notice me!
kuroo tetsurō x oblivious!f!reader
please notice tetsurō before he juggles kenma and fukunaga for attention. wc: 1.8k
kuroo tetsurō had spent approximately four business days drafting the letter, destroying enough notebook pages to clear out half the amazon rainforest just to ensure his handwriting didn’t look like a chicken had dipped its feet in ink and had a seizure across the page.
the letter was, without a single ounce of exaggeration, a masterclass in classical romance. it was the kind of prose that would make sixteenth-century poets throw their quills into a well and give up. he’d written about the way your laughter sounded like the exact resonant frequency needed to shatter his ribs from the inside out. he’d compared your eyes to the stable nucleus of an atom—the only thing holding his chaotic, electron-cloud of a brain together. it was poetic. it was devastatingly tender. it was enough to make a grown volleyball captain weep into his knee pads.
and, with the tactical precision of a stealth bomber, he had slipped it directly into chapter four of your organic chemistry textbook during study period while you were distracted trying to untangle your wired headphones.
he’d gone home that night, buried his face into his pillow, and kicked his legs like a victorian maiden who had just been perceived by a duke. he fully expected a text by 8:00 pm. a tearful confession by 8:30 pm. perhaps a marriage proposal by next tuesday.
instead, you showed up to school the next morning, aggressively yawning, and used that exact textbook as a makeshift shield against the morning sun while sitting on the brick wall outside the gym.
kuroo watched you from five feet away, his soul slowly evaporating from his body like rubbing alcohol left out in the sun. you didn’t even open the book. you just used the heavy-weight cover to fan yourself when the humidity hit. the actual love of his life was using his bleeding-heart declaration of eternal devotion to circulate lukewarm morning air onto her collarbones.
“you look like you’re tracking a gazelle,” kenma murmured from beside him, eyes glued to a handheld screen. “and not in a cool, predator way. more like a very sad, hungry dog.”
“she didn’t read it,” kuroo whispered, his voice cracking like a dry twig. “kenma. the paper density alone should have changed the gravitational pull of the textbook. how did she not feel the shift in equilibrium?”
“maybe she just hates chemistry.”
“impossible,” kuroo hissed, clutching his chest. “i’m chemistry.”
phase two required a complete lack of subtlety. if you wouldn’t stumble upon his heart by accident, he would simply have to leave breadcrumbs.
the next afternoon, you opened your locker to find a small, neon-pink post-it note stuck directly onto the metal grated vents. written in shaky, black sharpie was a clue that looked less like a romantic hint and more like a ransom note from a criminal who specialized in stem subjects:
‘the elements of life are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. but the element of my life is currently trapped on page 142. look closer, or i will literally spontaneously combust on the cafeteria floor.’
you blinked at the sticky note. you reached out, peeled it off, and stared at it for a solid three minutes. kuroo, who was hiding behind the corner of the hallway with his face pressed so hard against the brickwork that his nose was flattened, held his breath. this was it. the catalyst. the moment you would pull out the textbook, flip to page 142, and realize that he was completely, utterly, and devastatingly yours.
instead, you let out a soft snort, muttered, “yaku must have lost a bet to standard level science,” and stuck the pink note onto the front of your binder because you liked the shade of neon.
from behind the wall, kuroo felt his knees give way. he slid down the bricks until he was sitting flat on the linoleum, a hand dramatically draped over his eyes. his heart was performing a full, aggressive drum solo against his sternum, furious at the rejection it hadn’t even technically received yet.
by day three, the desperation had reached a critical mass. kuroo tetsurō was a man possessed by a singular, burning directive: make the prettiest girl in the third-year corridor realize that he wanted to hold her hand until their joints turned to dust. he couldn’t function. he missed three consecutive serves in practice because he kept visualizing the exact layout of page 142 and wondering if he should have used a highlighter.
“if you don’t fix whatever is rotting your brain, i’m going to set your shoes on fire,” yaku warned during evening clean-up, leaning heavily on a broom. “you’ve been staring at that volleyball like it owes you alimony.”
“it’s an intellectual standoff,” kuroo said, his voice hollow as he rolled a ball between his palms. “a battle of wits. she’s testing my resolve, yaku. she’s checking to see if my devotion can withstand the vacuum of her absolute oblivion.”
