A Very Tron Valentine's Day
Feb. 14th, 2011 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficDear Sam/Alan shippers: No hating, my Sam is just a bit of a frat boy and he'd be taken aback by your OTP. Me, I get that Sam/Alan actually only has slightly less canon backing it up then Sam/Quorra (like, they didn't even kiss. How can you not kiss at the end of an action movie?).
Title: Happy Valentine's Day (now have sex with me)
Fandom: Tron
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,147
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Quorra,
Previous: Dear Cosmo Magazine
Next: Happy Birthday, Kevin Flynn.
Summary: Why Brokeback Mountain isn't a good date movie.
"Do you know what day it is?" Quorra asked across the breakfast table.
Sam looked at the date on his newspaper. "February 14."
Quorra saw how it was. She played it cool. "Did you know there is a holiday that falls on February 14?"
Sam didn't lower his paper. "Is it Armenian Pride Day? Because every day feels like Armenian Pride Day, know what I mean?"
Quorra peeked down from over his newspaper. She had mounted the table. "It's Valentine's Day! Celebrating the day St. Valentine stopped the Loveless demon from ending romance!"
"I think you may have this confused with some other holiday."
"That's how it happened on Xena." Quorra sprawled out on the table, hips narrowly avoiding the napkin holders. Facing him with her chin in her hands, she looked like Sam's personal pin-up. "So, what are we gonna do? Ironically break-up and then get back together when we realize how much we mean to each other? Learn the true meaning of the holiday from a musically-inclined magical being? Watch our peers be picked off one by one by a masked killer who's really a classmate you thought you killed in a prank gone wrong but he survived with horrific scars?"
"You have a lot to learn about how we celebrate holidays. Generally, it's with heated family arguments and awkward revelations about our sexuality."
Quorra pulled down the paper. Now her face was inches from his. "And what would you like to reveal about your sexuality?"
Before Sam could get into his complicated feelings about whipped cream as an article of clothing, the doorbell rang.
"Could you get that please?"
Quorra kept her eyes on him, like a dog with a treat, as she got down from the table. It was… creepily endearing?
Sam picked up the Finance section. Encom stock was still going down, but it was course-correcting, plateauing. Soon, there'd be an upturn. There had to be.
An EEEEE sound so enthusiastic it was nearly ultrasonic coursed out from the living room. Quorra flounced back into the kitchen, holding a bouquet of roses in one arm, a box of chocolates in the other, and a Valentine's card in her teeth. "Mmph mmf mm!"
"Who's Timmy, and what well?" Sam replied.
Quorra laid the deliveries out on the table. "Someone sent me a Valentine!"
Sam casually folded his paper. "Does it say who it's from?"
"I bet it's a handsome prince! I bet he saw me once and fell in love from afar! I bet he's going to build me a palace, like the Taj Mahal! It was built by Shah Jahan in 1632, after the death of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal…"
"Quorra, I sent it."
Quorra couldn't contain her smile for a hot second. "I punk'd you!"
Sam slapped his forehead. "No! How could I get punk'd by a girl who doesn't even know about buttfors?"
"What's a buttfor?"
"For pooping, duh." Sam picked up his paper and turned to the funnies. "Reversal. C-C-C-Combobreaker."
Quorra thought furiously for a few moments then conceded gratefully. "My combo was broken." She brightened on a dime, tearing the box open like a kid at Christmas and popping a chocolate-covered cherry into her mouth. "Oh my dot com, this must be what an orgasm feels like!"
"There should be more tissues and shame."
Quorra looked at him like she'd forgotten Sam was there. "You've gotta try this!" And before Sam could say yes, she was surging across the table to slide a chocolate into his mouth. Only her finger went in too, just past his lips, maybe to keep him from spitting the candy out. His mind crossed some wires and he went "mmm, chocolate" when he should've been going "no, Quorra's finger." There was sucking. Quorra tasted like how medicine was supposed to taste, when you were young and mistook it for candy. She closed her eyes and looked like she was revising her opinion on what orgasms felt like. Sam didn't flatter himself. It was just that she was new at physical stimuli. She'd probably feel the same way about popping bubble-wrap.
