"It's weird when the ones with charm don't want to be rid of me," Sparkle noted, frowning. "Like, I don't know... maybe they're snakes, but it isn't like I have anything to offer them that'd make keeping me around worthwhile."

Except for the ones who waited until he gave them a reason to demand something from him, he supposed. He couldn't wait until he'd gotten that hard drive out of his life, until he was right back to not being beholden to anybody.

"So... what isn't easy? I mean, like, I can't even fucking tell. I'm a chameleon, chameleons don't look at purple and think about how hard it is when they see it. It's just, there, that thing is purple, that's what I gotta be, and then they're fucking purple."

And all of the snakes in Sparkle's life before Fandom had been the flashy kind, the brightly-coloured ones with spikes and spots and rattles that hissed and flared their hoods and made it really frigging clear that they were snakes. They weren't supposed to be chameleons too.