kait !

“what kind of jellies are these again?”

“moon jellyfish!” you turned your head and smiled at him, pecking the side of his forehead. “their sting isn’t strong enough to penetrate the skin… that’s why it’s safe to pet them.”

he hummed, eyes watching you caress the little baby jellyfish softly with your finger, the rest of them fluttering and pumping about around your wrist as you giggled, the sensation of their soft tentacles tickling you.

“they’re cute!” he smiled contently, lifting his head from your shoulder to then dive his nose into your neck, you laughing and squirming at the feeling.

“do you know any other facts about them baby?” he muffled against your skin.

you simmered down and thought for a moment, your hand moving from the baby jelly over to a bigger one and running your fingers over the top of its head— the smooth slimy texture fascinating to you as yuta picked his head up to stand upright.

“whenever they’re short on food, they can shrink down in size and save their energy that way.” you lifted your arm, little droplets of water sliding down your skin and tattering down quietly to the surface below, your hand drawing back to grip the edge of the tank and looking sweetly at yuta. “so it’s less demand for food and things.”

he stared at you warmly, a literal lovesick stupid smile on his face as he listened to you continue on with your little list of facts about the moon jellies, his ears basically perked up and alert as they drank in everything that you had to tell him— it being that way ever since your pretty timid self came to one of his frat parties two years ago.

and yuta loved to hear you talk about your interests and the smarty things you knew, that still unchanging and him in absolute wonder every moment he spent with you at how much information your little mind held, and he felt like his idiot num nut brain was funnily smarter now solely due to you.

because yuta before you was an absolute dick, and every time he thought about his former lifestyle he cringed at the stark difference— throwing rowdy parties each night as the president of his frat, playing beer pong for the hell of it, and getting shit faced with not an ounce of regret in his system, him sleeping with anyone he wanted and desired, and never even having to lift a finger in efforts at it either until he met you.

but yuta was ashamed.

so incredibly ashamed of his awful habits, and thanking his rotten luck that you gave him another fucking chance after blowing his first meeting with you, him working hard for an entire year straight just to get you to look at him the same way you looked at your friends, and to get you to trust him and win you over despite his awful reputation.

you changed him… wholeheartedly and for the better, his reputation no longer of a sleazy good for nothing piece of shit who whored around, but of just yuta okkotsu— president of his frat, still the most popular guy to ever fucking exist and throwing massive parties every week… but of also a guy who loved his girlfriend, a girl that took him off the market with just her presence alone, and a girl he was lucky enough to have by his side despite everything.

but though yuta’s new reputation was flourishing and grand, it didn’t mean his old one just— eradicated and didn’t follow him everywhere he went.

everywhere you went.

because it did, and he knew of the whisperings of his past every time he walked you to your lectures in the halls… how he had slept with so and so that one time, or how he did this that other time, and he was utterly remorseful over the fact that you had to hear those things too, knowing he wouldn’t like it in the slightest if it was the other way around no matter how many times you reassured him that it didn’t bother you.

and it’s precisely because of his old reputation that he was terrified of you thinking he was using you in anyway shape or form... that you were just another body count to him and that the minute he got you in bed with him he was going to leave— that particular gossip following him everywhere relentlessly and him feeling fucking sick over the thought of you hearing and believing it.

“can all jellyfish do that?” he asked, lifting a hand and mindlessly playing with a strand of your hair. “shrink in size?”

you shook your head. “not all! but a few others can too… moon jellies are just the best at it.”

he nodded, a content smile still on his face as he hiked up the straps of your purse over his shoulders, holding it for you and gladly doing so while you enjoyed yourself looking through the different informational panels of the exhibit— the aquarium being one of yours and yuta’s favorite places to go whenever you went out together on dates, the number of times you’d both been there literally irrelevant as it was deemed your designated special spot for the two of you, yuta often taking you there after classes, or randomly throughout the day to spend time with you and love on you-- doing it all amongst the fishies, jellyfish and penguins that you both had come to recognize and name.

“you having fun flower?” he asked, swinging an arm around your shoulders as you began walking out of the jellyfish exhibit. “you hungry at all? we could eat really fast before seeing buddy if you want.”

you smiled.

buddy was the penguin you and yuta decided to take ‘ownership’ of and was the sole reason why the two of you visited the aquarium so much to begin with— to see the chubby and puffy little penguin that was noticeably friendlier and more interactive than the rest of the flock, and you liked to think that buddy recognized you too every time you guys peered at him through the glass walls— your boyfriend always saying that the little furry thing was a part of his frat and second in command.

“oh let’s see buddy now!” you quickly interlaced your fingers with his hand that was around your shoulders, slightly nudging yuta in the direction of the penguin exhibit. “i don’t wanna keep him waiting.”

“heh, okay!” yuta’s cheerful breathtaking smile made the heat quickly rise to your cheeks. “and that’s very true… he’ll get grumpy like last time.”

you laughed. “i’m pretty sure that was because the staff was a little late on giving him food…”

“mmm— don’t think so!” you passed through the entrance of the exhibit and turned left, other families and kids staring intently at the different penguin habitats and nurseries as you walked by, majority of the enclosures housing from baby penguins to those who were just learning to grow and take independence. “it’s because he missed us flower.”

you both reached the primary habitat that contained a handful of adult penguins waddling about and jumping from big rock boulders, an ample sized body of ocean water in front that allowed them to go for a swim or splash their little wings if they wished, you and yuta approaching the front and eyes immediately scanning for buddy.

“do you see him..?” yuta spoke softly, his eyelids squinting over the rocks.

“nuh uh…” you shook your head, peering around and eyeing every penguin in attempts at spotting buddy in particular.

“oh! there! over there!” you speedily pointed to the far left, buddy on his chubby tummy on top of one of the highest boulders in the sanctuary, soaking in the cold icy temperatures of the habitat while taking a nap like a respectable little king, his body softly moving up and down in even breaths.

“really?! where?” yuta stepped closer to the glass wall, his gaze desperately scanning for buddy and shoulders slumping when he still couldn’t spot him. “oh no baby i think i need fucking glasses—”

you giggled, tilting his chin more to the left and pointing to the sleeping bird. “there silly… he’s taking a nap on his belly.”

“oh i see him!” his charming face broke out into a smile. “aw man we came at a bad time then flower… he might think we ditched him for the day and be mad at us next time we come back.”

you faltered and visibly frowned at the thought, yuta picking up on it and quickly fixing his demeanor.

“oh— but it’s okay! it’s fine!” he delicately patted the top of your head. “i’m sure he’ll forgive us… and maybe he’ll wake up before we leave?”

“hopefully…” you sighed softly through your nose, a little grin growing on your lips. “what if i just— start tapping on the glass to wake him up?”

yuta laughed and shook his head. “baby that’s something i would do don’t do that.” 

he brought you in by the arm around your shoulders and squeezed you lovingly into his chest.

“you’re hanging out with me too much…”

“well duh.” you giggled. “is this your way of saying you wanna cut back?—”

“oh what the!?—” his eyes whipped in your direction, frantically shaking his head side to side. “i’d actually rather give up my dumb frat position than do that flower.”

you gasped then, jaw running slack.

“yu it’s not dumb, and don’t gamble with things like that for me either… you work really hard for the status you have and i would hate to be the reason it goes away.”

that was the main concern you had when you first started dating yuta, and shamefully still a concern now actually… because throughout the year yuta spent trying to win you over and prove to you that he wasn’t a player, hot headed and awful anymore, something that you were so incredibly touched over and impressed about and so fucking happy that he did without you even having to ask— the worry of you being the cause of his depleting reputation because of your status never went away regardless, and it quickly bubbled up in your mind as soon as you saw the disgruntled reactions of his crowd.

and you normally wouldn’t care about things like that, the rumors and gossip that took no time at all to surface easily thrown to the back of your head because of yuta… for he was everything you’d ever wanted and more as he continued to shower you in that same amount of love, affection, and attention that he gave you when you first had met.

yuta's kind reassurance of the rumors and for you to pay them no mind wasn’t entirely necessary to you either, due to the fact that you adored his silly jokes and flamboyant frat boy behavior so much and loved him so much that you simply just didn’t need it.

at first.

until you started noticing that yuta never… initiated things with you past kissing or making out throughout your first year together.

but it’s not like you ever did either— your frustratingly timid and shy personality never allowed you to even utter a peep of suggestion about it no matter how much you wanted to take things further, though intimate things like that weren’t a deal breaker nor was it of great importance to you anyways, as just spending time with him was more than enough and all you wanted and needed… except—

you’d seen the way yuta was with girls before you.

so why was it so easy for him to be intimate with them and not with— you? 

and they never needed to ask either…

“flower?”