She came to when Sam pulled his mouth away. "I'm sorry, was that erotic?"
Sam nearly choked on the candy saying "Little bit."
"And that's bad because we might be tempted to give in to our perfectly natural biological urges?"
Sam's mouth was full, so he just nodded.
"And that's bad because—"
Sam needed a way to stop people from wanting to have sex, fast. He swallowed. "We should go see a romantic comedy."
"Yes, that's a great idea! Almost as good as having sex!"
She was on to him. "Come with me. I wanna show you something. Bring the flowers."
"Alright, but they have thorns, so it could be painful if you—"
Sam loudly opened the window he'd walked to. Outside was the planter he'd installed while Quorra was asleep. "I know you already have a garden on the roof, but this way you can look at your roses every day and not worry about them dying." He knew how Quorra got. If she were worked up enough, she would probably genetically engineer a super-rose, and the Earth would be overrun by romantic, sweet-smelling death.
He leaned next to the window. "So, whaddya think?"
Quorra turned him to face her, took a few steps back for a running start, then leapt into his arms for one of those anime character hugs. "I'm so glad you're the one teaching me about humanity, because you must be the best it has to offer."
"No, I'm not. Trust me, a lot of the time I don't even recycle… you can get down now."
"Spin me. You're supposed to spin me around when I do this."
Mustering all his upper body strength, Sam gave her a spin. Quorra clung to him and laughed and dropped away when he was done. Her smile was so uncontainable she was embarrassed by it, so she turned to peel away the topsoil from the planter and begin rooting her flowers.
"Sam, when we were talking about orgasms earlier, that was a joke you made about masturbation, right?"
Quorra was the first girl his humor was too subtle for. "Uh-huh."
"You don't do that because of me, right? I mean, the shame…"
"No, Quorra, I haven't lately… we've been sleeping in the same room… before, I mean. When I didn't have a girlfriend."
"Why didn't you have a girlfriend? You're nice and when I look at you, I want to be your girlfriend."
"I've had girlfriends, it's just… none of them were right for me."
"What was wrong with them?"
Sam stuck his hands in his pockets to keep from gesturing. Conversations like this made him want to pull his hair out. "I don't know. Nothing. Maybe it was me. My last girlfriend was a first-year psych student. She said I was messed up cuz of my dad leaving. I said if I didn't want to cuddle with her and watch Sex And The City, it wasn't intimacy issues, it was the fact that I have balls."
"But you like cuddling with me. What happened to your balls?"
Sam sighed. "They're in your purse. Let's go watch a chick flick."
***
While Quorra looked up showtimes, Sam splashed on some cologne and changed into a tuxedo his stylist had thrown in on his last makeover. After he made a few James Bond poses in the mirror with Quorra's hairdryer, Sam called "Found anything yet?"
"Yeah, Sam, I've got the perfect show. It has a great cast, it was a box office hit, it even won some Academy Awards."
Sam walked out of the bathroom, pausing in the doorway to adjust his tie, and for Quorra to admire him; when she didn't look up from her laptop he walked over to rub her shoulders. It was kind of gratifying how she melted back to rest her head against his stomach. "So what's the movie?" he asked, interrupting her reverie.
"Brokeback Mountain. It's supposed to be really romantic."
He stopped massaging. "You don't have a second choice?"
She looked upside-down at him. "What's wrong with Brokeback Mountain?"
"Nothing. I've just been prepping myself for Hugh Grant as a sex symbol, not full-on guy-to-guy combat."
Quorra pulled away from his hands to spin her chair around. "Sam, are you a… a homophobe?"
"What? No! For God's sake, I watch Glee!"
"Then why would you not want to watch Brokeback Mountain?" Quorra j'accused, as if she'd just caught him in a lie.
"Listen, Quorra… for guys, gay sex is like spiders mating. We appreciate that it's totally natural and there's nothing wrong with it, we just don't want to know the gory details."
Quorra emitted a shrill note of protest and turned her back on him. "Right now, it wouldn't surprise me if you were perpetuating rape culture."
