#...even tho if one of my friends told me that I would do it no hesitation fullheartingly | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

celestie0 · 4 months ago

Text

gojo satoru x reader | oneshot smut [18+]

title. around the clock

Hooking up with your little brother’s babysitter? That sounds more like a bad porno than a sensible decision.

ᰔ pairing. babysitter/boxing au - underground boxer & babysitter!gojo x college student!reader (f)

ᰔ summary. when underground boxer gojo satoru becomes a little strapped for cash, he gets a day job as a babysitter for a five-year-old kid named yuuji who most definitely has adhd (but that’s besides the point). the kid’s mom gave gojo two rules, and two rules only: don’t accidentally kill my son, and do not flirt with my daughter. he’s pretty sure he’s got a good hold on the former, but he’s got no self control over the latter.

ᰔ warnings/tags. 18+, fem!reader, smut, casual sex, lil bit of fluff, lil bit of crack, slight age gap (reader’s 22 & gojo’s 27), cum play, creampie, unprotected sex, praise kink, slight degradation, gojo is a sleazebag that cares?, sort of porn-coded smut except there’s a lil bit of lore so it’s kinda porn w plot, uhh having sex with risk of getting caught, gojo beats people up at night & then plays father figure to a 5 y/o during the day, mentions of violence/alcohol/drugs/blood/cigarettes

ᰔ word count. 12.6k

a/n. hiiii friends jeez it feels like FOREVER since i've posted some good ol' smut (still has plot tho xd)...hopefully you enjoy n see ya at the bottom! lmk if i missed any warnings! if you asked to be tagged but didn’t get tagged it’s bc you have your tags off aaa :( even when some ppl tried to fix it i still couldn’t tag them i’m sorry!!

alsoooooo so very much love to @starmapz for beta reading this for me :”) really helped me w my posting nerves haha. she is also a wonderful jjk author pls go check out her works!! 💕 ART CREDITS: @/3-aem

➸ masterlist

2:34 pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): heyy um i’m sorry if this comes off kinda rude i just am kinda bad with this but i was wondering if you could text my mom for questions about yuuji’s care instead of me?

2:46pm Gojo Satoru: Oh 2:46pm Gojo Satoru: Yeah, sure

2:34 pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): sorry i know my mom doesn’t know much ab how to take care of him bc i was the one that took care of him for a while but i just really want to separate myself from that guardian role now that i’ve transferred to NYU yknow? :/ i think it’s not my place anymore. i just wanna be big sis now haha

2:46pm Gojo Satoru: I get it. Sorry if I was making you uncomfortable with my texts

2:48pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): no no not uncomfy by it, thanks for looking after him. it’s just i’m kind of busy n stuff so it can be distracting

2:49pm Gojo Satoru: Ok, got it

2:52pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): and it was kind of an issue with his last babysitter

2:53pm Gojo Satoru: Oh?

2:55pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeahhh like he would keep textinf me n stuff uhh kinda weird things… i told my mom about it and she was super pissed so she fired him

2:55pm Gojo Satoru: Weird things?

2:56pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeah he was always “accidentally sexting me” n like he sent me a dick pic once sooooo yeah

2:56pm Gojo Satoru: Who tf 2:56pm Gojo Satoru: I’ll go beat him up

2:57pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): oh no no its fine lol 2:57pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): please dont beat anyone up 2:58pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): i’m not saying you’re like him tho i just think maybe less texting unless its an emergency okay?

3:00pm Gojo Satoru: Are you sure because I will totally go beat him up for you

3:01pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): NO I DONT WANT YOU TO BEAT ANYONE UP FOR ME 3:01pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): also no offense but you dont look like you could beat someone up

3:01pm Gojo Satoru: WHAT 3:02pm Gojo Satoru: Tf you mean “no offense” that’s literally the most offensive thing you could say to a guy

3:04pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeaa i mean you have muscles ofc but in the ��ohhh i wanna look good for instagram’ way and not like real man muscles yknow

3:06pm Gojo Satoru: Ok princess next time you visit home and go on one of your stupidly large grocery hauls I’ll make sure you carry all those groceries in by yourself

3:06pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): NO 3:07pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): I WAS JUST JOKING 3:07pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): YOURE SO STRONG TY FOR ALWAYS CARRYING THE GROCERIES INSIDE 3:08pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): PLEASE KEEP CARRYING MY GROCERIES INSIDE

3:09pm Gojo Satoru: Nah 3:09pm Gojo Satoru: Should we be texting right now? I’m not sensing any emergencies here

3:11pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): pls. my groceries :(

3:16pm Gojo Satoru: I’ll let the kiddo know you say hi 👋🏼

The irony of it all was that, if Gojo really wanted to, he absolutely could beat the shit out of someone. And he has, hundreds of times, pseudo professionally. Although that isn’t something he’d admit to you, out of fear that you might relay that info back to your mom who would then become mortified that she’s entrusted her five-year-old son’s life to the hands of an underground boxer.

But he needed the money. A night-time job didn’t really make daytime money, not when they could easily replace him with the next dude the second he gets knocked out of the ring more than twice, let alone if he let it happen once. And although he sometimes made large sums, it wasn’t stable income. He needed a back-up plan, and so babysitting it was.

The babysitter working nights at unsanctioned dojos and gyms located in the back of cartel blocks, knocking teeth out of men twice his size, would put any decent mother into a coma or induce some episode of syncope, hence why it wasn’t something he put on his resume before he got hired. Not that he even needed to provide a resume; your mom seemed desperate to cover the position as fast as possible, that promotion at work was moving faster than she wanted to, and Gojo’s beneficial attribute that he possessed as a candidate to look after her son, compared to all the other potential hires, was that he had a penis.

He likes the kid. Yuuji. He’s got kind of a short attention span, and makes Gojo weary of his age. Hold up, that makes him sound like he’s geriatric, he’s really only the ripe old age of twenty-seven, but the immortality and infinite stamina that a five-year-old boy has on him is enough to have him huffing and puffing at the end of every single evening shift he takes on with the rascal.

Fighting is all sprint, and no stamina. Sure, there might be some more seasoned boxers that might disagree with him, but for someone as young as him in the field, it’s the tactic he’s been forced to gain. If he draws a fight on for too long, he'll get killed by a forty-two year old man with steroids clogging up his adipose tissue and enough testosterone to grow a full-body beard by the time the sun starts to set. No, his strategy is to knock them out within the first fifteen seconds. Use their weight against them, and whatnot. A tactic he’s found has worked, since he’s been undefeated thus far.

He can never wrap his head around it. The drug lords that run the rings who’ve gained millions the night before from selling crystal meth only to lose it all the night following in the second Gojo hooklines a solid punch to their betting boxer’s chin, making them see God & their Momma before they tap out (if they’re even able).

He doesn’t pocket much money from it, not anything compared to what the men who bet on him end up making at least, but it’s a decently solid sum. How lucrative it really is depends solely on what he thinks the value of his life is.

It’s not unheard of, boxers dying in the ring. Turns out, rich drug dealers care very little about the sheep they’ve captured to perform their entertaining little stunts. But Gojo wasn’t doing all of this to feel some sense of work-life pride, no, it was just sustenance. When basic needs are not met, humans resort to the most animalistic of all behaviors, and while he’s not proud of what he does, he can’t deny the fact that it’s turned him into an adrenaline junkie that gets a rush in his veins every time he knocks a jaw loose.

