Chapter Text
In a dark location, where light only comes weakly from street light, two souls are playing cat and mouse. Never catching each other. Never harming each other. Just a weird dance around the disused buildings and this dark night.
But one of them breaks the unsaid rule before the other. The sound of bullets being fired echoes on the sheets of metal surrounding them. The other vanishes into the shadows for his own safety, only perceived through the gun flashes.
The rule breaker takes a break, dropping on an opportune chair, recharging his gun. The haunt must have clouded his logical judgment. Because letting his guards down this easily doesn't sound like him. Reason takes too long to get back to him, because he can already see the scintillation of daggers dancing morbidly in their next victim’s direction. Slowly, the second soul’s silhouette detaches from the darkness.
They can finally see each other's faces. They aren’t two anonymous souls anymore. They are Finn and Damon. The mouse catching the cat.
Damon’s movements are unrushed. Finn is frozen, half by the fear, half by the mesmerizing. The blade gets closer to the cop’s face. With a light pressure on FInn’s chin, Damon makes him look back at him. Eyes in eyes, only a dagger away.
The murderer maintains their locked stare while brandishing his weapon, ready to end this hunting party. Finn slowly closes his eyes, ready to accept his defeat by facing his own death.
But the cutting thump never came.
The dagger hit the floor as Damon is holding his head, a painful expression painted on his face. Then, his hands migrate to his neck right before his mouth opens up too widely to be natural and a thick and dark smock escapes from it. Once the show was over, the painter’s body joined his precious daggers on the floor, inert.
Finn can only observe this thin and little body so vulnerable that was so threatening just a moment ago. The person in front of him clearly was just Damon Cillian, the nice and shy local still life painter, someone who could never hurt a fly. All signs of a potential maniac serial killer seem to have been sucked out of this weak body.
“That’s it?” Those words followed by an angry scream can be heard in the whole neighborhood. Thankfully, this is not the kind of area where people tend to worry at the first scream they hear. If the cops had to knock at his door, Anawin would have been quite embarrassed to explain what was the cause of his rageful cry. “What the fuck!”
He stands up from his bed where he had been laying those past minutes listening to his best friend’s voice. Reading those chapters by himself became too painful, so he just listened to Koh’s reading while letting his mind wander in this imaginary world. He crashes on his friend’s back to access the computer’s mouse.
He ignores Koh’s complaint and starts scrolling through the chapter just to attest that the sentences he just heard don’t come from his friend’s imagination. As the words imprint in his retina, his rage boils up inside him. He can’t contain it anymore.
He walks away, setting Koh free from his violent embrace, and starts rambling frenetic about it. “Finn was supposed to be greater, wasn’t he? He solved hundreds of cases. He’s the best detective ever! Damn it!”
He catches his breath under his friend’s disapproval stare. As soon as his brain has enough oxygen to run again, he cages Koh again, this time to point at a specific line in the text.
“Read Damon’s dialogue from the start of the chapter.” Then, he proceeds to read it out loud as if Koh didn’t read it to him a few minutes earlier. “His eyes completely went blank, as if he’s an alien that never acknowledges love.” This sentence resonates in Anawin’s mind. He sees it as proof that the writer is setting up a redemption arc, or even worse, a love story, for Damon’s character. The young boy is a writer himself and is well aware of how to recognise a Chekhov’s gun narrative. This writer may be fooling most of his fanbase, but he won’t fool him. He never could.
“Come on!” He shouts right in Koh’s ears before stepping away again and dropping back on his bed. “That sounds like he’s a damn hero! I wanna throw up!”
“Hey, calm down, man!” Koh’s disapproval in his eyes turned into concern for his best friend. ”What are you pissing about?”
Anawin can’t contain his heavy breath, proof of the turmoil inside his head. He wants to scream to the world how betrayed he feels, how this is opening up again scars he thought were long gone, and how this redemption arc would bleed him out alive. This would be unreasonable and illogical for an outsider, someone who doesn’t and can’t see the big picture, what’s really playing in front of their eyes right now.
“The plot doesn’t always go our way. It’s just like a drama, you know. Just enjoy it. It’s free fiction, anyway.” His friend tries to reason with him.
Koh can't understand his pain. No one can understand his pain. Anawin is alone in this spiritual war the writer created.
“Can you even do that, bro? Have you ever written a chapter of a fiction in your life?” His friend continues as if this was an implacable argument against Anawin’s rage.
If only he knew how wrong he is, how painful his remark is and how ironic it sounds to the angry boy’s ears. But how could Anawin be angry at him? He can’t understand. He doesn’t have all the cards to plainly understand the game’s rules. To understand that the writer is the one cheating, and that Anawin has all the rights to be angry at their narrative choice.
That’s why, the taller boy knows he can’t debate with his friend on this subject without revealing too much. So, he stays silent and tries to control his breath.
Koh brings back his attention to the computer screen and scrolls back to the end of the page. “I was just mad they didn’t upload all the chapters.”
A few seconds pass before the smaller boy looks back at his friend. Anawin is concentrating on not letting his emotions explode to his friend’s face. He is still heavily breathing, his stare fixed on an invisible object on the floor.
