Book!AeneasWouldNever: Thank you for saying it so I didn’t have to, MPA.
TopMeAeneas: Even apart from all the anachronisms, the dialogue just seems so much more . . . rudimentary? . . . than in the first three seasons.
Book!AeneasWouldNever: That’s not a coincidence. One book per season. Three books.
Book!AeneasWouldNever: The showrunners never understood the characters. They relied on the books and the actors. Now the books are gone, and the actors will do their best to sell what they’re given, but they can’t simply make up plots and dialogue.
Book!AeneasWouldNever: At least, that’s the rumor. I don’t know for sure.
28
APRIL SKIPPED ALEX’S Q&A SESSION, SCARED SHE MIGHT see Marcus there. Afterward, though, she couldn’t avoid hearing about it.
“He just . . . announced it,” a guy with stylized wings on his tee said to a circle of his friends, looking shocked but titillated. Cupid Gets Shit Done, No Diaper Needed, the shirt read. “Without any prompting. And apparently his fics all include pegging?”
Edging behind a large potted plant, April listened to the fourth iteration of this conversation she’d encountered in the last ten minutes, hoping to glean some piece of information—anything—that might mitigate her worries for Alex.
A young woman with Psyche’s trademark circlet on her head crinkled her brow. “Pegging?”
Another fan, her T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the underworld, beckoned the first woman closer and whispered in her ear for a minute.
“Oh.” The Psyche fan blinked. “Oh.”
At her expression and pinkening face, they all laughed.
“Filming for the final season’s done, right?” Another of their friends, a fortysomething man with a plastic sword strapped to his hip, sounded highly entertained. “At this point, can they still fire him?”
Cupid Tee snorted. “Maybe not, but they can sue him. I’d be shocked if they didn’t.”
When the group began moving toward one of the halls for their photo sessions, April didn’t follow, and she didn’t attempt to eavesdrop on any more conversations. They all contained the same basic information, and they all offered her one inevitable conclusion.
Alex was fucked.
She was now glad she’d missed his session, and she did not intend to watch any of the countless YouTube clips uploaded within minutes of the incident. If Alex was sometimes an asshole, he was also loyal and funny and entertaining. She liked him. And she had no desire to watch him throw away his life’s work in a fit of what—according to onlookers—seemed to be total, mysterious, grinning rage.
Which didn’t mean she wasn’t looking up his fanfiction. Immediately. If anyone in the Gates universe needed a good pegging, Cupid was definitely that character.
As she began edging toward the elevators, she drew more than a few stares and whispers, as she had from the moment of her arrival earlier that afternoon.
Even after a couple of hours at the hotel, and despite her mental preparation, all the attention still disoriented her. Some of her fellow con attendees merely looked, or took pics and videos from afar, and she could live with that. But the people who approached her with comments and queries and entirely too much familiarity for her comfort . . .
She wanted to hide from them. Not because she was shy, or ashamed of herself or her appearance or her former relationship with Marcus.
Because she was grieving. Because speaking Marcus’s name hurt. Because the winks, the innuendo, the excited questions were streams of salt poured into wounds that hadn’t even begun healing.
“Is that . . .” a woman in a Dido’s Vengeance Tour: 1000 BCE tee hissed, elbowing her friend. “That’s the fan Marcus Caster-Rupp was dating. We should ask her—”
April walked faster.
Suffice it to say, some time alone wouldn’t come amiss, even though this was only the first night of the con. Thank fuck she hadn’t accepted room-sharing invitations from the Lavineas crew, even TopMeAeneas.
After retreating gratefully to her quiet, peaceful hotel room, she took off her shoes and propped herself comfortably against the headboard. Finishing all of Alex’s fics would only take a couple of hours, if she was judging his word count correctly, and she was more than willing to devote that much time to them. She didn’t particularly want to answer more questions about Marcus in the near future.
In the end, she was reading at her laptop for longer than two hours. Much, much longer. Until she’d missed all the remaining scheduled events for the evening, and giggling groups of Gates fans were no longer stumbling down the hall and shushing each other at top volume.
Alex’s stories were fascinating. More than that. Revelatory, in so many ways.
Before each of his fics, he thanked his faithful beta reader and fellow writer, AeneasLovesLavinia. The laws of probability informed her who that author had to be. BAWN, unwilling to use his former pen name, lest he draw her attention to his continuing presence online and hurt her further. Marcus, either unable or unwilling to stop writing.
Now that she knew BAWN and Marcus were one and the same, she had to wonder what drew him to fanfic in the first place. What he got out of writing, and writing stories about Aeneas in particular, especially given the risk to his employment if anyone found out. What the Lavineas community, the community he’d left behind—for her sake, of course for her sake—meant to him. How it felt to remove himself from that circle of friends and start over again, his stories now without a guaranteed audience.
It had to hurt. How much she couldn’t say. Probably more than she realized.
Maybe it was foolishly sentimental, but once she realized who AeneasLovesLavinia must be, she read his stories, the ones written during their time together in Berkeley, before Alex’s.
They were recognizably Marcus’s work. More than that, they were—
April lowered her head. Bit her lip until she tasted blood.
AeneasLovesLavinia’s stories were swoony.
His trademark angst was never completely gone. There was always a jittery undercurrent of nervousness on Aeneas’s part, a fear Lavinia would find out about his fraught past with Dido and judge him harshly for it.
For the most part, though, his new fanfiction centered around love, not pain.
Story by story, Marcus’s Aeneas lost more and more of his heart to his wife. Determined to win hers in return, he did his best to woo her, to make her see his devotion, to battle past her insecurities and defenses, until they reached a hard-fought happy ending.
No one else would recognize the real-life parallels.
April could hardly miss them.
Once she’d blown her nose and applied cold, wet washcloths to her eyes and questioned all of her recent life choices, she switched back to Alex’s stories, and holy fuck.
The pegging. Oh, God, the pegging was glorious.
That wasn’t the aspect of his writing leaving her agape and concerned.
His fic depicting Cupid as an actor on a popular Gods of the Gates–esque show was beyond pointed. Beyond damning. It was searingly blunt about what he considered the strengths of the show—the crew, the cast, the source material—and what he deemed its key weakness.
Namely, incompetent and unpleasant showrunners.
Everything he wrote confirmed what she and most other Lavineas denizens already believed, as well as a few things Marcus had hinted at in private. But neither she nor her fellow fans had ever, ever thought a cast member would say those things so clearly and publicly.