#fukiouh

[fukiouh]

Error 404: Dignity Not Found | nerdjo x reader

He's a man who can code flawless physics simulations but has almost permanently visible pizza stains on his chest. He operates on condescending logic and a mountain of physics textbooks. You operate on chaotic impulse and the deeply questionable belief that the most satisfying men are the ones you get to personally dismantle. He thinks you're just a study partner who tolerates his nerdy references. You know you're about to become the fatal error in his code. After all, a man with a genius-level intellect is still just a man. And this one is so touch-starved that a single hug is enough to blue-screen his entire thought process. His entire system is crashing, and his dignity is officially Not Found.

pairing: nerdjo x reader

warnings: explicit sexual content, 18+ (mdni!!), university au, reader insert, smut, fluff, crack treated seriously, slow burn (kinda? they're both just idiots), mutual pining, praise kink, improper use of pringles can, virgin!gojo, oblivious gojo, experienced reader, established friends to lovers, piv, premature ejaculation, happy ending

word count: 21k+

a/n: rewrite and repost! ✨

masterlist | crossposted on ao3!

The second the lecture ended the hallway flooded with students pouring out of the Communications building. You were still wrestling your laptop into your bag when Suguru fell into step beside you.

"Hey." He adjusted the strap of his bag. Effortlessly casual. As always.

"I'm heading to the library to finish notes for the campaign project. My roommates grabbed us a table on the third floor. You in? I figure we can speedrun the outline in an hour, maybe less—"

You'd only just met Suguru this semester. Psych major taking your Persuasion and Social Influence class as a random upper-level elective. He claimed it was for "analyzing the mechanics of mass manipulation" or whatever reason he fed the professor.

Honestly, you really liked him. He was painfully chill and normal. Sensible, even. Genuinely one of maybe three people you'd met in college you could actually say that about. Which was a depressingly low number but oh well.

Exactly the kinda guy who seemed to have his life together. So you figured roommates meant, you know, normal college students. As one does. Maybe someone who chewed gum a little too loudly. Maybe someone who clicked a pen.

"Sure," you shrugged, falling into pace with him. "I've got some time to kill. Let's go."

The walk over was pleasant. You complained about your professor's weird obsession with the word synergy and he agreed with that calm patience of his. The kinda conversation you two shared on a weekly basis.

The third floor of the library was supposed to be the Silent Zone. Highest floor. Always the go-to for quiet mental breakdowns, dissociating between classes, or straight up passing out for twenty minutes without judgment. Sacred ground, basically.

And then you heard it. Well. Everyone heard it. Legally deaf people probably heard it. People three floors down definitely heard it. NASA's deep space monitoring equipment may have picked up a blip.

THWACK CLACK THWACK.

Obnoxiously loud. Rhythmic and sounding exactly like someone had found a plastic machine gun and was absolutely going to town with it in the middle of a library.

Suguru stiffened beside you. The cool mask slipping right off his face—  "Oh my fucking god." Eyes closing.

"Huh?" You glanced at him. You heard the noise sure, but you hadn't placed it. Was there construction happening? Was someone breaking the vending machine again?

"Just..." he muttered it through his teeth. "...keep walking."

So you did. Single file behind him through the stacks, the CLACKING getting louder with every single step. Louder. Louder. LOUDER.

You could literally see the heads of other students snapping around. Shooting homicidal glares over their MacBooks, all desperately trying to locate whatever, whoever was responsible for the fucking ear rape.

You followed their gazes to the far end of the room. 

Bingo.

Sitting there was a girl with choppy brown hair. One would say, completely locked the fuck in. Dead-eyed, dragging a glittery pink marker across a cross-section of a human spleen, head bobbing slightly to whatever was blasting through her overhead headphones.

And then you looked past her. 

Oh. OH.

Someone had built a freaking barricade out of heavy spine-broken physics textbooks and buried behind all that was a man who looked like he hadn't seen direct sunlight since he hit puberty.

Hunched over a laptop that looked like it was actively fighting for its own life. Cooling fans screaming for mercy. And plugged into it was a keyboard. Taking up almost half the desk. Huh?

…So that was the noise.

The keys had those specific tactile switches created with one purpose and one only of making everyone within, like, a fifty-foot radius contemplate a violent felony.

He looked... lived in. And that's, like, putting it very, very PR friendly.

His white hair was sticking up on the left side, matted down on the right as if he'd been running his hand through it the whole day.

"Satoru," Suguru's voice cut through the clicking. It came out really tight. Really low. The kinda tone of a man trying very hard not to make a scene while absolutely, undeniably making one.

"I explicitly told you to stop bringing the damn keyboard to school."

Click click click click click.

But at that, the girl finally looked up. One headphone sliding off and a lazy wave in your direction.

"Oh, hey," she rasped out. "You brought reinforcements."

She then gave you a look. Then softer, almost conspiratorial. "I'm Shoko, by the way." A pause. "Please ignore him. He's always like that."

Satoru didn't look up. Didn't pause. Didn't even flinch.

He just reached out blindly, shoved a stack of Quantum Field Theory textbooks a few inches to the left to clear his sightline. And kept typing.

Click click click click click.

"Look." He finally spoke. Eyes still glued to his screen, not even a flicker toward you. "I've been going through this logic loop for an hour. I'm finally in the middle of it."

A pause. “If I look away now I will lose the thread n' have to start over from line one." Another pause. "Please leave me alone."

Suguru looked like he wanted to dissolve directly into the ugly library floor. You could literally hear him internally asking the universe or whatever why his best friend was still like this at twenty-one. He'd grown out of this phase at sixteen. Sixteen. So why hadn't Satoru? 

Shoko just rolled her eyes and went back to studying. Clearly a veteran of this specific situation.

But you— You just stared at the mess on his side of the desk. The Great Wall of textbooks. The greasy-ass pizza stain sitting dead center on his chest.

And your brain just basically cheered tf on. You need this man. It was a sickness at this point. It wasn't like you had a great track record to begin with either. You'd basically YOLOed your entire way through college and your taste in men had always been, let's say, questionable too. And yes, you liked them a little pathetic. A little weird. Nerdy in that specific way most people just didn't get. 

But this was a new low even for you. He looked like a raccoon that had raided a Best Buy and for some reason your ovaries were doing a very enthusiastic standing ovation.

You stepped forward. Bypassed the do not engage aura radiating off Suguru like a physical forcefield. Leaned your hip against the edge of the table.

"Two Monsters before noon?" you grinned down at the two cans standing next to his laptop. "Isn't that, like, an excessive amount of caffeine?"

Click click cli—  

It stopped.

Satoru pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at you. There was no shame in his expression whatsoever. It was just the annoyed, arrogant glare of a genius who had been interrupted by a mere mortal.

"Caffeine has a half-life of roughly five hours," he said. Like you were the stupid one for asking.

"I timed the consumption to overlap for best performance." A pause. "I'm not addicted." Another pause. "It's just a well-thought-out fuel strategy."

You blinked at him. What does that even mean?

Like genuinely. What. Lmfao. He talked like those grotesquely self-assured nerds you'd only ever found in the deep corners of the internet. The ones you always assumed couldn't exist in real life.

"And the keyboard?" you gestured to the loud glowing monstrosity. "You really carry around a whole external keyboard everywhere? It sounds like you're firing a shotgun—"

"This is a custom board with Cherry MX Blue switches." His tone could've curdled milk. He looked genuinely offended.

"Do you have any idea what the travel distance on a standard laptop key is?" A pause that really let that question sit there. "It's complete garbage. Complete garbage. No actuation point whatsoever."

"We're in the library," you rolled your eyes. "People are trying to study. Or sleep." You jerked your head. "Look at your friend—"

He glanced over at Shoko. 

And she chose that exact moment to look up from her textbook. The look she gave him was kinda hard to describe. It sat somewhere between a death glare and a promise of future violence.

"Shoko's fine," Satoru said, shrugging it off completely. "That's why she brought the headphones. She adapts." A beat. "And I am trying to code. If I use the laptop keyboard my WPM drops by twelve percent," he said it like he was reporting a fatality. "Which is. Like. An unacceptable efficiency loss."

"WPM?" you repeated. WPM. It sounded completely ridiculous coming out of his mouth and somehow even stupider out of yours.

"Words per minute," Suguru jumped in, not looking up from his notebook. He looked like he had to explained this before and had long since stopped finding it funny. "He tracks it. There's a spreadsheet. Do not ask about it. He'll talk for twenty minutes minimum about finger-travel distance n' none of us will get anything done."

Again… What.

You let the silence sit there. Just a few seconds. Purposefully, deliberately awkward.

"Sure."

Satoru's fingers twitched. Just kind of... hovered there. Waiting. He clearly waited for you to be more impressed. He was awaiting maybe a little gasp of awe, or at least some sort of acknowledgment of his hyper-optimized little hobby. Anything, honestly.

When absolutely nothing came his eyes narrowed behind his smudged glasses.

"What?"

"Nothing—" You leaned a little further into his space, hip grazing the stack of textbooks beside him. "It's just a lot of big words for a guy with visible crumb-crust on his spacebar."

Jerk— 

Satoru's hands flew back from the keyboard instantly. Hovering mid-air like he genuinely believed he could erase the evidence through sheer willpower alone.

But you didn't just stop there. Oh no no.  You then lowered your gaze to his chest and stared at the disgusting sauce stain with a silent disdain. Long enough to make it weird. Longer than that, actually. Just really committed to the bit at that point.Then looked back up at him with eyes full of pity. 

And being this close you caught a whiff of him. He smelled like sweet soda and lived-in musk. The specific scent of a man who probably treated showering as more of a when-i-remember-to activity.

It should have been a red flag. Genuinely. A full sensory alarm system going off. But god fucking help you. It was masculine enough to make your pulse skip and it had absolutely no business being that effective and you were going to need a moment—

"The—the stain is simply sustenance residue," he blurted out. "Pizza rolls."

His voice pitched up much higher than before, waving a hand to dismiss it. But the movement was jerky and uncoordinated, panicked—  And caught one of the empty cans on the edge of the desk.

Clatter clatter — thud.

The hollow aluminium echo rang through the entire floor like a gunshot. Every head within a twenty-foot radius snapped up. People already looked pissed off as hell.

Satoru froze. Hand still in the air. Eyes on the fallen can. 

"And before you even ask—" he pushed on immediately, the words tumbling out in a desperate avalanche to cover the noise. "No. I am not changing." A shallow breath. "This hoodie is currently at its peak comfort level. It is nicely broken in and the fabric tension is exactly where it needs to be for full range of motion," his voice was picking up speed. Getting away from him slightly. "Washing it right now would disrupt the structural integrity of the cotton and honestly— It's inefficient to use so much water and detergent so I'm basically saving the planet by not—"

He abruptly shut up, realizing he was rambling off. Chest going a little too fast. The tips of his ears going red and then his neck and then his cheeks, the blush spreading very fast.

And you were still just standing there just smirking down at him with that stupid smirk on your pretty face.

Somewhere in the two seconds of silence that followed, the full awareness of the situation caught up to him—

You aka an objectively hot girl. Standing very close to him. Like, actually close. Purposefully close. Close in a way that was making it extremely difficult to remember what intelligent words were.

Your thighs were barely a foot from his arm and your perfume was doing something genuinely criminal to his ability to think straight.

Focus, his brain suggested helplessly. But alas, his brain was ignored.

Most women didn't voluntarily talk to Satoru. No no. His mom did. Grandma too. Shoko did too, though sometimes involuntarily, but technically she didn’t really count. He'd witnessed her aggressive My Chemical Romance phase, her brief and deeply unsettling taxidermy hobby, n’ basically every embarrassing era of her life since middle school. She was less a woman and more of a biological thing at this point. Like a fungus he'd developed immunity to.

So now understand, you were a system error. His game was non-existent. Hell, it was deep in the negatives. He mostly communicated in comic book references and spent his free time studying or farming loot in World of Warcraft.

The closest he'd ever come to actual dating was when he thought he was flirting with a cute e-girl on Discord — only for her to turn out to a middle-aged man named Gerald.

And yet here you were. Someone half the campus was probably actively tripping over themselves to look at. Wasting your premium time bullying him about things no one in his life had cared about in years.

Why. Why were you doing this. Why did he want you to keep doing this.

"...Stop looking at me like that," he muttered.

He moved to turn back to his screen, but his gaze faltered. Immediately.

His eyes slid down. Tracking the line of your legs, the very short skirt you were wearing, the way the sharp edge of the desk was digging into the soft squishy flesh where you were pressed against it.

Look. You genuinely cannot blame a man for having a thing for thighs, okay? It's not a character flaw. It's just biology. Moving on.

His jaw tightened. Face and ears blooming even redder than before.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

He then had a few very awkward seconds of him having a staring contest with your legs. Jaw practically hanging open. 

He would swear on his life it was one second. Maaaybe two at the absolute maximum.

It was ten. It was definitely ten. You could practically hear the Windows XP shutdown noise playing on a loop somewhere behind his eyes.

He finally scrambled to recover whatever was left of his dignity and snapped his eyes back to the laptop with a literal neck-breaking jerk that probably should've required a chiropractor.

"Now," he grumbled, eyes locked back onto his wall of code. "Unless you have a degree in computational physics—" a pause that really let that land, because of course he couldn’t help himself to be at least a little condescending. "—you're obstructing my view of the compile bar."

Another pause.

"Move."

You should've been offended. You would've been offended. If his eyes hadn't snagged back on your legs approximately every five seconds like he physically couldn't stop himself.

Noted for future reference.

Suguru had both hands over his face in absolute defeat. Shoko, on the other hand— Click. Her marker shut. She leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and just watched Satoru's erratic typing.

The keys clicking with the rhythm of a man whose heart rate was currently sitting at a minimum of 120 BPM and climbing.

She looked at his beet-red ears, then at your smug smile, and a wicked grin spread across her face like a slow sunrise of pure evil.

"Nice meeting you," Shoko purred, keeping her eyes on you. The specific look of acknowledging a fellow apex predator when she saw one. "I think you're going to fit in here just fine."

Hm. You sat down next to him and opened your laptop.

And somewhere to your left, the compile bar of Satoru's self-control sat frozen at 99%.

Buffering. Buffering. Buffering— And completely unable to load. Just a few feet from the source of the fatal error.

You decided right then and there. You were going to absolutely ruin this man.

It only took a few weeks. The library dates were officially declared a thing of the past. A string of "accidental" study sessions and Suguru's increasingly desperate need for a buffer, and somehow you'd gone from intruder to full-blown invasive species.

Naturalized citizen basically.

And sure enough, you and Shoko were a match made in hell. Inseparable within the first two weeks. You two were trading clothes, stealing each other's food, spending hours ignoring the boys to talk about people they'd never met.

But the truth was you weren't just there for Shoko. Or for Suguru. Or for the free study space and occasional snacks.

You were there because — against your better judgment, against all available evidence, against every reasonable instinct you had — you actually liked the tall weirdo who couldn't hold eye contact for more than three seconds even when you were just asking how his day was.

You liked the way he laughed. The way his glasses were always sitting slightly crooked on his face. The way he— Okay, enough. We get it, girl. Or do we though.. You were trying, in your own quiet way, to get closer to him.

Meanwhile, Satoru was completely, impressively blind to all of it. In his genius brain he had crunched the numbers and landed on one devastating conclusion. He'd been fucking friendzoned.

He convinced himself you only tolerated him because he was Shoko's roommate and a convenient Statistics tutor. That your friendliness was just a social obligation tax you paid to hang out in his apartment. That you weren't there for him specifically —

Just the proximity. Just the free tutoring. Just the apartment with the good Wi-Fi. Obviously.

It was two weeks before midterms. Their apartment smelled like cheap takeout and nail polish.

You were on your stomach on the floor, legs kicking idly in the air, frowning at a probability distribution chart. Satoru was sitting cross-legged a few feet away, supposedly helping. But he was mostly just clicking a pen and staring at the side of your neck.

"Soo," you started, chewing on the end of your pencil. "I watched that sci-fi movie you talked about — the one with the time dilation?" A pause. "It was actually pretty cool."

You looked up at him smiling.

Satoru stiffened immediately.

Oh god. Small talk. You were engaging in small talk. Do NOT make it weird. Do NOT make it weird. Do NOT—

"Yes," Satoru said a beat too late. "The cinematography is... alright. The physics were derivative. I've seen worse I guess..."

He turned back to his notebook. ...Aand he made it weird.

You sighed and shifted your weight, arching your back slightly to stretch.

Roll— 

Your highlighter skittered right off the edge of your notebook, across the floor, and came to a stop directly under the sofa. Of course it did.

"Ugh," you groaned.

Shoko had claimed that entire sofa. Legs stretched out, wet red polish on her toes and a massive medical textbook balanced on her knees. 

"Don't touch the paint," she warned, not looking up. "You smudge, you die."

"I know, I know—"

Okay. Here was the situation. You couldn't reach blindly. The only way around Shoko's wet toenails without sending the textbook flying was to get up on your knees and Satoru was sitting directly behind you…

So, when you twisted your torso and arched your back to swoop your hand underneath the frame— You miiight have angled yourself just so. Or maybe it was just physics. Who could say.

The movement caused your shirt to ride up. Just a little. Just enough. It exposed the curve of your lower back while your yoga pants did exactly what yoga pants were engineered to do, right in front of him, at this specific cheeky (literally) angle.

Engineering at its finest, if you ask me.

Thud. He dropped his pen, making a noise that weirdly sounded like a strangled moan? His eyes went wide. Pupils blown. And then his survival instincts kicked in approximately three seconds too late.

"I just remembered—!" He scrambled upright, voice cracking a full octave on the way up. "I totally forgot to download the expansion patch—"

He was backing toward the hallway, gesturing wildly at absolutely nothing. "There's a raid tonight and if I don't update the client right now I'll miss the login window entirely and—"

"What?" You sat back on your heels. "But 'Toru, you were helping me study?"

'Toru.

He'd never— You'd never called him that before. The nickname hit him like a physical slap across the face. Friendly. Casual. Completely devastating. And how exactly was he supposed to act normal when you were just. Like this?! 

"Tutoring... can wait!" he yelped, heel hitting the baseboard. "My guild needs me! Bye!"

Slam. His bedroom door closed shut, and the lock clicked instantly. 

Then, you heard the muffled opening notes of California Girls seeped through the door. 

...what. What?!

"Is he okay?" You frowned at the door, pouting slightly. "He keeps just disappearing like that." A pause. "Does he hate me?"

"He doesn't hate you," Suguru sighed, looking at you with the exhaustion of a single father of two. "He's just... over-calculating." A beat. "Honestly? You should just tell him you like him. His genius brain won't figure it out for the life of him. He needs the answer key.”

You just stared at the door listening to the muffled bass of Katy Perry bleeding through the wood.

The answer key, huh?

Things went from awkward to chaotic just a few days later. Naturally.

It was around 2 AM. You and Shoko were in the kitchen, Both of you completely high out of your minds from the brownies you two had baked earlier. 

The munchies arrived. "I need snacks," you announced, swaying slightly. "If I don't eat something yummy in the next five minutes my organs will shut down."

Shoko was already rummaging through the pantry. "We're out."

But then her eyes lit up. "Wait—" She turned around with a look that meant absolutely nothing good. "Satoru has snacks. He only hides them in his room because he's a stingy goblin."

So without another word you wobbled down the hall together. Shoko didn't even bother knocking. The door swung wide and you barged straight past the hand-written Forbidden Zone sign.

This was your first time here and it was exactly what you'd expected and somehow also more. 

Full shut-in sanctuary. Blackout curtains pulled tight, five thousand dollars worth of setup glowing neon blue, LED strips lining the ceiling like a gamer's idea of mood lighting.

Satoru was in his chair, headphones on, smashing his keyboard. 

He spun around, eyes going wide at the sudden intrusion. 

You scanned the room. For a man who seemed to live primarily in stained oversized t-shirts and barely-contained social anxiety, it was actually pretty orderly.

Surprisingly orderly. More, like, suspiciously orderly.

Well. Except for the shelf right next to his bed. That seemed to be its own disaster zone. We’re talking textbooks, dog-eared manga, a suspicious surplus of crumpled tissues, and a stray Goku figure that looked like it was fighting for its life against the clutter—

But buried right in the middle of all that crap— There. Your eyes landed on the prize. A red Pringles can.

Now. Maybe it was the weed haze. Maybe you were just being an idiot as per usual. But you didn't even stop to wonder why a lone can of chips was sitting there. Right next to a pile of tissues and a bed— 

You just wanted the carbohydrates. Simple as that. 

"BINGO," you shouted.

Satoru's head snapped to where you were looking and he swore his soul left his body. He launched himself from his chair and scramble scramble scrambled over the mattress.

But unfortunately for him. You were faster. You snatched the can off the shelf triumphantly and held it over your head like a trophy.

"Gotcha! Hand over the chips, 'Toru." A grin. "I'm eating the whole can right now—"

"—DO NOT OPEN THAT!"

His big hands clamped over yours before you could even process the words. Pinning the can shut. The momentum sending both of you tumbling backward — Fwump. Straight onto his unmade bed.

And suddenly you were flat on your back and Satoru was hovering directly over you. Straddling your hips to pin you down, face inches from yours, wild-eyed and breathing like he'd just run a sprint and also possibly seen a ghost.

Both hands gripping yours so tight his knuckles were white. Holding that tube like his entire life, his entire future, depended on it.

"Drop it," he wheezed. Cheeks flushing immediately. "You can't open that—!"

You blinked up at him. Completely stunned. Because what the fuck was happening. What was actually happening right now.  His chest was heaving, his hair was tickling your forehead, and he was… very very heavy.

"I don't care!" you laughed. The brownie fog making the whole thing feel like a fever dream. You wiggled under him, trying to get your hands free. "Gimme the salt—!"

Salt—

The word hit him like a flashbang. BANG.

His brain took it and sprinted straight into the gutter. He was suddenly very aware of the specific white gooey reality of what usually happened inside that can. The taste of it. The—

You want the salt. Oh my god. OH NO.

His heart was hammering so hard against his ribs he was convinced you could feel it through your own chest.

I'm the grossest man alive, he thought, his face burning up like a furnace. I'm thinking about you eating —

"HELL NO!" he screamed.

"'Toru. Are you seriously wrestling me over potato chips?"

He finally looked down at you. Knees bracketing your waist, your wrists pinned to his chest with the can between you like a hostage situation. And then the horrible realization arrived. That if you struggled even a little bit, the lid might pop off and reveal the unholy sponge-and-glove contraption hidden inside. 

That. Cannot. Happen. Absolutely cannot.

The fact that the prettiest girl he'd ever seen in real life was currently lying on his bed with him on top of her hadn't even fully registered yet. His entire brain was running one single mission — Make sure you do not find out. 

Make sure you do not find out that he was a certified grade-A gooner who had used this exact... thing while thinking about you... Literally just yesterday. 

"They're — they're stale!" he stammered, sweat already forming at his hairline. His grip didn't loosen. If anything it tightened. And somehow you wondered where the hell all that sudden strength came from. 

"The sodium levels are freaking lethal. I am literally saving your life right now—!"

Meanwhile, Shoko, leaning against the doorframe, did a quiet sweep of the room. Her eyes followed the can, the shelf with absolutely no other snacks on it, and Satoru practically vibrating with terror on top of you.

Click. She put it together immediately. Because it didn't take a genius to figure out why a certified virgin would throw his entire body over a Pringles can like it contained state secrets.

Oh this was going to be so good.

She started cackling. This deep wheezing laugh that made Satoru flinch like he'd been physically struck. So you took your shot and writhed. But it only made him yelp instantly.

He ripped the can entirely from your hands, and scrambled backward off the bed like a scorched cat. Clutching the red tube to his chest, curling into a ball in the corner of the room. Cornered.

"Get out!" he squeaked. His face the color of a literal stop sign. "You high hooligans!"

You sat up slowly on his messy duvet. Hair tousled. Face flushed. Heart beating a little too fast from the impromptu wrestling match and also possibly from being pinned under him for thirty seconds but that was neither here nor there.

Your eyes did a lap around the room — Shoko, smirking in the doorframe like she'd just witnessed the best thing that had ever happened to her. Satoru, trembling in the corner like a man on trial for crimes he was absolutely guilty of.

And then. Then you realized. You had never. Not once. In your entire time knowing this man. Seen him eat a single chip.

Oh.

"Oh."

Satoru practically sobbed. The Pringles went behind his back. Eyes fixed on the floor. Literally praying for a meteor to strike the apartment building immediately. Please.

You and Satoru were sitting on a concrete bench in the middle of the quad. It was Result Day. Neither of you mentioned the Pringles can incident ever again, only because Satoru had spent the intervening days pretending not to exist and incinerating the device in the dumpster out back. 

And you did feel bad for him. You'd nearly had to physically restrain Shoko from bringing it up approximately forty-seven times. I mean. An adult guy shouldn't get bullied for being... innovative with the way he pleasured himself, right? That felt like a basic human right. You were going to stand firm on that.

He looked like absolute, unmitigated garbage though. Wrinkled shirt that said I Paused My Game To Be Here— This man genuinely did not seem to own a single decent t-shirt, not one. Clutching his third Monster of the day like a life support system.

He seemed more stressed about your grades than you were.

Squinting aggressively into the distance like he was actively losing a battle against the sun but refusing to surrender.

Your phone buzzed. Mid-term Grades.

Satoru stiffened beside you, and the aluminum can in his hand let out a sharp crinkle of protest.

Your heart did a stupid little kick. You opened it. Scanned down the list and stopped at Statistics.

C+.

It wasn't a great grade. It wasn't even a good grade. But in the grand scheme of "Cs get degrees"  it was a goddamn miracle. Especially considering this one midterm had made up 50% of your entire grade. Which the fuck?

"I passed!" you shouted, launching yourself off the bench. "Oh my god, I actually passed! I'm not going to fail this goddamn class!"

Satoru, who had been hunched over his knees, nervously biting his thumbnail down to nothing, snapped upright immediately.

One second of pure, unfiltered relief crossed his face. One. Then his ego kicked back in.

"Naturally," he said, going for a smooth baritone n' landing somewhere considerably closer to a sleep-deprived croak. "My teaching methods are flawless. Even with a..." A pause. "...suboptimal student, success was obviously guaranteed." Another pause. "You're welcome."

He looked so smug. So proud of himself. So incredibly roastable that you almost almost let the subtle dig slide.

…okay or perhaps you didn't.

You grinned and stepped closer. Right between his spread knees, while he sat there looking up at you. A simple thank you was far too boring for what you were about to do to this man.

"Aww, look at you being all proud!" you cooed in the exact tone reserved for golden retrievers and small confused animals. You reached out and aggressively ruffled his hair — messing it up even further — scratching lightly at his scalp right behind the ear.

"Who's a good tutor? Satoru is a good tutor! Who's my smart boy?"

Satoru froze. He really should have been offended. He knew he should have been offended.

But for one long, humiliating second his eyes just closed and he leaned into your hand. Tilting his head against your palm like a cat chasing warmth.

Purr, said his brain probably…?

This man had a high-level understanding of quantum mechanics and he was currently leaning into someone scratching his ears like a freaking pet. 

He felt like a disgrace to his entire bloodline.

But then his CPU rebooted, jerking his head back. His face went a violent shade of red that clashed terribly with his white hair.

"I am not a canine!" he sputtered, batting your hand away. "Stop that patronizing behaviour! People are looking!"

"But you did so good!" you laughed, completely ignoring him. "You helped a girl in need."

Satoru's chest puffed out instantly. His ego took the bait before his brain even had a chance to weigh in.

"Actually," he said, sliding back into that obnoxious condescending lilt he used whenever he was feeling himself. "I didn't just 'help' you. I performed a miracle. I dragged your GPA out of an actual dumpster n' did academic CPR on a brain that was essentially flatlining." A pause for effect. "I'm not a tutor." Another pause. "I'm a secular saint."

He took a prideful swig of his energy drink, already gearing up for a full ten-minute lecture on his own brilliance—

A girl in need.

The phrase did a slow, sticky lap around his skull.

In need of what, exactly?

His mind went places. And none of them had anything to do with Statistics. His eyes dropped to where you were standing between his legs —

He thought about his bed. With you in it. And mostly about the very specific, very needy noises he'd imagined you making — For him. Because of him —

His throat went completely dry. He nearly choked on his Monster. Adam's apple bobbing violently as he tried to swallow it down. And I don't mean the gulp.

"I-I mean," he stammered, "the terminology 'in need' is very subjective n' vague as hell! You should be more precise with your descriptors!"

"You're so cute when you're being a nerd," you giggled.

And before he could get another smart-ass word out you went for the kill. Just for the hell of it. You threw your arms around his head and hugged him.

The physics of the hug were... aggressive. You pulled his head forward, and Satoru went completely still. His entire world went dark, soft, and terrifyingly warm. All at once. 

His nose was smashed directly between your tits, glasses getting absolutely destroyed, suddenly inhaling a whole lungful of you —

He sat there stiff as a board. Hands hovering uselessly in the air like he'd genuinely forgotten he had limbs. But then something just. gave. He'd been praying for this for months. Months. And in that moment he genuinely believed he might actually be a fucking saint because your chest was somehow even softer than he'd imagined. And he had imagined it a lot.

Do not drool. Do NOT drool. So god help him god if he drools right now—

Trembling slightly, Satoru lowered his hands and tentatively wrapped them around your waist. Hugging you back.

Which was, unfortunately for him, his complete and total undoing. The second his hands touched your waist you hummed happily and leaned your whole weight into him.

Because he wasn't the only one who'd been waiting for this. You'd been thinking about making out with him long before he'd even worked up the nerve to call you a friend in his own daydreams. So. Yeah.

You arched your back slightly. Pressing your chest harder into his face, your stomach warm against his lap.

And instantly— He was hard. Completely. Painfully. And motherfucker-immediately.

And because he was wearing those thin worn-out sweatpants. The kind that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination, the kind that were currently leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was nowhere to hide the sudden rock-hard problem now throbbing against his waistband.

A single hug. One hug. That's all you'd done and he was— God he really thought he wasn't this pathetic.

He realized — with a clarity that was almost impressive given the circumstances — that if you shifted even an inch closer you'd feel it. And he was the grossest man on the planet and was actively destroying what little chance he had with someone he was so hopelessly down bad for.

"Satoru," you murmured, your voice right against his ear. "You stopped breathing again."

He started to panic badly. Which led to him launching himself into what could only be described as an emergency self-eject sequence. ??

He slammed both hands on his knees and threw his upper body backward with enough force to briefly defy gravity. Which would've been fine. Except he was sitting on a backless bench and there was absolutely nothing behind him.

He tipped— Legs flying up in the air and in that one cursed split second, before gravity fully claimed him, the fabric of his sweatpants pulled tight across his lap.

And you saw it. You saw everything.

The distinct and frankly, impressive outline of a very angry erection tenting the grey fabric.

Thud.

A wide grin spread across your face. A faint stupid blush crept up your own cheeks simultaneously. For months you'd been convinced you were the one stuck in the friendzone. Waiting around for a sign that never came, slowly going a little cray cray, genuinely starting to wonder if you'd just made the whole chemistry thing up inside your own head.

He was always so awkward. So seemingly unbothered by your advances. So apparently unaware that you existed as anything other than a study buddy and an occasional source of snacks.

But now. Now. You finally knew.

He wasn't indifferent. He was just as obsessed with you as you'd been with him. Maybe more and he'd been silently losing his mind about it this entire time.

Thank fucking god. The relief hit you warm and slow and settled right in your belly like something coming home.

You did feel a little bad for him though. A little. I mean. The poor guy's situation was currently very visible in the middle of the campus quad and there was absolutely nothing either of you could do about it right now.

But you still felt powerful. You finally felt wanted by this stupid giant of a man.

"What —"

"Shut up!" Immediately. Before you could even finish the word. "I — I just got a cramp!" he yelled, forehead pressing hard into his knees, refusing to look at you, refusing to look at anything. "A really bad one! My leg just— it locked up! I haven't slept n' I'm shaky n' — stop looking at me like that! It's not funny! Just please go away! I'm just gonna lie here for a second." A pause. "The grass is cold. I need the cold." Another pause. "Just begone!"

"Right," you said. Your voice dripping with a brand new, very specific, very dangerous kind of sweetness. "A cramp. Of course."

You knelt down in the grass right next to him. Satoru flinched. Curling even tighter, compressing himself into the smallest possible shape. Looking like a pill bug trying to defend itself from a predator. The back of his neck glowing a nasty, bruised red color.

"'Toru," you hummed, leaning right in until your breath was ruffling his fluffy white hair.

Oh. You weren't even close to being done. You were going to soak up every single second of this and milk it absolutely dry. 

"You look thirsty." A pause that you let sit there. "All that muscle tension… Must be dehydrating."

You were still holding your half-finished boba — ice rattling around in the cheap plastic cup like a tiny, cheerful taunt.

Rattle rattle rattle.

"I— I'm fine," he wheezed into his knees. He deadass sounded like he was three seconds away from a full-blown asthma attack. "I got my Monster. Please just go back to the library. Or home. Or literally anywhere but here."

"But your hands are full," you pointed out pleasantly, eyeing the white-knuckled death grip he had on his own shins. "Here." You held out the cup. "Have a sip of mine."

You didn't wait for him to say yes. You just shoved the cup riiight up to his face and poked the straw directly against his lips.

Satoru's eyes snapped open wide. Staring at the straw like it was a loaded gun. Then snapped his gaze back to you.

His brain was literally just dial-up noises right now. He clocked the flush on your cheeks anyway. The way you were looking at him with zero pity — just full of something that made his stomach drop straight through the soil.

Shaking like a goddamn leaf, Satoru finally parted his lips. Let you put the straw in his mouth. Eyes locked dead on yours. Absolutely terrified and horny as hell and somehow both at the exact same time.

He took a long drag. You yanked the cup back before he could finish, popped the straw straight between your own lips and sucked down some boba while holding the most aggressive eye contact known to man.  Slurp.

"Good boy," you whispered, getting back on your feet.

Satoru let out this pathetic little whimper n' buried his face back into his knees. And since you were standing right over him, your shadow swallowed his shaking form completely, his dumb ass just couldn't help himself as his eyes shot up.

And you were wearing that dangerously short little skirt again. The one that was going to send him into cardiac arrest one day. His beloved laws of physics had basically abandoned him. When you shifted your weight the hem flared up just enough, just enough, to give him a straight-up godly view. 

Not just your legs. The full fucking show. The soft curve of your thighs. A dead-on glimpse of the panties he'd only dared to think about in his wildest dreams. 

You leaned down one last time, skirt hiking up even higher. Getting that close made him jolt like he’d licked a car battery.  You reached out and gave his messy white mop the most patronizing little pat imaginable.

"See ya later, 'Toru." A smile that meant absolutely nothing good. "Don't sit out in the sun too long."

You spun on your heel and strutted off toward the library. Heart beating out of your chest on a sick, electric thrill. You didn't even bother looking back. You felt his eyes burning holes into your head as you walked away.

And behind you, Satoru made a decision. He was never standing up again. Ever.

He was going to live in this specific patch of grass until the end of time — the raging boner as a flag of surrender.

He stayed glued to that exact spot for a solid forty-five minutes after you walked away. Just staring at a cloud that deadass looked like a giant thumbs-down. Waiting for his situation to resolve itself so the blood could actually go back to his brain.

The data was conclusive. The facts were staring him right in his stupid face and there was no room for error whatsoever. You — the girl he'd been trying to impress by playing it cool and nonchalant for months — hadn't just caught him rocking a massive stiffy. You had swapped spit with him. …While actively looking at it.

“Good boy,” he whispered to the sky,as if testing the words on his tongue. A fresh violent shiver racked his entire spine. Shudder.

He had to cover his face with his hands to stop himself from screaming. He was probably the smartest person amongst all the undergrads, he was a Level 80 Paladin, and he was currently being obliterated by two stupid words and a boba straw

Why did he like being called a good boy. WHY.

He should be disgusted with himself. He understood quantum superposition and non-Euclidean geometry. He was supposed to be the apex of human evolution. But nah. Apparently millions of years of primate evolution had been instantly, catastrophically overridden by a praise kink he didn't even know he had. 

And this guy was into some weird shit, okay? He had seen the dark corners of the internet. Poor Charles Darwin was probably rolling in his grave.

And the worst part, It was his own damn fault. This absolute clown constantly backed himself into a corner because the second you existed in the same air as him, he physically forgot how to operate as a human being. Every. Single. Time.

So the days after were an absolute clusterfuck of ungodly blue balls n' pure existential dread. Naturally. Satoru straight up ceased to function as a man. Became a ghost in his own apartment. Haunting the living spaces, operating purely on energy that was equal parts shame and desire.

He tried to function. He really really tried. He tried to focus on studying. Tried to grind for loot in World of Warcraft. Tried to do literally anything that wasn't thinking about you. But every time he closed his eyes, the sensory data from the campus overloaded his brain.

He could still feel it— The ghost-warmth of your body all up on him. Your arms wrapped around his neck. The god-tier squish of your chest smashing right into his face when you hugged him. Or the way you smelled this up close.

He felt like he was in literal heaven and it was ruining his life—

Stop it, he hissed to himself, glaring at a blank Word doc that had been blank for three hours. Stop thinking about her—

...but you were just so soft. So, so soft.

He vaguely remembered Shoko trying to warn him at some point.

It was some blurry memory from Wednesday. He’d been lay-sitting on the couch, staring blankly at a turned-off TV, fully dissociating over the specific way your hair had brushed against his cheek. Shoko had been standing over his slumped form, holding a bag of ice and ripping a cigarette.

Her mouth had been moving. Satoru knew that much. He could see her lips forming words and everything.

But his audio input had been completely muted because his brain was currently allocating 95% of its RAM to the memory of your thighs.

"...mid-terms..." something something. "...party..." something. "...Friday... people coming over..."

Satoru nodded like an idiot. Threw out a "Yeah, cool" or whatever. Just enough to make her stop talking so he could get right back to his ongoing mental simulation of you sitting on his lap.

He had walked face-first into a total trap. He somehow hadn't computed that "party" meant, like, a literal fucking party. That "people" meant you.

It wasn't until Friday night, when he started hearing giggles through the walls and smelled stuff wafting under his bedroom door, that it all finally clicked.

He wasn't safe. He was so fucked. He'd just greenlit a party in his own home where the literal cause of his humiliating blue balls was going to be the guest of honor.

“I might have made a tactical error,” Satoru whispered to his glowing monitors.

He slumped back in his gaming chair, yanking at his hair, cursing his past self to hell n' back and several other things besides. He could have been safe.

He could have been deep in some basement across town right now. Ijichi had literally invited him to a 48-hour raid weekend. And dumbass Satoru had said no because he thought it sounded "socially pathetic." Socially pathetic. Can you fucking believe it? 

God, what an absolute clown he was. "Pathetic" meant smelling like Cool Ranch Doritos and stale air. Surrounded by a bunch of nerds who were just as terrified of women as he was, playing games until 4AM and never once having to think about the specific way someone's hair smelled.

It was paradise compared to the horny purgatory he was currently trapped in with absolutely no parole date in sight.

You and Shoko were in the kitchen standing by the island. Shoko was holding a plastic tub the size of a toddler, while you dumped in a handle of bottom-shelf vodka that cost less than a McChicken.

“Does this need more Hawaiian punch?”

"Fuck no," Shoko deadpanned, letting her cigarette ash drop dangerously close to the tub. She swirled the mixture with a soup ladle. "The goal isn't flavor. It's blackout. If they can taste the fruit, we fucked up."

You nodded like she just didn’t declare something utterly stupid. 

Across the room, Suguru was sprawled on the beanbag. Half-finished joint in one hand, phone in the other. Queuing songs on Spotify.

"’I'm putting on Tame Impala." He blew out a thick cloud toward the smoke detector — the one they'd had taped shut with a sock since the move-in day.

"We need to establish a baseline vibe before the frat boys Shoko invited ruin the feng shui."

"’Aye, fuck off!" Shoko snapped, ladle pointing in his direction. "I desperately need to come in contact with some hot guys considering I am trapped with gremlins twenty-four seven!"

And then there was Satoru.

Hovering in the hallway. Clinging to the doorframe. Looking like a man who had just realized he'd walked into a situation he had severely miscalculated.

His eyes went to the joint in Suguru's hand. Then to the vat of red death in yours.

Back n' forth. Back n' forth.

"I rescinded my objection to the 'gathering,'" he announced, white knuckling the doorframe, absolutely refusing to step one single foot further into the room.