"Rape culture? Where'd you hear that? Have you been going to college behind my back?"
"No, it's something I learned in fandom," Quorra said proudly.
"What's fandom? Sounds like something you'd buy in Thailand."
"It's not!" Quorra spun her laptop to face him and started calling up websites. "See, I was searching for information about you and Encom online—"
"You've been cyber-stalking me?" he teased.
"No! Not at all!"
"Are those pictures of me in Bora Bora? In swim trunks?"
"That's a pop-up." Quorra closed the window. "Anyway, you know they're making a new Tron, right?"
"Oh, yeah, the new Tron game. Alan mentioned it to me. Supposed to be good. Great graphics, cool band doing the music, they even got some chick from The OC to play the heroine."
"Mischa Barton?"
"That's her. I'm looking forward to it."
"I don't know, the hero seems really generic. Doesn't every video game hero want revenge for his dead family? At least he doesn't have daddy issues. How lame would that be?"
"And you would prefer?"
"Why can't Tron come back? The game's named after him, isn't it?"
"The game has changed," Sam fired back. "What were we talking about again?"
"Brokeback Mountain."
Crap! "No, after that."
"Oh, fandom. You know a lot of people were fans of the original game, and some of them got together and started writing stories about the game. And many of those fans are very passionate about social justice. They wanted a transgendered, queer-identified, racial minority in the hero role."
"Yeah, we were going to go in that direction. Then we stopped laughing."
Quorra crossed her arms huffily. "You're nothing like you're written."
"Whoa, I have fanfics?" Sam leaned over her shoulder. "Let me see."
"Not many. It's called Real Person Fiction. Some people noticed how… cinematic you were, with the extreme sports and the corporate sabotage and the animal rescue, and they started incorporating you into their stories."
Sam looked at the fic headers. "Hey, what does 'Sam/Alan' mean?"
"Same thing an X would mean between your names."
"And what would Sam X Alan mean?"
"I think his name would come first, since he's the top."
"Okay, either you're reading a story where Alan's a shirt or a story where him and me are an item."
"Actually, both. It's anthrofic. Tron fandom is so cracky!"
Sam backed away slowly. "Are you seriously telling me there are people who think me and my godfather are gay for each other?"
"They don't really think that—for the most part. They just like to speculate about it. Sometimes in song! Would you like to hear your flik?"
Sam circled around to sit on the desk, where he couldn't see the laptop's screen. "Why would anyone think Alan and I are having sex? Is it because I tweeted I'd go gay for Nathan Fillion? That's it, isn't it? It's not my fault, he's an amazing actor, and he seems like a very tender lover."
"This has nothing to do with Nathan Fillion. You and Alan just seem really close. In interviews, you're always talking about how supportive he is and he's always talking about how smart you are…"
"The interviews!" Sam cursed. "I knew nothing good could come of wearing a tie."
"Plus, you do some major eye fucking."
"Eye fucking?"
"You know, this." Quorra locked eyes with him and squinted slightly.
"That's called eye contact. People do it when they talk. Even straight people."
"The paparazzi photographed you hugging."
"That was a bro-grab and you know it!" Sam calmed down and stood, tugging at his bowtie. "At least tell me the stories aren't weird."
"Weird?"
"You know, I'm a talking cat-person and Alan is a tentacle monster and Frodo Baggins watches us make-out."
"Oh, no, no tentacles. Usually just fics where you play boss and secretary. In one, I play yenta and give you the idea."
"Wait, you're in these stories?"
"Oh, yes." Quorra spun the laptop to face him. Sam was afraid to look. "A lot of the storytelling is based off candid photos, and since I'm in the photos, people put me in their stories."
"A-ha!" Sam jabbed a finger at her. "How do you like it?!"
"I don't like it very much. A lot of people are nice, but some of them think I'm getting in the way of their OTP and they don't realize how hurtful they're being."
Sam's bemusement did a U-turn into concern for Quorra. "OTP? What's a… never mind. What do you mean hurtful?"
