Fan Service

Chapter 2

2

Alex was in the midst of getting peed on by a geriatric Doberman when her group chat exploded over the video.

It wasn’t until after she changed into a fresh set of scrubs and took her lunch break (or rather breakfast break since she’d worked the solo overnight shift at the vet and it was currently four a.m.) that she had a moment to open iMessage.

To almost a hundred notifications.

Holy shit. Who died?

As it turned out, the deceased was Devin Ashwood’s dignity.

Cam: Do we think he lost a bet? Is this some kind of public degradation fetish we didn’t know he had?

Eliza: idk but it’s horrific and tragic and i can’t look away

Cam: I’m making the howl my ringtone. Idec

Eliza: it’s the part where he ripped off his own shirt like The Hulk for me

Though The Arcane Files had gone off the air years ago, the Internet friendships Alex had forged in that dumpster fire of a fandom outgrew their origins and remained ironclad to this day.

It was funny to think that Cam, Camila Adeoye, revered barrister who lived in South London with her wife and young daughter, had once been better known as NolbyGrl96, one of the most prolific fic writers in The Arcane Files ’ fandom.

For the record, Alex never wrote fic. Not for lack of interest; she just sucked at it. But she’d read it voraciously, even after Devin Ashwood read her for filth in 2008.

Her favorite fics had always been the ones where Colby helped Nathaniel accept that craving blood didn’t make him inherently evil, coaxing him tenderly out of his shell. It was no wonder she’d been obsessed with Cam’s In My Veins , a seminal work in the Colby/Nathaniel—shorthand Nolby—ship, and basically weaseled her way into being Cam’s beta/best friend through shameless flattery.

Like every great TAF friend group, they needed a resident Asher bias. Enter Eliza Leonard, formerly dinosaurkitten, one of the most sought-after artists in the fandom. Alex and Cam blamed her being Canadian for the fact that she fell into the minority part of the fandom that preferred the “light” half of The Arcane Files ’ FBI partnership to Colby’s tortured darkness. She’d since abandoned Toronto winters and was now an investment banker breaking hearts and taking names in New York City.

After Devin Ashwood labeled her pathetic all those years ago, maybe it would have been easier if Alex had abandoned TAF altogether. After all, she wasn’t tuning in for the writing, and there were plenty of people who would have happily picked up her reins as mod for the archive. But when the rubber hit the road, she hadn’t been able to part with the wiki.

It was her baby, and as things got messier with her parents’ divorce, the archive became a kind of safe haven. She had built that tiny, nerdy corner of the Internet as a resource and meeting place for fellow fans. Why should she have to abandon a space where she felt good and powerful just because Devin Ashwood made her cry?

Even with her rose-colored glasses shattered, she still loved the ritual of watching the show every week. Sometimes waiting for Friday night at eight p.m. got her through an entire school week. The comforting experience transported her to a world where she always knew which side was good and which was evil. And if her previously unbiased reviews skewed a little snarkier starting midway through season 3, site traffic certainly didn’t suffer.

Alex saw it as a personal fuck-you to Devin Ashwood that instead of dropping out of the fandom, she leaned in. Cam and Eliza were the only people she’d ever told about her crushing humiliation at Supercon ’08. They were both discreet and petty enough to keep her shameful run-in with the series’ star a secret while remaining ready to roast him at a moment’s notice, even seventeen years later.

Eliza: OK WAIT we’re ignoring the most obvious and important question—did he do his own makeup?? Because those claws and fangs look more realistic than anything the TW ever commissioned.

Cam:

Cam: Say whatever you want about the Arcane Files fandom, but seven years after the show goes off air Devin Ashwood is still feeding us.

Eliza: I can’t believe he waited for an actual super blue blood moon eclipse to pull a stunt like this—but then missed by one day.

Cam: I can. That messy bitch loves drama but he’s simple.