But balance was key. And hence why he’s a boxer by night, babysitter by day. For at least four days a week, he gets to pretend he’s the king’s most trusted appointed knight, or he’s the radioactive tyrannosaurus rex that wants to tyrannize all the other dinosaurs, or maybe he’s the evil power ranger (he always forgets which color that one was) that is determined to make the world a living hell by smashing mr. potatohead against the bunk bed post a billion times for all the other toys to see. Or whatever other imaginative hyperfixations Yuuji imposes on him in the later afternoon once he’s had his bowl of spaghetti-O’s and is ready to play. Lately, the kid’s been really into space. They’ve got all sorts of space toys these days. Back in Gojo’s day, he just had a good ol’ Buzz Lightyear.

“One rule, that’s it: don’t accidentally kill my son. Actually, one more rule. Don’t flirt with my daughter.”

There’s a part of Gojo that believes your mom kind of knows he’s up to shady shit at night, otherwise why else would she clause for him to not flirt with you if she didn’t read the slight swell to his eye and the healing gash across his cheek as anything other than this boy is trouble and I want him nowhere near my too-good-for-him daughter of reproductive capacity since that’s the exact tale of how I became a single mother in the first place. Or maybe he inherently looks like he’s up to no good? He’s not sure which angle is more offensive, and which one was more flattering. Well in any case, she entrusted Yuuji’s life to him, despite acknowledging the plausibility of harm, and that means she overall thinks positively of him, right? ……right?

The first night he met you, it was awkward to say the least. Gojo spends most of his nights performing deadly stunts for middle aged men with potbellies, and most of his days hanging out with a five-year-old (one who he’d argue is his only friend at this point). Sure, he’s got some people he sees occasionally back in his high school hometown when he can brave hearing about how everyone’s in college now or doing a masters or they’re working respectable nine-to-five day jobs meanwhile he has to lie to his Pops that he’s been working in insurance for the past two years. Listen, in fairness, he probably makes the same amount of money as an insurance broker would anyways, but he can’t exactly own up to the identity of his craft.

Anyways, the point is, he’s not used to seeing other people his age anymore. There’s the occasional hook-up with girls he hasn’t seen since Mrs. Tracy’s homeroom period back in sweet two-thousand-sixteen, or his twice-a-year hangout with Suguru where he only learns the day of where he's visiting from since the guy moves around more than Gojo can keep up with. But save for that, he mostly just sees your mom and then Yuuji.

So seeing you standing in the kitchen for the first time when he went to put Yuuji’s half-finished GoGurt back in the fridge was startling to say the least. When the sight of a woman startled him, he knew he needed to start getting out again.

You were on your tiptoes, reaching up to grab at something over the fridge, and wearing these ridiculously short shorts to where he could see the curve of your ass, his line of sight trailing down the skin of your bare legs. He couldn’t see anything of your form above your shorts, given you were wearing an extremely baggy t-shirt with NYU on it in big bolded university letters. As far as he knew, you were a senior at NYU, studying psychology, made dean’s list consecutively for the past three years given the way your mother posted all your stellar transcripts up on the fridge (he gets that she’s proud of her daughter, but doesn’t that kind of stuff usually end in grade school?) But other than that, it was all the information he had on you.

“Here,” he said, pressing his front to your back, maybe just to get a feel, as he reached over to you to finally grab the box of cereal you were swatting for, the one that he purposefully placed at the back because Yuuji learned how to climb counters recently. “Is this what you want?”

He had heard you gasp, spinning around on your heel fast, staring up at him with wide eyes like you weren’t expecting some random man to be in the house right now, and your first instinct ended up being to grab the knife out of the kitchen knife block and lunge it straight at his torso.

If it wasn’t for his boxer reflexes, he’d have ended up at the ER that evening. Or dead. All depending on the strength you could pack into a stab. But instead, he deflected it, though not without a gash to his torso through the fabric of his shirt, one that you spent the rest of the evening profusely apologizing for and eventually mending to with cotton balls and neosporin.

“I didn’t know you were my little brother’s babysitter,” you mumbled with a small wince on your face as you dabbed ointment on the wound while he pulled the hem of his shirt up to his shoulder. He’s never had an injury tended to before. It was nice.

“It’s fine, I get it, totally acceptable response to seeing a random dude in your house.”

He remembers the curl of your eyelashes while you stared down at his bare upper half, something he imprinted on his memory rather than the concern in your face as your fingertips traced the scars across his chest. He hoped they made you feel better about the one you just slashed into him, because after all, what was one more?

He knows he shouldn’t have, but he kissed you that night. Two minutes before your mom came home, and right after you bid him goodnight with one more apology, he backed you up against the door of your bedroom, his hands on your hips pulling you towards him, and his lips pressed against yours. Something seamless, from candid conversation that was heading towards an end, to full fledged making out against white-painted wood, his teeth nipping at your lip and he wondered just how touch-starved those university boys were leaving you given the desperate way you’d clinged to his shirt for dear life as he deepened the kiss.

The moment only lasted one minute and fifty-seven seconds, and in the remaining three, your mother’s key pushed into the front door and he had to pull away. Always, on the dot, 10PM, she was home. It was how he knew he had two minutes left to make a move in the first place.

So much for no flirting.

6:57pm Gojo Satoru: Bahahah I accidentally forgot where yuuji’s epipen is 6:58pm Gojo Satoru: [sent a photo] 6:59pm Gojo Satoru: Turns out this can-o-soup was just covering it in the cabinet

7:01pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): ??? why did you need to find his epipen

7:08pm Gojo Satoru: Oh he accidentally took a bite of my pad thai 7:09pm Gojo Satoru: I freaked cuz I thought it had peanuts in it but I remember I asked for it without any 7:09pm Gojo Satoru: shit’s crazy

7:10pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): WHY THE FUCK DIDNT YOU TEXT ME????????

7:12pm Gojo Satoru: YOU SAID YOU DIDNT WANT ME TEXTING YOU UNLESS IT WAS AN EMERGENCY ?

7:13pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): SATORU YOU THOGHT HE ATE SOMETHING W PEANUTS IN IT AND YOU FORGOT WHERE HIS EPIPEN WAS THATSS A FUCKIGN EMERGENCY

7:15pm Gojo Satoru: THE KID IS DOING FINE HES ALIVE JESUS LEAVE ME ALONE 7:16pm Gojo Satoru: [sent a photo] 7:16pm Gojo Satoru: See. he’s chill 7:17pm Gojo Satoru: with intact airways might I add 7:18pm Gojo Satoru: Also isn’t he a little too old to still be watching baby sensory videos?

7:20pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeah my mom thinks he has adhd :(

7:22pm Gojo Satoru: oh

He tried to keep his word though (although he doesn’t recall ever giving it) out of the respect he had for your mom. She was a hard-working lady, single mom of two who went from working three jobs to now being a major administrator at a big law firm near the outskirts of town. It was an underdog story if he’d ever heard one, and he loved an underdog story.

But a little texting here and there wouldn’t hurt, right? Or so he thought, until you told him to cut it out with the contact. Maybe you were just trying to be the good one in this situation. After all, hooking up with your little brother’s babysitter? That sounds more like a bad porno than a sensible decision. Still, he’ll eventually get your replies to his which shirt should Yuuji wear to the park? and look, the toothfairy gave him the butt of a joint and a couple thumbtacks for his front tooth. he’s ecstatic texts, although in a less timely manner than before when you weren’t trying to preserve propriety. And when you’d occasionally visit every other weekend, he’d do his best to keep his hands in his pockets, and you’d fill up your nights with hangouts with your hometown friends to avoid spending too much time with him at the house. A silent agreement to not fuck each other, it was.

4:55pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): send pic of yuuji pls i miss him :(

5:04pm Gojo Satoru: [sent a photo]

5:08pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): IS THAT BLOOD?!?!?!?!

5:09pm Gojo Satoru: chillllllll it’s fake. We’re working on his halloween costume

5:09pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): WHY DOES IT HAVE BLOOD?!?!?!?!?!?