Quorra clicked a link. Sam read. It was a repost from one of those TMZ wannabes, "candids" of a few days ago when Sam had taken Quorra to the skate park to show her how to ollie. She'd been enthused. The comments weren't. What does he see in this basic bitch? Does she even know how to color-coordinate? She looks like she's auditioning to play the first female Doctor Who.
"I thought that scarf went with that fedora." Quorra cursed.
"They can't talk about you like this!"
"There are a few Constitutional amendments that say they can. Sometimes I wish I could quarter troops at their homes, though…"
Sam was reading on, his face growing darker by the second. "It's like they think you're this gold digger trying to drive me and Alan apart! What the hell's wrong with them?"
"Well, a lot of them are still pretty broken up by Heath Ledger's death."
"Wh… the Joker?"
"He was an American hero, Sam."
"That doesn't give them the right to insult you, Quorra. Nothing could give them the right to insult you."
"I know that. Sam, I don't care what they say about me. I know they're wrong. But thanks for trying to stick up for me. Like the poet said, you help keep the haters from getting me off my grind."
"Uh… anytime. Now, when's Transformers playing?"
As Quorra looked it up (she still had an iffy grasp on real-world physics, story structure, and basic human psychology, so she was pretty much the target audience), Sam thought about her online "friends." Trying to stick up for her, eh?
***
"That was the best movie ever!" Quorra cheered as they left the theater.
"Even better than Eragon?"
"Much! The romance was so touching. She got in the car with him, Sam. She got in the car."
A camera flash tickled the corner of Sam's eye. Either they'd caught the attention of the paparazzi or he was standing in the way of a very photogenic building.
"Optimus Prime was cute, though. I don't know if I'd date Shia if he were on the menu." Before she could continue Hot or Notting the Autobots, Sam pulled her to his chest (which in this context, he couldn't help but think of as manly) and kissed her. He gave the tongue action a good three-Mississippi count, and when he pulled away. Quorra had that little breathy face rom-com characters got when it wasn't just a kiss. The one where their eyes stayed shut maybe five-seconds post-kiss, like they were mentally doing an instant replay of the liplock. "That… that computed, Sam. That really, really computed."
"Yeah." Sam discreetly nodded to the photographer. "Wonder what my fanclub will think of that?"
For a moment, Quorra's eyes flicked from Sam to the snapping camera like a racketball at either a racketball game or a very confused baseball game. "You did that… for the lulz?"
Great, Quorra was getting started on another of her tangents. Sam gritted his teeth in frustration. "No, I'm letting them know that you're my girlfriend and if they mess with you, they're messing with me."
"I can take care of myself, Sam."
"Can you now? Because I thought I was supposed to protect you. That's the deal, right?"
"I didn't need protection, Sam! I told you that! You did this because you felt vindictive. You kissed me to hurt people."
The photographer kept snapping away.
"Why are you yelling?" Sam demanded. "I did you a favor!"
"You treated me like a child! As always."
"You act like a child! Throwing out my wardrobe, messing with my laptop… hell, we're still on an all-Twinkie diet! You never think anything through!"
The louder he got, the quieter she got. "I know I'm new at this, Sam, and I have a lot to learn. But it would be a lot easier if you didn't condescend to me and patronize me at every turn."
"When have I ever—"
"Just now. You thought you had to trick me into seeing this movie. You could've just said that you would rather watch it than Brokeback Mountain, but you deceived me and I didn't say anything because I hate saying bad things to you, I hate disagreeing with you, I hate that I'm saying this right now, but I should've said it a long time ago."
"Like when?"
"When you disappeared. I called you and asked where you were, you told me to get eggs in case the ones we had hatched. Storebought eggs can't hatch, Sam. They're not fertilized. Would it be so hard to say you'd be back soon and I shouldn't worry, or that you needed to be alone because you'd lost your father and you didn't know—"
"Would you shut the hell up, for once, for once in your life!?" As soon as he'd said it, Sam realized he was breathing hard, that his face was red, that he hated himself.
Quorra's voice was a whisper. "Since when do you yell at me, Sam?"
He made a shrugging motion. "Since now."
"I think we should separate for a while, then. I might be learning too much about humanity."
Sam just stood there, faintly shaking with rage and hate and some of it even for Quorra.