His eyes ping-ponged wildly around the room before locking dead onto the coffee table.

Sitting right there was a massive glass bong that looked like a high school chemistry project from hell.

"But this?" His voice went up an octave. "This is a blatant violation of the lease. I did not RSVP to a localized drug ring."

"Chill out, bro," Suguru drawled, lazily waving the joint in a vague gesture of reassurance. "It's organic." A long, contemplative drag. "It helps with the... expansion of the mind."

"I don't need my mind expanded—!"

His eyes were darting everywhere. The dirty floor. The ceiling. The soup ladle in Shoko's hand. The coffee table. The bong. The coffee table again.

Anywhere. Everywhere. Except your face. Specifically not your face.

Because he knew exactly what would happen if he made eye contact with you. He'd remember. The specific way you fit so so nicely against him and the way you'd felt and—

"I need my ping low!" he babbled, frantically grabbing for any nerd-ass excuse that would get him the fuck out of this room. 

"I am literally inhaling second-hand felonies! My reaction time is gonna drop! I have a Tier-1 Guild Raid at 10 PM n' I'm the main tank —" his voice cracked slightly "— if I die, the whole party wipes n' I am not taking the heat for forty digital deaths just so I can stand here and watch you give the entire student body poisoning!"

You just looked at him. The empty handle of the cheap vodka still dangling upside down from your hand.

Normally you would've roasted the absolute shit out of him. Told him to quit being a whiny little narc or something, dragged him in by the hood and shoved a solo cup directly into his hand.

That was the standard procedure. 

Instead you just stood there watching him vibrate in the doorway like a terrified chihuahua.  Eyeing the dumb fluffy hair sticking up in three different directions and the sheer panic radiating off him in waves.

Your stomach did this sick, traitorous little flip.

And it wasn't even annoyance anymore. It was this stupid bubbly heat that made you feel like a total freak because you couldn't stop thinking about the way he'd looked up at you from the grass. Completely wrecked. Flushed all over. Totally losing his mind just from you getting a little too close.

It was honestly intoxicating and he looked so lost and so gorgeous—

God. You wanted to walk right over there and touch him. Your hands were literally itching to smooth down that ridiculous tuft of hair, grab him by the jaw, tell him exactly how fucking cute he looked when he was panicking.

But. Neither Shoko nor Suguru knew about the little quad incident. And you weren't making it weird in front of witnesses.

So you let him go. For now.

You set the empty bottle down on the counter. "It's okay, 'Toru," you said softly.

Satoru froze dead mid-rant about packet loss.

His head snapped toward you. Eyes going wide behind his glasses, looking exactly like a deer in the headlights of a semi-truck. Fully bracing for you to tear him a new one. To earn a cheap laugh from Shoko at his expense.

Instead, you just gave him this soft, genuine smile that felt waaay too sweet for a kitchen that currently reeked of weed and rubbing alcohol.

"Go save Azeroth." A pause. "We'll save you a cup if you decide to show up."

Satoru just stared at you.Completely stunned. Mouth slightly open. 

You knew it was called Azeroth? Since when the fuck did you know WoW lore?!

What he didn't know— What he couldn't have known —

Was that you were so embarrassingly down bad for him that it was genuinely bordering on a legitimate mental illness. 

Instead of studying for your actual degree like a normal human being, you'd been spending your free time deep in the trenches of Wikipedia and Reddit. Practically running FBI-level background checks on every single nerd hyperfixation he'd ever name-dropped.

Just so you could casually drop a lore reference and make this supposed genius finally, finally take a fucking hint.

Because you needed him to realize you wanted him to rearrange your guts. But you also knew that if you just walked straight up to this socially inept loser and told him you wanted him to demolish your cervix, he would instantly assume it was a cruel prank, spiral into a full-blown panic attack, and start cursing you out for making fun of him.

And how did you know that? Because you already tried. Bruh.

It happened a few weeks ago when you two were stuck alone at lunch in the cafeteria. Shoko off letting some jock drool all over her, Suguru getting high on the quad with his Psych friends. Just you and Satoru and a golden opportunity.

You figured, fuck it, you’d take Suguru’s advice and just shoot your shot straight up.

Okay, maybe you phrased it in your own unique little way. But the message was clear.

And this dense dumbass looked you dead in the eyes— Completely missing the point— Shrugged and said, "I know I'm such a good friend, you don't have to tell me that."

Like are you fucking KIDDING me?!

Bro had literally friendzoned himself while you were actively trying to suck his dick.

So yeah, you had to play the long game.

Now he stood there with his mouth open, Adam's apple bobbing hard. His brain trying to mash up two completely incompatible images.

You. Looking hot as hell. Smelling like heaven. Smiling at him. And his crusty little MMO hobby. Does not fucking compute.

He looked insanely relieved you weren't roasting him. But there was this wild flash of confusion in his eyes too. And honestly the sick bastard almost looked disappointed that you weren't begging him to stay. Mixed up with a massive wave of attraction just because you'd name-dropped the goddamn continent. He legitimately didn't know what to do with any of this information.

"Right," he breathed out. "Sure. I will..." A pause. "...I will retreat then."

He gestured vaguely behind him at his bedroom door.

That stupid Forbidden Zone sign still taped to the wood. Peeling at the corners. Looking even more pathetic than the first time you'd seen it. And his only defense against the fact that he desperately wanted you to touch him again and never, ever stop.

"T-try not to be loud," he said, already backing away. "I gotta focus. And also don't want to be complicit if anyone calls the cops."

He turned on his heel and scurried back into the darkness of his room. 

Pooof.  Gone.

You stood there staring at that Sharpie-scrawled sign. The messy black letters basically laughing at you from across the hall. 

That bubbly heat settled into something more frustrating. An ache right between your thighs and the specific, annoying disappointment of watching him go. Again.

"He's gonna fold," Shoko declared, wiping her hands on her jeans, eyes already on your love-sick pout like she'd been taking notes. She might be a bitch sometimes — she was a bitch sometimes — but she wanted her two best friends to finally just. Get on with it. The sexual tension was genuinely becoming a public health concern.

"Give him two hours max. He'll get thirsty." A stir of the ladle. "Or insanely jealous." Another stir. "Honestly? Mostly jealous."

Suguru laughed from his beanbag, finally peeling his eyes off his phone. "You really orchestrated this entire social nightmare just to smoke him out of his hole, didn't you." 

"I'm a woman of science, Suguru," Shoko deadpanned, stirring the punch with a terrifyingly evil grin. "I'm just introducing a catalytic agent to a volatile compound." A pause. "He's going to explode. I only sped up the timeline."

Gotta love women in STEM. 

You grabbed a cup and dunked it straight in. Glug.

"I hope so," you muttered, and took a long gulp that tasted exactly like cough syrup and mild regret.

"’Cause if he plays World of Warcraft all night, I'm gonna kick his door down myself."

Shoko clinked the soup ladle against your plastic cup.

"That," she smirked, "is Plan B."

And Shoko was right on the fucking money. 

Two hours. 

That's exactly how long Satoru lasted before his own biology staged a full coup against him.

InfiniteVoid_69 was just running face-first into a pixelated brick wall on loop because Satoru hadn't touched his keyboard in fifteen minutes. Too busy sitting in the RGB glow, listening to the muffled music bleeding through the wall from Suguru's JBL speaker.

He was miserable. Lonely. Horny as hell—

He wasn't hiding from the party. Obviously he wasn't hiding from the party. He was hiding because his stupid brain was stuck on a hyper-realistic loop that refused to stop.

Every time he closed his eyes — Every. Single. Time — His twisted mind went straight to it. The lewd way your lips had wrapped around that straw. The filthy eye contact you'd held while you sucked down your boba. And then — like clockwork, like his brain hated him — the audio file auto-played.

Crystal clear. Full surround sound and all.

"Good boy."

Stop it, he hissed, white-knuckling the armrests of his chair until the plastic creaked.

Cease data retrieval. Clear the fucking cache—

But his meat wasn't taking orders from his brain anymore. Just the ghost of your whisper was enough to send a fresh surge of blood rocketing straight south.

He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Under the fabric of his sweats, things were starting to wake up again. And by things I mean him getting bricked-up for the sixth time that day alone.

Over a memory. A single memory.

Oh god. Stop it, Satoru, he had to beg himself, staring blindly at the ceiling like it had answers. Stop it stop it stop it—

You are an adult man. Not some hormonal teenager who needs to be bonked. But if we're being completely honest, he desperately needed to be bonked. It was actually hysterical how pathetic he was. Like, genuinely hysterical, the kind of thing you'd tell a therapist about and watch them struggle to maintain a neutral expression. 

He was a literal danger to society. If Horny Jail was a real place he'd be in maximum security serving consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

He needed a hard reset. Badly. Needed caffeine. Needed to flush his system with enough taurine to kill a small horse and reboot his logic center.

He reached blindly down to his mini-fridge and yanked the handle —

Nothing. Empty.

"...Fucking hell." He was actually going to have to go out there.

Yanking his hood up over his hair, he took one long, steadying breath.

The mission was simple — Acquire the Monster. Avoid all eye contact. Haul ass back to base. Do not, under any circumstances, perceive the girl.

He cracked the door open. Suguru's shitty indie bass rattling the floorboards, the whole place reeking of weed and Shoko's cheap cigarettes and whatever memory-erasing blackout cocktail you two had cooked up out there.

Head down. Hugging the wall like a little cryptid. Making a beeline straight for the kitchen.

Ninja. He was a ninja. He was a shadow. Nobody was even gonna notice he was—

SLAM.

A hand smacked flat against the fridge door right next to his head. Satoru jumped, the Monster can in his hand nearly getting crushed. And looked down and—

Fuck. It was you. And you looked… dangerous.

You were a solid three cups deep. Cheeks flushed. Eyes dark and heavy-lidded. Staring at him with this predatory hunger that instantly turned his long legs to absolute jelly.

You'd been stalking his bedroom door all night. Nursing your drink, trying to act all interested in whatever conversations the frat boys Shoko was practically eye-fucking were attempting to have with you.

You didn't care about their gym routines. Nor did you care about their crypto. You'd spent two hours staring at that freaking sign and willing it to burn— Just waiting for the white-haired coward to finally crack. 

And crack he did.

"I—I was just... acquiring electrolytes!" His back hit the fridge. Thud. Pupils blown so wide the blue was just a thin frantic ring around nothing. "The party seems... statistically successful! You should be out there, socializing!"

You stepped into his space. Chest to chest. Close enough to feel him stop breathing.

"Sukuna was giving me plenty of attention out there, ya know." A pause that you let sit there. "He asked for my number." Your voice dropped. "He seems pretty direct. Knows exactly what he wants to do to me." You tilted your head. "Unlike someone who's been hiding in his room for days because he's scared of a girl."

Satoru's jaw clenched. Sukuna. God he hated that guy. His tattoos. His confidence. The fact that he probably never once needed a pep talk in the mirror just to talk to you. Just existing over there being all. that.

And Satoru would literally rather drag his freaking balls through a mile of broken glass than let you leave with him tonight.

“I am not scared!” Satoru whined. His voice pitching up so high he sounded like a literal tween hitting puberty. 

“‘Am just practicing social distancing! It’s for health reasons, a highly responsible choice, you know—”

“Liars don't get prizes, ‘Toru.” 

You were done with the talking. Your hand glided down his stomach. Satoru flinched, his breath hitching, but he didn't move away. But he didn't move away, physically couldn't, mentally couldn't. Trapped between the fridge and the girl who had been haunting his jerk-off sessions for months—

Your palm landed flat at the very top of his thigh. There. Under the fabric  the thick muscle violently twitched. And then he went rigid. Instantly.

Not just a little bricked up. Actively throbbing right under your hand. His own meat snitching on every filthy little secret he'd been trying so hard to repress. Rock-hard and straining against his waistband.

Again. HOW. How are you even doing this to him?!

"You're so tense, 'Toru—" you cooed, thumb tracing a slow teasing circle. "Is the 'cramp' coming back?" A beat. "Or is it just that you've been thinking about me touching you..." Another pause. "...as much as I've been thinking about... you touching me?"

The words hung in the air. Heavy. Intoxicating. Sitting there like a lit match.

Satoru stared down at you, his face burning up, the realization making him dizzy. 

You. Out of his league. Had been fantasizing. About. Him. Does not compute. DOES NOT COMPUTE.

But hallelujah... I guess? The dense bastard finally clocked it.  Which, of course, just sent him into an immediate spiral of existential dread. Looking like he was five seconds away from physically melting into the kitchen linoleum.

"I—I've gotta go back," he stammered.

His trembling hands hovering uselessly in the air. The Monster sitting somewhere on the counter. Long forgotten.

God, he wanted to grab you so so bad. Confess everything right there next to the refrigerator magnets. Haul you in by the shoulders and kiss you so so stupid. Even if his virgin ass had absolutely no clue how to do it. He was dying to eat that sparkly pink lip gloss right off your mouth, mostly because he knew exactly how pretty those lips would look wrapped around his—

But the unholy sensation of your hand gripping him oh so perfectly was completely overloading his system.

A literal breathing 404 Error, this man. eeeerrrrr—

"H-have to hop back on Discord!" he yelled-squeaked, ears ringing.

He shoved right past you, nearly wiping out an entire stack of solo cups on his way, and gremlin sprinted down the hallway which was genuinely something to witness. 

You took one last sip of your drink. Watching his pathetic little virgin retreat. Eyeing that stupid Sharpie sign. Forbidden Zone.

Yeah, no. Fuck that. You weren't letting him lock himself away tonight just to edge to the memory of your hand on his dick. Absolutely not. Not tonight.

Cup down. And you took the fuck off. You hit the hallway just as his bedroom door slammed shut, threw your shoulder against the wood before he could even think about turning the lock —

The door flew open with a violent BANG—

Satoru spun around. Caught dead in the center of his musky bedroom, illuminated by the RGB glow of his PC. Hadn't even made it to his desk. 

"I am busy!" he screeched, backing up with both hands raised like you were literally holding him at gunpoint. "I am—I am currently in a raid! I am logged in — digitally occupied!"

“Your game isn’t even on, Satoru.”

He risked a panicked glance back at his monitors. Which were doing absolutely nothing but displaying his embarrassing anime waifu wallpapers. Dude was literally caught in 4K.

Realizing his raid excuse had just become an impossibility, he experienced approximately two seconds of genuine internal crisis. Cursing his past self for quitting the game, then immediately thanking his past self for quitting the game, then cursing himself again.

"I use... err... voice commands!" he gasped. Delivering it with zero conviction. "It's hands-free gaming! You wouldn't understand the meta!"

Did he think you were stupid. You scoffed and took one step forward. 

Satoru backed up instantly. Heels dragging through the carpet and you kept marching forward until his knees hit the bed and he tipped backward onto the mattress. Tried to scramble away like a cornered prey animal. Got trapped between his pillows and the weight of your gaze.

You crawled right up onto the bed after him— Swung a leg over — Straddling his lap.

Satoru, pinned down, staring up at you like he'd genuinely forgotten how to process oxygen. Frozen fucking stiff.

"You have a boner, Satoru."

"I absolutely do not!" A full body flinch. "It is— it is a trick of the light! Like an optical illusion! It's the pleats of the pants!"

Okay, that was enough. His sweats didn’t even have any fucking pleats, the hell. 

You grabbed fistfuls of his hoodie, yanked his panicked face up toward yours, his glasses sliding down his nose, and kissed him. Finally.

It was messy. Horribly uncoordinated. Teeth clashing and noses bumping with a vibration that went straight through Satoru's entire skull. 

Clack. Smack. And everything in between, I guess.

He tasted like soda and sheer terror and you freaking loved it. Satoru had absolutely no idea where to put his anything. Tongue doing just everything and nothing all at once. Lapping at your lower lip, then wrestling with yours, then somewhere completely wrong, then back again, never where it was supposed to be.

Oh, Gojo. You sweet, sweet summer child. Bless him.

But at the exact same time it was hands down the single greatest moment of his entire life. 

You were actually kissing him. His dumb ass was somehow kissing you back. Right there in his bed, with you in his lap, and it wasn't even one of his pathetic little wet dreams.

Real. It was real. Someone should pinch him right now— Or rather not, his skin is too sensitive for that. So please, don’t do that.

He whimpered straight into your mouth. His heart aggressively trying to punch its way out of his chest at Mach 2, knock knock knocking on his ribcage like it wanted out.

His hands finally crashed down onto your hips, almost bruising them. He literally needed to anchor himself so he wouldn’t float away. Cloud 9 was for fucking normies. He was skyrocketing straight past Cloud 11 into a whole new stratosphere.

You pulled back just a little— Lips barely grazing the shell of his ear —

"Look at me..." A pause.

"Good boy."

BANG.

Satoru's eyes snapped open. Blown wide. Swirling with this desperate hungry something that made your stomach flip.

This man looked absolutely drunk off your existence. Addicted and disbelieving and so so gone— And you couldn't understand how it had taken you this long to finally just… jump him.

The past weeks had made everything so insanely intense n' unbearable n' you were done waiting. You rolled your hips down. Slow. Filthy. Deliberate. Grinding right into his crotch and god —

Heavenly.

Eyes half-lidded. Cheeks flushed. Staring right into his pretty blues while you ground down on him.

Satoru swore to god he had never seen anything more beautiful in his entire life.

Three measly dry-humps later, and that was it. Satoru gasped straight into your mouth. Mentally on the brink of complete insanity for days, and you just shoved him off the fucking cliff without a parachute. A literal nuke going off in his lower abdomen. 

...And to think he had literally prayed to whatever god would listen that he wouldn't instantly bust a nut in his own pants the very first time he got with a girl.

Oh well. RIP to that dream. 

His entire body shuddered— Shoulders straight down to his trembling knees. He ripped his mouth away from yours with a sloppy gasp, glistening with your spit, starry-eyed, skull smacking back against the headboard with a hollow—

Thonk.

"Oh, FUCK!” He went limp under you. 

And you felt it. That jerky little twitch right against your inner thigh, followed by the sudden warm dampness soaking through the fabric and sticking lewdly right to your leg.

Oh.

Satoru dead-eyed stared at the popcorn ceiling. And there goes his only chance with you...

"I..." he whispered. Voice hollow. "...uhh. I'm so sorry—"

Satoru slowly tipped his head down. Looked at his own crotch. The wet spot blooming right dead center on the light grey fabric like a declaration of defeat.

His hands came up to cover his flaming face. He just laid there. Already drafting his resignation from the honors program in his head, mentally scouting off-the-grid locations where he could fake his own death and live out the rest of his life as a celibate goat herder somewhere with no WiFi and no witnesses.

And then. He heard it. A soft bubbly little noise— A giggle.

Satoru slowly parted his fingers just enough for one terrified eye to peek through. Fully bracing for the roast of a lifetime. Instead, you were just staring down at him. Shoulders shaking. Sporting this genuine, goofy-ass smile that made your eyes crinkle up so prettily it actually hurt to look at.

"It's not— it's not how it looks! I swear— it's a margin of error! This shouldn't have happened—!"

You'd have to be a literal stupid stupid to clown on him right now. I mean. Fuck. You finally had this nerd right where you wanted him. Pinned directly under you, completely at your mercy.

You leaned back down. Framed his burning face with both hands. Stroked your thumbs over his sharp cheekbones, soft enough that his hyperventilating stopped.

"Satoru," you whispered. "You're such a dork."

And kissed him again.

The sheer whiplash of it all hit him like a complete system reboot — Ding. The pants-ruining shame didn't magically vanish. Obviously. It was very much still there. But you weren't running away. You weren't laughing at him. You were here.

Forehead resting against his. "Don't you look like you're about to cry." A pause. "It just means I'm that good." Another pause. "But we definitely gotta take these off now."

A hopeful spark returned to his eyes. Tiny. Fragile. But there.

"Wait—" His voice came out very small. "You're not disgusted?"

And how could you be? Even if a little questionable— The man of your dreams had just come in his pants from one kiss and a little caress.

For you. Because of you. …Yeah. A good fucking ego stroke, if you ask me.

"Satoru, please—" you laughed softly, fingers already hooking into the waistband. "Shut the fuck up."

Because you were just getting started —

BAANG.

The bedroom door flew open with enough force to crack the drywall.

"Emergency!" Shoko shouted, stumbling in.

"Girl, there you are —"

She froze mid-step. Her eyes did a full sweep of the room. You. Sitting all pretty, straddling her roommate. And then the undeniable pièce de résistance— The nut stain. Proudly blooming dead center in his crotch. 

Look. She'd expected something to happen between you and Satoru. She'd planned on something happening. But you genuinely cannot buy this kind of premium entertainment.

She nearly choked on her own laugh before she could even get the words out.

"Oh." A sip. "OH."

"So the nerd is finally getting some?" Another sip, slower this time, savoring it. "Fucking took you long enough, Satoru. I honestly thought we were gonna have to bury you in that gaming chair with your V-card perfectly intact."

"GET OUT!" Satoru squealed, frantically grabbing a pillow and smashing it over his lap. "LEAVE! DE-PERCEIVE ME! I AM INVISIBLE!"

"I'd literally love nothing more than to leave you two to your pathetic little goon session n' go bleach my eyes," Shoko deadpanned, grabbing your arm in a vice grip that left absolutely no room for negotiation. "But Nanami's dumbass cousin just tried to do a backflip off the fucking balcony, beefed it, n' plummeted straight into the downstairs neighbor's inflatable kiddie pool."

… Bruh.

"I was literally in the middle of something—!" you whined, heels digging into the carpet.

God, you just wanted to eat him. Was that a crime? Genuinely. Was that legally a crime?

"The neighbor is currently screaming about property damage and wants to call the cops. He's apparently a fucking faculty member—"

"Can't, like, Suguru do something?"

"—Suguru is out there but the loser is losing the freaking fight!" Shoko's grip tightened. "If you don't get out there right now and use your major to convince this boomer that a 200-pound frat boy crushing his pool was actually a high-concept performance art piece about suburban decay, we are all getting expelled!"

She started hauling you out into the hallway like a sack of very horny potatoes.

Drag drag drag.

"Look—" she barked, completely aloof, not even looking back. "You can finish de-pantsing the three second wonder later." A yank. "Right now you need to go gaslight a very angry man into dropping the charges."

And so you were ruthlessly dragged away from the absolute feast you'd just laid out for yourself.

Satoru sat there. Glasses crooked. Staring at the empty doorway with the confused expression of a man whose reality had just been shattered, rebuilt, and shattered again in the span of approximately five minutes.

It took another two agonizing fucking hours. Two straight hours of you pulling out every absolute bullshit buzzword in your arsenal. 

"Kinetic community outreach." 

"Suburban decay performance art." 

"Youthful spatial reclamation—" 

Just to gaslight this angry boomer into not calling the actual cops.

The universe was sooo conspiring against you getting into Satoru's pants, it was crazy.

By the time the three of you dragged your exhausted asses back inside, the party was completely dead.

"I'm going back in," you whispered, already pivoting toward Satoru's room like a horny heat-seeking missile.

"The fuck you are," Shoko's fingers caught your collar with a yank— "You've had exactly three cups of my amazing drink and just spent two hours aggressively lying to a tenured professor. You're going to pass out mid-stroke, and Satoru's weak-ass cardiovascular system will give out if you so much as breathe on his dick tonight." A beat. "Let the poor nerd chill."

Suguru was slumped against the wall. Fully horizontal on the inside, you could tell. 

"God, I still can't believe that actually happened." He shook his head slowly, staring at nothing. "Poor guy. But she's right— He's probably already convinced himself he needs full witness protection. Give him the night to spiral n' overthink it." A tired little smile. "It'll make him way more compliant tomorrow."

Okay, Suguru, you manipulative little freak. He wasn't wrong, though.

Obviously you weren't just going to leave like that. You slipped away for just a second— Creeping down the hall, nudging his bedroom door open juuust enough.

His PC was still glowing. Some random Twitch stream humming quietly to an empty room. Satoru was completely passed out cold, still wearing that stupid oversized black hoodie.

The grey sweats were gone though. Replaced by a baggy pair of dark navy ones. The ruined ones prolly 100% stuffed into the deepest, darkest corner of his closet. Waiting to be ceremonially burned, RIP.

He looked peaceful. His long white lashes casting soft little shadows on his still flushed cheeks, chest rising and falling. 

God— He was so fucking pretty when his mouth was shut.

You lingered in the doorway for a second just watching him. Yeah. You were going to absolutely destroy this man tomorrow.

The door clicked shut behind you, soft as you could manage. You'd let his pathetic ass rest. For now.

When the morning sun was blasting through the kitchen window, Satoru felt worse than anyone who'd actually gotten wasted last night. Sitting at the kitchen island like a horny n’ depressed gargoyle.

He was staring into a bowl of Froot Loops that had long since dissolved into a toxic pink-and-orange sludge. Spoon hovering mid-air. Arm completely frozen. One single pink loop clinging desperately to his bottom lip like it was the last life raft on a sinking ship.

Across from him, Suguru was nursing a mug of tea, mindlessly scrolling his phone. Actively fighting a war on two fronts. The hangover. And the urge to absolutely lose it in Satoru's face.

Then. 

Click. 

Shoko's doorknob.

Satoru flinched so hard the spoon dropped. It clattered against the ceramic bowl, sticky pink milk splashing directly onto his hoodie sleeve. 

Huh. White substances really did have a thing for this man's clothes. 

You stepped out first. Freshly showered. Moisturized. Terrifyingly composed.

Thank god you'd tactically dumped every single toxic concoction Shoko had tried to hand you straight down the bathroom sink after those first three cups. You were running at full 100% capacity. And ready to obliterate him.

Satoru's breath hitched like a dying Victorian child.

Oh god.

The crushing weight of reality dropped onto his brain like a cartoon anvil. Looney tunes sound effect and everything. 

The Witness and The Victim. Emerging from the same room. In unison. The jury had deliberated in secret and the verdict was permanent exile! to the shadow realm.

You marched your hot ass straight up to the island and stopped dead right in front of him. Arms crossed. Features terrifyingly unreadable.

The ultimate Comms Major About To Destroy Your Entire Life poker face.

"Satoru."

Your voice dead level, strictly professional, brutally stripped of a single ounce of warmth.

Satoru forgot how swallowing worked. Like the biological mechanism left his body alongside with any backbone. The lone pink loop finally lost its grip on his lip and plop straight into the sludge.

"I've been talking with Shoko," you stated, throwing a glance at the brunette. She was currently posted up against the counter, taking drag out of her vape with aggressively trembling hands. 

"And given the... situation... I think we need to have a private conversation."

The blood evacuated Satoru's face so fast it was almost audible. Whoosh. It's an absolute miracle he didn't pass out face-first into his Froot Loops right then and there.

The realization slammed into his forehead like a flying brick. You two talked. And probably not just some casual morning girl-chat either. No no no. This was a full-blown autopsy. A National Transportation Safety Board crash investigation into his ruined dick.

He stared wide-eyed at the two of you standing there— the High Council of the Tribunal of Shame. And his brain immediately auto-played the whole thing in high-definition Dolby Surround Sound and all.

You, recounting the "incident" with a cringed-out face.

"Wait, so then he just—?"

Shoko, cackling her lungs completely out. Brutally dissecting his premature failure like a dead frog in AP Bio. 

"Yup. Instantly. Right in the sweatpants."

"Jesus fucking christ."

"I know."

"Fucking pathetic."

"I know."

He gripped his cereal bowl so hard it was a miracle the ceramic didn't just crack straight down the middle. He felt tiny.  A biological error. Like the devs had clocked the bug, flagged it, and were desperately trying to patch him out of existence before the next server update.

Clunk.

Suguru's mug hit the table.

The silence that followed was so extremely awkward it had physical weight. 

"I..." He swallowed hard, desperately trying to locate a vocal frequency somewhere in his throat that didn't sound exactly like a suffocating walrus. "Uhh... okay.."

Suguru was watching him.

Eyes absolutely brimming with this tragic, brotherly pity that only exists between people who've watched someone humiliate themselves beyond recovery. Satoru broke out into cold clammy sweat instantaneously.

Why the fuck is he looking at him like that. Does he know too?! Did they have a goddamned group chat?!

"Be brave, Satoru." Suguru's voice came out low and solemn. He did this slow, incredibly weighted nod as if delivering a terminal diagnosis in a hospice. "Just listen to what she has to say. Try to take it like a man."

Satoru paled so violently his skin basically color-matched his hair.

Like a man.

Oh god.

Bro-code for: please don't start aggressively sobbing until she's at least out of the building.

Shoko blew a long stream of smoke, sunglasses sliding down her nose just enough to flash one bloodshot eye. "Don't worry, Satoru. I told her you're a really fast learner." A drag. "You'll understand exactly what she means immediately."

He wanted to wither into actual dust.

She has performance notes.

You were literally about to sit him down and hand him a grading rubric on his premature ejaculation. With bullet points. Color coded. A works cited page.

"Right," Satoru squeaked.

He somehow forced his body to stand. Legs wet cement. Hands shoved deep into his sweats, fingers curled into tight fists just to hide the pathetic shaking happening inside them.

One step. Then another.

The longest ten feet of his entire life. Genuinely. The Green Mile. Dead man walking. Shuffling straight toward his own humiliating execution.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

He made a beeline straight for his gaming desk the second the door opened, putting every single inch of physical distance between himself, you, and that godforsaken mattress as mathematically possible.

That bed was a Bermuda Triangle for his virginity and he was absolutely not going anywhere near it.

He spun around awkwardly. Head ducked. Dead-eyes locked on his dumb white socks.

Click.

You locked the door behind you.

"Look," he whispered. Two seconds of dead silence and he was already caving. His voice coming out completely defeated. "You don't have to... be nice about it. I get it, okay? I'm a total mess. I know I completely ruined the vibe and blew the single chance I had."

Sniff. 

He shoved his slipping glasses up his nose frantically. Refused to look at you. His eyes were traitorously starting to burn and he was not, absolutely not, doing that right now.

He felt so insanely pathetic it was bordering on high comedy. Like, genuinely. He was 100% convinced Shoko was currently folded in half out by the toaster, one hand over her mouth, waiting for you to come back out n' join the roast session.

"I can just be your study partner," he mumbled straight to the floorboards. Voice thick n' gross n' wobbly like a building foundation about to give. "I'll do all your Stats homework for the rest of the semester. I won't... try to bother you with any of that other stuff ever again. Just, please don't tell me we can't hang out anymore. I really..."

His voice snapped.

"I really like hanging out with you."

You were absolutely not letting this groveling little monologue go on for one more second. Although, holy hell. He looked so absurdly cute on the verge of literal tears. 

And honestly you probably would've soaked up this miserable little imagery for at least another thirty seconds if he didn't look like he was three seconds away from a 72-hour psychiatric hold.

You stepped right between his spread legs. Grabbed the hoodie strings and yanked him down.

"Satoru," you paused while he just stared down at you like a stunned fucking mullet, "for the love of god. Calm the fuck down."

He was bent awkwardly at the waist, flaming face hovering mere inches from yours, panting these short terrified little puffs of air straight onto your face. hff. hff. hff.

"I don't know what you were expecting," you whispered, staring right into his panicked blue eyes. "Shoko was literally just apologizing for cockblocking us."

Satoru blinked.

An actual tear escaped the corner of his eye. Plipped straight down his nose.

"...What?"

"I came back, Satoru." Your thumb caught the wetness before it could drip off his chin, brushing it away so gently it almost broke him worse. "Last night. I wanted to finish exactly what we started. But you were already passed out."

The information hit his brain like a sledgehammer.

He stared at you like a complete idiot. Mouth slightly open. Processing and freaking buffering.

You came back? You didn't fake pity and bolt in absolute disgust?  You voluntarily re-entered the Forbidden Zone? Oh my god. Did he just refer to his own bedroom as the Forbidden Zone?

That sign gotta go. 

"You... you actually wanted more?" He furrowed his eyebrows, deeply disbelieving. "But it was so... embarrassing."

"It was cute," you corrected, letting this filthy little smirk take over your face. "Messy, yeah. But incredibly fucking hot." You tilted your head. "Made me soo horny, 'Toru."

He blinked.

"...Horny?"

The word fell out of his mouth like it was a completely foreign concept he was actively failing to translate in real time. Sounding it out.

Hor. Ny.

His oh-so-brilliant mind was attempting. No, straining to run two completely conflicting programs simultaneously.

Protocol A: Terminal Self-Loathing & Permanent Societal Exile.

Protocol B: The Hottest Fucking Girl On Campus Is Telling Me She Wanna Jump My Bones. S.E.X. I. Repeat. SEX.

The processing friction was genuinely something. You could practically see the smoke coming out of his ears. 

But you were so done waiting for him to catch up. You just wanted to get on with it already.

You pulled him flush against you. Thump, His chest hitting yours.

"You..." He swallowed hard. "you're actually not making fun of me? This isn't some cruel, elaborate sociological experiment Suguru paid you to do? I'm not getting Punk'd right now?"

"Satoru." Your voice came out deadly calm. "If you don't shut the fuck up right now, I am going to physically bite you."

The feral glint in your eyes made it very clear. It wasn’t a threat. It was part of an itinerary.

Cartoon heart-eyes and you shoved him backwards. Stumbled like a newborn giraffe discovering it had legs for the very first time, his already terrible coordination completely shot to hell, until the back of his thighs hit the edge of his desk with a thunk and he scrambled to brace his hands behind him.

Trapped. Right between his dual-monitor setup and you.

Is it weird that he kind of loved that? Getting trapped between any piece of furniture and you specifically? Because he did. He really, really did.

Satoru literally didn't know whether to keep arguing or just haul you against him. So you made the choice for him. You grabbed his face in both hands n' kissed him.

Not messy this time. Tender. Deep. So completely reassuring it almost hurt.

And it kind of wrecked you too. This tight, warm, stupid knot of something blooming right in your lower belly, fluttering around like it owned the place.

"Now," you hummed against his mouth, one hand sliding straight down to rest possessively on the waistband of his fresh sweats. 

"I see we went for the tactical wardrobe change." Eyes dragging down. "Black? No... dark navy?" A slow smile. "Trying to hide something?"

"It's a universally slimming color!" he squeaked. "And—and the cotton density is mathematically optimal for the... the temperature of the room!"

"Uh-huh."

You hooked two fingers right under the waistband and pulled. Thwack. The elastic snapping back against his hips.

"They look comfy," you agreed pleasantly. "But they're currently in my way. And I have a very specific goal for the next few hours that requires you not wearing them."

Satoru's heart was hammering against his ribs so hard. Like a trapped bird that had been in there a really long time and had just now spotted the window.

You looked so dead-set it was both equally hot and terrifying. Starving. Fully locked n' loaded to rip his V-card straight out of his fucking hands with zero hesitation.

Your eyes rolled but your smirk softened. Just slightly, into something that looked almost, dangerously, like fond.

You reached up and threaded your fingers into his white hair. Gave it one commanding little tug that forced his head right back down to yours and left another soft peck against his open mouth.

"If you glitch out again," you whispered right against his lips, "we'll literally just reload the save file, nerd."

A beat.

"Now." Your fingers found the waistband again. "Shut off your brain and let me get these fucking pants off you."

Satoru didn't even try to fight you this time.

In fact he became so aggressively eager to comply that he tried to kick the pants off way too fast— Instantly tripping over his own feet, nearly taking both of you down in a tangled heap.

"Wow," you deadpanned, watching him aggressively boot the sweats across the room. Fwip straight into the corner. "Graceful."

"Shut up! I am... currently experiencing... severe motor control issues!"

"Bed. Now."

The command completely bypassed his higher brain functions and hijacked his spinal cord directly. 

Satoru scrambled onto the bed, knobby knees hitting the duvet. He scurried backward with the urgency of a soldier diving into a trench to dodge an active grenade until his spine thwack-ed the drywall and he yanked his knees straight to his chest in the most pathetic little defensive crouch you'd ever witnessed in your life.

He looked exactly like a daddy longlegs that had just been swatted with a rolled-up newspaper.

Rocking nothing but the hoodie and a pair of boxers that were—

Wait. Wait.

Were those the pixelated slimes.... from Dragon Quest?

Jesus fucking Christ.

You were physically fighting the urge to pinch the bridge of your nose. This was it. This was the man you were currently risking your entire reputation for.

It was tragic. Beyond pathetic. It was hands down the hottest fucking thing you’d ever seen in your life.

You stopped right at the edge of the mattress.

Satoru tracked your approach like you were a raid boss entering his aggro range. Eyes wide, breathing shallow, every muscle in his body coiled like he was genuinely considering his escape routes.

"Hoodie," you ordered, holding out one expectant hand.

Satoru clutched the fabric violently to his chest like you'd just asked him to hand over his firstborn child.

"Hell no! The hoodie stays! It is—it is a tactical safety blanket! It provides crucial emotional armor!"

"Satoru." You sighed, popping one knee onto the edge of the mattress. "We are absolutely not doing this with you dressed like a goddamn burglar. Take. It. Off."

"I physically can't! My upper body definition is highly suboptimal! I literally haven't set foot in a gym since the mandatory phys-ed requirement of freshman year—"

You were biting your lip so hard it was a miracle it didn't bleed.

This fucking nerd. This absolute smooth-brained genius was really about to debate his lack of gains while you were actively trying to throw it back on him.

Okay. Fine. If logic wasn't working, you were going straight for shock and awe. 

"Fine," you hummed, fingers already finding the hem of your own shirt. "If you're gonna be a shy little bitch about it. I'll go first. Make it fair."

Satoru's eyes snapped wide.

He realized what was happening approximately two seconds too late to stop you. And three seconds too late to prepare his nervous system for the incoming blast.

oh no—

"WAIT—" he squeaked, hands fluttering uselessly in the air. "Hold on! I—err… my graphics card literally cannot render this yet—!"

You absolutely did not wait.

One fluid motion and the top was over your head. Getting tossed directly onto the bedside shelf, landing right over the poor Goku figure's head like a little hat.

Satoru's jaw dropped like three inches. Heart-shaped pupils locked on your chest. 

You were standing there. Arms reach away and bathed in the obnoxious rainbow RGB glow of his PC tower, tits out, looking at him like you weren't the one currently causing a cardiac event.

Oh my fucking god. The geometry. The physics engine. The sheer... high-res texture quality.

For ten whole-ass seconds Satoru physically forgot he was a carbon-based life form who required oxygen to survive. Lights on, nobody home.

His eyes were blown-out saucers of pure panic. Desperately trying to render the sudden influx of high-def titty. 

He stared directly at your chest, panicked and looked up at the ceiling, immediately clocked that staring at popcorn ceiling was a colossal waste of premium runtime, and aggressively yanked his gaze right back down.

He flushed sick looking crimson and slapped both hands over his own face like a cartoon character. Left his fingers spread wide open though. Obviously. His desperate ass wasn't missing a single frame of this.

“This is way too much!” he wheezed, physically swaying on the bed. “You can’t just rip your shirt off like that! Your boobs are mathematically way too nice for a warningless drop!”

Laughing, you grabbed his wrists and ruthlessly yanked his hands away from his face. He put up approximately half a second of useless resistance. Absolutely terrified of the direct line of sight. Before totally caving and letting you pin his arms down.

"Good boy," you purred, dripping with satisfied smugness, and poked him right dead center in his chest.

Thump thump thump thump thump. His heart going absolutely feral in there. Like a double-kick drum at a death metal concert. "Now." Another poke. "Hoodie. Off."

Satoru looked at you. Then down at his hoodie.

The entire pre-planned thesis defense regarding his lack of muscle mass poofed the away instantly. Because the alternative was you putting your shirt back on and he absolutely refused to exist in a timeline where the boobs went away.

"Okay," he breathed. "Okay okay. Initiating... un-equip sequence."

He raised his arms. You didn't wait— Grabbed the bottom hem and yanked it up before he could reconsider.

It got stuck on his head. Mmmph—!

A muffled pathetic little yelp of protest, before popping clean off with a violent rush of static electricity. His bright white hair was now sticking straight up in every single direction like a cracked-out mad scientist.

You tossed the hoodie into the void.

He instantly crossed both arms over his chest and curled in on himself like a shy anime girl.

"Stop looking at me!" he actually whined. "I feel like a lab specimen! You're currently calculating my exact BMI, I can literally see the math happening in your eyes!"

"I'm literally just calculating how many seconds it's going to take to finally get you to shut the fuck up," you said, n' shoved his wide shoulders back.

Fwump. Satoru went down, flopping back onto his pillows like a very tall, very compliant ragdoll.

"Boxers."

