yun ? @syoldei - Tumblr Blog

ayyy twin ur so goated i saw u got requests open !!!! can i request my husband idia shroud tryna bag a baddie and lowkirkenuinly feeling like he’s fumbling (bc yk how he is) but then he finds out she’s like highkey into his shit anyways lebron smiles down at you twin ily and ur writing so so much !!!!

❝ LOVE IS THE ANTITHESIS OF GAMERS (?) ︵﹒

💭: idia has a crush—what's the worst that could happen? apparently, his IQ and rationale drop by 70 points every time you're within a three-foot radius near him. fortunately for everyone except idia, you think it's positively adorable.

pairing. idia shroud x fem! reader

wc. 4.3k

warnings. loser idia lol, idiots in love, reader lowk wants that cookie bad too, not proofread

a/n. HII ANON !! thank u for the request first and foremost 😋 , and this was highkenuinely a cute prompt to write. tysm my king may lebron smile upon all of us twin 🥹🥹

Idia Shroud is in some deep shit.

Much to his horror, it's not the "I stayed up a whole night or two grinding an event raid knowing full well I have PE the morning after", nor the "oh shit my mom found out about my history searches" type of deep shit. No, this is far, far worse than he can ever imagine—an insidious, life-altering catastrophe of Biblical proportions that has rendered his hyper-optomized intellect completely obsolete.

To put it in simpler terms: he has a crush—a real person, too.

He has a crush on a real person in a sense that it is not on one of his oshis that exists safely behind a screen where rejection cannot physically reach him, but rather, an honest-to-gods, horrifyingly tangible crush on an actual living person who walks the halls of Night Raven College and greets him every time they meet like that alone isn't enough to reduce his entire system into decimated rubble.

He handles this revelation as well as you think—disastrously. Now that he acknowledges it with no room for denial, every interaction with you feels like a limited-time event quest with irreversible dialogue options, except unlike in games, there is no strategy guide to look up online (that he finds feasible, anyway), no save slots, and no guarantee that choosing the wrong response won't have him want to dissolve into ash on the spot.

Take his latest predicament, for instance. Yesterday, you asked him about one of the newest figurines on his desk, and that was all it took. One harmless little “Oh, this one looks cool. Where did you get it?” and suddenly Idia blacked out so hard that he regained consciousness midway through a ten-minute ramble about it, up until the character archetype marketing.

The moment his consciousness finally jogged up with this mouth, Idia felt his soul try to physically detach from his body. He stopped dead mid-sentence, the horrifying realization of spending ten continuous minutes infodumping about a literal figurine washing over him after a few seconds.

Oh, that was it. Any second now, you were going to execute a hard skip on this dialogue tree, back away slowly, and backfire him from your social circle forever.

He could practically see the dialogue box clearly—

INCORRECT CHOICE ! Love interest is now deeply uncomfortable—Affection Points decreased significantly.

He squeezed his eyes shut, hands flying up to grip the strings of his hoodie as he braced himself for the inevitable. “A-Ah—whatever, it’s stupid anyway! Just ignore me, I-I’m basically just a glitch in the NPC matrix, disregard everything I just said!—”

“Whoa,” you quip, your lips curling into a warm, effortless smile that thoroughly crumbled his remaining frame rate. “I didn’t exactly realize that so much detail went into marketing for these. You really know a lot about these, Idia.”

Despite his initial spiral, he was stunned to find that you just sat there, leaning forward slightly with your chin resting in your hand, looking up at him with a genuinely captivated expression. You hadn’t interrupted him once, he realized, and that you had been listening to his rambles the whole time with your head tilting with curiosity at all the right moments, completely unfazed by his mile-a-minute, high-pitched tech jargon.

In fact, he’s pretty sure his soul briefly left his body the moment you continued, “I like hearing you talk about things you’re passionate about.”

Like… huh?

What kind of romance-route dialogue is that?! That’s not fair—that’s literally a critical hit to his EXP!

