HALO HIDIN' MY OBSESSION - Taylor Swift x Reader

secret sessions (pt.1)

A/N: The first chapter of this is a little bit of plot and generally PG. Second bit is explicit, so please be mindful of that. Also, yes, I do realise how meta this is. I do own the fact that it is very, very self-indulgent. Fuck it we ball.

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It wasn't a planned thing.

After a BA in Public Administration, you get a job as the permit coordinator's assistant at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. This, in simple words, means that you spend most of your day going through the motions of reading documents, highlighting important bits and pieces for your boss, filing them in a very outdated piece of software, and drinking cheap state-provisioned coffee. It isn't glamorous at all, but it pays the bills.

After three years of trying to get through just one more day without committing murder (an achievement generally conquered with much more of that weird coffee that anyone should probably have in the entirety of their lifetimes and a very heavy lot of Taylor Swift), on a random Thursday, it starts. It is, initially, an innocent browsing through FanFiction.Net (and then Wattpad. And then Spirit. And then, at last, AO3). You're tentative at first, but soon the utterly un-busy hours of your work days make you lean into it. A lot. Enough so that within six months of compulsively consuming every possible content for your favourite ships, you're jittery. And it all escalates on a fairly lazy afternoon of listening to Red back to back, when you think to yourself for what is probably the millionth time just how gay Treacherous feels.

So you decide to do something about it.

It's just a five-thousand-words long short story. Which then progresses into a collection of one-shots, all taken from Taylor's Red, each story a reflection of one song. Then an entire romance-novel-length story. Sometimes they're angsty to no end, with crying and yearning and fighting and breaking up. Sometimes they're romantic, all fluff, heartwarming couple montages, meet-cutes, all that jazz. More often than not, however, they're... thirsty. Hot. Smutty.

Thing is, you've been single for a very long while. And the one-off one-night stand here and there barely gets the job done. Besides, it's just so, so much simpler to dump all those thoughts in the back of your mind into some one-shot that'll get a few hundred likes and a few dozen comments and move on with your life. Things are just so much more work otherwise.

And then it gets... bigger.

The comments section becomes your version of a neighbourhood bar - regulars, familiar usernames, a few cryptic lurkers you can never quite figure out. Sometimes someone will pop in with a six-paragraph dissertation on why your interpretation of a specific line is "brilliant" and how your writing is "amazing" (their words, not yours), and other times it's a simple "hot 🔥". You start recognising people. And they start recognising you.

You don't notice the shift at first, the subtle slide from "person who writes fanfic" to "person who writes the fic everyone's talking about this week." Your Tumblr inbox starts to fill up with requests, your follower count ticks upward, and someone even makes a TikTok edit of your story quotes over clips from Taylor's past music videos. You get tagged in Twitter threads debating which fic of yours is the most iconic. People send you prompts and headcanons and please write this specific enemies-to-lovers scenario based on the time Taylor wore that one outfit in 2015.

You lean into it - not in an influencer way (though your best friend does joke that you're "Swiftie famous" now), but in a "fine, I'll post this fic where Taylor's a moody artist and the reader is her hopelessly smitten neighbour, if that's what the people's clamouring for" kind of way. You start curating your Twitter to be 95% Taylor content: theories, memes, and, occasionally, overly impassioned essays about why a certain song couldn't possibly be about a man.