He didn't even hesitate this time. Hooked his thumbs into the waistband of those stupid pixelated slime boxers and shoved them down his legs, ready to serve you his v-card on a silver platter.

The fabric launched off his foot — Arced beautifully through the air — Landed directly on top of his keyboard.

Satoru froze. "My-my custom GMK keycaps..."

You could not have given less of a fuck about his keyboard. Although— Okay, it did make you think. Because thanks to that keyboard, and a very specific chain of subsequent events, you were currently about to sleep with this hot disaster of a nerd.

Wild. Anyway.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

For a guy who'd actively claimed his body was composed entirely of soft tissue and Monster Energy— The sight of him fully, completely exposed was enough to instantly liquify your kneecaps.

He. Was. Gorgeous.

Not just cute. Not just boyishly handsome. Unfairly masculine. The long elegant lines of his thighs, the sharp filthy cut of his V-line, the pale smooth expanse of skin glowing like an actual marble statue under the harsh rainbow LED lights.

Not fair. Genuinely not fair.

Your eyes dropped to his lap.

Oh.

That was a dick that had absolutely zero business being attached to a man who owned $400 limited-edition anime figurines. Illegal, almost.

Satoru suddenly clocked that you weren't mourning his keyboard. He tracked your gaze slooowly downward. Down, down, down  to his own lap and immediately crab-walk backward. Both hands flying to cover his junk like a terrified Victorian maiden guarding the last scraps of her virtue.

"Arms down," you commanded, reaching out to grab his sharp jaw and snapping his burning face back up to yours. "Eyes up here."

Then you stood up, towering over this trembling, giant, pathetic mess of a man.

Slowly. Agonizingly. Slowly.

You grabbed the hem of the ratty sleep shorts Shoko had loaned you and shoved them down.  They hit the floor in a sad little puddle. Then the panties followed.

Satoru’s lungs officially filed for unemployment.

He bolted violently upright, shock completely overriding his paralysis, and scrambled backward into the cheap headboard like a cornered raccoon with nowhere left to go, knees knocking awkwardly apart.

Just two completely butt-naked idiots staring at each other across an RGB-lit gamer den. Premium content right here.

His eyes were blown out like massive blue dinner plates of pure terror. Both hands frozen mid-air, fingers curled like he was scrubbing in for open-heart surgery.

Every single pathetic lonely goon session he'd ever had didn't even come close to this.

The sheer 4K ultra-HD reality of you standing there— Fully, completely, actually naked in his room was something not even Santa could've delivered on his best Christmas. You were so much softer. So infinitely prettier than the pixelated garbage he usually stared at.

Real, his brain supplied, barely functioning. she's real she's real she's actually—

"You're..." A wheeze. Literally sounding like a punctured tire slowly deflating. "You're actually fully naked right now. For me. In my room. This is 100% a simulation. I'm going to wake up in a cold sweat in approximately thirty seconds."

"I'm very fucking real, Satoru," you purred. And dropped back onto your knees. Prowled right up over his massive frame. Settled all your weight squarely across his thick thighs and —

Oh. Oh the skin to skin. So surreal you had to actively swallow down a pathetic little moan before it escaped. Can't let him know the effect he was having on you. Not yet. Not when you were supposed to be the composed one here.

He folded just as instantly.

Just crumbled forward, burying his burning face deep into the crook of your neck. His stupid nose bumping against your skin like a needy golden retriever.

"You're soo warm," he mumbled right against your collarbone, ragged hot breath sending a violent shiver straight down your spine. "I can feel your pulse. It's going— it's going crazy." A pause. His nose dragging against your skin. "Is that... is that actually because of me?"

"Wadda you think, 'Toru," you chuckled.

But your voice came out softer than intended and you honestly couldn't take the hovering anymore. More. You needed more. More touching. More kissing. More everything. More all of it. You grabbed both his violently shaking wrists and physically slammed his massive palms flat onto your bare skin.

Dragged his hands up your waist. Right up to the curve of your chest. Pressed down hard, forcing those long twitchy gamer fingers to finally, finally sink straight into the softness.

Sqqeeeeak— Satoru let out a sound like a dying tea kettle directly into your neck. His lips brushed your collarbone as he made it, the deep vibration shooting straight down to your core like a livewire.

"Holy fucking shit," he actually whimpered, hands twitching helplessly against your chest. "You're— you're so soft. Like mathematically impossible levels of soft. I literally cannot believe you're actually letting me— that you're actually—"

He couldn't even finish the sentence. 

"Good." You tilted his chin up. "Because I want you to feel this too."

You didn't give him a single second to brace himself. One hand grabbed his trembling wrist and shoved it straight down between your legs. The other wrapped dead around his cock. And started pumping.

Satoru’s head literally slammed back against the ikea headboard with a hollow thump. Throat bared, eyes rolling completely into the back of his skull the second he registered two things simultaneously — How ridiculously slick n' hot you were against his fingers. And a hand. Your hand. not his hand. Someone else's hand. Finally wrapped around his dick. Both at once.

Feeling how feral you were for him while you touched him so perfectly was genuinely sending him to another dimension. You were so soft everywhere— Your body, your hands, the way you were looking at him. All of it, too much.

"Toru..." You leaned in and bit down hard on his earlobe.. "Feel how wet I am?" A pause. "This is all for you."

"Is this..." He was stammering, completely losing his entire mind in real time. "Is this level of fluid leakage biologically nor—"

"Do not," you warned, voice dropping dangerously, "ever use the word 'leakage' during sex again."

The threat dissolved instantly into a high-pitched yelp when his clumsy untrained fingers violently slipped and' accidentally mashed directly against your clit.

It was so chaotic and uncoordinated, but holy shit, it worked.

"What—" Satoru yanked his hand back and stared at it like it had just performed unauthorized black magic. "What was that? Did I just— wait." Eyes going wide. "Did I just hit a hotkey?"

You shot him the most withering glare known to mankind but did not bother answering. Because what the fuck was even that question? 

You just lifted your hips, grabbed his cock, and guided it straight to your entrance.

God. It was a literal struggle. He was so unreasonably, stupidly, illegally large. Like, "did you illegally 3D-print this in a basement lab?" levels of large. 

You let out a sharp staggered gasp as you tried to sink your weight down onto his lap and had to stop halfway. You wrapped both arms tight around his neck and buried your face in his shoulder, gritting your teeth, just trying to accommodate.

Breathe, girl. You lowered yourself another inch. Physically forcing your body to accept the hardware upgrade one excruciating millimeter at a time— Like trying to parallel park a Hummer into a compact spot or something.

"Oh my fucking god, Satoru," you gasped, the words literally punched clean out of your lungs. "You're so fucking— just. Just give me a second."

Satoru's reaction was immediate. And absolutely catastrophic.

His hands convulsively dug into your waist like he was dangling off the edge of the Grand Canyon by his fingertips and you were the only rock face within reach.

Whimper. And vibrating right against your collarbone.

His spine gave an actual audible pop as he arched aggressively off the headboard. Neck straining. Eyes rolling back so far into his skull you could literally only see the whites.

He looked like he was getting abducted by aliens and they were beaming him up by his dick. 

"I see the literal light," he whispered, voice raw and trembling into your ear like a Victorian orphan succumbing to tuberculosis on a particularly cold Thursday. "I see the math. I can actually see the Fibonacci sequence. I..." A full body shudder. "I've wanted this so bad it has been actively ruining my life." A pause. "I think I'm literally in love with you." Another pause. "Please tell my mother I died bravely."

You froze completely. Fingers digging into his messy white hair. Not moving. 

"...Wait." Your voice came out very carefully. "What the fuck did you just say?"

But Satoru couldn't answer. Bro was gone. Officially offline. Blue Screen of Death. Mouth hanging wide open in a silent brain-dead gasp, soul visibly and physically ejecting from his body in real time as you sank the rest of the way down—

"DON'T MOVE—!"

The shriek cracked across three separate octaves simultaneously. Crushing your waist so desperately his knuckles went pure white.

"If you move I'm going to instantly bust! The friction coefficient is mathematically way too high! I literally cannot handle the sensory input! You're squeezing my dick so fucking hard—!"

"Too bad," you hummed mercilessly.

You started to grind. Slow. Filthy. And rhythmic— Just this devastating swivel of your hips down against his, over and over and over.

Satoru squeaked every single rotation. His glasses had slid so far down his nose they were basically resting on his bottom lip. His entire face flushed a violent radioactive crimson that honestly looked medically concerning. Sweat gathering at his temples. 

"Satoru," you panted, pulling back just enough to glare down at his completely wrecked face. "You are not watching porn right now. You are the ride. Fucking touch me again!"

"I don't know how!" he wailed — actually wailed, like a man being wronged. "It looked way easier in the videos! The professionals make it look like a perfectly seamless cutscene! I am operating on manual controls here! There's no tutorial! I never did the tutorial!"

You desperately needed more. Frustrated, needy and sweating, you reached right down between your bodies— Fingers finding your clit instantly, exactly where it had been grinding into his pelvis. There.

Satoru's eyes snapped violently to your hand. The wailing stopped. The panicked bird-flailing ceased.

He went dead. Fucking. Silent. 100% of his processing power diverted, from pure screaming panic straight into hyper-observation mode. Behind his fogged-up lenses, his eyes locked onto the movement of your fingers with the terrifying laser-focus of a sweaty esports pro who'd just spotted a single enemy pixel from across the map. 

Locked in.

He watched your face change. Saw your head tip back. Your lips parting in this desperate wordless oh. Heard that sharp jagged intake of breath, that filthy little noise that you caused, not him. Watched you actively get yourself off while fully riding his dick.

The rusted gears in his genius brain started grinding together. And something sharp and sudden spiked through him. Indignation. Pure indignation.

Wait. Wait a damn minute.

His brain frantically crunched the numbers. Eyes cutting to your hand doing all the actual work. Then down to his own hands, which were currently just holding your chest.

"Hey." His voice dropped. And not in the cool sexy anime-boy way either. No no no. This was the aggressively grumpy petulant drop of a toxic gamer who'd just gotten blue-shelled at the finish line in Mario Kart. And was absolutely not okay with it.

He clumsily swatted your hand away— Nearly poking you in the thigh in his chaotic haste.

"Move,” he grumbled. "Move. Let me actually try."

You bit the absolute shit out of your inner cheek. Mastermind. You were a literal mastermind.

Because the absolute last thing you'd actually wanted was to rub one out while straddling a guy who, approximately five seconds ago, hadn't known where to put his own giant hands without looking like he was frantically trying to defuse a bomb. You didn't want to do it yourself.

You needed to trigger his competitive streak. You needed him to get in the game.

He shoved your hand completely out of the way and slapped his own massive thumb down. 

Splat.

Absolute. Fucking. Disaster at first.

Bro was pressing waaaay too hard— Mashing it like he was desperately trying to skip an unskippable cutscene that the developers had deliberately made unavoidable. His ping was lagging. His thumb was slipping everywhere. He was dead-ass glaring at your crotch like he was trying to mentally calculate the square root of Pi through sheer force of will.

But then. Then. He hit the spot just right again.

The exact second a genuine filthy moan ripped out of your throat.

And Satoru didn't just feel encouraged. The man felt god-tier. His fragile male ego, which had been in a state of catastrophic multi-system failure for the past twenty-four hours, surged back to full capacity like a phoenix rising from the ashes of his own ruined sweatpants.

Ding. 

PLAYER 2 HAS ENTERED THE GAME.

A hyper-competitive glint flared up behind those fogged-out lenses.

And it wasn't just a mental buff either. He felt it. Directly. In the hardware.

The sudden frantic spasm spasm flutter of your pussy wrapping around his dick— Just pulsing against him in a way that zero hours of 4K VR porn could have ever prepared his virgin brain for.

The ultimate premium haptic feedback. It sent a massive fucking shockwave straight from his crotch directly into his brain stem.

And in the same exact second, Satoru had a full-blown religious experience.

Right then and there, he made a decision. He needed to feel this exact specific sensation until the literal heat death of the universe. Wanted to live inside this flutter. Wanted to be permanently buried inside this wet mushy and terrifyingly perfect reality until the servers shut down for good. Forever.

"Hypothesis—" He was panting, this manic absolute shit-eating grin splitting violently across his sweaty face. "Fucking confirmed." His eyes were wild.

"I've officially mapped the inputs. My dexterity stats are mathematically way higher than originally calculated."

A beat. He looked down at you. "Step aside, amateur."

"Amateur?!" You barely managed to get the word out before —

He clamped his fingers down on your waist and with the sudden terrifying display of someone who regularly lugs a 40lb custom PC rig up three flights of dorm stairs strength he aggressively shifted his weight and violently twisted his hips to completely flip you over.

"Excuse the fuck out of—?!" 

Aaand the entire room did a barrel roll.

Oomph. You hit the mattress, hair sprawling across the pillowcase. You just laid there staring up at him, jaw hanging open like a laggy video feed buffering on a bad connection. 

Completely. Utterly. Fucking. Gagged.

Because you had plans for this man. Massive. Long-term. Devious-ass plans.

You'd fully intended to spend the next six to eight business months systematically dismantling his virgin innocence piece by piece. Just carefully, methodically digging until you finally unearthed the depraved feral perverted monster you just knew was hiding somewhere beneath the pathetic layers of "I have a 2D waifu" and "I forgot to use deodorant today."

You were supposed to be the mentor here. The mastermind.

But apparently apparently Satoru had decided to skip the base campaign entirely and just buy the endgame DLC. Without even reading the patch notes.

You had been trying. Sweating. Putting in 110% elbow grease, grinding down on his dick with the full calculated intention of keeping his ass completely pinned and overwhelmed this entire time.

And yet three measly strokes and one lucky-ass thumb placement. And bro had successfully speedrun the entire goddamn power dynamic.

He looked absolutely feral.

Glasses so violently fogged up he was legally blind. White hair a static-charged dandelion puff of pure chaos standing in every direction simultaneously. Straddling you with the intense focus of a speedrunner who could smell the global World Record.

His fingers finding purchase on either side of your head. Settling in and locking eyes.

"The latency issues," he rasped, "have been resolved."

His voice sounded like it had been dragged through a gravel pit, run over twice, and left there. He didn't even look like a pathetic nerd anymore. He looked like a man who had just discovered how to aggressively exploit a physics glitch in the universe and was absolutely planning to abuse it.

He leaned down and licked this wet scorching-hot stripe right from your collarbone straight up to your ear —

His tongue was hot and surprisingly firm and before your brain could even begin to process the sensory input he sank his teeth right into the soft junction where your shoulder met your neck.

Bite. Not a cute gentle romantic nibble either. No no no. This was a feral hungry "I am permanently claiming this hardware" bite that instantly curled your toes and made a muffled horny shriek die completely in your throat before it could escape.

"'Toru—!" you gasped, fingers knotting desperately into his sweaty hair.

"Mine," he mumbled right against your skin.

The deep rumble of it buzzed through you like a livewire. He clamped his teeth down again— Just hard enough to leave a blatant mark before dragging his open wet mouth slowly across your pulse point.

But then he stopped. The momentum didn't slow down gradually. It slammed face-first into a brick wall at full speed with zero warning and absolutely no survivors.

Satoru's entire massive body went rigid. His head popped up so fast it was like someone had triggered a fire alarm directly inside his skull.

And that devastatingly confident glint completely gone.

Replaced instantly by the panic of a guy who had just realized he might have accidentally violated a major societal contract without reading the terms and conditions first.

"C-can I actually call you mine?" he squeaked out terrified. "Is that— is that allowed? I haven't read the updated EULA for this dynamic! I don't want to violate the user licensing agreement! Was that way too aggressive?! Did I just sound like a possessive fedora-tipping creep in a Discord server?! People say a lot of crazy shit in porn n' I just thought it would sound cool! Oh my fucking god—"

A full body shudder of horror. "I'm being a literal Nice Guy, aren't I?!"

He looked existentially horrified. Both hands hovering awkwardly in the air above your chest like he was completely terrified to make contact without a legally binding notarized consent form signed in triplicate. 

"Satoru," you groaned.

You reached up, grabbed a fistful of his sweaty white hair, and yanked his panicked face right back down to yours. "We are naked." A beat. "I put your dick inside me." Another beat. "I have wanted this for months." You stared directly into his terrified eyes. "I am literally yours. It was incredibly fucking hot. Keep going."

Satoru didn't just reboot. The man overclocked. His eyes blew out so wide they were basically just two shimmering dilated blue voids full of worship. This pathetic sob ripped out of his throat like it had been stored there for months and had finally found its exit.

You were his. You. And him. Together.

God. God. Neither of you were making it out of this bed until the heat death of the universe and that was just. A fact now. A biological certainty.

"Administrative privileges..." he wheezed, his entire massive body trembling so hard the cheap headboard rattled. "...fully granted."

Ding.

Oh lord have mercy, he was such a nerd it truly does hang between fucking hot and wanting to slap the fuck out of him to just shut the hell up.

"Ownership confirmed." His voice dropped an entire octave on its own. "I have the master key. I'm the only fucking user with root access."

He dove straight back into your neck. Mouth wide open and starving. Sloppy hot tongue laving right over the red mark he'd just bruised into your skin like he needed to physically taste the fact that you belonged to his nerd ass.

But he wasn't camping in one spot anymore. Oh no. Now that he had official root access? Satoru was data-mining.

Aggressively experimenting. His wet mouth wandering everywhere. Sloppy scorching kisses along your jawline, teeth dragging over your collarbone, biting down the slope of your shoulder. Acting like a rabid completionist hunting a hidden Easter egg on a brand new map, hot breath coming in ragged hitches right against your bare skin. 

And then. Then. He found a new variable. Leaned down and just shamelessly dragged his hot wet tongue directly into the curve of your ear. Slow. Disgustingly bold. Incredibly wet. The movement sent a literal 10,000-volt electric shock straight to your goddamn clit.

And the noise that ripped out of your throat wasn't some cute curated porn-star moan. It was a freaking wail. Loud and totally wrecked and completely embarrassing and you could not have stopped it if you tried. 

Your body reacted way before your brain could catch up. Walls clamping down around his dick with this sudden feral ferocity, squeezing so aggressively hard you could literally feel his pulse thrumming against your own.

Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. 

Like two heartbeats arguing about who was more desperate.

What the actual fuck. Your skull slamming back into the crusty pillowcase. What the ACTUAL fuck.

Your body was just completely milking this man. Acting out on some deep feral instinct you didn't even know you possessed. The mastermind top persona? Dead. Buried. A distant memory. You will not be missed. You were officially just a puddle of needy desperate overstimulated nerves n' poor decisions.

Are you both having a catastrophic spiritual awakening right now? Is this giant trembling nerd actually a sleeperagent sex god? Are YOU actually just an irredeemable degenerate? Have you seriously been holding back this insane radioactive level of combined freakiness this ENTIRE time?

These were questions that deserved answers. That you were utterly unable to process right now.

Satoru's reaction to getting aggressively squeezed was this strangled deeply vibrating groan that felt like a literal car subwoofer detonating directly against your chest.

"Do that again," he panted. "Squeeze me like that again."

He did not pull away. Obviously he did not pull away because why would he?

If anything the premium haptic feedback just made him more of an animal. He bit down hard on your earlobe— And started thrusting with this renewed intensity that had absolutely zero chill left in it whatsoever.

He wasn't testing variables anymore. Bro was farming the spawn point. Like his entire life depended on it.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

His hips finding a rhythm. A terrible one, but yet just perfect rhythm.

He was a sweaty mess. You were a drooling mess. His entire bedroom was a disaster zone of kicked-off sweatpants and aggressively glowing RGB electronics and approximately zero dignity left between the two of you.

But as he drove his hips back into you, massive gamer fingers digging deep into your hips, keeping you completely pinned under him. You realized. The tutorial level was over.

"God, Satoru, seriously—" you gasped. "Just shut the fuck up n' fuck me or let me get back on top!"

The command didn't just register, it was processed as a Priority 1 Override Directive.

Satoru's fried motherboard, already overclocked way past its safe operating limit, finally, finally stopped trying to verbally narrate the gameplay.

He let out this low growl straight into your neck. A noise that was like 5% actually sexy and 95% a giant nerd who had just achieved his ultimate final form. He abandoned the theoretical approach entirely. And just leaned in.

He kissed you. Finally, on his own, without being yanked into it. It was just full of spit and licking and biting and he still had absolutely no idea what to do with his tongue and none of that mattered at all because he started thrusting with actual terrifying frame-dropping velocity simultaneously and your brain just— Buffered.

It wasn't smooth. It was desperate and heavy and his long-ass pale limbs kept tangling with yours in this sweaty chaotic disaster.

Every time he drove back in, his glasses rattled so violently against the bridge of his nose that they finally just gave up. Flying off to clatter against the headboard before vanishing into the void behind the mattress. Gone. Forever probably. 

RIP.

"Going dark—!" he wheezed.

His vision was nothing but a smear of blinding colors n' your face. But that was enough for him. That was everything. He didn't need to see to feel the way you were completely wrapped around him or the way he was bottoming out with every single heavy messy thrust.

Aggressively kissing your cervix or whatever the narrator would say in some of those smutty ass romance books. 

It was a collision-detection in the absolute best way possible. Every time he drove deep a fresh wave of static electricity popped behind your eyelids.

For Satoru it felt like he was actively trying to clip through the world geometry just to get closer to you. Like the normal rules of physics didn't apply and he was exploiting that.

"Critical—" His voice almost inaudible. "Hit." He buried his sweaty face deep into the crook of your neck, breathing in ragged desperate lungfuls of you. "I'm— I'm hitting the level cap! I can literally see the credits rolling—!"

The mushy suffocating warmth of you was the only thing in his universe.

Only thing left. Every time you clamped down around him he made this noise —

Eeeeerrrrr — Like high-speed server fans failing. A high-pitched hum of a moan of pure sensory overload that he couldn't have stopped if he tried.

Rhythm so frantic and sweaty and desperate as he chased the final achievement with everything he had left.

Almost almost almost—

"Satoru, I'm— I'm close! Right now—!"

"NOT WITHOUT ME—!" His voice cracked across three separate octaves simultaneously like it was actively shattering. "I'm not— I'm not letting you finish solo! We extract together!"

A pause. The most unhinged pause in human history.

"TELL MY DISCORD MODS I DIED A HERO!"

…Is he deadass for real now? Lol.

He buried himself inside you even deeper, like that was even possible. Every muscle in his back straining, visibly shaking, giving it absolutely everything his CPU had left in the tank. Teeth grazing your skin one last time.

Triggering the endgame cutscene.

Loading. Loading. load—

You unraveled completely.

Screamed his name. Like, actually screamed it. And oh my, he didn’t know his name could sound so heavenly like this. Your body violently arching off the mattress as you clamped down around him with this rhythmic crushing force that permanently blew his remaining fuses.

SYSTEM FAILURE.

Satoru's eyes rolled completely into the back of his skull. His entire frame went as rigid as a frozen PC mid-render.

"OH GOD— ERROR! SYSTEM DOWN!"

He shook. No, wait. He didn't just shake. He vibrated. Like a cell phone buzzing on bare tile at 3AM. And somewhere in the middle of all that vibrating his brain tried to send him one last coherent thought —

Wait did i just— am I about to— should I ask— her walls are so— focus FOCUS— Shoko will know what to do, Shoko always— god you feel so— SATORU GOJO FOCUS— What if you want to— NO you wouldn't— Would you— Just ASK—

"Can I—"

You could literally hear his entire thought process just from his eyes. "Yes." A beat. "Jesus, Satoru." Another beat. "I'm getting the shots."

The relief that crossed his face was genuinely profound. Like a man who had just been pardoned three seconds before his own execution.

"Oh—"

And then he just poured himself into you. One final shuddering gooey gasp of pure relief. Safe and protected and inside and the warmth of it was just. Ungodly. Heavenly. The kind of warmth he couldn’t even express using the thickest dictionary in the world—

And then he tipped forward. Straight down. All 190 centimeters of sweaty dead weight. Right on top of you.

You let out a muffled gasp of air as Satoru's entire lanky thoroughly exhausted body crushed you directly into the mattress. He was heavy. He was aggressively damp. He was currently heaving like a marathon runner who had just seen the face of God and realized he was worthy.

You two laid like that in complete silence.

Well, save for two things:

The desperate whirrrr of his PC. And the distant muffled lo-fi beats playing out in the living room since the morning. 

You were staring up at the ceiling. Feeling the aggressive aftershocks twitching through your thighs and genuinely wondering if your ribs were still in their correct anatomical positions.

Are they though… Like actually?

Then— A twitch. Satoru lifted his head just enough to rest his chin directly on your chest. White hair sweaty and god knows what else. Without his glasses his blue eyes were wide and glassy and filled with a genuinely terrifying amount of raw adoration.

You looked up at him and this sudden massive surge of something warm and stupid and completely inconvenient hitting you directly in the chest.

He looked so painfully pathetically vulnerable that it actually made your heart do something embarrassing.

You reached up, threaded your fingers deep into his hair, and yanked him down to kiss him.

Satoru made a noise. And then he just melted. His hands clutching your waist desperately, trying to clip your physical models together, trying to close every possible gap between you. 

No space. He wanted no space.

"I think I love you too, dork." You whispered, foreheads still pressed together.

Silence. One beat. Two.

But the buff was instantaneous.

Not just a mental reboot. A total unauthorized hardware overclock. That confession injecting directly into his system like an illegal mod and his ego just surging.

Satoru's frame gave a sudden violent jolt and you felt him —

Vividly — Undeniably — Throb right back to rigid inside you.

"Oh," he wheezed.

"Oh, that's..." A pause. "...that's a very dangerous thing to say to a man."

He lifted himself up— Blindly squinting down at you. His starry eyes full with this cocktail of worship and a newfound level of main character energy.

You were in trouble. Significant trouble.

"But seriously," he rasped, fingers sliding right back down to caress your hips. "We gotta find my glasses." 

"Why?" you panted, feeling the ridiculous heat of him actively expanding inside you all over again.

"Because," he grinned. Just this feral lopsided smirk that was way too goddamn confident for a man who thought he’s gonna die a virgin twenty minutes ago.

"I'm a visual learner." His hips shifted lightly. "I want to see exactly how I fuck my pretty girlfriend for round two. And I need 4K resolution on this achievement unlock."

Pretty girlfriend. He said it so casually. Like it was already a fact.

…I mean, it was a fact? This little — okay, tall — fucker had you wrapped around his finger for months and he didn't even know. And it WILL stay that way. His ego would swell up so much he'd become even more insufferable and you don't need any unnecessary cortisol spikes.

You didn't even have a single second to process the sheer unbridled weaponized nerd-hubris of that statement before—

THUD. THUD. THUD.

The bedroom door rattled violently on its hinges.

"CONGRATULATIONS, ROMEO."

Shoko's voice pierced through the wood like a blade. And it sounded utterly unimpressed. The voice of a woman who had been expecting this and was somehow still annoyed it had happened.

"We are all very proud that you've officially retired from the virginity league." A pause. "But can you both be like. At least 50% less fucking noisy?"

Satoru completely froze. His entire face turned a shade so hot that practically outshined the RGB setup.

"Some of us are actively trying to survive a hangover out here without hearing the Fibonacci sequence moaned out!" Her footsteps receded slowly down the hallway. "Keep the volume down or I am literally changing the Wi-Fi password."

The silence that followed was deafening. Satoru stared at the door. Dead-eyed. Unblinking. Then slowly looked back down at you. His pupils were vibrating.

"She's just jealous," he whispered, voice cracking only slightly as he tentatively tentatively started rolling his hips again. His newfound god-complex only momentarily dampened by the catastrophic existential threat of losing internet access. "She's just a hater." A roll. "I'm a ranked pro now." Another. "I have a girlfriend."

"Let’s just find your glasses, Satoru," you laughed, reaching up to yank his sweaty ass back down toward you. He paused for one literal microsecond. His hands tightened to bruise-level hard the exact second he felt you pulse around him and the need for 4K visuals instantly lost the battle against the sheer haptic feedback of being buried inside you.

No contest. First round knockout.

"Actually—" he mumbled, lips already finding your neck. "Fuck that." Dive. "I can find them before round three." His teeth grazing your skin. "Right now I'm playing on instincts."

── Dividers from pixopix and honeyluvsw!

[fukiouh]

Double take | shy!nerdjo x shy!reader

warnings: drabble, pure fluff, meet cute awkward, café au, slow burn, mutual crush, mutual pining, shy!gojo, shy fem!reader word count: 3.8k

You are a simple creature of habit. This was your café. Your corner nook. Your wobbly table by the window where the sunlight hit just right every time you came in.

You have a system, a routine, your sacred order the barista starts making automatically anytime you walk through the front door, noise-canceling headphones, and mild productivity. You do not bother the universe, and the universe does not bother you.

It was your emotional support place, an unassuming little spot where you went to work, study, read, or just exist. Cliché, yes, but you were a coffeehouse loafer, so what.

Until one day the universe decides to intervene. It was raining that day, sudden downpour, and he'd forgotten his umbrella, of course, so when he spotted the café on his frantic walk downtown, he ducked in to just wait it out somewhere dry, somewhere cozy. A cup of coffee sounded good anyway.

He tumbled through the door with a soft, breathless laugh, shaking the rain from his shoulders like a very tall wet dog. 

You instinctively looked up from your book. The chapter was dragging like craaazy and you were getting bored. He was at the counter, currently trying to wipe the fog off his glasses.

Oh—

You blinked away, but your eyes betrayed you. 

You did a double take.

OH—

Tall. Cute. Pale cheeks flushed from the cold, hair plastered to his forehead, and he was burying his fingers into the sleeves of his sweater just to warm his hands up. Wet and cold from the rain but probably the most attractive man you'd seen in your entire life.

You looked back at your book. Bit your lip. Looked up again. Back at your book. Up again.

Triple take.

You could feel your cheeks involuntarily heating up as you took in his wet hair, his nose, his jaw, the adorable little shiver that ran through him while he waited. God, he was really your type. But you just glanced at him, nothing more. As one does. Casually—

Quadruple take.

Okay. Fine. You were staring.

Internal spiral initiated. Deep breaths, babe. He was just a ridiculously attractive stranger. This was a normal human experience. You were in a public space. Hot people existed. You would survive this.

He turned around, clutching a steaming cup of his americano with both hands, and scanned the room. The moment he turned around, you caught a glimpse of the most absurdly blue eyes you had ever seen. Even his eyes were so, so pretty. It wasn’t really fair.

You looked back at your book. You'd read the same sentence four times now.

You forced your eyes to stay glued to the page, aggressively willing yourself to comprehend the actual freaking words.

Focus. You were reading! It was just a man.

But out of the corner of your eye, you tracked him as he settled into a chair a few tables down. The scrape of the chair. The soft rustle of his wet sweater. He finally gave up on wiping his glasses dry on a damp sleeve and just shoved them back onto his face. God, cute men with glasses really did something to your knees. You were so pathetic.

And for the next twenty minutes, you were super aware of his every movement. The plot of your romance novel be damned, ‘cause you glanced at him every few sentences through your peripheral vision only.

You heard the quiet clink of his cup being set down. You heard him sneeze once, very quietly, which was lowkey a ridiculous sound to come out of a man who was easily six-foot-three.

But you did not look directly anymore. You held your ground as you were the god’s strongest soldier right now.

Eventually the frantic drumming of the rain against the window slowed to only a light drizzle. The storm broke and you heard his chair scrape again.

You risked one final, fleeting glance as he stood up. He grabbed his empty cup, ran a hand through his semi-dry, messy hair, and headed for the exit. And you wondered if his hair was as soft as it looked…

As he pushed the door open, he paused as if hesitating, glancing over his shoulder. For one terrifying, totally heart-stopping millisecond, those bright blue eyes flicked over to your corner. Directly, not directly, you couldn't tell because you ducked your eyes back to your book as quickly, immediately chickening out. So he pushed through the door. The little bell above it chimed and off he went.

The air in the café immediately felt weirdly lighter.

Okay, you thought, finally turning the page. Not that you'd been on this page for the last fifteen minutes or anything. Happens to the best of us, I guess.

He was just a glitch in the matrix. A very tall, very blue-eyed glitch in the matrix. You survived the hot stranger. He got his coffee, he dried off, he left.

The gravitational pull you felt was just what happens when you see the man of your dreams. And in true man-of-your-dreams fashion, he disappeared as quickly as he materialized.

Normal human experience.

Except, a week later, on a perfectly sunny afternoon, the little bell above the door chimed a little more loudly in your perceived little bubble.

Hmm. Weird.

You didn't even mean to look up. It was a reflex at this point. But there he was.

Wearing an aggressively cozy hoodie this time, those big glasses, and that ridiculous height with it.

Your stomach violently dropped to your shoes. Oh no. He wasn't just a figment of your imagination. He was freaking back.

And a few days later, he was back again.

You figured he just really liked the coffee. And to be fair, just your luck perhaps, because the coffee here actually was that good. The Google Maps reviews were damn right about it being the best espresso in town. So it made perfect sense that a guy who stumbled in out of the rain would become a repeat customer after tasting the superb roast.

Perfectly logical. Totally normal. Nothing to do with you. Why would it anyway.

But there was something you didn't know.

He also came back because there was this girl in the corner with a book who looked up when he walked in and then immediately looked away like she hadn't — and something about that was, well. He didn't have exactly a word for it. Because while you were busy having a silent, hyper-fixated meltdown over him on that rainy first day, he had clocked you too.

In fact, the moment he'd turned around from the register with that steaming americano and caught you aggressively chewing your lip while pretending to read, his brain had completely stalled out. White-out.

So on his very second visit, Satoru had stood on the pavement half a block away, pathetically arguing with himself whether you'd even be there — or if he was actually crazy for thinking about it at all. He told himself he just wanted to take a lewk. Just to confirm that a girl that pretty! actually existed and wasn't some kind of fever dream brought on by the rain.

He walked in. There you were. Same corner. And just as cute as the first time, maybe even cuter.

So he kept coming back. And he felt a little pathetic about it, tbh. Showing up like a well-trained dog just because he was crushing on a girl he'd never even spoken to. But he couldn't help it. He was just a man, after all.

Satoru learned quickly. Look your way from his table. Look away. Look back. Realize he was staring, look away again too fast. Rinse and repeat.

He caught you looking, twice, three times, every single time. The first time your eyes actually met properly, you both snapped your heads away so fast it was a miracle neither of you pulled something.

He told himself he wasn't a coward. He just… He figured you'd say something eventually. You kept looking at him. And that meant something, right? You were practically telegraphing your interest! Which — was it interest though? What if you were staring only because he looked weird, hair a mess or some stain on his clothes —

Oh god.

OH GOD.

He wasn't great at reading people. So he decided to simply wait it out. His strategy was simple: exist in your general vicinity, look nice, and eventually you would come over and say something. He was not a coward. He wasn't, I swear!

Except you did not, in fact, say something.

You just kept staring at him like he was a jump scare and then violently burying your face back in your book, or your laptop, or your hands.

Your eyes betrayed you constantly. Do not look at him, you would tell yourself. You would look at him anyway. You would catch him glancing in your direction—chewing on the end of a stir stick, his glasses slipping slightly down his nose—and panic would seize your throat. You would snap your head away just to study the gluten-free muffins in the pastry case.

He would realize you caught him, and he’d immediately pretend to be so so engrossed in a completely blank stretch of the wall. Sometimes he’d accidentally bump his knees against the bottom of the table and the soft thump! followed by his quiet sigh would make you want to literally melt into your chair.

A lot of fleeting glances, a lot of unnecessary throat-clearing, and one very serious pep talk he gave himself in the bathroom mirror. But to no avail. 

So once you locked eyes again, you did that awkwardly, very pathetically, very often, he tried to be brave brave. He did this tiny, little nod, like a quick acknowledgment, a gentle, hesitant yes, I see you seeing me, hi hello.

You stared back at him with a blank, wide-eyed face of a person whose brain had simply ceased to operate. What the hell. Affectionately, of course.

His cheeks flushed, turning this soft, pretty pink.

Your cheeks flushed so hot you were surprised you weren't actively steaming.

He held the look for a beat, his expression so painfully hopeful, before you completely gave up, turned away like a loser, and snapped your gaze back to your mug. He deflated a little, pushing his glasses back up his nose with a quiet exhale. And here went his chance. Well, damn...

It was truly agonizing, if you ask me. It was the most physically painful, heart-fluttering, ridiculous thing to endure.

Satoru was too invested now, but entirely out of his depth. He kept coming back, genuinely believing every single day that this would be the day! you finally made the move, because surely you realized how cute he thought you were.

And you believed every single day—every single one—that this would be the day! he finally made the move, because surely he knew he was the most gorgeous man to ever walk into your life.

Yet every day, neither of you did. 

The panic just kept growing. Growing. Growing! And the respective crush along with it. 

Until a rainy Wednesday, exactly one month after he first walked in.

You were there, you always were. 

You didn't even need to look up to know. Your stomach did the thing, the fluttery one, that happened only when a specific six-foot-three man in glasses walked through the door.

Satoru got his order, sat at his usual table.

For the next hour, you fell into the build of your usual dance. You were actually working, doing okay, but your eyes kept drifting, always drifting. He caught you once or twice; you caught him twice or thrice. Your silent language. Settled into something almost comfortable. Something that made you look forward to coming here beside the actual coffee. A quiet, familiar routine noone had balls big enough to break. 

And then, he ruined it. By taking the leap again.

You glanced over, expecting him to be snapping his neck sideways. Instead, he was already looking right at you.

He visibly swallowed, sat up a little straighter, and risked to lift a hand off the table, offering a small, hesitant wave, accompanied by a soft, genuine smile that completely transformed his face. Breaking the stalemate, daring you to participate too.

Oh my. Your hand spasmed and in said hand was your mug with your latté. Your wrist ungracefully, unceremoniously jerked and enough espresso and oat milk splashed! over the rim to soak your notes and pool dangerously close to your laptop.

Humiliation hit your face like a freight train.

You couldn't find the courage to look up, if you did right now, you would literally expire on the spot. You grabbed a fistful of dry napkins, slapped them blindly over the puddle, and immediately started shoving your things into your bag.

Book? In. Laptop? Shoved. Dignity? Left in the puddle of dairy. Hotel? Trivago. (And I swear I will stop using this phrase. One day…)

You were packed and out of your chair in record time. The little bell chimed its cheery goodbye, and you noped the fuck out into the downtown crowd before you could actively perish from the secondhand embarrassment.

The air in the café suddenly felt completely different. Heavier. Emptier.

Satoru sat frozen in his chair, his hand still half-raised in that pathetic, brave little wave.

But you were fucking gone.

He lowered his hand, staring blankly at the empty chair you'd left behind. His heart hammered in his chest, but it wasn’t because of the fluttery panic of having a crush. No no. This was faaar more dreadful.

Oh no.

He had spooked you. He had tried to be brave, bravest either of you ever allowed yourselves to be, he had tried to just smile at you, and you had literally rather fled the premises.

Satoru buried his face in his hands, his glasses digging uncomfortably into his palms. 

Fuck, fuck. He didn't know your name, for fuck’s sake! He didn't know what you did for a living, or what you were always reading, or anything other than the fact that you had a sacred order and the cutest face he had ever seen.

He sat frozen to his spot with very icy, very ugly realization. What if you stop coming in because of him?

What if you were so so embarrassed that you will never come back to your wobbly little table? What if he had just ruined the one undeniably good thing about his week, all because he had spent a month staring at you like a coward, okay he is a coward he admits it okay?!, instead of just walking over and saying hello?

He furrowed his eyebrows as he eyed the soggy pile of soaked napkins as he sipped his own coffee. Tapped a finger against the ceramics. 

Next time.

Next time he was just going to walk over. That was it. That was the whole plan. Simple.

NEXT TIME!

Except, there almost wasn't a next time. And he cursed himself every time you didn’t show up. You didn't show up the day after, nor the day after that.

By the following week, Satoru was practically vibrating out of his skin. He went in every single day, just in case you broke your routine. But every single time he sat in the café alone, he almost convinced himself that he had ruined his own life by smiling too aggressively. Were his parents lying when they taught him to be nice to strangers?

But then you came back. Of course you came back. It’s your freaking café.

Yes, you had been avoiding it for almost a week, surviving on approximately seventeen different bathroom mirror pep talks and five different affirmation YouTube videos about how you were going to be completely, totally normal this time.

You will not stare! You will not spill a single drop of anything! You can drink a caffeinated beverage in the same zip code as a super hot guy in glasses. You can do this! You go girl!

You pushed the door open and he was there. Obviously, he was there. Why was he there.

