Work Text:
Topher’s right eye twitched, and he leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He had been staring at his first draft for The Topher Experience, a memoir of his time in the spotlight from the first call from a talent agency after Pahkitew Island to where he was now, for hours. Now, at thirty five years old, he was sitting in the dimly lit study of his mansion, feeling empty and unfulfilled.
How did it come to this? He stood up and opened the window, squinting his eyes at the piercing light of the early afternoon. These days he hated going out. He hated the sun. He hated himself. His eye twitched again, a constant reminder of his regrets.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, he focused on the guy tending to his garden. Topher had five or so guys who lived on the property and worked around the house, landscaping, cooking, cleaning, and doing any tasks he didn’t have the heart to do.
Oh to be young again, to be fresh faced and sixteen, eager to be someone with a promising future. He envied them, but he had everything he ever wanted, right? The fame, the money, the mansion, the cars, the clothes. The material world had nothing left to offer him, and Topher felt that he had nothing left to offer the world.
Topher clutched the aviators that hung on his shirt pocket. They were a gift from Sierra, and he never left the house without wearing them. They were like a security blanket to him.
As he prepared to leave the maze of his mansion to go outside to take a walk around his property, he thought about those sunglasses. They were probably the only material thing worth anything to Topher.
---
“Topher! I’m so happy to see you!” Sierra rushed up to him and scooped him up into a bone crushingly tight hug. “Like I’m sooo glad you could make it to the Chris McLean Charity Auction!”
“Sierra, babe, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Topher coughed out from being held in Sierra’s tight grip. She finally let go, and Topher smoothed his shirt and patted his hair in case it got messed up.
Sierra bounced on the balls of her feet, obviously excited. “Eeeee, I got something special for you!” She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a pair of aviator sunglasses. She lowered her voice, “They’re Chris’s.” She giggled excitedly and perched them on Topher's head.
Topher wanted to complain that she had messed up his carefully coiffed hair, but those were the Chris McLean’s sunglasses on his head. He decided that he wouldn’t take them off for the entirety of the event and adjusted them to sit straighter on his head. He strutted around as proudly as ever and with the added swagger that Chris’s sunglasses bestowed upon him.
When he met back up with Sierra at a halfway intermission of the auction, he had to ask, “How did you get all this stuff?” So far, there had been various items belonging to every Total Drama World Tour member, including Blaineley, and they still had half the auction left, presumably for the things that belonged to Chris and Chef.
“Oh it was easy peasy,” Sierra brushed it off. “Breaking into Chris and Chef’s room on the plane was so easy. Anyways, Topher, this is Cody!” She gestured to Cody, who was standing behind her and off to the side.
Cody waved sheepishly, “Hey, Topher.”
---
“Hey, Topher,” the gardener waved to him as he passed by.
Topher absentmindedly waved back, continuing along the paved path through his garden where the plants were pristinely pruned and appeared perfect. He approached the centerpiece, a topiary in the shape of his face, his stupid, smiling face with his quirked eyebrow and perfect hair. He wanted to stab at it with trimmers and hack at it with a chainsaw, but the shrub had been there since he bought the mansion many years ago, and all he ever did was allow the gardeners to maintain it.
Topher walked past, not making eye contact with his larger than life self. He liked himself a lot more back then. Would that Topher be proud of where he was now?
---
“Hi, I’m with the Fresh TV Talent Agency, and after seeing you on Total Drama Pahkitew Island, we’re interested in working with you.”
To say Topher was excited was an understatement. This was the call he had been waiting for his whole life. He calmed his nerves, not that he had many in the first place, and responded with the airy tone of an in-demand celebrity.
They set up a time for an in person meeting a few weeks later, and Topher gave them his information. When they had hung up, Topher picked up his cat, Chef, and hugged him, burying his face in the soft orange fur. The cat screeched and pawed at his face, and Topher held him out at arms length to avoid being scratched. Topher could not stop smiling, “Chef, you’re looking at a star!”
Work was slow at first, but Topher didn’t mind. He knew that the good stuff took time to build up to. No amount of rejections could dull his confidence and passion.
A few years later, Topher got his big break: a Slotox commercial. He had never gotten Slotox, nor had he ever considered getting it, but hey, a job was a job, and this one featured him in the starring role. With a bone structure like his, no wonder they were casting him.
To his surprise, when Topher watched the finished commercial and saw himself on screen, he thought he looked a bit…off. Smoothing filters and heavy makeup were standard for filming, but his facial features looked altered. When the commercial zoomed into a before and after close up of his face, Topher’s eyes widened as he realized that his unaltered face was the before picture and an edited face was the after . He gently touched the corner of his eye. Was it just his imagination or were his fine lines really that prominent?
He ran to the bathroom to look in the mirror. Topher leaned against the sink so that his face was a mere inch away from the mirror. Frantic green eyes darted from his forehead to his temples to his nose to the corners of his mouth to his jaw to his eyebrows and finally landed to stare into his own eyes. He blinked and closed his eyes, letting this sound of his shallow breathing fill his headspace.
When he opened his eyes again, the bottom half of his face was obstructed by the misty fog that condensated on the mirror. He wiped the surface with his sleeve and took a step back. Topher rubbed his thighs where the edge of the sink dug into his skin and left red indents.
Feeling not quite satisfied at looking at his appearance, Topher took off his slippers and climbed onto the sink to more closely inspect the details of his face. He raised and lowered his brows and watched as the lines on his forehead appeared and disappeared. He smiled a big cheesy grin then let it drop into a neutral, serious expression.
