesn't notice them at all.
Two weeks away and you get a tearful call from Sandy, who calls you even though you told her you hate the phone, probably because Jared won't give out his number except to you. It's his last holdout and you feel vindicated, almost, with Sandy's voice in your ear saying, "And it turns out Chad isn't Chad at all but someone else, this woman and there are IP addresses to prove it and I just, I don't know what to do! I feel so betrayed and I really wish I could talk to Jared but, like, of course he's not answering his phone and you're the only one I can talk to about it."
"Jared gave you his number?" you ask. Out of all of that mess, that's the only part you really hear.
"Well, we had coffee like, a month ago." Her voice is small. "I thought you knew."
"Yeah, no, right. I just wasn't thinking." You don't say anything else. You're not sure you can. You feel betrayed in a way that makes you feel even more pathetic and stupid and horrible than you ever have before and you reach for your pen and notebook because you need to write this down right away.
You’re in love with Jared. Officially, stupidly, ridiculously in love. It can't be real, not even close, but it is and you hate yourself, but you hate Sandy even more.
"I don't think I can come to the Marsathon," she says. "It's just too much right now, you know?"
"Totally, " you say. "It's, yeah. Too much."
*
The fallout from the Chad Thing takes up so much of your online time that you only barely finish the motorbike fic before Marsathon, and only then because you have Jared feeding you lines and ideas over IMs. You're both looking for a distraction from the wank going on and it's reaching epic proportions even though Chad quietly admitted the truth when confronted and deleted the journal the next day. He (she?) said it was a social experiment to prove that fandom is a self-sexist machine, and you tell Jared, "I could've told her that months ago, and then she wouldn't have had to lose all her friends."
Jared admits that Sandy is sort of wearing him down and that's why he's not answering his phone and he's gone invisible on IMs. "It's not that I don't love her, because she's great, seriously. But she's taking this really hard for someone she only met a few months ago and it's all a little creepy, you know?" You just agree and keep formatting your fic, uploading the soundtrack you and Jared put together almost a month ago, when you were still just plotting things out. It's a good fic, you think. Maybe your best yet. When you post it, you list Jared as the co-author because he really did come up with some of the best lines and anyway, you wrote it for him. In the header you write, This is for *my* J, so please excuse the OOCness. It's not about them, really. Is it ever?
Jared will be here tomorrow. You take three Tylenol PM and go to sleep.
*
When you wake up the next morning, there are already twenty comment notifications in your inbox, but the only one you read is Jared's, which just says: I love you. I'll see you soon!!! Followed by a trail of hearts, because Jared has always been way too overenthusiastic about the hearts thing ever since he finally figured out how to make them. You don't reply, but you smile to yourself and save the comment. You don't need to reply. He'll be here soon and you can do it in person.
He'll be here soon and you can do it in person-the very idea is enough to have you leaning over the toilet bowl, waiting to throw up. It's Jared and he's amazing and you shouldn't be nervous, you've known him for so long and so well and you shouldn't be nervous, but you are, because it's Jared and he's amazing. You don't puke but you're shaking a little in the shower and suddenly you think that this is probably the worst idea in the history of ideas, meeting Jared. Because what if it's not how you imagined it, and you're incredibly disappointed and you've lost something, there-it would feel like losing him. Or what if it is, and he's disappointed? Because online you're articulate and funny and smart, but in person you have a hard time looking people in the eye and you never know what to say.
This is not a good idea, you think, and carefully floss your teeth. But his plane has already left, and there's no going back now.
*
Jared has been with you through all the worst parts of your fandom life, including the time you ended up on fandom wank for a post you wrote on a whim about the inherent racism in Stargate: Atlantis and the entire fandom seemed to think you were attacking them personally. And penny_lane, who started the whole thing in the first place, that was the worst bit, because she was just asking the question-what did you think of the racism in SGA-and you didn't realize her post was locked so now, even though you basically agreed on the subject, she hates you because you made all of SGA hate her, and it's just, it's really sad. You really liked her and it really was an honest mistake, reposting locked meta, and you don't know how you would've gotten through without Jared saying, "It's not worth it, she's not worth it, and SGA is FOR SERIOUS not worth it."