You ordered your drink. But when you turned around to head to your cozy familiar corner, you froze.

Your table was taken. Some random-ass guy was sitting at your precious wobbly table, aggressively typing on a laptop. What the hell? Just your fucking luck. You stood in the middle of the café, clutching your mug, completely derailed. You scanned the room in a mild panic.

And the only open table left was... oh, God.

It was exactly one table away from Satoru.

It was closer than you had ever sat before. Closer than you would ever choose to sit. But you had no choice, though. You power-walked over like the big girl you were and practically threw yourself into the chair.

You were instantly off balance. You took out your book of the week, but you couldn't focus. You were so close now. Too close now.

You could feel the warmth radiating off him. You could smell his ridiculously good, subtle cologne. Something like cedar and clean laundry mixed with the scent of roasted beans. It was making you so, so pleasantly dizzy, or perhaps it was just him. You couldn’t really tell.

You both fell right back into the unspoken dance, but it was completely different now. More exposed. You looked. He looked. The usual betrayal of your eyes, but with the closeness dialed up to an utterly suffocating, heart-fluttering level. Every time he shifted in his seat, you felt it. Every time you shifted, he felt it. Hyperaware of every movement, of every breath taken, of him.

You decided to look sideways, properly, for the first time today.

And it locked. It held.

It was longer than usual, electric! and absolutely terrifying. You could feel your heartbeat in your throat, yet the warm flutter that spread from your stomach all over your body prevented you from chickening out right away. It felt too good. You were pleasantly stuck. You were curious. And you were maybe testing the waters, too.

His eyes started darting all over your face, as if searching for clues, checking if he would, could, should take it further, if you dared to look even longer. He oh-so-wanted to. Needed to.

But as those absurdly pretty blues softened, melting into something fond and undeniably sweet, your breath hitched. You completely panicked again. You broke the gaze, snapping your eyes down to your novel and bracing for the agonizing silence as a hot, deeply betraying flush spread all over your neck and hiked up all the way to your cheeks. 

Then, Satoru sighed.

It wasn't from disappointment, or from being angry. After all, he so proudly said next time, didn't he? And he understood that if anything, you were even more shy than him. He found it impossibly endearing.

It was a definitive, resolute sound, and you froze. You heard his chair being pushed back. Was he leaving because you were being such a coward again?

Then, a few soft footsteps closing the short distance between your respective tables.

A tall shadow fell over your table.

You slowly lifted your eyes and he was standing right there. Up close, he was somehow even taller—not imposing though, more like inviting. And his chest was rising and falling a little too fast.

He reached out with a shaking hand, grabbed the chair across from you, and pulled it out.

The tips of his ears went brilliantly pink. He rubbed the back of his neck, burying his hands into the sleeves of his sweater, but he didn't run away. Now or never, baby. Hail Mary. He sat down. Right across from you.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, looked you right in the eyes, and let out a long, shaky exhale.

"I, uh." A pause. He cleared his throat. Pushed his glasses up again even though he'd just done that. "Caught you staring." His ears somehow got pinker. He wanted to sound more confident, but oh well... "I MEAN—I was also—I've been staring. That's not—" A beat. He ducked his head slightly, peering at you through his long lashes. "Hi. Can I sit with you?"

What. You stared at him.

"...you're already sitting."

"Yeah." He let out a breathless, cute little laugh. "Is that okay?"

You eyed the way his broad shoulders were hunched inward, how he was practically holding his breath while he waited for your permission to stay. He had actually crossed the unspoken line between you, managed to completely fumble his opening line, and was now looking at you with wide, nervous eyes.

"Yeah," you said softly, your voice barely above a whisper. "It's okay."

He smiled. A real one, wide and slightly crooked, and it did the thing to his face that made you always bite your lip, but up close it was somehow so much worse in the best way possible. He had dimples. Of course he had dimples.

"I'm Satoru," he said.

You told him your name. His smile just grew softer at the sound of it.

He reached over and stole the little glass sugar dispenser from the center of the table, turning it over in his hands like he desperately needed something to keep his fingers occupied.

Over the past week, Satoru had been planning, deciding how he would approach you. He had asked friends, scoured Reddit, and practically checked a freaking WikiHow on how to approach a cute girl in a café when you've both been mutually staring at each other. 

He hated all the cliché café-adjacent pick-up lines, but perhaps it was the gravity of your doe eyes, or perhaps he was just nervous. Either way, his mouth went on autopilot, asking with terrible casualness:

"You come here often?"

You looked at him.

He looked back, expectant, already cursing himself that his vocal cords had picked the absolute most ass question imaginable, but he tried to play it cool and you genuinely could not tell if he was joking or dead serious.

But this was the next time he had promised himself. And honestly, you had missed him over the week you spent caving at home. You thought about your café. Your corner. Your sacred table by the window that was currently occupied by a stranger who had no idea what he'd just accidentally done. Which you were currently thankful for. To Satoru. And to the stranger, too.

You picked up your coffee.

"Yeah," you said, a tiny, helpless smile finally breaking across your own face. As you decided that he meant it dead serious afterall. "Actually."

He looked unbearably pleased about this. You looked out the window so he wouldn't see just how hard you were blushing.

Then you thought about this table. This one, right here. The one that wasn’t yours, nor his.

But as Satoru stretched his long legs out and his knees accidentally bumped gently against yours under the wood and neither of you pulled away you realized that maybe, just maybe, this table might just become yours. Both of yours.

── Divider from muerdida!

[fukiouh]

50 Ways to Say Goodbye | finance bro!gojo x reader

Dumping your narcissistic finance-bro boyfriend should have been a clean break. You get rid of a manchild, he finally gets humbled. Simple as that. Except Satoru Gojo refuses to admit he got dumped. Instead, he spends the next six months convincing everyone that you fell victim to a series of increasingly bizarre, tragic accidents. It’s a foolproof plan to save his pride. Until you return. Very much alive. And completely unimpressed. Suddenly, his whole world starts to collapse, taking his career and his God Complex down with it. But the real problem isn't figuring out how to ruin him—it's admitting you both actually might be the villains.

pairing: gojo x reader

warnings: explicit sexual content, 18+ (mdni!!), corporate settings, reader insert, smut, fluff, crack treated seriously, exes to lovers, slow burn, mutual delusion, miscommunication, fake death conspiracy, narcissistic ex, god complex, ego deaths, finance bro!gojo, petty revenge, hate sex, piv, face sitting, mutual pining, denial, happy ending

word count: 18k+

a/n: a bit of toxic romance never killed anybody. 💔

masterlist | crossposted on ao3!

You didn't just wake up one morning and decide to blow your entire life up.

You were just supposed to be an external consultant. A twelve-month contract to be his tech firm's new auditor. Get in. Audit their mess. Get the hell out.

But Satoru Gojo was the Senior Project Manager on your account. Thirty-two. Wearing a bespoke suit—in hindsight, he definitely financed. And annoyingly, devastatingly charming.

He cornered you by the espresso machine on day five. Smiled that stupid—okay, dangerously gorgeous—smile that made his blue eyes crinkle. Memorized your lunch order. Bought you expensive coffees. Told you he must have been the luckiest guy to ever exist to just take you out on a date. Charmed his way right into your pants before your first invoice even cleared.

So practically you were stupid, he was sly. Moving on.

Almost a year. That's how long the delusion lasted. The first three months were great. The rest almost left you bald and in a straightjacket.

Because the shiny veneer rubbed off. Turns out the "untouchable executive" aura was completely manufactured. He spent half his paycheck projecting a God Complex just to hide the fact that he was an exhausting manchild.

The “networking” dinners where he talked over you. The constant Slack pings during movie nights. Treating you less like a girlfriend and more like a highly-functioning accessory. Acting all self-righteous and annoying even if you made more money than him.

The latest of last straws then came as your one-year anniversary gift. The box was massive. Rectangular in this specific, expectant way. Sitting right in the middle of the living room with a cryptic, romantic note taped to the top.

You stared at it. Your heart actually did a stupid little flutter.

Finally. He listened. You’d been dropping hints for months about this vintage leather travel trunk. The kind that practically screamed we are going to Santorini for our one-year. You thought he was actually paying attention.

You tore the paper. Your left eye twitched.

Titleist.

Fucking golf clubs.

He walked in ten minutes later. Dropped his briefcase. Wrapped his arms around your waist from behind, resting his chin on your shoulder. Looking at the open box like he’d just cured a disease.

"Do you like 'em, baby?" he purred. "Now you can come to the networking retreats n' look hot on the green while I secure our future."

Looking hot. While he secures his future.

So for the next week, the fucking clubs laughed at you from the corner of the room while you actually plotted how to move on from this ridiculous hellhole of a relationship.

A heavy, titanium reminder that you weren't a partner. You were just a walking prop with boobs—

You had enough of fulfilling his macho corpo alpha male fantasy.

You were constantly tired, agitated, sporting this super specific 1,000-yard my-boyfriend-is-a-massive-narcissist-but-at-least-the-sex-is-good stare. But even a good dick only goes so far. 

You had enough of his self-important, stupid speeches while his boss doesn’t even like his atrocious LinkedIn posts. This man had to get properly humbled.

Satoru was sprawled on the sofa. Laptop balanced on his knees, performatively typing on Teams chat. Looking incredibly important. Actively pretending to save the global economy.

You walked out of the bedroom.

"Satoru, I think it's for the better if we break up."

He stopped typing. Looked over his screen at you. Eyes narrowing.

"Baby, what? Did you get your period early?"

Yeah. No. What the fuck.

You snapped. You pointed directly at the golf clubs gathering dust. You laid out the exact, suffocating hypocrisy of him treating you like a doll.

He then rebutted with some questionable corporate, future-this, finance security-that bullshit until it turned into a full-blown screaming match you two shared honestly quite often. His neighbors certainly loved this apartment building feature.

You spun on your heel and marched right back into the bedroom. He actually left the laptop. Followed you. Leaned against the bedroom doorframe.

He saw you throwing clothes into the suitcase while your face was red with rage. But his narcissism physically prevented him from registering this as a permanent exit.

He crossed his arms. "Oh, so you're packing?" The patronizing executive voice. God, you hate that voice. You wanted to rip out his vocal cords and feed it to his smug-ass mouth—

 "What, going to your parents' place for the weekend? Fine. Cool off. See you on Monday."

Ziiiip.

He followed you into the hallway, the smugness slipping juuust a fraction. "Okay, so are you actually throwing a tantrum right now? I give you everything. My apartment—"

"You give me a goddamn headache daily!” You spun around and he actually flinched.

"I'm done being your freaking doormat," you snapped, gripping the handle of your suitcase so hard your knuckles went white. "You're thirty-two, Satoru. You're an average project manager, not a god. Get a fucking grip."

His jaw clenched. "You're being completely irrational. You take that back—"

You grabbed your bag. Looked him dead in those stupid, piercing eyes.

"You're just a lucky bastard, Satoru. And I hope your luck finally runs out." A beat. "I genuinely hope the universe curses you n' karma gets you."

He scoffed. Literally scoffed. Like you were a kid playing witch. But before he could even think of another stupid rebuttal, you violently slammed the front door right in his face.

BAM.

Satoru was just standing there in his empty entryway. Arrogant little scowl perfectly plastered on his face. Waiting for the elevator ding. Waiting for the inevitable knock when you realized you made another emotional mistake.

Nothing.

He uncrossed his arms. Recrossed them. Looked at the front door like it owed him an explanation.

Fine.

Fine.

You'd be back by Monday. You always — okaay, this was technically the first time you'd actually packed a bag and left, but the energy was still very you'll be back by Monday. He knew you. You ran hot. It simply was the downside of having a hot girlfriend that fucked way too good. 

You needed to cool off and eat something and remember that you lived a significantly better life with him in it! And then you'd text him something passive aggressive and he'd respond with something magnanimous and you'd be done with it.

He went to bed. He woke up Sunday feeling only mildly concerned.

Monday came.

Nothing.

Gone.

And gone you were. You called his firm's HR department. Requested to take the remaining weeks of your external contract 100% remote. Approved. 

Booked a flight and noped the fuck out to Santorini. ‘Cause obviously. If that manchild wasn't able to take you you would treat yourself. You needed to clear your head and wash out the memory of the past year with enough wine to kill off a concerning amount of your brain cells. 

Waking up at noon. Answering emails from a whitewashed balcony. Type shit. Turns out dropping two hundred pounds of try-hard finance bro is scientifically proven to clear your skin. So while you were getting a tan and eating your body weight in fresh seafood, Satoru was busy completely losing his mind.

Not that he'd admit that. Obviously.

In his head the sequence of events was very simple. You had a meltdown. You needed space. You'd come back to his arms, tail between your legs, ready to be reasonable. He was prepared to be very gracious about it. But there was no text. Zero. The hell?! 

He checked his phone. Checked it again. Opened Instagram for completely unrelated reasons and your story was right there at the front of the queue —

Whitewashed walls. Aegean blue. A very full glass of white wine. Location tag: Oia, Santorini. He stared at that for a long time.

Santorini.

He knew that word. He'd heard that word. Multiple times. With a very specific energy he had, in retrospect, perhaps not adequately responded to. He thought about the Titleist box. He put his phone face down. And the vein in his forehead almost popped.

So you were being petty. Flying to fucking Greece because of one argument. That you caused, by the way. Instead of coming home and apologizing like a good girlfriend. Were you out of your goddamned mind?

He picked his phone back up. Put it down again.

Wait.

...Did he get dumped?

Waaait. 

No. Nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense. 

Satoru Gojo does not get dumped. If anything he does the dumping. No woman had ever said no to him. You were not supposed to say no. Especially not when he already had the whole thing mapped out — his promotion coming through, you being so relieved and happy that one thing leads to another. You know, happy accident happens… You get pregnant, and then naturally, organically, you become his hot-ass little housewife.

Without the official wife title of course. It is too early to commit like that just yet.  The point is. He had a plan. And your little Greece trip was not in it.

He spent the week marinating in it. Stewing. You still had not once texted him. Not once. God gracious, why would you anyways. But that was the bloody problem now, wasn't it.

His pride physically prevented him from picking up the phone first. He was the wronged party here! He was the one owed an apology!

His pride wouldn't let him even try to salvage whatever was left of your relationship. He might have finally understood that you left him. Which — your fucking loss, bitch. 

He might have, miiight have, been able to compute getting dumped if he'd done something genuinely unforgivable. Cheating? Whatever. Something with stakes. But you left because you were bored. And over golf clubs.

You left over golf clubs? Unbelievable.

Up until now Satoru had gotten everything he ever wanted. Well. Almost everything. And you breaking up with him was certainly not something he was prepared to file under things that happened to him. 

No one would ever find out you broke his heart. Not his colleagues. Not his friends. Not even his own damn mother.

Ever.

But what would he say if anyone asked. Because it wasn't like your relationship had been a secret. He'd made out with you in the break room. Twice. In front of witnesses. He needed a story n' he needed—

The coffee machine died. Mid-brew. One flicker and nothing. He stared at it, jabbed the button three times, unplugged it, counted to ten, plugged it back in.

Nothing.

Shitty brand. He spent fortune on this coffee machine so why the fuck it is not working. Left a mental note to leave a scathing review and went downstairs for coffee.

And that was the same morning Nanami appeared in his doorway asking about you — compliance audit, department timeline, where were you, when were you back. Something like that. 

Satoru adjusted his blue light glasses, panicking. What to do. What to do. WHAT TO DO—

Oh. 

What if…

He put on the face. The kinda devastatingly sad, grieving-widower face he hadn't planned but found out it came on surprisingly naturally. Then heavy, suffering sigh.

"She was swept out to sea in Greece," he said. Flat. Tragic. Ridiculous. "Riptide. It was awful, Nanami. A freak accident." A pause loaded with dignified grief. "I'm just trying to stay strong for the project delivery."

Nanami blinked. Filed whatever he was filing and left without another word because what the absolute fuck but also your audit was a pain in the ass anyways so.

And Satoru just heaved by his desk because it worked. It actually fucking worked.  Because here's the thing about Satoru. He had presence, okay. The kind that made conference rooms go quiet. That made clients trust him with numbers he only half understood at best. That made people nod along to completely insane things he said with total conviction. 

So when Satoru was telling Mei Mei from Finance updates about the vicious shark attack he told her a few weeks back. He'd stopped by the lobby vending machine on his way — needed coffee since obviously the machine at home was still dead and the café three blocks away was too subpar for his impeccable taste and Mei Mei had fallen into step beside him, asking about you with this concerned little frown. That she hadn’t seen you in a long time already or whatever.

So he put the coin in. Pressed the button. And while the coil turned and his coffee tipped forward and balanced on the edge—

"She survived," he said, voice dropping into that quiet devastated register that had been working sooo well. "The shark attack. But it was touch and go. She's still recovering. Prolly gon’ leave a nasty scar. But it’s fine, I love her anyway."

Mei Mei's hand flew to her mouth. His coffee didn't drop. He hit the glass. Once. Maintaining full eye contact with Mei Mei. 

"The doctors are optimistic," he continued. Hit it again. Nothing. He rolled up his sleeve. Reached through the bottom slot just to try and —

Clunk.

Arm. Stuck.

"She's — she's showing real strength," he said, the grieving widower energy now doing genuinely heroic work against the backdrop of him being literally physically trapped in a vending machine in the lobby.

Mei Mei was nodding. Eyes almost glistening. From his desk across the lobby attendant looked up. Looked at Satoru. At the machine. Back at Satoru. Did not move though. Perhaps if it wasn’t the prick who was too good to even say good morning to him he would call the maintenance guy. But he was too violently underpaid to deal with Satoru right now.

So it took about four minutes. Four full minutes of Satoru delivering tragic updates in a solemn voice while simultaneously working his arm free at an angle that should have required a medical professional.

"Faulty machine," he murmured under his breath when he eventually pried his arm open, Mei Mei nodded sympathetically like this was also somehow your fault.

He added the mudslide the very next week. Told Suguru while they were on lunch break — you'd been evacuated after the shark, caught in it on the way to the recovery facility, now in a full body cast at a Swiss clinic in Zurich, world class team, very optimistic prognosis.

Suguru looked at him over the rim of his mug.

"Riight," he said finally. The voice of a man who just doesn't have the mental capacity to dissect this.

Satoru rode the elevator up feeling pretty good about how that landed actually and then the elevator stopped. Between four and five with a soft mechanical sigh and a complete loss of all momentum.

He pressed the button.

Nothing.

He pressed every button. Door open. Door close. Lobby. Emergency. The emergency one made a noise that went nowhere. Until the pressing turned into smashing and the smashing into kicking because he was pissed and he had a fucking important meeting happening within a few minutes— 

An hour later.

Tie getting progressively looser and hair getting almost plucked out of his scalp. Nothing to do but stand there and stare at himself while the slowly mounting suspicion that the universe was trying to communicate something crept up the back of his neck.

He did not entertain it. Absolute bullshit anyways. He was naturally lucky, a slight unlucky streak was naturally bound to happen from time to time to balance out the universe or whatever. He heard it in some podcast you were listening to one day on your way to the office.

First ten minutes: someone's definitely coming. Let him just doomscroll— Oh shit, his phone’s dead.  Next twenty: building maintenance failure. He was taking this up formally with management. Last twenty-three: just. Standing there. Staring at his own reflection in the mirrored doors.

He looked fine. Completely fine.

Fine.

Doors finally opened. Fifth floor. Suguru standing right there, coffee in hand, taking in the full sight.

"Faulty elevator," Satoru said.

"Obviously," Suguru answered.

He told Yaga about the lion in month two. Sat across from his boss's desk apologizing for messing up the deadline the day before, before going on with his lies.

Yaga went very still in the specific way Yaga went still when he was deciding whether something required direct intervention.

"A lion," Yaga said.

"She was with her personal nurse on a trip in ZOO to lift her broken spirit," Satoru said. "I’m already filing a lawsuit against the negligence of the ZOO staff and all. My poor darling."

Yaga just picked up his coffee and threw him out.

One day, Satoru was feeling that all his little storytimes so far had gone reasonably well, sat down, opened his laptop, pulled up the Q4 projections and was mid-sentence explaining regional variance to two of his interns when —

Flap. Flap. Flap.

The pigeon flew in like it had his name on its calendar. It made a beeline straight for him. He ducked. Just enough while the pigeon banked hard overhead, clipped the corner of his lamp —

Craash.

— swooped back around, knocked his entire coffee mug clean off the desk on the way past then landed. Right on top of his head. Satoru froze. Both hands hovering mid-air. 

The two interns staring at him with the expressions of people who tried their hardest not to die from laughing in front of their stuffy boss.

The pigeon shifted its weight. Satoru's eye twitched.

It stayed up there for what felt like a very long time and was probably eleven seconds. Then it launched off his head — taking a considerable amount of his hair with it — swooped once more around the office like a victory lap and flew back out the window it came in.

He smoothed his hair down in the silence of the room. Looked back at his laptop.

"Any questions on the projections?"

It was Shoko who first made him sweat.

Around month four. Some vendor meeting downtown, the two of them sharing a cab back there, Shoko with her vape stopped in the middle of discussing who's gon’ start their presentation.

"So," she said, not looking up from her phone. "How's she doing.” Not a question. More like. A tap on the glass.

Satoru adjusted his tie. "Still recovering," he said. The grieving widower register coming on automatically by now like a reflex. "The Swiss facility is—"

"Right, the Swiss thing." Shoko scrolled something. "Suguru said mudslide. But Nanami told me riptide." A pause. "Which was it? I’m just confused about the timeline."

Satoru opened his mouth. Closed it. Outside the cab window the traffic was moving slow and gray and completely unhelpful and then —

There. A purple Scion. Boxy. Slightly dented. Puttering along in the next lane like it had been sent specifically.

"She got run over," Satoru said.

Shoko looked up from her phone for the first time.

"...By a car."

"Some crappy purple Scion." He tried to discreetly cover the window. "On top of everything else. It was — it was a very difficult few months."

Shoko looked at Satoru. Then back at her phone.

"Soo," her voice was completely flat. "Riptide. Mudslide… And a car accident?"

"She's very unlucky. Poor thing."

"Apparently."

She took a long drag of her vape, while the cap driver just glared at both of them. Satoru stared straight ahead. The Scion puttered away into traffic and was gone.

The same evening he was in the office parking garage ready to leave.  Engine running. He looked down. There was a lip balm. Yours. 

The specific one you always had — strawberry something, he'd complained about the smell once and you'd used it more aggressively after that just to annoy him. But he secretly loved it. Rolling back and forth against the console like it had been doing that for months. Because it had been doing that for months. 

He put the car in reverse. He was still looking at it. The concrete pillar had been there since the garage was built. Painted yellow. Reflective tape. Objectively very hard to miss.

CRRrrrunch.

The sound that came out of Satoru’s mouth was not a word. Not even a sound. Just — something, concerning. 

He got out. Walked around to the rear bumper. The scrape ran clean across the panel of his precious midnight blue M5. The garage was empty. Nobody saw. He blamed the parking garage. 

Faulty architecture. 

Who the fuck even assigned him this particular parking spot anyways? Back office’s gon’ hear about this. 

Got back in. And drove home while dialing his mechanic.

So if we get the full picture straight. Just for the record. You gave him three weeks in the beginning. Three weeks of long earned vacation in Greece and keeping your phone screen up. Just. You know. In case.

You weren't waiting. You were just. Available. If he happened to grow a single functioning brain cell and pick up the phone and say the word sorry like an adult human being.

But instead he texted once in the middle of the night like a petulant child. 

I expect you to be home by next week. It’s the annual golf tournament with the other firm. Remember?

You stared at that for approximately four seconds. Then you blocked him. On everything. Instagram. iMessages. WhatsApp. LinkedIn. You went fully, completely, surgically dark.

He sent you one remindful message went to take a piss and then suddenly your profile was just—

He stared at that for a long time.

Blocked.

He put his phone down. Picked it back up. Checked again like the answer was going to change.

Profile unavailable.

You had actually blocked him. On purpose. With intention. Like he was some random unhinged ex and not the man you were supposed to spend the rest of your life with.

The nerve.

The absolute unmitigated nerve.

So there were months of nothing. No way to track where you were or what you were doing or whether you were okay or whether you were thriving or whether you'd thought about him even once. Just silence.

And the silence was so much worse than the stories had been. Because at least the stories gave him something to be furious about. Something to point at and say look at the audacity. 

And on top of it all there was that weird aching thing in his chest that had been there since the coffee machine died and kept getting worse and worse.

Heartburn. Stress. Too much coffee. Whatever.

He was fine.

By month five the Swiss facility had apparently also treated you for injuries sustained in a cement mixer incident.

And six months came by, his sanity slowly slipping away while you apparently near died fifty different ridiculous ways…?

So when Suguru waltzed into his office on Monday morning, brows knitted together and looking around like he got lost, Satoru thought the guy had accidentally smoked a rolled cig mixed with weed again.

It was genuinely a good morning for Satoru. He wasn't even thinking about you that much! His precious BMW beast had finally been repaired, so wonderful start to a new week honestly.

"Mate, I know this is going to sound insane, but I just saw your girlfriend walk in?"

"Huh?"

Suguru's expression was hard to read. Somewhere between genuinely concerned and trying very hard not to be the one responsible for what was ‘bout to happen.

"I genuinely thought it was the ketamine but then I saw her talking with Shoko ‘n—"

Satoru didn't even let the poor man finish his thought when he bolted out of his office.

Well. Reasonably. Demurely. Because Senior Project Managers don't run in their own buildings! It's beneath them. He just walked. Very fast. With enormous purpose. Down the corridor toward the glass-walled meeting room where Suguru had pointed—

He stopped dead.

There you were.

Standing by the meeting room table like you'd never left. Laptop open. Coffee in hand. Talking to Shoko who was leaning against the doorframe looking like Christmas had come early.

You looked— Well, he couldn't even finish that thought. You looked incredible. Rested. Glowing with that specific glow he hadn't seen in the last six months of your relationship and had apparently fully recovered somewhere between Santorini and blocking his number. Your hair was different. Something about the way you were standing was different. 

You were laughing at something Shoko had just said. Sure, it was a slightly nervous laugh. Uncomfortable. Because Shoko was just in the middle of telling you exactly what kind of shitshow your ex had been spawning about you for the past six months.

Mauled by a lion? Bitten by a shark?

What?

Satoru's blood ran cold. He stood in the corridor with eight different things happening in his chest simultaneously and none of them had names he was prepared to use right now.

His face was going red — from rage or embarrassment? Both probably.

Jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt. He finally, reluctantly, understood that he had massively fucked up. But also — why the fuck were you here of all places? Did you not have the basic decency to, like, never set foot in his office building again?

Not that you came here on purpose. The auditor who replaced you after your contract expired had done a colossally shitty job and got fired after just five months. Long story short — they contacted your firm, your firm assigned you since you were the chief auditor on the account the year prior, n' thus here you were. Simple as that.

You could feel the uncomfortable heat at the back of your head like someone burning holes through it. So you turned around — only to find Satoru seething in the corridor.

Lol.

You gave him exactly zero emotion. Slowly blinked. Turned back to Shoko. Needless to say, Satoru wanted to scream. Half a year of no contact and you couldn't even have the decency to say hello? Wave? Something?!

You had been planning on popping into his office actually. Say hi, ask how he'd been, the normal thing you do with an ex you parted with on decent terms. But that idea got absolutely scrapped the second Shoko told you that you'd apparently fallen into a cement mixer and got run over by a Scion.

…Did Satoru take up creative writing? When did he have time to come up with shit like this?

But before he could even scrape his dignity off the ugly corporate carpet — not that he lost it — the unhinged bomb he'd been curating for the past half a year went off.

The office was suddenly a minefield. Word met word, and the information about you being here and looking entirely unmauled by any lion spread through the building like the food poisoning last summer from the deli ham in the cafeteria sandwich. You remember that one. Half the company called in sick. Same energy, just slightly less vomiting.

Because here's the thing about lying to an entire company for six months — telling ten different people ten different tragic stories about the same person — eventually the lies start to unravel. And the outcome is going to be very loud, very fast n' very, very public. Especially when the subject is suddenly very much alive, very fine and standing right there.

Mei Mei, who'd almost cried when she heard about the vicious shark attack, was now by the elevator wearing a very different expression entirely. Nanami stood by the printer with the look of a man doing very quiet, very damning math. Even Yaga had apparently emerged from his office — which he never did voluntarily — just to peek through the doorframe, look at you for a long moment n' go back in without a word.

By lunch the sixth floor knew. By three PM the company Teams chat was in complete chaos.

Satoru really tried to be reasonable about it. Trying to ignore the weird stares he was getting from his coworkers and contemplating whether the mass HR email about dealing with pathological liars in the workplace was somehow meant for him specifically. Or rather…. Okay, no. His ego physically prevented him from possessing any normal self-awareness whatsoever. But good try, honestly. 

He gave it a full week. Seven entire days of watching you walk past his office n' sit in meetings n' exist in his building like you hadn't just detonated his entire six-month corporate mythology. And looking so criminally good doing it. 

Oh how he wanted you to walk into his office, lock the door and just bend you over—

He genuinely thought he was being generous. Giving you space. Figured you were just embarrassed about the whole, you know, having to explain to the bullpen why you weren't actually in a full-body cast in Zurich thing. So he decided to be a good boyfriend. A gooder boyfriend, if you will. Show you exactly what you walked away from.

But first he got you flowers. Because that was the essential romantic gesture, right? A very large bouquet. Tasteful— okay no it was not tasteful, it was enormous. Required its own postal code honestly. But the sentiment was clear n' “we’re not gonna beat around the bush” kinda note. 

Glad to see you back. Date tonight? —S

On top of it, the courier got the floor wrong. Because of course Satoru wasn't going to deliver it himself. Even if he was just two floors down from you.

So the bouquet toured the entire building first — about a third of the company read the note — and by the time it navigated through the door of the Finance meeting you were in, you just looked at it. Opened the note. Tsked and handed it to Mei Mei. Went back to work.

RIP.

Satoru stalked his phone for hours waiting for you to send, like, a big fat ass thanks or just the fat ass. He was never against nudes as a form of apology.

Nothing.

Alas. He pivoted. Thus the Show-Off era begun. He didn't corner you — Satoru was stupid but not that stupid, especially with his reputation already bleeding out.

He just. Performed. Suddenly always just. There. Everywhere. Leaning against breakroom doorframes looking violently tailored. Saying something impressively competent loud enough for you to hear. Trying to make very aggressive and inappropriate unblinking eye contact. 

Dropping your hyper-specific artisanal coffee on your desk without a note — or the cronut, remember the cronut? You two tried it once and you didn't like it but he did? Anyway, on your desk. Expecting you to swoon.

You on the other hand treated him like office furniture. Flat "thanks" and back to the laptop. Because indifference for a manchild like Satoru was waaay worse than anger. Anger means emotion. Indifference was just a massive middle finger to his stupidly gorgeous face.

Which is exactly when the universe cleared its throat considerably louder. He paced in the breakroom on a call, back and forth until —

Crack.

Splooosh.

Water cooler violently ruptured. Tidal wave right over the $400 suede loafers. 

Swept to sea.

Or the time he was walking to his car and a stray tabby launched itself specifically at his ankle and clawed straight for the crown jewels.

Hiss.

…Mauled by a lion?

He brushed it off. Just a weird week. He's still the golden boy. Right?

But what happens when you're spending ninety percent of your brainpower trying to decode someone's blank face and ten percent actually working? What happens to the logistics project? Aka eleven months of his life? His literal golden ticket to the Senior Director promotion he'd been eyeing for two years?

He was too busy drafting "mandatory check-in" emails just to legally force you into a room with him. So the entirety of the project sat fucking untouched. Gathering dust in his Excel sheets while he stood on street corners being a very diligent, very dedicated project manager — which is absolutely what he was doing checking your blocked IG profile from a burner account he did not make specifically for this purpose.

A beat-up purple Scion hit a pothole.

Splaash.

Thick. Brown. Sludgy street water. And right over his suit.

Mudslide?

...Wait. Is that the same Scion for all those months back? Nah. Can't be. 

Unless…

And that's when the paranoia set in. Just slightly. Was something trying to tell him something? Or someone?

The thick egomaniacal armor finally cracking. Completely unaware he also lowkey scheduled his own career execution for Wednesday afternoon.

Satoru was up front. Laser pointer in hand. Fourteen slides deep into the Q4 logistics deployment. Actively performing for you. Look at the man you walked away from. He even took his sweet time this morning with his manly skincare routine!

Slide fifteen. 

You uncrossed your legs. You put away your pen and leaning back you crossed your arms instead.  You were looking at him like a forensic accountant at a crime scene. Because what kind of mental gymnastics had gone into putting this together. It couldn't even be called proper finances. Did he actively try to get himself demoted? 

"Satoru." Your voice sounded completely level, eyes squinting at the screen, genuinely trying to locate the missing equity. "The variance data on this slide doesn't match the budget on slide nine. There's a fifteen percent discrepancy. Where is it?" 

Satoru's brain halted completely. God, when did his name sound so heavenly on your tongue?

He hadn't prepped it. Of course he hadn't prepped it. He'd spent the last few months creatively lying for sport and throwing himself a one-man pity party.

He tried the smile. The devastating, million-watt thing. "Well, synergistically speaking, the projections are fluid—"

"Synergy doesn't balance a ledger." Cold. Clinical. Get the fuck out with the corpo jargon. "Is the data missing or did you just not prep it?"

The entire room physically recoiled. People had been tiptoeing around you two since your infamous return. Quietly sympathetic. Sending unsolicited links like "life after a narcissistic partner, it's not over" to your Teams inbox.

But you actively going after his work? That was new. You genuinely didn't care about his professional disasters. Back when you were together Satoru wasn't great at numbers but it wasn't this bad. You'd started to genuinely wonder if he'd seriously hit his head during those six months. It would explain the lion, at least. 

But right now. Slaaughter time, baby.

His charisma bounced off the walls and died on the carpet. He just stood there. Mouth slightly open. Ready to shout, or cry, or both.

At the head of the table Yaga set his coffee down. And since Yaga had been deeply tired of Satoru lately, he let him stand there completely stripped bare for a few agonizing seconds. 

"Gojo," Yaga finally cleared his throat. "Stay after the meeting. Just a quick word."

Usually that meant praise. Inside jokes about the board directors. Golden boy shit he was usually used to.

But oh boy, not today.

Yaga quietly, politely, brutally severed his head off and patted him on the shoulder while doing it.

"You're distracted. I understand, all of this must be hard on you… It is indeed hard on us. But I’ve decided. I'm pulling the project. Finish your open tasks. Geto takes over on Monday."

Eleven months of work.

Whoosh. 

Promotion.

Whooshed away too.

And you didn’t even look apologetic? The fuck? Can you be, like, less ungrateful? 

He spent the rest of that week finishing the handover. Walking out of the office with zero dignity left to his name. Sending the entire project to his best friend.

Suguru even texted twice. He left both on read. He was technically dead to him now. The project can get orphaned for what all he cared about now. Ungrateful, perfectionist clowns this company, for real.

He sat in his office between uploads like a very angry, very expensive ghost. Too proud to go home. Too humiliated to talk to anyone. The bullpen gossip washing past his glass walls like white noise — drama so good people apparently forgot to complain about politics. 

Then he saw you on Friday. Walking toward the subway. Panic spiked. Opportunity arose.  And on Friday evening? When he needs comforting? The universe gotta love him with these openings.

He jogged toward you. Wind wrecking his hair. Stepped directly into your path on the pavement. 

"Okay." Chest heaving. "I'm offering a truce."

The audacity.

"You don't even have to apologize," he said rapidly. Trying to mask the desperation like it's a business proposition. "You had your fun in the past six months. I get it, independent era or whatever. But this silent treatment is exhausting. So just— tell me what to do n' I'll do it. Let's reopen this."

Drowning man negotiating with the ocean. 

You just looked at him.

"You told people I fell out of an airplane, Satoru."

His jaw tightened. What was the point of bringing that up right now. He said some things. Insignificant things. Didn't matter. The wounded ego threw hands anyway. Bared its teeth. Just to gain the upper hand. Always the upper hand—

"That was a coping mechanism!" He raised his voice over the traffic. "And what about you? You walked away from one fight, ghosted me n' then audited me in front of Yaga to get even! Your little stunt cost me my promotion!" 

Delusional it was painful. 

Okay — you did feel slightly bad. What happened in that meeting room wasn't intentional. You just did your job. The thing about you — you  were never lenient as it only bred more problems and more overtime. Due diligence was due diligence.

But whatever residual ache was left in your chest evaporated the second Shoko told you yesterday that you'd apparently been also fried from excessive suntanning while you were away. Every single day you found out a new way you were supposed to die, each one more unhinged and more sad than the last. You were almost starting to believe that underneath all the tantrum, this manchild had actually missed you. Almost. Just as far as his ego and emotional constipation let him.

"I didn't cost you the project, Satoru." Ice cold. "Your shoddy math did. I only did my job. And you apparently didn't do yours."

His face went red. It was doing that a lot lately.

“What the fuck?!”

"For Christ's sake. Take some accountability for once in your life and leave me alone. Have a nice weekend."

You two just shared a deadly glare and you stepped around him to walk down the subway stairs.

He stood frozen on the pavement. Dry-cleaning slip crumpled in his fist. Completely out of things to say — which was genuinely new for him. He always had something. Even if it was something fundamentally deranged, he'd say it just to have the last word. People usually stopped engaging before he did.

His heart hammered. He briefly considered following you and immediately clocked that carrying you over his shoulder would almost certainly involve police.

Flap. Flap. Flap.

Splaat.

Mid-thought, the sudden dive-bomb arrived. Right shoulder. Sniper shot shit.

He looked up — the bird was still hovering in the air like it had done it on purpose and Satoru was almost certain it was the same pigeon that had nested in his ripped-out hair months ago.

"You gotta be kidding me."

He tried to swat it away and only made it worse, smearing it further down his arm in what was, objectively, becoming a piece of abstract modern art.  Satoru always did have an eye for aesthetics. Slightly stinky though — not even the ungodly amount of Dior Sauvage he sprays on every single morning couldn’t cover it up.

His left eye twitched. It did that a lot lately too. His sanity, meanwhile, was slowly but steadily dancing itself to death somewhere in an east-side nightclub. Or that's what it felt like anyway.  Or like in his head, but it’s the metaphor, duh. 

He started quietly side-eyeing water coolers. Flinching at pigeons. Avoiding the curb. For no specific reason. Just. In case. The world was full of dangers and he was an important project manager!

You'd started dodging him like the flu on the subway during flu season and he was too proud to admit it was working. If strength were measured in superiority complex, Satoru would be a super soldier. But Colonel! a problem! ‘cause even super soldiers malfunction eventually. 

Suddenly he was looking forward to just laying down n' doomscrolling for the rest of his days. No performative finance bro evenings — no getting shitfaced in pretentious overpriced bars downtown, no spending two hours playing padel shirtless having alpha-offs with his sparring partners. Lowkey just white-knucling the days away until he was back home. 

He unlocked his apartment door.

Stepping inside —

Squish.

Freezing, dirty apartment water right over his loafers. So apparently a water pipe burst open during the day and his living room ceiling was just. Weeping.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The woven rug that cost an actual fortune? Ruined. The velvet sofa? A small island in a dark lake. And in the corner, half-submerged in the slop— 

The Titleist golf clubs.

Riptiiiiide. 

The universe was honestly poetic. But that's just between us, okay?

Satoru just. Looked—  Well, it wasn't sadness exactly — this man didn't really know what sadness was — but it looked like the fight had finally, quietly left his face. The ego couldn't even find a baseline to scream from. His knees buckled. He slid right down the doorframe.

Splash.

Sitting in two inches of dirty water, hand pressed hard against his chest because it actually, physically hurt to breathe.

Long story short, he packed a hotel bag. Called the contractor all while trying to convince himself all of this shit was just character development. The insurance company was absolutely delighted to hear from him.

By the next Friday evening he was standing by the corporate lobby windows. Battered. Tired.  Ready to get blackout drunk and violently dissociate through the entire weekend. Suit slightly rumpled from the hotel closet. Running his thumb over his cracked phone screen. Oh yes! He dropped it down a flight of stairs on Tuesday, just fell and kept falling, falling and falling… 

He was waiting for Shoko. She'd caught him by the elevators earlier, told him he looked like he was about to walk into traffic, and announced she wasn't leaving until he'd had at least five beers. He had nobody else to talk to anyway.

Ding.