She turned, like she couldn't even look at him, couldn't bear to associate him with this. "Goodbye for now, Sam. Thank you for… before."
And she walked away.
Title: Happy Valentine's Day (now have sex with me)
Fandom: Tron
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,147
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Quorra,
Previous: Dear Cosmo Magazine
Next: Happy Birthday, Kevin Flynn.
Summary: Why Brokeback Mountain isn't a good date movie.
"Do you know what day it is?" Quorra asked across the breakfast table.
Sam looked at the date on his newspaper. "February 14."
Quorra saw how it was. She played it cool. "Did you know there is a holiday that falls on February 14?"
Sam didn't lower his paper. "Is it Armenian Pride Day? Because every day feels like Armenian Pride Day, know what I mean?"
Quorra peeked down from over his newspaper. She had mounted the table. "It's Valentine's Day! Celebrating the day St. Valentine stopped the Loveless demon from ending romance!"
"I think you may have this confused with some other holiday."
"That's how it happened on Xena." Quorra sprawled out on the table, hips narrowly avoiding the napkin holders. Facing him with her chin in her hands, she looked like Sam's personal pin-up. "So, what are we gonna do? Ironically break-up and then get back together when we realize how much we mean to each other? Learn the true meaning of the holiday from a musically-inclined magical being? Watch our peers be picked off one by one by a masked killer who's really a classmate you thought you killed in a prank gone wrong but he survived with horrific scars?"
"You have a lot to learn about how we celebrate holidays. Generally, it's with heated family arguments and awkward revelations about our sexuality."
Quorra pulled down the paper. Now her face was inches from his. "And what would you like to reveal about your sexuality?"
Before Sam could get into his complicated feelings about whipped cream as an article of clothing, the doorbell rang.
"Could you get that please?"
Quorra kept her eyes on him, like a dog with a treat, as she got down from the table. It was… creepily endearing?
Sam picked up the Finance section. Encom stock was still going down, but it was course-correcting, plateauing. Soon, there'd be an upturn. There had to be.
An EEEEE sound so enthusiastic it was nearly ultrasonic coursed out from the living room. Quorra flounced back into the kitchen, holding a bouquet of roses in one arm, a box of chocolates in the other, and a Valentine's card in her teeth. "Mmph mmf mm!"
"Who's Timmy, and what well?" Sam replied.
Quorra laid the deliveries out on the table. "Someone sent me a Valentine!"
Sam casually folded his paper. "Does it say who it's from?"
"I bet it's a handsome prince! I bet he saw me once and fell in love from afar! I bet he's going to build me a palace, like the Taj Mahal! It was built by Shah Jahan in 1632, after the death of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal…"
"Quorra, I sent it."
Quorra couldn't contain her smile for a hot second. "I punk'd you!"
Sam slapped his forehead. "No! How could I get punk'd by a girl who doesn't even know about buttfors?"
"What's a buttfor?"
"For pooping, duh." Sam picked up his paper and turned to the funnies. "Reversal. C-C-C-Combobreaker."
Quorra thought furiously for a few moments then conceded gratefully. "My combo was broken." She brightened on a dime, tearing the box open like a kid at Christmas and popping a chocolate-covered cherry into her mouth. "Oh my dot com, this must be what an orgasm feels like!"
"There should be more tissues and shame."
Quorra looked at him like she'd forgotten Sam was there. "You've gotta try this!" And before Sam could say yes, she was surging across the table to slide a chocolate into his mouth. Only her finger went in too, just past his lips, maybe to keep him from spitting the candy out. His mind crossed some wires and he went "mmm, chocolate" when he should've been going "no, Quorra's finger." There was sucking. Quorra tasted like how medicine was supposed to taste, when you were young and mistook it for candy. She closed her eyes and looked like she was revising her opinion on what orgasms felt like. Sam didn't flatter himself. It was just that she was new at physical stimuli. She'd probably feel the same way about popping bubble-wrap.
She came to when Sam pulled his mouth away. "I'm sorry, was that erotic?"
Sam nearly choked on the candy saying "Little bit."
