Jily oneshots

The Rise and Fall of the Extraordinary Jillysanschilly

by elanev91

'Jesus christ, I cannot read anymore fanfiction today.'

James slammed the lid of his laptop harder than he'd intended and leaned back into the sofa cushions. He'd been scrolling through this fanfiction site, Archive of our Own, with Sirius for hours to find something suitable to read for a video that he was planning to film. Trouble was, though, that a lot of what he was finding had a fair amount of explicit content, and he really didn't need to get into any more trouble with the YouTuber censors.

And, as it happens, reading porn someone wrote about you was more emotionally taxing than James had expected.

Sirius shook his head at him. 'You're going to break that fucking thing and then I don't want to hear you whining about it.'

James shot him a look. 'You sound like Remus.'

Sirius held his fingers up at him and turned back to his own laptop. 'How could you be done with this?' A slow smile started at the corner of Sirius' lips. 'I, for one, love reading about your long, hard —'

'Alright.' James held up a hand and Sirius immediately burst out laughing.

'Seriously, though, can you believe that people write this shit about you? Isn't it weird?'

'Obviously it's fucking weird. It's one thing if people are writing it about Star Wars or something —'

Sirius' eyes widened with excitement. 'People write fanfiction about Star Wars?!'

' — but I'm a real fucking person? That's just what gets me.'

'Okay, but wait, go back to the Star Wars thing.'

James rolled his eyes. 'No. You can look up Star Wars fanfiction on your own time.'

Sirius grinned. 'Do you think people write fanfiction about wookies? Their hairy, undulating bodies —'

James pushed up off the sofa and started towards the kitchen. 'I'm not listening to you!'

Sirius chuckled to himself as he scrolled back up to the top of his screen and started typing in the search bar. 'I bet they write fanfiction about wookies.'

There were a lot of things about being a YouTuber that James hadn't expected when he'd started making videos back in uni.

He never expected that anyone would really follow him. Never expected he'd be able to make a living making videos. He, never once, and especially not in those early years when he was pulling in a few pounds of AdSense money every few months if he was lucky, imagined that he'd become… a brand. That he'd have a vlog channel and a website and merch and a company and a manager.

And while all of that — this life he'd accidentally worked himself into — still completely blew his mind, the thing that shook him the most was the fact that people cared so much about him.

He understood people enjoying his videos, connecting with his content, being excited about the things he was creating. It was falling in love with a novelist because you love the stories they tell and the worlds they create (not that he was ever so big-headed as to think his videos even remotely counted on that level). And people cared about his content — they'd have to've for him to get where he did — but more and more often, he found that people cared about him individually.

Him, separated from his content.

And it wasn't that it bothered him, not really. He was surprised that people wanted to hear about his life and see what he got up to, but enough people asked and so he created a second channel and vlogged, and it required extra editing every week, but he liked the exercise well enough to keep doing it. He did Q&As, he opened up asks on his Tumblr, responded to questions on Instagram stories. He wasn't averse to sharing his life— in a lot of ways, it made him feel like he knew his followers because when he shared, a lot of them opened up, too.