Koh sighs loudly. “Are you going to sulk like a little boy just because the story didn’t go your way? Are you really this immature, Win?”
Anawin looks back at him with the darkest look the young man ever saw on his friend’s face. Anawin did already tell him to never call him “Win”. Maybe the reason he gave him wasn’t honest enough. Some like him, who lost everything and kept on losing, didn’t deserve to be associated with winning. This was a half-truth, but it should still mean something to his friend.
Anawin was going to call his friend on the nickname he used when a notification sound coming from the computer brought both of their attention back on the screen.
“Oh! Did I manifest it? The writer just posted a teaser of the next chapter to make up for the wait since we’ll have to wait longer than usual for the next update.” Koh sounds extatic.
Anawin gets up and leans on the desk, gentler than previously, not caging his friend. They both read the writer’s last message.
In the sneak peek, Damon and Finn look friendlier together, working as one to understand why the demon possessing Damon had him kill all those people. This is already too much for Anawin who feels his rage filling his body seconds by seconds, atom by atom. But this is clearly just the beginning, because you can clearly see that Damon kept some demon ability. The writer fucking turned his villain into a super hero, with a tragic back story.
Unable to control his emotions anymore, the young man shouts a “Damn it!” filled with rage and steps away from the desk knowing himself. He clearly doesn’t have the money to pay for a new screen, right now. Out of despair, he orientates all his anger on the pot on his chest of drawers, sending it flying right on the bedroom’s floor. The little cactus is completely uprooted, and the ceramic is split in half. Not waiting for his friend’s reaction, he jumps on his bed and curls up in a fetal position.
Koh is staggered by what happened in front of his eyes. Is this really the colorful boy he used to be friends with? Yes, Anawin had been feeling down for a little more than a year now, like someone had drained him from all his life source. He had always been this poor, running away from creditors, losing his family members to poverty-linked disease or to the mafia, but he had always found it in him a way to laugh it off and to keep on smiling.
When the web novel “Finn & Damon” started airing, he thought his old friend was back. Anawin was talking passionately about something again. Yes, he was now living through this book, but he was finally living again so Koh wasn’t going to complain.
He now realizes how wrong he had been. Anawin was just postponing his break out by forgetting his terrible life, living in another world made of words and paper.
Koh decides that he clearly isn’t competent in that matter to help him. Anawin has to help himself. so he stands up and takes his bag.
“If you’re going to sulk now, I’m out of here. Tell me when you’re finally over this fictional character.” Koh tells his friend. He waits for a reaction, but he doesn’t get any. So, he leaves like he said, slamming the door behind him.
Anawin is left alone in the silence of this room. He doesn’t know how long he stayed in this vegetative state, not living but not sleeping either. His mind just left his body to root for a certain time. Only darkness came from the windows now. The only subdued light painting the room came from the computer screen.
Slowly, like every movement demands him inhuman efforts, Anawin takes his phone from his pants’ pocket. The first thing he sees is the same notification he heard earlier on the computer. The “Finn & Damon” sneak peek. He feels a slight pain in his chest, but still opens it. He doesn’t read it again, afraid of losing control as before, but he goes right to the comment section.
Here, he leaves a massive message rant about how this plot twist is the worst storyline choice the writer ever made. He highlights all the plot holes that are brought to life just by the premise of Damon being possessed by a demon and not actually being a psychotic murderer. This is just an easy way out to produce fanservice. Anawin knows a large portion of the web novel’s fanbase is thirsting over the dark villain, as they always do. So, killing it off wouldn’t be a good marketing plan. On the other hand, giving him a redemption arc to have a reason to be closer to the main character, with whom a lot of people ship him… this is a well proofed marketing tool these days.
The owner of the username @.AntiDamonFan hits “send” with a relieved sigh.
The young fan in him is just disappointed right now. He really thought he knew him enough to trust him with this storyline. He thought his characters and their world meant more to the writer than just clouts. He was wrong. He feels like he had been betrayed once again, and this time, he won’t let sadness drown him over, he’ll fight side by side with his rage.
He holds to this thought as Morpheus’ arms take him away for the second time of the night.
Anawin drops his phone on his bed, exceeded. It’s been a few days, but his friend still holds a grudge against him and doesn’t want to talk to him anymore. The thing is, Koh is his only friend.
Well, he just has to accept his apparent wrongs and apologize for his behavior to his friend. Koh also found out he was the Damon hater who rant in the last update’s comment section, and he’s clearly not happy about that. Something about acting like a 12 year old who has never heard the word “no”. But Anawin strongly believes he has every right to be angry. But how can he explain to his friend that he knows those characters better than any of the other fans, probably even better than their own writer, without looking like a degenerated fan who lost his mind to a world made of paper.
Anawin lets himself fall backward on his bed. This coupled with his studies not going as good as he wants to and his creditors leaving threatful messages at his door every other day, he feels desperate.
He spends some time looking at the ceiling, like the witness of it was sucking his spirit out of his body, unable to think clearly about a way to reconcile with Koh or just to study like he should do right, a week away from his finals. Time became intangible.
How many hours has he already lost in his young life to those blank out sessions since the “incident”? Will he ever recover? Obviously not if this author keeps vandalizing his storyline like it’s nothing.
