Alternate Canon

    Lara Connolly

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      Kirk is ready to leave his wife for Camilla.  He writes that he can’t sleep.  He wants to file for divorce.  He is going to make the four-hundred-mile drive to Cincinnati tomorrow.  Camilla scrolls through the messages, all three hundred twenty-seven of them, the first dated almost exactly seven months ago.  Usually, it seems as if she’s known him so much longer, as if she’s always expected little red notifications to pop up on her blog, alerting her to another message from him.  She knows him well enough to predict how he’ll react to each and every plot twist in Phantasmagorical, BBC’s hit supernatural thriller-drama about two demon-fighting best friend flatmates, and she smiles to herself when she’s right.

      It was Phantasmagorical that brought them together, specifically their mutual outrage when neither Tim Thornton nor Thaddeus Hollingberry, the show’s two stars, received BAFTAs last year, especially after the scene in the series two finale, when Colin, Tim’s character, gets knocked unconscious by a poltergeist and he wakes up in the hospital, crying and crying for Ian, Thaddeus’s character, but Ian is just a few feet away in a chair, because he would never leave Colin, especially when he was injured, and then they just hold each other.  Colin wraps his arms around Ian and bunches up his sweater in his fists as if he’s afraid Ian will disappear.

      There was a time when she would refresh her feed over and over waiting for Kirk’s messages.  She would read and reread her messages to him before pressing send.  Now, Kirk writes he wants to see her.  Not just pictures anymore.  He wants to touch her.  He wants to make all of their fantasies real.

      The problem is that there is never enough time for Camilla to do the dishes or turn off her computer, and often, there isn’t even time for her to change out of her sweatpants.  Her roommates, Marie and Veronica, try to remind her that it is bad for her computer’s hard drive for it to remain on all of the time, but she insists that there isn’t a point in turning it off.  She always returns to it within ten minutes.  This inevitably leads to an argument about Tom, who, according to Camilla, is positively foul.  She says he is constantly peeping in their windows.  She thinks he is a pervert.

      Camilla is poised to begin a blog post, a cup of Lady Grey tea in one hand, the other resting on her laptop’s touch pad, when she hears Marie and Veronica fighting in the next room.  She knows it’s probably related to Tom.  She’s fairly certain that he is sleeping with both of them.  Camilla can’t be bothered with their latest drama any more than she can be bothered with the sink full of dishes.  Especially not when the blogosphere is exploding with news of Thaddeus Hollingberry.  He has stated in recent interviews that he is indeed aware of the “obscene fan fiction floating around on the internet.”

       One of Camilla’s best friends Holly, username tadswifey, has already made a gifset of the interview, endless loops of Thaddeus smiling uncomfortably and rubbing his chin beneath the subtitles.  Unable to bear the idea that the fandom has broken into full blown hysteria without her, Camilla scrambles to respond.

        She imagines Thaddeus in front of his computer, reading one of her own pieces of fan fiction.  He is wearing a tuxedo, as he always is in her imagination.  Perhaps he’s just returned from an award show, she decides.  He runs the fingers of his right hand across his mouth, a habit of his that invariably causes his fangirls to flail and squeal, and the long white fingers of his left hand roll over the touchpad.  His dark brows furrow over his heavily lashed blue eyes as he reads about himself—as his character Ian—ripping the clothes off of his co-star Tim Thornton—as his character Colin.

        Camilla herself has neither the technological savvy to Photoshop Tim’s and Thaddeus’s heads onto existing photos of naked men, nor the artistic skills to create erotic art.  However, she is well known within the Phantasmagorical fandom for her fan fiction.  She has written three fics, excluding her current project which she has open in another window. 

