Scrap post
Apr. 5th, 2014 14:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sekritomg
This was my famous and much-anticipated attempt to write a fic where Kyle and Stan are in the fandom life. I could explain where this was going up front but instead it's noted at the end of the scrap. I can't believe I'm quitting this to write Craig/Clyde, oh well.
It struck Stan as very unlikely that somehow Kyle’s testicular cancer had gone undetected long enough for it to progress to stage III. After all, Stan argued, he subjected Kyle’s testicles (both of them) to intense scrutiny on a daily basis. He had always felt very connected to and in-tune with Kyle’s body. The entire thing was unusual in addition to being inopportune. Stage III cancer was relatively rare. Stan, if not Kyle, probably should have noticed the doubling in size of Kyle’s left testicle. Kyle’s parents blamed it on all that damn “internet porn.” “It’s not internet porn, mother,” Kyle said in his defense, as if that detail was the thing that would or wouldn’t distract Kyle and Stan from noticing that Kyle’s retroperitoneal lymph nodes were riddled with cancer cells. “I’ll have you know Stan is a very gifted lyricist and he’s been putting together an album for his filk.”
“His what?”
“His filk,” said Kyle.
“What the hell is that?” Kyle’s father asked. “It sounds unseemly.”
“It’s not,” said Kyle. “It’s just songs with lyrics about fandom.”
“About what?” Kyle’s father asked.
Leaning over, Kyle’s mother whispered to him, “Internet porn.”
“It is not porn!” Kyle shouted loud enough for the entire sushi bar to hear, though Stan did write extremely explicit porn and post it on the internet. “It’s filk and it’s very prestigious. He’s writing an album!”
“How is he going to publish songs about other people’s fictional characters?”
“Well,” said Kyle’s father, leaning over his sake martini, “I guess this could, in some roundabout way, be considered fair use.”
“This is all a distraction! Kyle, the prognosis, you were saying—”
“I was until you interrupted me to shriek about internet porn.”
“So tell us already!”
“I’m trying to!” Kyle took a swill of his glass of white wine, scowling.
“Should you even be drinking that?” his mother asked.
“Yes, mother, I haven’t started chemo yet.”
“Well, when do you start it?”
“Next week,” said Kyle. “I don’t think I can start it until after Yuletide.”
“Yuletide, like, Christmas?”
“No, like, it’s a fandom thing and I’m writing a story — just, never mind! You don’t understand this stuff.”
“You’re right, we don’t!” said Kyle’s mother.
“Now, Sheila, maybe it’s not for us to judge this … lifestyle. Maybe it’s not for us to understand.”
This was the comment that drove Stan over the edge, though it wasn’t as if he had been an active participant in the conversation up to this point. In fact, after saying hello to Kyle’s parents and ordering a sashimi set, he hadn’t said a word. He had been, until now, resolved to sip his lukewarm miso soup, slowly chewing the soft tofu. Now he slumped into his seat and let the conversation drift past him. He was not very hungry, still in shock from the appointment this morning.
“Our son has cancer!”
"Well, it's not because of his — lifestyle."
"How do we know it's not?"
"Because fandom doesn't cause cancer!" Kyle shouted. He was on his third glass on wine. "Listen, it's not a big deal. The survival rate is very high, like, it's something like 80 percent!"
"Kyle, that means there's a 20 percent chance you could die!"
"That's what I said," Stan mumbled.
"There's a 20 percent chance I could die in a car crash on my way to work, too," said Kyle. "I just think this is something you have to think about rationally. I mean, it's something I'm thinking about rationally. And it's something that's happening to me! So pardon me for trying to cope by being rational, mother." Kyle took another sip of his wine, emptying the glass. "Where the hell is my shrimp tempura roll?"
"So what," Kyle's mother was asking, "so you asked us out to dinner to tell us you had cancer but not to worry?"
"No," said Kyle, "I asked you out to dinner to ask you to pay for the treatment!"
"Oh, jesus." Stan buried his head in his hands, his hair narrowly missing the bowl of soup.
"We can do that," said Kyle's father. "You don't even have to ask."
"Well," said Kyle, "I figured I at least had to ask."
"It's just an expression."
"You know, it's very awkward trying to talk four in a row across this sushi bar," said Kyle's mother.
~
Kyle handled bad news with a lot of grace and dignity. Of course, he usually handled minimal slights with fury and indignation. For example, when a guy dressed as Batman at Momocon had hit on Kyle and then said, "Oh, sorry, your costume is very realistic, I thought you were a real girl, never mind," and then followed it up with, "it's just that you have hips for childbearing," Kyle had reported Batman to hotel security for sexual assault. ("I felt very uncomfortable with that comment. He ruined the con for me.") Also when someone named danyfly had plagiarized one of Stan's anonymous kink meme PWPs Kyle started a flame campaign of unsigned comments telling her she was "illiterate trailer trash." She had since disappeared from the internet entirely. "I hope she quit fandom forever," Kyle would say. "That or I hope she killed herself."
"Jesus," Stan would say, "I really hope she didn't. It was just one fic. That would be horrible."
"It's horrible to plagiarize! That's really the worst thing a person can do. I matched her ISPs, Stan, I know it was her."
"I'm not saying it's not her, I'm just saying it's kind of dark to wish someone dead because she copied my most popular fic in its entirety and then reposted it with the names changed to Dean and Castiel."