Eliza: Apparently there’s a quote from some NASA scientist going around on Tumblr that says the sublunar point was—get this—twenty miles outside los angeles

Cam: how convenient!! I knew he was lurking on the remains of our patron hellsite along with all the p0rn bots.

Eliza: The poor man’s career was already in the toilet. I’m just glad we got to see his dick

Cam: …it was literally censored.

Eliza: Yeah but unfortunately you could tell it’s big

Eliza: Can you believe someone got paid to place that black box? And I’m over here slinging stocks…

Suddenly, what had been shaping up to be a pretty typical shitty Tuesday in the small Florida town Alex had never managed to escape took a turn for the better. She had to scroll back forever, through a veritable maelstrom of memes and all-caps exclamations, to find the actual article link.

The headline read, TV Werewolf Goes Feral .

A Pyrex full of tofu curry went cold at her elbow as Alex clicked through and read.

Assumed to be intoxicated…

…growling at a passerby…

…fully nude…

…allegedly did not attempt to bite any person or pets.

The actual words “Devin Ashwood” didn’t appear until the second paragraph, but when they did, her stomach gave a sick little flip. You’d think after all these years she’d grow indifferent to seeing his name. You’d be wrong.

Alex no longer hated the man with the fire of a thousand burning suns. She was thirty-four years old and lacked the energy. But she didn’t begrudge herself a little schadenfreude.

On that note, the video itself was…a lot.

At first she thought he was drunk. All that stumbling and squinting. The camera didn’t have a great angle. It must have been security footage from one of the nearby storefronts. The capture was black and white, grainy. Ambient sounds dominated the audio. Outdoor diners at a neighboring restaurant. A guy playing saxophone on the corner with an open case at his feet. But the gossip site had added subtitles. At one point little white letters popped onscreen that read: [indecipherable growling] .

He must have bought some kind of special contact lenses, because his eyes shone unnaturally bright, like they were backlit.

Alex knew what was coming. She’d read the article before hitting play. Still, it was wild to watch the “transformation” she’d seen so many times onscreen play out in real time.

Eyes, claws, jaws.

Devin’s performance art followed The Arcane Files ’ formula exactly, with the end result being eerily similar to how Colby’s partial shift had looked on TV. The transformation was in the same school of late nineties / early aughts paranormals like Buffy and Teen Wolf , where they kept the actors upright on two legs and used minimal prostheses on their faces and hands to make them look “monstrous” while still retaining plausible fuckability.

Couldn’t he have at least added a tail?

The howl was by far the most convincing part. Alex spent plenty of hours in Ocala with her dad listening to real wolf pack communications. Somehow Devin had managed to nail something distinctly feral. A sound so deep and powerful, it seemed impossible for a human’s vocal cords and diaphragm to achieve.

Goose bumps broke out across her arms as the clip continued.

God. The frustration in his long drawn-out cry was palpable.

He’s scared , Alex thought. But that was silly. She didn’t even have the volume on her phone turned all the way up. And besides, she had no business thinking she knew anything about Devin Ashwood.

He must have worked with a new vocal coach, because Colby never sounded that wounded.

When she got to the part of the video where he started ripping off his own clothes, Alex expected the tortured but tantalizing choreography to be in the same vein as the shifts shown on The Arcane Files . But Devin moved with surprising brutality. It almost looked like he was scouring his own chest as he shredded the fabric of his shirt with whatever kind of prosthetic claws he’d managed to acquire.

By the time he fell into a naked crouch, Alex had to physically close her eyes against secondhand embarrassment.

“Morning.”

Alex jumped when Seth, one of the vet practice’s other techs, came into the break room and picked up the ancient Mr. Coffee pot.

“Holy crap, Mizlansky.” She pressed her palm to her racing heart. “Make a little noise.”

Was it time for him to clock in already? Sometimes he came in a little early to catch Alex before her shift ended. Dr. Wronski’s practice was small enough that she needed only one tech on at a time, but Seth seemed to think that as coworkers it was their sacred duty to exchange watercooler chitchat rather than pass like ships in the night.