“huh?” you jumped slightly, your eyes shooting up and meeting a concerned faced yuta. 

“you okay?” he blinked. “did you… hear what i said?”

“oh! i’m sorry yu i didn’t…” you peered up at him shyly with pinky cheeks, your bashful look spurring his little heart on as he gave you a smile and quickly pecked your forehead.

“that’s okay! i just said you’d never be the reason for something like that baby…” he smoothed a hand down the back of your hair, mind a little preoccupied by how silky it felt. “and i don’t care if it goes away either. also buddy’s awake.”

you perked up, eyes immediately darting to his former sleeping place and seeing him now fluttering his furry wings, gradually stretching and moving his little limbs before hopping down from his rock and waddling, both you and yuta funnily gushing and waving your arms around to try and catch the birds attention, yet undoubtedly looking absolutely insane to the rest of the guests around you as you both hopped and flailed around.

“buddy!” yuta whisper-yelled. “hey! look look!”

you giggled as he jumped up and down then with floundering arms, his car keys that were hooked through his belt loop jingling with every hop along with the charms on your purse, your hand flying to your mouth then to stifle your laughter once you noticed the odd stares parents were shooting at him as they passed by, their gawking children clinging to their coats and sleeves.

“yu!” you spoke in between hiccups of laughter. “i think— you’re scaring the kids—”

“oh!—” he froze, hands still up in the air as he looked side to side over his shoulders, a sheepish smile creeping on his face once he realized that he was in fact eliciting bewildered glances and judgmental stares, his arms coming down immediately after as he peeked over at you with blushing cheeks.

“oh man...” he laughed, completely fucking embarrassed and scratching the back of his neck. “how much of a stupid idiot did i just look right now…”

you quickly shook your head and giggled some more, standing up on your tippy toes to plant a sweet kiss to his rosy cheek.

“i was doing the same thing yu it’s okay!” you cutely smiled, your eyes switching back to the habitat in front of you, pointing. “it got buddy’s attention though!”

the chubby bird excitedly flapped its wings before trodding over to where the both of you stood, you gushing and cooing as he hopped over pebbles and moved through other stubby penguins just to get where the two of you stood behind the barrier, the penguin tilting its little head to and fro in curiosity as he peered at you both.

“hey little man!” yuta grinned, bending down a bit and placing his palm flat on the glass, you doing the same as you leaned closer to get a better look at the bird. “you okay?”

you sent a tiny wave to the penguin, him flapping out his wings again in return and waddling even closer to the glass, you softly gasping and head snapping up to your boyfriend.

“i think—” your wide eyes shifted back to buddy. “i think he does recognize us…”

“that’s what i’ve been saying flower!” yuta laughed boyishly, swinging an arm over to place a hand on your waist, giving it an affectionate squeeze. “i know i’m a dummy dumb but never about buddy.”

you snorted and gently nudged his side with your shoulder. “you’re not a dummy dumb baby don’t be silly.”

“kay!” yuta funnily cheesed, leaning down to press a quick peck to your cheek before turning his attention back to buddy, the penguin oddly now excessively fluttering its wings and puffing up its chest over your interaction, honking and squawking more than usual as it waddled over to your side now instead of yuta’s.

“wha—” your boyfriend gawked, eyes narrowing at buddy. “what i can’t kiss my girlfriend? why not?”

buddy honked again and hopped in place on its little feet, yuta’s eyes only growing further into slits.

“what?” you giggled. “what’s wro— mpf!”

he cupped your cheeks and mushed your lips with his, buddy letting out a loud string of honks and squawking through the other side of the glass as yuta basically tongued you down, your cheeks instantly heating up at the random raunchy display of public affection.

he came off your lips with a smack and looked to the penguin again, his eyes then widening at the distressed state buddy was presumably in, jaw hanging open and frantic gaze switching to yours.

“buddy wants my girlfriend…” 

“huh?!” you laughed. “yu he’s—”

“you think i’m gonna let you in my frat now little man?” yuta let your face go and threw his hands up. “you were my second in command!”

“baby he’s a penguin what are you on about—”

“yeah a penguin that wants my girlfriend.” he mumbled, crossing his arms and bitterly looking off to the side. “i feel betrayed.”

you giggled, cheeks buzzing and pink as you reached up and patted the top of his head.

“c’mon yu let’s go it’s okay.” you interlaced your fingers with his and gently tugged him with you. “let’s go get something to eat—”

yuta pointed to buddy as you pulled him away.

“you’re out of the frat.”

“yuta!”

“what?!”

a total of ten more minutes was spent of you trying to drag him out of the exhibit and him still picking a fight— yuta in utter disbelief that buddy backstabbed him and wanted the same woman he did, him sulking and muttering the entire way to the sandwich shop to pick up lunch, you laughing at his silly behavior as you led him through the aquarium corridors and pathways to go to the flower exhibit, that being yours and yuta’s usual munching spot ever since you first came to the aquarium at the start of your relationship.

and although visiting the aquarium was something you both always did— specifically on a weekly basis and multiple times throughout it… the two of you loved it, especially yuta, for he was content in doing absolutely anything with you just so long as you were having fun and happy and with him, your regular endeavors of touching jellyfish, seeing buddy (even though he was currently on probation), and buying lunch at the usual deli spot next to the aquarium was something he loved and floored over just like you did, a thing he looked forward to everyday and unabashedly texted you constantly to see if you were up for another trip to your little usual spot.

but that’s precisely how yuta neglected to see how he was unawarely making you second guess yourself— your needs, because due to the fact that he was the happiest man alive by just your presence alone and didn’t need anything else, he failed to catch your disappointed frowns or taken aback blinking eyes when he rejected your shy little advances at a little something more than just a smoochie smooch, advances that were so humiliatingly tiny and fleeting that you never blamed him for missing them in the first place, and only blamed yourself for not being more obvious, frustrated for being upset over something like intimacy when it shouldn’t be on your mind as much as it was.

“did you want the same thing baby?” yuta asked, speaking over his shoulder with a little smile as you stood behind him. “or something different?”

“the same thing is fine!” you sweetly replied. “oh! but can i do curly fries with it instead of chips? if that’s okay?”

yuta laughed at your apprehensiveness, placing a hand on the back of your head and bringing you in to press a kiss to your forehead, fingers carding gently through your hair after.

“you don’t have to ask like that flower you know that.” he grinned, his hand moving from your hair to the side of your face, thumb softly caressing your pretty cheek. “whatever you need is always okay.”

you blushed, lips pursing shyly to the side as you nodded and thanked him gratefully, yuta shining another kind smile your way before dropping his hand and stepping forward to the cash register to order and pay— two delicious and stuffed deli sandwiches with chosen sides ready at the pick up counter within minutes.

the bag of food crinkled underneath yuta’s arm as he held it up against his chest, the other extending an offering hand out for you that you quickly took in response, the both of you leaving the deli shop and blissfully walking the familiar path towards the flower exhibit like muscle memory.

“let me have my bag yu, i feel bad that you’re carrying all of that yourself…” you spoke worriedly, arm already lifting for the strap on his shoulder.

“i’m alright!” he chirped, shoulder purposely moving away from your trying grasp as you passed through the entrance of the greenhouse— the complex fumigated with lovely mixtures of different floral scents that filled your nostrils as you walked through. “don’t worry flower it’s fine.”

you quirked a brow, a defiant hand reaching out for your bag anyways but it only met with yuta jerking his shoulder away from you again.