Somehow, though, Kyle managed to stay positive about the cancer. A freelance computer programmer, he took fewer jobs while he underwent treatment and recovered from surgery, but managed to keep working. It was good money but Kyle had put off buying health insurance and was now in the hole for $40 anti-nausea pills. “I guess $40 for a prescription doesn’t seem so bad, considering,” Stan had said when he first heard this figure. “I mean, my co-pay is $30 a scrip, so—”
“No, Stan, $40 a pill. I should have married you when you’d asked me, and taken your insurance.”
Stan had asked Kyle to marry him when they were 20. It hadn’t been entirely serious, though it had been entirely illegal, before civil unions in Colorado, so it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Stan did not make great money as a music teacher at St. Vulgis College Prep, but he did have good benefits. Plus, summers off. He was not out at work, though Kyle said he didn't care to attend the cast party for the spring production of Camelot anyway. Instead he'd worked out his feelings through a Holy Grail/Arthurian legend AU, which he'd abandoned after three chapters.
If Kyle was asked what the worst part of the whole thing was, he would have said he could single out any one aspect. Every aspect was horrible on its own, Kyle said, though he remained confident that his odds were pretty good. They were, in fact, extremely good, medically speaking. In reality the worst part about it was losing his balls. Easily that was the worst part. He tried to downplay it. "I was never super butch anyway," he wrote, posting a picture of the compression underwear clinging to his crotch on his Instagram. "I didn't really need these anyway."
But then he found himself waking Stan up at 3 in the morning, saying, "What would you think of me writing about Thor being castrated in my RP journal?"
"What?"
"It's kind of sick, but like — what if I wanted to write about it?"
"Write about what?" Stan was still rubbing his eyes. "Kyle, I have work in four hours."
"Maybe my mother's right. Maybe I do use this shit as a crutch."
"That's crazy."
"Is it, Stan?" Kyle reached over, turning on the light. "I should be more upset about this in real life, right? I should be crying. Not — lying awake at night, coming up with ways to torture fictional characters with problems from my own life."
"Look, I don't think using fiction to work through something that's happening to you is a bad thing, or a 'crutch,' and I think your mother just doesn't understand this 'internet porn' very well so she blames everything that goes wrong in your life on 'internet porn.' " Stan made air quotes. "Internet porn," he repeated. "Like I guess the Iliad was just 'performative storyteller porn.' "
"But you don't think it's sick, do you? Writing about Thor? Being castrated? And like — Steve has to take care of him?"
"Yuck," said Stan. "I'm Steve?"
"Jesus, you dressed up as him for Halloween."
"When I was 8!"
"I'm sure you were older," said Kyle. "Look, do you promise writing this isn't weird?"
"No," said Stan. "Why should it be?"
"Because — do you ever worry maybe it's weird for a couple of dudes in their 30s to be doing this?"
"Doing what, trying to get some sleep before work?"
"No, just — you're being difficult on purpose."
"Kyle." Stan patted Kyle's thigh. "Lay down with me here." When Kyle did, Stan said, "This might be an understatement, but things are pretty rough right now. I think they'll get better, but — the very last thing I want is for you to start worrying that the things you're interested in aren't okay. And maybe that's selfish, because I love those things, too, but."
"But what?"
"But let's leave that unexamined for right now, I guess. Because I have to be at school by 7 to teach a kid how to sing the low part in 'Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs.' " Then Stan sang the opening bars of it.
"That song is terrible," said Kyle, though he was grinning.
Kyle was off the next day, a week away from chemo sandwiched in between weeks two and four of a four-week cycle. And though he should have spent the day working on a timecard system he was building for a temp agency, instead he ate some of the crustless quiche Stan had prepared the night before and left in the fridge for Kyle's breakfast or lunch. The anti-emetics cost $40 a pill, but they were often very effective. Besides, this was an off-week. Genuinely, he wanted the quiche, and even felt normal for a moment. When Kyle sat down with his computer he meant to start on the timecard thing, but instead he found himself opening Tumblr and answering asks: “Do you find that your condition is influencing your fanworks?” It was from a girl who was getting a master’s in sociology, who often asked Kyle questions about his “unique position” as a queer man in media fandom. He tended not to think about it that way, because to him his position was not unique; it was all he knew. He also lived with someone in the exact same position, which made it seem rather unspecial. Still, he wrote back to her:
A conditional ‘yes’ to allow for the fact that my life influences everything I make, because that’s really all I have to draw on. But to be honest I’m rather unfazed overall, maybe because the prognosis is very good. I’m not going to say it’s not annoying and uncomfortable, because it is, and I’m still working out some of my feelings. But I’ve not consciously set out to write about it yet.
Kyle stared at the screen. He read his answer over, then a second time. It was true; this was his honest answer. But something about it struck him as disingenuous. He missed sitting with his computer in his lap. Maybe that had given him testicular cancer. He thought about what he’d said to Stan in bed earlier, about castrating Thor. He could include that in his reply and post it publicly, which would surely get the followers of that journal excited. But then it occurred to him that regardless of what Stan said, there was something weird about this. Kyle sent the reply privately, just as he’d written it.
