Chapter Text
She's not sure how it started really, Helena had been telling stories ever since she had learned how to talk, she started writing them down as soon as she could write. Her earliest works included a fascinating story about the moth she had found in her room, courtesy of the scared six year old's mind, and a lovely little anecdote on the neighbor's new cat and it's supernatural abilities. Of course, those were the stories she kept to herself, not wanting anyone to find them. Instead she had kept them in the little pink diary she kept, a golden lock at the side, that only she had the key to, with tiny, colorfully contoured glow in the dark mouse stickers covering it. As much as she disliked the fact that it was pink, not that there was anything wrong with pink, but her favorite color was yellow and the book was yet another reminder of the fact that her mother just didn't seem to know anything about her daughter at all.
So, the writing started with dancing mice and barely discernable scribbled letters, continued into the next diary, this one featuring horses, as if she wasn't deathly afraid of those gigantic hooved creatures and from then onwards she decided that she would just save up her allowence to buy her own books to write in.
Her first purchase as a seven year old had been a bright yellow notebook with tiny bees on it and while it wasn't perfectly what she had wanted, it did the job and she liked it better than the other ones. Even though she did have a soft spot for the dancing mice, those had significantly improved her mood about the pink situation. She had wanted to get a red one with robots on it, but the woman at the store had talked her out of it, asking her if she really wanted to buy that boy notebook with the little money she had. She really did want it, not quite understanding why it apparently was a boy notebook, since it was red and red was close enough to pink to be girly, right? Still, she had let the lady get to her, not wanting to start a fight about how stupid that was and got the pretty yellow one with the bees. She loved yellow, and she did like bees, but robots were awesome and next time around she would get the robot one, she was sure of it.
She kept writing, burning through notebooks at an incredible pace. By the time she was ten she had to invent reasons for the lady at the store, who was growing more and more incredulous at how fast she kept coming back. Instead of telling her the truth she invented a friend, Charles, who she got some notebooks for. It was a rather convenient white lie, after that one she was able to buy the notebooks she wanted without the weird looks and questions. She bought a book with a bunch of drawn powertools and wrenches on it? It was for Charles, because he just loved that kind of stuff. She got the steely grey notebook with spiders all over it, Charles was super fascinated by creepy crawleys. It got to the point where the lady at the store ordered new kinds of notebooks, designed that she thought Charles might like. Helena enjoyed them very much, so Charles did, too. He sent his regards, after a particularly nice selection came in. It got to a point where the little white lie had turned into something a little more.
There was little to no reason to enjoy middle school, helena concluded roughly after the first week in the new school. The gym always smelled, the seniors were mean and being the shortest kid in her grade did not help at all. The only good thing middle school brought was the discovery of youtube stories. One of her classmates had been watching a story on her personal computer the other day, when Helena had brought over work for her because she had missed class that day. It had been an accident and her classmate was none the wiser, but Helena was fascinated. There was a place where people could write stories and others would read it, anonymously. She loved it, she wanted to be part of it. She created a Youtube account with a fake email address the same evening.
She was careful with the videos she posted. She didn't include any personal things, strictly keeping it to writing and sharing her stories with others. It took some time until she started understanding what other people liked, how she should name her stories so others found them and how long it took to actually create a video in the first place (the answers were romance, something including mystery and horror, and way longer than it took to write the story). She started searching for other people's stories too now, realizing that people hated not knowing the caracters. Instead they just wrote their stories with characters everyone knew. Characters from movies, from television shows, some even about real celebrities (she didn't really like those, it felt kind of invasive to her). She started watching movies, popular television shows, really anything she could get her hands on without anyone noticing. She didn't like the romance, the guy gets girl narrative. Instead she wanted something cool, intriguing, maybe more action than romance, definitely more science than boys. The videos took off, she wrote a short story about an astronaut who discovered that she was an alien while she was on a mission to the moon, she wrote a story about a contraption freezing time, she wrote about a laboratory full of hidden mysteries. Her viewers loved it, the audience steadily growing and the need for interaction becoming more and more pressing.
She was fifteen, when she saw that one of her regular commenters had written about being sad that the writer kept their distance, as if they didn't care about their audience. No one even knew the writer's name, the commenter had added, as if the readers meant nothing to him. Him being the author in question. Him being Helena, devastated at the harsh truth that writing alone was not going to satisfy her readers anymore, was not going to uphold the special connection she felt with the little community she had built. It mad sense really, that they all thought her a boy, especially with the contents of her stories, focusing on everything stereotypically associated with boyhood, leaving everyone wondering. Things escalated shortly after that first comment, leading to long comment threads of people discussing her rather than the story, a deeply unssettling development to the teenager that just wanted to keep herself hidden from the world, like she had done for so many years already. In her real life no one other than the lady at the office supply store even knew she wrote, nevertheless that she had managed to build something akin to a fanbase for her stories within the years she had posted on Youtube. After long nights of thinking it through, she decided to give in. She was going to interact more, she felt cut off from her own community and that just wouldn't do. She would interact with them, be more personable. Still, she couldn't even get herself to share her name with them, when they asked. She panicked and her mind went back to that little white lie, years ago. On that day Charles was born, the fiction writer with a fanbase of several hundreds of loyal readers.
There was a new platform around, a lot of her readers talked about how it was so much better there. Pure writing, no shitty videos and copyright claims on music and hours spent on the videoediting when the story was already done. She decided to check it out. It was anonymous, and she could finally concentrate on her writing again, instead of wasting hours in front of the video editing program, growling at the family computer as it was just on the side of too slow. The new site was just what she needed, just how she liked it. It still took several weeks, but by the time that she turned seventeen, the decision was made. Her new pseudonym NotYourRegularDarwin was born out of what she, at the time, thought to be pure wit. Now, at age twentyfive she's not quite as sure about that anymore.