about: dai ⊹ 21 she/they ⊹ slow writer during the semester (｡T ω T｡) ⊹ im an asian-am uni student (healthcare-related major) ⊹ sfw fics only
rules: i am an adult and feel uncomfortable with replying to anyone under 18! ⊹ im a full time student with clinical hours to complete on top of research work (*μ_μ) so i will be slow with updates/replies
feel free to send requests but no promises i’ll fulfill them—not because i don't want to, but bc some prompts are harder for me to write than others & i’d hate to disappoint you with a subpar fic (-ω-ゞ
if you enjoy my work, consider buying me a ko-fi! 100% optional, but always appreciated
─ find warmsatoru's masterlist here <3 .✦ ݁⟢ ・⸝⸝˖
most recent work ── ⟢ ・⸝⸝
gojo satoru | the way back to you
⤷ exes to lovers, ex!gojo satoru, forced proximity, hurt/comfort, angst | 13k
A winter getaway was supposed to be a relaxing break, but a room mix-up leaves you sharing a small room with your ex. Between the mountain air and the shared space, the distance you spent seven months creating starts to crumble before the weekend is even over.
pocket-sized facts about dai: my works are purely self-indulgent & are mostly all gojo (not sorry) i haven't actually watched that many animes; my attention span peaked at 14 and it's been downhill ever since. my favs: jjk, hq, aot, horimiya, a sign of affection, wotakoi, banana fish. my watchlist includes way more but i've embarrassingly stopped too many shows mid-way through, so do they really count
current worry: battling vitamin d deficiency atm & scared that the satorus in my stories feel too similar to each other
navi: masterlist⊹ self-reblogs ⊹ answered asks ⊹ my 2 cents | to keep things tidy, posts about specific works will be tagged w/ warmsatoru.[title-abbreviation] for example orbit of two: #warmsatoru.oot
ruin the friendship | gojo satoru x you
⟡ fluff, soccer player!gojo, lowkey a 5+1 if u squint | 2.7k
Satoru meets you on a fleeting day that only September knows how to do. The autumn afternoon tasted of woodsmoke, the sky a deep blue that seemed to go on forever. The soccer field impossibly green against the fire of the turning trees, gold and scarlet leaves drifting lazily across the track, the whole campus holding its breath… Or maybe none of it looked like that at all.
Maybe it was only because seeing you standing there made Satoru's whole world arrange itself into something worth looking at.
Well, the half of you that he could see in his vision. You were tucked behind your friend, who had enough to say for the both of you. She was halfway through introducing the college newspaper before he noticed you at all. The setting sun pooled golden along your throat and cheekbones, your hair lifting softly in the wind, and your expression, through all of it, utterly relaxed.
"So would that be okay?" Yumi finishes, he had caught her name somewhere in the middle of her spiel, but the rest of it flew over him.
"Uh," Satoru hums, a real testament to his sharp mind. Suguru answers for him; at least one of them had been listening. Suguru walks Yumi back through everything she had just said, the newspaper, the semester, the plan to cover the sports section, like he had been listening to every word.
Well, because he had been. Suguru had been listening while Satoru was just standing there with the sun in his eyes and you in his line of sight, watching the way you hadn't looked at him yet, the way he already found himself wanting to know what your voice sounded like, what you thought about, what you were like when you weren't standing on the sideline of a soccer field looking like you had somewhere better to be.
"Great! See you tomorrow," Yumi says, already turning on her heel. You nod after her, a small polite gesture, your eyes cast somewhere just past Satoru's shoulder, and then you turn and follow her across the track, leaves skittering around your sneakers as you walk away.
Satoru’s eyes follow you, and he only snaps out of it when Suguru reaches over and smacks the back of his head.
“You done?”
Satoru gapes at him. “What?”
Suguru just looks toward where you disappeared, then back at him.
Satoru immediately looks away. “Shut up.”
“Do you like soccer?” It slips out of Satoru’s mouth before he can stop himself. It was either that or saying something objectively worse, like admitting the fact that he’s thought about you an unreasonable amount since yesterday’s practice.
Suguru told him your name yesterday, and you introduced yourselves properly today, which means there is absolutely no reason for him to be embarrassing himself like this already.
“No, not really,” you confess with a shy laugh. “The sports section wasn’t exactly my first choice-” Your eyes widen slightly. “Not that there’s anything wrong with soccer. Or sports. God, that sounded bad.”
Satoru laughs, not because you’re funny (although you are, a little) but because you’ve known him for roughly 10 minutes and already managed to reject something he likes, unlike most people who hear he plays soccer and start pretending they’ve always been deeply invested in its history.
Satoru has never put much belief into that whole opposites attract thing, mostly because it sounds like something people say after making objectively questionable decisions, but he looks at you for a second longer than necessary and thinks maybe there are other more flawed theories in the world.
Satoru’s known you for almost a month, mostly through awkward encounters at practice and increasingly less awkward walks afterward. Somewhere between post-practice interviews and waiting for his teammates, who insist warm-down stretches take thirty years, he learns you’re pre-med.
He also learns that you’d originally wanted to cover research studies in the biology department for the paper instead of sports. Unfortunately, most of those positions had already been filled by upperclassmen before applications even reached sophomores.
Satoru nods sympathetically and says something supportive like a normal person when you tell him. Secretly, though, he’s glad, which immediately makes him feel like a terrible person.
He wants you to get the opportunities you actually wanted, but selfishly, he likes that sports means you end up here instead, sitting on cold bleachers with your laptop open and asking him questions after practice and pretending not to laugh when he starts giving useless answers just to keep the conversation going.
On the first practice of the week, you’re nowhere to be found. Satoru notices on his first sweep of the bleachers, the sidelines, and the small cluster of students hovering near the track. Yumi is there, which means you should be too, tucked somewhere close to her with your laptop balanced on your knees. But today the space beside her is empty.
He tells himself it’s nothing. People miss things; it’s normal. He repeats this to himself twice during drills and once more during the cooldown. But after practice, he finds Yumi anyway, hands shoved deep in his pockets like that makes any of this casual.
"Hey," he says, "Where's your friend?"
Yumi's pen stops moving. "She's sick."
"Sick?"
She turns to face him fully then, "Relax, she’s not dying. It's a cold, not medieval tuberculosis."
Satoru laughs in return, because it was funny, but underneath it, the same low hum of worry was sitting unmoved right in the middle of his chest. "...Do you think I could get her number?"
Yumi stares at him. "I just told you," she says slowly, as if he's a little bit foolish, "she's sick."
"I know."
"So why do you need her number?"
He opens his mouth, then closes it. His hands are still in his pockets, which is the only place they could be right now, because they have gone slightly damp, and he absolutely has no interest in Yumi knowing that.
Yumi watches him for another second, letting him sit in it, and then the corner of her mouth pulls up. "I'm kidding," she says, already flipping to a new page in her notepad. She scribbles your number down, tears it off, and holds it out to him.
Satoru sits in his car for an embarrassing amount of time, staring at your name at the top of a blank text message. He types something. Deletes it. Types something else, reads it back, winces, deletes that too.
He deletes it. Too formal, sounds like a get-well card from a coworker.
Satoru: Hey! It’s Satoru from the soccer team. Yumi gave me your number.
He deletes that too. He should’ve scrapped it after typing the exclamation point.
Satoru: Hey.
He stares at that for a long moment, then deletes it. He throws his phone face down on the passenger seat and runs a hand through his hair, tipping his head back against the headrest. He has played in front of hundreds of people, taken penalty kicks with the score tied, and not once felt his hands shake, so he doesn’t know why drafting a single text message to you is doing this to him.
He picks his phone back up.
Satoru: Hi, it’s Satoru. Yumi mentioned you were sick, feel better soon.
He reads it four times. It’s fine. It is completely fine and normal. He sends it before he can talk himself out of it and turns his phone face down on the passenger seat, wishing that he could do the same with whatever is sitting in his chest every time he thinks about you.
He hears his phone ding and something in his chest flinches, which is insane, which is genuinely embarrassing. But he still reaches for his phone off the passenger seat so fast he nearly fumbles it between his fingers.
You: hiii satoru!! yeah im okay, just a cold! thanks for checking in tho
He reads it once and types back:
Satoru: And here I thought you had perfect attendance
He stares at it and immediately regrets sending it. But 2 minutes later, your typing bubble appears.
You: i have a 102 degree fever. so sorry i couldn't make it out to stand in the cold and watch you run in circles like a hamster on a wheel >:( have some compassion
He grins at his phone like an idiot.
The next time you come to practice, there is a bottled tea drink sitting in your spot on the bleachers, impossible to miss. Beside it, a post-it note pressed flat against the cold metal.
Glad you're feeling better.
Beneath the words, occupying considerably more space, is a small doodle of a hamster. You look up. Satoru is already on the field, in the middle of warming up, looking right at you.
Suguru falls into step beside him during a water break, glancing once in your direction and then back at Satoru. "So when are you going to tell her?"
Satoru, mid sip, chokes. Water goes everywhere, a significant amount of it landing directly on Suguru, who recoils and shoves him hard in the shoulder.
"Tell her what?" Satoru asks.
Suguru wipes his sleeve, unimpressed. "That you like her."
Satoru wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He seems to be processing this like it’s new information. "I don't… " he starts, and then stops, and then says nothing.
You had only made it out to a handful of games during the season; you and Yumi split the roster between you, trading off week by week. But it’s the last game of the season, and you are both there, and Satoru sees you from across the field during warm-up and has to actively remember how to breathe.
You are wearing his jersey. His number, his name across your back, which you have because 2 weeks ago in the library, you had knocked your drink across the table and onto yourself, and the only thing Satoru had in his bag was a spare jersey. You had given it back the next day, freshly washed, but he had told you to keep it and then walked away before his face could do anything embarrassing.
Your hair is tied up with ribbons in the team’s colors, and there is face paint on your cheeks. You are standing next to Yumi, who is scribbling something in her notepad.
Suguru appears at his shoulder. "Breathe."
Satoru shoves him lightly for being insufferable and then, annoyingly, takes his first breath after seeing you.
A week after the last game's victory, the final sports issue finally gets printed. You and Yumi had spent stupid amounts of time on it, more than necessary, probably. You had argued over layouts, stayed late editing quotes, and gone back and forth over photos until both of you were cross-eyed under the fluorescent lights of the newspaper office.
You almost don't give it to him, but you'd written this one with him in the back of your mind the whole time. And it was the thing you'd spent the better part of two weeks on, the piece your editor sent back twice with notes that made you want to close your laptop and walk into the ocean.
There was no practice to go to anymore, no bleachers to sit on, no easy excuse to find yourself in the same place at the same time. You hadn't quite realized how much of your access to him had been built into the structure of the semester until the season ended and took all of it with it.
But you ran into him on a Thursday morning. He was coming out of the building you were going into, his bag over one shoulder, looking like he'd had roughly just enough sleep.
"Hey," he says
"Hey," you hum back, and then, before you could think about it long enough to talk yourself out of it, you pull the folded copy from your bag and hold it out to him. “The final issue."
He takes it and finds your name before he finds anything else, which he does every time. He stands there in the cold of the path like he has nowhere else to be, like the words you wrote were worth taking the time over, and you let yourself look at him the way you don't usually let yourself look at him.
October had been all fire and gold, the air still holding the last warmth of summer in the afternoons. But November had come in quietly and taken all of that away, leaving something crisper and cleaner behind, the trees stripped back now, the sky a pale gray that sat low over the campus.
Satoru’s white hair catches the morning light the way it always does, but there is something about the gray November sky behind him that makes it look softer. A few strands have fallen across his forehead, and the cold, with its real teeth to it this week, has put the faintest color along his cheekbones.
He turns another page, and something in his expression shifts. You look away before he can catch you watching.
"You wrote about the last game like you actually cared about it," he says, which was not what you expected him to say.
"I did care about it," you say, carefully.
"You told me a month ago that you didn't even know the offside rule."
"I looked it up," you confess, and something paints his face at that, something warm and slow, and you feel your heart do the thing it has been doing around him for months.
He closes the issue and looks at you. "It's good," he says, which you can tell is not what he actually wanted to say, which is its own thing to think about.
"Thank you," you say.
The wind moves through the bare trees lining the path, and he shifts the issue to one hand, and you watch him not quite look at you, which is unusual because Satoru Gojo has never once had trouble looking at anything directly in his life.
"I kept thinking about what you'd write," he says finally, still not quite looking at you.
You don't say anything.
"And then I kept thinking about that and then about other things and then," He stops, then starts again. "You take up all my mind when you're not with me. And half of it when you are."
Something blooms in your chest, your heart doing something without your approval, your hands not entirely steady either.
"That's a lot," you say finally, which is not really a response, which you are aware of. So you reach out and close your fingers around his wrist, then lean forward and rest the top of your head against his chest.
"I know," he smiles.
You pull back to look at him and think about September, the soccer field, the afternoon you didn’t dare to look at him yet. You think about cold bleachers and post-practice walks and every conversation that started about one thing and ended somewhere neither of you had planned. You think about his jersey still hanging in your closet.
"I chose the photo of you from the third game," you say. "There were better ones technically."
"You're not looking at the camera. You're looking at something off to the side, and you're..." you stop for a second. "It's the best one because of your smile. I've never seen you smile like that in any of the other photos."
"I know that photo," he says, quietly.
"It ran on the front page."
"I know." He hums, "I was looking at you."