~
Stan remained annoyed throughout this work days, trapped in the stifling cloisters of professional piety and not at home with Kyle, helping him. The surgery had been scheduled over Stan’s mid-winter break in early February, the week off that had always seemed unnecessary. In the past, Stan and Kyle had used that week to go on low-season vacations to the islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Stan liked to identify birds and fish, walking miles of beach and writing songs in his head. They had done this three times, three years in a row, and each year they’d spent the nights of their vacation sitting on the patio of their rented house in the balmy evenings, drinking cheap wine and tapping away at their computers, communicating mostly through Gchat, sending each other links. It had felt so adult, the first vacations they’d taken without their families that weren’t to cons. This year Stan and Kyle had cancelled their trip to Curacao and started the rainy, gray week at the University of Colorado Cancer Center. The surgery had gone well, though Stan felt guilty for spending it daydreaming of the brightly colored Dutch Colonial facades of Willemstad. He made it up to Kyle by reading fic aloud from his laptop, or lightly strumming the guitar as Kyle dozed. Kyle had a preternatural calm about the whole thing. “They said they got it all,” he kept saying. Stan didn’t doubt that they had, though it didn’t make him feel better about his desire to be on soft sand beaches, staring at the sea. He wrote a little song about what their vacation might have been like and sang it to Kyle, repeating his best verse about the wine and Gchat on the patio. “We’ll go next year,” said Kyle, though Stan couldn’t imagine taking a vacation ever again, at least not before they had proven to Kyle’s parents that they understood the financial misstep they’d taken in not getting Kyle insurance.
Worrying was all Stan did lately, overcompensating by reacting to all of Kyle’s thoughts with a sort of eerie evenness. Stan fretted over how he would continue to present his involvement in his friend’s cancer treatment. When he’d asked the head of upper school, a certain Father Claus O’Shaugnessy (improbable name, Kyle was fond of noting), for the time off, Father Claus had said, “But of course!” and insisted that solace would come from the lord Christ. Once again Stan had been roped into praying with his boss. He would have quit right there if it wouldn’t have been demented not to forsake their only steady paycheck. It was small compensation that Father Claus thought Stan was noble and generous for giving up his solo trip to Curacao to care for his sick friend. Now that it was early March and the break had come and passed, Stan thought about his vacation less and spent more time wondering if Kyle would be able to make it to any of their upcoming cons. Not that Stan could possibly go without Kyle. It would be an empty experience.
Stan usually spent his lunches alone in the music room, at the desk he’d slid into the corner so he could have somewhere to eat his lunches. When Stan had arrived at SVCP there had been a keyboard, a locking metal cabinet with xylophones and recorders, and 20 single chairs arranged around the bright red rug in the shape of a horseshoe. Father Claus had not understood what a music teacher needed a desk for, but there was an extra in the teachers lounge, and the facilities staff wheeled it upstairs one night. Stan had still not been given a computer, for which a music teacher had no purpose. If Stan wanted to use one, he had to go to the computer lab during an off-period.
He had in the past brought a bento box to work, as Kyle made them for Stan while bored between assignments. They often came with little snippets of actual fan porn written on scraps of paper, making Stan blush in front of the students before he learned better and started eating at his desk. Today, as for the past several months, he was eating a peanut butter sandwich with a Mott’s applesauce on the side. Uncomfortably, this was exactly what most of his students ate for lunch. He wished for a real apple, but there was nowhere within walking distance to get one in a reasonable amount of time, and Stan was too energy-conscious to waste fuel driving to the King Soopers almost one mile away. Instead, he ate his apple sauce quietly at his desk in the empty room, lights off and blinds up, light rain hitting the windows in crooked fashion. Stan had the radio on; he only dared to listen to NPR and its midday serving of local jazz trios. Stan didn’t really enjoy jazz, but it faded into the background well enough. When he was done with his apple sauce he wiped his spoon clean with a cloth napkin; he had brought both from home. He didn’t see the point in wasting plastic and paper. This was when he left the classroom to toss the old Mott’s container in the recycling, locking the door behind him. The bins were down the hall.
Students being at lunch, it was quiet in the corridors. Classroom teachers followed their students to the cafeteria, leaving Stan well alone. He began to think about certain characters might do, were they human and employed at this school, alone in these corridors. He had never written a Catholic school AU, though his experiences on this job might surely provide enough fodder for one. He lingered at the recycling bin, having tossed his empty container inside. Sometimes he spent his lunch break writing little songs, or using the computer lab recording software to upload what he'd written to this Dropbox account. Today he stood over a recycling bin daydreaming about what might happen if superheroes were 15-year-olds in starchy cable-knit sweater vests, filing into the school chapel to pray after lunch. Like most things Stan thought about, the setting was superficial; it was the subtext that mattered, the homosocial undertones of the thing. Stan had gone to public school, but he had enjoyed a healthy dose of the same in his friendship with Kyle: lingering gazes; hands that sat on the same arm rest for a moment past comfort; rhetorical questions that served only as an excuse to study Kyle’s face for a moment longer. Perhaps, Stan thought, there was a way to turn these reminiscences over to the present experience of teaching in this school, even if Stan was merely teaching music and could not by any reasonable measure be considered a real teacher. He’d been there — the school, that was — for a while.