"And that's bad because we might be tempted to give in to our perfectly natural biological urges?"
Sam's mouth was full, so he just nodded.
"And that's bad because—"
Sam needed a way to stop people from wanting to have sex, fast. He swallowed. "We should go see a romantic comedy."
"Yes, that's a great idea! Almost as good as having sex!"
She was on to him. "Come with me. I wanna show you something. Bring the flowers."
"Alright, but they have thorns, so it could be painful if you—"
Sam loudly opened the window he'd walked to. Outside was the planter he'd installed while Quorra was asleep. "I know you already have a garden on the roof, but this way you can look at your roses every day and not worry about them dying." He knew how Quorra got. If she were worked up enough, she would probably genetically engineer a super-rose, and the Earth would be overrun by romantic, sweet-smelling death.
He leaned next to the window. "So, whaddya think?"
Quorra turned him to face her, took a few steps back for a running start, then leapt into his arms for one of those anime character hugs. "I'm so glad you're the one teaching me about humanity, because you must be the best it has to offer."
"No, I'm not. Trust me, a lot of the time I don't even recycle… you can get down now."
"Spin me. You're supposed to spin me around when I do this."
Mustering all his upper body strength, Sam gave her a spin. Quorra clung to him and laughed and dropped away when he was done. Her smile was so uncontainable she was embarrassed by it, so she turned to peel away the topsoil from the planter and begin rooting her flowers.
"Sam, when we were talking about orgasms earlier, that was a joke you made about masturbation, right?"
Quorra was the first girl his humor was too subtle for. "Uh-huh."
"You don't do that because of me, right? I mean, the shame…"
"No, Quorra, I haven't lately… we've been sleeping in the same room… before, I mean. When I didn't have a girlfriend."
"Why didn't you have a girlfriend? You're nice and when I look at you, I want to be your girlfriend."
"I've had girlfriends, it's just… none of them were right for me."
"What was wrong with them?"
Sam stuck his hands in his pockets to keep from gesturing. Conversations like this made him want to pull his hair out. "I don't know. Nothing. Maybe it was me. My last girlfriend was a first-year psych student. She said I was messed up cuz of my dad leaving. I said if I didn't want to cuddle with her and watch Sex And The City, it wasn't intimacy issues, it was the fact that I have balls."
"But you like cuddling with me. What happened to your balls?"
Sam sighed. "They're in your purse. Let's go watch a chick flick."
***
While Quorra looked up showtimes, Sam splashed on some cologne and changed into a tuxedo his stylist had thrown in on his last makeover. After he made a few James Bond poses in the mirror with Quorra's hairdryer, Sam called "Found anything yet?"
"Yeah, Sam, I've got the perfect show. It has a great cast, it was a box office hit, it even won some Academy Awards."
Sam walked out of the bathroom, pausing in the doorway to adjust his tie, and for Quorra to admire him; when she didn't look up from her laptop he walked over to rub her shoulders. It was kind of gratifying how she melted back to rest her head against his stomach. "So what's the movie?" he asked, interrupting her reverie.
"Brokeback Mountain. It's supposed to be really romantic."
He stopped massaging. "You don't have a second choice?"
She looked upside-down at him. "What's wrong with Brokeback Mountain?"
"Nothing. I've just been prepping myself for Hugh Grant as a sex symbol, not full-on guy-to-guy combat."
Quorra pulled away from his hands to spin her chair around. "Sam, are you a… a homophobe?"
"What? No! For God's sake, I watch Glee!"
"Then why would you not want to watch Brokeback Mountain?" Quorra j'accused, as if she'd just caught him in a lie.
"Listen, Quorra… for guys, gay sex is like spiders mating. We appreciate that it's totally natural and there's nothing wrong with it, we just don't want to know the gory details."
Quorra emitted a shrill note of protest and turned her back on him. "Right now, it wouldn't surprise me if you were perpetuating rape culture."
"Rape culture? Where'd you hear that? Have you been going to college behind my back?"
"No, it's something I learned in fandom," Quorra said proudly.
"What's fandom? Sounds like something you'd buy in Thailand."
