Chapter Text
It all started with a clip.
A very embarrassing one, at that.
Sasuke had been streaming, exactly as he does nearly every day of the week. A horror game had just come out with tempting promises of exhausting puzzles and, of course, he had to play it.
Things were like they usually are. He went through the puzzles smoothly, rarely getting stuck and piecing the story together with ease as he escaped the game's terrors without much fear beyond his elevated heart rate that tried to keep up with the chase song and its quick beats per minute.
It figures that the one time he would succumb to one of the game's many jump scares would be in the dead silence of a puzzle he was trying to solve. He had been so focused on finding the missing piece to it, his face so close to the screen, that the ghost had caught him unprepared. Her bulging, red eyes, along with the shrill piercing scream that echoed through his bedroom, did it.
It is probably the lowest moment of his career, and no, it isn't drama on his part — he built it using his naturally stoic personality as a foundation, sometimes exaggerating it for the sake of entertainment, and when that foundation is shattered by a shitty horror game with good puzzles, then it's only fair he gets to call it so.
It was hard enough to finish the game without perishing from the mortification he felt, so there was nothing Sasuke could have done to stop the disgrace of the clip from spreading like wildfire through the internet. His chat had erupted into laughter and comments that he ignored for his own sake, and from right then he already knew it would be worse on every other social media.
He is well-aware that the chatters laughing at him were never ill-intentioned, and Sasuke found them funny as well, even though he pretended the incident never happened as he continued the game. The problem actually started after he finished the stream, when he went on Twitter to try to do some damage control but instead found the clip to have burst the bubble of his viewers and gone viral.
Just the thought of having people come to know him because of it sent his stomach tumbling.
The clip was supposed to never have happened in the first place, but since he couldn't do anything about it, he had been hoping it would have at least stayed within the confines of his "fandom" — he loathes calling his community that —, maybe gotten shared around a little, but never to the point of tens of thousands of retweets alone.
Even worse than that; somehow, the ten-second long clip got edited into a ten-minute long compilation video of various content creators suffering from the same game's many jump scares.
And even worse than that; the compilation was sent as a watch recommendation in Uzumaki Naruto's chat.