You still felt bad, though, because she wrote one of your favorite genderswap fics and she's writing a crossover SGA fic that you were really into despite everything, but now she hates you and you feel guilty for even reading her stuff. You tried to leave feedback, once, but after she replied in the bitchiest way imaginable, you decided to drop the whole thing. You didn't read the fandom wank post because it was too painful and you didn't want to know who was over there mocking you with their teal deers and their painful ignorance. You didn't even know what a teal deer was at the time, and now you won't let anyone explain it because it's too incredibly stupid. Instead you just said fuck it and purged all the SGA people from your friends list, because the very sight of anything SGA-related made you want to kick puppies and perform other Terrible Acts of Violence.
The sad thing is, before all that started you really liked SGA. Now, you can't even see a picture of Ronan without thinking about penny_lane and how the entire fandom hates you and how you lost a lot of good friends over that.
Yeah, Jared wrote you, but half of them are old enough to be my mom and spend 90% of their time in fandom. And okay, so do we, but we're young and hot, so that makes it okay.
You think about all this, about Jared texting you when you were at work that day while you tried not to tear up over penny's increasingly self-righteous and hateful emails and knowing that you were a complete caricature of a person at this point-Jared texting you, "And by the way, Rodney is balding and he's getting a gut, and not the cute kind like Chris has, either, so fuck them all!"
You think about the SGA wank, about Sandy and Chad and how Jared told you that now Sandy's saying she's pretty sure she found a lump in her breast and Jared's pretty sure she's lying and how scary is that, faking cancer-you think about it and stare at the escalator, at the people coming off their flights looking exhausted and excited, and you wait for him to come down.
This is either the best idea you've ever had or the worst, and then you see him, tall and still beautiful, smiling wide because he sees you, too, and he's the only one who knows what you really look like. There's a dark blue backpack slung over one shoulder and his hair is a little longer than you remember from the pictures, lying softly across his forehead and getting in his eyes just a bit so that he has to brush it away as he approaches.
It's either the best idea or the worst, and then he looks down at you, smiles, says, "Jensen." His hand is heavy on your shoulder, fingers hot where they press against your neck but his lips are soft and cool against yours. He tastes like cherries and coke and when he says your name again and rubs his fingers along the back of your neck, you know-
None of that other shit matters, because it's just fandom, it's not like this, it's not Jared grinning at you and looking even better than his picture and the taste of cherries on your tongue. It's not real life.
Fandom: cw rps, and a bit of popslash
Pairing: Jensen/Jared, Sandy
Comments: I need to say, first off, that I did not come up with this idea. This fic is heavily inspired by Not Based on A True Story, and all the best bits are taken from there. Sort of. No real people were harmed in the writing of this fic. I don't usually do dedications because it's kind of creepy, but this is kind of a creepy fic and so, Sunday, this is for you. This is very personal and I have no one to blame for mistakes except myself, because I was too scared to get it beta'd. And now, I'm going to post before I chicken out.
Summary: Jensen and Jared are popslashers.
Things are always easier when you're writing them down, but sillier too, somehow, and sometimes you think that you're just not capable of writing anything true or meaningful because you're so intent on writing for other people all the time. You know what they expect from you, your style or whatever-crack and drunken fumblings and a little bit of angst as long as it's funny, and it should all end in a big pile of hot sex that ensures at least ten comments from people wanting to have your brain babies when what they really mean is that they want your dick. You can't really blame them for that, though. It's a nice dick and you're quite fond of it yourself. You suspect you'd love it even more if you were a sex-starved thirty-something single woman, overweight and living with her mother and or twelve cats.
You try to explain the whole thing to Jared in your next email, but you end up on a tangent about your roommate Steve and his girlfriend and how you suspect that he's secretly gay and that's why things never work out with his relationships, so you never end up getting to the part about the writing process and the expectations fandom seems to have of you. A lot of people love you and some of them hate you, but a lot more just think of you as the guy who writes the hot porn. Jared sees through the bullshit in your email because he always does, and you only hate him for a second while you're reading. Just a second, because Jared is the best friend you've never met and you feel closer to him than anyone else in fandom or real life.