"It's not!" Quorra spun her laptop to face him and started calling up websites. "See, I was searching for information about you and Encom online—"
"You've been cyber-stalking me?" he teased.
"No! Not at all!"
"Are those pictures of me in Bora Bora? In swim trunks?"
"That's a pop-up." Quorra closed the window. "Anyway, you know they're making a new Tron, right?"
"Oh, yeah, the new Tron game. Alan mentioned it to me. Supposed to be good. Great graphics, cool band doing the music, they even got some chick from The OC to play the heroine."
"Mischa Barton?"
"That's her. I'm looking forward to it."
"I don't know, the hero seems really generic. Doesn't every video game hero want revenge for his dead family? At least he doesn't have daddy issues. How lame would that be?"
"And you would prefer?"
"Why can't Tron come back? The game's named after him, isn't it?"
"The game has changed," Sam fired back. "What were we talking about again?"
"Brokeback Mountain."
Crap! "No, after that."
"Oh, fandom. You know a lot of people were fans of the original game, and some of them got together and started writing stories about the game. And many of those fans are very passionate about social justice. They wanted a transgendered, queer-identified, racial minority in the hero role."
"Yeah, we were going to go in that direction. Then we stopped laughing."
Quorra crossed her arms huffily. "You're nothing like you're written."
"Whoa, I have fanfics?" Sam leaned over her shoulder. "Let me see."
"Not many. It's called Real Person Fiction. Some people noticed how… cinematic you were, with the extreme sports and the corporate sabotage and the animal rescue, and they started incorporating you into their stories."
Sam looked at the fic headers. "Hey, what does 'Sam/Alan' mean?"
"Same thing an X would mean between your names."
"And what would Sam X Alan mean?"
"I think his name would come first, since he's the top."
"Okay, either you're reading a story where Alan's a shirt or a story where him and me are an item."
"Actually, both. It's anthrofic. Tron fandom is so cracky!"
Sam backed away slowly. "Are you seriously telling me there are people who think me and my godfather are gay for each other?"
"They don't really think that—for the most part. They just like to speculate about it. Sometimes in song! Would you like to hear your flik?"
Sam circled around to sit on the desk, where he couldn't see the laptop's screen. "Why would anyone think Alan and I are having sex? Is it because I tweeted I'd go gay for Nathan Fillion? That's it, isn't it? It's not my fault, he's an amazing actor, and he seems like a very tender lover."
"This has nothing to do with Nathan Fillion. You and Alan just seem really close. In interviews, you're always talking about how supportive he is and he's always talking about how smart you are…"
"The interviews!" Sam cursed. "I knew nothing good could come of wearing a tie."
"Plus, you do some major eye fucking."
"Eye fucking?"
"You know, this." Quorra locked eyes with him and squinted slightly.
"That's called eye contact. People do it when they talk. Even straight people."
"The paparazzi photographed you hugging."
"That was a bro-grab and you know it!" Sam calmed down and stood, tugging at his bowtie. "At least tell me the stories aren't weird."
"Weird?"
"You know, I'm a talking cat-person and Alan is a tentacle monster and Frodo Baggins watches us make-out."
"Oh, no, no tentacles. Usually just fics where you play boss and secretary. In one, I play yenta and give you the idea."
"Wait, you're in these stories?"
"Oh, yes." Quorra spun the laptop to face him. Sam was afraid to look. "A lot of the storytelling is based off candid photos, and since I'm in the photos, people put me in their stories."
"A-ha!" Sam jabbed a finger at her. "How do you like it?!"
"I don't like it very much. A lot of people are nice, but some of them think I'm getting in the way of their OTP and they don't realize how hurtful they're being."
Sam's bemusement did a U-turn into concern for Quorra. "OTP? What's a… never mind. What do you mean hurtful?"
Quorra clicked a link. Sam read. It was a repost from one of those TMZ wannabes, "candids" of a few days ago when Sam had taken Quorra to the skate park to show her how to ollie. She'd been enthused. The comments weren't. What does he see in this basic bitch? Does she even know how to color-coordinate? She looks like she's auditioning to play the first female Doctor Who.