“yu!” you laughed, both hands now reaching out repeatedly and him playfully dodging every attempt you made, cute boyish snickers slipping past his lips as he moved quickly to avoid your grabbing fingers. “please you’ve been carrying it all day let me help you—”

yuta swiveled away from you and turned, him walking backwards as your purse jingled on the other side of him and unreachable from where you stood.

“nope!” he shook his head side to side. “but thank you baby! you’re sweet.”

you shot him a lighthearted glare.

“i’ll leave you for buddy if you don’t give me my purse—”

his jaw dramatically dropped and you giggled, a scoff leaving his open mouth as his eyes narrowed.

“now he’s done it.” you both stopped at your usual spot— a pretty little emerald green bench that sat underneath various potted voluminous flowers, hanging from the ceiling from chains and providing cooling shade from the slight sunny warmth of the greenhouse. “he’s gone behind my back and wooed you.”

you laughed, taking a seat with him as he set the bag of food in between the two of you.

“he ‘wooed’ me ever since we first met him silly.” you teased, reaching inside the bag and pulling out yuta’s sandwich, unraveling it from it’s wrapping for him before carefully passing it over. “he’s a cutie.”

he pouted, taking his food and setting it down on his lap. “and you don’t think i am?”

your cheeks heated at the cute face he was making, grabbing your own sandwich and unfolding the wrapping.

“buddy’s not president of a frat.” yuta spoke through a mouthful of his deli. “buddy didn’t try to win you over for a year straight. i did.”

you giggled, resting your head on his shoulder as you plopped a curly fry in your mouth.

“that’s very true.” you hummed. “but buddy did try to share his lunch with me that one time, remember? his fishy?”

yuta swallowed, looking down at you then and smiling fondly.

“you’re right he did.” he craned his neck and took the curly fry you were offering for him in between his teeth, chewing after. “i can’t compete with that can i?”

“nuh uh.” you grinned. “sorry yu! maybe if you give me a fish of your own i’ll reconsider hehe.”

he laughed loudly and kissed the top of your head.

“i can do that!” he spoke smugly. “shit i’ll give you five fish instead of just one. i bet buddy can’t do that.”

you giggled again and lifted your head up from his shoulder, carefully grabbing your deli and taking a bite out of it, plopping another curly fry into your mouth after to chew simultaneously.

“deal!” you chirped. “i’ll be waiting for my five fishies then.”

“but do i get something in return?” he smiled brightly, the suggestive tone in his voice making your face heat up and your heart simmer up with hope, you gnawing on the inside of your cheek as you tried to fucking calm yourself and not jump to conclusions.

“like what?” you asked, ever so cutely tilting your head to the side that it made yuta’s cheeks heat up.

“likeeee…” he looked up in giddy thought. “like you—”

a blaring ring cut through the tranquil atmosphere of the greenhouse, yuta dropping his sandwich on his lap and huffing as he dug through his pockets for his phone, him pulling it out and checking the caller i.d. before rolling his eyes and setting his sandwich down on the open bench space next to him, standing.

“i’m sorry baby it’s one of the guys…” he sighed, slight agitation in his chest as he diverted his attention to your pretty face. “i’m just gonna check what he wants really quick… is that okay?”

you frantically nodded and waved him off. “yes! yes yu that’s totally okay don’t worry! take your time.”

he gave you a soft smile, leaning down and pressing a kiss to your cheek, stepping away.

“i’ll be back!” he called over his shoulder as he walked, quickly answering the call after and pressing the phone to his ear, striding a short distance away from you.

“what man?” 

you laughed at his grumbling as you heard it from afar, you already used to him frequently taking calls from the boys in his frat about upcoming events, expenses and member behaviors— not minding one single bit every time he had to step away for a moment to take care of issues, because you knew and wholeheartedly understood that his role was the most prestigious and demanding responsibility in his life at the moment, your heart warming at how apologetic he was each time he was forced to take a call… and you more worried about him and how stressed out he must be about having to basically babysit and watch over 35 different men and take care of their fuck ups.

“oh my god…” you heard him mumble, taking a bite out of your sandwich as you curiously listened in on the call. “why would he do that?”

your brows slightly furrowed in concern, a little anxious as you watched the way he rubbed a hand over his forehead exhaustedly.

“this is the second time he’s done this and i’m gonna get marked for his stupid shit again.”

marked?

you’d heard yuta use that phrase before… but the logistics of it you still didn’t really get nor remember clearly from what he had told you previously, the only thing you could really recall was that he’d already been marked once in the past.

he heavily sighed.

“no… no— tell him he’s banned from leaving the frat until i get there later tonight i’m serious. he can’t leave.”

yuta slowly started making his way back over to you, his eyes to the ground as he held the phone up against his ear.

“alright… thanks for calling. make an announcement to the rest of the boys that i’m holding a meeting when i get there please.”

you heard him bid his final goodbye’s before hanging up the phone, him stuffing it back in his pocket and lifting his other hand, scratching the back of his neck in irritating thought as you watched him come over, wide eyed.

“what happened?” you asked softly, gaze following him closely as he slumped down next to you on the bench with crossed arms, his brows pinched together.

“hm?” his eyes flickered to yours. “oh nothing flower… the VP just called me about some frat stuff.”

he made it seem like it was nothing, but the bouncing of his knee and the way he used his index finger to pick at the skin around the nail of his thumb… told you otherwise.

“yu…”

“yeah?”

you reached over and untangled his crossed arms, gently taking the hand he was picking at in yours to stop him from doing it, an anxious expression on your face.

“what does marked mean? and who’s banned from leaving the frat?”

an amused smile slowly spread across his lips, his grip on your hand tightening earnestly.

“you being nosy baby?” 

you blushed.

“sorry!” you blurted. “i didn’t mean to… you just looked really upset so i got worried.”

he shook his head, bringing your interlocked hands up to kiss the back of yours.

“i’m just teasing flower it’s okay.” he spoke quietly, a weird far-off look to his eyes as he stared down at your hands, the gnawing feeling in your chest only growing the longer he sat there without saying anything to you— a pinch between his brows.

“what’s wrong?” you tenderly squeezed his hand. “are the guys okay?”

“they’re being baboons.” he heavily exhaled, annoyed. “do you remember toma?”

“toma?” you tilted your head. “the one who started a fight with that other frat?”

“yeah, him.” he picked a curly fry from the food on your lap and took a bite. “he went back to their house with a few other guys and threw bricks at their windows.”

you gasped.

“and they lit off a firework inside.”

a hand flew over your mouth, your eyes blown fucking wide as yuta continued to irritably shove curly fries in his mouth.

“and the fucked up part is, is that i’m gonna be the one that eats shit from it by administration.” he continued, swallowing and bitterly shaking his head. “i really shouldn’t have let toma off easy from last time…”

“but why would you get in trouble yu?” you asked. “you didn’t do anything it was toma.”

he looked at you a little sadly, but more stressed out than anything.

“because i’m president baby…” he let go of your hand and picked up his sandwich. “i’m responsible for whatever they do and go down with them if they mess up. that’s what being marked means.”

you frowned, feeling totally annoyed at toma for being such a selfish stupid idiot for what he did, but feeling more agitated over the fact that yuta always seemed to get the short end of the stick when it came to their mishaps just because he was president, when all he’s ever actually done for the frat is keep them out of trouble and amicably successful, it’s level of popularity and recognition one the previous president failed at as yuta had thousands of applications each year with new brothers trying to enroll.

“toma’s a freshman so… i get it, but—” he took a small bite of his sandwich and spoke through a mouthful. “he’s fucking stupid.”

you giggled softly, leaning back on the bench and crossing your arms before speaking.

“what’s gonna happen with you and administration?” 

“depends on how much that other frat complains.” he swallowed. “it’s destruction of property and basically almost killing someone with that firework… so i could be expelled. and toma.”

you froze, your head whipping in his direction and you baffled at the way yuta continued to chow down on his sandwich like he didn’t just say something like that.