His blue hair violently combusted, the flames instantly shifting from panicked embers into a blinding, neon, flustered pink from root to tip. The flames crackled and hissed so vigorously that they nearly drowned out the sound of his own hyperventilating and the hysterical pulses of his heartbeat. His eyes darted wildly around the room, desperately scanning the air for hidden cameras or a floating twitch chat.

Surely, this was a prank set up by some high-tier Pomefiore influencer for a “pranking the local Ignihyde otaku” video, right? Real, actual 3D heroines didn’t just say stuff like that—they didn’t just sit there looking like a literal SSR drop while handing out free, unprompted ego buffs.

Idia stammered against his words, voice hitting a higher frequency than usual. He yanked the strings of his hoodie so tight his face was practically swallowed by the fabric, leaving only his wide saucer-like eyes visible. “Y-you’re… you’re hackling. There’s no way… what kind of broken RNG…?”

You just let out a soft and melodic chuckle at his absolute meltdown.

“I’m serious,” you said, leaning in just a fraction closer, completely unfazed by the heat radiating from his blushing flames. “It’s nice to listen to someone who actually has deep lore to share. You should show me some of your other setups sometime.”

Idia nearly fucking died.

The moment the door clicked shut behind you, he remained as he was in his gaming chair for a solid thirty seconds, staring blankly at the closed door. After what felt like hours, he folded forward until his forehead hit the desk with a loud thunk, his flustered pink sparks dancing wildly against the ceiling.

This was bad—this was incredibly, dangerously bad.

Idia is in some deep shit, and he’s got it horrendous.

That leads him to his current train of thoughts, which mostly consists of him staring into the middle distance like a war veteran while questioning where exactly his life took such a catastrophic turn—genuinely, when did this happen?

Idia never planned for this; people like him aren’t supposed to fall in love in the first place (love, he thinks, is supposed to be a word that he mouths with no lingering weight of pathos promised and entangled within its philosophy). He isn’t built for the main storyline—a background-dwelling tech support NPC like him is supposed to be the guy behind the scenes, he’s supposed to be with the rest of the audience that spectates on the male lead sweeping the female lead off her feet, he’s supposed to be the comic relief shut-in who is named Supporting Character A.

Supposed, supposed, supposed—yet, here he is, completely and irreversibly hard-locked into your route, with a heart that is currently hammering against his ribcage so violently it feels like a mechanical keyboard stuck on macros.

He has never wished harder in his life for visible quest objectives and navigation to magically appear in front of him. At least then, he’d know what he’s supposed to do.

Hell, not even the otome games he downloaded for this specific situation help him much. Those self-insert protagonists can casually lean against walls, trap their love interests in kabedons, and whisper devastatingly smooth lines into their ears without wanting to blow their shit smooth off—but Idia? He’d rather die than do any of those things in public, let alone in the halls of fucking Night Raven College, where those normies can have a front row seat to his social doom.

Absolutely not.

Sure, he’s confided in Ortho, which, in hindsight, might’ve been his first fatal mistake.

Ortho, being the wonderful little brother he is, immediately treated the situation like a full-scale strategy game. By the time he pulled out pie charts and statistical breakdowns with alarming enthusiasm, Idia belatedly realized that somehow made things infinitely worse because now, with every analysis that spills from his brother’s mouth, the suspicion that comes with every tiny interaction with you worsens.

You smiled at him, you laughed at his niche gaming references, you reposted anything remotely romantic? Was that normal, platonic friendliness, or was that a hidden affection flag?

At this point, his brain is running thirty tabs at once while overheating catastrophically. The worst part is that, despite everything, a small delusional part of him is starting to think that maybe—just maybe—you actually like him back.

Which is an insane thought—actually clinically insane on his part, because there’s no way you would genuinely look at his chronically online ass and think, yeah, this one. I want this one.

…Probably

Muscle Red: Oho! A love trouble? Then you must court them properly!

