Page 8 of Fate Fiction

Andrea texted me that she and Caroline had arrived at my apartment as I was towel drying my hair. I tossed on a well-worn hoodie and boxer shorts and padded to the door.

I could barely open it before I was physically accosted by a Barbie clone.

“I’m so sorry, are you okay? You look okay. Honestly you look hotter now that he’s gone, I don’t even know how that’s possible. But like, fuck men amiright?” The words spewed out of Andrea as she threw herself at me and a handful of blonde hair flew into my mouth.

In her heels she towered over me and her head rested firmly on top of mine. She swayed and shook me about like I was a ragdoll. In the romcom movie version of my life she would be played by a severely underrated character actress.

As I was flung about, her fiancée laid a hand on her shoulder to pry her off of me. “Maybe loosen up there a bit, hon?” Caroline said.

“Shit, sorry,” Andrea released her grip on me and click-clacked her way across the apartment.

Caroline stepped in behind Andrea with a bouquet of flowers and a box of pastries. She embraced me in a far gentler hug and whispered in my ear, “you made the right decision.”

She pulled off her beanie and fluffed her curly black pixie cut before walking into my kitchen to retrieve a vase for the flowers. I watched as they danced around each other, choreographed as two people in love always seem to be.

I couldn’t help but hold a bit of jealousy seeing how they were more aligned than Nick and I had ever been. Even three months ago, when I’d witnessed their engagement on a snowy Saturday in the center of Boston Common, some deep, sad part of my soul knew that something that beautiful magical could never happen to me.

Andrea and I shared a long history. She’d seen her fair share of my heartbreak, just as I’d seen hers. I squealed with her in our senior year apartment living room when she got a text back from the cute girl in her photography elective class. I watched her and Caroline fall in love. I fell in love with Caroline too and I happily existed as their third wheel.

Andrea’s and my standard breakup protocol was simple: cannolis, a dozen roses, and the heartbroken one’s choice about how we’d spend our night.

We’d evolved from lovesick college kids to something now resembling functioning adults. The breakup procedure hadn’t been necessary for either of us in years, but from the bouquet of pink roses on my kitchen table and the box of cannolis Caroline was unpacking, it was clear Andrea hadn’t forgotten. My eyes grew watery again.

Andrea patted the cushion next to her and called me over from my mannequin-like stillness in the doorway as I was taking it all in. I scrubbed away a few tears that had tumbled onto my cheeks. At least that was growth from sobbing on a bathroom floor in our college dorm at nineteen.

“Is that—” she gestured to my laptop sitting on the coffee table as I crossed over towards her. It was currently glowing with a document tab that was half outlines and half rambling.

I gently shut it from behind, before she had the chance to read anything. “It’s not ready yet.”

“It’s been like three months, how much have you written?”

The truth? Nothing. Zero. Not a single word on the page that was worth anything.

“A bit,” I lied. “I’m a little stuck. I didn’t think it would be this complex, it feels like I’m starting from scratch.”

She cocked her head, “didn’t you say you had a hundred and seventy thousand words written already or something like that?”

One hundred and seventy four thousand six hundred and eighty one to be precise. Every single one of those words existed in the universe of Sword of Thorndown.

Sword of Thorndown was impossible for me to talk about without getting giddy. It was the show where I’d join a conversation with strangers if I heard them talking about the episode from the night before. The hoodie I was currently wearing was emblazoned with the crest of one of the rivaling clans in the show, worn and cracked from years of wear. To say I loved Sword of Thorndown was an understatement. That show occupied far too much of my brainspace and nearly a decade of my life. Through the countless amount of fanfiction I had written about it, the show also occupied most of my computer’s memory.

That aforementioned one hundred and seventy four thousand six hundred and eighty one word document held the biggest fanfiction endeavor I’d set out on. “Ice on the Turret,” an odyssey I’d been working on for roughly two years, uploaded chapter by chapter to a popular fanfiction website.

In those one hundred and seventy four thousand six hundred and eighty one words I’d written, every bit of dialogue was spoken by the valiant hero main character Sir Erwyn Nightingale of Rospice, his love the quiet leader Lady Juperitus Premble, or another character in the show.

I knew writing this much was an achievement in and of itself, and accepted that my fanfic’s popularity would probably be the closest I'd come to actual recognition. In true best friend fashion, that wasn’t what Andrea wanted for me. She constantly told me that I should be putting out best sellers and going on glamorous book tours and sitting on panels at conferences. If I romanticized the mundane parts of my life, Andrea was completely delusional about my possible future.

She’d been working as an assistant for a literary agent for over a year now and constantly pressured me to submit my work to her. Work that, as of right now, still didn’t technically exist.

My entire documents folder was filled with drabbles, one shots, and my lengthy work in progress I had added a few hundred words to this morning. None of it was something that could be published outside the confines of the internet.

I knew I should be writing something that I could submit, or at the very least outlining something, hell, even thinking of a concept—but my brain wouldn’t let me. Recently I’d placed even more effort on writing fanfiction. My nights were unusually quiet now, I could write to my heart’s content. Hunching over my laptop like a gargoyle and plunking the keys as words turned into sentences and paragraphs had always served as my escape from whatever mess I was experiencing in my personal life.

In the fictional lands of Andoriaan, my heartbreak didn’t exist, and the canonical slow burn love story between Sir Erwyn and Lady Premble was far more romantic than my own had ever been. No matter what I wrote, be it canon-divergent, self-indulgent, or something else, Erwyn and Premble would always end up together.

Happy endings were my specialty.

I had operated under the pseudonym Cl0ud3dR0se for eight years, a reference to a line Sir Erwyn says in season one, “for when I look at you, your beauty seems to have placed clouds over every rose, as none of them can compare to you.” Cl0ud3dR0se was a mask I could put on, a safety net of sorts where I’d always be welcomed into the Thorndown fandom.