Then — how long had he been standing here? A woman said, “Excuse me,” and Stan looked up at her. It was Deborah Allison, the school librarian. Stan had never been sure if Deborah Allison was a corny double-pronged first name, or if Allison was her surname. She was mousy but probably no more than five years Stan’s senior. Stan had never really spoken to her, not beyond small talk. She was wearing a matching cardigan and tank set, and a pair of pearl studs. The really gay part of Stan longed to say something catty about it, but he never gave in to those impulses. They were like little love letters from the kind of person he could have been, were he not so consumed in worrying about the non-lives of pretend people he didn’t even invent. “Are you okay?” Deborah Allison asked. “Stan?” She was holding a can of lemon La Croix, and Stan figured she probably wanted to toss it.
Stan stepped aside, shaking his head and saying, “Sorry, I don’t know what that was.”
“You seemed lost in thought,” she said, disposing of the can. “Were you thinking about something?”
“What?” Stan asks. “No. I mean — nothing — not really anything.” He wanted to flee, though it was not as if she knew what he was thinking. “I’ve just been … it’s been weird, lately.” He shrugged. “You know?”
“I know.” Deborah Allison crossed her arms. “I heard about your vacation being canceled.”
“Oh no, does word really spread around that fast?”
“Sorry,” she said, “was I not supposed to know? I heard it from Lindsay — apparently it was mentioned at the faculty meeting.”
“I’m sorry I missed the faculty meeting,” said Stan. “See, my friend is sick, and the day of that meeting I had taken him to get some blood work done. Actually, it was on his account that my trip had been called off.”
“I’m so sorry about your friend!”
“He’ll be fine.”
"It's good to have a positive attitude," she said.
"No, I mean — he'll be physically fine. The long-term survival rates are very good, so. He should be fine. In the long run, you know. That's what I mean."
"Oh." She raised an eyebrow. "It's awfully sweet of you to take care of your friend when he needs someone."
Stan would never be sure why he felt that now was the time, or why he felt unthreatened by Deborah Allison. Maybe it was simply that he needed relief from the burden of really having no one to talk to, not in real life. Stan could talk about whatever he wanted out there on the internet, but no amount of typing seemed to help. He had never found himself in a place before where he wanted for anyone, a living, breathing friend, more than he had wanted the consolation of his community. These weren't so much people he knew as a feeling he got when he saw he had received a private message, or a comment on one of his stories: someone is listening.
Steeling himself, Stan began to say, "I realize this is a weird thing to confess here of all places, but, he's actually my partner."
But Deborah Allison interrupted Stan. This was officially the longest conversation in which he had ever taken part with another member of the school staff, excluding those which pertained to actual school business. "I know that," she said.
"You know what?" Stan asked, "About Kyle?"
"Well." Now she had turned scarlet. "Yes, but only because, er — I read his blog."
"His ... blog?"
"Well, yes," she said, "I was under the impression that you knew about it?"
Now Stan crossed his arms. "How do you — what?"
"I'm in fandom," she said.
"Yes, I got that much," Stan replied, though it was just here that he put that together. "What the fuck?" As soon as Stan had said it, he whipped around, unsure if it the offending note of caution was played by the casual swear or the illicit internet fan porn connection.
"Look," she said, "Mrs. Grummund's class is coming by with her fourth graders for storytime in five minutes, and I left some weird tabs open I should probably go close."
"Oh, so the librarian gets a computer, but I don't?"
"What, you — don't have a computer?"
"A computer? I just barely managed to get them to give me a desk."
"You don't care?" she asked.
"Well, I wish they'd give me a computer, because I'm sick of going to the computer lab to use the internet—"
"I meant about the — blog."
"How do you know about Kyle's blog?" Stan asked. "I mean, his RP blog?"
"I'm not into RP blogs, but his personal Tumblr — yeah, I read that one."
"Deborah Allison!" Stan exclaimed. It came out sounding too high-pitched for Stan's liking. "Look, this is weird. I need to — get out some recorders, or something, I don't know." He thought of his mostly uneaten lunch back on his computerless desk. He wouldn't be hungry for it now. "I'm so confused. How long have you known?"
"I've been following your blogs—"
"I don't even use my blog!"
"For a while, maybe a year. But it was only recently that I realized it was you, or rather, that Kyle was your sick 'friend.' He writes about this stuff very candidly, you know."
"I know."
"Well, it started to seem uncanny. I was following him for his meta posts.” Kyle had gained some followers last year for his series of intensive posts of frame-by-frame analysis of the first Hobbit movie. He also wrote at length about the male fan experience, or the queer fan experience. Perhaps Deborah Allison had begun to follow Kyle's meta posts then. "Anyway, since I follow his posts, I just waned to come over here and offer you some reassurance or support, or -- I think it's the right thing to do, you know. Because of fandom."
"Because fandom," San repeated.
"Well, yeah."
[Then Kyle was going to be cured (obv.) and want to get testicle implants, but Kyle's parents won't/can't pay for that. So Deborah Allison was going to suggest to Stan that they start a Kickstarter campaign to fund Kyle's implants. But then Stan and Kyle get a lot of shit for asking the mostly female fandom community to pay for Kyle's testicles, etc. Kyle does not take this gracefully and there is wank. And so on. Can't finish, oh well.]
It struck Stan as very unlikely that somehow Kyle’s testicular cancer had gone undetected long enough for it to progress to stage III. After all, Stan argued, he subjected Kyle’s testicles (both of them) to intense scrutiny on a daily basis. He had always felt very connected to and in-tune with Kyle’s body. The entire thing was unusual in addition to being inopportune. Stage III cancer was relatively rare. Stan, if not Kyle, probably should have noticed the doubling in size of Kyle’s left testicle. Kyle’s parents blamed it on all that damn “internet porn.” “It’s not internet porn, mother,” Kyle said in his defense, as if that detail was the thing that would or wouldn’t distract Kyle and Stan from noticing that Kyle’s retroperitoneal lymph nodes were riddled with cancer cells. “I’ll have you know Stan is a very gifted lyricist and he’s been putting together an album for his filk.”