Muscle Red: Listen well! Courtship is a sacred tradition between two burning souls. You must demonstrate sincerity, devotion, and the unwavering confidence of a man prepared to seize happiness with his own hands!

Muscle Red: Bring her gifts! Walk her back to her dorm! Praise her openly before others! Challenge rivals for her affection if necessary!

Gloomurai: im gnna throw up

Suffice to say that Idia can only stare at the screen in mounting horror.

Walk you back to your dorm? In public? Where people can see him? He would rather get caught accidentally liking a six-month-old post on your account at three in the morning.

Praise you openly before others? The closest he has ever gotten to publicly complimenting someone was typing “cool fit” into a server chat once—and that led him to overthink about it for three business days.

Don’t even get him started on the “challenge rivals” part.

What rivals?! This isn’t some shoujo manga where he dramatically confronts another guy beneath cherry blossoms while orchestral music swells in the background. If anyone else liked you, Idia would simply accept his defeat and back off.

The next few days become a special kind of torture, during which Idia spends approximately ninety percent of his time internally debating every possible interaction before chickening out at the last second.

Should he message you first? No, too desperate.

Should he invite you to hang out in his room again? Too suspicious.

Should he casually send you one of those funny cat videos you liked last week? Wait, no, what if you think he’s weird for remembering that—

By day three of this psychological gridlock, Idia is practically a ghost haunting his own gaming chair. He hasn’t even logged in to do his daily quests, a tragic metric that has Ortho considering launching an emergency medical protocol.

Every time his phone buzzes with a notification, his entire central nervous system experiences some sort of shock wave. If it’s an update from a gacha game, he sighs with a mix of relief and profound patheticness. If it’s you, his blue hair violently flashes a bright, neon-pink warning signal before he shoves the device face-down onto his mattress like it’s a live explosive.

He’ll stare at your chat head for twenty minutes, his thumbs hovering over the digital keyboard with the manic, trembling high-APM of a pro e-sports player at a grand final.

“hey, r u free to look at that coding script 2day?” Draft deleted—he sounds like he’s an underpaid IT helpdesk NPC.

“yo, i got a rare item drop if u wnt it.” Draft also deleted—what if you think he’s trying to bribe your affection metrics?”

“uhm, wyd.” Yet another draft deleted—literally a cry for help, he sounds like some no good frat boy.

Ultimately, he locks the screen, buries his face deep into the fleece of his hoodie, and emits a muffled groan of absolute defeat.

Unbeknownst to him, however, his unsuspecting self is about to be hit with a massive, unavoidable random encounter. On the fourth afternoon of his isolation, just as he finally sneaks out of Ignihyde to restock on his highly specific, premium snacks and energy drinks under the cover of dusk, he turns the corner of the courtyard, and runs straight into you.

“...Uh. W-well.”

The single syllable chokes out of his throat, hitting a pitch so violently uncalibrated.

He does not remember much from that embarrassing moment, his brain entirely wiping its cache of those crucial ten seconds due to a system-wide stress overload. Next thing he knows, his autopilot script had somehow had him stammer out an invitation to his dorm under the paper-thin, incredibly pathetic excuse of “O-ortho wanted to show you something new.”

Which brings him right here—the thing that Ortho had apparently “mentioned” happens to be a co-op game. He didn’t even have the time to swap his oversized fleece hoodie before you are already sitting right beside him in his personal sanctuary.

“T-the game itself is this co-op puzzle RPG where the mechanics are built around synchronized movement patterns and environmental coordination, so if one person messes up, both players immediately explode. Which is, uh, fun—in theory.” He explains quickly, his hands fumbling as he offers you a spare controller.

“Sounds perfect for us, then,” you joke lightly as you take the controller from his hands.

He sounds like a loser thinking about this, but the moment your fingers brush against his for less than a second, Idia almost drops dead on the spot.