5:10pm Gojo Satoru: He wants to be a baby xenomorph and I'm his parasitic host. You know that iconic chestburster scene from the old school alien movies? yeah

5:12pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): satoru please for the love of god just dress him up as a dinosaur or something

5:13pm Gojo Satoru: I’m not the one that came up with the idea, okay? It was him

5:14pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): because you let him watch adult swim with you before putting him to bed. you’ve deranged his brain.

5:14pm Gojo Satoru: He needs it. Builds character.

Gojo was living a double life, and if someone asked him, he’d say it was less of a Clark Kent way and more of a Bruce Wayne way, although in reality, he knows it’s close to neither. He’s no superhero with a concealed identity fighting crime, he’s a con artist that’s tricked a hard-working woman into hiring him just because he’s trying to save up enough money to get the fuck out of this godforsaken town, given he’s not knocked dead before then for the crime’s amusement.

But Yuuji looks up to him now. And Gojo’s grown attached to him too. He taught the kid how to tie his own shoes and piss inside the actual toilet like a real man. And that kid’s the only thing that’s made him question any of this. Maybe that’s what dads feel, suddenly held to all this impossible responsibility and the pressure to stop doing stupid shit so that you’ll stick around to see your kids get older. The thought that there are eyes on you now, eyes that are innocent and hopeful and learning, and because they know nothing at all, you feel the responsibility to protect them from everything. For fucks sake, remind him to never become a dad.

“Do you like my sister?” Yuuji had asked him out of nowhere one afternoon after he just got home from preschool, stacking a blue cube over a yellow one at the dining table.

“Uhh,” Gojo starts. He wondered if your mom had put a wire on the kid, so his answer was as diplomatic as he could manage. “Yeah, she’s cool. You’ve got a cool sister.”

“But. But.” Yuuji stutters, trying to find his big boy words. He stretches up higher to reach the top of his stack of blocks, but he only has so much arm real estate at the age of five. “Do you like her like you wanna kiss her?”

Gojo grabs the block from the kid’s hand, for a moment questioning Yuuji’s decision to want to put a blue block over another blue block, but he figures aesthetics are the least of a kid’s concern, and so he places the block where Yuuji wanted it.

Why does the kid know what kissing is anyway? Do kids know that kind of stuff at that age? Isn’t a kiss to a five-year-old just something their mom gives to them before they head off to preschool for the day? And not something that happens between adult men and women? Maybe he should stop watching that adult swim in front of him.

“No. I don’t want to kiss your sister,” he says, again, because he is suspicious of a wire. It was a lie and then some, because he wants to do a lot more than just kiss you.

Gojo lifts the RedBull he was nursing up to his lips and watches Yuuji in the corner of his eye as the kid stares at his growing stack of blocks with a concentrated expression on his face, his chubby fingers squeezing tightly into little round dimpled balls, like he’s putting together all his tiny brain cells together to form another coherent thought before turning to face Gojo on the chair.

“It’s ok. You can kiss her if you wan’ed to. You can marry her too,” Yuuji says.

Gojo almost spits out his RedBull. He barely manages to swallow it, a broken cough immediately leaving his throat when some of the liquid goes down the wrong pipe and he’s smacking a fist against his chest to knock the sanity back into himself.

“Where the fu—…where the flip did that come from?” he asks, blinking back tears from the rasp in his throat.

Yuuji’s small shoulders sulk as he sits back on his heels. “I want a papa.”

Oh fuck that hurt. Jesus christ, there was nothing more sad than that. Yuuji has literally never known what it’s like to have a dad, since his had left before he was even born. Gojo’s not really close to his old man by any means, but he had still been a fatherly figure in some pivotal moments when he had needed it growing up. Kids need their dads. And he’s seen enough people lose their way without one to know that the value of them is really underestimated.

He’s also kind of shocked that Yuuji really did think of you as his motherly figure. Maybe since it had always just been him and his dad, Gojo learned how to self sustain from a young age, and he and his dad became accustomed to just looking after their own interests to avoid the headache of tending to one another. My land is my land, and your land is yours, and there was the occasional Saturday night spent together with his dad’s millions of beer bottles emptied dry on the carpet in front of the 1992 box TV as the two shared a greasy pizza from the place down the street. That was the extent of family solidarity that he knew.

But he can’t imagine being barely eighteen and having to take care of your little brother all by yourself because your mom was too busy trying to put food on the table and was too poor to hire a babysitter. Your mom tried so damn hard to keep you away from the single teenage mother life, but somehow ended up giving it to you by proxy in the end anyway. It was no wonder you wanted space now that Yuuji’s a little older and your mom can afford a babysitter. No matter how much you might love your sibling, being their effective guardian out of pure necessity had to have taken a toll.

Gojo clears his throat before he speaks. “Buddy. If I married your sister, we’d be brothers. I wouldn’t be your dad.”

Yuuji’s eyes light up at the word brother. “Brothers? Me and you?”

“Yeah. Bros.”

The kid giggles, all bubbly with cheeks rounding fully and eyes sparkling. Gojo reaches out to ruffle at his hair before Yuuji gets down onto one stubby leg at a time from the chair then bolts towards the kitchen.

“Juice!!” he yells somewhere around the corner out of sight.

Gojo sighs, staring at all the toys he pulled out for Yuuji to play with, all left in a scattered mess across the table. He gets up out of his chair and heads towards the fridge. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get you your juice, you little demon.”

The conclusion he comes to, and it might read like an obvious one, is that kids don’t really know the reality of life, hence why adults hide so much from them.

This is what he thinks of tonight when he wraps his worn out boxing tape around his hands and his wrist, tightening it with his teeth, and he can smell the sweat and grime from them. The back of the underground gym had an old dated locker room, and as Gojo stretches his neck side to side while sitting on the stiff metal bench, he eyes the peeling red paint of the locker in front of him, blurring vision making it look like spilt blood.

His phone pings with a text. He shuffles inside his duffle bag to look for it while his other hand scratches at his bare chest.

1:07am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): hhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii 1:07am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): omgomgomg sor y i’m

He blinks at the screen, confusion flashing across his face. He types one letter, but then he sees three dots and a speech text bubble in the bottom left, so he waits for you.

1:09am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): i drunk :(

The corner of his mouth ticks up slightly.

1:09am Gojo Satoru: Yeah I can tell

1:10am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): at a apartyyyy

His eyebrows raise slightly, the thought of you tipsy on some frat party couch flashing through his mind, yet of all things you could be doing at that frat party, you’re texting him? Must be a really boring party.

1:11am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): whyyy are you aawake?

1:12am Gojo Satoru: Couldn’t sleep 1:12am Gojo Satoru: Don’t you have a midterm in the morning?

1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): wtf hwo do you knwo that

1:15am Gojo Satoru: Your mom keeps your schedule posted on the fridge

1:15am yuuji’s sister (no flirting): im so fucked;’;(((

He snorts. He’s got a bit more life experience than you, five-ish years to be exact, more than enough time to master the no-hangover hangout, but just before he can offer you some advice, he sees another text from you.

1:16am yuuji’s sister (no flirting): can i tell u smething

His gaze flits up to the ceiling briefly, and he hears commotion outside the thick walls of the locker room. The previous fight was over, and fast. The guy must’ve been knocked out in under twenty seconds tops, which means that Gojo was next up against whatever superbeast just beat him up.

1:17am Gojo Satoru: Sure

He stands up, placing his phone down on the bench before he flexes the muscles in his arms a couple times to get the blood flowing into them. And there’s the noise of another ping. Actually, four.

