The Fandom Games

Peter

When Snow White cleans, she’s the happiest that Peter has seen her.  She rinses the slime out Legolas’s hair, smooths away the wrinkles in her clothes, scrubs the blood off Leia’s boots.  A pile of paper towels grows, each one half-disintegrated from the filth they’ve accumulated on the quest.  Snow White’s face glows with joy when at last she chucks them into the trash.  Maybe Peter should try actually cleaning something once in a while.

Snow White may have wiped all the slime off Legolas, but it’s left a kind of residue, and the pink colour has tainted his clothes.  The elf’s tunic has lost its ethereal green sheen and darkened to a muddy brown.  His ivory-white bow has been stained a kind of strawberry candyfloss colour.  Legolas glares at it with all the disgust of a boomer watching tiktok.  Pink clearly isn’t his favourite colour.

Peter teases apart two of the boards on the window, and peers through.  It takes a second for his eyes to adjust from the dim coffee house to the blinding daylight.  The street outside is so unbelievably boring that he nearly laughs.  He’d half expected the residents of The One True Reality to live in celestial gold palaces, or to be floating around on robot hoverboards or something.  But this street looks like pretty much every other city street he’s seen in his life.  Huddles of commuters stream across the pavement in a block of black and navy.  A snotty child drags his bored father into a video game store.  Apart from the fact that there isn’t a memorial plaque for a fight with an Avenger and some alien around nearly every corner, this street could slot right into Peter’s New York. 

A girl not too far off Peter’s age is weaving through the pedestrians, careful not to spill a takeaway drink.  She’s wearing blue jeans and impressively winged eyeliner. White headphones are plugged in her ears.  Peter can feel the music vibrate from here.  The girl sits down on a bench right opposite the shut Starbucks and whips out her phone.  The screen glows white and burgundy, and she starts reading.  When she reaches for the drink and turns her head, her eyes meet his.  Peter is staring at the girl.  The girl is staring at Peter staring at her.  He jumps backwards, but his elbow knocks against a wooden board, and it comes crashing down in a cloud of splinters and wood dust.  The girl’s eyes move from Peter’s face to his red suit, to the black spider on his chest.  She cries out, and rushes across the sidewalk, phone and coffee still in hand.

‘Girl,’ Peter shrieks, waving his arms at the others, ‘there’s a girl!’

Leia rolls her eyes at him.  ‘What, you go to an all-boys school or something?’

‘I saw her and she saw me and then I broke the boards and she saw more of me and I think she recognised me because she starting coming towards me.’  Peter’s voice trails off as he runs out of breath.  ‘But what if she’s a… what did Deadpool call them… a fangirl?  And she knows we’re made-up people and we shouldn’t be here?’

As if to answer his question, the door vibrates from being knocked, and a voice calls out, ‘Tom Holland?’

Leia and Legolas duck behind the coffee counter, as if they were hiding behind the barricade in a paint ball game.  Peter expects Snow White will scarper and squeal again, but instead she drags a stool across the floor and takes a seat.  She sings, ‘do you think she’ll join us for tea, and take us to Steven Spielberg if we plea?’

Peter doesn’t know if he should be more shocked that she’s not panicking, or that she has an actually very silly yet sensible suggestion.  Like, if this girl is a fangirl and has already recognised that Spider-Man is a made-up person and is here, then what more damage could it do to ask her some questions?  First of all: is Mr Steven Spielberg’s home address on Google Maps?  Second of all: does this world have Taylor Swift’s new album?

Even before Peter moves towards the door, Legolas says, ‘absolutely not.  I know what you are thinking, and you must stop thinking it.’  Peter starts walking anyway.  He pulls the Spider-Man mask over his head, smoothing out the wrinkles in the material.  ‘Spider-Man,’ the elf barks, ‘get back here!’

Leia pats the counter and calls, ‘Spidey-Boy!  Come here!  Come hide behind the nice gross dusty bar with us.’

Peter tugs the door handle.  The door is ripped clean off its hinges.  Oops.

The fangirl is standing in the doorway, her eyes as wide as onion rings.  She opens her mouth to say something, so Peter grabs her arm and pulls her inside.  She wriggles and protests about how dare he manhandle her, and did he know that she will be charging him for the coffee he spilled because those extra caramel shots are super spenny.  Peter delicately props the door up against its frame.  Hopefully Starbucks can’t sue fictional characters?

Peter lowers his voice to what he hopes is an extremely intimidating growl.  ‘I demand in the name of… err, Starbucks… that you reveal to us the location of Steven Spielberg and leave us detailed instructions of how to get there without a railcard or passport or anything because we don’t have any of those.  Or else, I will… er…’  Peter scans his brain for ideas.  Threatening civilians really doesn’t come naturally to him.  ‘I will drink all your coffee.’ She doesn’t seem especially intimidated by that.  ‘I will break your legs up like an old credit card and lock you in a dungeon until you become a rat buffet,’ Peter tries.

The fangirl stumbles backwards.  ‘Oh my gods.’

Peter feels a pang of guilt.  ‘I mean, I don’t have to… you can pick your own punishment if you like!  I could just confiscate your phone and ground you or something?’