He closes the distance slowly. His hand comes up to your jaw, cold from the November air. He’s so close that you can see the gray sky caught in his eyes, and then he kisses you, his thumb moving once against your cheek. When he pulls back, he doesn't go far; his hand is still at your jaw, and you feel the cold on your face and the warmth of his hand and your own heartbeat, shaky and loud, and entirely his fault.
ruin the friendship | gojo satoru x you
⟡ fluff, soccer player!gojo, lowkey a 5+1 if u squint | 2.7k
Satoru meets you on a fleeting day that only September knows how to do. The autumn afternoon tasted of woodsmoke, the sky a deep blue that seemed to go on forever. The soccer field impossibly green against the fire of the turning trees, gold and scarlet leaves drifting lazily across the track, the whole campus holding its breath… Or maybe none of it looked like that at all.
Maybe it was only because seeing you standing there made Satoru's whole world arrange itself into something worth looking at.
Well, the half of you that he could see in his vision. You were tucked behind your friend, who had enough to say for the both of you. She was halfway through introducing the college newspaper before he noticed you at all. The setting sun pooled golden along your throat and cheekbones, your hair lifting softly in the wind, and your expression, through all of it, utterly relaxed.
"So would that be okay?" Yumi finishes, he had caught her name somewhere in the middle of her spiel, but the rest of it flew over him.
"Uh," Satoru hums, a real testament to his sharp mind. Suguru answers for him; at least one of them had been listening. Suguru walks Yumi back through everything she had just said, the newspaper, the semester, the plan to cover the sports section, like he had been listening to every word.
Well, because he had been. Suguru had been listening while Satoru was just standing there with the sun in his eyes and you in his line of sight, watching the way you hadn't looked at him yet, the way he already found himself wanting to know what your voice sounded like, what you thought about, what you were like when you weren't standing on the sideline of a soccer field looking like you had somewhere better to be.
"Great! See you tomorrow," Yumi says, already turning on her heel. You nod after her, a small polite gesture, your eyes cast somewhere just past Satoru's shoulder, and then you turn and follow her across the track, leaves skittering around your sneakers as you walk away.
Satoru’s eyes follow you, and he only snaps out of it when Suguru reaches over and smacks the back of his head.
“You done?”
Satoru gapes at him. “What?”
Suguru just looks toward where you disappeared, then back at him.
Satoru immediately looks away. “Shut up.”
“Do you like soccer?” It slips out of Satoru’s mouth before he can stop himself. It was either that or saying something objectively worse, like admitting the fact that he’s thought about you an unreasonable amount since yesterday’s practice.
Suguru told him your name yesterday, and you introduced yourselves properly today, which means there is absolutely no reason for him to be embarrassing himself like this already.
“No, not really,” you confess with a shy laugh. “The sports section wasn’t exactly my first choice-” Your eyes widen slightly. “Not that there’s anything wrong with soccer. Or sports. God, that sounded bad.”
Satoru laughs, not because you’re funny (although you are, a little) but because you’ve known him for roughly 10 minutes and already managed to reject something he likes, unlike most people who hear he plays soccer and start pretending they’ve always been deeply invested in its history.
Satoru has never put much belief into that whole opposites attract thing, mostly because it sounds like something people say after making objectively questionable decisions, but he looks at you for a second longer than necessary and thinks maybe there are more flawed theories in the world.
Satoru’s known you for almost a month, mostly through awkward encounters at practice and increasingly less awkward walks afterward. Somewhere between post-practice interviews and waiting for his teammates, who insist warm-down stretches take thirty years, he learns you’re pre-med.
He also learns that you’d originally wanted to cover research studies in the biology department for the paper instead of sports. Unfortunately, most of those positions had already been filled by upperclassmen before applications even reached sophomores.
Satoru nods sympathetically and says something supportive like a normal person when you tell him. Secretly, though, he’s glad, which immediately makes him feel like a terrible person.
He wants you to get the opportunities you actually wanted, but selfishly, he likes that sports means you end up here instead, sitting on cold bleachers with your laptop open and asking him questions after practice and pretending not to laugh when he starts giving useless answers just to keep the conversation going.
On the first practice of the week, you’re nowhere to be found. Satoru notices on his first sweep of the bleachers, the sidelines, and the small cluster of students hovering near the track. Yumi is there, which means you should be too, tucked somewhere close to her with your laptop balanced on your knees. But today the space beside her is empty.
He tells himself it’s nothing. People miss things; it’s normal. He repeats this to himself twice during drills and once more during the cooldown. But after practice, he finds Yumi anyway, hands shoved deep in his pockets like that makes any of this casual.
"Hey," he says, "Where's your friend?"
Yumi's pen stops moving. "She's sick."
"Sick?"
She turns to face him fully then, "Relax, she’s not dying. It's a cold, not medieval tuberculosis."
Satoru laughs in return, because it was funny, but underneath it, the same low hum of worry was sitting unmoved right in the middle of his chest. "...Do you think I could get her number?"
Yumi stares at him. "I just told you," she says slowly, as if he's a little bit foolish, "she's sick."
"I know."
"So why do you need her number?"
He opens his mouth, then closes it. His hands are still in his pockets, which is the only place they could be right now, because they have gone slightly damp, and he absolutely has no interest in Yumi knowing that.
Yumi watches him for another second, letting him sit in it, and then the corner of her mouth pulls up. "I'm kidding," she says, already flipping to a new page in her notepad. She scribbles your number down, tears it off, and holds it out to him.
Satoru sits in his car for an embarrassing amount of time, staring at your name at the top of a blank text message. He types something. Deletes it. Types something else, reads it back, winces, deletes that too.
He deletes it. Too formal, sounds like a get-well card from a coworker.
Satoru: Hey! It’s Satoru from the soccer team. Yumi gave me your number.
He deletes that too. He should’ve scrapped it after the exclamation point.
Satoru: Hey.
He stares at that for a long moment, then deletes it. He throws his phone face down on the passenger seat and runs a hand through his hair, tipping his head back against the headrest. He has played in front of hundreds of people, taken penalty kicks with the score tied, and not once felt his hands shake, so he doesn’t know why drafting a single text message to you is doing this to him.
He picks his phone back up.
Satoru: Hi, it’s Satoru. Yumi mentioned you were sick, feel better soon.
He reads it four times. It’s fine. It is completely fine and normal. He sends it before he can talk himself out of it and turns his phone face down on the passenger seat, wishing that he could do the same with whatever is sitting in his chest every time he thinks about you.
He hears his phone ding and something in his chest flinches, which is insane, which is genuinely embarrassing. But he still reaches for his phone off the passenger seat so fast he nearly fumbles it between his fingers.
You: hiii satoru!! yeah im okay, just a cold! thanks for checking in tho
He reads it once and types back:
Satoru: And here I thought you had perfect attendance
He stares at it and immediately regrets sending it. But 2 minutes later, your typing bubble appears.
You: i have a 102 degree fever. so sorry i couldn't make it out to stand in the cold and watch you run in circles like a hamster on a wheel >:( have some compassion
He grins at his phone like an idiot.
The next time you come to practice, there is a bottled tea drink sitting in your spot on the bleachers, impossible to miss. Beside it, a post-it note pressed flat against the cold metal.
Glad you're feeling better.
Beneath the words, occupying considerably more space, is a small doodle of a hamster. You look up. Satoru is already on the field, in the middle of warming up, looking right at you.
Suguru falls into step beside him during a water break, glancing once in your direction and then back at Satoru. "So when are you going to tell her?"
Satoru, mid sip, chokes. Water goes everywhere, a significant amount of it landing directly on Suguru, who recoils and shoves him hard in the shoulder.
"Tell her what?" Satoru asks.
Suguru wipes his sleeve, unimpressed. "That you like her."
Satoru wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He seems to be processing this like it’s new information. "I don't… " he starts, and then stops, and then says nothing.
You had only made it out to a handful of games during the season; you and Yumi split the roster between you, trading off week by week. But it’s the last game of the season, and you are both there, and Satoru sees you from across the field during warm-up and has to actively remember how to breathe.
You are wearing his jersey. His number, his name across your back, which you have because 2 weeks ago in the library, you had knocked your drink across the table and onto yourself, and the only thing Satoru had in his bag was a spare jersey. You had given it back the next day, freshly washed, but he had told you to keep it and then walked away before his face could do anything embarrassing.
Your hair is tied up with ribbons in the team’s colors, and there is face paint on your cheeks. You are standing next to Yumi, who is scribbling something in her notepad.
Suguru appears at his shoulder. "Breathe."
Satoru shoves him lightly for being insufferable and then, annoyingly, takes his first breath after seeing you.
A week after the last game's victory, the final sports issue finally gets printed. You and Yumi had spent stupid amounts of time on it, more than necessary, probably. You had argued over layouts, stayed late editing quotes, and gone back and forth over photos until both of you were cross-eyed under the fluorescent lights of the newspaper office.
You almost don't give it to him, but you'd written this one with him in the back of your mind the whole time. And it was the thing you'd spent the better part of two weeks on, the piece your editor sent back twice with notes that made you want to close your laptop and walk into the ocean.
There was no practice to go to anymore, no bleachers to sit on, no easy excuse to find yourself in the same place at the same time. You hadn't quite realized how much of your access to him had been built into the structure of the semester until the season ended and took all of it with it.
But you ran into him on a Thursday morning. He was coming out of the building you were going into, his bag over one shoulder, looking like he'd had roughly just enough sleep.
"Hey," he says
"Hey," you hum back, and then, before you could think about it long enough to talk yourself out of it, you pull the folded copy from your bag and hold it out to him. “The final issue."
He takes it and finds your name before he finds anything else, which he does every time. He stands there in the cold of the path like he has nowhere else to be, like the words you wrote were worth taking the time over, and you let yourself look at him the way you don't usually let yourself look at him.
October had been all fire and gold, the air still holding the last warmth of summer in the afternoons. But November had come in quietly and taken all of that away, leaving something crisper and cleaner behind, the trees stripped back now, the sky a pale gray that sat low over the campus.
Satoru’s white hair catches the morning light the way it always does, but there is something about the gray November sky behind him that makes it look softer. A few strands have fallen across his forehead, and the cold, with its real teeth to it this week, has put the faintest color along his cheekbones.
He turns another page, and something in his expression shifts. You look away before he can catch you watching.
"You wrote about the last game like you actually cared about it," he says, which was not what you expected him to say.
"I did care about it," you say, carefully.
"You told me a month ago that you didn't even know the offside rule."
"I looked it up," you confess, and something paints his face at that, something warm and slow, and you feel your heart do the thing it has been doing around him for months.
He closes the issue and looks at you. "It's good," he says, which you can tell is not what he actually wanted to say, which is its own thing to think about.
"Thank you," you say.
The wind moves through the bare trees lining the path, and he shifts the issue to one hand, and you watch him not quite look at you, which is unusual because Satoru Gojo has never once had trouble looking at anything directly in his life.
"I kept thinking about what you'd write," he says finally, still not quite looking at you.
You don't say anything.
"And then I kept thinking about that and then about other things and then," He stops, then starts again. "You take up all my mind when you're not with me. And half of it when you are."
Something blooms in your chest, your heart doing something without your approval, your hands not entirely steady either.
"That's a lot," you say finally, which is not really a response, which you are aware of. So you reach out and close your fingers around his wrist, then lean forward and rest the top of your head against his chest.
"I know," he smiles.
You pull back to look at him and think about September, the soccer field, the afternoon you didn’t dare to look at him yet. You think about cold bleachers and post-practice walks and every conversation that started about one thing and ended somewhere neither of you had planned. You think about his jersey still hanging in your closet.
"I chose the photo of you from the third game," you say. "There were better ones technically."
"You're not looking at the camera. You're looking at something off to the side, and you're..." you stop for a second. "It's the best one because of your smile. I've never seen you smile like that in any of the other photos."
"I know that photo," he says, quietly.
"It ran on the front page."
"I know." He hums, "I was looking at you."
He closes the distance slowly. His hand comes up to your jaw, cold from the November air. He’s so close that you can see the gray sky caught in his eyes, and then he kisses you, his thumb moving once against your cheek. When he pulls back, he doesn't go far; his hand is still at your jaw, and you feel the cold on your face and the warmth of his hand and your own heartbeat, shaky and loud, and entirely his fault.
ruin the friendship | gojo satoru x you
⟡ fluff, soccer player!gojo, lowkey a 5+1 if u squint | 2.7k
Satoru meets you on a fleeting day that only September knows how to do. The autumn afternoon tasted of woodsmoke, the sky a deep blue that seemed to go on forever. The soccer field impossibly green against the fire of the turning trees, gold and scarlet leaves drifting lazily across the track, the whole campus holding its breath… Or maybe none of it looked like that at all.
Maybe it was only because seeing you standing there made Satoru's whole world arrange itself into something worth looking at.
Well, the half of you that he could see in his vision. You were tucked behind your friend, who had enough to say for the both of you. She was halfway through introducing the college newspaper before he noticed you at all. The setting sun pooled golden along your throat and cheekbones, your hair lifting softly in the wind, and your expression, through all of it, utterly relaxed.
"So would that be okay?" Yumi finishes, he had caught her name somewhere in the middle of her spiel, but the rest of it flew over him.
"Uh," Satoru hums, a real testament to his sharp mind. Suguru answers for him; at least one of them had been listening. Suguru walks Yumi back through everything she had just said, the newspaper, the semester, the plan to cover the sports section, like he had been listening to every word.
Well, because he had been. Suguru had been listening while Satoru was just standing there with the sun in his eyes and you in his line of sight, watching the way you hadn't looked at him yet, the way he already found himself wanting to know what your voice sounded like, what you thought about, what you were like when you weren't standing on the sideline of a soccer field looking like you had somewhere better to be.
"Great! See you tomorrow," Yumi says, already turning on her heel. You nod after her, a small polite gesture, your eyes cast somewhere just past Satoru's shoulder, and then you turn and follow her across the track, leaves skittering around your sneakers as you walk away.
Satoru’s eyes follow you, and he only snaps out of it when Suguru reaches over and smacks the back of his head.
