No additional warnings for this scene.
She was a tom-boy who loved to ride her bike, climb trees, and play soccer. When she was really young, before the growth spurt and the period and the breasts, she was often mistaken for a boy, and even her own grandfather called her “Chuck”. Eventually only her mother remembered that her name was actually Charlene. Not that it mattered, because when puberty hit, everything that had made her an adorable little tom-boy only made her into an ugly and socially backwards teenager. She had breasts but she was mostly embarrassed by them, and everything else she enjoyed like soccer and climbing trees just got her beat up at school for being a “pussy dyke”, which she always, always pointed out was redundant. It just made the bullies even madder, but words were important to her.
The irony was that she really liked boys, and always had, but boys laughed at her and most of the girls in her classes avoided her, but that was fine because by sixth grade, she discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the seventh grade, she found out about “fanfic” from a ST:TNG penpal and from then on she spent most of her free time writing fanfic. She was totally a Riker/Troi girl, when she wasn’t writing about original characters who stormed the bridge and stole Riker’s heart (because ewww, Picard was old). Her fifteenth birthday present from her best (and only) friend was a ticket to the local sf convention, and that was where she finally discovered ‘slash’. From that point on, it was Geordi/Data all the way, and never a mary-sue was ever seen again.
Her teachers and her mother – none of whom saw her fanfiction, because Chuck Shurley was not stupid, thankyouverymuch okthanxbai – all told her that she had talent, or at least that she was dedicated. Charlene wrote all the time, because it was more fun than her own life. She was not pretty, her mother wasn’t rich, she had no fashion sense and all of her friends were geeks. She was in the Latin Club, and for fucks sakes she knew what that meant: virgin for LIFE. In her fanfic, though, she could live vicariously through anyone and everyone, have as many adventures (and as much sex) as she wanted, and even garner a large and devoted following of readers.
Not that is was easy, back in the early and mid-90s, because the Internet was just being born. Between fanzines and USEnet, though, and eventually YahooGroups, Charlene managed to become one of the biggest BNFs in the fandom. By the time she moved on to Buffy!verse, she realized that she might have something that other people wanted, and not just in fanfic. She graduated college in 1998 with a B.A. in English Lit and high hopes for her future as a published author.
It was a shock when no agent would touch her because of the fanfic, which she was not really sure how they found about in the first place. She finally got around to hiding most of it, causing an uproar in one forum which eventually ended with her being banned for life as a traitor to the fandom. It hurt, but not as much as agents thumbing their noses at her stories sight-unseen because they knew who she was online. She deleted accounts, removed fic from archives, and went undercover, but word had gotten around. She was a pariah from the only two worlds that meant anything to her.
From 2000 to 2004, her life was in the crapper. She returned to writing fanfic, only this time under an assumed identity that she hoped even the NSA couldn’t crack. She did a little bit in X-Files but her home away from home was SG-1, and of course she was a Jack/Daniel girl. It wasn’t as if she did not keep writing her own stories, or keep trying to sell them, but she was jaded by then. She thought it was somewhat unfair that her prime-of-life 20s were spent in front of a computer screen, either writing popular stories she could not admit to or writing glorified additions to agents’ slush piles under her own name. But, she was shy, and she still wasn’t that pretty, and she did not even lose her virginity until her last year in college. Which: pathetic. She knew that. It was just easier to hide, write, and hope for the best. With a whisky chaser.
Her parents were divorced, and she did not know her father that well, so it was a shock to inherit his house when he died in a car accident. It was also a blessing, though, because it got her out of her mother’s house before her 30th birthday. Aside from property taxes and utilities, Charlene did not have to worry about having a roof over her head anymore, so she went part-time as a barista and threw herself at her writing.
Anyway, in 2004 it became really easy to do, because she invented the deliriously hot and lethal Winchester Brothers and their damn sexy all-black Impala. With their tragic backstory and their controlling, obsessive, and self-sacrificing father, this was the best story she had ever come up with, and the strange dreams and vicious headaches were worth it. She got an independent publisher interested, and in 2005, Supernatural premiered. It wasn’t an instant hit, but each new book sold a few more copies than the one before it, and her publisher actually went out and tattooed her ass with the anti-possession ward that Chuck sketched out on a paper towel while doing research. (As a fangirl herself, Chuck appreciated the gesture, but that did not make it any less crazy.)
She thought the covers were a bit overblown, because yes her boys were tight as hell and muscular and good looking but they were NOT Fabio, but she was in no position to argue. Sales were sales, she had invites to speak at several regional conventions, and people were writing fanfic about her stories. If there was a great Giver of Justice in the universe, Charlene thought that Supernatural fanfic was proof of its existence, even if the Wincest thing kind of icked her.
Not that it was easy, because writing Supernatural was some of the hardest work she had ever done. She knew all about the artistic zone of creation, but what she went through writing about Sam and Dean was pure Hell. The headaches would bundle up and attack en masse, and when every drug known to man failed to work, Charlene would slip back to her old friend Jack Daniels until she was completely obliterated, then wake up in the morning and write down her stories as the hangover receded. Her betas would pick apart the final draft and her publisher would throw her a small advance and the book would be off to the presses, and then Charlene enjoyed a work-free month to drink heavily and write some Jack/Daniel PWP (because she had not even officially introduced Castiel yet, and getting him and Dean hooked up was looking to be a long term project, while SG-1 was already there) and pretend that she was happy before starting the whole cycle over again.
Until one day, Sam and Dean actually showed up with Dean’s Very Own Angel in tow, and she understood for the first time just how mightily fucked up her life truly was.
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