The fangirl isn’t shocked by him.  She’s pointing beyond his head to Legolas and Leia, who really aren’t as well-hidden as they’d thought.  Leia’s cinnamon-roll hair buns are sticking out beyond the till.  The fangirl’s whole arm is trembling.  ‘You’re not old.  And you’re not dead.’

‘You’re not polite,’ Leia notes.  She slides to her feet, brushing dust off her skirt.

She turns her gaze to Peter.  ‘You’re not a twenty-six-year-old man-child midget.  You’ve actually got super-strength.  And you’re’ – she raises her eyebrows at Snow White – ‘kind of a rogue choice, not gonna lie.  And you’re all real.’  She breathes the last word slowly, as if she was savouring some delicious taste.  Her eyes scan the Spider-Man suit.  ‘You’re from the last part of Far From Home, aren’t you?  I’m so sorry.’

Why is it that Peter’s heart is pounding, and his hands are shaking, and his thoughts are all tinged with panic?  Why is it that Spider-Man, who has outsmarted master criminals and fought all-powerful aliens and charged into battle with Avengers, is terrified of a kind of averagey-looking girl with headphones and coffee?  Because the fangirl isn’t flinching from fear or frowning down her nose at him in judgement.  This stranger is smiling at Peter like he’s a childhood friend.  Her eyes bore through the eyes of the mask and through Peter’s skull, as if they could see every thought and hope and memory floating around in there.  A voice at the back of his mind is screaming that this is wrong and unnatural and he needs to run.  Maybe she knows that he’s thinking that, too.

Then Leia breaks into laughter.  Not the warm, you-just-broke-through-my-shell kind of laugh from Star Wars, but the cold, forced laugh of a teacher during assembly.  ‘You actually think we’re -oh!’ She wipes a non-existent tear from her eye.  ‘I suppose these costumes really are good.’  Peter and Legolas pretend to laugh too.  Even Snow White joins in with a kind of squeaky trill.  Altogether, it sounds like the maniacal hyena laugh of Harley Quinn.

Peter can tell from the way Fangirl is wincing that she’s been laughed at before.  Peter would know.  ‘But,’ she stutters, ‘you look exactly like you do in my head.  How I picture you all.’

‘Then you should come to the opening of our musical next month,’ Leia continues, oblivious to how upset Fangirl obviously is, ‘it’s bound to sell out.’

Peter decides not to mention what an obvious copyright minefield it would be to charge money for a play with loads of different fictional characters.

‘A musical?’ Legolas scoffs.  Leia kicks him in the shin.  ‘Ah, yes, a musical.  An unknown villain threatens to rewrite the ending of every story so that the heroes always lose.  Avengers, witches, Jedi, Westerosi, extremely handsome heroes of Middle Earth and some other less important ones must unite to save all fandom.’

Peter chimes in.  ‘It’s called… um…’ He scans the room for ideas.  Whatever Fangirl was reading earlier is still up on her phone.  He catches the words Katniss x Johanna and Hunger Games AU.  ‘It’s called The Fandom Games!’  Peter decides.  ‘Spider-Man has a really bad day then an elf falls out the sky and then there’s a demon clown barbie and a cussing pervert and a tinsel triceratops and loads of stormtroopers with a kind of vague survival rate and an evil vending machine.  And we all need to team up and find a magic Library to save the storyworlds but we don’t do a very good job because we keep arguing and having to run away from scary things instead.’

Leia nods eagerly.  ‘And then increasingly interesting things happen as we go to increasingly interesting storyworlds and then it all goes wrong and then there’s a massive battle at the end.  It’s magnificent.’

Snow White sings, ‘the heroes have to save the Library / or dark forces will pollute it / they hate each other, and in particular me / you’ve met them, you can’t refute it.’

Fangirl’s eyes glaze over, and she looks lost in thought.  If only Peter knew what was going on in her mind.  Finally, she flashes a smile and sips her coffee.  ‘A musical, huh?  Wicked.  Well, vending machines do kill two and a half times more humans than sharks do.  What kind of eras are your characters from, then?  Like is Leia from before A New Hope, or in the golden age of fanfiction after Return of the Jedi, or..’ her voice trails off as she waits for Leia to answer.

‘Er…’ Leia looks at Peter.

‘Have you seen that retconned fluffy scoundress comic where they herd actual nerfs and argue and flirt?’ Peter says.  (Mr Stark once asked him if he knew how to always answer difficult questions with more questions, so Peter asked him how he learned such devious tactics.  Then Mr Stark asked him if anyone had taught him to respect his elders.  Then they’d kept answering questions with more questions for about half an hour until Ms Potts locked them both out the house.  Basically, the lesson stuck.)

A smile flickers onto Fangirl’s face.  ‘Who’s Luke’s father?’  Peter opens his mouth, but Fangirl waggles her finger at him.  ‘Not you.  I know you know.  You’re a proper fanboy with a lego Death Star and everything.  I want Leia to answer.’

Leia’s usual expression of rock-hard determination slips.  She looks completely bewildered for a moment.  ‘Um… didn’t he fight in the Clone Wars?’