“His what?”
“His filk,” said Kyle.
“What the hell is that?” Kyle’s father asked. “It sounds unseemly.”
“It’s not,” said Kyle. “It’s just songs with lyrics about fandom.”
“About what?” Kyle’s father asked.
Leaning over, Kyle’s mother whispered to him, “Internet porn.”
“It is not porn!” Kyle shouted loud enough for the entire sushi bar to hear, though Stan did write extremely explicit porn and post it on the internet. “It’s filk and it’s very prestigious. He’s writing an album!”
“How is he going to publish songs about other people’s fictional characters?”
“Well,” said Kyle’s father, leaning over his sake martini, “I guess this could, in some roundabout way, be considered fair use.”
“This is all a distraction! Kyle, the prognosis, you were saying—”
“I was until you interrupted me to shriek about internet porn.”
“So tell us already!”
“I’m trying to!” Kyle took a swill of his glass of white wine, scowling.
“Should you even be drinking that?” his mother asked.
“Yes, mother, I haven’t started chemo yet.”
“Well, when do you start it?”
“Next week,” said Kyle. “I don’t think I can start it until after Yuletide.”
“Yuletide, like, Christmas?”
“No, like, it’s a fandom thing and I’m writing a story — just, never mind! You don’t understand this stuff.”
“You’re right, we don’t!” said Kyle’s mother.
“Now, Sheila, maybe it’s not for us to judge this … lifestyle. Maybe it’s not for us to understand.”
This was the comment that drove Stan over the edge, though it wasn’t as if he had been an active participant in the conversation up to this point. In fact, after saying hello to Kyle’s parents and ordering a sashimi set, he hadn’t said a word. He had been, until now, resolved to sip his lukewarm miso soup, slowly chewing the soft tofu. Now he slumped into his seat and let the conversation drift past him. He was not very hungry, still in shock from the appointment this morning.
“Our son has cancer!”
"Well, it's not because of his — lifestyle."
"How do we know it's not?"
"Because fandom doesn't cause cancer!" Kyle shouted. He was on his third glass on wine. "Listen, it's not a big deal. The survival rate is very high, like, it's something like 80 percent!"
"Kyle, that means there's a 20 percent chance you could die!"
"That's what I said," Stan mumbled.
"There's a 20 percent chance I could die in a car crash on my way to work, too," said Kyle. "I just think this is something you have to think about rationally. I mean, it's something I'm thinking about rationally. And it's something that's happening to me! So pardon me for trying to cope by being rational, mother." Kyle took another sip of his wine, emptying the glass. "Where the hell is my shrimp tempura roll?"
"So what," Kyle's mother was asking, "so you asked us out to dinner to tell us you had cancer but not to worry?"
"No," said Kyle, "I asked you out to dinner to ask you to pay for the treatment!"
"Oh, jesus." Stan buried his head in his hands, his hair narrowly missing the bowl of soup.
"We can do that," said Kyle's father. "You don't even have to ask."
"Well," said Kyle, "I figured I at least had to ask."
"It's just an expression."
"You know, it's very awkward trying to talk four in a row across this sushi bar," said Kyle's mother.
~
Kyle handled bad news with a lot of grace and dignity. Of course, he usually handled minimal slights with fury and indignation. For example, when a guy dressed as Batman at Momocon had hit on Kyle and then said, "Oh, sorry, your costume is very realistic, I thought you were a real girl, never mind," and then followed it up with, "it's just that you have hips for childbearing," Kyle had reported Batman to hotel security for sexual assault. ("I felt very uncomfortable with that comment. He ruined the con for me.") Also when someone named danyfly had plagiarized one of Stan's anonymous kink meme PWPs Kyle started a flame campaign of unsigned comments telling her she was "illiterate trailer trash." She had since disappeared from the internet entirely. "I hope she quit fandom forever," Kyle would say. "That or I hope she killed herself."
"Jesus," Stan would say, "I really hope she didn't. It was just one fic. That would be horrible."
"It's horrible to plagiarize! That's really the worst thing a person can do. I matched her ISPs, Stan, I know it was her."
"I'm not saying it's not her, I'm just saying it's kind of dark to wish someone dead because she copied my most popular fic in its entirety and then reposted it with the names changed to Dean and Castiel."
Somehow, though, Kyle managed to stay positive about the cancer. A freelance computer programmer, he took fewer jobs while he underwent treatment and recovered from surgery, but managed to keep working. It was good money but Kyle had put off buying health insurance and was now in the hole for $40 anti-nausea pills. “I guess $40 for a prescription doesn’t seem so bad, considering,” Stan had said when he first heard this figure. “I mean, my co-pay is $30 a scrip, so—”
“No, Stan, $40 a pill. I should have married you when you’d asked me, and taken your insurance.”