“Sorry.” He smiled at her while filling the pot with water from the sink on her right.

It was a nice smile. Genuine. Friendly. Seth kind of reminded her of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo , all gangly limbs and unkempt hair.

He slid into a seat across from her. “Did you hear they might finally change the high school mascot?”

See, this was the problem with never leaving your hometown; people remembered your adolescent foibles.

She and Seth hadn’t even been in the same grade. He was at least three years younger than she was. But ask anyone in Tompkins about Alex Lawson and you’d still get some combination of the same four words: “gay” “goth” “vegan” “bitch.” The difference between Seth and the rest of the Tompkins population was he thought that made her cool.

The “gay” and “goth” pieces in particular weren’t even accurate. Alex was bisexual with a preference for black clothing. Her local reputation was built on the aging pillars of a few select acts of teenage rebellion, the most memorable of which involved releasing the geriatric horse that their high school had kept (and mistreated) as part of their mascot, the Knights.

“It happened again?” In subsequent years, the story had turned into a bit of local legend. Other teenagers, role-playing as vigilantes, repeated Alex’s midnight rescue with Cornflour’s string of reluctant successors.

This town treated racehorses better than kings, but once stallions stopped being able to win, the ones who couldn’t go on to stud became disposable.

“Oh yeah.” Seth got up to retrieve his cup of coffee. “I think they’re gonna go with something intangible this time. Apparently, ‘lightning’ was on the table.”

Alex sighed. This part of her town legacy was also, coincidentally, Devin Ashwood’s fault. At least indirectly. She’d walked out of that convention center all those years ago a ball of humiliated fury and remade herself in the shape of a rebel.

A normal person would have simply taken off the “freak” costume when they got home. Alex decided to make it permanent.

In the months that followed, she dyed her hair jet-black, pierced an eclectic array of holes in her body, and generally started dressing for school like she was going to a funeral. If the pearl-clutching conservatives of this town were going to hate her anyway, she might as well give them good reason.

As an adult she could see her teenage angst and acting out for what it was: all the stress and sadness and hormones bubbling over. But back then she’d just been mad. All the time. At Devin Ashwood. At her parents. At Tompkins.

Now she was mostly tired.

At the end of her shift Alex went home. The house was quiet, her dad at work. It always took a while for her to come down from the frenzy of the vet’s office. She’d sleep for a few hours before going to pick up Rowen from school.

Alex first met the precocious nonbinary teen when they got matched through a queer youth mentorship program run out of Tompkins Community Center. Built when a pack of granola-crunching hippies had briefly infiltrated the WASPy confines of Tompkins in the late seventies, the TCC battled chronic underfunding and an increasingly crumbling exterior.

Along with all the other volunteers, Alex knew each day their doors opened might be the last. But until then, the TCC served as a haven for the town’s outliers—the poor, the elderly, the queer.

Alex didn’t actually believe she had much to offer Rowen in the way of life advice, as evidenced by *gestures helplessly at whole life.* But as long as the Florida legislature was determined to put queer and trans kids through hell, Alex wanted at least one of them to feel less unwanted in this town than she had.

She toed out of her sneakers at the rack by the door, then went to make herself some peppermint tea. In the kitchen, she found a reusable shopping bag with a new pair of windshield wipers inside on the counter, along with a hastily scrawled Post-it from her dad telling her to have a good day.

After setting the kettle to boil, Alex went out to get the mail. She flipped through the stack on the walk back, and sure enough—damnit. Another medical bill.

It had been more than a decade since her dad’s first heart attack, but he’d spent a long time in and out of the hospital while doctors figured out what kind of treatment he needed. During COVID, he’d had an issue with his beta-blockers that led to arrhythmias and a pacemaker, and another long stint at Ocala General. That, plus his ongoing medication needs, meant his medical bills were like hydra heads: every time they paid one off, two more popped up in its place.