‘I knew it,’ Fangirl exclaims, ‘I was right.   There is no way in Hades that a Leia cosplayer wouldn’t know that. Literally every person on this planet knows that.  But Leia doesn’t until Return of the Jedi.  I’m right, aren’t I?’  Her smile is brighter than Times Square at Christmas.  She’s practically glowing from the victory, from the battle being won.  ‘The Force… the Jedi… all of it.  It’s all true, right?  In some weird impossible way?’

Peter doesn’t know what he can say to that.  Peter once asked Dr Strange why he can’t just use their time machines to save all the Avengers who died fighting Thanos, and Dr Strange went on some massive rant about the space-time continuum and multiverses and apocalyptic consequences and dumb stuff like that.  Peter has a feeling that Dr Strange would have similar opinions on fictional characters talking to their fans.  Out the corner of his eye, he sees Leia mouth Run? and Legolas nod.

Fangirl keeps gushing in the way that Peter gushes over trigonometry.  ‘Are you really going on a quest to save all fandom?  Like, there are more of you out there who need saving?  Because I’ll come to.  I’ll help.  I’ll fight.  I’ll die.  Please let me come.  I bet I know things none of you know.’

Legolas, Snow White and Leia are inching towards the door.  Legolas beckons Peter to do the same.

And Peter doesn’t know why he does what he does next.  Maybe it is some deep, innate instinct, like walking on walls or stripping grass or rescuing pigeons.  Or maybe he’s just an idiot.  Either way, he can’t let this golden opportunity slip out the door with them.  The words are flying out his mouth before he really has a chance to pull them back.  ‘Actually, Miss Fangirl, there is something you could do that would really help us.’

Her face lights up.  ‘Anything?’

Peter can practically feel Leia’s eyes burning through the back of his head.  He tries to push the others out his mind.  ‘Do you know what ‘the spikey turtle thing’s castle with the cars whizzing by’ would be?’

Fangirl looks confuzzled for a second, then says, ‘do you mean Bowser’s castle in Mario Kart?  You know, the game?  I don’t know if that’s silly, but it’s the only thing I can think of.’

He pictures the video game store across the street that he saw the sticky child go into.  ‘Amazing.  Now could you walk down the street for about the length of an X-wing?’  Peter slides the broken door out the way.  Fangirl dutifully bounds out the coffee house, and paces backwards for the right distance.  Pedestrians swerve to avoid her and complain, but Fangirl doesn’t give them any of her attention.  Peter smiles.  It’s nice to know that he’s not the only person in the world who knows how long an X-wing is.  Fangirl smiles back at him.

Then Peter bolts out the doorway.  Legolas, Leia and Snow White run after him, calling his name.  Cars swerve and hoot.  Pedestrians scatter and shout.  Some raise phones to film them.  Peter guesses that unlike where he’s from, the people in this boring real world aren’t used to seeing Avengers, elves, Jedi and princess running about the place.  Poor them.  He bursts through a huddle of squawking teenagers like a bowling ball knocking over skittles.  ‘Sorry, random people!’ he yelps.

Fangirl is sprinting back down the street, howling after them, ‘wait!  Please don’t go!  I can help!’  A wave of schoolkids floods the sidewalk.  They point and scream, ‘Spider-Man!  Peter Parker!’    Fangirl is stuck behind the crowd of kids.  She tries to push her way through, but the kids’ feet are glued to the paving.  ‘Spider-Man,’ she wails, ‘please wait.  Spider-Man!’  A little boy is blinking back tears, and mouths at him, ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’  Peter doesn’t have time to figure out what he means.

He pushes through the doors of the video game store.  His friends file in after him.  Shoppers drop their bags and gawp at them, stunned.  Peter rushes to an aisle marked Nintendo and ransacks the shelves, throwing game after game onto the floor until he finds what he needs: a box with cartoon cars and the title Mario Kart.  He grabs it, closes his eyes, and breathes a prayer to whichever God people worship in this world.  When he opens his eyes, the edges of his vision are blurring.  Peter laughs nervously.  He has no idea what he’d have done if that hadn’t worked.

His surroundings are melting into streams of colour.  He can make out the face of a cashier yelling at him, and a brown and silver elfish blob yelling at him even more, then they both dissolve.  Sirens whir in the distance.  ‘Spider-Man,’ Leia calls, ‘Spider-Man, come here!’  All Peter can hear is that name.  His friends are shouting, ‘Spider-Man,’ the other shoppers are shouting, ‘Spider-Man,’ the crowd outside is shouting ‘Spider-Man.’  Fangirl’s voice drifts above the others, crying, ‘Spider-Man,’ then is swallowed up by the others.  The whole earth seems to echo with Spider-Man, and the noise swells until Peter can’t pick out voices anymore, just one continuous Spi-Der-Man-Spi-Der-Man beating along with his heart.

Three hands dig their nails into Peter’s arm.  There’s a skidding noise, of a box being hurled across the room.  Then Peter is falling through darkness, and even though all those people have vanished, Spi-Der-Man-Spi-Der-Man-Spi-Der-Man is still echoing round his head.