The Dark Sides of Fandom - Supernatural

She's wearing a black shirt. The season 9 promo shirt. From the right; Sam, Dean, and Castiel stare with a gaze solemn and strong. It's their faces set in this stone that inspires her to carry on. The light in the room is dim; a tablet PC slotted into the mini USB keyboard. It's entirely too warm both from the humidity of the blanket and having hot sunlight's heat trapped in the space during the afternoon, but she doesn't notice even when the sweat is streaming in rivers down her brow. Her face mirrors the Team Free Will expressions; cold, stoic, and hard in the face of challenge.

She can hear her challenge stomping down the tiny hallway.

"Raylan!"

The door to her room slams open and she internally winces when the cute pink teddy bear hanging on her door held by a beaded cord is broken and the teddy is squished under her mother's foot. She'll have to fix that later. She recalls having a spool of cord somewhere, as soon as she finds her glasses and her mother stops calling her stupid, worthless, doomed to die, waste of the education system with her poor grades, and a total waste of 16 years of life, she'll go and re-string the beads (Her mother never got physical, she wouldn't dare. She's a lawyer. She knows the consequences. That, and Raylan was more than willing to go to the police when her father got abusive with her).

Or she can just forget about it and move on. Besides, her mother's probably gonna do this again pretty soon. Raylan doesn't care anymore.

When she's done just nodding her head and giving stone cold answers of "yes", "I understand", and "okay," her mother finally leaves her alone for just a little while longer. When she hears the door click shut, she opens up a new tab. Its at the end of a long line of Fanfiction, AO3, Tumblr, Google, Youtube, and Super-Wiki pages, and her e-mail pops up.

Her inbox is loaded with a ton of messages from various colleges and universities asking for her to be a potential student. She hisses and growls and proceeds to carefully select each one of those annoying e-mails, avoiding all her coupons on fan merchandise and e-receipts for multiple Supernatural conventions. She sees a message from her professor at the nearby community college where she was dually enrolled containing her semester grade. It's an automated message.



Dear Raylan,

Your grade for this semester in your class;
ADMJ57 [INTRODUCTION TO ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE]: A
ADMJ53 [LEGAL ASPECTS OF EVIDENCE]: A

Thank you,
Professor Michael Simmons.



She smiled and recalled good memories of being in the night class, enthusiastically learning about the law that she learned to live on both sides of. Raylan touches the anti-possession tattoo on her chest; a habit picked up from when the tattoo was first etched on her skin during Season 5; when the skin was still tender, itched, and burned. She sat there for a few minutes, feeling the invisible soreness over her tattoo. 

With the pleasant memories of learning what the law truly was, she was about to exit from the e-mail when she spots another e-mail from her friend from the night class. She open and smiles at the bad grammar and text speech.


HEYYYYYY!!!!! miss ya hekka much gurl. Ur a gr8 kid + i wish ya nuthin but da best. so a lil gift from meh! HAVE FUN!!!!!!! da attachment shuld b perf 4 u.



She chuckles when her smile turns lop-sided and begins downloadning the PDF and MP3 file and when they finish, she opens them both. And what she receives, makes tears fall where her mother's harsh words could not.

Downloaded Files:
Las Vegas Supernatural Con Ticket.PDF
Angel with a Shotgun - Cab.MP3

As the song continues on, she realizes that he knows. That everybody in that room with her every Tuesday knew. They knew she's just like Cas, fighting for what she believed in, not caring what her world thought of her, throwing her perfect life and perfect perfect future away just to keep what she loved.

Her fandom was everything. It saved her life when she wanted to end it and somehow, her friends knew. She smiles even brighter with crystal tears streaming down her face and prints out those tickets.




I'm an angel with a shotgun,
fighting until the war's won.
I don't care if heaven won't take me back.
I'll throw away my faith, babe, just to keep you safe.
Don't you know you're everything I have?

--Angel with a Shotgun - Cab