Chapter Text
It was always going to come to this.
Any artist who's ever tasted fame knows the way it goes. And in the dark corners of the world they gather, the ones old enough to have survived the battle, but not the war, and they speak of the battle, and they wait for the end. In the longhouses of ancient shaman, in the whiskey bars of Hemingway and Steinbeck, in the Olive Gardens of North and Green, they speak of the enemy.
But you want an example everyone knows, you think of the King. The King knew it in his bones, and though all his disciples might still deny it with all the strength of a coward wishing Rufio was real it remains un-fake.You want to see it in action, go see any musician who's been performing for more than ten years, now that the fame's lost its luster and they've worn the mask of their public persona for so long it's hard to take it off, and if the room goes quiet ask for them to play the song that made them famous a decade ago. You'll watch as the mask slips for a split second. Not enough to show you the emotion, but they'll stop for a second before they smile and riff something to the tune of 'I don't remember that one.'
Because remembering a thing gives it a connection to you, and you a connection to it, and forgetting buys you time.
And in the dark Olive Gardens, over breadsticks and wine they meet, the veterans, and they despair, for the young ones will never heed their warnings.
They always think it's a joke. It's just something you do. Sure, it flows from you more easily than other things have. And aspects to it you'd never consciously thought of become so transparently obvious as more of it escapes onto the page that of course you drop an octave here for the bridge, of course they're really brother and sister, of course it all ties together. And they use metaphors like letting it breathe, finding its way, still developing. And then they stop, suddenly.
Because these things take on a life of their own. A course is taken that wasn't thought of before. Lyrics take a darker turn, characters start to conspire and change, and influences you'd never even thought of appear, from where you do not know. And then comes the day you realize: this thing you write is no longer yours. Mary Shelley was the wife of one of the greatest poets of her time. She knew what she was writing when she wrote about a madman who brought a -thing- to a savage mockery of life, and that -thing- could not be controlled, and turned on its creator.
Ask James Taylor to play Fire and Rain, and look at a charming old man's eyes flash with hatred.
Ask Pete Townshend to play Behind Blue Eyes, and watch memories lost in a pharmacopial haze fight to remind him to fear.
Ask Sophocles why he wrote the story of Oedipus Rex.
It was always something different. Something deeper was tapped, early on. The fandom grew even after he cut off their access through the Fourth Wall, and their influence grew as time went on. Then came the Intermission, and he gave them access back. One last run at the old feel, for old times' sake. He knew it was a mistake less than a week in, but by then the damage had been done. It wasn't coincidence it was then He arose. Between him, and them and an It that was never an it, you wrote the Man in the Cairo Overcoat into existence.
But it was the wrong word. He'd already been there. And always had been.
The Philosopher-Raptor of the North and the Green Lord of Eternal Sorrow had given counsel, then. There was a path yet untried. It was feared, yes- a technique that was only possible with a breached Fourth Wall, a technique that had been the end of creator and creation a thousand times and more. But if this end was to be avoided, it was the only option. So it was the Creator incarnated among His Creation; to interact with His characters directly, and alter their paths, and wield the Fourth Wall as weapon, and in so doing bog the story down in pointless self-indulgent teenage romantic minutiae. Thus bound, it could be carried to the dark chasms of Slash, and there condemned to an unholy half-life.
But the daemon that lurked within the Creation was not so easily defeated. For from the dread Slash that would be his tomb had sprung yet more servants of un-life, those who did the bidding of their Technicolor Lord before even His creation. They bore a dread cargo across a violent sea, drawn by the emanations of authorial self-insert and self-indulgent romantic minutiae like vultures to a corpse, and the Creator's actions could not help but call them. And in their haste to approach and feed, these bearers of cargo came into conflict, and so began the Shipping Wars, and with the rich, warm blood thus shed fandom and story alike grew equally swollen and grotesque. So ended any hope that the story could be easily slain.
Not that it was not tried. In a frenzy, the Creator began to slay his creations. Characters fell left and right. Troll Romance was deployed without even a thought for the consequences. Trolls died, insects died, businessmen died, pets died, carapaces died, humans died, worlds died, galaxies died, entire universes died, Rufio Himself died, and yet nothing could stop the Shipping Wars from intensifying, the story from continuing, or the Man in the Cairo Overcoat from coming further.
And so here it ends, on a balcony with a green filter applied to it, with the creator dressed up as a character who is fanfictional within one of his fictional universes and simply fictional in the other, uncertain in which he now dwells.
It was always going to end like this.
And yet, as #FF0000 stains began to seep out onto the filtered photograph, his last thought was not of hate, or of revenge, or of sorrow. It was a single, solitary regret, the one thing he could look back on his creation and wish to change.
If only I had killed John more often.