─── 𑣲⋆ TWENTY WAYS to make a nerd yours ⊹ ࣪ ˖
୧ ‧₊˚ a guide to making 𝓖.𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐔 yours ♡
꒰ 𓏲๋࣭࣪˖🌷.ᐟ Satoru Gojo is the loudest, prettiest boy on campus — and secretly the biggest nerd you've ever met. You make a list of twenty ways to make him yours. It works better than expected. ꒱
ᘛ ꒰ satoru gojo x reader | university au | fluff, crack-ish, mutual pining, 3.4k wc. no real warning, this is pure fluff. art by @/to00fu dividers by @uzmacchiato and @pixopix ྀིა
Gojo Satoru did not look like a nerd. That was the first thing you had to get past.
He was six-foot-three, white hair that looked like he'd bleached it out of spite, and a jawline that made underclassmen forget how to walk in straight lines. So the first time you sat next to him in Intro to Theoretical Physics and watched him correct the TA's derivation on the whiteboard— politely, cheerfully, in a way that made the TA visibly reconsider their choice of career— you assumed it was a fluke. A pretty boy who got lucky on one problem set.
It was not a fluke. It happened every single week.
By week four you knew: underneath the sunglasses he wore indoors "for the bit," underneath the easy charm and the way he called everyone "sweetheart" like it cost him nothing, Gojo was the single biggest nerd you had ever met in your life. He annotated his textbooks in four colors. He had a ranked opinion on which university library floor had the best "ambient silence." He once spent twenty minutes explaining the Fermi paradox to a girl at a party who had asked him, literally, where the bathroom was.
And somehow, against every instinct you had about self-preservation, you'd fallen for him anyway.
The problem was that Gojo Satoru was completely, catastrophically oblivious to the fact that you liked him. Not because he was dumb— the man had a 4.0 and could recite pi to sixty digits when he was nervous— but because emotional self-awareness was, apparently, the one subject he'd never taken.
So you did what any reasonable person would do. You made a list.
Not a real list, not at first— just something you texted your roommate at 1 a.m. after he'd walked you back to your dorm and then said "anyway, goodnight, study buddy!" like a golden retriever who'd just learned the word "goodnight." But it grew. Item by item, week by week, you built yourself a plan. A syllabus, if you wanted to be annoying about it. A plan for how to make a nerd— your nerd, if you had anything to say about it– fall for you back.
Here's what the list looked like, three weeks later, mostly executed and slightly out of order:
1. Ask him to explain something you already understand
Not because you need it explained. Because Gojo lights up like a Christmas tree the second someone asks him a real question, and there is nothing in this world cuter than a six-foot-three man drawing a diagram of quantum entanglement on a napkin at 9 p.m. because you asked "wait, but how does that actually work?" He'll talk for eleven minutes straight. You will not understand half of it. You will not care.
2. Bring him coffee exactly the way he takes it, without asking.
Oat milk, two sugars, and— this is important— he needs it slightly too hot, because he likes complaining that it burned his tongue and then drinking it anyway. The first time you showed up to your study session with his order memorized, he stared at the cup for a solid five seconds like you'd handed him a diamond instead of a four-dollar latte.
"You remembered," he said, and for once he didn't sound like he was performing anything.
"It's not that hard, Satoru."
"No," he agreed, still staring at the cup. "I guess it's not."
3. Steal his hoodie and never give it back.
This one is less a strategy and more just theft, but the effect is the same. You took it during a group project when the library air conditioning decided finals week was a personal vendetta, and you simply forgot to return it. He noticed. He did not ask for it back. He instead started "accidentally" leaving other sweaters at your dorm, like he was building a small collection of hostages in reverse.
4. Beat him at something. Anything.
Gojo has never lost gracefully in his life. He is aggressively, hilariously competitive about things that do not matter, like Mario Kart, or who can name more moons of Saturn, or whose flashcards are better organized. Beat him once— just once— and watch a switch flip behind his eyes. He will demand a rematch. He will demand several rematches. He will, three rematches later, forget that he is supposed to be trying to win and just start trying to make you laugh instead.
5. Notice the thing he's insecure about, and don't make a big deal of it.
Underneath the confidence, Gojo has Opinions about his own eyes— the pale blue, the way people stare, the way strangers sometimes ask invasive questions like he's a museum exhibit. You noticed early that the sunglasses weren't entirely a bit. So you never once commented on his eyes unless it was in passing, the same way you'd mention someone's nice handwriting. Ordinary. Unremarkable. Just a fact about him, not a headline.
He clocked that you'd clocked it. He didn't say anything. But he started taking the glasses off around you more.
6. Let him info-dump. Then remember what he said.
Two weeks after the Fermi paradox incident, you asked him— out of nowhere, mid-lecture— "okay but statistically, if the paradox holds, doesn't that actually support the idea that we're early, not alone?" He turned to look at you like you'd grown a second head. A good second head.
"You remembered that?"
"You explained it for twenty minutes to a stranger looking for the bathroom. Of course I remembered."