“are you kidding me?” you breathed out. “expulsion?”

“that or i lose my position.” 

and yuta still didn’t show any signs of fear or anger as he stole more curly fries from your lap… but you on the other hand… were freaking the fuck out.

“yu oh my god—” you placed an exasperated hand over your forehead, chest ragged as you thought of all of the things yuta could lose when he worked so fucking hard to get them throughout his entire college career. 

“there— there has to be some kind of appeal we can do maybe— maybe if we get the rest of your guys to back you up it could be just toma getting expelled or—”

yuta slowed his chewing and looked your way, an expression of endearment crossing his face over how much you cared about him and his life, a little laugh escaping past his lips.

“it’s okay flower… don’t worry.” he reached up and placed a flat hand on top of your head. “i’m on good terms with administration so they won’t do anything like that.”

“how do you know though?” you murmured, eyes falling to your lap. “toma committed a crime yuta. i don’t think they’ll let you guys off that easy.”

his hand slid from your head down to cup under your jaw, gently lifting your face to look at him.

“i’ll handle it… okay?” he pushed softly. “don’t stress yourself over my frat stuff baby it’s not good for you.”

he leaned and placed a cute peck to your lips, letting your jaw go after and smiling at the blush on your cheeks.

“the most they’ll do is put us both on social probation or give us a warning… but either way i’m personally putting toma on social probation for being a fucking airhead.”

“social probation?” you softly spoke. “what’s that?”

yuta felt a sense of pride for himself every time you asked him about specifics on frat boy terms or rules, it being the only thing that he could really teach you and help you learn as he was a dummy dumb and didn’t know much about anything else, a complete contrast from your smarts and knowledge that he loved to drink up any time you told him special facts, or explained to him things he didn’t get (and would sometimes pretend he did when he actually didn’t to save himself the embarrassment…).

so whenever the opportunity came up of your sweet shy voice asking him about his fraternity? he was absolutely floored.

“we basically can’t host parties or events for some time.” he explained. “i try my best to never land our frat in social probation because it fucks up our relevancy… we basically go dead for a bit and other frats or sororities forget about us until we host the next event.”

“what?!— that’s bad tooo!” you whined, a hand flying over your forehead again as your brain tried to come up with ways to avoid this in addition to the potential expulsion, yuta only laughing and wrapping a hand around your lifted wrist.

“baby no— it’s okay!” he spoke between giggles, lowering your arm. “its really not that bad… i want social probation.”

“why the hell would you want that?” you pouted.

“because i get to spend more time with you.” he grinned, a big and shiny one too as he quickly smooched your cute cheek and leaned back on the bench, shoving the rest of his sandwich in his mouth. “i won’t have to spend time organizing parties or events and instead hang out with you flower.”

your heart fluttered on fucking overdrive in your chest, you shyly looking away then and mirroring him by leaning back on the bench, a silly smile on your face.

“more time to visit buddy too?”

“no.” he spoke firmly, and you giggled. “i put buddy on social probation we can’t go see him.”

you giggled some more with a hand over your mouth, yuta looking at you with hearts in his eyes as his ears greedily swallowed down your precious laughter to commit to memory, him reminded once again of how much of a sweetheart you were— but also of how easy it was for a man like him to lose you entirely because of his social stance and the people that he was surrounded with.

and at the thought of that, yuta subconsciously reached over and wrapped his arms around your waist, slowly pulling you snug and flush against his body as his insecurities overtook his thoughts for a moment.

“yu?” you snaked your arms around his neck and embraced him back, your brows furrowing. “are you okay? what’s wrong?”

“i’m fine.” he replied simply, but his hold on you only tightened.

you frowned. 

“are you finally worried about what administration’s gonna do?”

he snorted and shook his head against your shoulder. 

“fuck no.” he pulled back just enough to plant a kiss on your forehead. “i don’t care what they do flower… and you shouldn’t either okay?”

he was worried about driving you away.

and it wasn’t too often when his mind drifted to the thought, but it happened often enough that it sometimes kept him up at night on particularly bad days, and especially when he happened to catch another rumor about either of you that made him hope with everything he had that you didn’t end up catching it too.

but you always did. and you kept it to yourself that you did.

but funnily enough, it was like you and yuta were sitting pretty on a see saw and the stupid metal thing switched positions to you being the one at the top instead of him— you now lost in your thoughts as he remained grounded and okay, driving you home at the end of the day after your aquarium date with your hands folded tightly over your lap, silent as the quiet murmur of his car radio filled the air.

maybe if you just— sort of made a move now… yuta would get the hint? and maybe something intimate would finally happen? … maybe?

you anxiously gnawed at your bottom lip and stared out the window, swallowing down your nerves as you tried to come up with a way to instill something steamier between the two of you for the time being, and a way that wasn’t out of your comfort zone either as you were too pathetically shy to try something obvious.

but you knew that either way… you had to just— attempt it.

“oh! your parents aren’t home baby.”

you snapped out of your thoughts and looked up, your parents car sure enough not in the driveway as yuta pulled in, your heart hammering in your rib cage as you took that as a definitive sign to initiate something with him in the best way you knew how.

“do you wanna…” you pursed your lips. “do you wanna come in? for a little bit?”

he unknowingly beamed and nodded. “yeah! i do flower.”

you let out a nervous breath and nodded, hands shakily opening the passenger side door and you both stepping out of the car, shutting them behind you before beginning to walk up the path to your front door, you getting your keys out to unlock it and pushing it open once you did.

yuta had been to your house plenty of times before already, but your parents were always home.

this is the first time he was over where they weren’t.

“do you want something to drink?” you asked sweetly, him walking over and plopping down on your living room couch. “like… like soda? or beer? i think my dad just bought a pack—”

“oh no it’s okay!” he patted the spot next to him. “just sit with me baby.”

butterflies swarmed in your stomach as you nodded, nervously walking to the couch then and sitting down next to him.

“do you have a lot of homework for tonight?” yuta gently placed an arm around your shoulders. “i won’t stay too long if you do so you can do it.”

you quickly shook your head.

“no! no i don’t have any. you can stay as long as you want.”

he grinned.

“sweet!”

his handsome face sent another wave of nerves and need through your body as you breathed in deeply through your nose, your hands going cold over how anxious you were.

“tomorrow we should—”

you grabbed his face and brought him down, shoving your lips to his and cutting him off as his eyes blew wide, his cheeks immediately growing a bright shade of red while you kissed him in such a way that you’ve never ever done before, yuta’s palms quickly clamming up as he tried to simmer down the nasty thoughts that flew through his mind then.

why did he always have to be such a whore?

your hands slid down and around his neck before he even had time to think, his flying to your waist as smooching wet noises from your moving lips only fueled the fire and had him breathing erratically, knowing he was so fucking fucked if he didn’t put an end to this now.

“flower—”

you muffled his attempt with your god sent kisses, the way you were so aggressive with it shooting blood straight to his cock and causing him to completely miss the way you pulled him on top of you down on the couch, your pretty plush thighs around his waist making him choke against your mouth and force himself off of you without another second.

“w—what?” you drew your hands back against your chest, fearing that you did something wrong as he stared down at you with swollen lips and a heaving chest, his back upright.

“i—” he wiped his wet mouth with the back of his hand, shaking his head and trying to look at anything but the sight of you under him and the way your legs were spread around him.

“nothing! heh!” he laughed nervously, bashfully scratching the back of his neck as he moved away and created distance between you both, failing at catching the hurt flashing through your eyes.

you felt like you did something wrong.

“s—sorry if i squished you or—”

“no!” he blurted. “no you didn’t. it’s okay.”

then what?

you shyly tried to lean in again to continue, when yuta suddenly sprang up from the couch and stepped back, the abruptness of it making you flinch and stare at him wide eyed.

yuta needed to take a breather now before he ended up stripping you naked and— and hurting you…

but unaware of the fact that he already did.

“i’m gonna—” he struggled. “i’m gonna call one of the guys.”

what?

“i’ll be outside.”