After assessing the damage, Alex hauled one of the sturdy wooden chairs from the table over in front of the fridge and then climbed atop it to place the letter in Nana’s old bread box.

She did mental math while sipping her scalding tea. If she canceled her hair appointment for Friday, it wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing. At this rate, she’d spend the rest of her life living in the loft over her father’s garage, their combined salaries barely enough to keep their heads above water.

It would help if she got a better-paying job, but Tompkins wasn’t exactly bursting with gainful employment opportunities for a college dropout who’d spent most of her misbegotten youth antagonizing the people who controlled the town’s commerce.

Besides, Alex would miss the animals. She’d grown attached to the regulars on the night shift. Even Snowball, who, thanks to his increasingly rheumy eyes, sometimes mistook her fingers for food. All the sleepy animal snores in chorus reminded her a bit of camping with her dad in Ocala as a kid, listening under the soft canopy of the tent as he named each forest creature by the sound of their night calls.

What could she say? Borderline pathetic empathy for animals ran in her family.

Later that afternoon, Rowen came out of play practice with a new turquoise stripe in their hair.

They ran up to Alex’s beat-up old Honda and flung open the door before she’d come to a full stop.

“Did you see that the guy from that TV show you liked in high school thinks he’s a dog now?”

Oh boy. Here we go.

She’d told Rowen about her youthful TAF obsession because the Nolby fandom had been a huge part of realizing her queer identity as a teen. While Alex purposefully never got into specifics about how her feelings toward Devin and his character Colby might have evolved, Rowen was too perceptive for their own good.

They knew, at the very least, that mentioning him riled Alex every time.

She fought not to flinch as she waited for Rowen to stow their bass in the trunk and buckle their seat belt. She hadn’t willingly given Devin Ashwood this much airtime in her brain since Bob Barker was hosting The Price Is Right .

“Well?” Rowen said as Alex pulled away from the curb.

“Okay, fine.” Alex broke. “Yes, I’ve seen the video. Obviously.”

When her active attempts to appear unaffected by Devin Ashwood’s latest antics went on a beat too long, Rowen rolled their eyes like Alex was a trial. “And? What do you think?”

She thought delighting in another human’s public downfall seemed like bad mentor behavior.

“Maybe he’s trying method acting,” Alex offered generously.

“Seems like a cry for help if you ask me.” Rowen folded their arms as Alex pulled onto the highway, heading east toward Ocala.

Alex snorted. What would Devin Ashwood need help with?

Help! I’m too rich. Help! Time has done nothing to dull the impact and intensity of my smolder.

When Alex’s phone buzzed in the cup holder between them, Rowen picked it up.

“Taylor wants to know if you’re free this Saturday.”

“You can leave it on read,” Alex said.

Rowen made a tsking sound as they put the phone back.

“Don’t you think you’re a little old to be playing games?”

“I’m not playing games,” Alex huffed.

“I’m sixteen.” Rowen leaned forward to fiddle with the notoriously fickle AC. “You think I don’t know about ghosting? Therapists on TikTok say you have to make yourself vulnerable if you want to find love.”

“Gross. Pass.” Alex pulled a face and then, realizing once again that she wasn’t setting a good example, added hastily, “I’m just busy right now.”

“Are you?” they said skeptically. “I’m pretty sure I’m your only friend.”

“That’s not true. I have Internet friends.”

Rowen shook their head. “Listen to yourself.”

“Gen Z is so mean,” Alex grumbled as she pulled into the parking lot at the preserve where they did their twice-weekly hot person hikes.

“We’re not mean. We’re honest.” Rowen patted Alex’s arm sympathetically before unhooking their seat belt.

Devin Ashwood had pronounced Alex a sad loser seventeen years ago, and despite her best efforts, he looked more like a soothsayer every day.