Elevator doors opened. Shoko was still upstairs making out with Suguru in his office apparently. You stepped out instead.

Silk slip dress under a tailored blazer. Hair perfect. It was always perfect — why was it never this perfect when you were with him? You wore those ugly messy ponytails constantly back then. He couldn't remember the last time you'd done your hair for him.

Devastating.

The air left his lungs completely. His body just. Moved. One step forward— 

Then the revolving doors spun. A man walked in. Impeccably dressed. Easy, unbothered confidence. Something that screamed rich, successful and soon to bag your hot ex, loser. 

Wait. Doesn’t Satoru know him? He looked kinda familiar… Interesting.

You saw him. Your face did the thing. That soft, uncomplicated smile. The one Satoru thought he owned. The man shook your hand and guided you out toward an idling black car outside.

Satoru stood paralyzed. The thing in his chest wasn't an ache anymore—  It was a full emergency siren. Blaring. He was genuinely dizzy.

YOU HAD THE AUDACITY TO GO ON A DATE. WHILE HIS LIFE WAS FALLING APART. HE DIDN'T EVEN GIVE YOU VERBAL PERMISSION TO MOVE ON.

Hell nah.

Shoko materialized beside him on cue with this stupid, cryptid half-smirk of a woman who knew exactly what just happened, who it happened to, and why. She looked at his pale, frantic, completely shattered face.

Her hand came out. Palm up. Eyes still fixed on the empty street, hand shaking slightly, Satoru reached into his wallet and slapped a hundred into her palm. 

He knew she knew. And he needed her knowing to become his knowing too. Shoko always knew everything about everyone and he didn't have the mental capacity, the time, or the emotional stability to extract it any other way this time. 

"L'Effervescence," she said quietly. "The new Michelin star place. Reservation was for six.”

Did she mention it's a client dinner? I don't think so… 

You literally complained to her about it by the office fruit bowl this morning. Boring, mandatory corporate client review. You openly prayed the food would be worth the overtime at least. 

Let him ruin his own life.

Satoru might have literally sprinted out of the office lobby but he didn't just barge into the restaurant. That was too romantic movie even for him.

He stood outside the window first. In the drizzle. Like a creep. Now, that was more on brand for him honestly.

The grand sweeping romantic comeback speech he'd been rehearsing in the Uber felt instantly hollow the second he was actually standing outside it. The kind of hollow where one micro-stutter and he'd look like a full on stalker. It needed polish. But his brain was completely wiped of every grand romance vocabulary word he'd absorbed from three seasons of Love Island.

So he went to the dive bar next door. Just to recalibrate. One drink. Get the confidence back online. Remind himself who he is n' how this ends.

One Long Island Iced Tea.

Because of course. Thirty-two years old, drinking college-freshman blackout juice on a Friday night to work up the nerve to talk to his ex.

Fine.

Two Long Island Iced Teas.

He straightened his jacket. Took a breath and walked into the restaurant. Sensory overload immediately. Michelin-star clinking glasses. Dim lighting. Waiters in literal tuxedos. The speech that sounded perfect in the dive bar bathroom was already running slightly glitchy. 

…Was it "I'm not leaving without you"  or was it "you're not leaving without me?"

Loading. Loading. load—

He was still scanning the room for you, ignoring the poor maître d' in the most aggressively rude way possible. Then someone waved at him from across the room. He squinted. A familiar face. Where did he know—

Wait. That's the guy from the lobby!

Satoru strode over. Completely confused about why your date was waving him over specifically but going anyway. Because hey. An opening was an opening. If this man wanted to actively embarrass himself, then be his guest.

You were mid-sentence. Explaining the Q1 fiscal strategy over an entreé. You turned around curious who your client was waving toward your table—

Oh.

You have got to be kidding me.

But you decided to give him the rope. Because some tiny, morbidly curious part of you that had been watching him unravel for a month wanted to see it.  What would actually come out of him now? Did losing everything finally crack something real open? Was he actually here to drop the act n' be a human being for once? Maybe he will finally do some grand romantic gesture that might make you reconsider? 

He reached the table. Chest puffed. Ready for the alpha-male showdown. The client stood up. His hand out.

"Gojo! Long time no see!"

Satoru froze. Three seconds of him narrowing his eyes before it clicked— It was the guy who beat him on the back nine at the retreat last year! The LinkedIn guy who liked every single one of his posts.

"Holy shit— yeah! Dude, how are you—"

Smack.

Full corporate handshake reunion. Two finance bros doing the aggressive shoulder-pat thing directly over your head. Then the client lowered his voice. Did the solemn head tilt.

"Mate, I heard the news. Through the grapevine. About your girl."

Satoru’s spine went completely rigid.

"The desert accident," the client continued, shaking his head. "The quicksand. Just brutal. Is she still in Zurich?"

Satoru did not look at you. He physically couldn’t look at you. He shook his head. His eyes even went glassy.  His entire psyche went through some kind of Winx transformation and the widower persona kicked in on autopilot. Give this man a BAFTA fr.

"Yeah," he murmured. "It's. It's a day-by-day process."

You took a slow sip of your wine.

Fascinating.

He was actually doing it. He was doubling down. And right in front of your fucking sea bass. 

The client sighed n' patted Satoru's shoulder again. "Well, she's lucky to have you pulling for her. You're the MVP, man."

Then he turned n' gestured across the table at you with the pleasant completely oblivious energy of a man making a polite business introduction.

"Actually— do you two know each other?"

Satoru's brain shorted out. He'd backed himself into a corner. But nothing this project manager couldn't pivot out of. Nothing.

He looked at you. Looked at the client. And looked back at you. The one Long Island Iced Tea— Okay, the two Long Island Iced Teas took the wheel n' were about to lose their driving license.

"This is her," Satoru whispered.

The man blinked, eyebrows furrowed. "Uhh, sorry?"

"My girlfriend." The grieving widower voice dialed to eleven and a half. "She wandered off from the facility," he tapped his temple. Solemn. Tragic. "The trauma from the cement mixer left her in a fugue state. Amnesia. She doesn't remember who I am."

...Are you fucking kidding me? Amnesia?!

A few jaws dropped. Your poor client stared at you with absolute unfiltered horror and pity. And Satoru was suddenly doing two completely different performances at the exact same time.

Yes, he was spinning your client into complete nonsensical oblivion. But he was also staring directly at you with the most undignified, desperate, unblinking eye contact known to man. 

Telepathically screaming: Play along. This is my grand gesture. I came here for you. Just roll with it.

"It's been soo hard," Satoru doubled down. His voice actually fucking cracking. "Just watching her live her life. Without me. Working this corporate job like nothing happened."

Then he leaned in placing both hands on the crisp white tablecloth and looked directly into your eyes.

"But I think she knows deep down. Don't you?"

Him n' approximately four nearby nosy diners waiting for a medical miracle.

And in this moment you realized you were giving your shitty ex way too much grace. Tolerating all the shit he was saying about you left and right. Tolerating his unhinged behaviour ever since you came back.  Telling yourself he'd eventually clock it — realize, move on, grow up, something. That one day he'd walk into a room and actually see you instead of whatever role he'd written for you in his head.

But here he was. And he wasn't here to apologize to you. He wasn't here to see you. He was still just performing. Still directing his own little movie where he is the tragic hero and you are the prop, the plot device. Now with amnesia too?

He learned absolutely nothing. Not one damn single thing. And whatever was left of your patience evaporated quietly into the champagne beurre blanc.

You set your wine glass down and stood up. Satoru’s eyes widened just a fraction. The spark in them lighting back up. He actually thought it worked. He thought you're about to play along. Fall into his arms. Weep into his lapels. 

Oh, Gojo.

SMAACK.

Now ladies and gents, this was the echoing shatter of an ego finally hitting rock bottom.

The sound cut through the entire dining room like a gunshot. The restaurant went completely silent. You could hear a napkin drop. Satoru's head snapped sideways. Hand coming up slowly to his jaw.

You smoothed your blazer and turned to the client who looked like he either thought he was next or had just witnessed the most entertaining work dinner of his entire career.

"I apologize for the interruption," you said completely calmly, it was lowkey scary. 

"I need to handle a personnel issue. Please, enjoy the appetizer. We'll resume the fiscal breakdown shortly."

Fiscal breakdown.

…What? 

Did the pain actually make him hallucinate or did he hear that right? 

Why would you discuss fiscal breakdown on a— Wait. Was this— Is this a work dinner?

You looked back at Satoru.

His eyes found yours. Bewildered. Hurt. Angry. Surprised and everything else.  And for the very first time in soo long, the performance was gone. The stupid smirk was gone. The upturned nose wasn't so high up anymore. All of it was replaced by something so raw and panicked it actually made him look his age.

"Outside." Your voice was icier than ice. "Now."

You walked out. Composed. He followed. Not so composed. Obviously.

You two stood outside on the exact spot he'd been peering through the window just forty minutes ago.

Satoru obviously couldn't read a hypothetical room to save his life so he led with the slap. Because of course he did. Safest ground for his ego — you had done something wrong, he could point at it.

"You slapped me! What the hell?! In front of a room full of people!"

You didn’t apologize, because why the fuck would you anyway. You looked at him with the specific ticking patience of a woman who had approximately three minutes to spare before she lost a lucrative business venture.

"You told my client I have amnesia. Right in front of me.”

Full stop. 

He pushed back. Jaw tight.  "I came here for you. Doesn't that mean something? I've been trying—"

You cut him off.

“You’ve been trying what exactly, Satoru?” Your voice was really clinical. Naming each “romantic” gesture he was trying to sweep you off your feet with. “The ugly, corny bouquet of the specific flowers I don’t even like? The meetings you forced me to attend? Or the coffee on my desk every morning like I owed you gratitude for it? Showing up to my important work dinner with an amnesia pick up line?” 

He opened his mouth. 

"Those aren't grand gestures, Satoru. It's unhinged stalker behavior, n' you're lucky I haven't reported you."

His defensiveness faltered completely. Because you weren't wrong. He somehow knew you weren't wrong. And the slap must have hit hard because the God Complex hadn't fully rebooted yet. He went quieter. The slick register dropping out into something much more unguarded.

"I didn't know what else to do."

His eyes were on his shoes. It sounded almost real. Almost like something that didn't entirely sound like him. But his pride is a stubborn bitch and it twitched. Couldn't stay quiet for more than five minutes apparently. The framing slipped right back into possession.

"You just left. You didn't give me a chance to—"

"To what?" you said. Damn girl, you really weren’t letting him finish anything he was trying to say, were you? Good job. "Fix it? The same way you fixed the anniversary gift?"

The fucking golf clubs. Landing right there on the wet pavement between you. Alas, you pivoted. Because the point wasn't just the unhinged post-breakup behaviour — the entire thesis was the relationship itself. The real thing. The thing you were now paying weekly therapy bills for.

"I didn't leave over golf clubs, Satoru." A beat. "I left because I was exhausted. Borderline depressed. Because every single thing with you was a performance. Dates. Dinners. Conversations. The entire relationship. I was just another thing you were winning at."

He stared at you. Something in his expression that looked almost apologetic.

"You memorized my lunch order on day five. Yet you still didn't know I wanted to go to Santorini for example."

Knife right between his ribs. Because he deserved it. Because he paid attention only to the things that made him look good. Not the things that mattered to you. And if he did, he never showed it.

Suddenly there was deafening silence. Just the sound of the downtown street going about its business, completely indifferent to the two of you.

"I didn't know how to—" He stopped. Started again. Quieter. Almost to himself. "I just. Didn't want you to leave."

He bit his lips as if stopping himself again, or not knowing how to continue. 

“I missed having you.”

Boom.

Wow.

You went perfectly still. Your heart dropped. Because it was close. Genuinely, terrifyingly close. He was right there. But still miles away from the actual point.

"Having me," you repeated. Not cruel. Just true. And it hurt. You genuinely loved him and he loved having you. 

"Not me, Satoru. That's the difference,” you didn't even sound offended, you just scoffed. 

He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Because you were right. And somewhere underneath the suits n' the lies n' the lip balm still rolling around in his car, he knew you were right. Yet he just didn't have the vocabulary to argue with it or agree with it or do a single useful thing with it.

You stepped to the curb n' raised your hand. A cab pulled up immediately. The universe had excellent comedic timing when it wanted to. Especially in the past few weeks.

"Goodnight, Satoru." You nodded toward the car.

He didn't move. He wanted to reach for you but he knew he couldn't. Just stood there staring at you like you'd pulled the oxygen clean out of his lungs.

There was no time for theatrics and quite frankly you were done with him. For tonight and perhaps for good. Because he just explained and confirmed that he didn't love you for you. Or maybe he did but was just too dense to fully realize it. You walked back into the restaurant because you were an adult and a responsible professional and no ex was hijacking your career.

The cab driver yelled something annoyed because Satoru was still rooted to concrete and peeled away.

A beat-up purple Scion drove past. Hit the massive puddle right at the edge of the curb.

Splash.

Again.

...Was this still the same Scion? He glanced at the license plate. It seemed somehow familiar.

Though he did not flinch nor did examine it further. He just stared at the restaurant door praying for you to walk out or perhaps prayed for you to not walk out. Dripping with dirty oily street water.

Having me. Not me. 

The words doing their quiet lethal work in the silence.

You spent the entire weekend bracing for the retaliation. Checking the peephole. Even if you'd moved places months ago and he shouldn't technically know where you lived, you wouldn't be surprised if he somehow found out. Waiting for the frantic texts. The unhinged emails. The mariachi band of narcissism.

But nothing? Huh.

Because while you were sleeping peacefully, Satoru was sitting in a sterile hotel room. The Long Island Iced Teas had long worn off but the headache was still blooming. Staring at the ceiling while the fight played on a loop in his head.

His God Complex tried to reboot. Looked for an excuse. A loophole to still be the winner. But no project management algorithm ran positively. Only always a big fat syntax error.

For the first time in his thirty-two years of existence, he realized he might have actually been the villain. Shocking, right? Revolutionary concept. Ground-breaking stuff.

On Monday morning the universe decided to do one final sweep. Gotta check if the ego was actually dead. He walked into the lobby running on exactly little to none sleep. Swiped his employee badge at the turnstile.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Red light. Denied.

The security guard — a guy Satoru usually completely ignored — pointed a pen at him. "Gonna have to ask you to stand in the visitor line at the back, sir. System glitch."

The old Satoru would have thrown a fit. Threatened someone's job. Called the building manager. This Satoru looked at the red light. Sighed. Walked to the back of the line behind three nervous interns n' a delivery guy.

Uh, is this actually our Satoru? …guys?

Or the time he was signing a logistics form when his ungodly expensive fountain pen just. Exploded.

Sploosh. Or whatever fucking sound fountain pens make when they detonate.

Midnight blue ink. All over his hands. His cuffs. The desk. The form.

He looked at his stained hands like — yeah, okay, that tracks. Walked to the restroom. Washed his hands. Or, like, tried to. The ink stayed for another four days.

Or the afternoon he was bedrotting — which had somehow become his favourite pastime. 

What happened to the upcoming Hyrox? The fitness influencer arc? 

He was watching something on Netflix when he accidentally waterbombed his laptop. No amount of rice was fixing that one. It was also the brand new MacBook Pro. Well, It WAS the brand new MacBook Pro.

Alas. The karmic debt had been paid and the interest rate was his ego. Which was incredibly convenient timing, because Yaga summoned him immediately after.

Satoru walked into the office expecting a reprimand about the messed-up project again. Fucking whatever. But instead, Satoru literally broke out in a cold sweat when Yaga dropped the guillotine.

Stated the dreadful facts. Straight out of a corpo horror movie for a guy like him. And alongside Yaga? The freaking HR department head. 

Oh, fuck.

“Satoru, this is awkward," Yaga started. "Well, it can't be ignored any further, and I was just too lenient towards you if I'm being honest. You know what’s up, man. The entire company knows you lied about her. She told me not to make a big deal out of it, but ‘dis morning I got a call from her employer. Her other client complained about some incident Friday evening involving her ex? I believe you know what I'm talking about. Which means I no longer can ignore this… issue.” Yaga leaned forward.

"You faked the medical history of an external auditor. You are actively creating a hostile work environment. Do your due diligence and clean up this mess by Friday. Otherwise getting fired will be the least of your problems.”

And thus, this was the last payment. Since when are the last ones the biggest ones? So began the Apology Tour. The ultimate ego-shattering Walk of Shame.

Satoru Gojo, the untouchable golden boy, manually dismantling his own myth, his own pride, and his entire persona all in one care package, because HR made him apologize for all the other shit his terrible behavior caused. 

The HR case against him was thicc, plump, and fat. His luck might have finally worked in his favor this time, otherwise I think he would have been fired on the spot. Needless to say it was the most humiliating week of his life. And perhaps if he showed up, karma would love him again. And you included.

But nah. We are hitting a timeskip. ‘Cause for an entire month, literally nothing happened.

Because Satoru assumed the classic rom-com rules applied. He figured if he just put his head down, did the work and stopped being a public menace, you'd eventually notice his good behavior. You would soften. You would stroll into his office and say I see you're trying and you two would dramatically kiss in the rain.

He took six flights of stairs to avoid you. He pivoted out of breakrooms. He gave you a wide berth.  He waited for you to come to him. You didn't.

Damn you, Ryan Gosling.

He was DEAD to you. Literally.

You felt like a literal deity.

Eight hours of sleep every night. Impeccable posture. Strutting through that office watching him press himself against hallway walls to give you space. Life was once again beautiful when no manchild was trying to be the loudest one in the room. The birds were chirping, the money clinking, skin shining and manchildren crying in corners.

Look at that. You finally trained him.

You were high on your own supply. Thriving. Completely unbothered. Thinking the relationship was finally, mercifully behind both of you. That you'd both silently agreed to act like it never happened. You were free.

While Satoru had the ‘having me, not me’ playing on a loop. In his ears. Behind his eyes. On his skin. Everywhere. Every waking hour since that fight on the curb.

And he might have been truly broken, because after weeks he thought that, aye captain, he might have fucked up beyond repair. 

By week four he finally understood that just not being a problem wasn't going to win you back. He had to give up or actually try. Quietly. Without being loud. Without being him. 

So he decided to test the waters.

Hey, the whole company already thought he was a jerk. Might as well push his luck. What could he lose? His job? He'd already lost his girl n' his dignity.

So one morning, there was a small, unassuming paper bag sitting on your keyboard. A box of the specific herbal tea you used to hoard in his pantry. Three bags of the exact brand of cheap, artificial sour gummies you strictly ate when examining tax deferrals. And a pastry. From a tiny mom-and-pop bakery on the complete opposite side of town.

It screamed: I noticed the chaotic, real parts of you. But also, hey look, trying not to be pretentious while being performative.

He was standing by the printer. Holding a stack of papers. Watching you. Quietly. Expectantly.

You looked at the bag. Looked at him. Held deadpan, unblinking eye contact across the room.

You picked up the pastry. Moved your hand over your wastebasket. Because Satoru didn't calculate one important variable: you weren't interested in making amends or entertaining his courting tactics, even if they were weirdly different from his usual style, and fuck off, man.

Thud. 

Dropped it right in the trash. Satoru physically wilted. His shoulders actually dropped an inch.

You sat down, opened your laptop and started typing. Not a single drop of remorse. Watching him suffer was giving you a massive ego trip. You were acting exactly like the toxic prick you dumped and you were enjoying every single second of it. 

Like you two had undergone some deeply questionable personality swap straight out of a terrible early 2000s movie — but with a toxic twist. 

Who would have thought being this obnoxious would feel so good. You would nod in understanding if your ego wouldn't prevent you from being compassionate. The irony of it all. 

Chef’s kiss.

Or one afternoon when you were walking toward the breakroom to get some water. You heard voices, so you stopped outside the doorframe. Satoru n' Nanami.

"I just... I don't know what to do," Satoru was saying. "My pride couldn't take the hit. She dumped me n' it scrambled my brain so badly I made it all up because I couldn't admit she didn't want me." A heavy sigh. "I'm just a massive jerk, Nanami."

Nanami stirred his coffee. "Yes. You are."

"I know. I just... I don't know how to fix it when she won't even look at me. It hurts, you know? Knowing I hurt her so much."

He was finally saying it. The actual truth. No performance. No audience. Just him and Nanami and a breakroom that smelled like instant noodles.

Most people would melt right there. Or like, people in rom-coms would. Walk in. Forgive him. Epic corporate romantic reunion. Workplace second-chances romance you find in the clearance section in bookstores or whatever.

Not you, though. The devil somehow corrupted the angel on your shoulder, and both of them were currently laughing in this really evil, highly morally questionable manner, making you do the same.

You leaned your shoulder against the doorframe.

Fweee-ooo. 

You whistled.

Satoru whipped around. His eyes went wide. His bruised ego practically bleeding all over the breakroom linoleum and staining his cheek faint pink.

…Since he looked so cute blushing? Both the angel and the devil slapped you across each respective cheek. You just enjoyed seeing him this pathetic. Am I right?

So you smirked. Your pride absorbing the tragic energy from him like some cartoonishly evil mushroom parasite.

"Wow," you said, voice dripping with cold amusement. "Didn't know you had that kind of vocabulary installed."

You didn't wait for him to respond. Nanami awkwardly stared at the floor. You just pushed off the doorframe, turned on your heel, n' walked back to your desk. Leaving him completely, utterly leveled.

Now, who was creating a hostile work environment, girl? This isn't like you. Wake up, bruh.

Satoru was at what you would call rock bottom.  Sure, the pigeon had declared a ceasefire and the purple Scion had vanished from the streets, but the real terror was coming from inside the house: his own conscience. 

That, and the fact that every single one of his subtle, weirdly sweet peace offerings was getting ruthlessly rejected by you.

And okay, quite frankly, your ego was starting to physically suffocate the entire office too. People were suddenly starting to understand exactly why you two even dated in the first place.  A match made in absolute, toxic hell. Your pride inflated like Nvidia stock after 2022. And Satoru was starting to get seriously pissed. 

Like, what more did he have to fucking do? He had literally gone through ego death three separate times in the past month. He had this weird spiritual awakening. He finally stepped outside his own body, looked at his own actions, and asked, Wait, have I been a massive dick this entire time?

But listen. You can kill a man, but you can never completely extract the narcissism out of his body. He still thought he was in the game. Unless you were actively married with three kids, Gojo believed he had a chance.

Plus, his karmic debt was officially paid off. His apartment finally got fixed, after about three separate calls from his contractor pushing it back.  Yaga promised him the lead on another big project very soon. He even got pulled over for mild speeding on Tuesday and didn't even get a ticket! 

Except, his "brilliant" mind was completely running out of ideas to charm you. He had tried almost everything he could think of. He genuinely considered bringing the damn golf clubs to the office and performatively throwing them out the sixth-floor window into oncoming traffic right in front of you, just to prove, Hey! I finally get the point, okay?!

But to no avail. Even Shoko wanted to slap you. And Shoko lives for office drama. When you first came back, she literally damned her remote work days to come into the office specifically to savor Satoru’s downfall in high definition. But now? Even she was looking at you like, Okay, wrap it up, Satan.

The corporate lobby was an absolute sea of people. A stampede of tailored suits, briefcases, and weekend plans all surging toward the revolving doors.

Satoru was in the middle of the crowd, his patience and his feelings stretched so thin they were practically translucent. He was at the absolute end of his rope. Frustrated, exhausted, and mentally hyping himself up for a massive Hail Mary.

Okay, he thought, adjusting his pristine white shirt. This weekend. I am going to think of something final. Something massive. 

He desperately needed you to just acknowledge him. He had spent a month doing all this quiet, un-Satoru-like good behavior n' you hadn't given him a single crumb. Not a text, not a look, not even a freaking sigh. And as we already established, this man hated silence more than anything else on earth. 

The quiet was a literal medieval torture device shit for him. It was genuinely, clinically, destroying him.

Then, he saw you. You were standing right near the turnstiles, trapped in a soul-crushing conversation with some Finance Karen who was loudly complaining about quarter-end spreadsheet formulas.

Satoru's heart completely hijacked his brain. He had to reach you. Right now.

He didn't think. He just started speed-walking—

Crash.

He collided violently with a terrified, overworked marketing intern.

A massive, venti-sized, aggressively green vanilla matcha sugary sweet latte exploded like a neon grenade directly over his chest.

Sploosh.

Thick, sticky, lukewarm green sludge dripped down his crisp white shirt, instantly soaking through the fabric and pooling over his Italian leather shoes.

The universe, apparently, had one last invoice outstanding.

The intern looked like they were ready to drop dead on the spot and write their last will and testament. Satoru just sighed. Literally on a verge of tears, because this was the last fucking straw. 

You had stopped talking to Finance Karen. You looked at the green disaster standing in the middle of the lobby, gave him a slow completely unbothered blink, and then you just. Turned on your heel. Started walking away. 

Whatever that was, you felt like it would soon involve you, and it somehow didn't match up with the Friday evening plans you'd originally had in mind.

Your mouth twitched. Just slightly. Not quite a smile but in the neighbourhood of one. Because of course it did — you were enjoying being the villain in his story.

That was it. The absolute final breaking point.

Not this weekend. Not another weekend. Not one more day of the silence n' the distance n' watching you walk away like he was something you'd already filed n' moved on from.

No.

He didn't care about his shirt. He didn't care about his shoes. He didn't care about the, like, million people watching. He surged forward, completely ignoring the green sludge, and voluntarily dropped straight onto his knees right in front of you.

Thud.

Right there on the fake corporate marble.

You stopped dead in your tracks. Satoru looked up at you from the floor, his blue eyes entirely feral and desperate. He brought his sticky, matcha-covered hands up together, pressing his palms flat against each other in a literal begging prayer motion.

"Please!" he pleaded, his voice echoing loudly off the high glass ceilings. "Just hear me out. Give me one more chance to explain myself. Just... please. The silence is killing me."

Hail Marying right there, right now.

Your carefully curated, flawlessly maintained bad bitch persona immediately vaporized. Reduced to absolute atoms under the excruciating weight of the very public, very catastrophic secondhand embarrassment.

Your eyes went wide.  You looked around the lobby. At the audience that had assembled with the specific silent enthusiasm of people who had been waiting for this exact moment for years. Something moved through your face.

Oh, hell the fuck nah.

For the first time in your sweet life you experienced a fight and flight response simultaneously.  Heart rate hitting like 160. Great Zone 2 training if you ask me.

"Satoru, get up," you hissed through your teeth, your face burning a violent shade of crimson.

"Not until you listen to me—"

"Shut up!"

Before he could utter another pathetic, career-ending syllable, you lunged forward, grabbed him firmly by his matcha-soaked silk tie, and yanked him to his feet.

You dragged him across the lobby toward the stairwell that led to the parking garage. He stumbled after you. The tie doing the work of a leash n' him moving with the specific cooperative energy of a man who had absolutely no leverage n' knew it.

Down the stairs. Through the door. Into the garage. You were already opening your mouth — the speech loading, the full clinical precision of a woman who had been saving things up — when you clocked the car. His car. Satoru clocked where you were heading n' unlocked it.

Beep-beep.

You marched him straight to the driver's side, yanked the door open, and literally hauled his sticky body inside, shoving him behind the wheel.

Blinded by absolute red-hot murderous rage, you sprinted around the front of the car. Ripped the passenger door open, climbed inside and violently slammed it shut behind you, ready to completely dismantle whatever was left of his sanity in private.

"You are out of your goddamn fucking mind!" you screamed, pointing a finger directly at his face. 

He didn't know if these were his last seconds on earth or if he was just a lucky motherfucker. But hey, a game is a game.

"In the lobby?! In front of the entire fucking firm?! Are you actively trying to ruin our—"

Wait a damn minute.

You blinked. Your voice cut out. You looked at the dashboard. You looked out the heavily tinted passenger window. You take the subway.

Click.

Before your brain could even process the muscle memory mistake you had just made, Satoru — ever the opportunist — engaged the central locking. 

‘Cause as I said, a game is a game. And he was willing to finish this Hail Mary with a freaking touchdown. He had literally nothing else to lose now.

He didn't give you a single second to grab the door handle. He slammed his foot down on the gas.

"You can't be fucking serious!" you shrieked. "Did you just kidnap me?! Stop the car right now, Satoru! I swear to god, if you don't stop this car—"

"I prefer extended conversation."

The M5 was already moving by the time your brain caught up.

You were screaming. He was driving. The threats escalating in direct proportion to how completely unbothered he was acting.

"This is illegal, Satoru! You are actively committing a felony!"

"Probably," he said, checking his blind spot and merging aggressively into the fast lane.

"I'm calling the police!" you shrieked, slapping your hands against the dashboard.

"Phone's in your bag in the backseat."

"I will roll down this window and scream for help!"

"You're already screaming."

You were. You hadn't noticed. You lowered the volume approximately four percent. But you realized, with increasing, adrenaline-spiked horror, that he was genuinely not stopping this car.

"You cannot just kidnap me because you felt like it—"

"I didn't feel like it," he said. Eyes on the road. Voice completely level in the infuriating way it got when he'd made a decision and was done negotiating. "I had to."

"You HAD to."

"Yes."

"You HAD to kidnap me. You gotta be kidding me."

And that fucker had the audacity to chuckle. CHUCKLE.

"I will end you—"

"End me? Guess fucking what, I ALREADY ended myself. If you haven't fucking noticed!"

So you pivoted. Because if you couldn't stop the car, you were going to verbally dismantle the driver. The speech that had been compiling in your brain since you returned came out like a machine gun.

"You are a psychopath! All the shit you've done and now kidnapping me?!"

"What else was I supposed to fucking do? You wouldn't listen to me!" he yelled over the engine, knuckles white on the steering wheel.

"You did all the shit, then tried to make amends with the worst gestures known to mankind, and then after I had to physically slap you to wake you the fuck up — you started leaving me quiet little offerings like I was some kind of corporate woodland spirit you were trying to trap!"

All the pent-up, repressed energy he had been holding onto for so long completely exploded.

"You just LEFT!" he shouted, his voice cracking. "You packed a bag n' flew to fucking Santorini! Half your stuff is still in my bathroom! You never told me it was officially over! You just blocked me and disappeared! I didn't know where I stood!"

You laughed. A completely manic, unhinged sound.

"OH, you didn't know where you stood?! You knew exactly where you stood when I was apparently dead in a shark's stomach! Or being mauled by a lion! Or falling into a cement mixer! Or drying up in a desert! You TOLD PEOPLE I WAS DEAD, SATORU!"

Silence. The volume in the car suddenly dropped. Satoru glanced at you. Chest heaving. The green matcha drying into a crust on his collar. Then — because he was Satoru Gojo and he physically couldn't help himself, but mostly because it was actually true:

"So you DO care." Almost a laugh. Like you'd just handed him a golden ticket. "You kept track. Even while you were walking around that office with your tan n' your upturned little nose like you're oh sooo far above me. Like I'm some piece of trash you get to play with just because you were pissed at me."

You opened your mouth to eviscerate him.

"And you enjoyed it," he interrupted, looking dead ahead at the traffic. "Keeping receipts while throwing out every single gift. Every single time. Don't tell me you didn't."

You snapped your mouth shut. The silence was deafening. Because he was right. And you both knew it. But admitting defeat was not in your vocabulary either. The argument immediately spiked right back to a ten. The speedometer was doing something highly concerning. 

"SATORU, PULL OVER RIGHT NOW—"

"ADMIT YOU ENJOYED IT—"

"YOU'RE AN ARROGANT PRICK WHO CAN'T ADMIT LOSS!" you screamed at the top of your lungs.

SCREEEECH.

Full brake slam.

The tires howled against the asphalt. The seatbelts violently locked, jerking both of you forward as the car halted right in the middle of the fast lane. The city was suddenly loud outside the stopped car.

Satoru turned his entire body toward you. Breathing hard. Matcha drying dead center on his chest. His blue eyes completely dark n' feral. Forehead vein almost popping. 

"But I'm YOUR arrogant prick," he panted, his voice a low gravelly snarl. "And you're just as fucking stubborn n' can't admit when it's enough. Who else would put up with this bitchy behavior anyway?"

“Wha—"

Something rolled in the center console cupholder from the impact.

Clack.

You looked down.

Lip balm. Strawberry. Yours. It was still in his car. The one you remember him secretly loving. ‘Cause it was very sweet and wanted you to kiss him with it every morning before work so he could savour the kiss longer like that.

You looked up at him. He was already looking at you. Breathing hard. Knuckles still white on the wheel. Looking at you like you were the only coordinates his internal compass had ever pointed at and he was absolutely furious about it.

Scared.

Turned on.

Yearning.

And god help you, you missed him so fucking much.

All of it hitting simultaneously.

"You absolute narcissistic motherfucke—"

You grabbed him by the lapels and kissed him.

He kissed you back immediately. Like he'd been ready for exactly this and hadn't been sure it was ever coming. His hands finding your face before you'd even processed that you'd moved.

It was messy. Desperate. It tasted like months of repressed toxic obsession and the strawberry lip balm — because of course you had another one.

Satoru hummed into the kiss, brow furrowing as he licked the sweet taste off your lower lip.

Someone behind you leaned on the horn.

Honk Honk, bitches.

His hands were tangled in your hair, pulling you across the console as you whimpered, clutching the steering wheel so you wouldn't fall over. The back of your head was pleasantly tingling and you got the same butterflies in your belly like the very first time he’d ever kissed you.

HONK. HOOOONK.

He physically peeled himself away. The restraint of a man who absolutely did not want to stop but was operating a vehicle during rush hour traffic and suddenly had some remaining instinct for self-preservation.

He swallowed hard. Pupils completely blown. Blindly reached down to shift the gear and hit the gas. You slumped back into the passenger seat.  Slightly dazed. Flushed. 

You could feel the remaining lip balm smeared literally down your chin. You stared out the window, desperately trying to recalibrate.

Okay. New plan. You let this happen. You MIGHT give him another chance. You needed a clearer head. Away from him. Away from—

"Okay," you breathed out. "Take me home. My new address is—"

"No."

You blinked. Looked at him.

"...Excuse me?"

"No."

"Satoru."

"No."

"Take. Me. Home."

"No."

You stared at him. He was looking straight at the road. Completely calm. The fury gone. The desperation gone. And just your luck, his long forgotten God Complex had officially rebooted. V2 effectively deployed. And he was absolutely not entertaining alternatives.

"You literally just kissed me," he said. His tone was perfectly, patronizingly reasonable. "HOW can I take you home after that?"

"That was a reflex—that doesn't mean—"

"No."

"No what—"

"Just no," he said again. Preemptively. Shutting it down.

The argument never fully stopped after that. It just evolved. Morphed from screaming about the kidnapping into this weird bickering that was half fight and half foreplay and you weren't entirely sure where one ended and the other began.

You gesturing wildly. Him infuriatingly calm. You getting more frustrated because he was calm. Him occasionally throwing out a smug comment that set you off again. You firing back with something that made his jaw clench and his hands grip the leather steering wheel slightly tighter.

The city scrolled past the tinted windows. The traffic thinned. He turned the wheel and the M5 descended into the underground parking garage of his building.

The security barrier lifted. The city disappeared. Just cold concrete, fluorescent overhead lights and the rumbling sound of the engine echoing off the walls. He pulled into his spot. Put the car in park.

You opened your mouth — the argument still fully loaded, still ready to fire—

He turned and kissed you. And it wasn't rushed this time.

Both of your dignities currently MIA, you somehow stumbled out of the car first. Fully determined to talk this out. Like adults. With important things to discuss. Calmly. Clinically. Without screaming or throwing heavy objects.

Even if your eyes trailed down to his groin approximately every ten seconds. Damn you and your unfairly good dick game. Satoru appeared on your side, his arms snaking around your waist.

You swatted his hands away. "We're talking first."

"Obviously," he said, and immediately his fingers tried to interlace with yours.

Swat.

For fuck’s sake, he tried again. The man was committed.

You walked toward the elevator bank, staying slightly ahead of him. He followed close behind, only because you had explicitly told him to stay approximately four inches back without trying to fuse your atoms together. You pushed through the heavy glass doors into the main building lobby.

“Miss?!”

It was an undignified shriek from the night attendant, who clearly couldn't believe his eyes. "You're— you're walking."

You stopped dead in your tracks. "...Yes?"

"Mr. Gojo said you were in a full-body cast! That you broke every single bone in your body during this freak mountain-climbing accident."

You slowly, methodically turned to look at Satoru. Oh, here we fucking go again. Mountain climbing?

Satoru had suddenly located a highly specific, fascinating speck of dust on the marble floor and was currently examining it with intense, academic interest.

"He said that to you." A beat. "When?"

“Well, five months ago? When I hadn't seen you come home for a long time. I was worried, miss! Mr. Gojo was devastated! I'm glad you made such a miraculous recovery!”

Satoru was still looking at the floor. His ears had achieved a shade of crimson that was genuinely medically concerning. He now certainly knew that his past self had literally just cockblocked his present self. But, yeah, it was fun while it lasted.

You turned back to the attendant and deployed the sweetest, warmest smile you had used in months.

"Don't worry," you promised cheerfully. "I'm fine. But let's pray Mr. Gojo won't end up in a full-body cast himself anytime soon."

The attendant nodded once. In that solemn way where he didn't know exactly what was happening, but was glad Gojo was about to get properly humbled.

You two finally stepped into the elevator. Satoru was so flushed from embarrassment he might have spontaneously combusted. Suddenly, he realized how profoundly stupid it was to walk around lying your face off to a million different people. It has consequences. ‘Cause, duh.

You were looking straight ahead at the closed doors. Arms crossed. The specific posture of a woman exercising a truly heroic amount of restraint. The silence was immediate. Suffocating. Shaped like the longest elevator ride of Satoru’s life.

“Satoru. You told the lobby attendant?”

Satoru stared at the floor numbers ticking up on the digital display above the door. He shrugged. Because what could he possibly say at this very moment anyway? You closed your eyes and pinched the bridge of your nose.

Ding.

Thank fucking god. Satoru was getting war flashbacks even before the actual war happened.

He unlocked the door to his apartment. You stepped in already talking—the conversation fully loaded, about fifty things queued up, starting with the lobby attendant n' working backward through the restaurant n' the amnesia n’ getting run over by a car n’ drowning in a hot tub, n' probably ending somewhere around the golf clubs if you had enough breath left—

But suddenly the world spun. He turned you around and kissed you against the front door.

You completely folded. The very adult arguments evaporated into the Dior Sauvage and the desperate, suffocating way he was pressing into you. You slid your hands up his matcha lattéd chest, tangling your fingers in his tie to pull him closer.

And your blazer miraculously evaporated too. From your shoulders to somewhere near the shoe rack — you weren't entirely sure. You were slightly preoccupied with the fact that his mouth was doing something to your jaw that was making coherent thought structurally unsound.

"I mean it, we need to—" you gasped as he backed you along the wall toward the living room.

"Yes," he agreed, not stopping though.

His hands finding every place they could finally reach again. The rest of the undried matcha comprehensively, democratically redistributed across both of you by this point. Your neck. His chest. Your upper arms where he'd grabbed you.  The dry cleaner is gonna have a field day.

“Satoru, I'm serious.”

“Soo serious, baby,” he agreed, against your collarbone.

You slapped his shoulders trying to unsuction him from your tingling skin. But, lord have mercy, how good it felt to have him like this again.

“Let. Me. Go. We gotta talk.”

“Do we now?” he murmured directly against your ear. His voice dropping into that register that should piss you off.

You grabbed his shoulders this time, desperately trying to keep your knees from buckling.

"...Later," you breathed.

"Later," he repeated. Like it was already settled. I mean it already was. You couldn't peel yourself away from him even if he eventually agreed.

He kissed you again, dragging you alongside the wall, both of you trying to locate the damn light switch. You opened your eyes, catching the faint reflection of the moonlight against the walls. You pulled back slightly, blinking.

"Wait. Are these walls a different color?"

Satoru let out a sound that was half-groan, half-whine. "Don't."

"Is this Architectural Bone?" you asked, genuinely distracted. Because why the fuck was the white paint so cool-toned suddenly? You remembered it being a Washed Linen kinda color. Nice warm white. Not ugly ass Architectural Bone.

“No? I don't know? Doesn't fucking matter—"

And even if it DID matter, Satoru swore to god if you didn't just shut up and lay down on his bed he would become a very very angry man. Any fucking wall color can go to hell. White paint is white paint anyway.

So he just shoved you past the opened bedroom door. And shoved you again once he stepped behind the threshold.

Click. 

He kicked the door shut behind you. He dropped you to your feet for exactly two seconds. Just long enough for the absolute frantic impatience to take over.