“yu—”

he hastily walked to the front door and opened it before he stepped out, quickly closing it behind him and cutting you off, leaving you dumbfounded as you slowly sat up in silence and thinking you had done something wrong… you were sure of it.

horrifying embarrassment flooded your entire being then as you tried to blink back tears, feeling like a total loser and awful that you didn’t know how to properly initiate anything with him, you growing a little sick over the fleeting reminder of his past rendezvous and other girls doing it so successfully… that you were ashamed of yourself for being unable to do something as simple as fucking make out with him.

you quickly wiped the little tears that managed to slip from your eyes and stood, unsure if you even wanted to see him now because of your pathetic mess up, your desperate gaze searching around the kitchen for something to do to take your mind off of it as you walked over, your line of sight landing on the small pile of dishes left by your parents and you immediately going towards the sink— turning the faucet on.

a couple of more minutes passed before you eventually heard the front door open and click shut, your heart rate fucking escalating and feeling mortified again as footsteps came up from behind you, your eyes literally gorilla glued down to the dishes you were washing.

“the boys are killing each other right now.” yuta sighed, leaning against the counter next to you with his arms crossed. “the VP told me they’re divided in half trying to see if they should kill toma or not.”

you laughed softly, rinsing off a small glass cup under the running warm water and thankful that your hair was blocking your view of him.

“i thought they would all want to kill him for what he did.” you spoke.

“most of them do!” he slid closer. “but some of them think it’s funny… and the others are losing it over landing in social probation.”

you hummed, setting each rinsed off dish carefully on the rack next to you as you went.

“what about toma? do you know if he regrets—”

you stiffened at the feeling of yuta taking your hair in between his fingers and gently pulling back, brushing it behind your ear as you finally made eye contact with him, yuta shooting you a breathtaking smile— one that was so fucking contagious that you couldn’t help but reciprocate.

“sorry baby… i didn’t mean to cut you off.” he leaned back and crossed his arms again. “i couldn’t see you.”

you shook your head, standing on your tippy toes and pressing a sweet kiss to his cheek.

“no it’s okay!”

yuta had the power of having anyone and anything on their knees and at his feet with simply just a look of his godly face, and whether he knew it or not you weren’t sure of— only that the population of anyone and anything included you as well, for the minute he smiled at you in the way that he always did, you forgot entirely the shame and embarrassment you were shitting yourself over from the events prior.

though yuta did know…. he’d always known. but he stopped giving a fuck about it from the moment he met you— the only person he wanted by his side and the only opinion he cared about and strove to please, completely disregarding anyone else and putting you first above anything in his life, including his fraternity, him never listening when you fought him about it and told him he shouldn’t do that, because he felt as if he definitely should.

always and without fail.

“i feel bad keeping you here though if they’re having a full blown melt down over there...” you smiled sheepishly. “you should be there with them yu.”

he pouted.

“but what if i said i didn’t want to?” he quipped, tilting his head. “hm?”

you shot him a look, and he sighed, shoulders dropping.

“i know…” he took a step towards you and swung his arms around your shoulders from behind, mushing his cheek against the side of your head as you continued to wash dishes. “the VP was literally crying on the fucking phone and i couldn’t hear him well over the yelling in the back.”

you laughed, picturing the silly vision of a bunch of frat boys arguing and fighting over not being able to throw parties or go to events for a while, it probably seeming like the end of the world for them if they’re not able to interact with other sorority girls, and living instead on what felt like a dead deserted island devoid of alcohol and beer pong until yuta came to be the saving grace and lift their violations.

drying your hands on a nearby kitchen towel, you turned around in yuta’s hold and gave him a cute smile.

“go baby.” you pushed softly. “they need their papa.”

he playfully rolled his eyes.

“they’re full grown men and yet i still have to teach some of them how to do their laundry.”

you quirked a brow.

“didn’t i show you how to do that?”

“…no.”

you burst out laughing again at the embarrassed and flushed look on his face, his eyes darting away from yours and looking off to the side.

you craned your neck to kiss the tip of his pink nose and grinned, his gaze shifting back to you with a slow smile spreading across his lips.

“i’ll see you tomorrow.” you spoke gently. “and keep me updated on what happens when you get there okay?”

“mkay.” he loosened his hold on you and stepped a bit back, you affectionately squeezing his side as he did. “i’ll call you tonight if i make it out alive.”

you giggled, nodding as he released you entirely and began walking over to your front door, you following closely behind and opening it for him once you both got there.

“bye flower!” he leaned down and pressed a quick kiss to your lips. “i love you.”

you shyly smiled and leaned against the side of the door as he stepped out. 

“i love you too yuuuu.”

he stopped and turned his head to look at you from over his shoulder, sheepishly pursing his lips.

“can i just stay—”

“no!” you laughed, extending an arm and gently nudging him away by the shoulder. “go silly…. your frat’s gonna end up in flames if you don’t.”

yuta chuckled, knowing you were funnily actually correct and not over exaggerating in the slightest, the two of you well aware that his fraternity brothers had the tendency to be a bunch of reckless morons if he wasn’t there to guide them or make sure they weren’t stepping over the line.

and sometimes… (almost always though), he wished he could stop everyone in his damn college campus from stepping over the line like he could with his frat guys, their ridiculous and ludicrous rumors about his relationship with you never failing to set him off and make him anxious that you’ll worry your precious mind over it and believe them.

yuta tried to keep you away from that as much as he possibly could.

anytime you both took strolls throughout campus, or decided to visit that nice little student run bakery that you loved so much every morning, if he ever saw someone— anyone that was in his circle, that he knew for a fact had insinuated those rumors, or if they simply just had a nasty fucking attitude and he didn’t want you to get caught in the middle of it, he would gently steer you the other way with a hand around your shoulders and a loving little smile on his face, shielding you from a world of undeserving popularity, dishonesty, and calculated disingenuous foolery that only served to benefit the wrong people.

and yet still… all of that was his world after all.

and yuta couldn’t shield you from everything.

“who? yuta okkotsu?”

your ears perked up, gaze flickering from your notebook up to the two girls that sat in front of you during your afternoon lecture, pencil stilling in your hand.

“yeah him! the one that got with layla a while back.”

layla?

you pursed your lips in distaste, sighing a little through your nose and shifting your attention back to your notes, feeling a little silly for being bitter over a girl yuta got with before you.

but he got with her nonetheless… something he still hadn’t done with you.

“oh to be her…” one of them sadly sighed. “i would give anything to get dicked down by him.”

your jaw silently dropped, not knowing whether you should be bothered by that statement or laugh.

“i heard he has a girlfriend now though.” the other spoke.

“hah?! who?”

“dunno.” she shrugged. “someone told me it’s some nerdy girl that’s in the same year as him. she’s really easy to miss.”

you internally rolled your eyes and lightly pushed your notebook to the side, deciding to divert your attention towards your laptop screen instead.

“you’re fucking joking right?”

“nope!”

“that’s such a waste.” she expressed. “why would he be with that when he could be with layla? everybody wants layla shit— even i want layla sometimes.”

“you’re such a bitch!” her other friend cackled and smacked her arm. “but no yeah… i give it a year max. i heard he doesn’t whore around anymore, but considering how long he chased after me for a quick fuck? there’s no way he’s suddenly just— a saint.”

“do you regret rejecting him?” 

“yes oh my god— i was trying to be mysterious and different but he ended up just fucking someone else that same night—”

you hadn’t noticed how hard you were gripping your pencil until a cramping pain shot through your knuckles, you instantly relaxing and setting it softly off to the side.

“fuck! you know what?” one of them jumped up excitedly. “i actually heard he’s still seeing layla!”

the other gasped. “you’re lying!”