Stan had asked Kyle to marry him when they were 20. It hadn’t been entirely serious, though it had been entirely illegal, before civil unions in Colorado, so it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Stan did not make great money as a music teacher at St. Vulgis College Prep, but he did have good benefits. Plus, summers off. He was not out at work, though Kyle said he didn't care to attend the cast party for the spring production of Camelot anyway. Instead he'd worked out his feelings through a Holy Grail/Arthurian legend AU, which he'd abandoned after three chapters.
If Kyle was asked what the worst part of the whole thing was, he would have said he could single out any one aspect. Every aspect was horrible on its own, Kyle said, though he remained confident that his odds were pretty good. They were, in fact, extremely good, medically speaking. In reality the worst part about it was losing his balls. Easily that was the worst part. He tried to downplay it. "I was never super butch anyway," he wrote, posting a picture of the compression underwear clinging to his crotch on his Instagram. "I didn't really need these anyway."
But then he found himself waking Stan up at 3 in the morning, saying, "What would you think of me writing about Thor being castrated in my RP journal?"
"What?"
"It's kind of sick, but like — what if I wanted to write about it?"
"Write about what?" Stan was still rubbing his eyes. "Kyle, I have work in four hours."
"Maybe my mother's right. Maybe I do use this shit as a crutch."
"That's crazy."
"Is it, Stan?" Kyle reached over, turning on the light. "I should be more upset about this in real life, right? I should be crying. Not — lying awake at night, coming up with ways to torture fictional characters with problems from my own life."
"Look, I don't think using fiction to work through something that's happening to you is a bad thing, or a 'crutch,' and I think your mother just doesn't understand this 'internet porn' very well so she blames everything that goes wrong in your life on 'internet porn.' " Stan made air quotes. "Internet porn," he repeated. "Like I guess the Iliad was just 'performative storyteller porn.' "
"But you don't think it's sick, do you? Writing about Thor? Being castrated? And like — Steve has to take care of him?"
"Yuck," said Stan. "I'm Steve?"
"Jesus, you dressed up as him for Halloween."
"When I was 8!"
"I'm sure you were older," said Kyle. "Look, do you promise writing this isn't weird?"
"No," said Stan. "Why should it be?"
"Because — do you ever worry maybe it's weird for a couple of dudes in their 30s to be doing this?"
"Doing what, trying to get some sleep before work?"
"No, just — you're being difficult on purpose."
"Kyle." Stan patted Kyle's thigh. "Lay down with me here." When Kyle did, Stan said, "This might be an understatement, but things are pretty rough right now. I think they'll get better, but — the very last thing I want is for you to start worrying that the things you're interested in aren't okay. And maybe that's selfish, because I love those things, too, but."
"But what?"
"But let's leave that unexamined for right now, I guess. Because I have to be at school by 7 to teach a kid how to sing the low part in 'Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs.' " Then Stan sang the opening bars of it.
"That song is terrible," said Kyle, though he was grinning.
Kyle was off the next day, a week away from chemo sandwiched in between weeks two and four of a four-week cycle. And though he should have spent the day working on a timecard system he was building for a temp agency, instead he ate some of the crustless quiche Stan had prepared the night before and left in the fridge for Kyle's breakfast or lunch. The anti-emetics cost $40 a pill, but they were often very effective. Besides, this was an off-week. Genuinely, he wanted the quiche, and even felt normal for a moment. When Kyle sat down with his computer he meant to start on the timecard thing, but instead he found himself opening Tumblr and answering asks: “Do you find that your condition is influencing your fanworks?” It was from a girl who was getting a master’s in sociology, who often asked Kyle questions about his “unique position” as a queer man in media fandom. He tended not to think about it that way, because to him his position was not unique; it was all he knew. He also lived with someone in the exact same position, which made it seem rather unspecial. Still, he wrote back to her:
A conditional ‘yes’ to allow for the fact that my life influences everything I make, because that’s really all I have to draw on. But to be honest I’m rather unfazed overall, maybe because the prognosis is very good. I’m not going to say it’s not annoying and uncomfortable, because it is, and I’m still working out some of my feelings. But I’ve not consciously set out to write about it yet.
Kyle stared at the screen. He read his answer over, then a second time. It was true; this was his honest answer. But something about it struck him as disingenuous. He missed sitting with his computer in his lap. Maybe that had given him testicular cancer. He thought about what he’d said to Stan in bed earlier, about castrating Thor. He could include that in his reply and post it publicly, which would surely get the followers of that journal excited. But then it occurred to him that regardless of what Stan said, there was something weird about this. Kyle sent the reply privately, just as he’d written it.
~
Stan remained annoyed throughout this work days, trapped in the stifling cloisters of professional piety and not at home with Kyle, helping him. The surgery had been scheduled over Stan’s mid-winter break in early February, the week off that had always seemed unnecessary. In the past, Stan and Kyle had used that week to go on low-season vacations to the islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Stan liked to identify birds and fish, walking miles of beach and writing songs in his head. They had done this three times, three years in a row, and each year they’d spent the nights of their vacation sitting on the patio of their rented house in the balmy evenings, drinking cheap wine and tapping away at their computers, communicating mostly through Gchat, sending each other links. It had felt so adult, the first vacations they’d taken without their families that weren’t to cons. This year Stan and Kyle had cancelled their trip to Curacao and started the rainy, gray week at the University of Colorado Cancer Center. The surgery had gone well, though Stan felt guilty for spending it daydreaming of the brightly colored Dutch Colonial facades of Willemstad. He made it up to Kyle by reading fic aloud from his laptop, or lightly strumming the guitar as Kyle dozed. Kyle had a preternatural calm about the whole thing. “They said they got it all,” he kept saying. Stan didn’t doubt that they had, though it didn’t make him feel better about his desire to be on soft sand beaches, staring at the sea. He wrote a little song about what their vacation might have been like and sang it to Kyle, repeating his best verse about the wine and Gchat on the patio. “We’ll go next year,” said Kyle, though Stan couldn’t imagine taking a vacation ever again, at least not before they had proven to Kyle’s parents that they understood the financial misstep they’d taken in not getting Kyle insurance.