The sound of a news jingle coming from the TV brings him back to consciousness. He learned to always let the TV run during the day. The voices make him feel less lonely while the sound effects ground him in real life.
He motivates himself to take a shower before getting to bed for real. This is also a dangerous step in his everyday life, because he can’t hear the TV while the water is running, filling his ears with a constant white noise and forming a warm and cozy envelope around his body. Losing himself in his mind is way too easy this way.
Probably thanks to his earlier trance, he stayed perfectly conscious today. Which means he had all the time to overthink about his current debt and his delays in his cours review program. At least, it can’t get worse.
He should have learned to never expect anything, not even peace, through all those terrible years, because a few minutes later, his world is turned upside down again, in an irrevocable way.
He was drying his hair with a towel while searching for food in his very empty fridge when the blurred voices coming from the TV became intelligible. “In the living room, the police found the body in a sitting position with fingers on a computer keyboard.” Says the TV news anchor.
This precise sentence draws the young man’s attention to the TV screen. He vividly remembers a crime scene from one of the earliest “Finn & Damon”'s chapters that involved a body being staged with its hands on the keyboard, a message from Damon to the inspector still visible on the computer’s screen.
His feet lead him in front of his TV without him realizing it, absorbed by the macabre news.
“The body belongs to a mainstream best-selling fiction writer. The preliminary summary from the autopsy says.”
The time in the room around Anawin seems to slow down while his mind speeds up, adding everything up. A stinging pain in his heart, he understands what the TV anchor is about to say even before she breathes in the air that would carry her next words.
“The writer was reported dead while writing ‘Finn & Damon’, a well-known fiction among Thai people.”
There it was the last cannonball taking down Anawin’s walls, which he had built to protect himself from the painful void he had been abandoned in. But tonight the void finally wins because there won’t ever be any turning back possible now.
Anawin doesn’t have the time to mourn the memories washing over him in multiple waves that a loud bang on his front door can be heard. He runs to his front door already imagining his creditors reading to skin him alive but the suspicious light coming from the door’s diffuse window is weirding him out. He’s used to his creditors’ visit by now, and this is odd.
Before he can think of an escape plan, the door opens violently and a file is dropped right in front of him. He only has the time to see a black cap running away. Too stunt to follow this stranger, he takes several minutes to squat down and take the file.
Anawin’s mind marks a full stop. This can’t be.
The file in his hand is from the supposedly freshly dead writer.
It took Anawin all night to gather all the courage to open the file. At first, he spent several minutes, frozen in this exact position, eyes glued on the cardboard colored folder, his front door wide open. Then, he found enough strength in him to put the file on his living room table, carefully like handling a holy relic. He sat at the table, eyes on the sacred manuscript, for at least two hours, debating internally on what should be his next move.
Unable to decide within himself, he chooses to go to sleep, keeping the folder close on his night stand, always in his vision field. When he understands that his mind and body wouldn’t let him sleep until he opens it, he gives in. He crawls from his bed to his bedroom’s floor, gets the folder, opens it and places all the documents it contained around him, in a circle. There is the next chapter’s script, obviously, but not only. There are also drawings of characters and body parts.
Those eyes do feel familiar. But if Anawin is completely honest, those complete drawings of Damon look more like auto-portraits of the authors than a fictional face. The reader in him only recognized the dark villain thanks to his Victorian costume and the braille dots on his neck. Maybe he spent too much time contemplating one particular drawing, but he would never admit it.
Among all those papers, Anawin finds one not like the others. It’s a character resume like any other, but this one feels more diligent while less detailed. Hand written as if it was an important official document, filled with so little information.
The character, named Phae, is briefly described as a stubborn young man working as a demonist. It isn’t mentioned which part this character takes in the story but his “ability list” is quite powerful.
The fan reading this lets out an annoyed “Tsk” sound. This is clearly an over cheated character to use to turn the story over easily. This is a narrative spare wheel right here, the writer really lost all the respect he had for his own story, didn’t he? Breaking his truest fans’ trust in his recent updates was just the beginning, he was going to ruin the very core of the story he created.
A part of Anawin starts to celebrate the tragic death of the writer. He won’t destroy the world he had created anymore. It’s not his paper world anymore. It belongs to them, the real fans.
With a maniac laugh, the young man throws the character sheet far away from him like it was only what it really was: a piece of paper with ink on it. Nothing important to his eyes.
Grabbing the main script like a sacred item, he walks hastily to his desk and grab a fountain pen. This fan is ready to correct the author’s flaws in the name of the whole fanbase. Because, who would call themselves a true fan and let their piece of obsession get wrecked in front of them helplessly?
Anawin reads the sentences unfolding in front of him. He reads about Damon working on himself and getting better, so he crosses those words. He reads about Finn and Damon working together hand in hand, so he annotates the manuscript to turn the table around. He reads about Damon being a victim of possession, so he circles the word “demon” way too many times, leaving an ink mark on the page below.
Anawin will put back the demon in Damon.
Anawin will rewrite this script, correcting all the incoherences.
The story will tell the message it was created to tell since the beginning.