Blissfully unaware of his inner battle, you merely settle beside him, knees nearly brushing against his. Idia sits rigidly beside you the entire time like a corpse being propped upright for a funeral service, while you are having the time of your life.

“Okay,” you grin, glancing at the character selection screen. “Who do I get to be?”

Lord, he’s finished.

The first round goes surprisingly well so far, mostly because Idia becomes terrifyingly competent the second a controller is in his hands.

“Okay, jump there—no, not there there, the glowing platform—wait!—”

A shrill, distorted scream echoes through the speakers as your avatar pinwheels downward into the endless abyss below. Idia's avatar—who had been perfectly balanced on the platform a second ago—is immediately yanked off the edge after you like some poor sack of potatoes.

Then, in giant ornate Gothic lettering, splattered across the holographic display are the words Game Over.

“...Oops,” you say weakly.

Idia makes a strangled noise beside you—not an angry noise, per se, more like a sound of someone watching years peel off his lifespan in a matter of seconds.

“W-we actually died in under four minutes. This might actually be a new record.” He mutters. “A total server-wipeout… in the very first run.”

“Hey,” you nudge his elbow gently with yours, a soft, bright burst of laughter cutting through the air. “Don’t pass away on me, yet. I still need a teacher to help me get the hang of it.”

It’s not even a full shove—just a tiny bump of your elbow that barely grazes his sleeves—and yet, his heart jolted so violently that he nearly drops the controller straight into his lap.

Fuck, why did his entire nervous system fail him at the contact? What is he? A plaintive, sopping loser?

“A-ah, no, you’re fine,” he blurts out, his posture akin to that of a statue at this point. “I-I mean, the first quadrant is basically designed to filter casuals, anyway. The devs are sadists, it’s not your fault—well, not fully your fault, but—”

He watches in absolute horror as your eyes widen theatrically.

“Wow,” you gasp. “I’m quite offended.”

“N-no!” His voice cracks so hard in his flurry. “That’s not what I— I meant statistically speaking! The map layout is intentionally made to be deceptive and—”

You can’t even hold the fake, theatrical offense for more than three seconds before you completely lose it, letting out a loud and joyous laugh that echoes beautifully throughout his room. You slightly lean back, shoulders shaking as you try to catch your breath.

The holographic screen paints shifting blues and violets across your face while you grin at him like this is fun—like he’s fun, and something terrifyingly warm twists and convulses fiercely in his chest.

“I’m kidding,” you assure him between giggles. “Relax, Idia. We can just try again.”

Idia lets his hands drop, his pink hair settling into a slightly calmer, but deeply flustered magenta. He wipes his palms against his pants, yanking his hood down just enough to shield the red that peppers across his cheeks, though he can’t hide the tiny, incredibly bashful smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

“U-ugh… fine. A very funny joke modifier,” he mutters, his fingers snapping back onto the joysticks with a sudden competitive burst of high-speed adrenaline. He gives you a sideways glance through his glowing blue bangs, his heart doing completely unpatched glitches against his ribcage. “But you gotta seriously lock in for the second run.”

His fingers twitch anxiously over the buttons. “Besides… it’d be kinda lame if we give up after one try.”

The words come out more honest than he intended, because the thing is, he doesn’t care about the game anymore—not really.

He just likes the low flare of the holographic screen reflecting in your eyes, the sound of your laughter resounding through the room instead of the usual mechanical hum that he has come to liken with his dorm, the fact that you’re sitting here beside him close enough that your sleeve brushes against his every few seconds without recoiling from him once.

Judging from the way you beam at him afterward, Idia finds that awful pressure in his chest doesn’t feel quite as unbearable anymore.

It’s still absolutely mortifying—his heartbeat is pounding so frantically that he’s halfway convinced the controller can feel it through his palms, but beneath the burning embarrassment and internal, non-stop screaming, there’s something warm—dangerously close to elation—blooming quietly.