“no i’m not i swear!” she snatched her phone from the desk and frantically typed away. “ricky— you know ricky? he said one of layla’s close friends spilled that they talk so much and meet up sometimes to fuck—”

“stooop his poor girlfriend! oh my god someone needs to tell her—”

you slammed your laptop shut and stood, you never one to skip out on lectures or leave early but not giving a single fuck at the moment as you packed up, physically unable to hear anything else and feeling straight up nauseous at everything they were saying, drowning out the rest of their rambling as you swung your bag over your shoulder and pushed your chair in, walking out of class and leaving your lecture hall as a whole.

they’re just rumors.

they’re just two bitches with nothing better to do and were weirdly obsessed with your boyfriend's personal business.

yuta would never do that to you…

but was he— was he that obsessed with layla before you? and did he seriously fuck around with every girl he could possibly get his hands on?

so what was so different about you? his actual girlfriend?

“flower?”

you stiffened, eyes snapping up from the floor and landing on a surprised looking yuta, waiting for you by your class like he always did.

“you’re out of class already?” he tapped on his phone to wake it up. “it doesn’t end for another thirty minutes i was gonna go get my car from the parking lot to get you—”

you hated yourself for feeling like he was the last person you wanted to see… but you just couldn’t help it.

“i left.”

your simple quiet reply took him a bit off guard.

“you left?” he tilted his head. “but you never leave class early… are you feeling a little rebellious today baby?”

he smiled big and expected a pretty giggle from you at his teasing then— but he got nothing.

your face was still stoic, and with a small pinch in between your brows.

“mhm.”

his smile wavered.

“o—okay…” he put his phone back in his pocket. “well— the boys are organizing for our fundraising event… and i— i was gonna ask if you could help me with our booth banner and decorations baby? everything we made looks like chicken scratch and you have pretty handwriting…”

your heart clenched so fucking hard in your chest, wanting to say yes with everything in you, but the annoying stupid gossip from earlier soliciting bitter jealousy in your mind that unfortunately overpowered everything else.

“i’m sorry yu…” you mumbled, eyes looking away. “i don’t feel that great today so i’m just gonna go home. i’ll help tomorrow though if that’s alright.”

“oh— you don’t feel good?” yuta frowned, stepping closer. “what’s wrong?”

yuta caught the way you took a step back, and he blinked.

“i just feel nauseous is all.” you weakly smiled. “i’m gonna go home for the day and hopefully feel better in the morning.”

you felt nauseous?

“what did you eat today? let me take you to get some meds—” 

he tried to place a soothing hand on your back, but the way you moved away from him again set off a thousand blaring alarms in his head.

“i—it’s okay!” you stammered, hugging yourself and starting to walk in the opposite direction towards the parking lot. “i’m just gonna head home yu i’ll text you—”

“flower wait—”

yuta quickly caught your hand, his eyes flooded in absolute worry and confusion as he looked at you.

you were never like this with him.

and— and any time you were sick you always wanted to be with him to let him take care of you.

“what yu?” you mumbled, your sad gaze finally dragging up to look at him in the eyes.

“baby what’s wrong?” he asked softly. “i feel like it’s something else.”

you bit down on the inside of your cheek.

“i just feel nauseous.”

“well then come to my frat okay? you can— you can take a nap in my room and i think i have some nausea meds somewhere—”

his grip on your hand tightened a little.

“or maybe we can take a walk somewhere and that’ll help? like at the aquarium? we can visit buddy—”

yuta’s frantic blubbering to try to get you to stay with him sent a shooting pang of guilt through your chest, it breaking you from that weird and awful headspace you were in as your eyes softened.

you shamefully realized then that it really wasn’t fair you were treating him like this… especially because he quite literally didn’t do anything at all— you feeling silly and awful that you rejected his advances and were off with him when all he was trying to do was help you feel better.

the rumors and gossip was something that was completely out of his control… and you shouldn’t punish him for that.

you took a small step forward then, giving him a tiny hesitant smile.

“we can… go to your frat yu.”

he perked up.

“yeah?” 

“yeah.”

you timidly reached up and softly slid your arms around his neck, yuta immediately responding by pulling your body snug against his with a squeeze, relieved that you agreed to come home with him and that you were letting him touch you again— pecking the side of your head before letting go and gently leading you to his car.

but the tight feeling in his chest didn’t go away.

it was nagging at him, and annoyingly so as he tried to dumb down his stupid insecurities and not overthink on the drive to his frat house, trying to settle himself with the reasoning you had told him and trying not to think about the way you kept dodging his hands, that you were just a little sick is all…

so then— why had you looked so upset?

and yuta’s turmoil only grew once he started to juggle the possibility of it being not something you felt, but something you heard.

a rumor.

“a woman! yuta brought a woman!”

“it’s y/n idiot.” yuta shot back to one of his frat brothers, sending you a playful eye roll as he closed the door behind you upon arrival.

“oh it is! hiii yyy/nnnn!” a different one spoke up, a handful of them huddled over a large table in the dining room with a sheet of white poster paper laying in the middle.

“hiii.” you shyly spoke, a sweet polite smile on your face that yuta swooned over as he placed an arm around your shoulders, leading you to the table.

“what the—” yuta’s eyes squinted over the poster paper as you slapped a hand over your mouth, stifling a laugh and your eyes darting over how horrid the layout design of the banner was for their fundraising event, your boyfriend not exaggerating in the slightest when he said it looked like chicken scratch.

men.

“how did you guys manage to make it worse?!” yuta exclaimed, loudly laughing as he leaned over the table and pointed at specific weird smudges and drawings. “i was only gone for an hour!”

you giggled and leaned over with him, some of the boys making room for you so you could properly take a peek at their so-called vigorous work, your amused eyes gazing over the messily painted bold black lettering and the odd random drawings of smiley faces and money.

yuta burst out laughing again.

“who the fuck drew this?!” he pointed to a specific drawing of a weirdly shaped stick man holding a tray of cookies, the smile on its face so cartoonishly huge and toothy that you had to bite down hard on your bottom lip to prevent yourself from laughing, not wanting to offend whoever it was that drew it.

“it was toma!” someone from the crowd spoke up.

“toma?!” yuta shook his head incredulously, scanning the faces of his brothers until they landed on an annoyingly familiar pair of eyes— the culprit hiding behind a few other guys and snickering.

“what?!” toma whined, stepping through the boys and crossing his arms. “i was trying to help out.”

this was the first time you’d properly seen toma up close (and meeting him altogether actually), you not particularly accustomed to him yet like the other guys since he was a freshman, him having just come in for the year and you not really knowing much about him besides from the stories yuta’s told you, your recollections of the shit he’s done and said making it obvious that toma was rowdy and reckless in nature.

“with that?” yuta laughed again. “why’s the mouth bigger than its own head?”

“because he’s happy.” toma shrugged, a playful little curl to his lips. “he’s just so jolly to be selling cookies at a fundraiser, and i wanted to show off my rare artistic talent for the frat!”

“oh yeah? that’s what you wanted?” yuta leaned his weight on the side of his hip. “draw me some cute pictures on a piece of paper then, i’ll put them on the fridge for you and your probation buttheads to see.”

several brothers snickered while toma slumped, a distressed look on his face.

“yuta please i helped out so you’d lift my probation!” he exclaimed, freezing and cowering under your boyfriends sudden glare. “…maybe?”

in regards to toma’s outbreak, administration ended up just giving yuta and his entire frat a warning upon him meeting with them last week, leaving it ultimately up to him to decide what he wanted to do with toma and the pack he led to the other frat house, and yuta keeping true to his word to you, put them all on a three month social probation with no fucks given.

“are you nuts?” yuta chuckled. “you’re looking for parole with a drawing like that?”

“your girlfriend likes it! look she’s laughing!” all eyes shot to you and you froze, your giggles instantly halting and a hand flying over your mouth.

“sorry! i don’t—”

yuta shot him another menacing glare, deadlier than the last one as he picked up a marker from the table and chucked it at toma, it landing right smack on his forehead and clattering to the ground, the rest of the boys boastfully laughing.

“i’ll tell yuta to make your probation four months if you don’t get out of my face right now.” the vice president spoke up, moving through the crowd until he reached the front. 

yuta shrugged. “oh i was already gonna do that.”

“no! why?!” toma threw his hands up in desperation. “for what reason?! because of a drawing?!”

