a 1,000-word bro strider/moot fanfiction

You don’t often see a grown man cry. Perhaps he’s drunk out of his mind and his favorite sports team just lost in heartbreaking fashion. Perhaps he’s watching the end of the chick flick he doesn’t admit to liking and tearing up even though he’s seen it at least a dozen times. Perhaps he’s in a lot of physical pain and he realizes that yes, it is okay to cry if you are in a great deal of pain. Perhaps he’s remembering bittersweet memories. Perhaps these memories have been triggered by a word, or a phrase.

For Bro Strider, that phrase is “Otakon 2005.”

Why? If you ask him, he won’t tell you.  If you mention those words he’ll avert his gaze from your eyes and tense his shoulders. They’re very bittersweet memories indeed. In order to realize why, we can’t ask him.

We have to be him.

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I guess you could call him a celebrity. I wouldn’t call him a celebrity. A lot of people wouldn’t. A bunch of shut-ins do. I don’t. He’s not a celebrity. He’s just another guy. Okay, so he’s not just another guy. He’s the greatest man I ever met. But he’s no celebrity. He’s down to earth. Humble. Kind. Caring. Generous.

You may know him as “moot.” That’s how I knew him at first. His real name is Christopher Poole. He was “moot” to me at first. It was a while before I ever called him Chris. It was a while before he let me. If you don’t know him well, he prefers “moot.” The first time he ever let me call him by his real name, it was Christopher. I said Christopher and it was like goddamned music dancing off of the tip of my tongue. It felt like a privilege because he willed it so. He has that kind of power over a man, though he doesn’t look like it. He’s a fucking masterpiece.

I suppose I should feel privileged that he noticed me. I do. Everyone on 4chan knew who he was. He was the fucking Alpha and Omega. I didn’t post much, not on /b/ at least. I liked not having to reveal who I was, but it bugged me that there was basically no trace of individuality. When I posted, I kept it intelligent. Kept it real. And it caught his attention.

He first e-mailed me back in 2004, when e-mail was actually a preferred method of contacting someone through the internet. Before Facebook and Twitter and all that fucking timesink bullshit. I had posted my e-mail on one of the other boards; I forget which. I said that if you have any sense of perception, you’d know who I was. He knew.

He admitted to me that there was a great amount of inanity on the imageboard he ran, and I was inclined to agree. 4chan was still in its relative infancy at the time, and I could tell that he knew the direction it was taking. He seemed to innately know that it was going to blow up and eventually be out of even his control. It behooves me to say that he’s right. In the years since our fateful meeting, 4chan has morphed into something grotesque. I would pity moot, if he wanted it.

Our interactions escalated quickly and he offhandedly invited me to Otakon, a video game and anime convention in Baltimore. He didn’t know I lived in Texas at the time. He didn’t know I was raising my brother, Dave. There was a lot he didn’t know about me. There was a lot he didn’t need to know about me. But I needed to meet him. For the first time in my life, I felt a vague emptiness in my soul. He shined a light in it—he let me know it was there. And he could do something about it, whether he knew it or not.

In the sweltering summer of 2005, I loaded a weekend’s worth of shit into my car, left Dave with a neighbor, and drove. This was a trip I had to make alone, you see. It’s a hell of a long trip from Houston to Baltimore by car, and it functioned as sort of a batshit spirit journey for me. With Lil Cal buckled into the passenger seat, functioning as my spirit guide, I drove with no map and no sense of direction.

I made it.

According to our correspondence, he would meet me outside his hotel room at 8 in the evening on Thursday. By 7:30, I was standing. Waiting. Bear in mind I had no idea what he looked like. I had no idea if it was actually him, but I believed, and faith is a fucking strong thing. I understood what religion was like now. He was my religion.

Then.

“Hey, man.”

I turned.

“Good to finally meet you.”

He wasn’t an Adonis by any means, but his smile seemed to drug me and his eyes dulled the needle. If it wouldn’t have went against decorum, I would have kissed him right then and there, but I had to make do with talk. I fucking hated talking.

“You too.”

He smiled, unsure where to go next. It dawned on both of us how haphazardly planned this all was.

“Should I call you moot?”

“Yes, please. What do I call you?”

“Bro.”

“Bro. I see.” He serenely opened the door to his hotel room. “I can see you as a brother. Maybe even my brother. Come in.”

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We kissed that night. We kissed before I got to call him Chris. It was months before he let me. Most of our interactions after that night were via the Internet. With he in NYC and me planted in Houston for reasons I couldn’t reveal even to him, it was difficult to keep any semblance of a relationship up. But we managed.

When the meteors came down, I cried for the first time in my whole fucking life.