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Living your whole life in a competition show did things to you, Fan found. Well, everyone really. Knowing you, quite literally, never got a chance to live outside of it, never learning to grow without conflict. Shimmers- he should know. Not that he had things worse!! So many had things worse.
Late nights on Tumblr, itching to open the Inanimate Insanity tag, would never be mentioned in the morning. Even if Paintbrush would grumble at 2 am about the screen light. They understood. A nod of understanding, and an offer to watch desperate housewives.
(Fan could never quite understand how they could deal with him.)
It almost seemed like everyone just moved on. He knew, he knew they didn't. Taco was often seen wandering around at night, Marshmallow and Knife still couldn't talk outside of brief conversation. Fan never quite got the handle on conversation himself, he’d admit. Thanks, Mephone.
He missed his features. Pre-prepared conversation, that he could end whenever he wanted. A show. His comfort zone, a friend behind the camera and (hopefully) a future one next to him. A familiar topic, a shared history he already memorized. OJ would complain, he’d stare into the mirror thinking over every mistake he made on screen, plan more questions, and start again next episode. He hadn't missed II’s lack of routine. He had missed talking to people.
Fan had never quite been able to put into words how much he appreciated Test Tube for letting him hang around her lab, talking for hours about the science behind peanut butter, thinking about upgrades for Bot, having him pass supplies in exchange for a purpose.
(He didn't have much of one outside of the show, did he?)
Bot passed through often, for maintenance and conversation. The days they passed through at the same time as Lightbulb were fun, if overwhelming. Helped him forget.
Sometimes he wondered if there was more for him, if he chose to leave. Not like he could've (what even is a job application..), but he wondered. Would he even be able to interact with people? What if they figured he was (inherently) wrong? Wrong in a way he could almost figure out, put his finger on, but never quite. Nothing he could ever fix. Watching sunsets over the water helped. Sometimes he would be found half asleep on the coast, hours after dark, just to be either woken up or carried back (he was a fan, after all.) It never quite scratched the itch the show left, but it dulled it. There wasn't reception by the water anyways.
He tried not to feel useless, or like a reminder. It definitely didn't help that he was unemployed, even if the only options were living AC or line cook. (Fan was never a “fan” of omelettes, cooking them or otherwise.) He considered setting up a news channel of sorts, merge his love of TV with something actually productive. It never went through, besides, everyone else was tired of the camera. Game show or otherwise. Reminders, reminders, Fan, the one who couldn't let go.
He tried, is trying. He doesn't want to stop. Stopping meant giving in to that buzzing in the back of his head. Leaving his friends behind, losing all that growth the show taught him to love. Character development, he called it. He still likes the term. ‘Character’. He has ‘character'. He's a person. He was outside of a show. A doodle a child made. But letting go meant losing what made him, him. The worst balancing act ever. One expected of the whole island. One everyone seemed so good at, until he looked closer.
Things needed to change again. He knew. Everyone knew. Everyone was so tired of change. He was tired of change. He was also worried. Worried seeing Test Tube overwork herself till small cracks appeared in her glass, bent over a workbench, asleep for the first time in days. Worried seeing Paintbrush flinch every time Lightbulb tripped, throwing themself into work to keep everyone they hold dear alive, almost excessively. Shoving everything down so as to not catch fire. (Fan understood. No conversations were had at first, just a hand on a shoulder and a punching bag in an empty room. That talk would be had when they broke down crying instead of yelling.) He worried, every time he saw Lightbulb drop her smile the second he was out of sight, every time she avoided a question in favor of confusion.
Something needed to change, again again again. Something had to be more than this. More than the work he knew was getting to everyone else, that already got to him. A system no one on the island was built for, but couldn't bear to admit. No one knew what they were doing! (Fan a little less than others.) But that was fine! Maybe not fine but they could be ok. Maybe. Hopefully. TV didn't prepare him for calculating tax.
(TV didn't prepare him for a lot of things really. He misses his question cards.)
(He misses a lot of things, really. He shouldn't. He does.)
(Is it possible to miss a life that technically never happened?)
(He shouldn't think about this.)
He’d talked about it before, with Test Tube. He wasn't the only one who noticed, who saw the way newcomers seemed disappointed. Who saw the cracks. Maybe it was a matter of time before someone said something, he just hoped he wouldn't have to say it alone.