“it’s the only poster paper we have toma.” your boyfriend grumbled. 

“and you’re not even supposed to be down here around the fundraising shit.” the vice president spat. “you’re supposed to be upstairs with the rest of your—”

“i came down ‘cause i was thirsty!—”

“you drew on the poster paper!—”

“yu.” you murmured through their continuous bickering and yelling— tugging on his shirt to try and get his attention, his eyes flickering to yours and head quickly coming down to listen.

“what happened baby?” his grip on your shoulder tightened a little. “is it your nausea?”

“oh! no i’m okay now!” you smiled. “i can do your guys’ fundraiser poster still, i’ll just flip it over to the blank side and work there.”

“aw flower that’s okay! not when you’re feeling a little sick...” he looked at you fondly, a kind half grin on his lips as he placed a flat palm on top of your head.

“no honestly i’m alright!” you quickly shook your head and looked towards the poster and the rest of the boys, them still fighting and blaming each other over nonsense that had to do with social probations, the ruined poster, and sorority girls— wanting to ease them a little in anyway you possibly could, as well as mentally make up for the stupid white lie you had told him earlier.

yuta’s hand slid from your head back down to your shoulder, apprehensive.

“are you— are you sure?” his eyes shifted to the poster. “i feel bad making you do the work i’m supposed to be doing…”

“you’re not making me do anything silly.” you reassured with a small laugh. “i wanna help yu… its really okay. honestly.”

a gradual beaming smile spread across his face then, the hand on your shoulder pulling you in and yuta pressing a big fat kiss to the side of your head, enamored by everything that you were as he leaned back and nodded gratefully, letting you go.

“thank you flower—”

“okkotsu these beasts are out of control.”

the vice president struggled through the moving pushy crowd to reach the both of you, looking so utterly pissed off and overwhelmed as he elbowed and shoved to get face to face with yuta, a tad bit out of breath.

“they’re freaking out over toma’s fuck up and now they somehow think the fundraiser’s fucked up and i actually do think we fucked up—”

“hey— it’s okay! relax.” yuta placed a hand on his shoulder. “why do you think that? we’re not—”

“because the posters fucked.” he huffed out, trying to even his breathing. “so then we look like the biggest shitheads at the fundraiser by default and everyone’s gonna buy the sorority girls cookies instead of ours so then we’re gonna be broke and we can’t throw parties without money— why are you laughing.”

yuta covered his mouth and shook his head.

“i’m not— sorry—”

“this is serious man my god!” he slapped yuta’s hand off his shoulder and glared. “they’re about to brawl over toma’s stupid drawing i can’t control them and you’re laughing?!”

his gaze quickly shifted to you.

“y/n he’s awful dear god help me—”

“alright okay— i’ll deal with them don’t worry.” your boyfriend looked at him pointedly. “you do that too much.”

“what, give a shit? my bad sir honestly my effing mistake—”

you giggled and yuta laughed at his sarcasm, lightheartedly shoving his shoulder.

“go to bed man you’ve been dealing with this all day.” he sent him a sympathetic smile. “y/n offered to do our poster and i’m gonna help so we’ll be done by morning—”

surprise crossed the vice president’s face, his eyes flickering to yours once more.

“actually?” 

you nodded with a smile.

“oh thank god—” the color seemed to return to his face, him placing a hand on his chest and feeling relief wash over him as he looked at you, reciprocating your smile. “thank you y/n. seriously.”

“mhm! no problemmm.” you responded kindly. “but rest please. you’ll make yourself sick if you keep stressing like this…”

you’d lost count how many times you’d seen the vice president lose his shit over anything that had to do with the frat, it evidently obvious how much he cared for the boys and the fraternity despite his humorous verbal abuse— him being possibly the only brother in yuta’s frat that you respected and trusted out of anyone else in there, and often went to him whenever you had questions about their upcoming events or things in relation if yuta wasn’t available.

“alright.” the vice president sent you both a small smile before turning around to face the rowdy men-filled crowd, raising his hands up.

“okay away from the table! everybody leave and go to bed we have a fundraiser tomorrow! cabinet will deal with it just away— toma what the fuck are you still doing down here?!”

“i have to talk to yuta!” he whined. “you were hogging him the entire time.”

the crowd began to disperse as toma made his way forward.

“he’s not gonna lift your probation stupid.”

“i know!” he spat. “it’s about something else.”

yuta quirked a brow.

“something else?” 

there was a devilish glint to his eyes, and yuta internally rolled his, turning to the vice president.

“it’s okay.” he placed a gentle palm on your lower back and softly ushered you forward. “can you show y/n where the materials are for the poster please? i’ll be there in a minute.”

the vice president nodded and smiled politely at you, beckoning you over to the table where the ruined poster lay, markers and paint brushes and little cups of paint scattered about in disarray as you approached.

yuta’s attention shifted to toma, crossing his arms.

“what is it? you alright?”

“are you cheating on your girlfriend?”

yuta froze, brows immediately pinching together.

“what?”

toma shrugged. “are you? it’s what i’ve been hearing.”

“hearing?” he stepped closer. “from who?”

“dunno. like— almost everyone. too much to say.”

yuta’s heart dropped.

who the fuck was saying that?

“no you moron i’m not.” he snapped. “but… if you can figure out who’s spreading it… i’ll— consider lifting your probation.”

toma lit up.

“will you?!”

“i said consider.”

yuta’s face was blank and cold, wanting to quickly put an end to the conversation as it was making him fucking queasy, nodding his head up towards the stairs.

had you heard this rumor?

“go up before the VP chews you out.”

“good idea!” toma flashed him a goofy thumbs up and scrambled away to his designated room, yuta shaking his head as he walked over to you and the vice president, his eyes cast down to the ground in pensive thought.

why couldn’t people just leave you and him alone?

“—and we literally only have blue, yellow, red, and green like the most rancid colors—”

“oh that’s okay!” you laughed. “they’re primary colors i can mix to make new ones if i need to.”

“great!” the VP smiled. “i’m going to bed.”

“go man.” yuta chuckled, patting a friendly hand to his back. “thank you again.”

he nodded and began making his way to the staircase, hopping up the steps. 

“i’ll set up in the morning for the fundraiser and handle the guys!” yuta loudly mentioned. “will you just check attendance for me please?”

“yeah!” the vice president called out from down the hall, his voice gradually fading with each step until he was out of earshot, leaving just the two of you in the middle of the huge dim living room.

you looked to the poster and grabbed the ends then, flipping it over to the clean blank side and picking up a nearby spare pencil to begin sketching.

“i was thinking of writing your fraternity's name in calligraphy up here—” you pointed to a spot a little above center. “and then ‘cookie sale’ down here? do you like that?”

“sounds great flower!” yuta smiled big. “what’s calligraphy?”

you giggled, picking up a ruler and drawing a faint straight line across to make sure you weren’t going crooked as you went. 

“it’s kind of like cursive but just a bit chunkier.” you explained softly, starting to sketch out the loopy lettering. “it looks really pretty on projects and advertisements.”

yuta hummed, peering over your shoulder from behind you as you worked.

“and then i was thinking of drawing little cookies floating around? and stars? or maybe—”

“you know i love you right?”

you stopped, shifting your body slightly in his direction to reveal an anxious looking yuta, worry splattered all over his face as he waited for your response.

was… he okay?—

“of course i d—”

“and you know i’d never do anything to hurt you right?”

you fully turned your body around now to properly face him, your eyes filled with concern as you put your pencil down.

“i do baby…” you softly replied. “are you okay? what’s wrong?”

yuta sighed through his nose and shook his head, placing his hands at the edge of the table on either sides of you, his head slumping down to gently rest against your forehead.

“nothing.” he muttered. “i just— think.”

“you just think?” you lifted your arms and slid them around his shoulders, giving him a little comforting squeeze. “about what… hm?”