7. Make him carry something heavy for you.
Not because you need the help. Because there is a specific, devastating satisfaction in watching Gojo Satoru— who could probably bench-press the entire physics department— insist on carrying your grocery bags, your laundry basket, your six textbooks, all at once, while pretending it's nothing, while very obviously flexing about it.
8. Show up to his study group uninvited and stay anyway.
He runs a Tuesday night study group that is, allegedly, "for anyone who wants to come," but somehow the same three terrified freshmen show up every week and leave within the hour because Gojo cannot resist turning every session into a TED talk. You started showing up too. You did not leave within the hour. By the third week, he'd started saving you a seat next to him without being asked— the one by the outlet, because he'd noticed your laptop charger was fraying.
9. Text him something dumb at 2 a.m. and let him overthink his reply.
You know this one works because your roommate is somehow also friends with his roommate, and the intel came back within the hour: Gojo spent eleven minutes composing a response to your "ok but if a vending machine gains sentience is it a philosophical zombie or just annoying" text. Eleven minutes. For a joke. He sent back four different drafts before landing on one, and it was still unhinged.
10. Compliment his handwriting, not his face
He gets told he's hot approximately nine times a day, by everyone, including strangers on the bus. It means nothing to him anymore— it's just weather. But tell him his lecture notes are genuinely, freakishly beautiful— every equation boxed, every margin annotated in four colors like he's illuminating a medieval manuscript— and watch him go quiet in a way he never does when someone calls him pretty.
11. Let him see you fail at something.
Gojo doesn't actually want a girl who has it together 100% of the time— he wants someone real, though it took you a while to realize that. The night you completely bombed a presentation and cried a little in the stairwell after, he didn't try to fix it or hype you up with empty noise. He just sat down on the concrete step next to you in his very expensive jeans and said, "okay, worst professor you've ever had, go," and let you complain until you'd laughed the tears away.
12. Ask about his family. Actually listen.
He deflects hard whenever anyone brings up the Gojo name, the money, the expectations. Most people either fawn over it or pretend it doesn't exist. You did neither— you just asked, once, gently, "is it heavy? Carrying all that?" and let the silence sit instead of filling it. He didn't answer for a full minute. Then he told you more than he'd told anyone all semester. He told you about his twin.
13. Give him a nickname that isn't about how he looks.
Everyone calls him "Six Eyes" as some ironic school-wide joke about how much he supposedly sees. You started calling him "Professor" instead, low and teasing, every time he got insufferable about a fact nobody asked for. He complained about it constantly. He also, notably, never asked you to stop.
14. Show up to his dumb extracurricular thing
He's in the university's astronomy club, which meets on the roof of the science building at ungodly hours to look at things you cannot see because of light pollution. You went once, mostly out of curiosity, and ended up going every month after, wrapped in his stolen hoodie (see: item 3), while he pointed at smudges in the sky and insisted, with total conviction, that one of them was definitely Saturn.
"That's a plane, Satoru."
"It's Saturn, and I won't be taking questions."
15. Get jealous. Badly. On purpose.
You are not proud of this one, but it worked, so it's staying on the list. A guy from your seminar started sitting suspiciously close to you during group work, and Gojo— usually the most chill, unbothered person alive— suddenly developed a burning need to sit in on your seminar "for fun." He is not enrolled in your seminar. He does not need to be there. He was there anyway, arms crossed, radiating an aura your professor mistook for academic passion.
16. Take care of him when he forgets to take care of himself.
For someone so smart, Gojo is disastrous at remembering to eat during midterms. You started leaving snacks in his backpack without telling him— protein bars, the specific brand of gum he chews when he's anxious, a note sometimes. He never mentioned it directly. He just started leaving you snacks back, an unspoken little economy of care neither of you would put a name to yet.
17. Let him walk you home even when you don't need it.
It's fifteen minutes out of his way. He does it every time anyway, sunglasses off, hands in his pockets, talking the entire walk about nothing and everything, and you've started timing your goodnights to be a little longer than they need to be.
18. Catch him staring, and don't look away first.
It happened in the library, over a stack of shared notes— you looked up and he was already looking, not at your notes, at you, and for once in his entire dramatic life he didn't have a single word ready. You didn't look away. Neither did he. Somebody's highlighter rolled off the table and neither of you moved to catch it.
19. Tell him, out loud, that you like the nerd version of him best.
Not the flirt. Not the golden retriever performing for a crowd. The version that gets quiet and intense over a whiteboard, that memorizes the digits of pi when he's anxious, that lit up over a napkin diagram because someone finally asked him a real question. You told him this on the roof, under his fake Saturn, and he went so still you thought you'd broken him.
20. Kiss him first.
Because he will never, ever make the first move— not out of fear, but because some small, stupid, sincere part of him doesn't believe someone like you would actually want someone like him, underneath all the noise. So you have to be the one. You kiss him on the roof, hoodie sleeves pulled over your hands, his ridiculous fake constellation still glowing faintly behind him, and he makes a sound against your mouth like every ounce of composure he's ever performed just short-circuited at once.
When you pull back he's staring at you the way he stares at a problem he's finally solved— stunned, delighted, a little smug that he got there at all.
"Say something smart, Professor," you tell him, breathless.
"Give me a second," he says. "You broke my working memory."