“Okay, okay,” you laugh, lifting your hands in surrender. “I’ll try not to drag us both to our death next time.”

“Good,” he murmurs, though the tiny smile clawing at the corner of his mouth completely ruins any attempt at sounding cool. “C-cause carrying you is already consuming like… ninety percent of my processing power.”

Thankfully, the next several stages go relatively smoothly. There are still several incidents involving nearly avoiding laser grids, one extremely unfortunate puzzle mishap where both your avatars get flattened by a giant stone mechanism, and a particularly humiliating moment where Idia nearly accidentally walks straight into a cursed debuff trap because he was too busy staring at your excited expression after you solved one of the rune sequences correctly.

By the time the twelfth stage materializes, the difficulty has scaled exponentially. The environment shifts to a scene of ruins that give way to a massive suspended cathedral floating in the void, stained-glass windows glowing with fractured luminous light while chains hang endlessly beneath the platforms, mimicking the remains of a fallen god.

You lean slightly closer to the screen, brows furrowed in concentration as you navigate through a narrow, razor-thin edge.

“This is the midpoint difficulty spike,” Idia mutters. “Most co-op teams dissolve here because the synchronization timing gets super strict and the platforming physics become—”

Midway through this explanation, your character encounters a sudden collision glitch, causing its footing to skid perilously close to the platform’s edge. Before his processing units can even boot up, let alone catch up to his mouth, Idia jolts in a frenzy.

“Careful!”

At the same exact moment, his right hand shoots out entirely on instinct, abandoning his controller to steady your wrist.

On the massive screen, your character’s sprite catches the edge of the mesh at the last possible frame and pulls itself up.

The good news is that your avatar survives—bad news is that Idia might as well be the opposite.

He is made painfully aware that:

One: He is holding your wrist—his long, pale fingers are wrapped firmly around your skin.

Two: your skin is warm, in contrast to the chill touch that lingers on the expanse of his skin.

Three—

Holy fuck.

What if that looked overly possessive?! What if he just triggered a permanent creepflag?! What if his user rating just dropped into absolute null?!

His hand jerks away from you so fast it may as well have been a recoil animation. Had you not known, you might think he’d just been struck by a high-voltage lightning spell.

“S-sorry!—” he stumbles out the apology immediately, nearly swallowing his tongue. “That was—uh—gamer reflex! It’s purely a tactical maneuver! N-not in a weird way! I’m not trying to, like, grab you or anything! T-that sounded bad—wait, no, that made it worse—”

His words rapidly devolve into incomprehensible static, his entire chest heaving beneath his hoodie. His saucer-like amber eyes are blown out to the size of dinner plates as he tries to compress his entire lanky frame into the deepest, darkest depths of his ergonomic gaming chair.

The flames around his head explode, burning such an aggressive and flustered pink that they cast an almost blinding, radioactive glow across the room.

You blink, completely stunned for a second by the sheer, thermonuclear velocity of his meltdown. You look at the vibrating bundle of hoodie and pink sparks sitting next to you, and then down at your wrist, where the faint imprint of his surprisingly firm (and pleasant) touch still lingers against your skin.

A chuckle escapes your lips, cutting through his frantic static like a high-tier debuff cleanser.

“Idia,” You reach over, using the edge of your controller to lightly tap his rigidly locked elbow. “Relax, if anything, I should be the one thanking you. You literally saved our run.”

The flames around his head sputter more glaringly.

“I’m serious,” you reaffirm, a warm and blithe smile tugging at your lips as you lean closer, wholly unfazed by the subtle crackles of his blushing flames that slightly warm the air between the two of you.

“Besides, if you’re going to keep saving me every time I almost fall off a cliff, I think I’ve got a pretty good teammate.” You tilt your head. “Guess I’ll just have you stick with me, hm?”

“Oh.” The eloquent response escapes before he can stop it.

You raise an eyebrow in amusement. “Oh?”