This became a habit for him, scrutinizing every detail on his face in the mirror. Every time he passed one, he had to lean in for a once over of his features just to check. Topher didn’t dare tell anyone about his insecurity; the industry was all about faking it til you made it, so he continued displaying the overly cocky, obsessed with his own looks personality to the world, while he criticized himself in private. Topher was convinced that there was something wrong with his face.
It was becoming a problem in his life and interfering with work. He’d request breaks between filming to go to the bathroom and look at his face, and often some intern would have to come knocking on the bathroom door because he was taking so long. As embarrassing as it was to lie and say that he was spending so much time in the bathroom because of a “new diet,” he couldn’t tell the truth and say it was to pick apart his facial features.
He finally decided that he should do something about it. It wasn’t surgery, it was an injectable , Topher rationalized.
While he was internally obsessing over his looks, to the outside world, Topher appeared as successful as ever. He was moving on up in the entertainment industry. After Blaineley left Celebrity Manhunt to work on the Puppy Bachelorette full time, and also its new sibling, the Puppy Bachelor, Topher was hired as the host for Celebrity Manhunt.
The people were captivated by Topher’s come up from contestant to host, and his popularity skyrocketed. He soon became the face of Celebrity Manhunt when Josh announced that he would be quitting hosting to start selling a line of his own candles and soaps.
Live hosting added another layer of anxiety to Topher. There was no post production editing to ensure his face looked perfect, so he had even more work done to compensate. He wondered if any of the viewers saw the flaws in his face. Of course they did, Topher thought, but they were just lying when they would say he looked great. No matter what he did, Topher never looked quite like how he wanted.
Years ago, he had made fun of Chris for getting Slotox, but he was a hypocrite, shamefully sitting in the waiting room for yet another procedure. However, this one left permanent effects on his face. An accident occurred, and Topher was unable to move one of his eyebrows. When he tried to wiggle his eyebrows, only his left eyebrow moved. If he were to try to fix this, there was the risk of even more damage to his face, so Topher decided to completely stop getting any cosmetic procedures.
His one eyebrow raised smirk became his signature facial expression. It was printed on advertisements, posters, branded items, and it was even sculpted into a topiary when he bought his mansion. His face was everywhere, and Topher was finally starting to accept that his face looked how it did.
A few years later, however, rumors started circulating about how Topher would be getting a co-host, a former child actor and model. Worse, some rumors claimed that Topher would be replaced by the new person. He was supposed to be the young and fresh host. All the progress Topher made on being comfortable with how he looked crumbled, and he panicked. The fear of becoming a washed-up has-been outweighed the fear of another medical mishap.
Despite his promise not to, he was back to obsessing over his looks and getting cosmetic procedures. At this point, people who saw him in person would comment that he looked different from the videos and pictures of him. Topher’s perception of himself was so warped that he didn’t even know what he really looked like. He hated seeing his own pictures because whenever he’d look for more than a few seconds, his face would start to look disfigured and disproportionate. Paparazzi photos that caught him off guard were particularly anxiety inducing; those tried to get him in the worst possible position.
Topher began wearing sunglasses everywhere he went. Not only did Chris’s aviators prevent anyone from seeing his eyes, but they also provided comfort. It was like Chris himself was helping Topher block out the negative press. How silly that he still clung to his childhood idol, who was an all round piece of shit. The sunglasses made him feel like he was fresh faced and sixteen again and excited for his future, still a bit of a nobody, but soon people would know his name - even though he saw little future for himself now.
It was getting to be too much. Topher also wore the aviators inside during meetings and only took them off in the safety of his own home. During one meeting with Celebrity Manhunt producers, he was asked to take off his sunglasses, but Topher refused. This small disagreement was a big deal in his head. He was naked without his sunglasses, and the fact that the producers didn’t want him to wear them made him scared that he was losing control of his image.
So Topher quit. He had the money to live comfortably for the rest of his life completely out of the public eye, so he did it.
At his announcement, the media went crazy with a story about how he was retiring due to his age and the possibility of a new, younger Celebrity Manhunt host. Topher denied it, but the speculation kept on coming.
To get them talking about something else, Topher eloped with a eighteen year old model less than a month later. Sierra was their ordained minister.
Topher let the model live in his mansion, and they planned strategic dates where they would act like they actually were in love just to be sighted by paparazzi. Otherwise, he barely talked to her. He was more of a sugar daddy to the girl, buying her clothes and giving her money, though for nothing in return except the illusion of marriage.
Not even a year later, after most of the media frenzy died down, they divorced. Once public opinion was that Topher quit because of the marriage and not because of his age, Topher had no need to stay married. Both had gotten what they desired from the brief marriage, so there were no hard feelings over the separation. Topher never cared for dating women anyways.
After the divorce, Topher rarely made public appearances, and if he did, he always wore his sunglasses. If you looked closely, you could see his one raised eyebrow.
---
Topher ended up by his pool. He looked over the glossy surface of the water and watched as the light wind made shallow ripples dance in the afternoon sunlight. He settled into a chaise lounge under the shade of a massive umbrella, immediately feeling the temperature drop as he slipped underneath. Topher set down his boating shoes and closed his eyes before taking off his sunglasses and placing them in his pocket. Eyes still closed, he took off his shirt, throwing it on the small table next to him. His hand quickly flew to his pocket, desperate to put his sunglasses back on. When they were back on his face, Topher laid down and relaxed, opening his eyes again.
All this time in the spotlight made the darkness more comforting. He closed his eyes knowing that when he opened them again, he would still be seeing the world through his shades and no light could hurt his eyes.