"I thought that scarf went with that fedora." Quorra cursed.
"They can't talk about you like this!"
"There are a few Constitutional amendments that say they can. Sometimes I wish I could quarter troops at their homes, though…"
Sam was reading on, his face growing darker by the second. "It's like they think you're this gold digger trying to drive me and Alan apart! What the hell's wrong with them?"
"Well, a lot of them are still pretty broken up by Heath Ledger's death."
"Wh… the Joker?"
"He was an American hero, Sam."
"That doesn't give them the right to insult you, Quorra. Nothing could give them the right to insult you."
"I know that. Sam, I don't care what they say about me. I know they're wrong. But thanks for trying to stick up for me. Like the poet said, you help keep the haters from getting me off my grind."
"Uh… anytime. Now, when's Transformers playing?"
As Quorra looked it up (she still had an iffy grasp on real-world physics, story structure, and basic human psychology, so she was pretty much the target audience), Sam thought about her online "friends." Trying to stick up for her, eh?
***
"That was the best movie ever!" Quorra cheered as they left the theater.
"Even better than Eragon?"
"Much! The romance was so touching. She got in the car with him, Sam. She got in the car."
A camera flash tickled the corner of Sam's eye. Either they'd caught the attention of the paparazzi or he was standing in the way of a very photogenic building.
"Optimus Prime was cute, though. I don't know if I'd date Shia if he were on the menu." Before she could continue Hot or Notting the Autobots, Sam pulled her to his chest (which in this context, he couldn't help but think of as manly) and kissed her. He gave the tongue action a good three-Mississippi count, and when he pulled away. Quorra had that little breathy face rom-com characters got when it wasn't just a kiss. The one where their eyes stayed shut maybe five-seconds post-kiss, like they were mentally doing an instant replay of the liplock. "That… that computed, Sam. That really, really computed."
"Yeah." Sam discreetly nodded to the photographer. "Wonder what my fanclub will think of that?"
For a moment, Quorra's eyes flicked from Sam to the snapping camera like a racketball at either a racketball game or a very confused baseball game. "You did that… for the lulz?"
Great, Quorra was getting started on another of her tangents. Sam gritted his teeth in frustration. "No, I'm letting them know that you're my girlfriend and if they mess with you, they're messing with me."
"I can take care of myself, Sam."
"Can you now? Because I thought I was supposed to protect you. That's the deal, right?"
"I didn't need protection, Sam! I told you that! You did this because you felt vindictive. You kissed me to hurt people."
The photographer kept snapping away.
"Why are you yelling?" Sam demanded. "I did you a favor!"
"You treated me like a child! As always."
"You act like a child! Throwing out my wardrobe, messing with my laptop… hell, we're still on an all-Twinkie diet! You never think anything through!"
The louder he got, the quieter she got. "I know I'm new at this, Sam, and I have a lot to learn. But it would be a lot easier if you didn't condescend to me and patronize me at every turn."
"When have I ever—"
"Just now. You thought you had to trick me into seeing this movie. You could've just said that you would rather watch it than Brokeback Mountain, but you deceived me and I didn't say anything because I hate saying bad things to you, I hate disagreeing with you, I hate that I'm saying this right now, but I should've said it a long time ago."
"Like when?"
"When you disappeared. I called you and asked where you were, you told me to get eggs in case the ones we had hatched. Storebought eggs can't hatch, Sam. They're not fertilized. Would it be so hard to say you'd be back soon and I shouldn't worry, or that you needed to be alone because you'd lost your father and you didn't know—"
"Would you shut the hell up, for once, for once in your life!?" As soon as he'd said it, Sam realized he was breathing hard, that his face was red, that he hated himself.
Quorra's voice was a whisper. "Since when do you yell at me, Sam?"
He made a shrugging motion. "Since now."
"I think we should separate for a while, then. I might be learning too much about humanity."
Sam just stood there, faintly shaking with rage and hate and some of it even for Quorra.
She turned, like she couldn't even look at him, couldn't bear to associate him with this. "Goodbye for now, Sam. Thank you for… before."
And she walked away.