Worrying was all Stan did lately, overcompensating by reacting to all of Kyle’s thoughts with a sort of eerie evenness. Stan fretted over how he would continue to present his involvement in his friend’s cancer treatment. When he’d asked the head of upper school, a certain Father Claus O’Shaugnessy (improbable name, Kyle was fond of noting), for the time off, Father Claus had said, “But of course!” and insisted that solace would come from the lord Christ. Once again Stan had been roped into praying with his boss. He would have quit right there if it wouldn’t have been demented not to forsake their only steady paycheck. It was small compensation that Father Claus thought Stan was noble and generous for giving up his solo trip to Curacao to care for his sick friend. Now that it was early March and the break had come and passed, Stan thought about his vacation less and spent more time wondering if Kyle would be able to make it to any of their upcoming cons. Not that Stan could possibly go without Kyle. It would be an empty experience.
Stan usually spent his lunches alone in the music room, at the desk he’d slid into the corner so he could have somewhere to eat his lunches. When Stan had arrived at SVCP there had been a keyboard, a locking metal cabinet with xylophones and recorders, and 20 single chairs arranged around the bright red rug in the shape of a horseshoe. Father Claus had not understood what a music teacher needed a desk for, but there was an extra in the teachers lounge, and the facilities staff wheeled it upstairs one night. Stan had still not been given a computer, for which a music teacher had no purpose. If Stan wanted to use one, he had to go to the computer lab during an off-period.
He had in the past brought a bento box to work, as Kyle made them for Stan while bored between assignments. They often came with little snippets of actual fan porn written on scraps of paper, making Stan blush in front of the students before he learned better and started eating at his desk. Today, as for the past several months, he was eating a peanut butter sandwich with a Mott’s applesauce on the side. Uncomfortably, this was exactly what most of his students ate for lunch. He wished for a real apple, but there was nowhere within walking distance to get one in a reasonable amount of time, and Stan was too energy-conscious to waste fuel driving to the King Soopers almost one mile away. Instead, he ate his apple sauce quietly at his desk in the empty room, lights off and blinds up, light rain hitting the windows in crooked fashion. Stan had the radio on; he only dared to listen to NPR and its midday serving of local jazz trios. Stan didn’t really enjoy jazz, but it faded into the background well enough. When he was done with his apple sauce he wiped his spoon clean with a cloth napkin; he had brought both from home. He didn’t see the point in wasting plastic and paper. This was when he left the classroom to toss the old Mott’s container in the recycling, locking the door behind him. The bins were down the hall.
Students being at lunch, it was quiet in the corridors. Classroom teachers followed their students to the cafeteria, leaving Stan well alone. He began to think about certain characters might do, were they human and employed at this school, alone in these corridors. He had never written a Catholic school AU, though his experiences on this job might surely provide enough fodder for one. He lingered at the recycling bin, having tossed his empty container inside. Sometimes he spent his lunch break writing little songs, or using the computer lab recording software to upload what he'd written to this Dropbox account. Today he stood over a recycling bin daydreaming about what might happen if superheroes were 15-year-olds in starchy cable-knit sweater vests, filing into the school chapel to pray after lunch. Like most things Stan thought about, the setting was superficial; it was the subtext that mattered, the homosocial undertones of the thing. Stan had gone to public school, but he had enjoyed a healthy dose of the same in his friendship with Kyle: lingering gazes; hands that sat on the same arm rest for a moment past comfort; rhetorical questions that served only as an excuse to study Kyle’s face for a moment longer. Perhaps, Stan thought, there was a way to turn these reminiscences over to the present experience of teaching in this school, even if Stan was merely teaching music and could not by any reasonable measure be considered a real teacher. He’d been there — the school, that was — for a while.
Then — how long had he been standing here? A woman said, “Excuse me,” and Stan looked up at her. It was Deborah Allison, the school librarian. Stan had never been sure if Deborah Allison was a corny double-pronged first name, or if Allison was her surname. She was mousy but probably no more than five years Stan’s senior. Stan had never really spoken to her, not beyond small talk. She was wearing a matching cardigan and tank set, and a pair of pearl studs. The really gay part of Stan longed to say something catty about it, but he never gave in to those impulses. They were like little love letters from the kind of person he could have been, were he not so consumed in worrying about the non-lives of pretend people he didn’t even invent. “Are you okay?” Deborah Allison asked. “Stan?” She was holding a can of lemon La Croix, and Stan figured she probably wanted to toss it.
Stan stepped aside, shaking his head and saying, “Sorry, I don’t know what that was.”
“You seemed lost in thought,” she said, disposing of the can. “Were you thinking about something?”
“What?” Stan asks. “No. I mean — nothing — not really anything.” He wanted to flee, though it was not as if she knew what he was thinking. “I’ve just been … it’s been weird, lately.” He shrugged. “You know?”