“You done?”
Satoru gapes at him. “What?”
Suguru just looks toward where you disappeared, then back at him.
Satoru immediately looks away. “Shut up.”
“Do you like soccer?” It slips out of Satoru’s mouth before he can stop himself. It was either that or saying something objectively worse, like admitting the fact that he’s thought about you an unreasonable amount since yesterday’s practice.
Suguru told him your name yesterday, and you introduced yourselves properly today, which means there is absolutely no reason for him to be embarrassing himself like this already.
“No, not really,” you confess with a shy laugh. “The sports section wasn’t exactly my first choice-” Your eyes widen slightly. “Not that there’s anything wrong with soccer. Or sports. God, that sounded bad.”
Satoru laughs, not because you’re funny (although you are, a little) but because you’ve known him for roughly 10 minutes and already managed to reject something he likes, unlike most people who hear he plays soccer and start pretending they’ve always been deeply invested in its history.
Satoru has never put much belief into that whole opposites attract thing, mostly because it sounds like something people say after making objectively questionable decisions, but he looks at you for a second longer than necessary and thinks maybe there are other more flawed theories in the world.
Satoru’s known you for almost a month, mostly through awkward encounters at practice and increasingly less awkward walks afterward. Somewhere between post-practice interviews and waiting for his teammates, who insist warm-down stretches take thirty years, he learns you’re pre-med.
He also learns that you’d originally wanted to cover research studies in the biology department for the paper instead of sports. Unfortunately, most of those positions had already been filled by upperclassmen before applications even reached sophomores.
Satoru nods sympathetically and says something supportive like a normal person when you tell him. Secretly, though, he’s glad, which immediately makes him feel like a terrible person.
He wants you to get the opportunities you actually wanted, but selfishly, he likes that sports means you end up here instead, sitting on cold bleachers with your laptop open and asking him questions after practice and pretending not to laugh when he starts giving useless answers just to keep the conversation going.
On the first practice of the week, you’re nowhere to be found. Satoru notices on his first sweep of the bleachers, the sidelines, and the small cluster of students hovering near the track. Yumi is there, which means you should be too, tucked somewhere close to her with your laptop balanced on your knees. But today the space beside her is empty.
He tells himself it’s nothing. People miss things; it’s normal. He repeats this to himself twice during drills and once more during the cooldown. But after practice, he finds Yumi anyway, hands shoved deep in his pockets like that makes any of this casual.
"Hey," he says, "Where's your friend?"
Yumi's pen stops moving. "She's sick."
"Sick?"
She turns to face him fully then, "Relax, she’s not dying. It's a cold, not medieval tuberculosis."
Satoru laughs in return, because it was funny, but underneath it, the same low hum of worry was sitting unmoved right in the middle of his chest. "...Do you think I could get her number?"
Yumi stares at him. "I just told you," she says slowly, as if he's a little bit foolish, "she's sick."
"I know."
"So why do you need her number?"
He opens his mouth, then closes it. His hands are still in his pockets, which is the only place they could be right now, because they have gone slightly damp, and he absolutely has no interest in Yumi knowing that.
Yumi watches him for another second, letting him sit in it, and then the corner of her mouth pulls up. "I'm kidding," she says, already flipping to a new page in her notepad. She scribbles your number down, tears it off, and holds it out to him.
Satoru sits in his car for an embarrassing amount of time, staring at your name at the top of a blank text message. He types something. Deletes it. Types something else, reads it back, winces, deletes that too.
He deletes it. Too formal, sounds like a get-well card from a coworker.
Satoru: Hey! It’s Satoru from the soccer team. Yumi gave me your number.
He deletes that too. He should’ve scrapped it after typing the exclamation point.
Satoru: Hey.
He stares at that for a long moment, then deletes it. He throws his phone face down on the passenger seat and runs a hand through his hair, tipping his head back against the headrest. He has played in front of hundreds of people, taken penalty kicks with the score tied, and not once felt his hands shake, so he doesn’t know why drafting a single text message to you is doing this to him.
He picks his phone back up.
Satoru: Hi, it’s Satoru. Yumi mentioned you were sick, feel better soon.
He reads it four times. It’s fine. It is completely fine and normal. He sends it before he can talk himself out of it and turns his phone face down on the passenger seat, wishing that he could do the same with whatever is sitting in his chest every time he thinks about you.
He hears his phone ding and something in his chest flinches, which is insane, which is genuinely embarrassing. But he still reaches for his phone off the passenger seat so fast he nearly fumbles it between his fingers.
You: hiii satoru!! yeah im okay, just a cold! thanks for checking in tho
He reads it once and types back:
Satoru: And here I thought you had perfect attendance
He stares at it and immediately regrets sending it. But 2 minutes later, your typing bubble appears.
You: i have a 102 degree fever. so sorry i couldn't make it out to stand in the cold and watch you run in circles like a hamster on a wheel >:( have some compassion
He grins at his phone like an idiot.
The next time you come to practice, there is a bottled tea drink sitting in your spot on the bleachers, impossible to miss. Beside it, a post-it note pressed flat against the cold metal.
Glad you're feeling better.
Beneath the words, occupying considerably more space, is a small doodle of a hamster. You look up. Satoru is already on the field, in the middle of warming up, looking right at you.
Suguru falls into step beside him during a water break, glancing once in your direction and then back at Satoru. "So when are you going to tell her?"
Satoru, mid sip, chokes. Water goes everywhere, a significant amount of it landing directly on Suguru, who recoils and shoves him hard in the shoulder.
"Tell her what?" Satoru asks.
Suguru wipes his sleeve, unimpressed. "That you like her."
Satoru wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He seems to be processing this like it’s new information. "I don't… " he starts, and then stops, and then says nothing.
You had only made it out to a handful of games during the season; you and Yumi split the roster between you, trading off week by week. But it’s the last game of the season, and you are both there, and Satoru sees you from across the field during warm-up and has to actively remember how to breathe.
You are wearing his jersey. His number, his name across your back, which you have because 2 weeks ago in the library, you had knocked your drink across the table and onto yourself, and the only thing Satoru had in his bag was a spare jersey. You had given it back the next day, freshly washed, but he had told you to keep it and then walked away before his face could do anything embarrassing.
Your hair is tied up with ribbons in the team’s colors, and there is face paint on your cheeks. You are standing next to Yumi, who is scribbling something in her notepad.
Suguru appears at his shoulder. "Breathe."
Satoru shoves him lightly for being insufferable and then, annoyingly, takes his first breath after seeing you.
A week after the last game's victory, the final sports issue finally gets printed. You and Yumi had spent stupid amounts of time on it, more than necessary, probably. You had argued over layouts, stayed late editing quotes, and gone back and forth over photos until both of you were cross-eyed under the fluorescent lights of the newspaper office.
You almost don't give it to him, but you'd written this one with him in the back of your mind the whole time. And it was the thing you'd spent the better part of two weeks on, the piece your editor sent back twice with notes that made you want to close your laptop and walk into the ocean.
There was no practice to go to anymore, no bleachers to sit on, no easy excuse to find yourself in the same place at the same time. You hadn't quite realized how much of your access to him had been built into the structure of the semester until the season ended and took all of it with it.
But you ran into him on a Thursday morning. He was coming out of the building you were going into, his bag over one shoulder, looking like he'd had roughly just enough sleep.
"Hey," he says
"Hey," you hum back, and then, before you could think about it long enough to talk yourself out of it, you pull the folded copy from your bag and hold it out to him. “The final issue."
He takes it and finds your name before he finds anything else, which he does every time. He stands there in the cold of the path like he has nowhere else to be, like the words you wrote were worth taking the time over, and you let yourself look at him the way you don't usually let yourself look at him.
October had been all fire and gold, the air still holding the last warmth of summer in the afternoons. But November had come in quietly and taken all of that away, leaving something crisper and cleaner behind, the trees stripped back now, the sky a pale gray that sat low over the campus.
Satoru’s white hair catches the morning light the way it always does, but there is something about the gray November sky behind him that makes it look softer. A few strands have fallen across his forehead, and the cold, with its real teeth to it this week, has put the faintest color along his cheekbones.
He turns another page, and something in his expression shifts. You look away before he can catch you watching.
"You wrote about the last game like you actually cared about it," he says, which was not what you expected him to say.
"I did care about it," you say, carefully.
"You told me a month ago that you didn't even know the offside rule."
"I looked it up," you confess, and something paints his face at that, something warm and slow, and you feel your heart do the thing it has been doing around him for months.
He closes the issue and looks at you. "It's good," he says, which you can tell is not what he actually wanted to say, which is its own thing to think about.
"Thank you," you say.
The wind moves through the bare trees lining the path, and he shifts the issue to one hand, and you watch him not quite look at you, which is unusual because Satoru Gojo has never once had trouble looking at anything directly in his life.
"I kept thinking about what you'd write," he says finally, still not quite looking at you.
You don't say anything.
"And then I kept thinking about that and then about other things and then," He stops, then starts again. "You take up all my mind when you're not with me. And half of it when you are."
Something blooms in your chest, your heart doing something without your approval, your hands not entirely steady either.
"That's a lot," you say finally, which is not really a response, which you are aware of. So you reach out and close your fingers around his wrist, then lean forward and rest the top of your head against his chest.
"I know," he smiles.
You pull back to look at him and think about September, the soccer field, the afternoon you didn’t dare to look at him yet. You think about cold bleachers and post-practice walks and every conversation that started about one thing and ended somewhere neither of you had planned. You think about his jersey still hanging in your closet.
"I chose the photo of you from the third game," you say. "There were better ones technically."
"You're not looking at the camera. You're looking at something off to the side, and you're..." you stop for a second. "It's the best one because of your smile. I've never seen you smile like that in any of the other photos."
"I know that photo," he says, quietly.
"It ran on the front page."
"I know." He hums, "I was looking at you."
He closes the distance slowly. His hand comes up to your jaw, cold from the November air. He’s so close that you can see the gray sky caught in his eyes, and then he kisses you, his thumb moving once against your cheek. When he pulls back, he doesn't go far; his hand is still at your jaw, and you feel the cold on your face and the warmth of his hand and your own heartbeat, shaky and loud, and entirely his fault.
a world alone | gojo satoru x you
→ fluff, high school (?) au, growing up | 1.5k
Liking Gojo Satoru is the easiest thing you've ever done in all your years of living, which is almost funny because admitting it out loud feels like the hardest thing you can imagine.
He's already there when you turn the corner, white hair catching the morning light that flows through the windows, long legs stretched out in front of your locker, oblivious to the fact that he makes everybody else walk a little faster when they pass him, laugh a little louder when he's watching, try a little harder to be interesting when he turns his eyes in their direction.
"You're late," he says, not looking up from his phone, thumb scrolling lazily through something you can't see, though you know from previous knowledge it's probably either memes or sports highlights or some combination of both that only makes sense to him.
"I'm exactly on time, actually, if you want to get technical about it, which you never do, but I'm clocking in at 7:42, which is precisely when I said I'd be here." You stop in front of him, close enough now to smell his shampoo, a citrus scent diluted by sunlight that follows him everywhere, something warm and expensive that makes you think of summer afternoons even in the dead of winter, even at 7:42 in the morning when the sky is still deciding whether to turn gray or gold.
"You're early," you add, because he is, and because you saw him check his phone 3 times from the stairwell where you were hiding, telling yourself you weren't waiting for him to arrive even as you counted down each second.
He lifts his head at that, his eyes finding yours immediately, "I wanted to beat the crowd," he says, which is ridiculous, because it's 7:42 am on a Tuesday and the hallway is empty except for you and him and a building service worker mopping something suspicious near the water fountain.
Gojo doesn't move from your locker, and you don't ask him to, because this is the routine you two share, the push and the pull, the way he always finds reasons to be exactly where you are.
"Move," you say, but your voice lacks conviction.
"No," he says, and grins, all teeth and trouble.
"Satoru." His name sits differently in your mouth than other names.
You're young, and nothing is easy, and this boy with his white hair and his blue eyes and his smirk is your biggest headache of all, the way he looks at you like you're ordinary and extraordinary in the same gaze, like you're the only person in the room and also just another person in the room, and you never know which version of yourself you're supposed to be.
"Say please," he says, stretching the words out like sweet candy, like he has all the time in the world and nowhere else he'd rather be than here, blocking your locker, blocking your exit, blocking every reasonable thought from your head with nothing more than his existence.
"I'll say nothing, I’ll just wait," you tell him, crossing your arms, trying to look tough and probably failing because he's smiling at you like you just told him the best joke he's ever heard, your stubbornness a gift he didn't expect to get this morning but will absolutely treasure.
"You'd wait?" He tilts his head, and you watch the way the light catches the scar near his jawline, the one he got during basketball practice last semester when he dove for a ball he didn't need to dive for, when he made the shot anyway because of course he did. "For me?"
The question lingers in the thick air between you. Instead of responding, your gaze drifts to his lips, at the way his lower lip is slightly chapped, at the small imperfections that make him real, make him reachable, make him someone you could touch if you ever worked up the courage to try.
"You're staring," he says, and his voice is softer now, and you wonder if he's nervous, if this game you play costs him something too.
"You're in my way," you reply, but it sounds like an excuse even to your own ears, sounds like the weakest protest you've ever made, because the truth is you don't want him to move, you want him to stay exactly where he is forever, blocking your locker and every sensible plan you had for this morning.
“Am I?" He shifts then, just barely, his shoulder brushing yours as he finally steps aside, but he doesn't actually give you the space you're (not) asking for; he stays close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, close enough that you have to decide between pulling him closer or running away. "Or am I exactly where you want me?"
Your fingers fumble with the locker combination, once, twice, three times, the numbers blurring because he's watching you fail with delight.