He didn't even bother unbuttoning the rest of his sticky shirt — which at some point your fingers had started unbuttoning on the way here. He ripped it open the rest of the way, shrugging it off his shoulders and tossing it away.

He immediately went for his belt buckle. While he fumbled with the clasp, you grabbed the hem of your dress, and pulled it over your head alongside your bra, so you were standing there in practically nothing.

And that was it. Satoru's brain completely short-circuited.

Boobs. Your boobs. Holy shit.

His pants could go to hell — he had to touch you now. Bro was losing precious seconds every single time his hands weren't on you.

He gripped your hips, walked you backward until the back of your knees hit the mattress, and pushed you down into the sheets. He immediately crawled right over you, caging you in. Half-naked and feeling like an absolute god. He leaned down, a filthy triumphant smirk spreading across his face, and actually, unironically opened his mouth to drop a very diabolical line.

"Daddy's ho—"

He didn't even get to finish the vowel.

Before the cringe could even fully materialize, your muscle memory kicked in. You grabbed his forearm, planted your foot, used his own heavy forward momentum entirely against him, and violently launched him sideways.

Thuud.

Satoru lost his center of gravity, flopped flat onto his back on the mattress, bouncing against the springs. He blinked at the ceiling, completely stunned.

"What the hell?!" he wheezed, the air knocked cleanly out of his lungs.

"Judo," you said calmly. "Tuesday and Thursday nights for the last five months. Great for core strength.”

And apparently also great for shutting up obnoxious finance bros.

You swung your leg over, firmly straddling his hips. Reached sideways — core-strengthening your way over — to grab the tie he'd thrown on the edge of the bed. Now, you had an idea.

You yanked his arms above his head and looped the silk tightly around his wrists, securing them to the spindles of the headboard. Satoru stared up at you. Literally panicking.

"What are you doing?!" he demanded, pulling his arms experimentally. The silk held firm.

And look. Satoru was never against experimenting, roleplaying, or switching the power dynamics. But he just wanted to fuck you senseless and just get the pleasantries over with.

Too frustrated and too horny to entertain games. And even if he very much welcomed having your boobs literally in his face as you fumbled with the knot, he preferably wanted you tied up, if anything. Not himself.

You sat up straight, smoothing your hair.

"I said we are talking first." A beat. "And since you have a problem with telling the truth, you're staying right there until I get it out of you."

Now, fuck him ‘cause you also started rolling your hips against his clothed lap. Slow. Deliberate. You were bare, soft, and warm, tracing your fingernails lightly down his chest.

Absolute. Maddening. Torture. He tried to buck his hips into yours but the tailored pants and your weight restricted his movement. He started to squirm, completely desperate, his tied wrists pulling hard against the headboard.

"Baby, take ‘em off," he whined, his voice thick and strained.

You raised an eyebrow. "Take what off? You seemed to be in such a rush to be a Daddy, I thought you had the logistics handled."

"I can't take it," he groaned, dropping his head back against the mattress. "Take the pants off. I'm begging you. I'll do whatever you want."

He just whined. And whined. And whined. And don't get me wrong — this sight was sinfully satisfying — but it didn't really scratch the itch you had for how you wanted to bury his ego ten feet under.

"Admit it," you whispered, leaning down so your lips hovered just a fraction of an inch over his. "Admit exactly how miserable you were."

"I was actually fine—"

So you ground down harder. Slower. Watching him squirm.

"Now were you?"

Oh, this man wasn't walking out of this bedroom the same. You were about to wreck his worldview and his dick. He kept pulling at the silk tie with zero dignity and approximately zero shame about the lack of it.

"Please. Just take the fucking pants off. Pleease."

You considered the verbal approach for approximately two more seconds.

Yeah. No.

"I still don't think you deserve that, Satoru. Liar liar, pants on fire."

He went red with rage and opened his mouth to argue— ‘Cause tf? Are ya’ll 12? Where the hell did that come from? But you were done arguing. You swiftly shut him up by lunging forward and sitting on his face. You took hold of the headboard. He looked up at you with wide eyes. You smirked.

Miss Girl, you reeeally thought you had the structural upper hand here.

"So." Trying to sound clinical. Professional. Like your central nervous system wasn't currently melting into a puddle. "Are you going to finally admit your entire God Complex is just a cover-up for the fact that you're completely obsessed with me?"

Tsk, tsk, tsk. You might as well have handed Satoru the second golden ticket of this evening because the fucker didn't waste any time. He just dived in. Like a man starving. ‘Cause he fundamentally refused to lose an argument. Even with his mouth full.

He didn't stop. He just—

Hummmmmed.

Right against your clit.

"Mmm, baby... yeah. Whatever you say."

Muffled. Wet. Still dripping with that exact patronizing tone everyone else hated. You included. Well. Sort of.

And the smirk of yours? Gone. Deleted. Instantly transformed into a blissful ‘O’ n' the most angelic-sounding whimper Satoru swore you had ever let out.

Embarrassing. Moving on.

But you were committed to the bit. The independent era was not going down without a fight. Grip tightened. Brain desperately trying to reboot.

"And—" hips involuntarily rolling down on his tongue. "And the... stunt you had been pulling?"

He didn't even pause. Just adjusted his angle. Flicked his tongue exactly where it would cause maximum structural damage. Licking into you like you were a Michelin star soup.

"A brilliant pivot... strategically speaking it worked out in the end."

Eyes rolled back. Spine arched to oblivion.

You tried. You really did. You had a whole PowerPoint of his sins queued up in your head and ready to go.

"Did you... did you actually... ah, fuck—"

English? Deleted. Hotel? Trivago.

He latched on. Sucking with this filthy agonizingly perfect rhythm. You hated how good he was at this. You hated that you'd been missing out on this for eight entire months.

Wait, what?

Beeeep. Frontal lobe flatlined.

The ‘I hate him with all my heart’ persona experiencing catastrophic technical difficulties. Interrogation officially over. Lost completely in the sauce.

Totally oblivious to the fact that he was just. Quietly. Wiggling his wrists. Okay so. You were a genius auditor. But you were not a Boy Scout. You tied a colossally shit knot. Like, a really bad one. In your defense you were horny, desperate and angry — you thought you could fake it till you made it.

But Satoru's brain worked terrifyingly well under pressure. One twist to the left, one twist to the right and he knew he'd be out in no time. He just used his weaponized tongue to distract you while playing a solo escape room with his hands. And winning.

Warm. Large. Wrapping around your bare thighs.

Wait.

Hands? Weren't those tied?

Whooosh. Thrown flat onto your back. You gasped. Trying to catch up on the new zip code.

You looked soo good like this. Satoru's dick literally jumped against the pants — the seam felt like it was trying to split him open. How he wanted to just push himself inside you. But. Why just win the argument when you can obliterate your opponent's sanity first?

He crawled right back down between your legs.

"Satoru—"

Nuh-uh. He just shoved the entirety of his tongue inside you, drinking your wetness out while he abused your clit with his thumb. And holy cunnilingus have mercy — he hit the spot inside while pressing from the outside simultaneously. A hundred Santorinis couldn't compare to the twinkling stars behind your eyes as you came apart completely around his pretty face. RIP to your dignity. Gone too soon.

He licked you off his lips and scrambled at his waist. Practically tearing the fabric from his legs. Suit pants prison: abolished. Free. Finally fucking free.

He crawled up your body. This time without any cringe-ass remark — he'd learned the hard way. Gripped your hips and pushed you gently toward the edge of the mattress. Your head fell backward off the bed.

Blood rushed immediately to your head. Your neck arched, completely exposed n' vulnerable that he couldn't help himself and just suuuck on the spot where you would have to be damned if you could cover it tomorrow morning.

Biting. Claiming the pulse point while you're still trembling.

Asshole.

Satoru pulled back just enough to look at you upside down. His blue eyes pitch black. Gripped your face and forced you to look at him. He wanted the receipts too.

"Aight. You got your confession," he rasped. Hovering right at your entrance, length twitching, smearing the precum all over himself. 

"Now you're going to give me mine." A beat. "Admit it. Tell me exactly how miserable you were."

Your pride still standing. Barely. You might have lost the war but you hadn't lost the fight yet.

"I was... thriving. I bought soo many new plants—"

He nudged forward. Just a fraction. To prove a point. You gasped violently, what the fuck, feeling like you were falling headfirst, his laugh somewhere above you, your nails digging into his shoulders to hold on.

"Liar liar, pants on fire," he mocked. "Tell me the truth. Tell me you hated every second of it. Tell me you compared every single guy to me n' hated them for it. How your little vacation was boring as hell without me there?"

You squeezed your eyes shut. Stubbornness evaporating. Pride packing its bags and heading back to Santorini. Without you, because the fuck, bitch?

"I hated them all. They were boring. They didn't..."

"They didn't what, baby?"

"They weren't you." Practically sobbing. Ego officially buried ten feet under the newly installed floorboards. The problem is, it was fucking yours. Now, c’mon. How could you mess up the script—

"And Santorini?"

"Was boring without you too." The words came out like they physically hurt. That’s why they came out so tight, it was embarrassing to admit. "I was miserable. I wanted to kill you n' I wanted you the entire time."

Satoru exhaled. Long and slow. Because he felt the same and hearing it out loud was something else entirely. His ego currently expanding at a rate that defied the laws of physics. Fed. Stroked to absolute perfection.

"Good girl."

And finally. Mercifully. He drove his hips forward. Buried himself in you completely. Because his dick needed stroking too. And boy, was it uncomfortable. Or mind-bending. Actually, you couldn't tell if the dizziness came from currently having all your blood in your head, or if not having Satoru's dick inside of you for so long meant your body forgot how to accommodate his wood. He was violently making room for himself.

"Were you also doing some pelvic yoga? You're so fucking ti—"

Lmao. What.

"Just shut the fuck up already!"

You shouted as you tried your hardest not to get railed clean off the bed.

Look. Gravity is gravity. You try getting fucked while your brain is marinating in blood. Cinematic for exactly ten seconds before it becomes a massive bio-mechanical hazard.

Satoru apparently agreed. Without missing a single agonizing thrust, he reached under your arms and dragged you straight back up to the center of the mattress. Hooked your legs over his shoulders and folded you like a campfire chair. Your boobs getting squished under the weight of your own thighs while Satoru salivated over the entire image.

Fuck, how he missed this.

Leverage? Acquired. Dignity? Still missing. Hotel? Trivago. Again? Yes. ‘Cause I'm a phrase repeater, so what.

It was sweet romantic lovemaking. Just kidding. It immediately became a direct horizontal continuation of the screaming match in his BMW. Just with more bodily fluids, kissing and marking. You were both going to end up covered in bruises and love marks and HR was going to have questions on Monday.

Toxically soulmating even mid-act. Because both of you could fucking multitask and never shut the fuck up.

"You are a manipulative, narcissistic prick." Digging half-moons into his back. You wanted to sound intimidating. You really did.

But Satoru did not take insults lying down. He weaponized his dick game. He slowed down. To this agonizing, deliberate, spiteful grind. Hitting the exact spot that made your soul leave your body.

Your breath hitched mid-insult. Completely n' legally unfair that his personality belonged in a dumpster but his physical capabilities belonged in an art gallery. Your mouth was fighting him but your body was utterly, completely folding. Well, it already was folded, but again it is the metaphor of it all.

"And you made me a laughingstock for weeks!" Entirely unapologetic. Breathless. One arm flying around your throat and squeezing just enough to take the air and the attitude out of you.

"I wouldn't do it if you didn't lie about me!" you managed, completely out of breath, gripping his wrist. Aye, it was not the time to be unnecessarily kinky but Satoru never gets the memo about anything, does he.

He hit the spot again. You let out a sound you'd pay money to delete from his memory. Your eyes going half-lidded, walls starting to flutter around him — n' then the spiteful slow grind just. Snapped.

He was pissed, but he had your best interest in mind, okay. Since you were so busy arguing he had to do the work for both of you. Not because he was also close and let's say the interior walls of the apartment won't soon be the only thing freshly painted white.

He lost his own control. Because you felt too good. Because eight months is a long fucking time.

"I did it because I couldn't take not having you by my side!" Panting. Desperate. "Tell me I'm yours. Say it."

"NO! YOU say it first!"

Satoru literally paused. A microsecond. Just long enough to process the absolute unmitigated audacity.

And girl, I don’t know how to say this… But you were currently folded in half. Getting choked out and railed into the mattress. And you were counter-offering?

And yes, technically both of you knew the respective answer, because otherwise you wouldn't get yourselves into this peculiar situation. But hearing it would give y'all the upper hand. And understand, that was the issue.

He let out this sound. Half-laugh, half-feral growl.

"Stubborn fucking brat," he rasped.

He stopped playing fair. Shifted his grip. Pulled your hips flush against his. And went absolutely, terrifyingly feral.

“You fucking egomaniac.”

Back n' forth. Forth n' back. And every other different direction. Both egos completely unyielding. Treating sex like a hostile corporate takeover.

But eight months dry can last just as long. You broke. He broke. The entire space-time continuum broke. Someone call the referees from the Tour de France because we have a photo finish.

Messy. Devastating. You screaming, nails carving trenches into his back, squeezing around him so hard it triggered him instantly. That deep guttural groan. His teeth buried in the crook of your neck as he emptied into you.

And then?

Well. Normal couples usually cuddle. Whisper sweet nothings. Bask in the afterglow.

Not you two.

You were both gasping for air. Lungs burning. He collapsed heavily on top of you, crushing you into the wrecked sheets as he let go of your legs.

You shoved weakly at his sticky chest. Barely any strength left.

"You came first," you wheezed. Chest heaving. "I felt it. I won."

Satoru lifted his head. Sweat dripping from his nose. Looking absolutely, structurally wrecked, but personally offended.

"No fucking way." Panting. Glaring down at you. "I felt you squeezing the shit out of me. You came first. I won."

"You literally whined."

"I grunted. It's a biological response."

"Satoru, you came before me. Take the L."

"I held out for eight months and twenty minutes." His voice cracking slightly. "You lasted like ten seconds once I got back between your legs. Shut up."

"Narcissist."

"Liar."

You just stared at each other. Sweaty. Bruised. Still physically connected. Arguing about orgasm logistics like it was a quarterly earnings report.

And then. You both just... deflated.

Energy reserves at zero. Ego war paused due to lack of stamina. Stalemate— But both of you swore once the blood redistributed, you'd make the other regret it.

He dropped his heavy head back onto your chest. You let your arms fall onto the mattress.

Silence.

Just the sound of your heartbeats n' heavy breathing echoing in the empty room. The ceiling slowly stopped spinning.

He rolled you both over. You turned your head, chin resting against his sweaty shoulder. Blinking past the remaining stars in your vision. Looking into the corner of the room.

Slumped against the Architectural Bone drywall.

The Titleist golf bag.

But this time it somehow didn't sour your mood. Though this time they weren't the pristine titanium in a pink golf bag laughing back at you. Now they were warped. Water-stained. Rusted? Perhaps. Dull as hell. And absolutely pathetic. 

"Satoru." Eyebrows furrowing. "Are those the fucking golf clubs?"

He went completely still.

Dropped his head back against the mattress and sighed. Here you go again, bruh. Arrogance suddenly evaporated.

"The contractor must have shoved them in here," he mumbled. Turning his head.

Huh.

“Contractor? What? What are you talking about? Does it have to do with the wall colors too?”

Satoru groaned again, mashed his face into the wrecked sheets, and thus he explained everything. How with all the lies the universe seemed to actively punish him. And that it was getting so bad until he got the apartment flooded alongside how he apparently made a mortal enemy out of a pigeon.

But he then paused for a brief moment. Expression actually soft. Raw even. "I'm sorry. About the clubs. About… everything actually. I was a dick."

A genuine apology. A real, actual moment of accountability. Did the lights in his head finally switch on? But Satoru Gojo’s accountability has a battery life of exactly five seconds. He lifted his head and looked you dead in the eyes.

"But you're the true villain here," he stated. Entirely serious. "You dumbed me and it messed with me so bad I literally had to invent all of... that to cope. You made me do that. So it's also your fault."

Staring at him you just laughed. Genuine, completely helpless laugh for once. Because this man can actually be funny when he wants to, but also, what the hell, lol. But you know what? What the hell, sure. His lack of chill and inability to cope was actually kinda cute.

You wouldn't want a healthy, normal man anyway.

He just watched you. And that ugly, feral anger completely, finally dissolved. Oh, how stupid he was for not treating you right the first time around. He leaned down. Pressed his forehead against yours. Brushed his nose against your cheek.

"I'm yours, by the way," he mumbled quietly against your jaw. With zero hesitation. Fully cementing his own ego death right into the Architectural Bone drywall. "Just so we're clear. So now YOU say it."

You smiled. Kissed him back. “Obviously.”

Now since the great war of egos was over, he wasn't just having you anymore. He was finally, completely yours. And you were his. But you weren’t saying that out loud just yet. You WILL make this man sweat for it. Just like he deserves. 

And maybe, just maybe, this time around, actually giving you the official wife title didn't sound so intimidating to him anymore.

He let out a slow, contented breath, his eyes fluttering shut.

"Hey, Satoru."

"Mm."

"What if I wanna try out the golf thing for real?"

── Dividers from pixopix and kodaswrld!

[fukiouh]

The Soulmate Sprint | gojo x reader | chapter 2

Faking your way onto a brand-new Netflix reality show for a five-million-dollar grand prize should, under normal circumstances, be an absolute no-go. But you and Satoru Gojo have spent the last nine years lying for sport to get just about anything. We're talking scamming luxury apartments, restaurants, themes parks and full police escorts.Armed with a tragic backstory blatantly plagiarized from Maid-Sama and a single, highly questionable Halloween photo, the plan is foolproof. You just have to convince a camera crew, a deadpan host, and well, the entire world that you are true soulmates.Except the show comes with 24/7 surveillance, a cast of cutthroat rivals, and a brutal mechanic designed to actively tear couples apart. Suddenly, protecting the lie requires very thorough and very intense method-acting. But the real problem isn't outsmarting the reality TV meat grinder—it's admitting that your completely fake relationship might actually be the most honest thing you've ever done.

pairing: gojo x reader

warnings: crack treated seriously, best friends to lovers, fake dating, reality tv au, idiots in love, professional con artists, extreme codependency, questionable morality, mutual delusion, slow burn, mutual pining, idiots in love, unreliable narrator, jealousy / possessiveness, maid-sama references, happy ending, sex on camera, semi-public sex, they are absolutely shameless and stupid, gaslight gatekeep girlboss, it’s super cringe

additional tags to be added!

word count: 11k+

masterlist | crossposted on ao3!

fic masterpost | previous chapter | next chapter

The estate was—

Okay. Yeah.

The estate was something.

You'd seen the production brief. You'd googled the location n' studied the floor plan like the professional you were. You knew what you were walking into. You were prepared. You thought you were prepared.

You were not prepared. And your luxury apartment back home could be damned. Because—

Holy fucking shit.

Grand manor house, sprawling grounds, the kind of architecture that said old money doesn't explain itself with every single stone. Manicured everything. A driveway that took longer to walk up than your entire apartment building. Cameras already rolling before you even got out of the car. Which, the fuck. You looked like shit — drool most likely dried on your shoulder, hair a mess — and I'm not even talking about Satoru yet.

Look, the journey here had been fine. Fine-ish. Fine-adjacent. Fine-neighbouring. Fine-kinda. A plane ride, mostly. Only for Satoru to fall DEAD asleep on your shoulder about five minutes into boarding and snore directly into your ear for six hours straight. You had spent a meaningful portion of that time researching the cost of surprise skydiving experiences and whether you could legally push someone out of a plane as an early birthday present.

You arrived with a sore shoulder and probably half deaf. He arrived rested. We are NOT the same. Talk about a power imbalance.

You stepped out onto the gravel, squinted, and immediately began clocking exits, camera angles, lighting conditions, the emotional temperature of the three crew members nearest you — who were eagerly watching you like white tourists on a safari watching confused lions lying around.

"Okay," Satoru said, stepping out beside you n' immediately tilting his head back to look at the manor like it needed assessing. "Yeah. Okay. This is acceptable for us."

"It's a Grade I listed building worth about thirty million," you said.

"I said acceptable."

The cameras within a fifty-foot radius were already on you. You could feel them. A tiny red recording light blinking from the rhododendrons. A guy with a fluffy boom mic hovering suspiciously close to the luggage cart.

Showtime, baby.

Nine years of muscle memory took the wheel. Satoru shifted his weight, angling his body toward yours. You leaned into his side. Hand casually slipping into the back pocket of his Lululemon shorts. Again — he said if he was going to show off his sexy, masculine, muscular, and LONG legs, it would help the score. 

Sure, buddy.

You were readable as: couple, comfortable, relaxed. Two people who belonged here.

Not readable as: two absolute frauds who had submitted a literal shoujo anime plot to Netflix n' were now standing in front of a historical estate trying to rob a major streaming network of five million dollars.

Professional.

"Camera left," you said quietly, not moving your mouth much.

"Clocked it," Satoru said, equally quiet, already smiling at something in the middle distance like a man who was delighted to be here. "Also one in the topiary."

You looked at the topiary. There was, in fact, a camera in the topiary. You felt like international spies in Mission: Impossible. Tom Cruise had nothing on y'all.

"They really committed," you said.

"Good," he said. "So did we."

And commit you did — matching t-shirts that meant business. Because obviously.

Yours read: I'M PEACE.

His read: I COME IN PEACE.

Don't look at me like that. It was HIS idea.

His exact argument was that nothing screams secure in our long-term romance quite like wearing the absolute trashiest, most legally TV-dubious boomer-cruise apparel on a freaking Netflix show.

"It's camp," he said, when he clocked you looking down at the beautiful quote written in Comic Sans across his chest. You did this tragic frown when you noticed someone from the camera crew going into literal shock at the sight of your matching cotton-blend monstrosity.

"It shows we don't take ourselves too seriously. It makes us relatable to the working class."

Relatable.

Right.

You could still feel the dream of an epic entrance straight out of a Vogue editorial quietly pulsing somewhere inside you. Yet here you two were, looking like you'd gotten lost on the way to a Margaritaville.

"I am going to stuff this into your mouth while you sleep," you mumbled, giving him a bright, devastatingly fond, camera-ready smile you'd practised for hours in front of your bathroom mirror.

"Don't threaten me with a good time, BABE," Satoru beamed back — the babe coming out aggressively loud — sliding an arm around your waist n' pulling you tightly against his side. The I COME IN PEACE text warping aggressively against your shoulder.

And the first two hours went exactly like this.

Satoru almost spiralled the very second you two walked into your assigned room. Blinked once at the window. Whipped out the compass app on his iPhone. And through the door he went.

You heard him marching down the hall.

"North-facing is simply, definitely, not going to work for us, wellness-wise. My girlfriend gets short amnesia-inducing headaches without a proper natural light source. I think if you speak to whoever handles the room allocations, you'll find that—"

N' then you couldn't hear him anymore. Because you'd already gone downstairs to network like a professional n' had gotten into an argument within five minutes.

Like a professional, of course.

You decided to go mingle. Strategically. Assess the couples that were already there, measure up the competition, do a quick sweep before you and Satoru locked the fuck in properly.

You were better at this alone anyway. Charming people and all that jazz.

One couple was already in the sitting room. One of them was a woman with a fuckass bob and a miserable-looking man beside her, already half a bottle deep into a red wine.

Dead-locked. Targets acquired.

Day drinking before the official introduction dinner? Oh, they were absolutely going to spill every piece of psychological leverage you could ever want.

Though they didn't look exactly impressed when you sized them up in real time, standing deadass right in front of them. The man furrowed his eyebrows so hard they threatened to become a unibrow.

You introduced yourself.

She said Shimizu.

He said Higuruma.

"Nice to meet you, Haruhi and Shizuu?" you said with a big smile. Though you weren't entirely sure why Haruhi's eyebrows furrowed even further?

The bobbed-up lady looked at you like you were deadass for real. And yes, you were. Why wouldn't you be?

Look, on the record. Just between us... You weren't exactly good with names. Okay? Not like it's a crime.

She probably shook whatever the fuck that was off because you immediately followed it up by asking some wildly out-of-pocket question about offshore tax havens. And she answered. You liked her for that, period.

You were maybe four minutes into what was genuinely shaping up to be a useful conversation about tax breaks when Shimizu — as she corrected you after you butchered her name twice — leaned forward slightly.

Ah. Engagement. Things were going well.

Then.

Some dude with a very questionable bleach job walked in.

He said something to his poor, serene-looking girlfriend. And I am not going to repeat what that shit was. All I'm going to say is your ears clocked the disrespect like a submarine sonar pinging in the middle of the Arctic.

You turned around.

"Uhh," you said. Very pleasant. Genuinely friendly. "Buddy, what was that?"

You deployed the scariest, most terrifyingly dead-eyed fake smile in your arsenal. The one that usually got you free appetizers because the waiter felt psychologically threatened.

"Excuse me?" he sneered.

"No no, I heard you. I just want to make sure I understood correctly — are you actually being like this on purpose or is it like a medical thing?" 

He went from mildly annoyed to full-on rage in about three seconds.

What followed was not exactly a screaming match. Screaming matches are amateur hour. 

What you did instead was considerably more efficient. You took whatever he'd just said n' just. Followed it. Premise by premise. Thread by thread. Because no rat-ass man — and yes, you could tell he was slimy just by looking at his piss-coloured hair — was going to disrespect the woman next to him in front of you. Reality TV or not.

And oh boy, was he not ready for this.

No one in the room was ready for this. Everyone was too jetlagged to engage in whatever you'd just started. But hey, a lady's honour had to be protected no matter what. You were going to be her knight in shining, scamming armour.

Except he only started to double down. Which you were obviously not having. No man had ever won an argument against you — and I repeat, none. Not even your father. You'd made Satoru cry once. The weaker sex seriously had nothing on you.

You were losing patience though. All you wanted was to get some allies n' get this ugly-ass t-shirt off your body. Yet some crusty man was picking a fight with you? Whatever happened to basic courtesy — apologising and moving on?

You raised your arm.

The Pointing Finger of Wrath™ deployed.

You opened your mouth, inhaling enough oxygen to deliver something so historically vile it would probably violate the Netflix terms of service—

"Listen to me, you radioactive haystack, I will personally uninstall your balls—"

Yoink.

You were suddenly hoisted up. Dragged backward.

Satoru had been standing behind you for like fifteen seconds.

He had literally abandoned his feng shui crusade on the second floor because his grifter spider-senses started tingling. And mostly because he could hear the pitch of your voice shifting into the Active Hostility octave from one floor up. 

He'd sprinted down the stairs because he knew it was over — for the guy in front of you, but mostly for your five-million-dollar dream, before the taping had even properly started.

He locked eye contact with the miserable-looking dark-haired man across the room. A silent, desperate communication between two sensible, rational, level-headed, responsible men who understood what was at stake here.

Of course.

Hiruguma gave him the faintest nod.

And off you went. Mid-sentence. One arm securely clamped around your waist. Six feet to the left. Done.

"—and perhaps you should ask your hairdresser for a refund, because looking like a wet school mop is certainly a choice—"

"Completely valid," Satoru murmured, still moving. "Very good point, we're going this way—"

"I'm not finished—"

"Little bit finished."

"Satoru, I am not—"

"It's getting sticky," Satoru announced loudly to the room, depositing you by the window n' planting himself in front of you with the immovability of a living shield. "Seriously. It's getting everywhere. Stop it."

Dead silence.

The entire sitting room stopped breathing.

Satoru aggressively wiped his free hand on his shorts.

"The lip gloss," he clarified into the horrifying silence, lightly tapping your chin. "It's catching on your hair. Huge mess."

Look. If you're asking what the fuck stickiness has to do with this particular situation — the story goes like this.

If you're running grifts the way you two do, you need a safe phrase. An abort code for when shit is going completely sideways. It's just professional things. And since you two do just about anything, you need something universal. You really tried to come up with something normal that would work anywhere. But oh well.

And I am not going to elaborate further.

Because look, it worked. It apparently worked on the entire room because every single person's brain just. completely short-circuited trying to process what the fuck they'd just experienced.

Naoya — that was his name, acquired mid-argument apparently — was standing there with his mouth slightly open, staring at Satoru with abject, visceral confusion. Well, everyone was standing there with abject, visceral confusion. But I guess that's what you get — getting into a fight, getting dragged out of said fight by a person in matching cringe tees. What a way to make a first impression, man.

His partner, whose name was still lowkey kinda pending, mouthed a small thank you in your direction.

You winked at her.

Which riled the clown right back up.

"Okay, let's go find the dining room!" Satoru announced brightly, wrapping an arm around your neck n' physically marching you away before you could deploy something way worse.

God, you already hated that man.

Satoru was sitting on the window pane like a wistful widow reminiscing on her life with her deceased husband.

By the west-facing window, may I add.

After he'd dragged you out of the sitting room he was on a mission to finish what he'd started — aka securing the best bedroom in the entire estate. The one no contestants were supposed to stay in. But apparently throwing a fit in front of three poor assistants who were simply not paid enough for this was all it took, because he was relocating your luggage in no time.

Needless to say, the view was a bit shit. Diplomatically speaking. 

Yes, he got his west-facing window. But there was a tree in front of it, so instead of staring into the lavish gardens imagining himself as a viscount in Bridgerton, he was having a mildly hostile staring contest with a freaking pigeon.

"'Toru, stop scaring the poor pigeon. It's only sitting on its eggs," you said, furrowing your eyebrows as you held up two outfits against yourself in the mirror.

It was the first and introductory dinner with the entire cast. Taped one on top of that. You needed to make one hell of an impression, well fix the impression from earlier — intimidating but approachable, in the specific way that said let's be allies only to stab them in the back the second it became threatening. Aka: bitch, we're here for the five mil type of outfit.

Hair down or up? Hmmm.

"Yeah so what, me too, bitch, you ain't special," Satoru muttered, glaring at the pigeon. "Plus I bet mine are bigger anyway—"

Huh.

What was that.

Also, did I mention there was only one bed. Naturally. A teaser. Moving on.

"The first one is screaming 'going to my kid's piano recital,'" Satoru said, still looking at the pigeon. "Not 'hot shit on a reality TV show.' Why did you even pack that dress."

Your eyebrows flew to your hairline.

You eyed his Lululemon shorts. A beat too long, his quadriceps doing something again… Frankly offensive. OF COURSE they'd hypnotize anyone. That was just physics. A completely normal, involuntary physiological response to mass. It's practically the way gravity works, no?

But the athleisure man would not be offending your fashion sense.

Especially not when he'd just attacked the dress you'd had since senior year. The ride-or-die of your entire closet. The one he'd apparently been totally fine with for years — so where the actual fuck was THIS coming from?

"And you're wearing?" you asked. Flatly. 

He gestured down at the shorts. Did a little ta-da hand flourish at his own thighs for grand effect. No, the legs won't work as an accessory, it's not a Birkin, bruh. Or would it...? I mean, it kinda worked, no — no, it would NOT work. The legs MUST be covered.

"Interesting," you said.

One eyebrow. Then the other. Both heading north toward your hairline at an alarming speed.

You didn't even say anything else. You just let the aura do the work. The same kinda aura that had once bullied a Delta Airlines gate agent into upgrading you to first class with nothing but sustained, unblinking eye contact — while flying on a vacation with Satoru, only because he'd said he was taking the window seat this time. Rot in economy, bitch.

Satoru recoiled.

He tried to lean away to escape the blast radius of your glare. Forgot he was already sitting on a six-inch window ledge.

Thwack.

The back of his skull hit the glass so hard the pigeon outside visibly jumped.

"Sorry ma'am, for legal reasons that was a joke," Satoru surrendered immediately, his head still pinned flat against the windowpane like a terrified gecko.

He slid off the ledge.

Thud! on the floor and dropped to his knees in front of his suitcase like a man seeking political asylum.

Ziiiiip.

Started tearing through his packed clothes with violent focus. Throwing things over his shoulder. A single sock. A very wrinkled Hawaiian shirt? A shoe that narrowly missed your head.

"I have slacks! Jeans! PANTS! Look—" he announced loudly, triumphantly holding up a fistful of fabric.

He shook it out. It was just another pair of shorts.

He stared at them. "They're... evening shorts," he tried.

"I am going to physically tickle you to death," you said.

He'd opened his mouth to defend the ethical concept of formal shorts when his iPad lit up on the mattress next to you.

You picked it up. Netflix had dropped the cast reveal while you were on the plane.

Sixty-three thousand freaking comments. You opened the post.

The photo was—

Look. You cared about your appearance. Everyone did, do NOT lie to me! Not obsessively though, but optics are important, okay? And this was not planned.

What had been discussed was something clean. Established couple, nothing to see here, normal photo taken by normal people in a normal way. It was from the production photoshoot months back.

What had actually happened was the photographer saying "quick couple photo" n' Satoru saying "what about the fuck no" n' picking you up over his shoulder before you'd finished processing the first two words of that sentence.

The resulting image: you, upside down, one hand smacking his back, mouth open mid-sentence. Him, one hand squarely on the back of your thighs, looking directly into the camera with the smile of a man who had never once in his life made a decision he regretted.

And they promised not to use this image! Ugh. You made a face. You went into the comments. Because if some of these losers were trying to be rude, you were going to show them what cyberbullying truly meant—

You scrolled.

@/realitytvjunkie: WHO IS THE BADDIE BEING YEETED

@/bingewatcher99: netflix what is this cast reveal i am unwell

@/gojofancam: she is HITTING HIM and he is SMILING AT THE CAMERA

@/soulmatesprintupdates: THE HAND ON THE BACK OF HER THIGHS. NETFLIX EXPLAIN.

You looked to your left.

Satoru was on his phone— Typing rapidly, heavily focused on completing an important task.

"Don’t worry, it's a burner," he said, not looking up. "I made two so it's not too obvious."

You nodded. Understood. Him finally doing what he was good at. Arguing with strangers on the internet.

Kept scrolling.

@/thigh_enthusiast: HIS THIGHS FROM THIS ANGLE SPECIFICALLY

You read that one out loud. Because what the fuck. Also yes, but what the fuck. That one was uncalled for. You waited for him to agree it was uncalled for.

"See?" he answered, examining the comment himself.

From somewhere outside the window, the pigeon made a noise.

Satoru, without looking up from the screen: "I know, right."

You ignored whatever the hell that interspecies alliance just was n' went back to reading. Until you stopped at one. One that you didn't particularly like. One that had way more likes than you particularly liked.

@/detective_truth: Been staring at this photo for ten minutes and I genuinely cannot tell if they're doing a bit or if this is just what they look like together. Weird aura about these two. hmmm

Forty-two thousand freaking likes.

Well now—

That was probably because you weren't deploying the Lovey-Dovey Face Pro Max, but rather being genuinely caught in the moment. Which never served you well. You were quite frankly anti-candid pictures. Your face always looked weird in those. The incidental pictures Satoru took of you throughout the years... girl, you would understand immediately. Double chin-ville, greasy hair republic, expressions where you genuinely looked either 12 or 80 years old, no in between. Posture so bad you sometimes wondered if your spine was like. okay.

How did he even manage to snap these?

And it wasn't fair that he looked good in the picture. He definitely picked you up just so he could be the star of it. You could sense it. Smell it. 

Also, why were your legs doing that in the pic?

You scrolled back up and started to dissect every micro-detail of your perceived flaws. You were currently zooming in on your left kneecap because it looked conceptually wrong—

"You look so pretty in it."

He said it quietly. That low, gravelly register he usually used when scamming the parking lot attendant into letting him park in the disabled spot because he was too lazy to walk. 

"Huh?"

You turned to him. Genuinely mortified. Because where the hell did that come from, and why was he smiling at you so sweetly? A small smile. The kind that had made your stomach do this weird flip back like two years ago and approximately three weeks ago, the last time you remember. 

"You," he said softly, tilting his head. "I'm talking about you, silly."

Wait.

Hold on.

"Satoru, do you have a concussion?" you asked, leaning away from him. "Did you hit your head that hard on the window? PRODUCTION PLEASE HELP—" 

"Bruh."

The sweet face immediately vacated the premises. Evicted. And the landlord was the are-we-serious-now-chat glare.

"It’s called acting," he said, his tone dropping completely flat. He picked up a pair of socks and aggressively balled them together. "I'm warming up the material. Getting into character. Sometimes you are that dense, it’s crazy we were able to get this far."

He shook his head in disgust n' went back to pants hunting.

They called the couples in one by one.

You could hear it from the corridor — the muffled sound of the host's flat affect announcing each couple, the polite applause, the heavy double doors swinging open n' closed. Seven times.

You n' Satoru were couple eight. Last in.

You'd been standing in this corridor for approximately twenty-five minutes with a production assistant named — something, you'd already forgotten, you were bad with names — who had the specific, desperate energy of someone whose job description had not prepared them for this particular assignment.

Especially when you and Satoru refused to drop a hotdog discourse that had somehow started three weeks ago in a freaking Subway. And because Satoru apparently didn't know what social cues were anymore, because why was he restarting this now.

"A hotdog," Satoru said, for the fourteenth time, "is a sandwich."

"It is NOT a sandwich," you said, for the fourteenth time.

"Bread. Filling. Between bread. Sandwich. Easy."

"The bread is connected. It's a SINGLE piece of bread. That's not a sandwich, that's a—"

"A sub is a sandwich n' the bread is connected in a sub—"

"A sub has two proper bread surfaces—"

"So does a hotdog bun if you spread it open—"

The production assistant checked their clipboard. Checked it again. Looked at the door. Looked back at you two. Blinked a few times, visibly reconsidering every life choice that had led them to a career in television. Which — not shocked, honestly. Who tf even argues about a hotdog being a sandwich for three weeks straight.

From inside the dining room, muffled applause. Couple seven going in.

"Dude," you said.

"You just won't admit I'm right," he said.

"You are demonstrably, factually, fundamentally wrong—"

The production assistant touched their earpiece.

"Couple eight," they croaked, clearing their throat. "You're up."

Click.

The doors opened.

You walked in together. His hand found your waist. His legs, covered by actual pants. Smiles deployed. Nine years of con muscle memory taking the wheel with the efficiency of something that had been practised so many times it had stopped being a performance n' become simply. The thing that happened.

The room was watching. Seven couples already seated, candlelight n' all. The kind of vibe that made you want to stand up straight n' pretend you'd been to places like this before. Which you had, technically, but usually you were running some kind of con in them n' this was — well. Also that. But different.

And then.

Smack.

"Satoru—" you hissed, smile not even flickering.

"Oops, my bad," he said. Completely unbothered. Steering you toward your seats. "Reflex. The dress does something to me I genuinely cannot explain. Apologies."

He did not sound sorry.

The room went slightly quiet. Not fully though, people were still holding their glasses, still perfectly arranged in their seats, but the vibe was universally what the fuck was that, while simultaneously trying to act like nobody saw it. Because how do you even react to that.

The blond man at the table looked up from his champagne flute, which he apparently hadn't waited for the toast to start drinking. The expression on his face was impossible to categorise. Shocked, appalled, n' disgusted were all present, but none of them were quite right. You were starting to think this was simply his face.

"I told you not to wear it," Satoru murmured, pulling out your chair, voice dropping low enough for just you. "Your ass is too juicy in this. Reads like I'm available for poaching. Brand integrity, remember."

He sat down next to you. Completely serene.

"Sometimes I feel like the only professional here."

"You said it was screaming mom's closet," you said, through a smile so camera-ready it physically hurt your cheeks.

"Kinda," he said, casually unfolding his napkin. "Totally different concern. That's why I told you not to wear this."

Now you were genuinely suspicious he had a concussion. Because why was he suddenly acting functionally lobotomised.

You blinked at him a few times in disbelief n' picked up your own champagne flute. Absolutely not waiting for the toast either.

Fine.

You took a drink. And locked eyes with the couple seated immediately to your left.

Two baddies with long hair, as you would professionally say.

They were staring at you. Both of them. Not a subtle, polite, reality-TV peripheral glance. A perfectly synchronised, dual-wielding what the actual fuck stare that transcended simple judgment.

They looked like two scientists observing a pair of rabid monkeys who had somehow managed to dress themselves in formal wear.

The woman — dark hair, profoundly exhausted aura — took a slow, deliberate sip of her wine. Her eyes tracked Satoru like he was an undocumented medical anomaly.

The guy next to her, sporting a half-up man-bun, leaned slightly toward her. Eyes still fixed on Satoru's serene, smiling face. You could practically see him mentally calculating how much of a threat you two actually were.