1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): sonetimes 1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): i thikn of 1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): when u kisse me 1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): *kissed me

His eyes widen slightly, irises dry to the ashy cigarette smoke from outside lingering in the air, and his heart rate picks up a bit. An adrenaline junkie with close to no fear in his veins due to the way his amygdala’s been fried to a crisp from years of boxing, yet he’s got his breath hitched from the memory of your soft lips against his. It makes the blood rushing through the muscles of his arms rush somewhere down south instead.

Loud banging on the door of the locker room jolts him out of his trance, and he’s stiff around the edges once more.

“Satoru! You’re up, man,” he hears Danny, the fight coordinator, yell at him from the other side of the heavy & poorly-installed steel door.

Gojo sighs, glancing down at the texts on his phone. To respond, or not to respond. You’re off your face, clearly chatty from the alcohol, and he knows for certain you’ll regret every life decision you’ve ever made once you wake up in the morning and see the self sabotaging behaviors you’ve engaged in tonight. He knows that responding to you might put you at ease rather than straight up ignoring you, but the feeling will pass, and he has a match to win with no more room left to stall.

He makes his way out the locker room, pushing past the crowded halls of people underneath dim flashing club lighting, some dudes angrily jerking to face him when he pushes past them with a stiff shoulder, only for their eyes to widen when they see just exactly who pushed them.

There’s strippers in the ring, doing some routine for pre-match, and Gojo narrows his eyes at the man he sees laying back over the rubber boundary rope, head tipped back up to the ceiling with a wicked grin on his face. So that was his opponent? He’s never seen the guy before. Was he from a different district? Different district talent was tough, you had no background info on them, while they’ve been preparing to be here for weeks. Hence why boxers tend to do better when they visit a different district than they do in their own. There have been rules made to limit these types of fights, mostly over outrage that it was unfair to bid on them, but they were also usually more entertaining to watch. Gojo’s got a sick feeling to his stomach as the strippers clear the ring.

“Hey,” Gojo calls out, grabbing Danny by the back of his collar and dragging him towards him and away from the girls stepping down onto the floor, “what’s in for this fight?”

Danny glances up at the ceiling. “Tarp’s bettin’ tonight, so it can’t be anything less than ten grand for you. I’d say tops fifteen?”

Gojo narrows his eyes further, then glances off into the ring again. The man stands up, and Gojo gets a better look on his face. He’s got short hair, neon green in color with a dark fade underneath and tattoos all over his face. But those eyes. They were freakishingly red, and it made him uneasy. He knows the type. The type of boxers that do this to genuinely hurt people for thrill. Make no mistake, Gojo understands he’s made himself out to be like that too, gaining some kind of rush out of this profession, but this type of fighter was different. The type to literally continue smashing a dude’s face into the floor until they’re a bloody mess even minutes after the winning call, and no referee to stop it because that’s the kind of action the spectators wanted.

Danny reads his line of sight. “That’s Gale. Newton’s new boxing toy. Came outta nowhere about a month ago. He’s undefeated so far in his district, and Newton specifically wanted to see you up against him tonight,” Danny tells Gojo, resting his elbow up on his bare shoulder. “Chances are he’ll compete with Tarp for final bid if you win this one. I’m talking twenty-five grand in the next if you can knock him out in this.”

“Uh-huh,” Gojo acknowledges, rolling his shoulder so Danny’s elbow falls from it. Forget the money, he just wants to make it out of this alive.

He sets his foot up on the square, ducking through the dividing boundary straps and the tacky caution construction tape that the gym thinks creates an exciting ambience. He hears the static of the speakers as the announcers call out Gojo’s name, then this other guy, loud bass club music booming through Gojo’s chest as he tries to take a few deep breaths through the thick air of this low-ceiling arena.

The dim overhead lights flickered, casting shadows over the makeshift ring, and the crowd pressed tight around at every perimeter area, yelling and pushing, one even tosses a beer bottle on the square and it shatters, spreading glass all across, a few shards reaching Gojo’s feet and he looks down at them with a shudder. A fight immediately breaks out in the crowd over something related or possibly entirely unrelated, and he’d have no way of knowing as he swipes the shards away with his heel.

The influential men always sat up on higher seating, off towards the back in their own VIP section where they suck in the smoke of fat cigarettes and peer through 100% tinted sunglasses to assess the boxers they’ve bid thousands on. The light reflects off the golden grills of their teeth with every snarl at any passerby that gets too close, like a lion in its den. That’s what the sanction was called. Lion’s den.

Gojo sighed, eyeing the twisted grin of this Gale guy across from him. Was that his real name? Usually, foreign district guys get nicknames. Gojo’s always thought the nicknames were tacky, and he’s accumulated some of his own over the years, but to his ears, none of them ever really landed, although The White Fox admittedly was kinda nice. Reminded him of throwback shooting games.

He sucked a breath in through his teeth, holding his hands up in front of his chest in weak fists, storing energy in them in the form of pure anticipation alone, and then the bell rang.

His opponent lunged towards him immediately, fists flying in a barrage of reckless strikes, and Gojo’s eyes momentarily widened in the briefest moments of hesitation he had been allowed before ducking and dodging every one of this guy's shots, then jumping a step back to create distance.

Fuck. He was fast. Not just boxer fast, athlete fast. There was a difference. And it wasn’t a good one to be up against.

Gojo picked up light on his feet. He couldn’t win this one fast, that much was certain. One single careless or reckless move, and he’ll get tackled. He knows that by the malicious look he sees on that guy’s face, grin wide like he’s some cannibalistic beast.

Stepping back towards the center, Gojo purposefully set himself up for Gale to swipe a vicious hook towards his head, before Gojo last minute ducked down, crouched to the floor, and swung his leg out to knock the guy off balance by his ankles, and he falls onto his back with a loud thud!

There’s a moment of momentary silence from the crowd, right before Gojo put the man in a torso-lock, twisting him in a way a human body should absolutely not be twisted, hearing the grunts of pain and the crack of spine even through the shouts of the crowd.

He can hear it. Kill him! Knock his fucking teeth out! Snap his neck like a goose, man! FIN-ISH HIM! FIN-ISH HIM! FIN-ISH HIM!

He feels like throwing up.

Gojo looks up at the referee, who wasn’t really a referee, just there to run the clock when there was action and only barely stop it before near death. “This is enough, right?” he asks.

The referee nods. “1-0, next round.”

Gojo lets go of his opponent, leaving him there to heave for a moment before he gets up onto his feet again. Just needs one more, and he’s a winner. Ten grand in his pocket, and he won’t have to come back here for a couple weeks.

Gale gets up, swiping at the spit that had trickled out the corner of his mouth down to his chin, and he had an enraged look on his face. The second the bell rang for the second round, he exploded forward towards Gojo with even more fervor than before, gritted expression with a thirst for violence fueling the storm of punches he was throwing towards Gojo but he tried to remain calm, light on his feet, swiftly duck and avoid before he can find another opportunity to clear a sharp, clean jab right to the ribs—

sometimes, i think of when you kissed me

Gojo misses his strike, leaving his guard wide open, and Gale takes the opportunity to land a solid punch straight to his jaw, sending his mouth guard flying straight out of his mouth into the air, and knocking him backwards onto the ground with a thud and then he finds himself staring up at the rusting metal ceiling and a ringing in his ears that almost matches the roar of the crowd.

His head is in a haze, dizzy like where one second could feel like a millennia. He feels a soreness underneath his chin, a pain that radiates to his mouth, and he briefly swipes his tongue over his front teeth to make sure he still has all of them.