You’re the only two guys in popslash and even though he's not much of a writer, he gets it. He has at least as many fangirls as you do, so he gets it.
Okay Jensen, truth time. Stop bullshitting and pretending that this is about your roommate when we both know it's really about you. Have you ever even been with a girl? No, seriously, have you? I'm not trying to be mean, okay, you know I love you, and that's why I'm saying this. You need to think about this shit. It's not about fandom or your roommate, it's about you. So just think about.
I sent you the thing by the way, it should be there in a few days. And yes, fuck you, I am nervous, so just maybe don't say anything about it right away. Unless it's good, and then you can IM me the second you get it. Back to the grind… remind me again why I thought grad school would be a good idea?
-Jared
You don't hate him, you can't hate him, it's pretty much physically impossible for you to hate him, but you allow yourself to be angry at him for just a little while and you don't answer his email. You know exactly what your silence will do to him, too, because sometimes you're just that manipulative and gross, but on the other hand, you're twenty-six and you work at The GAP and write fanfiction and you haven't had sex in two years that wasn't a drunken one-night hook up, so it's not like you have anything better to do. You're pretty pathetic, you think, but you have to stand up for yourself sometimes. You're bi, or at least you say you are, and you don't like it when someone tries to imply that you're not. Jared can go fuck himself if he wants to think that you're just gay. Even if it's maybe true.
Jared is actually bi, though, or so he claims. You've never had a reason to doubt him. He had a girlfriend once, for about a month, and you were happy when that ended. He hardly got online at all and he completely missed the fic you wrote for JuC Day-the really amazing time-shifting alien clone AU, which wasn't derivative at all, no matter what that bitch from the metafic discussion boards seems to think. But Jared, he missed it completely because of the girlfriend, who you privately refer to as Cunty McFuckface, and only managed to leave feedback two weeks after you posted it. By that time you couldn't care less about the fic, but Jared and the Cunt had broken up. He told her he was bi and she couldn't accept that. Jared was really upset about it, you remember, so he probably actually does like girls, and you think it's a good thing you can't afford the long distance charges to discuss these things over the phone because there's no way you'd be able to keep the smile out of your voice.
So you're manipulative and kind of a bitch and maybe a bit self-deluded, but when you get home from work that day to find a small brown envelope in your mailbox, you know exactly what it is and you feel like a total asshole for not replying to his email. His careful block letters on the front of the package and the fact that he spelled your last name wrong; the shooting star NSYNC sticker in the corner where the return address should be and the note inside, written on a piece of torn-out notebook paper with soft edges and deep creases, as if it had been folded and unfolded many times.
You open it and feel like an asshole, read the note, which says nothing and everything in that typically clueless Jared way, but what you really see is the handwriting, slanted and messy and unfamiliar, barely legible and so very Jared. He's the type of guy who gets to the end of a page and uses the very last inch to write that he's running out of room, and you sort of love him for that even though you normally find that sort of contrivance really annoying. But it's Jared, so, yeah. It's Jared.
And then there are the pictures he sent, finally, after almost a year of waffling back and forth about it. You've known Jared for almost three years but you've only been really close since Star Wars, which was a year and two fandoms ago, if you can even count Final Fantasy or Marvel as actual fandoms. He was big in Harry Potter and you were always sort of jealous of that because he's really not much of a writer, but he was a guy and that was before you were really being you in fandom. You've never admitted it to anyone, not even Jared, but you sockpuppeted as a high school girl for your first year in fandom as a sort of experiment, testing the waters, but you kind of hated it because the only people who would talk to you were other high school girls who thought being Snaco shippers made them avant garde and special. Sometimes you still post to the old Harry Potter comms as drusillaxxx, but pretending to be a girl got boring really quickly so it's not often. Once a month, maybe, just to keep tabs, just to see what people are saying about you. The real you, that is. People like to tell Drusilla things they'd never have the balls to say to you.