“I know.” Deborah Allison crossed her arms. “I heard about your vacation being canceled.”
“Oh no, does word really spread around that fast?”
“Sorry,” she said, “was I not supposed to know? I heard it from Lindsay — apparently it was mentioned at the faculty meeting.”
“I’m sorry I missed the faculty meeting,” said Stan. “See, my friend is sick, and the day of that meeting I had taken him to get some blood work done. Actually, it was on his account that my trip had been called off.”
“I’m so sorry about your friend!”
“He’ll be fine.”
"It's good to have a positive attitude," she said.
"No, I mean — he'll be physically fine. The long-term survival rates are very good, so. He should be fine. In the long run, you know. That's what I mean."
"Oh." She raised an eyebrow. "It's awfully sweet of you to take care of your friend when he needs someone."
Stan would never be sure why he felt that now was the time, or why he felt unthreatened by Deborah Allison. Maybe it was simply that he needed relief from the burden of really having no one to talk to, not in real life. Stan could talk about whatever he wanted out there on the internet, but no amount of typing seemed to help. He had never found himself in a place before where he wanted for anyone, a living, breathing friend, more than he had wanted the consolation of his community. These weren't so much people he knew as a feeling he got when he saw he had received a private message, or a comment on one of his stories: someone is listening.
Steeling himself, Stan began to say, "I realize this is a weird thing to confess here of all places, but, he's actually my partner."
But Deborah Allison interrupted Stan. This was officially the longest conversation in which he had ever taken part with another member of the school staff, excluding those which pertained to actual school business. "I know that," she said.
"You know what?" Stan asked, "About Kyle?"
"Well." Now she had turned scarlet. "Yes, but only because, er — I read his blog."
"His ... blog?"
"Well, yes," she said, "I was under the impression that you knew about it?"
Now Stan crossed his arms. "How do you — what?"
"I'm in fandom," she said.
"Yes, I got that much," Stan replied, though it was just here that he put that together. "What the fuck?" As soon as Stan had said it, he whipped around, unsure if it the offending note of caution was played by the casual swear or the illicit internet fan porn connection.
"Look," she said, "Mrs. Grummund's class is coming by with her fourth graders for storytime in five minutes, and I left some weird tabs open I should probably go close."
"Oh, so the librarian gets a computer, but I don't?"
"What, you — don't have a computer?"
"A computer? I just barely managed to get them to give me a desk."
"You don't care?" she asked.
"Well, I wish they'd give me a computer, because I'm sick of going to the computer lab to use the internet—"
"I meant about the — blog."
"How do you know about Kyle's blog?" Stan asked. "I mean, his RP blog?"
"I'm not into RP blogs, but his personal Tumblr — yeah, I read that one."
"Deborah Allison!" Stan exclaimed. It came out sounding too high-pitched for Stan's liking. "Look, this is weird. I need to — get out some recorders, or something, I don't know." He thought of his mostly uneaten lunch back on his computerless desk. He wouldn't be hungry for it now. "I'm so confused. How long have you known?"
"I've been following your blogs—"
"I don't even use my blog!"
"For a while, maybe a year. But it was only recently that I realized it was you, or rather, that Kyle was your sick 'friend.' He writes about this stuff very candidly, you know."
"I know."
"Well, it started to seem uncanny. I was following him for his meta posts.” Kyle had gained some followers last year for his series of intensive posts of frame-by-frame analysis of the first Hobbit movie. He also wrote at length about the male fan experience, or the queer fan experience. Perhaps Deborah Allison had begun to follow Kyle's meta posts then. "Anyway, since I follow his posts, I just waned to come over here and offer you some reassurance or support, or -- I think it's the right thing to do, you know. Because of fandom."
"Because fandom," San repeated.
"Well, yeah."
[Then Kyle was going to be cured (obv.) and want to get testicle implants, but Kyle's parents won't/can't pay for that. So Deborah Allison was going to suggest to Stan that they start a Kickstarter campaign to fund Kyle's implants. But then Stan and Kyle get a lot of shit for asking the mostly female fandom community to pay for Kyle's testicles, etc. Kyle does not take this gracefully and there is wank. And so on. Can't finish, oh well.]
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no subject
Date: 2014-04-16 21:50 (UTC)"Kyle had gained some followers last year for his series of intensive posts of frame-by-frame analysis of the first Hobbit movie."
YES. He would be one of these fans who compare the book and the movie for every details. I bet he would be complaining about Beorn's appearance and Thorin not having a real thick beard but he checks out Richard Armitage's pics in secret. (By the way each time I see "Andy Serkis" somewhere I read it as "Andy Sekrit" and I think about you haha)
no subject
Date: 2014-05-18 20:05 (UTC)>> I particularly like Kyle's parents calling his fandom life "his lifestyle"
Oh gosh yes, I mean, they would be like "shouldn't you be saying money for your children to go to college instead of paying $3000 to go to one of these 'cons' as you call them" and Kyle would be like "ugh Mom my cosplays ARE my children" etc. Very depressing.
>> I bet he would be complaining about Beorn's appearance and Thorin not having a real thick beard but he checks out Richard Armitage's pics in secret
He's definitely sitting at home jerking off to those. "Stan, this Dwarf looks like you and he's very rugged and handsome." "I'm uncomfortable with that comparison" etc.