He murmured something to her. It pissed you off that your spy-level hearing didn't pick it up.

But Satoru caught it. Because of course he did.

Instead of acting like a normal human being who had just been assessed, Satoru leaned right across your plate, invading your personal space to look past you at the man-bun guy. He gave him a crisp, entirely unironic two-finger salute.

"Practically married," Satoru stage-whispered, winking. "You know how it is. We can barely keep our hands off each other. It's a sickness, really."

The woman winced. The guy just stared at him. Completely, absolutely deadpan.

You kicked Satoru under the table. Hard. Hard enough to bruise bone. Hard enough to kick some sense into him.

"Ouch," Satoru said happily, leaning back into his own chair and taking a sip of his water.

Before the man-bun guy could formulate a response to whatever Satoru was doing, a sharp noise cut through the ambient tension.

Clink. Clink. Clink!

The host stood at the head of the mahogany table. You knew it was the host — you weren't stupid, you'd done your research. And Satoru had done his even more thoroughly, apparently, because he'd recognised the guy from some other show.

And the lighting shifted.

Someone in the production booth had a button n' they pressed it n' the room changed. The candlelight was still there but suddenly it meant something. Warm, deliberate, annoying — the kind of light that needed to see every one of your pores. Thankfully you'd had the suspicion, so you'd used the most pore-erasing primer known to Sephora.

The cameras started moving.

Not the static ones you'd clocked when Satoru had taken you here earlier to chill out and do tactical peeping — different ones, sweeping ones. Finding people. The kind of camera movement that made you suddenly, acutely aware of every single thing your face was doing.

You looked into one as it passed.

Uhhh. Okay. So.

Mid-whatever-your-face-was-doing. n' suddenly you were thinking about what your face was doing which meant your face was definitely doing something n' you couldn't identify what n' you couldn't stop it n' this was fine, this was completely fine—

Satoru, next to you, looked directly into the passing camera. Naturally. Easily. Like the camera had found him n' he'd found it back n' this was simply a meeting between equals. Winked at it even.

Photogenic bastard.

You hated him a little bit for that.

Kusakabe let the silence sit.

Three seconds. Four. The kind of silence that on television would feel like gravitas n' in the room felt like everyone collectively remembering to breathe.

"Good evening."

He dramatically connected his fingers.

"Welcome to The Soulmate Sprint."

And look — you knew the format. You'd been told the format, how it would work, all of it. You'd watched three seasons of comparable shows for research purposes and had strong opinions about the editing choices in season two of a competing network's offering.

You could feel the deliberate dramatic pauses left for the music in post-production. This man was a professional. You could tell.

"This show exists to find out who the true soulmates are." A pause. "Each of you has a story. A real one." His eyes moved across the table. Unhurried. "That story deserves to be told."

Nobody moved.

"That is what we are here to do."

He unclasped his fingers. Smirked.

Damn. This man was a professional. Chilling performance.

"Now. Let me explain the rules."

And hey — the entire premise of the show might seem kinda chill at first. That's what you thought initially. But after reading pages upon pages, emails upon emails, and listening to producer upon producer, you might have, again professionally speaking, slightly underestimated how serious this show was. Like, chill out. This ain't Big Brother.

The easy stuff first. Challenges. Every reality TV has challenges — classic stuff. One per episode. Both partners required. Synchronicity weighted over speed. Because soulmates apparently mean maximum sync. Always happening during the week, pre-taped.

Then another show metric. An important one.

Bond Score. Exactly what it sounds like. Entirely up to the public. Updated every forty-eight hours. Connection Cam footage, challenge performance, viewer engagement all feeding into it.

You did the face. The attentive, mildly-surprised, hearing-this-for-the-first-time face. For the cameras, you know. Gotta gain the sympathies early. Acting reflexes — you wouldn't get it.

Simple in theory. And simple in practice for you two, obviously. You were the charmiest charming people from charmytown, so the Bond Score was frankly not something that kept you up at night. All I'm gonna say — nine years.

"The poaching mechanic," he said, with very dramatic flair. One eyebrow raised as he swept his eyes along the entire table.

Someone gasped. So there were more actors around here. Interesting.

The poaching mechanic is the unhinged part. Something you hadn't initially accounted for. So imagine your surprise when you found out.

At any point during filming — any point, mid-challenge, mid-dinner, mid-whatever — any contestant can pull aside any other contestant's partner n' make their case. Leave them, come with me — or something along those lines. That's the move. And then two things have to happen simultaneously: the person being poached has to say yes, AND the public has to vote in favour. Both. At the same time. If either says no, the poach fails n' everyone goes back to their corners.

Which — imagine you just tried to steal someone's partner. Publicly. On Netflix. And it didn't work. And now you have to go back to sitting across the dinner table from both of them for however many episodes you have left. And your own Bond Score just took a hit because the public watched you attempt it n' the attempt failed n' that's its own kind of information about you as a couple.

And imagine being the couple that got targeted as well. Your partner got poached — meaning someone looked at your relationship and went yeah, you and me could do better — n' now that's on camera n' the public has opinions about it and your Bond Score is about to reflect those opinions too.

Naturally this creates an atmosphere. A very awkward one. And of course you weren't stupid — you knew most of the time it wouldn't be used out of genuine attraction, it was a strategy. A dangerous one. A third party wedging themselves in to make you publicly look bad n' get you out of the show.

So the thing was to look tight. Tighter than a slightly small latex suit. Absolutely dead-gripped.

Anyway.

"Additionally," Kusakabe said, looking at the camera in the far corner. "Production will occasionally place cameras in contestant bedrooms. You will not be informed when this occurs."

He smirked again.

Well, damn. This was new.

The entire table processed this at different speeds.

The blond guy put his flute down.

"Oh, how fun!" the dark-haired guy next to him said.

Satoru nodded once. Slowly. Looked at you peripherally as you looked back at him.

Well, damn.

He then talked some more about the general schedule, the history of the manor — the stuff that would make viewers absorb the atmosphere.

"Any questions before we begin?"

Satoru did not waste any time. He raised his hand. Stood up even.

"Just wanna say — huge fan," Satoru said. Completely sincere. "Since Paws to Perfection. Especially the season from three years ago." A pause. "Especially the English Cocker Spaniel versus Bichon Frisé episode. The drama." He chuckled timidly.

So this is where he knew the guy from. Like — yes, you had seen Satoru watching dogs on TV before. You just hadn't asked.

The table looked at Satoru. Kusakabe looked at Satoru. The cameras looked at Satoru.

"Well, uh. It surely pleases me that someone recognises me—" 

"The Cocker Spaniel's texture work was completely—" Satoru interrupted. Clearly still upset about this episode.

"Any other questions?" Kusakabe interrupted back. Obviously not wanting to debate dog haircuts during an entirely different show's taping.

The tall blond woman raised her hand right after.

"So the bedroom camera thing. Does that mean we can't have sex, or—"

You respected her. Enormously.

"The camera won't be there the entire time," he answered. "So you never know."

"So that's a yes," she deadpanned.

Her dark-haired, pale-looking boyfriend puckered his lips. C’mon now, could we be professionals? You could see the outcomes being weighed behind his eyelined eyes — possible Netflix-taped porn on one side, possible two-month-long dry spell on the other.

The rest of the dinner went well. You actually learned names! Mostly.

The stoic baddies sitting next to you were Shoko and Suguru — though you didn't exactly remember which one was Shoko and which was Suguru. Anyway. 

The miserable blond guy who looked like he wanted to be legally emancipated from this reality show was apparently Nanami, n' his boyfriend was Haibara. Absolute puppy. They looked way too sweet for this, you were so sorry in advance for what you and Satoru are about to do to them. Also you needed to know, why they even wanted in.

You obviously already recognised your day-drinking bestie Shimizu and Haruhi.  They were talking to a rather intense-looking couple — Utahime and Kashimo. Seriously, why did so many men here have long hair? Was there a Pantene sponsorship you missed in the contract? Were you supposed to force Satoru to grow out his too?

The tall blond woman who deadass asked about the sex cameras was Yuki. Mother. Her pale, alt emo boyfriend was Choso. 

And the far corner was the scary one.

Tattooed-up guy and his deeply suspicious-looking girlfriend — Sukuna and Mei Mei, as they introduced themselves. Yeah, no. You had this weird feeling about them. Like they would deadass sell your organs on the black market if you failed a trust fall. Avoid at all costs. 

They were mostly talking to the bleached clown and his poor, serene girlfriend, whose name you still lowkey hadn't caught. Because exactly when she was introducing herself, Satoru had decided to violently whisper something about the butter into your ear. 

Naoya had been glaring at you the entire dinner. You know this because you were glaring right back.

Game on, bitch.

The next morning was great in the sense that it was fucking cold.

Because you woke up to about zero percent of the duvet. Because Satoru had somehow, in his sleep, achieved full burrito formation — the entire thing wrapped around him like a cocoon — while you lay there in the cold like a Victorian orphan.

"Satoru."

Nothing.

"Satoru."

He made a noise. Pulled the duvet tighter.

Ugh. You hated him sometimes. Even if he looked kinda cute sleeping. Just a general observation, btw.

More importantly, on today's schedule was the first and only challenge of the week and you needed to smash it. Absolutely destroy it. Establish dominance. Show them who tf was the daddy in here.

It was in the gardens. You had to get ready right after breakfast, where you demolished approximately four sausages because Satoru had apparently decided to take your protein intake very seriously. You needed to be strong or something.

Anyway. You got the athleisure on. Matching Salomon XTs. You looked ready for Hyrox, which meant some PBs were about to get absolutely smashed today.

Kusakabe was already in the middle of explaining the challenge when you arrived outside.

Five stations visible across the grounds — structures, obstacles, markers — spread across the lawn in a way that looked like a PE lesson from hell. On steroids.

Kashimo had the vibrating energy of someone who'd been ready since approximately four in the morning, which made you mildly concerned.

Cameras everywhere. Drones. Production crew at every angle. What if the cameras made you look like you ran funny? Satoru would have to defend your honour through his burners.

"This is The Gauntlet," Kusakabe announced, looking at the five stations across the lawn. "Five stations. Each one requires both partners to complete it together. You cannot move to the next station until both of you have finished the current one. You'll be scored on synchronicity above speed, which means how well you work as a unit matters more than how fast you finish. The couple with the highest combined synchronicity score at the end wins immunity from this week's elimination vote and a ten-point Bond Score bonus." A pause. "You'll have as long as you need. There is no time limit. There is, however—" the faintest suggestion of something in his expression "—a leaderboard."

He gestured at a board to his left. Eight couple names. Currently blank. And the rules were too generous. You were about to be the fastest and the most synchronised. Mark my words.

"You may begin when you're ready."

Kashimo was already moving before the sentence finished. The fucker.

You looked at Satoru. He looked at you. Pre-game bro fist bump.

"Three twenty," he said.

"Three eighteen," you said, because you were going to win the argument retroactively.

You winked at the closest camera. And went.

Station one was communication. And it was immediately, aggressively loud.

Assemble a structure using verbal instructions only. No touching, no demonstrating, no gesturing. A production assistant handed you a diagram and a pile of components. So what were you playing now — Ikea employees simulator? Huh.

To your right, Naoya was already yelling at his girlfriend about how to hold something. To your left, Haruhi was shouting something about spatial awareness while Shimizu yelled back that she hadn't had enough espresso to know what space was. Couples barking directions. Panicking. Over-communicating.

You looked at the diagram. Looked at the components.

You started building.

In absolute silence.

Because look. The rules said verbal instructions only, which implied two people who had never done this before would require them. What the production team did not account for was years of shared shorthand so specific it had stopped being communication. Running two-person cons in environments where a single spoken word could get you arrested means you don't need to shout. You don't even need to speak.

His left hand twitched.

Bottom left piece first.

You slid it over.

Already on it.

He tapped his index finger.

The connector goes right, not left.

You flipped it.

Duh. I know.

Forty-three seconds.

Triple C. Complete. Correct. Cool.

And cringe. But like, what were you gonna do about it.

The production assistant looked at the diagram n' then  with serious, mild panic looked at Kusakabe, who was already doing TV host things toward the cameras.

You moved on. Because you were not freaking amateurs.

Station two was a beam run. Something feet long, elevated about three feet off the ground. One partner carries the other across. Don't fall. Simple.

Satoru looked at the beam like it had personally challenged him.

"I was born for this," he announced, unblinking.

"Please don't—"

He picked you up. Hoisted you into his arms and flexed for the cameras. Because, again, you were not amateurs — fanservice was as important as winning the challenges, and his biceps had already won over so many unsuspecting people. They would for sure win over the ladies watching at home.

You grabbed his neck on instinct.

"I'm going to cross it, come back, n' cross it again," he said. "Just to establish dominance."

"No—"

He stepped onto the beam.

The beam was narrower than it looked. Was he a female modern gymnast? What was this. Significantly, aggressively, personally narrower than he'd imagined during Kusakabe's explanation.

Fine. It was fine. He was coordinated. Great core strength. Amazing spatial awareness.

His first step landed fine. His second step landed fine. His third step—

Wobble.

"Your centre of gravity is shit as hell. And I swear to god if you drop me—"

"My centre of gravity is fucking flawless, thank you very much. You're just heavy. And if you hadn't eaten all four sausages n' left me one, like a great girlfriend would, I wouldn't feel so lightheaded right now."

"And couple eight seems to have started arguing — after such a smooth beginning!" Kusakabe announced from somewhere nearby.

You were absolutely not having that. You were the poster picture of serenity.

"WE ARE NOT—"

You both snapped your heads around simultaneously. Satoru squeezed you warningly.

Shut up.

He readjusted his grip — moving his arm from under your knees to right under your ass.

It tickled.

Weirdly tickled. Like a specifically inconvenient, newly discovered tickle spot in a location that was extremely unhelpful for your current television persona. You clamped your jaw shut, readjusted your arms around his neck, and stared very intently at a tree in the distance like a stoic war hero.

He steadied. Kept moving. Four more steps, three, two, one — and you were off the beam. But he wasn't setting you down, why—

"Going back," he said. "For the dominance lap."

"You are not doing a dominance lap—"

"Yes we are."

And yes, you did. The wobble must have been a glitch in the matrix because he ran back with zero issue, turned around, and sprinted back to the finish even quicker. You clung on. The cameras loved it. The leaderboard updated.

Three beams over, Suguru and Shoko were watching you in the middle of their own obstacle, genuinely horrified. Probably jealous of your immense skills.

Kusakabe had deadass nothing to say.

Station three aka finding the clue. Hidden somewhere on one partner's body. Find it and go.

Simple enough premise. The production assistant gestured at Satoru — clue was on him somewhere — n' stepped back.

The pre-challenge instructions had been simple: one partner secretly hides a written clue on their body without telling the other. Testing how well you know each other. Or whatever.

Around you, the other couples had descended into varying states of chaos. Haibara was patting Nanami down like TSA security.

You could hear Haibara: "Can you take your socks off for me?" Nanami, with tremendous restraint: "Why would it be in my socks."

Kashimo was spinning Utahime around in a circle, checking her like she was a lost item he'd misplaced. Mei Mei was doing a slightly inappropriate body check on Sukuna. Another fanservice enthusiasts. You gotta respect the hustle.

You just stepped into Satoru's space. Pursed your lips. Did a quick mental sweep of behavioural data. The lightbulb was already on.

You reached out. Took his left hand. Flipped it over.

And there it was. Inside of the wrist.

Bingo.

Small black letters on the inside of his left wrist, slightly faded from the challenge prep earlier.

Eleven seconds from the production assistant saying go. You read it out loud for production n' let go of his wrist.

Satoru smirked. You smirked. Smirking together like a couple of smirkers.

"Good girl," he said.

"You bet," you answered.

For your case, you two flirted in far worse ways on a regular basis, so this was practically camera appropriate. And mostly just for the cameras. Obviously.

Also, you knew where to look because Satoru had been writing things on his wrist since college. Exam cheat sheets. Con screenwrites. Grocery lists when he was in a rush. Everything important ended up on his veiny left wrist eventually.

Station four was a blur of his face being at a specific level while you retrieved something from a platform which you were not going to elaborate on and a weighted ball travelling from his chest to your hip via a configuration that was professionally handled, thank you very much.

And the last station was basically just sprint together to the finish line. Fifty metres. Cross simultaneously. Seemed easy enough, only for Satoru being a fucking giraffe.

So you ran.

Same stride. Same step. Same moment. Like you'd rehearsed it. Well, you kind of had — for years, actually. When you'd scammed an ice cream man for two popsicles during your weekly runs as national marathon runners who needed to replenish their glucose levels. The man never stood a chance.

First place. Of course.

The cameraman assigned to follow you was standing ten feet away, literally bent over, hands on his knees, panting like he was about to pass out. He hadn't been able to keep up.

Three minutes eighteen seconds.

Second was Kashimo n' Utahime at six forty-two. Fast, efficient, aggressive. But slow, lol. They'd needed words at station one. And two minutes at the clue station. Were these people actually in relationships or just a bunch of losers.

The production crew was dead silent. A few of them exchanging deeply unsettled looks. Handlers whispering into headsets.

Because — I'm going to be honest — it didn't look like true love, exactly. True love was sloppy. True love communicated. True love stumbled and laughed and helped each other up. Clumsy, slightly slow, sweet to look at. That was the challenge vision board from production.

What you two just did looked like military-grade telepathy. Disturbingly, terrifyingly efficient. Mostly just disturbing.

Kusakabe let the leaderboard update.

"Couple eight absolutely smashed it. Three minutes eighteen seconds. First place by a significant margin." A pause. "Your synchronicity score will be reflected in your Bond Score update within forty-eight hours. You have won immunity from this week's elimination vote."

He looked at you for one beat longer than anything else.

"Well done."

You looked at Satoru. He was already looking at you. Expression of a man who had confirmed something he already knew n' was extremely satisfied about it.

Satoru started celebrating like he'd just won the Stanley Cup. Toward the cameras. This man was the drama. Then held out his fist.

You bumped it.

"Three eighteen," you said.

"Basically three twenty," he rolled his eyes.

The rest of the first week was just filming content. Content content.

Tuesday you filmed the Connection Cam segment.

A producer with a clipboard n' a very specific idea of what organic couple content looked like had corralled you into a kitchen. The vibe mostly translated to: here are some ingredients, make something together n' be in love about it. So you made pasta.

Satoru narrated the entire process like a Food Network host who had incredibly strong opinions about al dente and absolutely zero formal culinary or media training.

The director loved it. Or at least he said he loved it, delivering the compliment with that weirdly tired, vacant smile of a man who just missed his family and wanted to go home.

You ate the pasta. It was fine. Fine-ish. Fine-adjacent. Fine-neighbouring. Fine-kinda. 

And by that, I mean he'd added way too much salt and you'd burned the sauce to a texture resembling industrial cement. Neither of you broke character once. You just sat there, chewing aggressively, maintaining unwavering, romantic eye contact while white-knuckling through the culinary hate crime like the professionals you were.

Wednesday morning, Netflix dropped the Between the Sprints TikTok content.

And they posted the ultimate dominance lap clip like they should have.

Forty-three seconds of him sprinting back across the beam with you clinging on for dear life. The cameras visibly scrambling to keep up. The cameraman physically dying in the background.

The caption Netflix used: couple 8 said efficiency is romantic actually 🏃‍♂️💨

Four hundred thousand views by noon.

The comments were largely just people screaming. Satoru was also screaming in the comments, obviously. He was locked in on his burners, typing shit like, "damn his thighs are really thighing in this vid respectfully." And people agreed. Again. He felt incredibly vindicated. You were incredibly annoyed.

The preliminary Bond Score updated mid-week.

You were expecting like a humble 105/100 and a massive, dedicated fanbase already fighting for your honour on Twitter.

23/100.

Huh.

"It'll come," you gaslighted.

"Obviously," he gaslighted further.

And that was the whole convo. Because you weren't worried. The Connection Cam content hadn't fully dropped yet. The confessionals hadn't aired. The challenge clip had barely landed. The episode was airing this Saturday!

It was week one data only. The score reflected a few days of footage from eight couples n' you'd only been here for one of them. The math was simply mathing against you. You two were always late bloomers anyways.

It would come. It will come.

Thursday, Naoya's first personal clip dropped.

It was — look. It was what it was. The edit was not kind. The edit was not even trying to be kind. The editors had fully chosen violence and woke up wanting blood, which slay, perhaps literally.

His partner's confessional clip also dropped Thursday afternoon. Ten seconds and it just enough. She looked directly into the camera, blinking like a hostage, and simply said: "I think I'm learning a lot about myself this week."

Forty thousand likes.

The comment section was a graveyard of crying emojis. Satoru thoughtfully added a few more through his burners, tagging Amnesty International just to support the algorithm.

Friday you taped your confessionals for the entire episode.

Individual interview. Just you or Satoru, then even together, the producers asking questions, n' the camera. Simple.

You'd seen Love Island. You knew how to perform. You knew exactly what they wanted — a little honest, a little lying, a little mean, a little sweet. The perfectly manufactured reality TV persona from hell and Twitter discourses.

The producers asked about the challenge. You answered.

They asked about the other couples. You answered.

They asked about Satoru. You answered.

They didn't even ask about your opinion about Naoya's bleached hair. You still answered.

The live show was a different beast entirely.

They had built a full broadcast studio right on the estate grounds. Production had spackled you in an ungodly amount of stage makeup, squeezed you onto a sleek couch, and placed you under actual blinding studio lights in front of an actual live audience. 

There is a very specific and surreal psychological trauma in realising you're about to watch yourself on television for the first time while hundreds of people actively watch you watch yourself. 

What if somewhere in the episode your left kneecap will look weird again and you will have to pretend to not be insecure about your left kneecap? That bitch loves to act out at the most inconvenient times— 

All eight couples were arranged in a loose semi-circle. Cameras everywhere. Not the hidden documentary ones from the manor, but massive, red-blinking broadcast lenses feeding live to God knows how many people.

Kusakabe was entirely in his element.

Greeting the audience, pivoting seamlessly between cameras, effortlessly building the tension. He introduced the couples one by one. He got to you and Satoru, looked directly into the lens, and said something about Couple Eight possessing a romantic energy that was "a bit concerning for public safety."

Wait. What?

"Welcome to the first live elimination of The Soulmate Sprint."

They played the episode first.

Forty-five minutes of footage you had literally lived through, now chopped, screwed, and edited into a narrative that vaguely resembled your week but significantly more unhinged. 

The dinner was there. Kusakabe's briefing. Yuki's question about the sex cameras for comedy relief. All of it.

And then there was the smack™.

On a fifty-foot jumbotron, the ass-spank — in slow motion, mind you — did not look like a cute, unprompted form of PDA. It looked like Satoru had absolutely zero home training and you two had no manners whatsoever. Which was made infinitely worse by the fact that production had maliciously interlaced it with a solo confessional Satoru had filmed the day before.

Satoru, on screen, looking dead into the camera with absolute, sociopathic confidence: "I saw the opportunity n' I took it. Simple as that. Sometimes you just see it n' you go. No hesitation."

Smash cut to your confessional.

You, on screen hands pressed over your mouth. Complete silence. Your eyes unblinking.

The live audience made a collective noise of pure scandal. Across the couch, Sukuna and Mei Mei actually giggled. Giggled.

You maintained the most difficult poker face of your entire fucking life. Because what do you mean he went to his confessional shoot yesterday n' said that about spanking you? Voluntarily? Unprompted?

"I swear," Satoru hissed next to you, his arm snaking securely around your waist. He was smiling brightly and fakely as hell. "I swear to god, that was taken criminally out of context."

"Uh huh," you said. Your own smile was so fixed it felt like lockjaw.

"I was talking about the challenge! The beam run!"

"Sure," you said.

"They asked me about why I ran back and forth—"

"Satoru," you said. Very pleasantly. "The cameras are on us."

He stopped. Looked at the red blinking light on the camera directly in front of you. Smiled at it. You smiled at him. You smiled at the camera. You were already mentally calculating the perfect physical trajectory to kick him squarely in his own ass the second you were off stage.

Then — because the editors were not finished, because they apparently wanted you to legally perish on live television — they rolled the next clip.

You, at the dinner. Laughing cheerfully. "You're actually kinda funny, Haruhi."

The miserable guy looking at you.

You, already moving on, completely unbothered, continuing the offshore tax havens debate with Shimizu like you hadn't just legally renamed a man.

Cut to the guy's confessional.

"She seemed very confident about it," Higuruma said, staring blankly into the lens. "I found that compelling so I decided to wait and see how long it would last."

The audience absolutely howled.

You turned around to the couch behind you. They sat right behind you. And the miserable guy who was apparently named Higuruma? Huh.

You looked at him in absolute horror. You looked at Shimizu. She gave you a pained, but sympathetic grimace.

You snapped your head back around to Satoru.

He was vibrating. One hand clamped over his mouth, shoulders physically shaking under the studio lights as he lost the brutal war against hysterical laughter.

"What the fuck," you hissed through a camera-ready smile. "You knew all along and didn't tell me?"

Satoru genuinely couldn't stop laughing, that fucker. Entirely abandoning his microphone etiquette. He wiped a singular tear from his eye. "I waited the entire week for you to clock it. And I prayed to every god that you wouldn’t for this exact moment."

"Fuck you, what the hell—"

"This is for 'Sotaru', bitch," he whispered back, his blue eyes gleaming with vengeance with capital V.

Ah.

Right.

I mean. I said you were shit with names. Always had been.

And this dated waaay back to the fateful alumni gala, after which you two had gone to McDonald's to celebrate this newfound con-panionship over chicken nuggies and ice cream — and the ice cream machine was not broken, so you know it was fated.

The entire first month you'd called him Sotaru to his face because you genuinely thought that was his name n' he was too deeply offended to correct you.

You couldn't even defend yourself because the jumbotron instantly smash cut to the Gauntlet.

The tonal whiplash in the studio was physical. One second the audience was laughing at your sheer incompetence as a human being, n' the next they were watching you and Satoru dismantle an obstacle course with the cold efficiency of two grift assassins.

The clip ended on you two standing at the finish line. Not breathing hard. Not even hugging. Just staring deadass at the camera like it was your first day on Earth.

The studio audience didn't know how to react. A smattering of confused, terrified applause broke out, which quickly swelled into a massive roar of validation.

Satoru, instantly recovering from his laughing fit and emboldened by the noise, stood up from the couch. He ignored the absolute PR nightmare of a narrative you two had just been handed n' gave the live audience a smug, theatrical little bow.

Kusakabe let the applause settle.

"Thank you, couple eight," he said. "Please sit down, Satoru."

Satoru sat down. Still grinning. You, still computing whether kicking him was worth the camera coverage.

"Now. The Bond Scores," Kusakabe announced, turning to the broadcast camera with the enthusiasm of a man reading a ransom note. "This is the ultimate metric of our contestants' connections. A score from zero to one hundred, calculated entirely by your votes. It measures chemistry, authenticity, and how deeply you believe in their love story. High scores bring safety and power in the game. The lowest scores face the chopping block." 

The jumbotron shifted. Eight couple names. Eight blank scores. The entire studio went quiet with anticipation. This was it, this was your proper time to shine—

Kusakabe read them from the top.

"Geto Suguru and Ieiri Shoko."

The number appeared.

71.

"Congratulations. You seem to have won over a solid portion of our audience," Kusakabe said. "Let's see what the public had to say."

A tweet flashed onto the jumbotron:

@/realitytvjunkie: they look like they share a mortgage and a deep, mutual exhaustion with society. stable. 10/10.

Suguru gave a polite, measured nod. Shoko smugly fixed her hair n' gave the camera a very small, very measured smile.

"Yuki and Choso."

88.

@/alt_baddie99: she is a queen he is a yearner. true love exists and it's them.

Yuki blew a kiss to the camera. Choso, the alt baddie he was, stayed completely stoic.

Down the line. 65s. 79s. Solid, respectable numbers for people who hadn't spent their week arguing about sandwich taxonomy, accidentally renaming lawyers, and spanking each other in high definition.

Naoya and his partner got 45. The audience gave a lukewarm, vaguely uncomfortable golf clap. Naoya looked like he was about to demand a recount. You smirked. Forty-five was pathetic. Forty-five was the score of a man who radiated intense, unwashed incel energy. Serves him right.

Then.

The final card.

You sat up a little straighter. Satoru adjusted his cuffs.

Look. You knew the mid-week preliminary update on Wednesday had been rough. But that was just a tease. A little jab. Something to make you work haarder. 

You were expecting the highest score now, because obviously — you'd won the challenge, you were the stars of the show's Instagram, you were simply meant to take the week's double win. An iconic, dramatic week for the golden couple perfect for a reality TV narrative— 

Kusakabe looked at the card. Actively rolled his lips in.

"And finally. Couple Eight."

He didn't even try to build the suspense. He just dropped the guillotine.

"Twenty-six out of one hundred."

The jumbotron flashed red.

26.

Dead silence.

Then a collective, physical gasp from the studio audience and from you.

H-motherfucking-UH???

You froze.

Twenty-six.

Twenty-what-six???? Are you fucking kidding me right now??

Only a three-point increase? You fed that man grapes like a concubine for the TikTok content and it gave you a only three-point increase since Wednesday? The incel couple that barely spoke to each other unless they were arguing got a forty-five, n' you two got a freaking twenty-six?!

Satoru's arrogant peace sign!, which he had deployed right before Kusakabe looked at the card, slowly lowered. His fake smile completely disappeared, replaced by a look of ego-shattering offence. He looked like someone had just walked up and spat directly on his limited edition Adidas Sambas.

You were genuinely, deeply insulted. Yes, you had immunity from the Gauntlet. Yes, you were safe from elimination. But that wasn't the point, now was it. You were supposed to be selling the greatest love story of the century, and the public had just looked at your absolute best material and hit the reject button with extreme prejudice. The society is collectively so uncultured, it hurt— 

You had known each other longer than most of the couples here had even been together! How did that even make sense.

"Uh, let's see what the public had to say," Kusakabe said, sounding like a man who actively wanted to go home.

A tweet appeared:

@/detective_truth: are they in love or are they holding each other hostage for a five million dollar ransom?? the vibes really aint it. VOTE THEM OUT.

Satoru's left eye twitched as he stared at the giant screen.

"Twenty-six," Satoru whispered next to you, his voice vibrating with pure, unadulterated outrage. "Naoya beats me by nineteen points? Naoya?"

"I'm going to find @detective_truth," you whispered back, your eyes murderous as you stared into the audience. "I'm going to find them n' cyberbully their entire family out of their internet usage."

"Damn," Kusakabe said. "That's rough. Anyways." He looked at the camera, fighting the urge to smirk at y’all. Lol. "But couple eight, you're lucky. You won the immunity challenge, so you're safe from this week's elimination. The bottom two eligible couples, please step forward."

Naoya n' his partner. Kashimo n' Utahime.

The lighting went dramatic. You were suddenly plunged into darkness, the spotlight shifting entirely onto the standing couples. Which was frankly kinda rude. You had great hair and the stage makeup made you look like a complete sexy diva — it was a waste not to broadcast it for as long as possible. But to each their own.

Dramatic music. Dramatic pause from the host. Dramatic suspense from the audience. Dramatic knee-bouncing from Satoru next to you.

You just hoped the bleached clown would get the fuck out of here. He was ruining your vibe. It was definitely partly his fault your Bond Score had plummeted — you couldn't fully emit lover-girl energy when your man-hating radar was locked onto the biggest man-hating target in the current zip code! The other part of the blame was obviously on the audience, because your performance of unconditional love was unmatched and they just didn’t know shit.

Also, you were still stuck on the fact that Kusakabe had really just hit you with damn, that's rough on live television. Can people be like at least a bit sympathetic towards you? How can you show this to your parents? It was disgraceful.

Utahime and Kashimo stepped forward. They looked deeply annoyed but held their heads high. Also you could see them glaring at you sideways a bit, but guess what losers, you're the ones standing. Should have been more coordinated and quicker. Blame it on your un-athleticism. Duh.

Kashimo's Pantene-commercial hair blew slightly in the studio wind for dramatic effect.

But they were still respectable losers, gotta give ‘em that.

Naoya, meanwhile, was visibly malfunctioning.

His face went from pale to a violently dangerous shade of purple. He was looking around the studio like he was preparing to legally sue the live audience for defamation. Getting out-voted by a couple with a 26/100 who were only surviving on a technicality was apparently destroying his entire worldview in real time.

"The public has voted," Kusakabe announced, holding up the final card. "The couple leaving the estate tonight is—"

Another dramatic pause for dramatic effect of the dramatic moment.

"Naoya and Yorozu."

Oooh. So that was her name. Well, anyway. Better late than never, am I right!

And look.

You tried.

You genuinely, sincerely, professionally, nicely!, tried to maintain the composed, camera-ready expression of a gracious competitor who felt nothing but warmth and game respect for their fellow contestants and wished them only well on their onward journey.

You lasted approximately half a second.

The laugh came out.

Not a polite suppressed smile. Nah, you were too undignified and rude for that. Not even a quiet huff that could be edited into something charitable. A bit unhinged, one hundred percent audible laugh that bubbled straight outta your chest.

You covered your mouth immediately. But the damage was done and it kept going. The cameras were directly on you. And Satoru next to you was doing the most transparent job in television history of not also laughing.

Kusakabe turned his head. Just stared at you. He genuinely didn't know what to do. Because what do you even do as a host in this situation.

Naoya's face went through several stages in quick succession. Bafflement was the dominant one. He had genuinely not seen this coming, could not work out what had happened, was going to spend a significant amount of time thinking about it, and still not arrive at the correct answer.

Godspeed.

── Dividers from robinavitchslut and ferretmilkshakezzz!

[fukiouh]

The Oath | royal!gojo x knight!reader | taglist

In a world bound by oaths and ruled by duty, you were assigned to protect Satoru Gojo, a reckless, arrogant prince whose carelessness is a walking death sentence. As a lady knight, the court expects you to fail. Satoru expects you to be like all the rest: easily charmed, easily broken, and easily forgotten. But proximity is a dangerous thing. What begins as mutual contempt soon erodes into a forbidden, unspoken devotion that threatens to burn both of your lives to the ground. And when the crown finally forces the truth into the open, bridges will have to burn. Because the true legend was never the throne, it was the devastating price you were both willing to pay for the one thing neither of you was ever allowed: a choice of your own.

pairing: prince/king!gojo x knight!reader

warnings: 18+ (mdni!!), explicit sexual content, afab!reader, fantasy kingdom au, knight!reader, prince/king!gojo, heavy angst, slow burn, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, secret relationship, forbidden love, extreme power imbalance, systemic sexism and internalized misogyny, classism, toxic family dynamics, self-sacrificial reader, emotional repression, graphic depictions of violence, war themes, grief/character death (secondary characters), mutual pining, mutual stubbornness, both are bad at feelings, eventual bittersweet happy ending

more tags to be added!

word count: ??k

masterlist | crossposted on ao3!

fic masterpost

Decided to make a taglist for this fic!

Since it’s probably gonna end up being around 20ish chapters, I figured some of you might wanna be notified whenever I post an update—especially because I have absolutely zero posting schedule and chapters will appear whenever my brain decides it’s time lmfao.

Obviously no pressure at all! This is just for anyone who’s invested in the story and doesn’t wanna accidentally miss an update.

If you’d like to be added, just leave a comment under this post! And if you ever want to be removed from the taglist, just let me know at any point. 🫶

’Twas all!

Taglist below the cut! ❤️

@29s2 , @5-applepi-5 , @tomitoni ,

── Dividers from pxrce-lain and seulzitos!

[fukiouh]

The Oath | royal!gojo x knight!reader | chapter 2

In a world bound by oaths and ruled by duty, you were assigned to protect Satoru Gojo, a reckless, arrogant prince whose carelessness is a walking death sentence. As a lady knight, the court expects you to fail. Satoru expects you to be like all the rest: easily charmed, easily broken, and easily forgotten. But proximity is a dangerous thing. What begins as mutual contempt soon erodes into a forbidden, unspoken devotion that threatens to burn both of your lives to the ground. And when the crown finally forces the truth into the open, bridges will have to burn. Because the true legend was never the throne, it was the devastating price you were both willing to pay for the one thing neither of you was ever allowed: a choice of your own.

pairing: prince/king!gojo x knight!reader

warnings: 18+ (mdni!!), explicit sexual content, afab!reader, fantasy kingdom au, knight!reader, prince/king!gojo, heavy angst, slow burn, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, secret relationship, forbidden love, extreme power imbalance, systemic sexism and internalized misogyny, classism, toxic family dynamics, self-sacrificial reader, emotional repression, graphic depictions of violence, war themes, blood and gore, grief/character death (secondary characters), mutual pining, mutual stubbornness, both are bad at feelings, eventual bittersweet happy ending

more tags to be added!

word count: 9k+

masterlist | crossposted on ao3!

fic masterpost | previous chapter | next chapter

The corridor outside the court lady's chambers was cold in the particular way things got after midnight, laced with the day's exhaustion, the kind that left you just counting down the time before you could finally lay in your own bloody bed. Even the torches seemed to burn smaller, conserving themselves for morning, yet here you were.

You'd counted the exits twice already. Two — the door you stood beside, and a window on the far wall, second floor, drop survivable but not pleasant. You'd noted the wine service hours ago, watched the same attendant carry the same tray in, nothing switched, nothing lingering longer than it should. You knew the layout of this wing by now better than you probably knew your own quarters. Six months of this particular lady, give or take, though the names changed often enough that you'd stopped bothering to remember most of them. Though, you thought, since they didn't bother to learn your name, you'd be petty enough not to learn theirs. But you were genuinely losing track at times.

None of it would matter if someone actually wanted him dead. You knew that too. But knowing it didn't change what you did with the hours — you ran the sweep anyway, every time, because the one night you didn't would be the one night it mattered, and you weren't going to be the reason this post claimed another fucking name. The post was yours now, and you meant to keep it long enough that the court would finally be forced to learn that you took the duty seriously along with it.

The door opened a little after three. Three in the morning.

He came out half-dressed, shirt open, hair worse than usual, that particular looseness in his shoulders that told you exactly what kind of night it had been before he had to say a single word. He noticed you immediately — you were always exactly where he expected you to be, which seemed to amuse and irritate him in roughly equal measure depending on his mood.

Tonight, apparently, amusement won. The night had seemed to be a success, after all.

"Still here." He tsked. Stretching, completely unbothered, like the corridor was a mere extension of whatever room he'd just left. "What, you thought she was gonna murder me mid-thrust?"

"It's my job to be here, Your Highness."

"It's stupid is what it is." He tugged his shirt closed, lazy, not actually bothering with the buttons. "Nobody's poisoning me. Nobody's smuggling a blade in her—" he paused, smirked, clearly pleased with wherever the sentence had been about to go. "Ease off. She was just trying to suck my dick, not assassinate me."

You'd heard versions of this sentence enough times now that it should have landed soft, worn smooth by repetition. The crude language usually ranged from one profanity to another, the royal seemingly unbothered by how openly he said it — it should have gone in one ear and out the other by now.

It didn't, tonight. Something about it caught — sharper, closer to the surface than it usually sat — and you had to actually stop yourself before the words got too away from you.

"With respect," you said, voice level, head bowing slightly — the prince was still easily irritable even in good spirits — "I'd rather be wrong about nothing happening than right about something I didn't catch."

He blinked. Like the answer had cost more effort than he'd expected to provoke.

"Riveting," he said, after a beat too long. "Truly. I'll sleep well knowing you're out here protecting me from the lady's devastating bedroom skills."

You opened your mouth, almost drawing breath to spend it on another subtle argument. Oh, how you wanted to tell the princeling off — how badly you'd wanted it these past many weeks. Quite a record, for someone of your composure of steel, to have it repeatedly cracked by the prince without him even maliciously trying.

But you said nothing. It wasn't worth it. You bit your tongue instead and kept your eyes pinned to his terribly fastened hose, not wanting to — not desiring to — meet his gleeful blue eyes. You'd learned, years deep into a life built on saying nothing, that silence cost you less than the alternative.

He huffed — something between a laugh and a dismissal — and wandered off down the corridor toward his own chambers, not bothering to check if you followed.

You followed. You always did.

He didn't speak again for the rest of the walk, which was its own small mercy. You kept a polite distance behind him, watching the back of his half-buttoned shirt and the loose, unhurried way he moved through the corridors. The heels of his boots tap tap tapped the stone in a lazy, repetitive cadence as if he were entirely drunk on his own easiness. It was a castle that belonged to him in every sense except the one that actually mattered tonight: the sense where someone had to walk behind him, making sure he made it to his own bed alive. 