So it's been a year, almost a year of having some form of contact with Jared every day except weekends, when he doesn't like to get on the computer at all, and you're close, you're really close. You love each other, you think, as much as you can love someone whose face you've never even seen, and now you're about to see his for the first time. He's seen pictures of you-the real ones, not the ones of Steve that you post to your livejournal and say is you, because you'd rather people not know what you really look like. Not that you're ugly, because you're not, but you like to be careful. Fangirls can get pretty fucked up. You've gotten threats before, weird emails from girls you thought were cool and it turned out you were so so wrong about that. But you know how important it is that people think you're a real person, so posting pictures of Steve is the easiest way. You’re even in some of the pictures you post, from Halloween parties and the time you dragged Steve to a sound check party. You got to stand right next to JC and he seemed pretty dazed by you, actually. You maybe could've given him your number but probably, he's not really gay, it's just that you're actually really attractive regardless of gender. Besides, then you'd have to stop writing about him, and you don't really want to. No one inspires you like JC does.
Jared is the only one who knows which one is really you. You turn over the stack of pictures and look at Jared for the first time. The pictures are terrible, old things from high school dances and college formals with ugly dresses and ill-fitting suits and it's all so hetero and disgusting, but Jared is beautiful. He's tall with dark hair and wide eyes and dimples-fucking dimples, for real. He's utterly beautiful and you think, Oh fuck. You sort of feel like crying. He wasn't supposed to be beautiful.
*
You email Jared right away, after you've carefully gone through each photo half a dozen times, taken scissors to your favorite one and cut out the girl hanging off Jared's arm. You can still see a little bit of her in the photo and you think maybe later you'll scan it and fix it up with Photoshop, but this is good enough for now and you pin it to your inspiration board above your desk. Jared's the only real person on the board.
You email him right away, but you don't say anything about the photos. It feels like something you need to keep to yourself for now and besides, you're not really sure what you'd say. You remember the first time you sent Jared a picture of yourself-a real picture, and not one of Steve that you happened to be in the background of or something. You remember how disappointed you were by his reaction, which was pretty much the non-reaction of, "Dude, you're fucking HOT, why didn't you tell me you were hot??" and you think this is a big step for Jared. It's a big deal for him because as protective as you are of your identity online, he's even worse. He had a stalker once, though, so it's kind of understandable, a guy from Harry Potter who lived in Palo Alto too and kept trying to get Jared to meet up with him. Jared kept putting him off and putting him off until the guy snapped and went pretty much psycho. You still have the emails Jared forwarded to you from that time, and sometimes you read them when you want to remind yourself that you're maybe pathetic, but at least you're not David levels of pathetic. Not on the outside.
Your reply to his email has nothing to do with the things he said because you're still not really ready to talk about that, especially now that you have the pictures, so instead you tell him about this new idea you have for a fic about Chris and Justin on a Long Way Round-esque motorbike tour, "only it'll end up being JuC, of course, because yes." Ten minutes later he's IMing you to say, "Because yes!! And then Justin can send JC all these postcards from all the random villages and shit they go to."
"And it'll turn out that actually, JC's not even at his Florida house and he never gets Justin's postcards but Justin thinks he has and they're soinlove anyway, and JC didn't need the postcards but they're nice to have anyway."
"TOTALLY. And Chris will be like, This was my plan all along! Worship my awesomeness!"
"And they will. Do you think it's too serious? Are people going to be all, Where's the crack?"
"No, because there will be some hot porn to make up for it. Right? RIGHT??"
You look up at the clock and it's almost two hours later, it's almost time for you to go to bed but you really don't want to because now you sort of have an outline for this fic and you've got this scene in your head, this image of Justin sitting in the grass by the side of some country road in Russia or something, dry grass sliding through his fingers as he talks about nothing while Chris fiddles with something on his bike. A loose something, you'll fill that in later when you have the time to do motorbike research, but anyway, you have to write this now or you'll forget, you'll lose it.
Besides, Jared's on the west coast and he's not going to bed for another couple hours, so you might as well stay up, you think. It was only a day and a half of not talking to him, but now you're almost mad at yourself for doing that and you don't know why you're like that sometimes. Jared doesn't deserve it, he really doesn't. You look at his picture hanging on your wall, at the little blinking light on your computer screen indicating that he's talking to you. You open a word document and begin to write.