What the fuck was that? That intrusive thought. There’s no intrusive thoughts allowed in life or death situations, not when he was always just one smash to the head away from a permanent concussion. But, fuck, he can’t help it. Can’t help thinking of you. Even when his vision has gone blurry and he should really be weary about what happens next in this ring, his mind’s just thinking about you, at some frat party, tipping back shots of tequila and waiting for a text-back in response to your tipsy ones. Were you even waiting up on him? Have you already passed out on the couch, or were your friends dragging you back to your dorm? Or are you fucking some other dude right now? Has he got his hand up your top, squeezing at you, sleazily feeling you up before spilling beer all down your shirt, and are you kissing him back with the same enthusiasm, your phone now somewhere long slipped between the cushions of the couch and out of sight?

Even though it’s still sore, he tenses his jaw. Grinds his teeth, even. Tasting blood somewhere along the line of his gums, he realizes his lip is split. He licks at it, the flavor of copper more rich on his tongue, and he clenches his fists tightly. Why’s he thinking of that right now? It just pisses him off, the thought of you with some other dude. Maybe that’s what he needs to win this fight. Spite. Although he’s not sure why the guy across from him at the ring has to pay for it.

He lifts his head up off the ground, and while it felt like years he had been down, a glance at the timer tells him it’s only been a solid four seconds. A solid four seconds that his opponent had to fully charge a lunge towards him with the look of death in his face, raising his elbow up into the air in time with his leap, ready to come straight down, and Gojo’s eyes widen at the sight above him from where he’s still lying on the wood.

“Shit—” he cusses, rolling his body over to the side so that the dude falls straight down onto the floor rather than elbow Gojo in the fucking ribs, and then he gets back up on his feet.

Stakes were high, he has to end this, he has to end this now, and he flexes the muscle in his right bicep, channeling everything he has into this one blow, and before Gale even really has a chance to turn around and face him again, Gojo’s already three-fourths set up a knockout undercut that he drives straight up the guy’s chin, with so much force it has him lifting up off the floor, a vertebrate stretch to his spine before he’s sent flying backwards and slammed against the tight rubber lining of the ring to where he was half hanging over it.

The room fell silent for a split second, then erupted in a roar as the referee fell to one knee beside Gale, checking him for any semblance of consciousness, and when he found none, he waves the match off.

Gojo’s eyes flit up towards the lion’s den, the only opinions that he really needed to care about were sitting in those mahogany chairs with glasses of scotch swirling around in their hands, and he sees some of them looking straight at Gojo before leaning towards one another and discretely talking about something he can’t make out because he doesn’t know how to read lips.

He feels someone tug at his arms from behind, pulling him to crouch down and he balances back on the balls of his feet. He glances down through the ring at the floor. Danny was leaning against the wooden surface of it. “Dude. Go.” He jerks his head towards Gale, who still laid there sprawled across the now stretched out rubber perimeter bands. “Go fuck him up. Knock a few more teeth out, I don’t know, get some more blood out of him.”

“What?” Gojo huffs, yanking his arm away from Danny’s grip. “The fuck are you saying?”

“I told you, man, Newton’s here and he’s got his eye on you. Go give him a show,” Danny says, “do it.” And when he sees clear frustration on Gojo’s face he sighs. “Twenty-five grand, consider that, will you?”

Gojo sneers at the man, an awful taste in his mouth as he spits blood towards Danny’s feet. “Go fuck yourself on his cock if he wants a show that bad.” And then he ducks underneath the bands and hops back down onto the floor, pushing past people who were trying to grab at him and pull at him and lift him up and even throw him down until he made it through flashing hallways and back to the locker room.

He shuts the door behind him, sliding the bolt lock into the frame so no one can follow him inside, and then he leans his weight back against the chilling steel before tipping his head back until it hits the surface too.

He lets out of a few deep breaths, then stares down at the sting he finds over his knuckles. Red and blistering from the last punch he delivered, and he’s almost certain he broke a bone in his hand. Fuck. It was bleeding across the cuts, too. He had to figure out a way to get it all healed by tomorrow, as if that was humanly possible, just because he doesn’t want Yuuji questioning him about it.

Yuuji. For fucks sake, when has he ever thought about the kid this much? When has he ever thought about much of anything when he’s out here or in the ring? He’s a babysitter by day. He’s a “part” of your family when the sun is up and normal functioning society is breathing their lives into the clean air. That’s it. He’s no five-year-old’s caretaker in front of all these primetime drug lords, and he certainly shouldn’t be thinking of you when facing big, burly men he’s aiming to rough up, all within the dead hours of night. So then how come these thoughts are on his mind at all times, twenty-four-seven, around the clock?

He heads further into the locker room, glancing down at the bench where he’d left his phone, then picks it up, neck craned all the way down to glance at the screen as he holds his phone by his hip because he doesn’t have any energy to pick it up any further towards his eyesight.

He sees your messages. You never sent any follow-up ones, just your horrendously typed out sonetimes, i thikn of when u kisse me *kissed me across the span of four texts, and Gojo runs a tired hand down his face.

He tips his head back to groan at the ceiling, guttural with no basis other than a release of all the pent up frustration of every sort, then he types in a couple messages to you,

3:23am Gojo Satoru: That’s nice 3:24am Gojo Satoru: I think about fucking you all the time

—and then tosses his phone into his duffel bag to call it a night.

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

You’re awoken to your alarm blaring heavily, and you whack your arm across your nightstand table beside your tiny twin-size bed to hit the snooze button, then rub your eye with a loose fist while smacking at the residual taste of alcohol you have on your tongue.

“Mm…” you mumble to yourself. And then the thirst hits you. The overwhelming, intense, unquenchable thirst that leaves your mouth feeling like the Sahara desert before you grab your twice-dented Hydroflask from the nightstand, twist the cap off and chug about twenty ounces of water in one breath.

You let out a deep exhale and fall back into bed, your hand resting on top of your water-filled tummy, and you stare up at the ceiling of your dorm.

Last night was horrible. You knew you shouldn’t have gone to that frat party, especially given you have an exam in—you checked the time on your phone—about an hour, and an hour was not enough time to recover from the raging hangover headache that’s pounding through your head. But your roommates insisted you went, and so go you did. You never knew what to expect, always torn between shaving your pussy before you go or throwing on a stained pair of sweatpants to keep the guys away instead. Sometimes, it was a combination of both. But last night, you ended up drinking more than you usually do, and that always led to poor, poor, poor decisions, in which all the sense of pride you had in yourself was washed down with the puke that you hurled into the upstairs toilet.

You grab at your phone again, briefly seeing that your friends had sent you some photos from the night. You immediately swiped off to the side to dismiss the notifications, because as far as you were concerned, you never wanted to see those photos in your life.

And then, in the briefest of moments, you saw a familiar name in your notifications that made you heart skip a beat.

Gojo Satoru (yuuji’s babysitter)

With an immediate gasp, you pulled your phone to your chest and held it there, blinking up at the pale yellow ceiling, your heart picking up in rhythm.

Oh fuck.

That was right.

You drunk texted him last night.

You drunk texted your little brother’s hot babysitter.

Fuck.

Mortified was an understatement, possibly because you don’t even remember what you said, and so you don’t even want to see what he replied with.

You groan, rubbing both your hands across your face then kick your sheets back with your feet like a child having a temper tantrum because you were so embarrassed you had even texted him at all last night. I mean, he was hot. A little older than you, really gorgeous eyes, tall, and, yeah, you gave him shit for the Instagram muscles thing, but that’s only because you thought he’d find it cheeky that you were trying to humble him despite the fact that he’s more toned and ruggedly sculpted than any other man you’ve ever met. You didn’t want to have a flustered schoolgirl attitude because it would just seep through to his ego.

In any case, he was hot, there was no denying it, so can you really blame yourself? But still. There was collateral with this. You had to see him every other weekend. He knows your family, even your extended since they invited him to Thanksgiving dinner a couple weeks ago. A high-risque drunk text recipient if he ever was one (of course he has been, look at that face). Why couldn’t you have just drunk texted ECON160 guy from last semester who Clit DJ’d you underneath your desk at the back of the lecture hall instead?