"You're not real," you murmur, finally getting the lock open, finally discovering something to do with your hands that isn't reaching for him.
"And yet," he whispers, leaning in close enough that his breath hovers over your ear, "you're still smiling."
The bell rings then, loud and jarring, and the hallway floods with students carrying backpacks and coffee and the weight of another Tuesday, and Gojo disappears into the crowd like he was never there at all, leaving you with your locker open and your pulse hammering.
The first snow of the year falls on a Sunday, the sky intentionally picked the one day you had no obligations, no excuses, nothing between you and the quiet white of it settling over everything.
You notice it from your window. You were not supposed to go outside. And yet you find yourself at the park after a certain white-haired boy spammed your messages.
You have your hands in your pockets and your breath in little clouds in front of you, and you are thinking, specifically, about nothing. Gojo is standing at the edge of the fountain that's been turned off for winter, looking up at the sky with his face tipped back, and his eyes closed, catching snowflakes the way children do.
His white hair disappears into the snow, and you feel your heart skip a beat. It was not supposed to do that. You had an agreement with yourself, a firm and reasonable arrangement to keep yourself small, to keep the safe empty space you'd made so carefully around yourself. Your heart was supposed to be empty and quiet and safe from boys with white hair and blue eyes who make it do complicated things.
Nothing in life is easy. You learned that early, the way most students do, slowly and then all at once, the weight of it arriving in pieces small enough to carry until it’s suddenly too heavy to carry on your shoulders, until you're sitting in a counselor's office being asked what you want to do with the rest of your life at an age when you still can't decide what to eat for lunch, until the future stops being something distant and soft on the horizon and becomes something with a hard deadline.
Nothing is easy. School isn't easy. The person you're supposed to be growing into isn't easy. The choices that are somehow both enormous and completely ordinary are not easy to make.
But choosing to love Gojo Satoru is easy. Embarrassingly, inconveniently, against all possible odds, easy. The way breathing is easy, the same way your feet know the way home without thinking. Easy in a way that makes no logical sense, given that he is a headache in human form, given that he takes up more space in your head than anyone reasonably should, given that he makes you fumble your locker combination and forget your own sentences and stand in parks in the snow instead of staying home like a rational person.
It should be hard. You have thought of every reason it should be hard.
He is too much, too loud in quiet rooms, too certain in uncertain ones, too comfortable in his own skin in a way that feels almost irritating when you are so busy trying to figure out what your own skin is supposed to feel like.
But still. You would rather have the headache than not have it. Would rather stand in the cold feeling your heart do its elaborate thing than go back to the quiet you thought you wanted, the secure space you made with yourself before you knew what it would cost you to keep it.
The future is enormous and vague, and coming for you whether you're ready or not, and you are so exhausted sometimes of how much there is to carry. Nothing is easy.
But you look at Satoru standing in the snow with his eyes closed, and his face tipped up like he is completely unbothered by the cold, by the world, by any of it, and the complicated thing in your chest ever so slightly calms.
It's the easiest thing you've ever felt. That's the part that scares you most.
author's note: unsure if i like this but i yearn to post;; all i know is that im sleepy and my back hurts
a world alone | gojo satoru x you
→ fluff, high school (?) au, growing up | 1.5k
Liking Gojo Satoru is the easiest thing you've ever done in all your years of living, which is almost funny because admitting it out loud feels like the hardest thing you can imagine.
He's already there when you turn the corner, white hair catching the morning light that flows through the windows, long legs stretched out in front of your locker, oblivious to the fact that he makes everybody else walk a little faster when they pass him, laugh a little louder when he's watching, try a little harder to be interesting when he turns his eyes in their direction.
"You're late," he says, not looking up from his phone, thumb scrolling lazily through something you can't see, though you know from previous knowledge it's probably either memes or sports highlights or some combination of both that only makes sense to him.
"I'm exactly on time, actually, if you want to get technical about it, which you never do, but I'm clocking in at 7:42, which is precisely when I said I'd be here." You stop in front of him, close enough now to smell his shampoo, a citrus scent diluted by sunlight that follows him everywhere, something warm and expensive that makes you think of summer afternoons even in the dead of winter, even at 7:42 in the morning when the sky is still deciding whether to turn gray or gold.
"You're early," you add, because he is, and because you saw him check his phone 3 times from the stairwell where you were hiding, telling yourself you weren't waiting for him to arrive even as you counted down each second.
He lifts his head at that, his eyes finding yours immediately, "I wanted to beat the crowd," he says, which is ridiculous, because it's 7:42 am on a Tuesday and the hallway is empty except for you and him and a building service worker mopping something suspicious near the water fountain.
Gojo doesn't move from your locker, and you don't ask him to, because this is the routine you two share, the push and the pull, the way he always finds reasons to be exactly where you are.
"Move," you say, but your voice lacks conviction.
"No," he says, and grins, all teeth and trouble.
"Satoru." His name sits differently in your mouth than other names.
You're young, and nothing is easy, and this boy with his white hair and his blue eyes and his smirk is your biggest headache of all, the way he looks at you like you're ordinary and extraordinary in the same gaze, like you're the only person in the room and also just another person in the room, and you never know which version of yourself you're supposed to be.
"Say please," he says, stretching the words out like sweet candy, like he has all the time in the world and nowhere else he'd rather be than here, blocking your locker, blocking your exit, blocking every reasonable thought from your head with nothing more than his existence.
"I'll say nothing, I’ll just wait," you tell him, crossing your arms, trying to look tough and probably failing because he's smiling at you like you just told him the best joke he's ever heard, your stubbornness a gift he didn't expect to get this morning but will absolutely treasure.
"You'd wait?" He tilts his head, and you watch the way the light catches the scar near his jawline, the one he got during basketball practice last semester when he dove for a ball he didn't need to dive for, when he made the shot anyway because of course he did. "For me?"
The question lingers in the thick air between you. Instead of responding, your gaze drifts to his lips, at the way his lower lip is slightly chapped, at the small imperfections that make him real, make him reachable, make him someone you could touch if you ever worked up the courage to try.
"You're staring," he says, and his voice is softer now, and you wonder if he's nervous, if this game you play costs him something too.
"You're in my way," you reply, but it sounds like an excuse even to your own ears, sounds like the weakest protest you've ever made, because the truth is you don't want him to move, you want him to stay exactly where he is forever, blocking your locker and every sensible plan you had for this morning.
“Am I?" He shifts then, just barely, his shoulder brushing yours as he finally steps aside, but he doesn't actually give you the space you're (not) asking for; he stays close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, close enough that you have to decide between pulling him closer or running away. "Or am I exactly where you want me?"
Your fingers fumble with the locker combination, once, twice, three times, the numbers blurring because he's watching you fail with delight.
"You're not real," you murmur, finally getting the lock open, finally discovering something to do with your hands that isn't reaching for him.
"And yet," he whispers, leaning in close enough that his breath hovers over your ear, "you're still smiling."
The bell rings then, loud and jarring, and the hallway floods with students carrying backpacks and coffee and the weight of another Tuesday, and Gojo disappears into the crowd like he was never there at all, leaving you with your locker open and your pulse hammering.
The first snow of the year falls on a Sunday, the sky intentionally picked the one day you had no obligations, no excuses, nothing between you and the quiet white of it settling over everything.
You notice it from your window. You were not supposed to go outside. And yet you find yourself at the park after a certain white-haired boy spammed your messages.
You have your hands in your pockets and your breath in little clouds in front of you, and you are thinking, specifically, about nothing. Gojo is standing at the edge of the fountain that's been turned off for winter, looking up at the sky with his face tipped back, and his eyes closed, catching snowflakes the way children do.
His white hair disappears into the snow, and you feel your heart skip a beat. It was not supposed to do that. You had an agreement with yourself, a firm and reasonable arrangement to keep yourself small, to keep the safe empty space you'd made so carefully around yourself. Your heart was supposed to be empty and quiet and safe from boys with white hair and blue eyes who make it do complicated things.
Nothing in life is easy. You learned that early, the way most students do, slowly and then all at once, the weight of it arriving in pieces small enough to carry until it’s suddenly too heavy to carry on your shoulders, until you're sitting in a counselor's office being asked what you want to do with the rest of your life at an age when you still can't decide what to eat for lunch, until the future stops being something distant and soft on the horizon and becomes something with a hard deadline.
Nothing is easy. School isn't easy. The person you're supposed to be growing into isn't easy. The choices that are somehow both enormous and completely ordinary are not easy to make.
But choosing to love Gojo Satoru is easy. Embarrassingly, inconveniently, against all possible odds, easy. The way breathing is easy, the same way your feet know the way home without thinking. Easy in a way that makes no logical sense, given that he is a headache in human form, given that he takes up more space in your head than anyone reasonably should, given that he makes you fumble your locker combination and forget your own sentences and stand in parks in the snow instead of staying home like a rational person.
It should be hard. You have thought of every reason it should be hard.
He is too much, too loud in quiet rooms, too certain in uncertain ones, too comfortable in his own skin in a way that feels almost irritating when you are so busy trying to figure out what your own skin is supposed to feel like.
But still. You would rather have the headache than not have it. Would rather stand in the cold feeling your heart do its elaborate thing than go back to the quiet you thought you wanted, the secure space you made with yourself before you knew what it would cost you to keep it.
The future is enormous and vague, and coming for you whether you're ready or not, and you are so exhausted sometimes of how much there is to carry. Nothing is easy.
But you look at Satoru standing in the snow with his eyes closed, and his face tipped up like he is completely unbothered by the cold, by the world, by any of it, and the complicated thing in your chest ever so slightly calms.
It's the easiest thing you've ever felt. That's the part that scares you most.
author's note: unsure if i like this but i yearn to post;; all i know is that im sleepy and my back hurts
i’ve been hating everything i write lately & suddenly developed the standards of miranda priestley so apologies for the lack of updates ;; BUT trust there is something cooking in the oven
also ive been reading people we meet on vacation and now i’m obsessed and giddy so mentally prepare for a friends to lovers gojo fic because the inspiration is becoming too loud to ignore
SERIOUSLY tho i genuinely thought i’d have more time to write but i recently started a full time job. i still really wanna post soon i promise ):
[also i turned 1 year older recently and apparently that came with higher standards and back pain]
feminine intution | gojo satoru x you
⟡ fluff, parasocial reader, inspired by drop dead by olivia <3 | 2.6k
You’re staring.
You’re staring because he’s standing outside the lecture hall, white hair catching the early fall sun like something out of a purple shampoo commercial. He’s laughing at something the boy beside him said, head thrown back, completely not self-conscious about just how loud he is. Half the quad looks over at him; he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
But oh, you notice.
Rei appears at your elbow with two iced matchas and follows your gaze.
“Oh,” she says simply, as if she had unfolded your exact thoughts that have occupied your head in the last 2 minutes, “absolutely not.”
“What? I didn’t say anything.”
“Pshh. You didn’t have to.” She pushes your drink into your hand and loops her arm through yours, pulling you firmly in the opposite direction. “Come on, we’re gonna be late again.”
You let her pull you. But you look back at him, just a teeny glance, and he’s still laughing. You look back again. The sun is still doing that thing to his hair, and you should’ve listened to Rei... absolutely not.
His name, you learn from scouring the internet, LinkedIn pages, and a lot of embarrassing research (a Myriad of student organizations and Instagram mutuals), is Satoru Gojo. He’s a second year, like you, but in the physics department. He has an unreasonable number of followers for a college student. He once won a regional swimming tournament at eighteen, and there are photos. Lots of photos.
A person with dignity would share none of this with their friends, but because you have none, you share all of this with your friends.
Not long after, the group chat is buzzing about your parasocial relationship with Satoru. Aya sends a screenshot of him from the university’s physics department website.
aya: your future husband looks confused in this photo
you: he is NOT my future husband.
…
you: yet
The group chat is then filled with wedding ring and at least 10 kissing emojis.
You put your phone down on your bed and try to study for the exam you have tomorrow. But you have no self-control, and pick it back up thirty seconds later.
To preface, you’re minding your own business, sitting in the back corner of the 4th floor in the library. Your headphones are in, and your notes are spread sporadically across the table.
You were minding your business until he sat down across from you. Satoru Gojo is so close that when you glance up from your screen, you are looking directly at him. He’s got a yellow pad open and squinting at whatever problem he’s trying to solve.
He never looks up. You spend the next thirty minutes reading the same page of your textbook, you barely pick up your pen to write notes, and if you did, they are completely illegible.
To your dismay, he leaves before you do, yellow pad tucked under his arm, but on his way out, he glances over at you and gives you a friendly nod... and then he’s gone.
You text the group chat immediately.
you: i need you guys to know that i am not okay
You spent the entire winter break convincing yourself you’re over Satoru Gojo. Pining over a man for a whole semester when he doesn’t even know your name is useless. He’s just a person… A very tall person with a handsome face and an unfair laugh, and definitely not an angel… A person.
You’ve been back on campus for the spring semester for only four hours before you see him crossing the quad with a latte in each hand, handing one to the boy next to him, all while telling a story that makes the entire group around him laugh. He’s wearing a black puffer, sunglasses perched on his head despite the gloomy January sky, and he looks so unreal that you’re paranoid you made him up-
You walk directly into a trash can.
It makes an embarrassingly loud noise that makes a few people look over. You keep walking.
You are not over it.
It’s snowing lightly, but the kind that doesn’t stick. You’re in line at the convenience store on campus, holding a cup of instant ramen when he walks in.
You become extremely interested in the nutrition label on the cup. Sodium content, fascinating. The fat content? Riveting.
You hear him line up behind you. You are so normal. You are going to be so normal about this, so normal that you’re going to keep reading the ingredients list on a cup ramen at 11 oclock at night.