      She has high hopes for the piece.  It could easily be her best yet.  The first ten chapters are pure angst, but not just angst, the kind tagged “Unresolved Sexual Tension” (UST).  It begins with familiar scenes on the show—undeniably suggestive moments that have launched a thousand gifsets—the scenes when they look at each other a little too fondly, their fingers are a little too affectionate when bandaging each other’s wounds, and of course the infamous hospital scene with the hugging and the sobbing.  The space between them is reverberating with sexual tension, and the fangirls are willing them together so hard that the effort of it actually hurts.  Just when it seems as if Ian might finally give into the temptation, Colin tells him that he and the missus are going to give it another go. He’s moving out.  The fangirls might actually be more devastated than Ian at this point, if that’s possible.  Ian’s pretty messed up, but he, like many romantic heroes before him, will not stoop to begging or crying.  In fact, he will only become slightly pricklier toward Colin, which Colin will think evidence that Ian never loved him at all.  Plot twist: Colin’s evil wife, who’d be universally hated even if she weren’t evil because she exists and is married to Colin, betrays him, allying herself with a troop of demons.  Although Ian has been very distant toward his best friend, Colin must ask Ian’s help in order to save all mankind from his wife and her band of scheming demons.

      Camilla knows this is the moment all of the fangirls have been waiting for. They’ve suffered for ten chapters and now they want their reward.  Of course, she won’t actually post the next chapter without having Holly Brit-pick it first. She couldn’t stand a mortifying repeat of her first fic “Too Old to be Shy.” She’d written that Colin offered Ian a Tylenol, instead of paracetamol, the morning after a particularly vicious demon attack and filled a glass of water from the faucet, rather than the tap, and perhaps mostly humiliatingly, described Colin ordering take-out even after hearing them mention take-away dozens of times on the show.  Her British readers had been very polite about such errors, but she’d vowed never to repeat these rookie mistakes.  She’s already caught herself trying to spell pyjamas the American way.

      Colin has just walked across town to Ian’s flat.  Camilla hesitates.  It should definitely be raining.  Colin should arrive soaking wet and freezing and heartbroken and betrayed.  It will be late at night, but Ian won’t have gotten any sleep.  His nightmares get worse when Colin isn’t around to shake him awake and tell him that he’s safe. 

      Ian is in the kitchen with his tea.  His heartbeat is beginning to slow, but the tremors in his hands haven’t subsided.  He runs his tongue along the bridge of false teeth where his incisors used to be.  His interrogators ripped them out with pliers when he was a POW in Baghdad.  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t answer that question.” He wakes up screaming it.  The sudden knock at the door nearly makes him jump.  He sighs and unlocks his flat door without checking the peephole. 

       “I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have come,” Colin says.  His hands are shoved in his pockets and his eyes are red and he’s trembling a little.

      Ian takes Colin by the elbow, pulling him up the steps into the apartment they once shared and into the bedroom.  He looks at him, the same way he has so many times before, but this time, something is different.  Colin reaches up and pulls Ian’s face down to his.  Ian feels the tip of Colin’s cold nose brush against his own as he tilts his chin up to find Ian’s mouth.  And even though every part of Colin’s face is cold with the night air, his mouth is warm and sweet and gentle.

      Camilla is undecided about the gentle part.  She generally prefers them to be shoving each other against walls and kissing hard and ripping off each other’s clothes like they’re on fire.  Breath hitches and heartbeats pound and hips buck and fingernails dig into flesh and everything is urgent and hot and intense.  Maybe it’s because there has been so much emotional turmoil in this fic or maybe it’s the idea of Thaddeus’s reading it that makes her want to be gentle with them this time.

       She composes a text post, instructing her fellow fangirls and boys to hide the porn.  She hopes Thaddeus hasn’t read “Too Old to be Shy” or even worse “I’m Not Made of Glass.”  She inserts a gif of Tim Thornton looking scandalized on the set of Phantasmagorical to illustrate her chagrin.

       She doesn’t mention her third fic, “The Waves Came and Stole Him,” because it’s mainly angst, and probably less obscene, from Thaddeus’s perspective at least.  It’s about Colin’s slow descent into insanity after Ian’s death.  She still receives messages from devastated fangirls.  Camilla doesn’t usually admit it to them, but she also sobbed for an hour after it was finished and picked up Marie and cried into her grey fur.  Camilla knew Marie didn’t like to see her upset, but that didn’t stop her from noticing the sideways glances Marie shot Veronica who was licking her paws judgmentally in the kitchen.  Veronica seems to be able to do everything judgmentally.

      Whenever Camilla thinks Marie and Veronica are being especially judgmental, she reminds them that they’re fighting over Tom, even though he has a snaggletooth and always smells like fish.