*
One of the most annoying and endearing things about Jared is his complete and utter lack of computer knowledge. He found fandom almost by accident while he was on leave for a quarter from school because he'd fucked up his knee in the division finals game against Washington State, got slide-tackled and the kid got kicked out of the game but Jared's knee was already screwed by then. He'd found Harry Potter fic by accident while looking for porn and never looked back, and when everything shifted over from the boards and mailing lists to livejournal, you set up his journal for him because he couldn't figure out the "prove you're human" codes and kept timing out his sessions. He kept the password you gave him and you could log into his journal if you wanted, read the locked entries of the people on his friends list that aren't on yours. You've done it a few times, but you always feel really bad about it later. People never say anything good about you where you're not supposed to be looking.
The day after you finally tell Jared that you got the photos, he asks if you can scan them and post them for him. But like, really filtered. Can you set up a filter that's just us and sandra_dee and chad and alise and those people?
You sort of want to tell him no, but you can't think of a good enough reason besides that you don't really want to, which isn't really a good enough reason at all, but it's the only true one. You look at the picture on your wall, Jared and half of the bare arm of the girl he was with, his white slice of smile and the way her fingers curl around his bicep. You look at it and think that you don't want to share him, that you want to keep this for yourself because you're the one he trusted enough to show his face to, but if you do what he wants and post them, it's not yours anymore. It's not for you.
You say, "What about the Stalker? What if someone shares the pics and she finds them? Do you really want her knowing what you look like?"
"Good point," he replies. "Maybe just email them to sandy and chad then. Just to be safe."
You still hate it but you do it anyway, because it's what he wants and at least they'll know that you were the one he trusted to begin with, even if he's willing to expand his circle now. Chad is okay but you try not to talk to him too much and you blocked him on AIM a month ago because he's kind of creepy and he's not even in popslash anyway and you're completely uninterested in Veronica Mars. He likes you a little too much and he's always trying to get you to cyber with him, plus, you're pretty sure he's some girl's sockpuppet. But Jared is trusting and he thinks anyone Sandy likes must be cool, too, so you scan the pictures and email them off. It's what Jared wants, so you do it.
They were never really yours to begin with, you think, and take his picture down.
*
Your job is incredibly boring and you spend most of it thinking up new plot lines and jotting down random sentences on discarded receipts because you know if you don't write these things down when they come to you, you'll lose them completely. This is why you identify so much with JC-because he leaves messages to himself on his phone and he sings to himself in airports and doesn't want to lose the very important meaningless mishmash of cowboy cliché noises for 'Space Cowboy,' which you privately think is one of the best pop songs ever written. Well, privately in your own journal, where you write that it's clearly JC's ironic fuck you to Lou Pearlman, because why else would JC ever write such a completely awful and obvious song to begin with? His solo music only proves your point, you think, and after 73 comments from people agreeing with you completely and praising your brilliance, you get one from Sandy that just says, "You're so full of shit, Jensen."
You really sort of hate her. You wish she didn't know your name, but Jared uses it and she reads every comment Jared ever makes.
You're good at your job because girls want to buy clothes from you and you get paid commission if they mention your name, which they always do, but it's not like it's fulfilling or whatever. That's what your writing is for-honing your craft and building a following because you're not going to be a fanfic writer forever. You've already decided that your next big project, maybe for NanoWriMo next year, will be an original novel, a gay love story in the vein of Sleepless in Seattle only with hot sex and characters that don't make you want to barf. As much as you think Cassie Claire is a no-talent, plagiarizing hack, you sort of respect the way she got out of fandom and you're ten times more talented than she is, so.