“Those are good,” he says.
You look up. Satoru Gojo is pointing at the cup in your hands, and he’s also apparently talking to you.
“Yeah.” You croak.
“Spicy miso,” he says, nodding, “good choice. The beef one is depressing.”
You let out a sound that might be a laugh, you’re unsure right now. He smiles, then the line moves, and you pay and leave before your face can betray the feelings you’ve had for him for the last six months.
You stand outside in the cold, under the snow, and pull your phone out.
you: he talked to me
you: 12 words
you: im going to hurl
aya: TWELVE????? oh we’re framing this
The campus bar closes at eleven. You know this because post-exam celebrations have been here enough times for you to memorize the way the lights get a little brighter at around 10:45, the owner’s subtle cue that it’s time to start wrapping up.
But the corner booth still has your friends piled into it, Rei’s pink cheeks and happy on her birthday, Sora giggling at Suzu belting the song playing over the speakers, and the table scattered with empty glasses and crumpled napkins.
You’re unsure when he got here.
Aya spots him first; she always does. It’s her superpower, you think. She essentially gives you warning signals not to do something embarrassing. This time, she kicks you under the table without saying anything. You look up.
Satoru Gojo is at the same bar as you are, with a few people you don’t recognize, a half-finished beer in front of him, leaning on one elbow and talking with the confidence of someone who has never once felt out of place in their life.
Someone says something funny, and he tips his head back, laughing, and the bar lights catch the white of his hair and the line of his throat just like it did back in the early fall.
You’ve thought about this way too many times. In a joking way, a fun way, the way you text the group chat about him and make it into something light, poking at your own parasocial tendencies. But sitting here right now, watching Satoru Gojo exist from across the bar at 10:40 a tonight, it doesn’t feel like a joke.
“You okay?” Rei asks quietly beside you.
“Y-Yeah.” You hum.
She follows your gaze and doesn’t say anything, which is somehow worse than if she said her usual, absolutely not.
You look away. Then you look back. To your dismay, he’s still there. He’s still going to be there until the lights completely turn on and the servers start collecting cups, but you’re going to sit in this booth and do absolutely nothing about it, which is exactly what you’ve been doing for the whole school year, and that is fine. You are fine. That was always the plan.
The song overhead starts to play something older and slow, and you hear him even from the other end of the bar, starting to sing along. He has always been unselfconsciously himself, from obnoxiously laughing in the quad, nodding at you in the library, and making small talk about cup ramen. Satoru Gojo has never apologized for being himself.
Aya leans over. “You should go say something.”
“I did once. We talked about ramen.”
“Babe.” She looks at you with an expression that is both fond and sad. “That is not the same thing.”
“I know.”
She doesn’t push. She fills your shot glass instead, Sora starts a new story, your booth gets loud again, and for a moment you’re back in it, laughing at something, leaning into the warmth of your friends, forgetting all about Satoru Gojo.
The bar gets louder after the last round of drinks is called. Someone in the back booth cheers, Sora knocks over a glass (it thankfully doesn't break), and Rei's birthday sash ends up around her neck like a scarf.
It’s the type of loud that makes you feel invisible. It makes you slip out of the booth quietly to get air.
The bar door swings shut behind you, and suddenly the sound of the music is muffled, the street is cold and dark, and you let out a long breath, watching it fog up in front of you.
You feel your phone buzz in your pocket.
aya: GO TALK TO HIMMM
aya: NOWWWWW
The door opens again behind you. You don’t look up; you assume it’s Suzu or a stranger needing air. But then they stop next to you and lean back against the wall the same way you are, and you can’t help yourself from looking over.
Satoru Gojo.
He’s got his black puffer on now, hands in his pockets, looking straight ahead. He’s looking out at the street, squinting slightly at nothing in particular, like he also just needed a second, like maybe he also felt invisible.
You put your phone away. For a moment, neither of you says anything. The bar noise bleeds faintly through the door, and somewhere down the block, someone is laughing.
"Needed air?" he asks, still looking at the street.
"Something like that."
He nods like that's a reasonable answer. "Fun night in there."
"Yeah." You glance over at him. "Your friends seem fun."
He turns his head then, just slightly, enough to look at you from the corner of his eyes. "You know who I am."
It isn't a question. Your face goes warm despite the chill.
"Campus is small," you say, which is kinda true, and also not really an answer.
Something shifts in his expression. “How small?"
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it anything." But his voice has that rhythm to it now. "I noticed you, too, you know. In the library."
You look at him then, because you can't not. "The library..."
"You had your headphones in. You were highlighting everything on the page." A pause. "I don't think you were actually reading anything."
Your mouth opens. Then closes. "I was reading-."
"Sure."
"I was."
He's fully smiling now, and you are going to combust on this sidewalk, right here, outside this bar, in front of everyone. The door swings open behind you, and a group spills out, loud and laughing, popping the bubble of quiet you've both been standing in.
You both shift slightly apart without meaning to. And then Aya's head appears in the doorway, her eyes finding you immediately.
"We're heading out," she says. "Rei's calling it."
You look back at him. He's watching you with his hands still in his pockets.
"I'll see you," you say.
"Yeah," he says, quietly. "You will."
You follow Aya inside. She grabs your arm the second the door closes and makes a sound directly into your shoulder.
"I know," you say.
"DO YOU?" she hisses.
Things happen after that night. Small things.
He texts you (you still aren't entirely sure of how he got your number, and when you asked him, he just said, I asked around like that was a completely normal thing). The texts are causal, nothing things, observations, and the occasional questions. But they come at odd hours, and he responds fast, always, and you've stopped pretending that it doesn't mean anything.
He finds you in the library again. Same table, same corner. But this time, he sits next to you. You spend two hours not really studying. He steals your highlighter and doesn't give it back, you don't complain.
Aya asks almost daily if you've told him.
You haven’t.
You’re at the same bar, the one that closes at 11. Two months later, a different birthday, but the same corner booth, and the same low lighting.
Satoru invited you. He texted four days ago.
satoru: suguru's bday friday, you should come
satoru: invite your friends too!
You'd stared at the text long enough that Aya took your phone and typed we'll be there before you could overthink it. You've been equal parts grateful and furious with her since.
The two tables pushed together hold everyone easily, his friends folding into yours. Suguru is being roasted every twenty minutes. Rei has already swapped jackets with someone she met an hour ago. Aya and Suzu complain about a class they have together.
Satoru is beside you again. He talks to everyone, laughs loudly at the table, but he keeps coming back to you between all of it, small whispers, things meant only for you.
By 10:30, the table has spread itself around the bar, Suguru pulled toward the birthday shots, Aya deep in conversation with someone you don't know, Rei on the dance floor, and it's just you and Satoru in the corner, and it's just been the two of you for long enough now that it doesn't feel awkward. It feels like the most natural arrangement in the world, which is its own kind of terrifying.
It's almost 11. The lights haven't gone bright yet, but the energy in the bar has lowered. You slip away from the booth toward the back of the bar, and the line for the bathroom is longer than it should be for a Tuesday night. You join it nonetheless, checking your phone, and thirty seconds later, someone slots in behind you.
You don't have to look to know.
"You're following me," you say, without looking up.
"I also have to use the bathroom," Satoru says, unbothered.
You look up at him over your shoulder. The hallway is narrow, which means he's closer than he would be anywhere else, which means you are suddenly extremely aware of the exact (or lack of) distance between you.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi," you say back.
His eyes stay on yours, and there is absolutely nothing casual about the way he's looking at you right now, and you should say it... right now. You've seen his face a hundred times. You have tattooed it to your memory, in stolen glances, in your peripheral vision, in the glow of a physics department webpage you visited way too many times for someone who doesn't take physics.
Up close, in the narrow red-lit hallway, he is genuinely unfair. The angles of his face make you feel lightheaded. His jaw, the line of his throat, all of it lands on your heart like a bomb.
You are so down bad. You have been so down bad since the first time you saw him. You are down bad in the bathroom line of the only bar open on campus on a Tuesday, and he is looking at you like that, and you think, with the last functional part of your brain... say it.
"Satoru-"
"I know," he interrupts.
And then he kisses you.
His hand finds your jaw, and he kisses you like he's been working up to it for longer than tonight. When he pulls back, you're pressed between him and the wall, and you can't quite remember how that happened.
"You could have said something," you manage.
The corner of his mouth lifts. "So could you."
You’re going to drop dead... you think.
author's note: sorry for disappearing, the trajectory of my life changed but my obsession for satoru hasn't.
feminine intution | gojo satoru x you
⟡ fluff, parasocial reader, inspired by drop dead by olivia <3 | 2.6k
You’re staring.
You’re staring because he’s standing outside the lecture hall, white hair catching the early fall sun like something out of a purple shampoo commercial. He’s laughing at something the boy beside him said, head thrown back, completely not self-conscious about just how loud he is. Half the quad looks over at him; he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
But oh, you notice.
Rei appears at your elbow with two iced matchas and follows your gaze.
“Oh,” she says simply, as if she had unfolded your exact thoughts that have occupied your head in the last 2 minutes, “absolutely not.”
“What? I didn’t say anything.”
“Pshh. You didn’t have to.” She pushes your drink into your hand and loops her arm through yours, pulling you firmly in the opposite direction. “Come on, we’re gonna be late again.”
You let her pull you. But you look back at him, just a teeny glance, and he’s still laughing. You look back again. The sun is still doing that thing to his hair, and you should’ve listened to Rei... absolutely not.
His name, you learn from scouring the internet, LinkedIn pages, and a lot of embarrassing research (a Myriad of student organizations and Instagram mutuals), is Satoru Gojo. He’s a second year, like you, but in the physics department. He has an unreasonable number of followers for a college student. He once won a regional swimming tournament at eighteen, and there are photos. Lots of photos.
A person with dignity would share none of this with their friends, but because you have none, you share all of this with your friends.
Not long after, the group chat is buzzing about your parasocial relationship with Satoru. Aya sends a screenshot of him from the university’s physics department website.
aya: your future husband looks confused in this photo
you: he is NOT my future husband.
…
you: yet
The group chat is then filled with wedding ring and at least 10 kissing emojis.
You put your phone down on your bed and try to study for the exam you have tomorrow. But you have no self-control, and pick it back up thirty seconds later.
To preface, you’re minding your own business, sitting in the back corner of the 4th floor in the library. Your headphones are in, and your notes are spread sporadically across the table.
You were minding your business until he sat down across from you. Satoru Gojo is so close that when you glance up from your screen, you are looking directly at him. He’s got a yellow pad open and squinting at whatever problem he’s trying to solve.
He never looks up. You spend the next thirty minutes reading the same page of your textbook, you barely pick up your pen to write notes, and if you did, they are completely illegible.
To your dismay, he leaves before you do, yellow pad tucked under his arm, but on his way out, he glances over at you and gives you a friendly nod... and then he’s gone.
You text the group chat immediately.
you: i need you guys to know that i am not okay
You spent the entire winter break convincing yourself you’re over Satoru Gojo. Pining over a man for a whole semester when he doesn’t even know your name is useless. He’s just a person… A very tall person with a handsome face and an unfair laugh, and definitely not an angel… A person.
You’ve been back on campus for the spring semester for only four hours before you see him crossing the quad with a latte in each hand, handing one to the boy next to him, all while telling a story that makes the entire group around him laugh. He’s wearing a black puffer, sunglasses perched on his head despite the gloomy January sky, and he looks so unreal that you’re paranoid you made him up-
You walk directly into a trash can.
It makes an embarrassingly loud noise that makes a few people look over. You keep walking.
You are not over it.
It’s snowing lightly, but the kind that doesn’t stick. You’re in line at the convenience store on campus, holding a cup of instant ramen when he walks in.
You become extremely interested in the nutrition label on the cup. Sodium content, fascinating. The fat content? Riveting.
You hear him line up behind you. You are so normal. You are going to be so normal about this, so normal that you’re going to keep reading the ingredients list on a cup ramen at 11 oclock at night.
“Those are good,” he says.
You look up. Satoru Gojo is pointing at the cup in your hands, and he’s also apparently talking to you.
“Yeah.” You croak.
“Spicy miso,” he says, nodding, “good choice. The beef one is depressing.”
You let out a sound that might be a laugh, you’re unsure right now. He smiles, then the line moves, and you pay and leave before your face can betray the feelings you’ve had for him for the last six months.
You stand outside in the cold, under the snow, and pull your phone out.
you: he talked to me
you: 12 words
you: im going to hurl
aya: TWELVE????? oh we’re framing this
The campus bar closes at eleven. You know this because post-exam celebrations have been here enough times for you to memorize the way the lights get a little brighter at around 10:45, the owner’s subtle cue that it’s time to start wrapping up.
But the corner booth still has your friends piled into it, Rei’s pink cheeks and happy on her birthday, Sora giggling at Suzu belting the song playing over the speakers, and the table scattered with empty glasses and crumpled napkins.
You’re unsure when he got here.
Aya spots him first; she always does. It’s her superpower, you think. She essentially gives you warning signals not to do something embarrassing. This time, she kicks you under the table without saying anything. You look up.
Satoru Gojo is at the same bar as you are, with a few people you don’t recognize, a half-finished beer in front of him, leaning on one elbow and talking with the confidence of someone who has never once felt out of place in their life.
Someone says something funny, and he tips his head back, laughing, and the bar lights catch the white of his hair and the line of his throat just like it did back in the early fall.
You’ve thought about this way too many times. In a joking way, a fun way, the way you text the group chat about him and make it into something light, poking at your own parasocial tendencies. But sitting here right now, watching Satoru Gojo exist from across the bar at 10:40 a tonight, it doesn’t feel like a joke.
“You okay?” Rei asks quietly beside you.
