I was so distracted that even easy feeder teams were giving me a run for my money. Constantly checking statistics instead ofactuallyplaying the game.
Was it really a surprise? No. Me and pressure didn’t exactly get along smoothly. I was always the type of guy who got sweaty palms if a deadline was too tight. Or if my workload was too high.
A corporate job? Absolutely fuck that. Those annual performance meetings turned my guts into jelly more than once.
Usually, being a pro player meant a normal amount of stress. Sure, I needed to make sure I hit a certain rank every season to keep my sponsorships, but viewership had never been an issue for me.
It was hard work, of course, but it wasn’t like I was trying to cure cancer or something.
But right now?
Yeah, the pressure waspressuring,baby.
I’dfinallyranked high enough on Streamverse to be invited to some of the bigger cons as a creator, and just last week made it onto the highly coveted Discover page—making my average viewership jump from a couple thousand per stream to almost 10k.
It was everything I wanted, but that didn’t mean that it didn’t come with a whole new set of nerves, especially when a lot of people came to watch me play well.
And, with Tara accidentally spilling the beans on stream last night… I had a whole new problem. One that my mods were doing a damn good job of dealing with, but fuck me if it wasn’t a bit annoying.
Couldn’t people just mind their business?
Tracker4354: wow they’re playing like trash
syndicate_D: prob sucking without their healer and tank
redbull_graveyard: too busy thinking about how tara’s fckin herself rn ig
“Wow you guys are brutal tonight,” I said in my normal, upbeat streamer voice, but they weren’t wrong. Not only was my girlfriend and my team’s tank, Tara, not here to play with, but Charlie, my best friend and our healer, wasn’t either.
Charlie had been my best friend since he’d told off Zach Wein’s in the fourth grade for taking the last cherry Jello out of my hand in elementary school. Never mind that I liked lime just as much, it was just cool to have someone as soft-spoken as Charlie defend me. From that moment, we’ve always done everything together. Swim team and basketball. A disastrous stint in a school play. Getting our licenses… even if it took me three tries to actually pass the stupid fucking exam.
Who needed to know how to parallel parkthatwell?
Sure, like most friendships, there were lulls—like when Charlie got into his dream school and I didn’t. I’d pushed him to leave me behind and go chase his education. With only work to occupy me, I’d started streaming, mostly so I’d have people to talk to, and it didn’t take long before I was leaving my job dishwashing at the local pub and playing video games full time.
But, in the beginning? There were a lot of times when Charlie was my only viewer. He still watches most of the time, even when he doesn’t play, so him not being in chat tonight was a bummer.
He’d been busy as fuck with school for a while, but once he’d dropped out of college and sold his startup, he’d had enough free time to actually start playing games instead of just watching. At first, he’d been so terrible that he spent more time waiting to respawn than he did playing.
Charlie fell into the typical alpha trap of needing to be the biggest, baddest of the characters on the field. But he was the worst tank of all time, not quick enough to do real damage and not agile enough to be a shield. It wasn’t until we found his real strength—healing—that he really started enjoying himself.
And, even better for both of us, he got damngood.
So good that I invited him to play with me on stream. He was nervous at first, but I knew he’d settle in and adapt. But more than that? Charlie was charming as hell when he wasn’t being self-conscious. And I figured that hiding behind an avatar was the perfect way to get the shy alpha out of his shell. I was right, obviously, Charlie kicked ass in game and over the voice chat every time. My viewers loved him as much as I did, and that was a huge relief. Watching them build up his confidence and creating a whole stream lore around him. There was even a Charlie-themed emoji set that they used when he was on.
Tara and I met during a match. She was solo queuing to be paired with random teams and we were a man down.
She liked to joke it was ‘fate’. I usually told her it was an algorithmic coincidence.
One version was more romantic than the other… and likely more probable.
It was a little weird finding another streamer in the wild, but she was… amazing. Her ability to wipe out competitors was unmatched. She made Charlie’s pathetic attempts at playing a tank look like someone stumbling around blind.
It didn’t take long until we were regulars on each other's channels, and eventually, streams turned into texting, which turned into phone calls, and then dates.
Slowly, and then all at once, we were more than just teammates—she was easily, without a doubt in my mind, the love of my life.
Though our pairing was generally considered a little unusual, with her being an unbonded omega, it was something I’d just come to accept. We were each other’s pack, no alpha needed.