You spend your lunch breaks on your laptop in the Central Market outdoor square area because you can buy coffee and use their free WiFi. You really sort of hate Sandy and think she's disturbingly obsessed with rimming and has an unrealistic idea of what come actually tastes like, but you're trying to play nice because Jared likes her and you need to stay close, maybe. You don't want to be excluded even though you'd be happy with just Jared, but Jared has lots of friends-Chad and Sandy and Alise, and he's even mentioned maybe going to a con in the spring. Sandy's trying to pull him into Veronica Mars and there's going to be something for it here in Austin. You hadn't planned on going, but Sandy's emailing you all the time now with details, saying, "You have to convince Jared to come, it'll be SO FUN OMG." Attached to the email Sandy sends is an icon she made that flashes between yours, Jared's, hers, and Chad's default icons with a little OT4 tag at the end. It sort of terrifies you, but you think about the photos Jared sent and the note that came with it, the CD he made you for your birthday that you've listened to every day since, because it's beautiful and so completely Jared.
You think about it and hit reply. "I'll do my best," you tell her, "but I can't make any promises."
*
Jared is coming. Marsathon is still a month away and you could give a shit less about the show or the cast, but Jared is coming and every day you get more and more nervous. He sends you his flight itinerary and the subject line is just a string of exclamation points. You try not to talk to him about the visit too much because you're afraid of having too many expectations and being ultimately disappointed. Sandy is coming, too, so it's not going to ever be like you imagined when you let yourself imagine these things, which isn't often.
He posts about it in his livejournal and you obsessively count the number of times he mentions you versus the number of times he mentions her. You try to slide in subtle digs about her fandom background, about her following NSYNC on tour and even auditioning for one of their videos. She's a Lance fan and you don't get it at all because Lance is gay, he's totally gay and he's not even a real blond and he should've come out ten years ago, not that you're bitter. Jared doesn't agree and he's either ignoring your digs at his playground girlfriend (and god, do you fucking hate that inside joke, even more so because you don't understand it but you have to pretend you do, or else people will know you're Out of the Loop) or he just doesn't notice them at all.
Two weeks away and you get a tearful call from Sandy, who calls you even though you told her you hate the phone, probably because Jared won't give out his number except to you. It's his last holdout and you feel vindicated, almost, with Sandy's voice in your ear saying, "And it turns out Chad isn't Chad at all but someone else, this woman and there are IP addresses to prove it and I just, I don't know what to do! I feel so betrayed and I really wish I could talk to Jared but, like, of course he's not answering his phone and you're the only one I can talk to about it."
"Jared gave you his number?" you ask. Out of all of that mess, that's the only part you really hear.
"Well, we had coffee like, a month ago." Her voice is small. "I thought you knew."
"Yeah, no, right. I just wasn't thinking." You don't say anything else. You're not sure you can. You feel betrayed in a way that makes you feel even more pathetic and stupid and horrible than you ever have before and you reach for your pen and notebook because you need to write this down right away.
You’re in love with Jared. Officially, stupidly, ridiculously in love. It can't be real, not even close, but it is and you hate yourself, but you hate Sandy even more.
"I don't think I can come to the Marsathon," she says. "It's just too much right now, you know?"
"Totally, " you say. "It's, yeah. Too much."
*
The fallout from the Chad Thing takes up so much of your online time that you only barely finish the motorbike fic before Marsathon, and only then because you have Jared feeding you lines and ideas over IMs. You're both looking for a distraction from the wank going on and it's reaching epic proportions even though Chad quietly admitted the truth when confronted and deleted the journal the next day. He (she?) said it was a social experiment to prove that fandom is a self-sexist machine, and you tell Jared, "I could've told her that months ago, and then she wouldn't have had to lose all her friends."
Jared admits that Sandy is sort of wearing him down and that's why he's not answering his phone and he's gone invisible on IMs. "It's not that I don't love her, because she's great, seriously. But she's taking this really hard for someone she only met a few months ago and it's all a little creepy, you know?" You just agree and keep formatting your fic, uploading the soundtrack you and Jared put together almost a month ago, when you were still just plotting things out. It's a good fic, you think. Maybe your best yet. When you post it, you list Jared as the co-author because he really did come up with some of the best lines and anyway, you wrote it for him. In the header you write, This is for *my* J, so please excuse the OOCness. It's not about them, really. Is it ever?
Jared will be here tomorrow. You take three Tylenol PM and go to sleep.