“Y-Yeah.” You hum.
She follows your gaze and doesn’t say anything, which is somehow worse than if she said her usual, absolutely not.
You look away. Then you look back. To your dismay, he’s still there. He’s still going to be there until the lights completely turn on and the servers start collecting cups, but you’re going to sit in this booth and do absolutely nothing about it, which is exactly what you’ve been doing for the whole school year, and that is fine. You are fine. That was always the plan.
The song overhead starts to play something older and slow, and you hear him even from the other end of the bar, starting to sing along. He has always been unselfconsciously himself, from obnoxiously laughing in the quad, nodding at you in the library, and making small talk about cup ramen. Satoru Gojo has never apologized for being himself.
Aya leans over. “You should go say something.”
“I did once. We talked about ramen.”
“Babe.” She looks at you with an expression that is both fond and sad. “That is not the same thing.”
“I know.”
She doesn’t push. She fills your shot glass instead, Sora starts a new story, your booth gets loud again, and for a moment you’re back in it, laughing at something, leaning into the warmth of your friends, forgetting all about Satoru Gojo.
The bar gets louder after the last round of drinks is called. Someone in the back booth cheers, Sora knocks over a glass (it thankfully doesn't break), and Rei's birthday sash ends up around her neck like a scarf.
It’s the type of loud that makes you feel invisible. It makes you slip out of the booth quietly to get air.
The bar door swings shut behind you, and suddenly the sound of the music is muffled, the street is cold and dark, and you let out a long breath, watching it fog up in front of you.
You feel your phone buzz in your pocket.
aya: GO TALK TO HIMMM
aya: NOWWWWW
The door opens again behind you. You don’t look up; you assume it’s Suzu or a stranger needing air. But then they stop next to you and lean back against the wall the same way you are, and you can’t help yourself from looking over.
Satoru Gojo.
He’s got his black puffer on now, hands in his pockets, looking straight ahead. He’s looking out at the street, squinting slightly at nothing in particular, like he also just needed a second, like maybe he also felt invisible.
You put your phone away. For a moment, neither of you says anything. The bar noise bleeds faintly through the door, and somewhere down the block, someone is laughing.
"Needed air?" he asks, still looking at the street.
"Something like that."
He nods like that's a reasonable answer. "Fun night in there."
"Yeah." You glance over at him. "Your friends seem fun."
He turns his head then, just slightly, enough to look at you from the corner of his eyes. "You know who I am."
It isn't a question. Your face goes warm despite the chill.
"Campus is small," you say, which is kinda true, and also not really an answer.
Something shifts in his expression. “How small?"
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it anything." But his voice has that rhythm to it now. "I noticed you, too, you know. In the library."
You look at him then, because you can't not. "The library..."
"You had your headphones in. You were highlighting everything on the page." A pause. "I don't think you were actually reading anything."
Your mouth opens. Then closes. "I was reading-."
"Sure."
"I was."
He's fully smiling now, and you are going to combust on this sidewalk, right here, outside this bar, in front of everyone. The door swings open behind you, and a group spills out, loud and laughing, popping the bubble of quiet you've both been standing in.
You both shift slightly apart without meaning to. And then Aya's head appears in the doorway, her eyes finding you immediately.
"We're heading out," she says. "Rei's calling it."
You look back at him. He's watching you with his hands still in his pockets.
"I'll see you," you say.
"Yeah," he says, quietly. "You will."
You follow Aya inside. She grabs your arm the second the door closes and makes a sound directly into your shoulder.
"I know," you say.
"DO YOU?" she hisses.
Things happen after that night. Small things.
He texts you (you still aren't entirely sure of how he got your number, and when you asked him, he just said, I asked around like that was a completely normal thing). The texts are causal, nothing things, observations, and the occasional questions. But they come at odd hours, and he responds fast, always, and you've stopped pretending that it doesn't mean anything.
He finds you in the library again. Same table, same corner. But this time, he sits next to you. You spend two hours not really studying. He steals your highlighter and doesn't give it back, you don't complain.
Aya asks almost daily if you've told him.
You haven’t.
You’re at the same bar, the one that closes at 11. Two months later, a different birthday, but the same corner booth, and the same low lighting.
Satoru invited you. He texted four days ago.
satoru: suguru's bday friday, you should come
satoru: invite your friends too!
You'd stared at the text long enough that Aya took your phone and typed we'll be there before you could overthink it. You've been equal parts grateful and furious with her since.
The two tables pushed together hold everyone easily, his friends folding into yours. Suguru is being roasted every twenty minutes. Rei has already swapped jackets with someone she met an hour ago. Aya and Suzu complain about a class they have together.
Satoru is beside you again. He talks to everyone, laughs loudly at the table, but he keeps coming back to you between all of it, small whispers, things meant only for you.
By 10:30, the table has spread itself around the bar, Suguru pulled toward the birthday shots, Aya deep in conversation with someone you don't know, Rei on the dance floor, and it's just you and Satoru in the corner, and it's just been the two of you for long enough now that it doesn't feel awkward. It feels like the most natural arrangement in the world, which is its own kind of terrifying.
It's almost 11. The lights haven't gone bright yet, but the energy in the bar has lowered. You slip away from the booth toward the back of the bar, and the line for the bathroom is longer than it should be for a Tuesday night. You join it nonetheless, checking your phone, and thirty seconds later, someone slots in behind you.
You don't have to look to know.
"You're following me," you say, without looking up.
"I also have to use the bathroom," Satoru says, unbothered.
You look up at him over your shoulder. The hallway is narrow, which means he's closer than he would be anywhere else, which means you are suddenly extremely aware of the exact (or lack of) distance between you.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi," you say back.
His eyes stay on yours, and there is absolutely nothing casual about the way he's looking at you right now, and you should say it... right now. You've seen his face a hundred times. You have tattooed it to your memory, in stolen glances, in your peripheral vision, in the glow of a physics department webpage you visited way too many times for someone who doesn't take physics.
Up close, in the narrow red-lit hallway, he is genuinely unfair. The angles of his face make you feel lightheaded. His jaw, the line of his throat, all of it lands on your heart like a bomb.
You are so down bad. You have been so down bad since the first time you saw him. You are down bad in the bathroom line of the only bar open on campus on a Tuesday, and he is looking at you like that, and you think, with the last functional part of your brain... say it.
"Satoru-"
"I know," he interrupts.
And then he kisses you.
His hand finds your jaw, and he kisses you like he's been working up to it for longer than tonight. When he pulls back, you're pressed between him and the wall, and you can't quite remember how that happened.
"You could have said something," you manage.
The corner of his mouth lifts. "So could you."
You’re going to drop dead... you think.
author's note: sorry for disappearing, the trajectory of my life changed but my obsession for satoru hasn't.
family mart & lip gloss | gojo satoru x you
♡ fluff | 1.4k
The family mart is quiet at this hour. The fluorescent lights are a little too bright, the refrigerator units hum loudly in the back, and the smell of fish cake and floor cleaner fills your nose, but you’ve worked here long enough that you've stopped noticing… mostly. You’re restocking the drinks shelf on autopilot, your fingers finding the gaps and sliding the plastic bottles forward with ease.
It’s a Tuesday. Nothing usually happens on Tuesdays.
But then the door chimes. You don't look up immediately, because it's a convenience store and customers come in, that's the whole premise… and also because you are in the middle of a very important internal debate about whether the Pocari Sweat goes before or after the blueberry Ramune and you've developed very deep opinions about this.
First, you hear footsteps. And then you hear the sound of someone who has never been taught to use an indoor voice, asking, “You work here?”
You finally look up. Gojo Satoru is standing in the middle of the aisle in his school uniform, blazer hanging open, tie unknotted at the third button, shirt untucked on the left side, sleeves rolled to the elbow like your school’s dress code is a suggestion, holding a single pack of Chocorooms and looking at you like you've done something remarkable, his eyes wide and joyful in a way that makes your grip tighten on the Ramune bottle.
"Isn’t it obvious," you say.
"You work here," he says again, slower, like he's turning the information over and over, like it’s going to change. He looks around the store with the expression of someone viewing a very interesting museum exhibit. It’s a family mart. Then he looks back at you. "In the apron and everything."
"Satoru." You set the bottle down with more caution than necessary. "Can I help you find something."
He grins, which is somehow way worse than whatever you were prepared for, wide and unguarded and so genuinely satisfied with himself that it does something irritating and involuntary to your chest. "Yeah, actually," he says, and holds up the Chocorooms. "Are these good?"
You stare at him for a moment. "You came in here to ask me if Chocorooms are good."
"I came in here for a drink," he says, with satisfaction, "and then I saw you, and then I had follow-up questions."
"They're fine. They're Chocorooms. Everyone knows what Chocorooms taste like."
"I've never had one."
"That's…" you pause. "How have you never had a Chocoroom?"
He shrugs and turns the package over to read the back, which you are almost sure he cannot actually read from that distance without his glasses, which he never wears outside of class, and is another thing you try not to think about. "We had a chef," he says, like it’s a normal sentence. "He was very anti-processed foods."
"Well," you say. "They're good. Buy it."
He looks up from the package and smiles at you, the way it lands differently than the magazines he models for, different from the hallway smile, and way different from the one he gives Meili from class 2B when she lingers too long. It does something to the backs of your knees that you are choosing not to elaborate on. "Yeah?" he says.
"Yeah," you say, and pick the Ramune back up and turn back to the shelf.
He does not leave.
He picks things up. He reads the backs of packages with the same focused attention he gives to literally nothing in class, which is offensive in a way you can't quite describe. He wanders back past you, holding Chocorooms, a can of peach Fanta, and what appears to be a single, individually wrapped fish cake on a stick.
"You should go pay," you tell him.
"I will," he says. He leans against the end of the shelf and watches you restock with an expression of unbothered interest, like you are in fact the most interesting thing in this family mart on a Tuesday night, which is absurd, which is- "You're really fast at that."
You pause for just a half second. "I’m just restocking."
"Still." He tilts his head. "How long have you worked here?"
"A while."
"Do you like it?"
His question is genuine, which is the annoying thing, the thing that keeps confusing you up about him, underneath the magazine smile and the model face and the sleeves that are definitely a dress code violation, he has moments of sincerity that come without warning, that he casually lets out without apparent understanding of what they do. You glance at him. "It's a job," you say.
"That's not what I asked."
"Satoru."
"I'm just curious."
You slide the last bottle into place and straighten up and look at him, properly, which you try to do as infrequently as possible because it rarely benefits anything (especially your heart), and he's looking back at you with his head still tilted and his blue eyes doing that thing where they're more wary than they have any right to be given the general nature of the rest of him, and you think that it is genuinely unfair, the whole situation, really, the totality of him, the Chocoroom, the fish cake on a stick, all of it.
"It's fine," you say. "I like the quiet."
He hums and glances around the empty store. "It is pretty quiet," he agrees, and then grins again, sudden and bright, and says, "Now that I'm here, it'll be more fun though."
"Please go pay for your things," you say, and go back to the shelf.
You are reaching up to the top row, stretching for the gap at the back, when you hear him right behind you. You don't turn around. You have excellent spatial awareness, and you are choosing not to use it right now.
His arm comes up past your shoulder, his hand bracing lightly against the shelf above your head, close enough that you can feel the warmth of him along your back, close enough that if you turned around, you'd be looking directly at his collarbone, which you know because you have accidentally done the geometry of before and immediately regretted it.
"There's a gap," he says, helpfully, glancing at the shelf.
"I know," you say. "I'm filling it."
"You missed one." He reaches with his other hand and slides a bottle into a gap two inches to your left that you had in fact already noticed and were getting to, thank you. You are very normal about his arm trapping you against the shelf; you are completely okay, your grip on the bottle in your hand is not in any way tightened to the point that it might shatter.
"Satoru," you say, very calmly.
"Hm?"
"What are you doing?"
A pause. And then, close enough that you can hear the smile in his voice, "helping."
You turn around, which means he has to take a half step back, which he does, except he doesn't go far, so now you're looking up at him and he has the expression of someone who has absolutely no idea what you're talking about, which is the most offensive thing about Gojo Satoru, that he can fake innocence so candidly while doing whatever this is.
"Go pay," you say.
He looks at you for a moment, and then his smile tips sideways and says, "You have a piece of your hair stuck to your lip gloss." You reach up. You do, in fact, have a piece of hair stuck to your lip gloss.
"Thank you," you say, stiffly.
"Sure," he says, then he turns and heads toward the register, finally. You face the shelf again and stand there for a moment, and spend the next forty-five seconds staring at a sports drink bottle without reading any of the labels.
You hear him heading toward the register, then you hear him ask your coworker Kai whether the fish cake is good, and you hear Kai say yes, and then you hear Satoru say my girlfriend over there recommended it, which is not what happened at all, which is a blatant misrepresentation of events, and which makes something in your chest do the thing again, the thing you are not going to think about, the not-relevant thing, except did he just-
Girlfriend?
Girlfriend?
The last time you checked, you weren't dating. Last time you checked, the total significance of your relationship was one shared class, him stealing food off your lunch tray for three months, three weeks of him saving you a seat you never asked for, and one piece of hair stuck to your lip gloss.
You put the Ramune before the Pocari Sweat.
You can't even remember what opinions you had about it.
author's note: he makes me blush and i go into rambles because gojo satoru is so *gets dragged off the stage*
family mart & lip gloss | gojo satoru x you
♡ fluff | 1.4k
The family mart is quiet at this hour. The fluorescent lights are a little too bright, the refrigerator units hum loudly in the back, and the smell of fish cake and floor cleaner fills your nose, but you’ve worked here long enough that you've stopped noticing… mostly. You’re restocking the drinks shelf on autopilot, your fingers finding the gaps and sliding the plastic bottles forward with ease.