The thing that made you nervous about Gojo Satoru was that he was just so…confident? Like, in that I was raised to be this way confident and not that I fought inner demons my whole life to barely end up this way confident, y’know? Never had to fake it ‘til he made it, he just was. At least that was the kind of energy you got from him, and unfortunately for you, it was nerve wracking but enticing all at the same time.

You sigh. “Stupid. Stupid. Stuuuuuupiiiiidddddddddddd. You. Are. So. Stuuuuuupiiiiddddddd,” you sigh, running your hands through your hair to grip at the strands.

You pull your phone away from your chest, and finally brave yourself to read the texts from your notifications screen, but not without blurring your vision a little to further stall. And then you finally refocus it to read them. The first one you see has you gasping—

3:24am Gojo Satoru (yuuji’s babysitter): I think about fucking you all the time

It has heat spreading across your cheeks, and you blink at your screen, then quickly swipe up to read the previous messages with rushed glides of your index finger on the screen to see that he had sent it to you in response to your barely coherent texts about how you still so often think about that time he randomly pressed you up against the door of your bedroom to kiss you that night you first met him.

I think about fucking you all the time

At 3 in the morning? He decided to send that text at 3 in the fucking morning? That was the devil’s hour. What’s he trying to tell you?

Oh come on, you’re not stupid. And you know he isn’t either. The sexual tension was palpable, it was there since the day you two met and you almost stabbed him, and also everytime you were visiting the house, and his shoulder brushes against yours when he’s trying to get past you in the kitchen, or when you’ve got Yuuji in your arms and the kid is clinging to Gojo’s sleeve because he wants him near him at all times. There’s even sexual tension over the phone, in those stupid texts he sends you all the time about meaningless child care stuff, and honestly, those little updates made your day.

But… you don’t know much about him, and your mom would kill you if she ever found out you wanted him. And she’d probably pulverize him if she found out he ever made a move on you. Cremated without leaving a trace behind would be an understatement. She thinks he’s no good and she thinks you’re too good. You know she’s warned him before to not get close to you, as if she was pre-emptively expecting him to try to get in your pants like it was some canon force of the universe, hence why he’s probably so fucking awkward around you whenever she’s there too. Like if he accidentally got caught staring at your ankles, your mom would light him on fire, so he’d rather not risk it by just avoiding looking at you at all.

Your mom has always been protective of you. Your father was a deadbeat, one she thought she loved, only to watch him leave. And she had to raise a baby all by herself. He re-entered your lives right before you graduated high school, knocked up your mom again with Yuuji, and guess what? Left again without a trace. To be doubly humiliated by a man is a fate you wouldn’t wish on any woman, but that’s exactly what your mom went through. It was a wake-up call for her, though. No more living paycheck to paycheck like you had been your whole lives up until Yuuji was born. The kid doesn’t even know how lucky he is with everything he has right now. Your mom worked her way up the corporate ladder and made something of herself and now you guys were comfortable, so it was safe to say she had some sort of right to look after her daughter, of whom she simply doesn’t want to follow in the same naive footsteps of her youth.

You get it. She wants to break the generational cycle. But it made being with men tough on all fronts, let alone dating. You could never bring a guy home because he’d never be enough, even if he cured cancer or could make you orgasm while doing a sixty-nine handstand. And while her overbearing paranoia over what you do or where you are or who you’re with has since dimmed slightly since you officially moved out to finish your last year of higher education at NYU, you can still feel her disappointment from a hundred miles away when you’re making out with some random frat guy on his beer-stained couch at eleven AM on a Tuesday.

But you got to college. You’ve already made it this far. You’re on dean’s list. You graduated high school as salutatorian. You’re the most highly decorated cello player in the state. You won Miss County pageant when you were sixteen for your philanthropic efforts towards feline leukemia. You did online community college for three years so you could stick back after high school and help your mom raise Yuuji, which meant that you had to forfeit your scholarship to Cornell. You’ve spent your whole life being good, you just wanna be bad for a little bit.

And if bad meant fucking the hot and mysterious babysitter, then so be it.

You pick your phone up, begin blasting what the hell by Avril Lavigne on your dorm room bluetooth speaker, then type a message to him that says—

10:34am you: do it then

—then shove your phone under the sheets and belt out the lyrics aaaall my life i’ve been good, but now, ahhhh i’m thinkin’ what the hell!!! while kicking your feet and clutching your pillow.

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

Gojo has no clue what divine entity has overcast their gratuitous spirit over him on this blessed Monday afternoon, but he’ll thank them for it later once his balls are empty.

He’s got you on your back, sprawled across the couch in the living room, the first fuck being a rushed one that you offered him with before he has to go pick Yuuji up from circle time at preschool, which wasn’t ideal, but he’s delirious at the sight of you underneath him right now. Your little NYU shirt, a tighter one this time, bunched up over your bare breasts, otherwise entirely naked other than the flimsy panties dangling at your ankle, and the view of the tip of his cock looking hot and heavy against the velvet of your cunt, slowly pushing in, feeling the warmth of your walls squeeze around him paired with the sweet moan that leaves your lips, makes him fall forward with a bracing hand dug into the cushion by the side of your head because the sensation feels so fucking good he can hardly keep himself upright.

“Fuck, you’re so tight,” he grunts, pushing himself in further to try and bottom out but he’s still got a couple inches he needs you to take, and so you curl your hips upwards towards the cieling to make more room for him, practically putting yourself into a mating press and soon enough he’s balls deep, “you on any birth control?”

“Uh-huh,” you moan, eyes closed and head tipped back with one hand squeezing your own tit.

“I can cum inside then, yeah?” he asks you, pushing your knees to your chest, slowly drawing his hips back and you squirm underneath him.

“Let’s get there first, and then we’ll discuss,” you breathe out.

“I’ve been there for the past ten minutes, baby. I could cum at any second with the way you look and feel,” he informs you flatly, because it was just the truth and you had to know it, then he feels himself twitch inside, slowly working up to a languid rhythm, almost fearfully like your mom’s going to pop out somewhere around the corner with a camera crew ready like one of those retro TV shows just to humiliate him on national television for not keeping it in his pants like she’d told him to.

“Harder,” he hears you whisper, and he rolls his eyes shut to just focus on the feeling. The feeling of your nails grazing down the skin of his chest and his abs, tracing the scars he’s collected over the years, and he feels you tightening around him. He leans down to kiss you, fucking you properly now with the squeak of the couch springs echoing across the room, your hums of moans seeping through his lips until he’s fully taking them on with an open-mouthed kiss of sloppy tongue.

The fact that it was wrong felt right to him, and he realizes in this moment he’s lost all sense of control. He wasn’t just an adrenaline junkie that liked to rough up dudes, he was an adrenaline junkie that wanted to fuck you against all better judgement or moral compass. The way your tits were bouncing, the slap of skin on skin, his balls slapping against your ass while you wrap your legs around him tighter, all convincing him that any consequence made it worth it.

“Good,” he groans the praise, pinning your hands above your head as he rams his hips against yours, your cute moans and squeals sounding like literal music to his ears and he feels heat spread all the way up his neck, “goooood, keep squeezin’ me like that, fuck.” He slows down momentarily, just to take a moment and watch, really look and see the way his length disappears inside of your pretty self with every push forward, and then he works back up to a relentless pace that has you tipping your head back with a slack jaw and eyes closed tightly shut, sprained expression of pleasure spread across.

“Oh, oh my god, Satoru—” you mewled and he felt dizzy from the sound of his name from your softly parted lips.