“she doesn’t know you left a note, does she?” kenma called out from the bench, not looking up.
kuroo threw himself backward onto the polished gym floor, starfish-ing beneath the bright fluorescent lights. “i made it so obvious! i used neon! i referenced atomic structures! what else does she want from me? a billboard? a sky-writer? should i tattoo the chemical equation for dopamine onto my forehead?”
the next morning, he forfeited all remaining scraps of his dignity. if poetry wouldn’t work, and clues wouldn’t work, then raw, unadulterated public exposure would have to suffice.
you walked down the science wing at 7:50 am, holding a half-eaten convenience store bun, only to find a small crowd of second-years hovering around your locker. they were whispering, giggling behind their hands, and pointing at the metal door.
as you approached, the crowd parted like the red sea, revealing the monstrosity kuroo had unleashed upon the school infrastructure.
there, stuck entirely to the center of your locker with roughly four entire rolls of heavy-duty, industrial neon green painter’s tape, was the original, beautiful, cream-colored love letter. it was trapped beneath a lattice of green adhesive so thick it looked like it could withstand a category five hurricane. and slapped right on top of the whole mess was a giant piece of cardboard ripped from an old volleyball equipment box, featuring a frantic, jagged scrawl:
“please for the love of god notice my affection. page 142 was an innervation of my entire soul. i’m begging you to interact with this literature.”
you stood frozen, your bun halfway to your mouth.
from the far end of the hall, leaning against a drinking fountain with his arms crossed in a position he clearly thought looked casual but actually made him look like he was suffering from severe muscle spasms, was kuroo. his signature bedhead seemed even more chaotic than usual, a few strands sticking straight up like frantic antennae. his face was completely flushed, a deep, dark crimson that started at the tips of his ears and pooled all the way down into the collar of his school uniform.
you looked from the neon green monstrosity on your locker, to the heavy-grade paper trapped underneath, and then finally down the hall at him.
the silence stretched. a second-year student cleared their throat nervously.
slowly, you walked over to the locker. instead of tearing the cardboard off, you carefully slipped your fingers under the edge of the painter’s tape, working at the thick adhesive until you managed to pull the cream-colored letter out from its bright green cage. it was a bit crinkled at the borders, but the elegant, sweeping ink was fully intact.
you flipped to the back, your eyes scanning the dense, beautiful paragraphs where he had written about how your presence made his brain short-circuit like a faulty capacitor. you read the lines where he confessed, with terrifying honesty, that he spent his biology lectures drawing the exact curve of your shoulder blades in the margins of his notebook.
your chest did something strange—a sudden, warm domain expansion that felt remarkably like a small firework detonating right behind your ribs. your face grew hot, the heat spreading rapidly across your cheeks as the sheer weight of his ridiculous, beautiful, overwhelming feelings hit you full-force.
you folded the paper carefully, tucked it into your blazer pocket, and began marching down the hallway straight toward him.
kuroo’s eyes widened. the cool, leaning posture evaporated instantly. he straightened up so fast his spine made an audible clicking sound, his hands dropping to his sides like a soldier caught off guard. “uh. hey. so. the tape is entirely bio-degradable, if you were worried about the school property damage—”
you stopped right in front of him, reached out, and grabbed the lapels of his uniform jacket, tugging him downward so he was forced to bend his absurdly tall frame until his face was level with yours.
“you absolute menace,” you breathed, your voice a mix of a breathless laugh and total disbelief. “you could have just told me you liked me during lunch. you didn’t need to sacrifice a perfectly good moving box.”
kuroo stared at you, his eyes auditing your lips and then back up to your eyes, his brain completely liquefying under the proximity. up close, you could see the tiny, frantic flutter of the pulse point in his throat.
“but the prose,” he squeaked out, his voice a full octave higher than normal before he cleared his throat and tried to recover his usual low drawl. “the prose was exquisite. i compared you to a stable isotope. that’s high praise coming from a guy who fails literature.”
“it was incredibly dramatic,” you agreed, your thumbs brushing against the fabric of his blazer. “and it’s the most beautiful thing i’ve ever read. even if it was buried under three pounds of adhesive.”
kuroo’s expression softened, the frantic, manic energy draining out of him all at once, replaced by something so profoundly tender and vulnerable it made your stomach do a backflip. he reached up, his large, warm hand covering yours where you held his lapels, his thumb gently smoothing over your knuckles.
“so,” he whispered, a small, genuine smile finally breaking through his nerves, making his eyes crinkle at the corners. “does this mean the experiment was a success? are we experiencing a mutual reaction?”
“we are,” you said, letting go of his jacket only to slide your fingers into his, locking your hand with his large, calloused one. “but you’re still helping me scrape that green tape off my locker before the vice principal sees it.”
kuroo let out a loud, booming laugh that echoed down the corridor, squeezing your hand so tightly it felt like he never intended to let go, his chest swelling with enough joy to lift a house off its foundations.
n: my beloved @ryomenlettuce asked for this, huehuehue.. it’s from my scrapped ideas
© showhay — don’t copy, repost, or translate without my permission. do not use/feed my works to AI.
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