       Veronica comes out of the bedroom with an especially displeased expression on her face.  She has the kind of face that always suggests disappointment—she probably has some Persian in her breeding—so it’s particularly striking when she’s truly irritated.

       “Veronica, I’m not in the mood,” says Camilla.  “I know you’re having a tiff with Marie or whatever, but don’t come in here trying to make me feel shitty too.”

        This is a familiar conversation for both parties.  When Veronica and Marie have an altercation, they turn their hostility towards Camilla. 

        Even so, their love affair with Tom inspired Camilla to try online dating.  She checked her profile on slow blogging days.  She honestly made an attempt, but she found most of the men flakey.  They would suddenly stop replying to her messages.  When she actually did make it to dinner with them, she knew it was all wrong from the start.

        They were balding or overweight or wore Birkenstocks over white socks.  Their voices sounded high and squeaky compared to Thaddeus’s rich baritone.  They had dirt under their fingernails.  They only talked about their jobs or families or boring hobbies.  They said “Who?” when Camilla said something about Thaddeus.  They knew Tim, but only from a sitcom role that he’d had before he appeared on Phantasmagorical.  Camilla sat across the table from them while they chewed their steaks with open mouths, taking swigs of beer and wiping their mustaches with the backs of their pudgy hands, and all she could think about was Thaddeus and Tim and wished she was back in her apartment, on her couch, drinking Lady Grey and watching them on her big flat screen. 

       “You’d never understand,” she finally told Veronica and Marie.  “I’m an introvert.  Dating exhausts me, and it’s not even fun.  It’s easy for you guys to go out and make friends, but I’m happy right here in this apartment.”

       Veronica had the same reaction to that little speech as she does now.  Her eyes narrow and she turns around and walks back into the bedroom.

      “You should hang out with my mother!” Camilla calls after her.  “You guys have so much in common.  You could go self-help book shopping together.”

       Camilla’s mother’s latest gift is on the kitchen table, still in its shrink-wrap: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.  Camilla has decided not to dignify it with a Thank You note.

       A series of pop-up notifications appear on Camilla’s feed.  She reads everything except the growing number of messages from hollingberrian.  She knows what she’s supposed to do.  She knows she should just turn off her computer like Marie and Veronica are always telling her to, and get up from her orthopedic cushion and change out of her sweatpants. That lacy black push up bra she ordered two weeks ago still has the tags on it. The box is still in the bedroom.  She shuffles in her stuffed cat slippers down the hall. 

      Tom jumps to his feet.  She’s startled them, but not before she’s seen both Veronica and Marie snuggled up to him in the warmth of the sun coming through the glass doors.  Tom scampers onto the balcony.  Camilla sighs.

      After she feeds the cats, she takes a box of matches from the kitchen and lights some candles.  She turns off her computer.  She dims the lights. She runs a hot bath.  She shaves her legs.  She puts on the black lacy push up bra and matching underwear set.

      Four miles away, Camilla knows Kirk has showered at his hotel and ironed his shirt and spritzed himself with a fresh bottle of cologne.  She sends him a text.

      Did you order some wine?

      And then adds a Phantasmagorical quote.

      I always drink red on Manticore Mondays.

      Ian usually doesn’t usually drink, but he buys a bottle of wine to celebrate after they vanquish the manticore Asvald in the first series finale.  Colin starts to say that he prefers white wine unless they’re having red meat, but he watches Ian’s face fall, and he gallantly corrects himself with “But I always drink red on Manticore Mondays. I can’t believe you noticed.”  It’s an iconic scene.

      More of a beer man. It’s Friday…?

      It is Friday, but he was supposed to quote back Ian’s dialogue: “Just not too much.  We’ve got to prepare ourselves for Troll Tuesday.”  And Ian and Colin never drink beer.

      Camilla has a silk robe in her closet that’s reserved for special occasions.  She slips her arms through the sleeves and pours herself a glass of red wine.  She leaves her phone in the bedroom.

      “Well isn’t this cozy?” she says as she repositions herself on the couch.  Sometimes it’s difficult to get comfortable with two cats on one’s lap.  She takes a sip of wine as the credits start to roll.  “Should we watch one more episode?”