Work Text:
He logs into Campfire with an exhausted sigh. Crowley was being...himself, and Cas had wandered in with sixteen more of his angel friends at lunchtime. They were going to run out of flannel before much longer. Basically, nothing was going right. At all. He whined to chat about the situation-
batman:...and I tried to bake :pie: but it burned. :(
batman: no :pie:? AHHH THE INJUSTICE
SailorSol: Consolation :cookie:s?
melannen: The day we get a user who chooses that :cookie: as an emoji, I think we'll have widespread revolt.
teaboy: At least we'll always have :tea:?
Dean pulled up his wrangling page and swore loudly.
batman: More than 400 new freeforms in Trek. *headdesk* I was only gone for a weekend!
teaboy: They might've had an orgy with Sherlock; my bins are overflowing as well. Those new cumberbatch GIFs hit tumblr Friday night.
troutymouth: Man, you guys get all the excitement. DC's actually been slow this month. And I even have free wrangling time, too!
SailorSol: Won't last long after the new movie.
He clicked back to the other tag, checking his other fandoms. All his music RPF ones were decently tidy, but he fished a cluster of tags out of his Greek Mythology and sent them to Abrahamic Religions with as short a comment as he could manage. Not that he was avoiding them, but...okay, he'd pissed off the Christian Lore wrangler by stealth-correcting spelling on a shit ton of demon names as a baby wrangler, and the rest of them by interjecting comments into their Calling All Angels convention without being able to back them up with Resources, so now he just treads very carefully around the whole team. Even though he was now probably more qualified than all four of them put together to wrangle angel names, sheesh.
He cranked up his music and started sorting through tags, getting into the groove so much he didn't notice Becky sneaking up behind him.
"You're a wrangler, Dean! Oh, this is so exciting! You have to join the Supernatural team; you're the most qualified of anyone!" She squealed and pulled up a chair with a screech. "Oh, my gosh, I can't believe it."
Dean growled. "No, okay? I'm not going to wrangle tags for Supernatural, 'cause that requires actually reading porn about poorly-characterized versions of myself. And you better not tell anyone- not about the wrangling, or the nerd factor, or anything else you learn about me, got it?"
"Oh, of course not! OTW code of honor, dude. But, hey, you're in chat, right? Can I just - pop in and say hi?"
Dean sighed but spun the laptop around her way.
batman: samlicker leaning over batman's shoulder, here. HI EVERYONE. ALSO :crown:, if you're on, can we move the SPN conclave meeting to tomorrow night? I've got a thing.
goodtobequeen: :tongue:, I was just going to ask you that! Sounds good- I asked the others earlier.
batman: OKAY it's me again, :tongue: is going to use HER OWN COMPUTER now. Also, give me my beer back, you crazy person.
teaboy: Trek manageable again?
batman: Almost caught up, yeah. Did you read that one crossover? With all the crazy freeforms?
teaboy: *fans self* Almost reminded me of this one time, with J- well, let's just say that's not a discussion for Campfire, yeah?
batman: *snickers* one day I'm going to get that story out of you, :tea:boy, and no amount of welsh voweling is goign to save you
teaboy: Even if it weren't classified, I'm not going to say how J and I got together until you make a move on ur sweetheart
batman: Hey, I'm working on it! We talked about personal shit for like a whole hour yesterday. It's just...
batman: i'm not out at work yet. Or anywhere irl, really.
batman: so i'm kinda freaked out, not just of his reaction, but how everyone else is going to take it. plus work's a shitstorm atm, so we're both super stressed
teaboy: well, if you need arse kicking and/or virtual :beer: and shoulders to cry on, you know where to find us.
goodtobequeen: Yep, with swords and chocolate as necessary.
goodtobequeen: and sorry boys, but...do you know what ABAO could stand for?
goodtobequeen: google is no help at all
Dean helped out Charlie (and mentally cursed whoever invented A/B/O 'verse) and finished up his wrangling backlog. Most of his lit fandoms were (thankfully) slow, but an author had just imported all of her Dr. Sexy fics, so he wrangled all those tags.
Then read all the fic, shut up.
He'd lurked sporadically in fandom after meeting Becky. One of the big Supernatural writers he'd stumbled across during that shitstorm also wrote tons of Trek fic, and he was a sucker for a good Kirk/Spock. Since they had limited trunk space for books but Sam could always find wifi, it was cheaper and easier than finding new books to haul across the country. After Purgatory, he signed up to wrangle because he wanted to do something to give back.
Plus...he liked fandom. He liked that he could be just...batman, 'call me Dean' in emails and water cooler, no history or deals or apocalypsi. He could be a mechanic who read Homer and Trek novels and watched Dr. Sexy religiously, and he could be bi with a crush on a 'coworker' and no one gave a shit. (Except teasing him about making a move, but he deserved that after getting drunk and emoting all over them two months back). He could be a history nerd and have people respect him for it- he had a wiki page! He was part of the mythology enclave! He translated latin for other fandoms!
Even if Becky was going to tease him relentlessly about this, it was worth it, because that was one more person in real life that he could be honest with - and that was one step closer to being content with life. Because he was a wrangler, and life was good.
Even if there was no :pie: in Campfire.
EPILOGUE:
It was all rather confusing. He knew he died on Downey Street, with the 456, but then his consciousness woke up as...part of a fanfiction archive. Still, he was an archivist, so he kept it running as best as he could.
He knew some drafts went missing, sometimes, and the use counts were always borked, no matter what he tried. It was just...beyond his control. He was an inanimate spirit, and he excelled at filing, not fixing borked code. But he paitiently Raked up the unused tags every night, and scooted some things into bins when the wranglers got behind.
Posted porny fic anonymously in as many fandoms as he could handle, with messages encoded for Jack. Just in case. Flirted half-heartedly with the Wrangulator, but she was in love with one of the wranglers. And made friends in Campfire, because he had to get human interaction somehow and there just was not that much social scene on the internal wiki; there just wasn't.
He was Ianto Jones, teaboy reluctantly, Archivist of Torchwood, but now he was Ianto Jones, :teaboy: proudly, Archivist of The AO3, and as afterlives went? It was pretty damn amazing.