*
When you wake up the next morning, there are already twenty comment notifications in your inbox, but the only one you read is Jared's, which just says: I love you. I'll see you soon!!! Followed by a trail of hearts, because Jared has always been way too overenthusiastic about the hearts thing ever since he finally figured out how to make them. You don't reply, but you smile to yourself and save the comment. You don't need to reply. He'll be here soon and you can do it in person.
He'll be here soon and you can do it in person-the very idea is enough to have you leaning over the toilet bowl, waiting to throw up. It's Jared and he's amazing and you shouldn't be nervous, you've known him for so long and so well and you shouldn't be nervous, but you are, because it's Jared and he's amazing. You don't puke but you're shaking a little in the shower and suddenly you think that this is probably the worst idea in the history of ideas, meeting Jared. Because what if it's not how you imagined it, and you're incredibly disappointed and you've lost something, there-it would feel like losing him. Or what if it is, and he's disappointed? Because online you're articulate and funny and smart, but in person you have a hard time looking people in the eye and you never know what to say.
This is not a good idea, you think, and carefully floss your teeth. But his plane has already left, and there's no going back now.
*
Jared has been with you through all the worst parts of your fandom life, including the time you ended up on fandom wank for a post you wrote on a whim about the inherent racism in Stargate: Atlantis and the entire fandom seemed to think you were attacking them personally. And penny_lane, who started the whole thing in the first place, that was the worst bit, because she was just asking the question-what did you think of the racism in SGA-and you didn't realize her post was locked so now, even though you basically agreed on the subject, she hates you because you made all of SGA hate her, and it's just, it's really sad. You really liked her and it really was an honest mistake, reposting locked meta, and you don't know how you would've gotten through without Jared saying, "It's not worth it, she's not worth it, and SGA is FOR SERIOUS not worth it."
You still felt bad, though, because she wrote one of your favorite genderswap fics and she's writing a crossover SGA fic that you were really into despite everything, but now she hates you and you feel guilty for even reading her stuff. You tried to leave feedback, once, but after she replied in the bitchiest way imaginable, you decided to drop the whole thing. You didn't read the fandom wank post because it was too painful and you didn't want to know who was over there mocking you with their teal deers and their painful ignorance. You didn't even know what a teal deer was at the time, and now you won't let anyone explain it because it's too incredibly stupid. Instead you just said fuck it and purged all the SGA people from your friends list, because the very sight of anything SGA-related made you want to kick puppies and perform other Terrible Acts of Violence.
The sad thing is, before all that started you really liked SGA. Now, you can't even see a picture of Ronan without thinking about penny_lane and how the entire fandom hates you and how you lost a lot of good friends over that.
Yeah, Jared wrote you, but half of them are old enough to be my mom and spend 90% of their time in fandom. And okay, so do we, but we're young and hot, so that makes it okay.
You think about all this, about Jared texting you when you were at work that day while you tried not to tear up over penny's increasingly self-righteous and hateful emails and knowing that you were a complete caricature of a person at this point-Jared texting you, "And by the way, Rodney is balding and he's getting a gut, and not the cute kind like Chris has, either, so fuck them all!"
You think about the SGA wank, about Sandy and Chad and how Jared told you that now Sandy's saying she's pretty sure she found a lump in her breast and Jared's pretty sure she's lying and how scary is that, faking cancer-you think about it and stare at the escalator, at the people coming off their flights looking exhausted and excited, and you wait for him to come down.
This is either the best idea you've ever had or the worst, and then you see him, tall and still beautiful, smiling wide because he sees you, too, and he's the only one who knows what you really look like. There's a dark blue backpack slung over one shoulder and his hair is a little longer than you remember from the pictures, lying softly across his forehead and getting in his eyes just a bit so that he has to brush it away as he approaches.
It's either the best idea or the worst, and then he looks down at you, smiles, says, "Jensen." His hand is heavy on your shoulder, fingers hot where they press against your neck but his lips are soft and cool against yours. He tastes like cherries and coke and when he says your name again and rubs his fingers along the back of your neck, you know-
None of that other shit matters, because it's just fandom, it's not like this, it's not Jared grinning at you and looking even better than his picture and the taste of cherries on your tongue. It's not real life.