Jonatton Yeah? grinned at the stack of memos waiting on his desk in Sasha's efficient and delightfully passive-aggressive hand writing. It had been eighty hours since the 'Death of a Preacher Man' issue (as he had titled it in his head) and it was already their best selling issue since Dan's 'Rise of the Idiots' article had been published. And it had made a lot of people quite angry, quite outraged. It had been a very enjoyable weekend.

Jonatton flung himself into his chair and let it spin and swivel him around the room. Outrage was good. Outrage sold magazines because deep down, people loved being angry and scandalised and incensed, etcetera. People loved a good scandal. And now he could sit back and bask in the heat of the emotional maelstrom he had caused, knowing that he had finally, well and truly crushed Dan Ashcroft.

He rolled his chair back to his desk and began flicking through the memos, literally flicking them about the room when he'd read them. Sasha, poor love, would have to pick them all up later. Not because it was her job but because she was obsessive about that sort of thing and working here, where she was basically surrounded by very large children who didn't know how to clean up after themselves, well that very nearly killed her. So Jonatton threw the notes across the room, smug in the knowledge that she would have to bend over in whatever tight skirt she was wearing today, knowing she was being watched but doing it through gritted teeth anyway.

She was another Dan and he'd get to work on her next. The magazine was going down, like a dinosaur in a tar pit, but he'd crack her before then, make her lose her temper and storm out. She would quit before the SugaRape died, Jonatton would make sure of it, and that would be another win for him and another big L on the foreheads of the pricks who thought they were so far above the regular people.

It was funny really, because for years he'd pondered why Dan and Sasha weren't an item, but it all made sense knowing that Dan was a gay. Maybe Sasha had known all along. He hadn't asked her about it before running the story, he didn't need actual 'sources', he was much better at making stuff up, but finding out the real name of the idiot DJ Jones had been a stroke of luck. Let it never be said that Jonatton Yeah? didn't know how to dig dirt. Or rather, get other people to dig dirt for him. And people were already calling the guy Choir Boy on the street, it was a masterpiece.

Turning his attention back to the memos he saw that there had been at least ten phone calls from concerned, and anonymous, members of the Stray community wishing to complain. They hadn't been happy with the article exposing their filthy little habits in the first place and now they were unhappy because if Dan was gay then it hadn't been an act of stray at all and they felt victimised and misrepresented all over again. It was hilarious.

Jonatton had to admit that Dan's attitude toward wanking off a random bloke had convinced even him that Dan was straight as a 2B but looking back at it, Ashcroft's disgust was probably centered more on the seediness of it all rather than any question of sexuality. Jonatton had wanted to make Dan uncomfortable and sick and it had been mission accomplished but apparently Dan's disgust hadn't been over touching another guy's junk, just the fact that it wasn't the junk of hit fit, young, DJ lover.

He threw the memos with the Stray complaints up into the air and let them float back down to earth like confetti, a celebration of a job well done, but the next note on his desk stole the grin right off his face, which was just not on, as far as Jonatton was concerned.

A representative from Place had emailed. They were pulling their advertising because of the Ashcroft piece and were "deeply disappointed" whatever that meant. He turned to the next memo, and snarled at Sasha's handwriting informing him that she had contacted every single company with an advertising contract and offered them the opportunity to pull out of the magazine. The next six memos were confirmations that every single major advertiser had pulled out of SugaRape to escape being branded homophobic.

He scrunched each into a tight ball before hurling them about the room, but they all sailed to the ground before hitting anything, which was infuriating beyond belief. And then he came to Sasha's letter.

She'd typed it up but it had her rounded signature at the bottom of the page, and even an idiot could see at a glance that it was a letter of resignation. She'd left.

Jonatton felt the muscle by his left eye twitch. How dare that bitch realise she could, "do better". How dare she threaten to, "put him down like the sorry animal" he was. He took a deep, calming breath before folding the letter into a paper aeroplane and throwing it across the room and out through his office door. Perhaps things had gotten a little out of hand.

But at least he'd cracked Sasha. He'd been hoping for it, hadn't it? He was pissed that he wouldn't be able to watch her pick up his mess one last time but he'd won, even if she'd screwed him over and lost the magazine most of its income, he had still won. She was jobless and he'd driven her out.

He tried to smile but felt it turn into a snarl as he read the next memo cluttering up his desk. She'd put in a complain to the Media Complaints Commission. It was likely that they wouldn't do anything, freedom and the press and all that, but it was a serious move, all the same. Sasha was pulling punches and he was not impressed.