“Fuck, I’m gonna—” His hand finds it’s way between your legs, calloused pads of his fingers brushing against your clit and you jolt underneath him, gasping as your hand shoots out to dig your nails into his bicep for purchase. “I’m gonna cum, better tell me where you want it.”

“In me,” you moan, “nowhere else.”

He presses his mouth against your cheek in a lazy smile, “Atta girl,” he drawls before pushing your ankles down as far as they’d go near your ears, folding you in half and then reigns all hell into your cunt. He should really care a bit more about your pleasure, but testing your flexibility like this with both his hands holding you down was doing sinful things to his brain, and besides, you had yourself covered with the messy circles you were rubbing over your clit. It was hot to see that too, your nimble pretty fingers so close to the place where he was pounding into you.

“Oh shit, shit, shit—” he grunts when starts to see blistering white in his vision, balls straining with a pleasure that was almost painful. The moment he finishes feels like hot flashes in his brain, a heat like the cum he begins to paint inside your walls in time with your release, thrusting over and over and over, each one more staggered as he lets off a long, drawn out groan that comes from deep within his chest with the feeling of you milking him dry and the sound of you enjoying every second of it. He can’t remember the last time he came this much or this hard and even after coming down from the high, he feels the remnant pulse of your orgasm around his now half-flaccid dick.

He leisurely pulls out, hearing you let out a soft whimper as he marvels at the sight of his cum slowly dripping out of you and down towards the couch, before he scoops it up with a couple fingers and pushes it back inside. You grip his wrist tightly, but you weren’t stopping it, that motion of him plunging it all back into you.

“Want a taste?” he asks, casually.

“Mhm,” you nod, face looking flush.

He pulls his fingers out of you, coated with sex, then plugs your pussy with the fingers of his other hand because he kinda likes the idea of you walking around all day with him inside of you, so he doesn’t want it getting out. He’s then pushing his other fingers past your lips, pleased to find he’s met with not even so much as a grazing of teeth, and he grins, “bet you take a dick in your mouth as good as you take it down here.”

Your furrow your brows at him, the pout of your lips seen in the way they were puckered to lick his fingers off clean, and when you release the suction with a smack of your tongue and his fingers were wet from your saliva now, his eyes narrow with desire. You push his face away with the heel of your palm to his forehead. “Flattery won’t make me suck your dick.”

“Alright. So? How is it?” he jerks his chin towards your face, pushing against your hand with his forehead until he’s hovering over you again, “taste good?”

“It’s cum, Satoru.”

He shrugs. “Bad?”

“No,” you say, and you can’t make eye contact, “good.” You sigh. “Hot. I don’t know. Salty, sweet. I’m the sweet. You’re the salty. And this conversation is obscene.”

He kisses you, capturing your lips softly, tongue darting out to taste what’s on yours. “I like it that way. Dirty. Nasty. Obscene, whatever.”

There’s the slam of a car door heard from the driveway, and the two of you instantly make eye contact with round eyes.

“Sa—” you stutter, “Satoru.”

He gets up off the couch in a panic, and heads to the window of the living room fully butt-ass naked, then peers through the blinds to see—

Your mom was making it up towards the front door, rustling with her keys in her purse. And the last thing he sees before he turns around to face you is her pushing the keys through the lock.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” he cusses, finding his boxers off of the floor, hopping on one foot with his cum & slick coated dick flapping around and slapping against his thighs unceremoniously as he tries to get one leg in through them and then the other. You’re trembling as you hook your panties back into place, pull your shirt back down your torso, and even in his extremely panicked state, he’s still sad he can’t freely stare at your tits anymore. You’re rummaging for your skirt in a haste, looking everywhere for it, and he finds it underneath the coffee table before tossing it to you and then he side-to-side hops towards the coat closet while he pulls his sweatpants up over his ass, in time for you to quickly run and shut the door of the closet closed just before the front door of the house swings open.

The inside of the coat closet is dark, barely enough space in there for a six-foot-four two-hundred-and-twenty pound man, but it’s better than being balls deep inside his boss’s daughter on the couch when said boss just came home from work.

He hears conversation on the other side of the door, albeit muffled, and he presses his ear to it to hear better while he tucks his dick into his boxers from where it was hanging over the waistline.

“Mom! You…you’re home so early,” he hears you squeak out.

“Yes,” your mom says, “The rest of my meetings today are online, so I figured I’d come home when there’s less traffic.”

Gojo feels you lean against the coat closet door.

“I see, I see, how was your day at work?” you ask with a tremble in your voice.

“Fine.” And then nothing. The silence could mean that was all she had to say, since your mom wasn’t really a woman of many words, or it could be a silence that means she’s suspicious about something. “Darling, why is your skirt flipped up and tucked into your panties? Your whole butt is showing.”

Through the wood of the door, he hears you softly gasp. “Oh, um, I just went to pee. Must’ve—…must’ve got caught when I pulled it back up.”

“I see,” your mother says, and Gojo can hear her dropping her heels down near the shoe rack at the entrance. “You know, I really don’t like those short skirts you wear often. Maybe it’s just your generation, but I think it looks tacky and cheap.”

“Mom,” you say, in as stern of a voice as you can manage without sounding embarrassed.

Your mother sighs. “In any case, where is Satoru? I still would like him to go pick up Yuuji. I don’t have the patience to sit in preschool & daycare traffic right now.”

“Oh gosh, I don’t know,” you chirp, and then he hears you let out a small oh no before you lean even more weight against the door, this time somewhere lower, and he realizes you’re pressing your ass against it. His eyes narrow with a small frown, and then he realizes— his cum must still be trickling down your thighs. You couldn’t put your panties on fast enough.

Shit. That’s hot. A little fucked up, but hot. He feels his dick harden against the fabric of his boxers, and he rests his forehead against the door, fringe stuck to his forehead with sweat as he slips his hands down his sweatpants and then gives his cock a firm squeeze. The thought of you discretely swiping his cum up your inner thigh and smearing it against your thin panties so your mom doesn’t catch sight of it dripping down your legs has him slowly working up to a rock-solid erection, and he almost lets out a broken grunt from the feeling.

“What?” your mother says, “what do you mean you don’t know?”

“I’ve just been watching TV this whole time,” you say, “last time I saw him…he was…um, in the backyard pulling weeds?”

He lets out a small scoff through his nose at your cover-up. Cute. And not bad.

Your mother sighs loudly, and he glances down at the strained veins on his dick as he tugs it through his hand, the tip rearing and appearing flushed and dripping with precum. God, you were just on the other side of this door. Less than a few inches away, and he’d be inside of you.

“I’m going to take a shower. Go find him and tell him to pick up Yuuji soon. But before then, change into something less revealing,” your mother says in a more or less detached tone, and he can hear the stomps of her footsteps up the stairs from above him in the coat closet.

The two of you wait at least a solid minute, and just when the coast is clear, he hears you turn the knob of the coat closet and slowly crack it open.

“Okay, I think she’s in the shower, I hear the water running,” you whisper at him, “you can go now—” You glance down towards his groin, your jaw dropping. “What—…Satoru, why the fuck is your dick staring at me right now?!” you whisper-hiss at him.

He pulls you into the coat closet, pushing your front against the door to where it clicks shut, and you gasp when his hands pin your wrists crossed behind your back and his dick presses into the plush of your ass.

“You talkin’ to your mom while your pussy’s stuffed full of my cum was the single hottest thing that’s ever grazed my lizard brain,” he tells you, flipping your skirt up and hooking your panties to the side, his index finger briefly brushing against your entrance to find it still leaking from the way your walls were pulsating from his words. And then he aligns his tip to your entrance. “Now keep quiet while I do this, ‘kay?”