It’s a Tuesday. Nothing usually happens on Tuesdays.
But then the door chimes. You don't look up immediately, because it's a convenience store and customers come in, that's the whole premise… and also because you are in the middle of a very important internal debate about whether the Pocari Sweat goes before or after the blueberry Ramune and you've developed very deep opinions about this.
First, you hear footsteps. And then you hear the sound of someone who has never been taught to use an indoor voice, asking, “You work here?”
You finally look up. Gojo Satoru is standing in the middle of the aisle in his school uniform, blazer hanging open, tie unknotted at the third button, shirt untucked on the left side, sleeves rolled to the elbow like your school’s dress code is a suggestion, holding a single pack of Chocorooms and looking at you like you've done something remarkable, his eyes wide and joyful in a way that makes your grip tighten on the Ramune bottle.
"Isn’t it obvious," you say.
"You work here," he says again, slower, like he's turning the information over and over, like it’s going to change. He looks around the store with the expression of someone viewing a very interesting museum exhibit. It’s a family mart. Then he looks back at you. "In the apron and everything."
"Satoru." You set the bottle down with more caution than necessary. "Can I help you find something."
He grins, which is somehow way worse than whatever you were prepared for, wide and unguarded and so genuinely satisfied with himself that it does something irritating and involuntary to your chest. "Yeah, actually," he says, and holds up the Chocorooms. "Are these good?"
You stare at him for a moment. "You came in here to ask me if Chocorooms are good."
"I came in here for a drink," he says, with satisfaction, "and then I saw you, and then I had follow-up questions."
"They're fine. They're Chocorooms. Everyone knows what Chocorooms taste like."
"I've never had one."
"That's…" you pause. "How have you never had a Chocoroom?"
He shrugs and turns the package over to read the back, which you are almost sure he cannot actually read from that distance without his glasses, which he never wears outside of class, and is another thing you try not to think about. "We had a chef," he says, like it’s a normal sentence. "He was very anti-processed foods."
"Well," you say. "They're good. Buy it."
He looks up from the package and smiles at you, the way it lands differently than the magazines he models for, different from the hallway smile, and way different from the one he gives Meili from class 2B when she lingers too long. It does something to the backs of your knees that you are choosing not to elaborate on. "Yeah?" he says.
"Yeah," you say, and pick the Ramune back up and turn back to the shelf.
He does not leave.
He picks things up. He reads the backs of packages with the same focused attention he gives to literally nothing in class, which is offensive in a way you can't quite describe. He wanders back past you, holding Chocorooms, a can of peach Fanta, and what appears to be a single, individually wrapped fish cake on a stick.
"You should go pay," you tell him.
"I will," he says. He leans against the end of the shelf and watches you restock with an expression of unbothered interest, like you are in fact the most interesting thing in this family mart on a Tuesday night, which is absurd, which is- "You're really fast at that."
You pause for just a half second. "I’m just restocking."
"Still." He tilts his head. "How long have you worked here?"
"A while."
"Do you like it?"
His question is genuine, which is the annoying thing, the thing that keeps confusing you up about him, underneath the magazine smile and the model face and the sleeves that are definitely a dress code violation, he has moments of sincerity that come without warning, that he casually lets out without apparent understanding of what they do. You glance at him. "It's a job," you say.
"That's not what I asked."
"Satoru."
"I'm just curious."
You slide the last bottle into place and straighten up and look at him, properly, which you try to do as infrequently as possible because it rarely benefits anything (especially your heart), and he's looking back at you with his head still tilted and his blue eyes doing that thing where they're more wary than they have any right to be given the general nature of the rest of him, and you think that it is genuinely unfair, the whole situation, really, the totality of him, the Chocoroom, the fish cake on a stick, all of it.
"It's fine," you say. "I like the quiet."
He hums and glances around the empty store. "It is pretty quiet," he agrees, and then grins again, sudden and bright, and says, "Now that I'm here, it'll be more fun though."
"Please go pay for your things," you say, and go back to the shelf.
You are reaching up to the top row, stretching for the gap at the back, when you hear him right behind you. You don't turn around. You have excellent spatial awareness, and you are choosing not to use it right now.
His arm comes up past your shoulder, his hand bracing lightly against the shelf above your head, close enough that you can feel the warmth of him along your back, close enough that if you turned around, you'd be looking directly at his collarbone, which you know because you have accidentally done the geometry of before and immediately regretted it.
"There's a gap," he says, helpfully, glancing at the shelf.
"I know," you say. "I'm filling it."
"You missed one." He reaches with his other hand and slides a bottle into a gap two inches to your left that you had in fact already noticed and were getting to, thank you. You are very normal about his arm trapping you against the shelf; you are completely okay, your grip on the bottle in your hand is not in any way tightened to the point that it might shatter.
"Satoru," you say, very calmly.
"Hm?"
"What are you doing?"
A pause. And then, close enough that you can hear the smile in his voice, "helping."
You turn around, which means he has to take a half step back, which he does, except he doesn't go far, so now you're looking up at him and he has the expression of someone who has absolutely no idea what you're talking about, which is the most offensive thing about Gojo Satoru, that he can fake innocence so candidly while doing whatever this is.
"Go pay," you say.
He looks at you for a moment, and then his smile tips sideways and says, "You have a piece of your hair stuck to your lip gloss." You reach up. You do, in fact, have a piece of hair stuck to your lip gloss.
"Thank you," you say, stiffly.
"Sure," he says, then he turns and heads toward the register, finally. You face the shelf again and stand there for a moment, and spend the next forty-five seconds staring at a sports drink bottle without reading any of the labels.
You hear him heading toward the register, then you hear him ask your coworker Kai whether the fish cake is good, and you hear Kai say yes, and then you hear Satoru say my girlfriend over there recommended it, which is not what happened at all, which is a blatant misrepresentation of events, and which makes something in your chest do the thing again, the thing you are not going to think about, the not-relevant thing, except did he just-
Girlfriend?
Girlfriend?
The last time you checked, you weren't dating. Last time you checked, the total significance of your relationship was one shared class, him stealing food off your lunch tray for three months, three weeks of him saving you a seat you never asked for, and one piece of hair stuck to your lip gloss.
You put the Ramune before the Pocari Sweat.
You can't even remember what opinions you had about it.
author's note: he makes me blush and i go into rambles because gojo satoru is so *gets dragged off the stage*
ill be all that you need | gojo satoru x reader
⟡ fluff, yummy satoru ⬩1.4k
The first time you met Satoru, you waved your hand, said it was nice to meet him, and then immediately turned back to Shoko and continued the conversation he had (rudely) interrupted as though he hadn’t said anything particularly interesting.
Which, to be fair, he hadn’t. He had just said hey and smiled the smile that usually did most of the work for him. He stood there for a moment, hand still halfway raised, and felt something strange and unfamiliar move through him. It took him an embarrassingly long time to identify it as the specific discomfort of being mediocre to someone. A concept very foreign to him.
Shoko caught his eye over your shoulder. She was deeply amused.
Satoru had to take a second to breathe and understand what was happening. He was used to being the center of things. The strongest, the funniest. I mean… conversations usually bent toward him!
But here you were, still talking to Shoko about a professor, your voice low with irritation, dry in that effortless way that made it funnier than you seemed to realize, and you were unmistakably not paying attention to him.
“Wow,” he said, quiet, almost impressed with how awful it felt.
He hated it.
And, unfortunately for everyone involved, he decided right then and there (in Shoko’s kitchen) that he was going to fix it.
The campus cafe was loud on Wednesday afternoons. You learned to tune out the sound of the espresso machine, the drag of chairs, the overlapping conversations of everyone on campus who had a two o'clock gap in their schedule. You were good at that. Satoru was… not.
He had been narrating the whole cafe and every person who has walked in for the last ten minutes.
“That guy has just been holding his drink since we got here. He hasn’t taken a single sip,” he says, not quietly. “Like it’s a drink, not a prop.”
“Satoru.”
“And he’s not even reading his book, he’s just holding it.”
“Satoru.”
“Hey, I’m just saying-”
“I have two assignments left,” you say, without looking up from your laptop. “You can watch people in silence or you can leave.”
He makes a wounded sound that you ignore with the ease of long practice. Only a minute passes before his foot nudges yours under the table. You ignore him, not moving your foot. Instead, you keep working.
You also take a sip of your drink. The one he had ordered for you before you even got here. And before you could’ve thanked him, he was already looking away, scrolling on his phone like it didn’t make your heart still jump, even though he had memorized your order within the first two weeks of knowing you.
It was nothing, probably. That was just the kind of person Satoru was. Attentive in that careless way. You had made peace with that part of him early on, because Satoru was like that with everyone: the baristas, his classmates, Shoko, the girl in your class he had once spent an entire lecture passing notes with. It didn’t mean anything particular when he did it for you.
You set your drink back down. He nudges your foot again. This time it felt deliberate and something you couldn’t ignore.
“What,” you say.
“Nothing.” A pause. “Are you almost done?”
“No.”
“Approximately how not-done are you?”
You look up at him then. He has his chin propped in his hand. “Two assignments.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“No you won’t.”
“I’ll try,” he offers, which was at least honest.
You look back to your laptop.
He stayed quiet for almost four full minutes, which was genuinely impressive. Then-
“The drink guy left.”
“Satoru.”
“He left the cup. Just abandoned it.”
You press your lips together.
“That’s sad,” he continues. “...For the cup.”
The laugh came out of you before you could stop it, through your nose, short and involuntary. You put your hand over your mouth. He makes a satisfied sound and looks out the window.
When you finally closed your laptop, he was already looking at you.
“Done?”
“Done,” you confirm.
He stands, gathers his things, and holds the door open as you step out into the gray afternoon. His shoulder was warm where it brushed yours as you both fell into step together. He stays half a step closer than necessary the whole way back, and you let him.
But it was fine.
It was just Satoru. And this is normal.
You were currently sitting on Satoru’s couch, legs tucked under you, scrolling on your phone while he made food (instant ramen) in the kitchen.
You ended up here the way you often did. Shoko and Geto had cancelled, you had nowhere particular to be, and somewhere between the library and your dorm your feet had simply taken you to his apartment instead. You had texted him from the lobby. He had buzzed you in without replying. The usual.
He was currently telling you something about Geto, some argument they had about a movie, the kind of story he told where the point kept shifting and you were half listening, making small sounds at the right moments.
“And then Suguru said, hey, are you even listening?”
“Suguru said you were wrong and he was right,” you say. “As usual.”
“See, that’s what I don’t get about you two-”
“He’s usually right, Satoru.”
He points a spatula at you, you keep your eyes on your phone.
It was quiet for a little while after that. Just the sounds of him cooking, the occasional clatter of utensils, the low hum of something he had put on in the background.
You had been reading something, a post a friend had sent, about a mutual you vaguely knew getting into a new relationship. You had sent back a congratulatory response. Then, without really meaning to, you say it.
“Good for her. I don’t think people like me like that,” you said. Offhandedly. You were already scrolling past it.
Then the kitchen went quiet.
You glance up. Satoru had set down the spatula. He was standing very still with his back to you, and something about the frame of his shoulders was different. Some tension that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“What?” he says.
“What?”
He turns around. “What you just said.”
“I was just-” You shake your head. “It’s not a big deal. I just meant I’m not really the type that people-”
“Don’t do that.”
You blink. “Do what?”
He crosses the kitchen, comes around the counter, and stops at the edge of the couch, close enough that you had to look up at him, close enough that something in your chest did something very inconvenient.
“You’re saying it like it’s a fact,” he says. “It’s not a fact.”
“Satoru, I wasn’t being… it was just a second-thought thing, I didn’t mean-”
“I’d be so good to you.”
You feel the warmth hit your face before you could stop it and immediately look down at your phone. “Okay,” you said, your voice smaller than you wanted. “You don’t have to-”
“I’m not saying it to be nice.”
“I know you’re not, it’s just-” You laugh, short and awkward. “You’re you, so-”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean-” You gesture at him. “You know what it means.”
“I really don’t,” he says, and he sounded genuinely frustrated now. “Because I’ve been… I’m not being funny. I mean it, and you keep looking at me like I couldn’t possibly mean it.”
You open your mouth to say something, only to close it again.
He sits down on the coffee table across from you, forearms resting on his knees, close enough that you couldn’t reasonably look anywhere else.
“You don’t think people like you like that,” he said. “And I’m sitting right here.”
The flush that creeps up your neck was completely involuntary, and you hated it.
“Since when,” you say finally. It came out barely above a murmur. Something shifts in his face. The corner of his mouth moved, but not quite to a full smile.
“Shoko’s kitchen,” he says. “September.”
You stare at him.
“You waved at me,” he continues, “and then turned around and kept talking like I was nobody, and I thought-” He stops. Looks down briefly at his hands, then back up. “I thought, okay. That’s going to be a problem.”
The laugh that came out of you was soft and a little helpless. He watches your lips form a smile, and something in his expression goes warm.
You were quiet for a long moment. And he let you be quiet.
Finally, you say, “You’d really be good to me?”
He holds your gaze, and it doesn’t waver at all. “Yeah,” he says simply. “I really would.”
“Okay,” you say, after a moment.
He exhales. Small and quiet, like he had been holding something in for a long time.
author's note: ofc he gets anything he wants... look at him. i wouldnt be able to say no (*/▽＼*)
ill be all that you need | gojo satoru x reader
⟡ fluff, yummy satoru ⬩1.4k
The first time you met Satoru, you waved your hand, said it was nice to meet him, and then immediately turned back to Shoko and continued the conversation he had (rudely) interrupted as though he hadn’t said anything particularly interesting.
