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Lilith dropped the script in disgust. “Have you seen this?” she demanded of whoever happened to be in the room, which turned out to be both Meg and Ruby. “They can’t be serious about this. What the hell are they smoking in the writer’s room?”
Meg snatched up the script, eyes quickly moving over the page until she spotted it and burst into giggles. “I hadn’t seen that, I’m not in this scene, but oh my hell that’s just wrong. What’d you do to piss off Chuck?” Lilith started to protest, but Meg waved her off. “I know Amara wrote this episode, but come on, this has Chuck’s sticky bad writer’s fingerprints all over it. So? What’d you do?”
If Lilith had any idea, she’d tell Meg. As it was… “I don’t know either. I really don’t think it’s something I did. More likely it’s something Chuck did, don’t you think?”
Ruby took the script from Meg and shook her head. “Wow. Lilith, you must have done something, because this doesn’t even make sense for Ivy. If it were Gwen, I could understand, but Ivy?”
Lilith shook her head. She didn’t understand either. This was so out of character both for her and for Ivy that there was no way to make sense of it. “I know Chuck said that he was gonna give the fans the exact opposite of what they wanted and pair up Gwen and Ivy instead of Gwen getting with Harriet, but like this? Really?”
“Looks like,” Meg said, giggles intensifying. “I don’t know what Chuck’s thinking there, if he were hooking Gwen up with some random-ass dude that would be more of a fuck you to the Gwenniet shippers, but Ivy? It’s not like there’s been any canon evidence that Harriet would do anything but cheer on her best friend hooking up with her big sister. Heck, she’s the reason Gwen and Ivy are even friends!”
“You know that’s not how the shippers see it,” Ruby said. “Besides, unless you’ve got the next episode early, we don’t know how Harriet’s going to react, do we? For all we know, Chuck may be planning on confirming that Harriet’s in love with Gwen and pissed about things after all. And then he’s trashed their friendship as well as any potential for the relationship the fans are hoping for.”
Meg rolled her eyes. “He wouldn’t. Even if Harriet is in love with Gwen, which I really don’t think she is, nothing has ever been more important to her than Ivy being happy. The closest thing is Gwen being happy, so she’s not going to do anything to jeopardize both of those!”
Lilith cleared her throat. “Apparently, you should never say never about anything when it comes to Chuck and writing our characters. Because I would have sworn that Ivy would never have decided to pursue Gwen either, and if she did, not like this. There is no fucking way Ivy would decide that the best way to win her girl was to write and recite love poems at her!”
“Yeah, that’s…” Meg’s giggles from earlier returned. “In public, no less. Chase her down at the coffee shop and they’re not even good poetry! They’re awful!”
“And yet, somehow, when this goes over like a lead balloon, it’ll be my fault for not selling it on-screen,” Lilith grumbled. “Maybe Chuck’s trying to convince me to quit the show? I just might do it, too, Luc’s pitching a spinoff to the network next week and he asked me if I’d consider joining that instead. I wasn’t going to, but if Chuck’s going to pull this bullshit…”
“Well then.” Ruby came over and sat beside Lilith, pulling her into a hug. “Chuck’s not pulling this bullshit. You refuse to do it, tell him either this scene goes or you go to Luc’s spinoff, and since Gwen and Ivy are supposed to be together, I’ll tell him I’m right behind you. Luc will take me, too, won’t he?”
“And then it just wouldn’t make sense for Harriet to stay with Gwen and Ivy both striking out on their own, so I’d join you both,” Meg added. “Chuck will have to find new sexy spies for his self-insert to boss around.”
Lilith burst into laughter, touched by the support. “And Luc might even be willing to actually do something with the subtext between Harriet and Ivy, too. The network won’t let him go too far, but Chuck keeps trying to separate us to stop people talking about it.”
“There we go. We can forget this bad poetry and Chuck can come up with a better way for Gwen and Ivy to get together, or we can join Luc and get a whole new show. Honestly, I’m not sure we shouldn’t just go with option #2 to begin with…”
“If we knew the network would go for it, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Lilith admitted. “I’m sick of having to correct Chuck’s bad writing.”