“Oh—” you gasp, your cheek pressed against the door as you arch your back and push your ass out for him, “okay—” you say, barely vocalizing the first syllable before he’s already stuffing himself inside of you with one solid glide of a push, making you yelp loudly and he has to instantly cup a hand over your mouth.

“Shhhhhh,” he hisses at you, immediately starting to pound you from behind, “told you to— fuuuck,” he catches sight of his length covered with a mix of your glassy arousal and his white cum, now starting to cream at the base of his cock, “jesus christ—” he breathes out, squeezing the flesh of your ass harshly with his other hand and you let out another yelp, “I told you to fuckin’ keep quiet.”

“I’m—mff,” you muffle against his palm, “I’m trying but,” your hips move back in time with his, “feels good, feels too good,” you mewl, and his hand desperately yanks up the fabric of your shirt so he can squeeze at your breast.

“Yeah?” he grunts, hypocritical for telling you to keep it down when he was slamming his hips against your ass with so much fervor he wouldn’t be surprised if the sound was reverberating across the entire house, “you like it when I fuck you while your mom’s all clueless just up the stairs?” His rhythm falters, feeling his release building, and his hand reaches in front of you to rub your clit, making you drop your head against the door with tightly closed eyes. “Gets— you—wet, doesn’t it?” he torments you, his lips near your ear as he slams his hips against you harshly with every enunciated syllable.

“Mhm, mhm,” you easily agree, or maybe that’s because it’s all you can really articulate, and he angles his hips up so his balls slap more fervently against your clit, making you scream into his palm while he picks up the pace of the circles he draws on your clit and in one, two, three— beats of his pounding heart, he feels you come undone around his cock, gushing wetness leaking out of you, he can feel the mess of fluids splattering on the skin of his thighs due to each of his heaving thrusts as he cusses out a fuuuuuuckkk before spilling his cum inside of you, a short-lived and thicker release this time that has you mewling from overstimulation, and in a few following thrusts, he’s given you everything he had to give.

His eyes open, he wasn’t even aware he had shut them in the first place, and he glances down at where the two of you were joined. Rings of arousal coat the length of his half-pulled-out dick, and the second he retreats all of it, a bulging push of his cum seeps out of you, dripping and pooling all over the hardwood floors.

“Holy shit, I wish I could take a picture of this,” he says, taking a step away to commit the sight to memory, your legs trembling and still slightly spread, ass pushed out and when you wiggle it a little, he lets out a huff of an exhale because he just can’t believe how sexy you are. Are all college girls like this? He’s never been to college, his old man’s been trying to get him to go for years, but maybe this is what finally convinces him.

“No pics,” you breathe out once you catch your breath, standing up straight slowly, “that’s my one sex rule.”

He takes a step closer to you, flipping your skirt back over your ass while you shimmy your shirt down to cover your chest. “That’s the only rule you have? Anything else goes?” he asks.

You spin around to face him, his eyes briefly flitting down to the still exposed skin of your midriff. “I have a feeling I’d be making up more specific rules if it was with you.”

He smiles, his hands grabbing your hips before pressing you up against the door again. “I also had a rule. It was to not fuck you. Wait, no, to not flirt with you. Which, technically, I didn’t do.”

You blink your eyes at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What?” he asks, genuinely confused, “I didn’t.”

“Huh—” you scoff, “how do you think we got into this situation in the first place?? You didn’t just say wanna fuck? You were insufferably flirty with me.”

“Nahhh nah nah nah nah, baby, that’s not flirting,” he tells you, thumb running circles over your hips, “that’s, like—…I don’t even fuckin’ know how it worked on you to be honest, I was just being stupid.”

“Oh okay so I’m stupid.”

“I never said you were stupid?”

“Well you said you were being stupid so me falling for it must mean I’m stupid.”

“Pshhh. You’re cute. Pulling weeds, by the way? Adorable.”

Your hand slowly roams up the front of his shirt, the fabric bunching at your wrists until you uncovered up to his collar bone, and you stare at his skin. He tries to not let the way his heart’s beating faster show through the heave of his chest.

“Why do you have all these scars, anyway?” you whisper to him.

“Too many girls tryna stab me,” he tells you.

You roll your eyes. “Seriously.” Your thumb traces the one you had left on him.

“I—” He stops himself.

Does he tell you? Should he tell you? What, just because he’s seen you naked and you took his dick like a queen he’s supposed to open up to you about these things now? He doesn’t know. Maybe he could? Maybe you already suspect what he does at night. And if not, at the very least, I’m an underground boxer might make you think he’s hot? At the very worst, you’ll report him to the cops and he’d get fired as your little brother’s babysitter then thrown into jail, but not before the busted cartel gets him first.

“Maybe I’ll tell you some other time,” he says, his hand wrapping around your wrist and pulling it from his chest, “no hyper personal details until you’ve had my dick in your mouth at least once or twice. That’s my one rule.”

You snort. “I could’ve guessed that rule from a mile away.”

He hums. And then there’s the sound of steps creaking down the stairs above the two of you.

You both make eye contact, eyes widening, internally yelling at each other: how the fuck did we get into this situation twice?!

This time, Gojo opens the door and stumbles out of the closet, leaving you inside of it, just in time for your mom to come down the stairs.

“Satoru. I was looking for you,” she says as she rounds the post. “Have you picked up Yuuji? He has to go for his swimming lessons soon.”

“Ah, nope, was just about to head out,” he says, letting out a cough to diffuse tension, “sorry, I was—” he points his thumb over his shoulder to behind him, “…pulling out some gnarly weeds.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “I see. Well, thanks. If you want, I can add a gardening stipend to your paycheck. Let me know.” And he’s not sure how to respond because he’s not sure if she’s joking.

He heads out the door, the keys to your mom’s minivan in his palm as he throws them up into the air and catches them a couple times. And just before he gets inside the car, he turns on his heel to face the house and pulls his phone out of his pocket to type in a message for you.

3:22pm Gojo Satoru: Send over those me-specific sex rules soon

[the end]

a/n. hope u enjoyed im shitting bricks posting this bc i haven't posted a oneshot smut since february but thanks so much for reading i appreciate u!! i got way too invested in the whole underground boxer thing 😂😂 but the fact i managed to keep everything under 12k is an accomplishment to me bc if u read my other fics you know i’m a yapper LOL i have another kind of a similarly written smut oneshot n it’s a lil angsty (totally different au tho) i’ll probs post that one next but yea i really like, hmm, i really like exploring entire characters within a short amount of time i enjoy writing the obscure lore drops xd it’s been kinda fun so far anywho much loveee hope to see u around! <3

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@beabadobeee @air3922 @timetoletmyimaginationfly @chiyokoemilia @jotarohat

@sirencholia @sorcerersseestars @horisdope @to-dabi @staoru

@aliidarling @ninjaturtletoes @lavender-hvze @lanadelreylover11 @chckn-pi

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@milkm4nz @athinasaurus @sashisuslover @welldamnsatoru @aeriiixhh

@crystalymin @dcvilxswish @miakxn @satxoru

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caelum-in-the-avatarverse · 8 months ago

Text

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Lurkers really are great, tho

I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.

Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.

The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.

Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.

I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available.

I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.

I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.

So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.

But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.

I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.

Should we gatekeep fandom?

I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--

A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.

That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.

See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.

So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.

The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.

And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”

Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.

Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.

And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.

However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community.

I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.

And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company?

And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)

But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.

Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.

Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.

Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists.

While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:

[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom

OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]

“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.

I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.

It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits.

So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.

And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.

So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.

Think of it like a garden gate

When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.

The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people.

Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it.

Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.

My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.

But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.

I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.

Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.

And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.

Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.

There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.

#ao3 #lore.fm #fanfiction #fandom history #gift economy #caelum rambles

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