A\N: This is something a new author, ditena, and I were discussing. I thought it was about time someone wrote this down.
TOMMY
Pain.
I recognize it as soon as I click the link--the psychic energy flooding from the stories.
People think books and movies don't have energy, that psychic power only relates to the living. They're wrong. Every single line we write, everything a charecter thinks, does, says, everything they are, it's our stories bound up into it.
Powerful isn't the word for it.
Sometimes, if the story is good, I hold it and laugh. Rita's spells have gone a long way twords enhancing my natural ability, but they also showed me how precious life is, how beautiful the laughter can be. How fun times are more important than anything else on this planet.
But that's books and movies. Comic books, most of the time.
Fanfiction is the result of those stories. It's an art form born of pain, the pain of authors who saw something missing in those stories. Did the first authors see something missing in their own lives, too?
I did.
I saw the missing love, the sudden way my parents cared only about their work. I saw the lonlieness, the violence in LA, then this mess.
I saw people's corpses mutilated in the street. I saw children playing games while gangsters aimed guns at them.
I saw myself kill.
Only monsters. Not human. But they're still real.
No one has a right to take a life.
So when I look at the page, hundreds of colors leap out at me. Each is a type of pain. Some hide it. Some laugh and ignore it. But everyone tries to write it out.
The subtext is written throughout every story, every author, every page. The sympathy for the different. The love for others.
The ignored, the shunned, those who aren't. They flourish.
They rise above their worlds. For just the moments they write, they rise above the hells they came from, and they bring pain with them, transforming darkness into beauty.
Then they plunge down.
They laugh about it later. Don't talk about it. But everyone knows that, just as the rising is inevitable--because who can stop writing, if they know how?--the fall is equally permanent.
I admire them. I wish I had their courage, their hope.
And as I admire them, I become one of them, rising and falling.
In fanfiction, in the only place I can write freely, there's a subtext.
It's a subtext of pain.