Chapter Text
Karl noticed the follow immediately, like he noticed all his followers because he had so little.
"Thank you for the follow Sapnap," he said on autopilot before freezing.
The notification sat on his dashboard without ceremony, tucked between names he recognized from nearly every stream. He leaned closer to the screen, squinting like it might change if he did.
Sapnap followed you.
Karl laughed out loud.
“Wait,” he said immediately, voice sharp in the quiet room. “That’s not funny.”
He waited for chat to react. For someone to spam laughing emotes or admit to messing with him.
Nothing happened.
Karl glanced at the viewer count. Eight. Same as it had been five minutes ago.
“That’s a fake,” he said, still smiling, still casual. “Those accounts are getting scary accurate.”
The smile didn’t stick.
The name stayed where it was. Blue check. Verified. Real in a way that made his stomach flip unpleasantly.
Karl swallowed and clicked back into his game, fingers moving automatically while his thoughts stalled somewhere behind his eyes. His heart had started beating faster, but he refused to acknowledge it.
“Okay,” he said after 30 minutes of aimless gameplay. “I’m actually gonna end stream early tonight. I’m tired.”
He hovered over the button for a second longer than usual before clicking End Stream. The sudden silence felt louder than the chat ever had.
Karl stared at the screen. Then he refreshed. The follow was still there.
“Oh."
He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands over his face. This was nothing. People misclicked all the time. Famous people followed random accounts sometimes. Algorithms did weird things. There were explanations that didn’t require him to spiral.
He closed the browser and for the rest of the night, he tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. That turned out to be easier than he expected.
The next day, his follower count was up by one. He told himself that meant nothing. The follow settled into the background of his awareness, strange but distant, like a word on the tip of his tongue he refused to say out loud.
Streams stayed small. Comfortable. Familiar.
Karl played his games, talked to chat, hummed along to whatever music he had playing. Every now and then his eyes drifted to the follower list without meaning to, just to confirm the name was still there.
It always was and after a while, he stopped checking.
Two weeks passed like that. Then one evening while he was cooking a sad dinner of spaghetti after a long shift at the coffee shop his phone started vibrating.
Not buzzing. Vibrating. Hard enough that it rattled against his kitchen counter.
Karl frowned and picked it up, thumb hovering over the screen as another vibration buzzed through his palm.
“What the hell,” he muttered.
He unlocked it and immediately regretted it.
Notifications stacked faster than he could read them. Mentions. Follows. Messages from people he hadn’t talked to in years. The screen lagged, apps freezing as they tried to load.
“Okay,” Karl said, breath shallow. “Okay, okay.”
Twitter finally opened. The first thing he saw was a clip.
A grocery store aisle. Bright lights. A shaky camera. Him, holding a basket and smiling like he didn’t know he was being filmed.
Karl felt his stomach drop.
“Oh my god,” he whispered.
He scrolled. Replies piled up beneath the clip. Quotes. Screenshots. Threads connecting dots he hadn’t known were visible. His phone buzzed again.
A reply from Tubbo.
Karl stared at the screen, pulse racing. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t supposed to be how people found him, if they even found him at all. He streamed because it was quiet. Because it stayed small.
He dropped his phone onto the table and stood, pacing the length of the room with his hands in his hair.
“This is fine,” he told himself. “This is fine.”
He stopped in front of his PC and looked at OBS, the stream for tonight he had set up earlier stared unblinking back at him.
The follow was still in his notification center.
Sapnap.
Karl let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.
“Of course you are,” he said to no one.
He didn’t know what it meant. Didn’t know if it meant anything at all.
But it was still there.
And somehow, that felt worse.