Which, to be fair, he hadn’t. He had just said hey and smiled the smile that usually did most of the work for him. He stood there for a moment, hand still halfway raised, and felt something strange and unfamiliar move through him. It took him an embarrassingly long time to identify it as the specific discomfort of being mediocre to someone. A concept very foreign to him.
Shoko caught his eye over your shoulder. She was deeply amused.
Satoru had to take a second to breathe and understand what was happening. He was used to being the center of things. The strongest, the funniest. I mean… conversations usually bent toward him!
But here you were, still talking to Shoko about a professor, your voice low with irritation, dry in that effortless way that made it funnier than you seemed to realize, and you were unmistakably not paying attention to him.
“Wow,” he said, quiet, almost impressed with how awful it felt.
He hated it.
And, unfortunately for everyone involved, he decided right then and there (in Shoko’s kitchen) that he was going to fix it.
The campus cafe was loud on Wednesday afternoons. You learned to tune out the sound of the espresso machine, the drag of chairs, the overlapping conversations of everyone on campus who had a two o'clock gap in their schedule. You were good at that. Satoru was… not.
He had been narrating the whole cafe and every person who has walked in for the last ten minutes.
“That guy has just been holding his drink since we got here. He hasn’t taken a single sip,” he says, not quietly. “Like it’s a drink, not a prop.”
“Satoru.”
“And he’s not even reading his book, he’s just holding it.”
“Satoru.”
“Hey, I’m just saying-”
“I have two assignments left,” you say, without looking up from your laptop. “You can watch people in silence or you can leave.”
He makes a wounded sound that you ignore with the ease of long practice. Only a minute passes before his foot nudges yours under the table. You ignore him, not moving your foot. Instead, you keep working.
You also take a sip of your drink. The one he had ordered for you before you even got here. And before you could’ve thanked him, he was already looking away, scrolling on his phone like it didn’t make your heart still jump, even though he had memorized your order within the first two weeks of knowing you.
It was nothing, probably. That was just the kind of person Satoru was. Attentive in that careless way. You had made peace with that part of him early on, because Satoru was like that with everyone: the baristas, his classmates, Shoko, the girl in your class he had once spent an entire lecture passing notes with. It didn’t mean anything particular when he did it for you.
You set your drink back down. He nudges your foot again. This time it felt deliberate and something you couldn’t ignore.
“What,” you say.
“Nothing.” A pause. “Are you almost done?”
“No.”
“Approximately how not-done are you?”
You look up at him then. He has his chin propped in his hand. “Two assignments.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“No you won’t.”
“I’ll try,” he offers, which was at least honest.
You look back to your laptop.
He stayed quiet for almost four full minutes, which was genuinely impressive. Then-
“The drink guy left.”
“Satoru.”
“He left the cup. Just abandoned it.”
You press your lips together.
“That’s sad,” he continues. “...For the cup.”
The laugh came out of you before you could stop it, through your nose, short and involuntary. You put your hand over your mouth. He makes a satisfied sound and looks out the window.
When you finally closed your laptop, he was already looking at you.
“Done?”
“Done,” you confirm.
He stands, gathers his things, and holds the door open as you step out into the gray afternoon. His shoulder was warm where it brushed yours as you both fell into step together. He stays half a step closer than necessary the whole way back, and you let him.
But it was fine.
It was just Satoru. And this is normal.
You were currently sitting on Satoru’s couch, legs tucked under you, scrolling on your phone while he made food (instant ramen) in the kitchen.
You ended up here the way you often did. Shoko and Geto had cancelled, you had nowhere particular to be, and somewhere between the library and your dorm your feet had simply taken you to his apartment instead. You had texted him from the lobby. He had buzzed you in without replying. The usual.
He was currently telling you something about Geto, some argument they had about a movie, the kind of story he told where the point kept shifting and you were half listening, making small sounds at the right moments.
“And then Suguru said, hey, are you even listening?”
“Suguru said you were wrong and he was right,” you say. “As usual.”
“See, that’s what I don’t get about you two-”
“He’s usually right, Satoru.”
He points a spatula at you, you keep your eyes on your phone.
It was quiet for a little while after that. Just the sounds of him cooking, the occasional clatter of utensils, the low hum of something he had put on in the background.
You had been reading something, a post a friend had sent, about a mutual you vaguely knew getting into a new relationship. You had sent back a congratulatory response. Then, without really meaning to, you say it.
“Good for her. I don’t think people like me like that,” you said. Offhandedly. You were already scrolling past it.
Then the kitchen went quiet.
You glance up. Satoru had set down the spatula. He was standing very still with his back to you, and something about the frame of his shoulders was different. Some tension that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“What?” he says.
“What?”
He turns around. “What you just said.”
“I was just-” You shake your head. “It’s not a big deal. I just meant I’m not really the type that people-”
“Don’t do that.”
You blink. “Do what?”
He crosses the kitchen, comes around the counter, and stops at the edge of the couch, close enough that you had to look up at him, close enough that something in your chest did something very inconvenient.
“You’re saying it like it’s a fact,” he says. “It’s not a fact.”
“Satoru, I wasn’t being… it was just a second-thought thing, I didn’t mean-”
“I’d be so good to you.”
You feel the warmth hit your face before you could stop it and immediately look down at your phone. “Okay,” you said, your voice smaller than you wanted. “You don’t have to-”
“I’m not saying it to be nice.”
“I know you’re not, it’s just-” You laugh, short and awkward. “You’re you, so-”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean-” You gesture at him. “You know what it means.”
“I really don’t,” he says, and he sounded genuinely frustrated now. “Because I’ve been… I’m not being funny. I mean it, and you keep looking at me like I couldn’t possibly mean it.”
You open your mouth to say something, only to close it again.
He sits down on the coffee table across from you, forearms resting on his knees, close enough that you couldn’t reasonably look anywhere else.
“You don’t think people like you like that,” he said. “And I’m sitting right here.”
The flush that creeps up your neck was completely involuntary, and you hated it.
“Since when,” you say finally. It came out barely above a murmur. Something shifts in his face. The corner of his mouth moved, but not quite to a full smile.
“Shoko’s kitchen,” he says. “September.”
You stare at him.
“You waved at me,” he continues, “and then turned around and kept talking like I was nobody, and I thought-” He stops. Looks down briefly at his hands, then back up. “I thought, okay. That’s going to be a problem.”
The laugh that came out of you was soft and a little helpless. He watches your lips form a smile, and something in his expression goes warm.
You were quiet for a long moment. And he let you be quiet.
Finally, you say, “You’d really be good to me?”
He holds your gaze, and it doesn’t waver at all. “Yeah,” he says simply. “I really would.”
“Okay,” you say, after a moment.
He exhales. Small and quiet, like he had been holding something in for a long time.
author's note: ofc he gets anything he wants... look at him. i wouldnt be able to say no (*/▽＼*)
ill be all that you need | gojo satoru x reader
⟡ fluff, yummy satoru ⬩1.4k
The first time you met Satoru, you waved your hand, said it was nice to meet him, and then immediately turned back to Shoko and continued the conversation he had (rudely) interrupted as though he hadn’t said anything particularly interesting.
Which, to be fair, he hadn’t. He had just said hey and smiled the smile that usually did most of the work for him. He stood there for a moment, hand still halfway raised, and felt something strange and unfamiliar move through him. It took him an embarrassingly long time to identify it as the specific discomfort of being mediocre to someone. A concept very foreign to him.
Shoko caught his eye over your shoulder. She was deeply amused.
Satoru had to take a second to breathe and understand what was happening. He was used to being the center of things. The strongest, the funniest. I mean… conversations usually bent toward him!
But here you were, still talking to Shoko about a professor, your voice low with irritation, dry in that effortless way that made it funnier than you seemed to realize, and you were unmistakably not paying attention to him.
“Wow,” he said, quiet, almost impressed with how awful it felt.
He hated it.
And, unfortunately for everyone involved, he decided right then and there (in Shoko’s kitchen) that he was going to fix it.
The campus cafe was loud on Wednesday afternoons. You learned to tune out the sound of the espresso machine, the drag of chairs, the overlapping conversations of everyone on campus who had a two o'clock gap in their schedule. You were good at that. Satoru was… not.
He had been narrating the whole cafe and every person who has walked in for the last ten minutes.
“That guy has just been holding his drink since we got here. He hasn’t taken a single sip,” he says, not quietly. “Like it’s a drink, not a prop.”
“Satoru.”
“And he’s not even reading his book, he’s just holding it.”
“Satoru.”
“Hey, I’m just saying-”
“I have two assignments left,” you say, without looking up from your laptop. “You can watch people in silence or you can leave.”
He makes a wounded sound that you ignore with the ease of long practice. Only a minute passes before his foot nudges yours under the table. You ignore him, not moving your foot. Instead, you keep working.
You also take a sip of your drink. The one he had ordered for you before you even got here. And before you could’ve thanked him, he was already looking away, scrolling on his phone like it didn’t make your heart still jump, even though he had memorized your order within the first two weeks of knowing you.
It was nothing, probably. That was just the kind of person Satoru was. Attentive in that careless way. You had made peace with that part of him early on, because Satoru was like that with everyone: the baristas, his classmates, Shoko, the girl in your class he had once spent an entire lecture passing notes with. It didn’t mean anything particular when he did it for you.
You set your drink back down. He nudges your foot again. This time it felt deliberate and something you couldn’t ignore.
“What,” you say.
“Nothing.” A pause. “Are you almost done?”
“No.”
“Approximately how not-done are you?”
You look up at him then. He has his chin propped in his hand. “Two assignments.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“No you won’t.”
“I’ll try,” he offers, which was at least honest.
You look back to your laptop.
He stayed quiet for almost four full minutes, which was genuinely impressive. Then-
“The drink guy left.”
“Satoru.”
“He left the cup. Just abandoned it.”
You press your lips together.
“That’s sad,” he continues. “...For the cup.”
The laugh came out of you before you could stop it, through your nose, short and involuntary. You put your hand over your mouth. He makes a satisfied sound and looks out the window.
When you finally closed your laptop, he was already looking at you.
“Done?”
“Done,” you confirm.
He stands, gathers his things, and holds the door open as you step out into the gray afternoon. His shoulder was warm where it brushed yours as you both fell into step together. He stays half a step closer than necessary the whole way back, and you let him.
But it was fine.
It was just Satoru. And this is normal.
You were currently sitting on Satoru’s couch, legs tucked under you, scrolling on your phone while he made food (instant ramen) in the kitchen.
You ended up here the way you often did. Shoko and Geto had cancelled, you had nowhere particular to be, and somewhere between the library and your dorm your feet had simply taken you to his apartment instead. You had texted him from the lobby. He had buzzed you in without replying. The usual.
He was currently telling you something about Geto, some argument they had about a movie, the kind of story he told where the point kept shifting and you were half listening, making small sounds at the right moments.
“And then Suguru said, hey, are you even listening?”
“Suguru said you were wrong and he was right,” you say. “As usual.”
“See, that’s what I don’t get about you two-”
“He’s usually right, Satoru.”
He points a spatula at you, you keep your eyes on your phone.
It was quiet for a little while after that. Just the sounds of him cooking, the occasional clatter of utensils, the low hum of something he had put on in the background.
You had been reading something, a post a friend had sent, about a mutual you vaguely knew getting into a new relationship. You had sent back a congratulatory response. Then, without really meaning to, you say it.
“Good for her. I don’t think people like me like that,” you said. Offhandedly. You were already scrolling past it.
Then the kitchen went quiet.
You glance up. Satoru had set down the spatula. He was standing very still with his back to you, and something about the frame of his shoulders was different. Some tension that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“What?” he says.
“What?”
He turns around. “What you just said.”
“I was just-” You shake your head. “It’s not a big deal. I just meant I’m not really the type that people-”
“Don’t do that.”
You blink. “Do what?”
He crosses the kitchen, comes around the counter, and stops at the edge of the couch, close enough that you had to look up at him, close enough that something in your chest did something very inconvenient.
“You’re saying it like it’s a fact,” he says. “It’s not a fact.”
“Satoru, I wasn’t being… it was just a second-thought thing, I didn’t mean-”
“I’d be so good to you.”
You feel the warmth hit your face before you could stop it and immediately look down at your phone. “Okay,” you said, your voice smaller than you wanted. “You don’t have to-”
“I’m not saying it to be nice.”
“I know you’re not, it’s just-” You laugh, short and awkward. “You’re you, so-”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean-” You gesture at him. “You know what it means.”
“I really don’t,” he says, and he sounded genuinely frustrated now. “Because I’ve been… I’m not being funny. I mean it, and you keep looking at me like I couldn’t possibly mean it.”
You open your mouth to say something, only to close it again.
He sits down on the coffee table across from you, forearms resting on his knees, close enough that you couldn’t reasonably look anywhere else.
“You don’t think people like you like that,” he said. “And I’m sitting right here.”
The flush that creeps up your neck was completely involuntary, and you hated it.
“Since when,” you say finally. It came out barely above a murmur. Something shifts in his face. The corner of his mouth moved, but not quite to a full smile.
“Shoko’s kitchen,” he says. “September.”
You stare at him.
“You waved at me,” he continues, “and then turned around and kept talking like I was nobody, and I thought-” He stops. Looks down briefly at his hands, then back up. “I thought, okay. That’s going to be a problem.”
The laugh that came out of you was soft and a little helpless. He watches your lips form a smile, and something in his expression goes warm.
You were quiet for a long moment. And he let you be quiet.
Finally, you say, “You’d really be good to me?”
He holds your gaze, and it doesn’t waver at all. “Yeah,” he says simply. “I really would.”
“Okay,” you say, after a moment.
He exhales. Small and quiet, like he had been holding something in for a long time.
author's note: ofc he gets anything he wants... look at him. i wouldnt be able to say no (*/▽＼*)