And now that she wasn't here he was going to have to look at his own fucking email, which was too droll for words. He looked out through his open office door as he waited for the stupid computer to load and frowned at the emptiness. He was pretty loose about what time people had to arrive in the morning, because being a stickler for time made you a slave to the clock and he'd built up SugaRape to be the force it was based on a belief that he didn't give a fuck and not giving a fuck was cool.

People thought Dan Ashcroft dictated what was cool and what wasn't around Shoreditch but Dan didn't have a clue. Dan hated cool and the only times he didn't speak out against it was when he was too crushed and depressed by his own ineffectiveness that he just gave up. Jonatton had been the real mastermind. He'd sourced the Preacherman costume for Nathan, he'd tweaked most of Dan's articles and guided Rufus in the layouts so that Dan's words seemed ironic, so that his hatred came off as an inside joke. He'd put Dan's name on articles that made Dan look like a sell-out. He'd worked hard to pull as many strings as possible. And he'd held on fucking tight. So why did it suddenly feel like things were unravelling?

He wandered out into the main office area and did a slow circle in the middle of the room, pouting at the lack of moronic anarchy. The tiny tricycles were still, the pinball machine was silent and dark in the corner. Rufus's and Ned's desks were clean.

Jonatton stopped. Rufus and Ned had been hired because they were halfway decent at what they did but very easy to mould and manipulate. They were idiots. In fact, Jonatton had watched Dan writing his 'Rise of the Idiots' piece whilst glaring at Ned and Rufus competing over who could wear the most most tiny trilby hats at once. He'd typed so hard he'd broken the 's' key on his computer and Jonatton had taken great delight in charging him for the damage. It had been doubly amusing to see Dan drowning his sorrows in cheap beer and cigarettes at the Nailgun that evening, and trying unsuccessfully to ignore the fact that Ned and Rufus were trying to put a neon striped, half-sized, trilby on his shaggy head.

Ned and Rufus were not the sort of men to tidy their desks. He walked closer and saw that even the statuette of the farting gnome and doctored photos of Dan as the Preacherman, slaying the pig of ignorance, were gone. Which probably boded ill, or something.

He sat back down at his own desk and clicked on the email icon. There were hundreds of emails in there that he'd never bothered to read but the top five were letters of resignation from other former employees of SugaRape.

Jonatton tried to stop his eyes widening as he read through them because he did not do surprised or emotional but they kept doing it, whenever he opened the next email on the list and saw that he'd been deserted by yet another twat who thought that they suddenly had a conscience and that they needed to do whatever they thought Dan Ashcroft wanted them to do.

There were other emails too. Two club DJs had written in to say that they were also gay and intended to do everything in their power to publicly shame him and the magazine. 15Peter20 had written, threatening to do a series of photographs of celebrities defecating on copies of the offending SugaRape issue as a form of protest, which would have been funny at any other time except that Jonatton was starting to feel slightly uncomfortable at how many people had come out in support of Dan.

Then there were the threats from fans of the DJ, Jones. As far as Jonatton could tell, the guy was an Idiot, the kind that Dan hated and was worshipped by. He made shit music and was loved by the kinds of people who had UV tattoos and stretched ears. He made Euro-twat techno that people only thought was cool because it was played in Amsterdam. Fuck knew why Dan was fucking him, but the kid seemed to have some serious fans, and they were threatening to do serious damage to the SugaRape offices and Jonatton's person.

They were idiots. Just like Dan's 'loyal' followers. Just like his former employees. Just like Dan himself, even if he refused to see it. And Jonatton hated idiocy. Irony he was cool with. Laughing at the foolish for their misunderstanding of true cool was cool etc. But idiots, idiots had given Shoreditch a bad name, and made people sneer at his work and Jonatton hated all of it. He'd got his revenge by owning the idiots, dictating to them, ruling them and laughing at them while pretending he couldn't even be bothered to say LOL.

SugarApe had been his baby. First, the Idiots who read it and made it had been his apes, his monkeys, who would mimic whatever he did and wrote in exchange for the sugar he gave them, the false reassurance that they were part of the cool crowd and yet totally unique at the same time. And then, once he had them, he'd fucked them all over, and they hadn't even realised it was non-con. That had been his private little joke in changing from SugarApe to SugaRape. No one had understood, and he'd been able to pat himself on the back and know, without the shadow, that he was the smartest dick in the room.

Except that now the room was empty and more silent than he'd ever heard it on a Monday afternoon. And his magazine was all but dead, and no one seemed to understand the art of the trashy magazine as an ironic symbol, or that they were supposed to be laughing at people like Barley and pitying fools like Ashcroft. No one understood that they were supposed to be grateful for everything he'd done for them!

And now, the Idiots were winning.

No. The Idiots had won.

Almost.