“Uh, N-not—” His voice cracks. “I-I mean, y-yeah, technically. The fail state would’ve been triggered if your character fell there. So from a purely strategic standpoint, preserving teammate integrity was the optimal choice.”

His hair slowly begins to cycle back into a deeply flustered magenta, casting a warm glow over his sharp features as he fixes his gaze on the screen, refusing to risk looking at you again. “Of course, maintaining both player units is the most efficient route for progression, so it wasn’t, uh, anything special or—”

He continues to ramble, his clarifications getting increasingly tangled in technical jargon.

“Mm.” You hum thoughtfully, leaning your cheek against the top of your controller. The single sound is enough to make him nervous.

“Mm?” He echoes weakly.

You let the pause hang for a beat longer, your lips curling into a soft yet thoroughly amused smile that fully dismantled his remaining defenses.

“I think that’s the longest explanation anyone’s ever given me for grabbing my wrist,” you tease. “I never thought you would be so flustered over this, though.”

He makes a sound of pure, unadulterated suffering. “T-that.”

A useless syllable, that he is aware of. He stares straight ahead at the suspended cathedral on the screen with such an unblinkable intensity.

“You—uh.”

His grip on the controller tightens, the joysticks creaking ominously beneath his thumbs. What the hell is he supposed to say? “Oh, sorry. I’m flustered because I have a humiliatingly massive crush on you, and I can’t think of anything every time you stand within a three-foot radius?”

Yeah, fuck no, he might as well dig his own grave and lie down in it at this point.

“Y-you’re making it sound weirder than it was,” he mumbles instead, visibly shrinking further (if that’s even possible) into his hoodie. He looks everywhere but at you—staring intently at the carpet, at the glowing power strip on the floor, at the stray charging cable—anywhere to avoid your direct line of sight. “I just reacted before I thought—that’s all.”

“Mhm.” Your voice hums with a smooth, heavy drop of skepticism that slices right through his defenses.

“I did,” he insists, his voice hitting a slightly higher and defensive cadence that completely betrays his inner panic.

“Sure.”

“I-I did!”

The immediate high-pitched defensiveness almost makes you laugh out loud.

“I mean, obviously, I didn’t want to run to fail,” he continues, the words tripping over themselves and colliding in his throat as he rushes to build a logical explanation. “And we’d already gotten past, like, twelve stages, so it would’ve been a huge waste of progress, unallocated playtime, and—”

There he goes again.

You don’t interrupt—you don’t think you could even if you wanted to. The rambles keep branching into increasingly specific tangents, spiralling from game mechanics to reaction times, then, somehow, jumping seamlessly into other rabbit holes.

At some point, you subconsciously begin to focus on him. You watch the way one of his hands flails and moves as he talks, while the other still rests over the joysticks. You notice the sharp and defensive hitch of his shoulders whenever he thinks he’s embarrassed himself, the fabric of his hoodie bunching up like some sort of armour.

Your gaze traces the dance of pink embers around his head, watching them flicker into dazzling starbursts every single time his tongue buffers. Beneath his bangs, you catch the frantic, side-to-side darting of his wide amber eyes, because he still can’t quite summon the courage to look you in the eyes.

Cute.

The thought arrives so naturally and unprompted that it almost catches you off guard. You blink; the word echoes in the space of your own mind, carrying a strange warmth in its wake.

Across from you, Idia is still rambling himself deeper into whatever massive hole he’s currently digging, his voice dropping into a low mumble as the seconds stretch by. He’s not even aware of the shift in his room—thoroughly and utterly hopeless against the silent psychological warfare of your stare.

A soft smile tugs at the corner of your lips—he’s… kind of adorable, no, scratch that, he’s incredibly and devastatingly adorable when he’s trying this hard to pretend he doesn’t care.

Judging by the sudden, stupid little flutter that your heart gives the exact moment his eyes finally steal a brief glance back at your face—

…Yeah, this might be a serious problem.