Not that you were being overtly paranoid about him getting assassinated left and right, but you could never really know. Not with the way the political landscape had been looking recently.

Every careless walk cost something, and you'd rather not sleep than let that something happen. The door to his chambers shut a few minutes later. You exchanged glances with the guards positioned outside it that night and went off to your own.

How you hated the way he seemingly never cared about anything — every encounter easily forgotten, or simply never cared about enough for him to think about it properly, sensibly, in the first place.

And yet you weren't quite sure why you were still thinking about it.

This became a routine. Naturally.

It wasn't just the late-night rendezvous. It wasn't just standing around in this particular irritating stillness, waiting for the prince to be properly indulged.

It was everything.

There was the morning on the archery range, weeks back now, when he'd insisted on shooting while still half-drunk from the night before, laughing every time he missed, treating his own wavering aim like the funniest thing in the realm.

You'd worn a gambeson that day — the new one, lighter, freshly gifted and delivered by the seamstress.

He'd had a goblet of wine balanced on the fence post, sipping between shots like the range was a dinner party rather than weapons practice, and you'd told him, more than once, that drinking and loose arrows didn't mix well in any kingdom you'd ever served in. He'd told you, more than once, that you worried like an old woman, and that as far as he knew, you'd only ever lived in his kingdom. Touché.

You'd stood close enough to step between him and any stray nonsense — a startled horse, an overeager squire wandering into the wrong line of fire — closer than protocol technically required, because half-drunk princes with bows in their hands were exactly the kind of risk nobody else in this castle seemed to take seriously except you.

One particularly bad shot finally went wide — badly wide, clattering off the target stand entirely — and sent him stumbling back a step in surprise at his own failure, elbow catching the fence post clean, and the goblet went down with him. Wine arced through the air in a long, dark ribbon and caught you both — him across the chest, you and your brand new garment as well.

He stared at the mess of red staining his shirt for a second. Then at you.

He'd noticed you hovering and called out, loud enough for the watching guards to hear, that you looked more sour than the wine did, then started laughing. You hadn't found that especially funny either.

Or the council sessions — or rather, the ones he even bothered to attend — where he'd spent the entire two hours doodling something in the margin of a report nobody had asked him to annotate, sighing loud enough twice that the treasury minister visibly lost his place mid-sentence. 

You'd stood behind his chair the whole time, feeling every eye in the room slide toward you for half a second, like you were somehow responsible for keeping a grown man interested in his own kingdom's finances. 

That day you were particularly opinionated — well, in your own head at least — about how, why, and for what bloody reason the advisory would look at you like you were his fucking babysitter and not his guard. But then again, if every twenty-year-old heir acted the way Gojo did, the kingdoms were about to have some collective internal issues incoming.

The nights he tried to leave the castle grounds entirely weren't exactly rare either. One particular night, after a skirmish broke out near the capital between some merchant convoys a fortnight back, he decided to properly leave again — past the outer wall, past the last checkpoint, the kind of disappearing that would have taken him somewhere you genuinely couldn't have followed in time if something had gone wrong.

You'd caught him at the gatehouse, breathless, having sprinted the length of two corridors and a courtyard to do it, and you'd had to practically beg him to come back inside. The ever-amused prince had only half-listened, until you, at your wit's end, threatened to call the guards.

There was the afternoon he'd lost you on purpose — probably bitter from you tailing behind more than usual — properly lost you, not the usual half-hearted wandering. He'd slipped through a servant's passage you must have forgotten, timing it for the exact moment your attention had legitimately split between him and a courier trying to hand you a message. 

Ten minutes. Ten minutes of cold, climbing dread, running the wing twice, your mind already constructing the worst version of events before you'd found him in the kitchens, charming a baker out of a tray of pastries, utterly unaware that you'd spent those ten minutes rehearsing how you were going to explain his death to his father.

He'd laughed when he saw your face. "Relax," he'd said, mouth full. "M'right here."

You hadn't found it funny. You still didn't, months later, the memory surfacing at inconvenient times like a bruise you kept forgetting to stop pressing.

The accumulated weight of his attempts to fluster you — a comment here, a look there, the particular smirk he wore when he thought he'd finally found the thing that would crack you. 

He hadn't, not really, not in any way he could see. You'd gotten good at giving him nothing. Flat replies. Bowed head. Unreadable face. Which, quite frankly, made you wonder what would happen if you eventually did crack. Would he stop being so cruel, or would he retaliate tenfold?

Most days.

Though, to his grace, there were also the quiet ones — stretches where neither of you spoke more than required, maybe less, where hostility had stopped being something either of you performed and had just become the weather you both idled in. Those days were almost a relief, in their own exhausting way. At least silence didn't require you to keep proving anything.

You were so tired.

Not the kind of tired sleep fixed. The other kind.

The new girl's name was, well, you didn't remember — she'd introduced herself too quietly the first time. She was young, barely past her training year by the look of her, hands moving over the wardrobe with careful precision.

You stood near the door, not quite posted, not quite at ease — the in-between stance you were forced to use when you were technically on duty but the duty in question was watching someone else do theirs.

"She seems competent enough," Gojo said, not quietly, not exactly to you either — the way he said most things when he wanted an audience without admitting he wanted one. He was sprawled in the lavish chair by the window, one boot off, the other still half-laced, watching the young attendant refold something she'd already folded twice.

"She's merely nervous," you said. "That's different from incompetent."

"Mm." He didn't sound convinced. 

The girl's hands slipped on the next fold — a small thing, fabric catching wrong, nothing that really mattered — and she flushed, glancing toward both of you like she expected to be reprimanded for it.

"It's fine," you told her, before the prince could say anything else. "Take your time."

She nodded, quick, grateful, and went back to it with slightly steadier hands.

Gojo watched the exchange with the lazy attention he reserved for things that hardly amused him.

"See, that's the trick," he said, swinging his half-laced boot idly. "Be a little useless, a little sweet about it, and everyone falls over themselves being nice to you." He glanced at you, deliberate, the corner of his mouth already curling. "You should try it sometime. Might do you some good, old woman."

You'd heard it before. Dozens of times by now, easy, the shape of it almost blunt from overuse — old woman, like your competence was a costume you'd put on specifically to annoy him. Like a mere three years older had turned you into an ancient crone, hated by everyone. You'd learned quickly that no matter how well, how strictly you followed the codex, how restlessly you did your own job, it would never be enough for him. Treating you like some fanatic, following him around. Well, apparently you might as well be.

Today, something in you didn't bow either. The drawer was overflowing with the shit he kept doing, and one small, tiny thing escaped your composure.

"Funny," you said, before you'd fully decided to say anything at all, "that you'd rather I flinch and fumble like she does than do the job I swore would keep you alive."

The words just stumbled out of your mouth. But by the look of it, the prince seemed rather delighted than irritated.

His eyebrows went up, slow, something sharpening behind his cunning eyes. "Careful."

"I'm only being honest, Your Highness." Your voice was level, but only barely. "Isn't that what I swore as well?"

That landed somewhere — you watched it land, the brief flicker of him recalculating, the realization that you'd just turned his own jab into a quote from his own oath ceremony, and for a second he didn't have a ready answer for it. That was certainly new.

"Don't get smart with me."

"I'm only doing my job," you said, sharper this time.

The room stilled for a moment.

Gojo sat forward, boot forgotten, and for a long moment you genuinely didn't know what was about to happen — whether he'd laugh it off, snap back harder, or whether the careful composure was about to detonate in front of a terrified attendant who'd picked the worst possible day to start this job.

"...Right," he said eventually, voice quieter than you'd ever heard it. He looked back toward her instead of you — she was very studiously staring at the floor now. "Carry on, then."

You felt the heat climbing up your neck.

"Apologies, Your Highness." Your voice clipped back into its usual careful register, the mask sliding into place with visible effort. "That was out of line."

He didn't answer. And for the very first time, it was you who had the last word.

It was the king who told you — well, told the prince, obviously — not the council. He called the two of you in alone, which should have told you everything about how seriously this needed to be taken, given how rarely the king bothered with anyone below ministerial rank directly.

"The delegation from the North-east arrives in a week," he said, plain, tired in the way he always seemed lately. "I expect both of you prepared. This dinner matters more than most things you've sat through, Satoru. I need you sharp."

"I'm always sharp," Gojo said, already halfway to the door before his father had finished the sentence.

"Satoru."

"I heard you, father. Delegation. ‘Suppose it has something to do with the peace treaty, no? A week from now. Sharp." He didn't slow down. "Now, allow me. I've got sparring in twenty minutes."

The king's expression didn't change, exactly, but something in it settled into the specific weariness you'd started recognizing — not anger, just the tired acceptance of a father who'd stopped expecting his son to behave differently and had long since redirected that hope elsewhere.

Toward you, mostly, you'd come to understand, whether either of you had ever said so out loud. But unlike others, perhaps because he understood the actual cost of it, he didn't expect you to correct his own son — that was beyond what you could do. What anyone could apparently do. Though the hopeful, almost pleading expectation in his eyes told you enough of what you were supposed to be doing, at all times.

You found him in the training yard twenty minutes later, exactly as promised, sword already in hand, working through forms with a focus he never seemed to manage for anything that actually required it.

"You heard your father," you said, no preamble.

"Clever girl, yes, I indeed heard him. I'm not deaf." He didn't break stride, blade cutting clean arcs through the morning air. "Doesn't mean I need a week to prepare for a bloody dinner."

"This isn't just dinner. You know that." You crossed your arms, watching him work. "You almost started a war with a stray comment at the harvest banquet. With people who actually like us."

"That's an exaggeration. I merely shared a humorous jab at the fürst's expense. To lighten the mood a little. Those old geezers didn't know how to have fun—"

You expected him to follow up, to call you old, ancient even, just like he always did, seemingly bothered by you being older than him. But it weirdly didn't come this time around.

"Is it." You held his gaze when he finally glanced over, surprised, maybe, at the lack of careful deference in your voice. "Because I'd rather not find out what an exaggeration looks like with people who don't."

He stopped mid-form — a bad one, on top of that — sword lowering slightly, something crossing his face that wasn't quite an annoyance, closer to genuine consideration, which was rarer from him than you'd ever admit out loud.

"You're getting uncharacteristically bold," he said, not unkindly. Almost curious about it, the corner of his mouth twitching as if he'd found a new game to play.

"I'm only following orders," you said. "There's a difference, Your Highness."

He huffed something that might have been a laugh, shook his head, and went back to his spar — but slower this time, more deliberate, and you let yourself believe, for a moment, that you'd actually gotten something through.

The entire week passed strangely, expectant and dreadful in a way.

The prince spent most of it deciding what to wear.

You found this out the hard way — passing his chambers on the second afternoon to find no fewer than six outfits laid across every available surface, the tailor wringing his hands over collar styles while Gojo held two near-identical doublets up to the wistful, sunny light, debating their merits with the gravity of a man choosing a battle strategy.

"This one says competent," he announced, to nobody in particular, "and this one says competent but approachable. Which message do we want?"

"The council materials," you said, from the doorway. "Have you actually read them?"

"I glanced."

"Glancing isn't reading, Your Highness."

"It's reading-adjacent, knight." He held up a third doublet. "What about this one. Does this say 'I respect the sovereignty of your nation' or does this say 'I am, regrettably, a very handsome man and there's nothing to be done about it'?"

You didn't dignify that with an answer. You'd tried, twice now, to find someone — anyone — who could give you something more useful than the thin briefing you'd already memorized.

The minister of foreign affairs had been too busy. His deputy had assumed, politely but firmly, that someone in your position would already know the relevant protocols. Nobody seemed to consider that knights coming from less fortunate social and political standings weren't taught this at all. Nobody seemed to consider that you needed teaching at all — some quick diplomatic briefing to show what was allowed and what wasn't, to point out a few important social cues — but it was all to no avail.

So you'd read the same three pages of formal guidance over and over until the words lost their original meaning, and told yourself, convinced yourself, that it would have to be enough.

It did not feel like enough, and it still didn't, even days later, when the delegation's banners finally appeared above the eastern road — a deep, regal green you didn't recognize against gold thread that caught the morning light in a way that felt almost deliberately impressive, visible from the upper courtyard long before the actual procession came into view.

You stood posted among the king's knights and the queen's, your place at the edge of their formation rather than fully inside it. You'd gotten used to this kind of alone. The autumn morning's chill only solidified it further. Surrounded by people who had each other — partners, rotations, someone to perhaps share a meaningless joke with during the long wait — while you had only yourself, your sword, and your thinning patience for your dear princeling.

"Didn't think you'd still be standing here," one of the king's knights said, low, beside you. You recognized him vaguely — one of the three from your very first day, the one who'd let himself have the crude joke at your expense, all those years and lifetimes ago, it felt like.

"Did you think I'd have quit?"

"Thought you'd be dead or disgraced, if I'm honest." He didn't say it unkindly. More like an old joke he was revising in real time. "No offense."

"None taken." You smiled weakly — not sad, nor offended, but rather taking in what it meant, and why it meant so much to you right now.

He grunted something close enough to approval, and didn't say anything else, but he also didn't make the joke you'd half-braced for, and that, you'd learned, was its own kind of compliment in a place like this. Nobody was laughing at your expense this morning. Nobody had, in longer than you could easily remember.

You let yourself feel something close to pride about that, standing there in the cold morning air, watching the delegation's procession wind up through the gates.

By evening, the foreign delegation had been settled into their guest wing, the formalities of welcome completed, and the castle had shifted into an expectant hush.

You found Gojo in his chambers an hour before the dinner was due to begin, finally dressed — the competent-but-approachable doublet had won, apparently — and looking, for once, genuinely nervous underneath the performed ease.

"You look like you're about to be executed," he said, catching your expression in the mirror's reflection rather than turning around.

"I look focused," you deflected, tentatively and subconsciously fixing the sash draped over your breastplate, like a reminder that it was still there, easing your own nerves in the process.

"You look like someone who's about to ruin my evening with excessive vigilance again." He adjusted his collar one final time, then turned to face you properly, something almost like amusement flickering across his face, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. He stopped in front of you, glancing down — at you, and at your gloved hand still resting on the sash. "Relax. It's just a dinner. With new, important people, but a dinner no less."

You didn't answer that. You weren't sure, yet, whether he was right.

The dining hall was smaller than the main, ceremonial receiving one — more intimate, by the castle's standards, which still meant a ceiling high enough to swallow most of the candlelight before it reached the corners, long tables set with more silver than you'd ever seen assembled in one place, the whole room lavishly arranged with a precision that told you everything had been considered. Flower arrangements, decorative, season- and occasion-appropriate. Even the number of servants and attendants seemed measured against some careful line between enough and too much.

The seating wasn't random either, of course. You'd watched the steward agonize over the chart for two full days — who sat beside whom, who faced whom across the table, who was close enough to the head to matter, and who was positioned, deliberately, just far enough to signal something you didn't fully understand.

You knew the shape of it, if not the texture. A war once, a big one, costly at that, decades back — so long ago that only the grandparents might have remembered its end — the kind that left its scars not on stone but on the way people still chose their words around each other, careful, measured, the particular caution of those who remembered exactly what carelessness had cost. The war was not won, not lost, on either side, and the peace that followed had been built less on trust than on exhaustion — two kingdoms too tired of bleeding to keep finding reasons to bleed — and it had held, somehow, for longer than anyone had likely dared to hope.

But a treaty built on truce rather than stability tends not to hold up, and the border regions knew it best. Skirmishes, trade cutoffs, land disputes, all poisoning the fragile relationship — enough that your king had been cautious enough to invite the representatives, the royal family, and its retinue together, if only to remind everyone that the peace was still strong, still holding.

You understood, in the bloodless way theory let you understand anything, that tonight was a kind of test — that the people seated so politely across this table carried something far older and heavier than themselves, generations of grief worn quiet beneath good manners, watching to see whether your kingdoms had learned anything in the years since, or simply forgotten how to bleed.

You stood behind Gojo's chair, naturally, hands loose at your sides, eyes doing the sweep they always did — except tonight your eyes kept finding things they had no category for. 

A delegate's hand resting a half-second too long on the stem of his crystal glass. A pause in conversation that might have meant nothing or might have meant everything. The particular stillness of the older courtiers, the ones who might have remembered, you'd been told, what this peace had actually cost, wearing their pleasant expressions like something stitched on rather than felt.

You could read a blade from across a hall. You were beginning to understand, with a kind of cold, creeping dread, that you could not read this.

The king and queen exchanged very tight smiles, trying to hold a pleasant, if pointed, conversation about the minor incidents recurring along the border, growing more frequent by the season. Toasts were raised to everlasting peace, though the atmosphere bore little resemblance to any other court celebration you'd stood through. Gojo squirmed in his seat in front of you, the weight of more eyes than usual settled on him this evening, you could tell — not just the ordinary expectations and obligations owed to the crown.

The first course came and went without incident. Soup, something pale and delicately spiced, by the smell perhaps of mushrooms, served in silence broken only by the careful murmur of small talk — weather, the journey, the quality of the wine. You let yourself exhale, fractionally, somewhere around the second course, watching the prince make easy, charming conversation with the delegate seated nearest him, the kind of performance he was good at when he actually bothered to try.

The senior official — older, decorated, his bearing the particular quiet authority of someone who'd actually commanded soldiers rather than inherited the right to — had been quiet through most of it, watching more than speaking, deciding where to spend his words.

He spoke for the first time properly somewhere around the third course.

"Tell me, Your Highness," he said, mild, setting down his fork with deliberate care, "how does your kingdom structure its militia? I confess I find the variations between our nations fascinating."

"Ranks, divisions, the usual." Gojo waved a hand, unbothered, still riding the ease of the evening so far. "Boring bureaucratic stuff, honestly. You'd fall asleep before I finished."

"Humor me."

The prince obliged, lazily, sketching the shape of it — the militia's structure, the personal guard system, nothing especially detailed, nothing that should have mattered. Leading a seemingly pleasant conversation, which was quite a record for him.

"And the heir's personal protection," the official said, when Gojo finished, quirking his head. "How is that arranged?"

"One guard. Always has been." Gojo gestured, vague, toward you, without quite looking at you, the lace trim of his shirt catching in the air as he moved. "Tradition. Or law. Honestly I've stopped caring which."

The official's gaze moved to you for the first time, direct, assessing, and you held it the way you held everything — flat, correct, giving nothing away, though something in your chest had gone very still.

"Interesting," the official said.

Nothing else, for a moment. The conversation moved on, briefly, toward the trade routes, toward something safely, seemingly diplomatic, and you let yourself believe the official's interest had simply been curiosity, satisfied and moved past.

But dear, bloody lord, you were wrong. He returned to it two courses later, unhurried, like the thought had been turning over in his head the entire meal.

"Forgive my curiosity returning," he said, to Gojo, though his eyes flicked toward you again, briefly. "Your guard. She is — unusual, is she not? I don't believe I've seen the like in any court I've visited."

"She's good at her job," Gojo said, shorter this time, something tightening in his voice that hadn't been there before. He was getting annoyed at the persistence, you could tell as well.

"I don't doubt it." The official's tone stayed mild, almost gentle, which made it worse somehow than open hostility would have. "Though I confess, in my homeland, the thought would simply never arise. Women do not serve in our forces at all. The idea of one standing between the heir and a blade—" he paused, considering, "—it raises questions, I think. About priorities. About judgment."

The table's conversation thinned, several smaller exchanges trailing off as attention shifted, drawn by the particular gravity of a sentence that had just landed somewhere very dangerous.

You felt Gojo go rigid, the air seeming to cool around him, the sudden coiled stillness of someone about to do something he hadn't fully decided on yet.

"My judgment," Gojo said, voice still even, though the edge underneath it had sharpened considerably, "put the most capable person available in that position. If your homeland's judgment excludes half its population from ever being considered, I'm not sure that's the flex you think it is."

A ripple moved down the table — not shock exactly, something quieter, the recalibration of several people simultaneously deciding how concerned to be. The official's expression didn't change. That stillness again, the kind that read as offense precisely because nothing else moved. Gojo's eyes flickered toward you, chilling and short, perhaps to check that you were still there.

"Son." The king's voice, low, from further down the table. A small parental warning, nothing more, not yet sharp enough to actually cut through.

Gojo didn't appear to hear it.

"Forgive me," the official said, unhurried, "I meant no offense to the lady's competence. Only to the wisdom of placing your kingdom's most valuable asset — yourself — in hands that, by every tradition I've ever known, would be considered insufficient for the task. One wonders what message it sends. About readiness. About the seriousness with which your father's kingdom approaches its own defense."

That landed somewhere worse than the first comment had. It was supposed to, you had a feeling.

You watched Gojo's jaw set, watched something flicker behind his eyes that you recognized, distantly, from every council session he'd ever sat through bored and resentful, the specific fury of someone being told, again, that he wasn't being taken seriously.

"You're questioning my readiness," he said, voice dropping into something far colder now, "based on who I chose to stand behind my chair?"

"I'm questioning the wisdom of the choice, Your Highness. Not the person. There's a difference."

"Is there." Gojo's hand had curled, loose, around the stem of his own glass, the lace trim of his embroidered sleeve fisting in the process. "Because it sounds, from where I'm sitting, like you're telling me I don't know how to pick competent people. That I'm — what, careless? Reckless? Unfit to be making decisions about my own protection?"

"I made no such accusation."

"You didn't have to. You just spent the last two minutes implying it very politely."

"Satoru." The king spoke again, sharper this time, a real edge to it now. The entire room seemed unsure whether to bristle with amusement or hold its breath at the unseemly severity of the moment.

The prince's gaze flicked toward his father — and something in his expression hardened even further, as though being corrected in front of everyone was its own fresh insult layered on top of the first.

"I'm having a conversation," he said, not quite looking at the king, voice tight. "I'm allowed to have conversations at my own table."

"Your Highness." One of the council members — older, smooth-voiced, the kind of assessing tone used to manage exactly this sort of moment — leaned forward slightly. "Perhaps we might return to the matter of the trade routes. I believe there were several points still to—"

"I'm not finished," he snapped, turning on him now, a new target, fresh offense layering onto the old. "Don't manage me at my own table like I'm a child who needs redirecting."

"I only meant—"

"I know what you meant." His voice had risen now, properly risen, the careful register completely abandoned. "Everyone in this room seems very interested in managing me tonight. First him—" a sharp gesture toward the foreign official, "—questioning my judgment, n' now you, trying to herd me back into line like I can't be trusted to finish my own sentences."

"Satoru, that's enough." The king's voice had real authority in it now, the kind that should have stopped anyone. It did not apply to his own son, unfortunately.

"It's not enough until someone explains to me why my choices are apparently up for public debate at my own dinner table."

The room had gone properly quiet now, silent with a real weight to it, every eye at the table tracking the unraveling with a fascinated horror. The prince glared at everybody in the room, mere seconds, it seemed, from sending everybody — including the foreign king and queen — to damning hell.

Your pulse was climbing. This wasn't a blade. This wasn't a poisoned cup or a hidden weapon or anything your training had a category for. This was a prince, your prince, coming apart in real time over wounded pride — something he was supposed to let slide, something that had been a direct jab at you that he'd taken personally instead — in front of the exact people whose good opinion currently stood between your kingdom and something much worse than a mere awkward dinner.

You didn't know what to do. You genuinely, for one long, terrifying second, didn't know what you were allowed to do.

Your frantic eyes found the king's across the table. He held your gaze and gave the smallest possible nod. Permission, or something close enough to it.

You moved.

Your hand landed softly on Gojo's shoulder, firm, and he barely registered it at first, still talking, voice still rising, words spilling faster than you could fully track. You tightened your grip and leaned down, close enough that only he could hear.

"Your Highness. Stop."

He didn't.

"—and frankly," he was saying, to the table, to the official, to everyone and no one at this point, "if competence is the issue, I'd love to see exactly how many of your soldiers she could put down without breaking a sweat, since apparently that's the metric we're—"

Oh, for the heavens' sake. He was like a horse without reins, and he needed to stop before he accidentally, bloody well started a war. You straightened instead, voice pitched now to carry, flat and commanding, enough to steal every eye in the room toward you.

"Your Highness," you repeated. Sharp. Final. "It is enough — defending women's place in the army for the evening."

The table went silent. Properly silent, this time. Not out of amusement, not out of some unspoken dare. You could feel it pressing against your skin from every direction at once.

Gojo stopped talking. Well — at least that worked.

But the words were already loose in the candlelit air, hanging there, slowly swirling toward the ceiling, mingling with the candle smoke as the hall seemed to fall darker, shadows closing in as everyone now openly stared. Naming the exact thing everyone had spent the whole dinner so carefully not naming outright.

The official's expression shifted from something merely offended into something far colder — something that read less like de-escalation and more like confirmation of every doubt he'd just spent twenty minutes implying.

You'd stopped the prince, yes. But in the process, you weren't entirely sure you hadn't just made everything much worse.

After a few damning moments — the prince's chest rising to say something vile again — the king's dismissal landed like a stone.

"Leave us," he said, low, absolute, the kind of voice that didn't invite argument. "Now."

And for one terrible second you thought your prince might actually respond — might say the one thing that would make tonight unrecoverable instead of merely disastrous — but something in his father's expression must have miraculously reached him, finally, because he shoved his chair back instead, the legs scraping loud against the stone floor, and turned without another word to anyone at the table.

Without any further looks or aimed apologies — which you weren't sure the delegation wouldn't take offense to regardless — he just walked.

You closed your eyes and prayed to the heavens for this evening to be salvageable. You skidded into a trot to catch up to the prince, head bowed as you silently excused the prince's abrupt absence.

The corridors were quiet at this hour, the castle having collectively decided to be somewhere else entirely, and his footsteps were fast enough that you had to half-run to keep pace — the formal fabric of your ceremonial wear catching uselessly between your knees, your sword bumping against your hip with every too-quick stride, the sash across your breastplate shifting in a way that felt, tonight, faintly absurd. You'd stood in that hall wearing it like a statement. Now you were nearly running through a corridor trying not to trip over yourself.

Servants flattened against the walls as he passed. None of them made eye contact, immediately knowing not to provoke an already fired-up prince by, unfortunately, their mere existence.

"Your Highness." Low. Careful. Testing whether he was going to let you say anything at all.

He didn't slow down. Nor did he turn his head.

You tried again, slightly sharper. "The dinner—"

Bloody nothing. His back, the set of his shoulders, the rigidness. All aimed to not to acknowledge you at all.

You kept pace. The corridor stretched ahead, torchlight wavering as if it didn't want to be caught in the prince's wrath either. The silence between you was the loudest thing in it.

He turned the corner. You turned it with him.

His chambers were at the end of the next corridor, the guards at his door already visible. You thought about having to dismiss them. With Gojo's sour and sudden appearance, they would have questions — unspoken ones, but still. And you would have to take the blame for the prince's inability to hold his temper. Like you always had to, even if it wasn't your job to manage him. You thought about all the other things you'd had to go through, all the things he'd put you through.

You thought of the drawer, overflowing. Overflowing.

The guards, seeing you approaching, abandoned their posts and started walking in the opposite direction — not even waiting until you were fully by his chambers. Already sensing the foul atmosphere swirling alongside you.

But before the prince could disappear, upset, behind his carved doors, you had to talk to him. You had to let the steam out. You were just as upset as him, even if for completely different reasons. You'd had to embarrass him, embarrass the realm by having to stop him before he made everything worse — because he never knew when to stop indulging himself.

"You never listen," you said, to his back, sharper than anything you'd allowed yourself in a corridor this open, the words as venomous as your expression. "His Majesty tried to stop you twice — twice — and you kept going."

He stopped mid-stride as if something had caught him, and when he turned around his face was — not what you'd expected. Not the usual displeasure you'd gotten used to. This was something rawer than that, something that hadn't had time to arrange itself into anything manageable, the full weight of the evening sitting visibly on his features with nothing regal left to cover it. You had never seen him looking like this. His eyes holding thousands of words.

He grabbed your wrist — not rough, not gentle, somewhere in between — and turned back toward his door without a word, pulling you with him.

"Your High—"

The door opened. You were through it before you'd finished his title. It swung shut behind you both, the latch clicking into place, and the sound of it — small, final, private — seemed to change the quality of the air in the room entirely.

The public silence broke.

You stood where you'd landed — just inside the threshold, back nearly against the wood, still slightly breathless from the corridor, from the half-run, from the words left open, from the particular shock of his hand on your wrist.

First time he'd ever touched you. First time in months of proximity, months of standing close enough to step between him and a blade, that his hand had actually made contact with yours.

He'd let go like the leather had burned him.

You knew the layout of his room well enough to navigate it in the dark. But tonight it felt like somewhere else entirely, the familiar space pressing differently, the candlelight doing something strange with the shadows, the door shut behind you in a way that felt different from every time before.

Gojo turned on you instantly, the last shred of his performed, lazy elegance entirely gone.

"Shut the fuck up," he snarled, his voice vibrating with a raw, unmanaged fury before you had even drawn breath to speak. "Just shut your mouth for once."

You stared at him, your chest heaving, the sheer venom of it freezing you to the spot.

"Why can't you keep your tongue behind your bloody teeth?" he demanded, stepping aggressively into your space, using his demanding height to force you to tilt your chin up. "It is always 'Your Highness' this, and 'Your Highness' that, dripping with that exact, unbearable condescension. You had absolutely no right to put your hands on me in there! You had no right to tell me to stop!"

You should have swallowed it. Years of brutal discipline dictated that you drop your eyes, bow your head, and let his temper burn itself out against your silence. But the sheer, blinding injustice of it caught in your throat like bile. You had just risked your title, your family's name, and your very life to drag him back from the edge of a political cliff — and yet he was screaming at you over a bruised ego. The iron-clad mask you had oh so carefully maintained since the day you knelt and swore on your oath fractured into a million jagged pieces.

"I just saved your kingdom from your own bloody stupidity," you spat back, giving him back the very furious eyes he was staring down at you with. Your voice dripping with an open, venomous contempt you had never allowed yourself to use.

Something ugly flashed across his face. He turned away — sharp, sudden — and crossed to the far end of the room, toward the window, hands moving like they needed somewhere to be. Like the prince didn't know what to do with himself. The distance between you opened. You felt it like a change in pressure.

The window was dark, the castle grounds barely visible beyond the warped frame — torchlight on the outer walls, the world outside carrying on without you. Covered by blissful ignorance while this room was silently falling apart.

He stood with his back partially turned, and your eyes darted across the room in his absence and caught the desk. Books everywhere, open, left wherever he'd been reading last. And in the middle of them, the council materials from the week's preparation. Untouched. Spine still stiff. Not a single page turned. Merely glanced at.

"I should have you on your knees right now," he said, his voice dropping, still at the window. "Do you understand that? I'm being merciful by not demanding it. You are a mere guard dog. You stand behind my chair and you stay there."

Your hands fisted at your sides as his words cut deeper with each syllable. The prince always had a way with words, one way or another.

"Then find a better dog," you said. "Because the last two you had died because you couldn't be bothered to act like a prince. They bled for your carelessness. So forgive me if I don't trust you to hold the leash."

He flinched. Microscopic — a tightening of the jaw, something hitting somewhere unhealed — and the room went briefly still before he turned back toward you completely, the candlelight catching the white of his hair, his shadow long on the wall. Imposing. A warning.

He didn't retreat. The prince never did. He bared his teeth like a predator changing its strategy instead, and crossed back toward you — stopping somewhere in the middle of the room, close enough that the distance between you had collapsed again, close enough that you could see the specific anger in his eyes, the kind that knew exactly where to aim.

"You think you're my equal because they pinned some expensive silk to your hip?" His gaze dropped to the cape-skirt. The wavering golden light caught the embroidery, the crest at the hem, the snowy white of it against the steel, and you felt it the way you'd felt it at the fitting room, at the ceremony, at every moment since — looked at before anything else, always looked at first.

"Look at what they make you wear. Do you think they give skirts to real soldiers? They bolted that to your waist to remind every single person in this castle exactly what you are before you even open your mouth."

He stepped closer, his voice dropping into a cruel, mocking sneer.

"You think they see a knight when they look at you? They only see a lesser-house girl playing dress-up. Your opinion means absolutely nothing to the men who rule this world. You were put in that hall to be a pretty, expendable shield — not an aristocrat, not someone who should even be allowed to speak about state matters."

You wanted to rip it off. The cape-skirt, the sash, all of it — tear it free and throw it at him, let it land on his expensive doublet and his bruised pride and his absolute certainty about what you were and weren't allowed to be. You wanted to stomp on it. You wanted to make him understand that the thing he was weaponizing was the same thing the institution had put on you without asking, for exactly the same reason. So everyone always knew. So no one ever forgot.

You didn't move.

"Because no one ever taught me the rules!" you yelled.

The sudden volume cracked through the room — louder than you'd intended, louder than you'd allowed yourself, reverberating off the books and the ceiling and the window frame and the weapons on the table he'd never properly racked, all the small details of the room suddenly very present, very close, the familiar space closing in from every direction.

You couldn't stop it. The sheer, suffocating exhaustion, the sleepless nights, the terror of the dining hall — it all boiled over, stripping your composure down past the knight, past the oath, past the mask you'd been wearing since the day you knelt on cold stone and meant every word.

"No one ever—" you started, your voice breaking.

You snapped your mouth shut.

The rest of it — thought to ask if you had what you needed for this, whether you were drowning or managing, whether anyone had set you up to succeed, whether you were worth the trouble of seeing properly — lodged in your throat like broken glass. You swallowed it. Hard. It was more than you could allow yourself. More than he could ever comprehend.

The room went very quiet. The candlelight dimming as if by the stillness of the air. The bed in your peripheral vision — the attendants hadn't gotten to it yet, they rarely did, the prince unmade it quickly enough afterward anyway. The strange domesticity of it, something you had never allowed yourself to dwell on and did not want to allow yourself to dwell on, sitting strangely in the middle of all of this.

Gojo stared at you. The furious momentum of the argument had stuttered — the raw break in your voice catching him off guard; after all, it was the first time you had allowed yourself any emotion other than that annoying stoicism in front of him. Something shifted behind his expression that wasn't the anger or the wounded pride.

"No one ever what?" he demanded, stepping into the sudden quiet. One step closer. "Go on. Say it. The truth, knight."

You clamped your jaw. A direct order from the crown. Yet you refused it outright. Not tonight. Not now. Not to him. You were ashamed of even thinking those words, and you would rather swallow a thousand blades than admit them out loud for the prince to play with.

"No," you said, your voice shaking, weaponizing the pain and redirecting it directly at his chest. "It doesn't matter."

Because you couldn't stop yourself. Because it was what he deserved.

"You are a spoiled aristocrat! Rich and blessed enough to never have to care about the consequences! I have to bleed for your mistakes! My life, my family's name — I risk everything to babysit a man who treats his own safety like a tavern joke!"

He crossed away again — back toward the window, the full length of the room opening between you — and the distance felt vast, enormous, the space measured in something that had nothing to do with feet. The candle on his desk, the fast one, was nearly spent, the flame burning lower than the others, the light in that corner dimming fractionally.

"Everyone already paints me as the villain before I've done anything!" he fired back, his own voice cracking with a bitter, defensive desperation. "You think I asked for the prophecy, the expectations, or any of it?"

"The system is what benefits you." Your voice quieter register, yet sharper. "Benefits all of you. You can afford to lose your temper because the system will absorb it. It will blame someone else, smooth it over, find a ready explanation. I don't have that. Everything that went wrong tonight will land on me, and you knew it. You knew it and you kept going anyway. Costing me far more than venomous stares the next morning."

The room went dead silent.

Him at the window. You at the door. The full distance of the room between you, and everything that had been said filling it — all of it suddenly very visible, very specific, witness to everything neither of you could take back.

He went completely still. The fiery, wounded anger drained from his face, replaced by something colder. More precise.

"You think you're here because you earned it?" His voice flat. Empty. The candlelight and the shadows making his otherwise regal features more severe, more haunting. "You think anyone looked at you and decided you were worthy of protecting the crown?"

Your breath hitched.

"You were simply the only woman in the barracks when the council wanted to manufacture an apparently very amusing punishment for me," he said, delivering each word slowly, deliberately, aimed. Aimed at your pride, at your entire purpose. "That is the only reason you are standing in my chambers. You weren't a strategic choice. You were a deliberate insult."

He leaned in slightly despite the distance, his eyes hollow and freezing, his voice a vile whisper in the charged air between you.

"You are the joke," he said. "N' I'm the punchbag."

The silence that followed was total.

The fast candle on his desk guttered — the flame bending sideways, nearly going out before it steadied — and the light shifted briefly, throwing new shadows across the far wall, the room the same as it had always been and entirely changed.

You didn't scream. You didn't slap him. You didn't cry. Though you wanted to. He had worn you thin — not only tonight, but across the long months of being his shadow. His mere guard dog.

The confirmation landed square in your chest — the suspicion you'd carried for months, examined now and found to be exactly what you'd feared — and your composure did not shatter. Well, did not shatter any further, that was. It went cold and still, the fury draining out and leaving behind something that felt like nothing but wasn't. Though you were surprised by the deliberate phrasing — the prince landing a jab at himself while driving it straight into your very guarded, very fragile underbelly. And it bled.

"Understood."

One word. Coming out clipped. Devoid of everything. You had nothing left, yet still words to spend — but you chose to be the bigger person. You were always the bigger person. More words could be costly, while his were mere ventilation. Your head could be on the block tomorrow while he laughed it off. You couldn't afford anything. The prince was there for the stupidity, as you had apparently so diplomatically put it on the record.

Gojo blinked. Something flickered through his expression. He opened his mouth.

You didn't give him the chance.

"I will take my post, Your Highness."

You turned on your heel. You crossed the room — the few strides you had unknowingly made into it, away from the door — and you felt each step taking three times as long as it should, the distance playing with you, trying to trap you in.

Your hand found the door handle and you pulled it open and stepped through, pulling it shut behind you with a quiet, damning click that cost you more restraint than anything else in the last ten minutes.

His attendants were waiting in the corridor outside. Three of them — the young girl among them — eyes carefully averted, expressions arranged into the blankness of people who have heard something they'd rather not. Pretending otherwise.

You walked past them. You could feel your cheeks heating and you wanted to tell them off, the boldness the prince had surgically riled up in you not yet willing to settle back into the depths of your soul where it belonged.

You took your post.

The unsettling feeling had nowhere to go. The drawer had spilled open, yet ended fuller than before. The night stretched ahead of you, long and quiet and entirely without resolution, and you stood in it the way you stood through everything — chin up, eyes forward, giving the corridor nothing it hadn't already taken.

Your heart wouldn't slow down though.

Loud and relentless and entirely indifferent to everything you'd decided to perform, beating like it hadn't gotten the message yet that the fight was over.

As you kept replaying his dreadful words, leaving his mouth like a death sentence. You'd known, somewhere. You'd always known, somewhere. The suspicion had lived in the back of your mind since the letter arrived with the ink still smeared, since your commander said the position was yours if you wanted it and your family had already been notified, since the first time you'd walked into a room and watched people's eyes move straight past you to him.

You'd just never let yourself finish the thought. Protecting your peace, your pride, and your dream — the change you wanted to happen.

Now he'd finished it for you. You stood in the dark with it. Full of fury and unexplainable sadness. And the night very long.

── Dividers from pxrce-lain and seulzitos!

[fukiouh]

Bestiessss!!! Big announcement? I guess? 😭 Anyways… guess who the fuck is back to posting on AO3? 😋🫩

I just posted a new fic I wrote recently because, quite frankly, I cannot shut the fuck up about it to my friends anymore and also because I genuinely missed AO3. ❤️‍🩹

To answer the questions I’ve been getting:

Will I be posting again? When will I be posting again? And are Error 404, PhD, and Behind the Glass coming back?

The answer is: yes.

Error 404 will be returning first because I recently rewrote it and… why did nobody tell me it was lwk cringe? And not even in the fun way? 💀

PhD and Behind the Glass will follow once I finish giving them the same kinda treatment.

ANYWAYS.

The new fic is called 50 Ways to Say Goodbye (and yes, it is inspired by the Train song!!!)

It’s an office AU, toxic exes-to-lovers situation featuring my husband Gojo. Like kinda really toxic but in a funny way. Y’all know I can’t be serious for shit lol.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/86483646

And if anyone feels the need to start hating again, I will be throwing hands this time. istg. 💀

Love y’all!!!!!

[fukiouh]

Baddies, are we interested in cowboy!gojo x city girl!reader ??? Got an idea and idk if I should write it out or nah