“you.”

he was always thinking of you.

every morning, every evening, every night.

there wasn’t ever a time that yuta wasn’t thinking of you— of how you were, if you were feeling okay and if you’d gotten enough to eat in the morning… if you still loved him.

because unfortunately, there also wasn’t ever a time that yuta wasn’t thinking about the different ways he could lose you, since his past always seemed to come back to haunt him and damage the only good fucking thing remaining in his life, fearfully living on the edge and awfully insecure despite his reputation, one that was programmed for him to be thoughtless and careless and something he actually was once before.

but yuta wasn’t that person anymore.

except it still wasn’t enough.

“really?” a blush rose to your cheeks with a cheeky smile, you leaning back the tiniest bit. “and what about me yu?”

the corner of his lip quirked up— his face a little tired, but soft.

“how smart you are.” he spoke quietly. “and pretty. with pretty handwriting.”

you giggled, the sound filling yuta’s chest with warmth and the crinkles by your eyes making him stupidly swoon, bringing you in closer by the waist and pressing a delicate kiss to the tip of your nose.

“please tell me you know that.”

your brows furrowed a bit.

he’d never been this— serious with you before and stating things that were already the obvious, the way he clutched tighter at your waist and the sunken defeated expression he wore, was something that indefinitely alarmed you as your eyes quickly scoured over his features. 

“yuta.”

his eyes flickered up to yours.

“yeah flower?”

“what’s wrong.” you pushed gently, your hands slipping down from his shoulders to cup his cheeks. “why are you telling me this?”

“because i need to.” his head slowly tilted, cheek leaning into your touch. “i need you to know.”

“but i do know.” you shook your head. “you’re telling me things i’ve known since we became friends yuta…”

he still didn’t look alleviated in the slightest by your words, and you frowned.

“remember earlier when you asked me what was wrong? after i’d left class early?”

he silently nodded against your hands.

“the way you felt then about wanting to know is how i feel now.” you explained. “i can tell when you’re thinking too much about something baby…”

he sighed deeply through his nose and his eyes fluttered shut.

he didn’t want to bombard you with his insecurities or make you feel like it was your job to pull him from those agitating depth full thoughts… and he didn’t want to make you feel responsible for any of it either.

it was all just— him.

and everybody on campus who didn’t know how to shut the fuck up too, for it made his overthinking worse.

“i’m scared i’m gonna mess up.” he admitted, laughing humorlessly. “and ruin what we’ve built.”

“huh?” your eyes slightly narrowed. “why do you say that?… you won’t—”

“the rumors flower…” he mumbled, head lifting from your hands. “everyone’s apparently waiting for me to fuck up just because they like who i used to be better.”

your eyes softened, palms coming down to rest flat against his chest as you listened.

“i hate that they can’t accept i’m with you… and i hate that i let them bother me so much.” 

his hands and arms lifted from your waist to wrap around your head instead, caging you into his embrace. 

“i hate that they talk about you.” he whispered in your hair. “i hate that i can’t do anything about it.”

everyone on this stupid freaking campus could drag yuta through the dirt and say he was a loser and a sleaze, that he was an awful human being and deserved to rot in the deepest pits of hell— as he wouldn’t mind any of it in the slightest if it meant sparring you completely.

if he could, if you’d let him… he would drop it all for you.

“you’re not gonna mess up anything...” you breathed out a soft laugh as you pulled back, your fingers coming up to card and caress through his soft raven strands. “and if you do, that’s okay! we’ll just fix it baby.”

the scent of his citrusy cologne wafted through your nostrils, the smell one of the most comforting things in your fucking life as you sunk your nose further into the fabric of his clothing then.

“i’m sure there’ll be moments when i mess up too.” you murmured against him, gently. “but we’ll deal with it together… so you shouldn’t let what anyone says about anything affect you so much okay?”

you leaned back again and gave his head a little pat.

“you look so stressed and i don’t like it.”

he chuckled softly and picked his head up, eyes peering down at you for a moment and staring before he lifted his head completely, his posture a little straighter as he nodded.

“i’m sorry.” he sheepishly smiled. “i just get in my head sometimes.”

you smiled back warmly, shaking your head and understanding to the fucking max where he’s coming from, for you were silently in the same exact position right at this moment and yet too cowardly to seek reassurance like he was rightfully doing.

“s’okay!” your hands slid from his hair down to his chest, standing on your tippy toes to give him a tiny peck on the lips. “don’t be sorry.”

yuta couldn’t control the rumors or what people had to say about the both of you.

but what he could control, were his actions and his words to you… and it was almost like he wanted to prove a point to every single dickhead on campus and make them see, believe and comprehend that you weren’t just a toy for him to disgustingly use and have a simple fling with, deciding in that moment to prioritize your happiness and satisfaction above all else.

he needed you to know that he wasn’t using you.

so he created distance.

and although it wasn’t distance that was detrimental or cruel to you or your relationship, it was enough of a distance that you noticed right away while helping out at his fraternity’s fundraiser the next day— you offering to assist the vice president in keeping track of the total number of cookie sales and stock, refilling the stands and glass casings whenever it was needed while yuta dealt with the boys, him networking with other frat guys from several different universities as well and charming them with his usual second nature charisma, anyone who spoke to him succumbing up to it so much that they’d be swayed enough to buy packs and packs of cookies.

you’d even witnessed stampeding crowds of sorority girls and staff buy dozens of batches simply because yuta kindly flashed them a handsome smile and an enthusiastic hello, you sat at the booth blinking in dumbfounded amazement as the vice president worked the register and cashed in wads of dollar bills, the shelves cleaning themselves out quicker than you thought.

but every time you tried to talk to yuta or give him a kiss… it was almost hurried from him— interlocked fingers that were fleeting and only lasted a couple seconds, yuta squeezing your hand with a grin before letting go and walking a different direction without even letting you get a word in, or embraces that were too short and fucking weird, him sort of treating you like a best friend instead of his girlfriend as he barely pecked your forehead or cheeks or literally anywhere that wasn’t your lips.

you tried to tell yourself that he was just busy and probably had a lot on his mind, understanding completely that he had responsibilities to attend to for the day and feeling irritated at yourself for being a bit upset.

though you couldn’t help but wonder why this time it felt so… different.

because usually, even when yuta had things to do for the frat or events to cater to, he never once let you off on your own for too long, and he always showered you with affection and kisses that made your cheeks heat up and heart palpate into literal oblivion that you’d have to cup a hand over his mouth to get him to simmer down, a bashful silly sorry from him muffling against your palm in return.

and you realized then just how attached to your boyfriend you actually were… and way more than you initially thought.

you missed him.

the vice president glanced at you from over his shoulder and smiled, chuckling a bit as he finished up tending to the latest customer and closing the register.

“you okay?” he waved to someone in the crowd on the other side of the booth before turning back to you. “you look bothered. is it too hot?”

“oh! no i’m okay! thank you.” you shook your head, smiling politely.

he smirked.

“you miss yuta?”

your cheeks went pink and he burst out laughing, reaching to type a few things on the register’s touch screen.

“us selling cookies is one of our biggest fundraisers, and its where we make most of our money for the year so— yuta’s usually all over the place during it.”

you listened intently, nodding along as he breathed out tiredly through his nose and walked a bit away from the booth, sitting down on the chair next to yours.

“i don’t know how i’m gonna do this by myself next year man…” he mumbled with closed eyelids, tiredly crossing his arms. “yuta’s like a machine. i don’t know how he handles the guys and the frat and whatever else in between without crashing out like me.”

a sense of pride for your man bubbled up in your chest then, it always nice to hear the vice president or anyone for that matter speak highly of yuta and his abilities, the work he’d put into the fraternity for the majority of his college life so insane and admirable, that there was no doubt in your mind he’d leave behind a blueprint and had set the standards fucking high for the next presidents to come.

“are you applying to be president for next year?” you asked.

he snorted.

“fuck no. i could never fill yuta’s shoes.”

he peeked an eye open and you gave him a look, him laughing in response.

“what?”

“i’ve seen you handle the frat so well all of the time what are you on?”

“four cans of energy drinks.” he muttered. “and cookies from the batch of burnt scraps.”

you giggled, leaning back against the chair and looking on ahead— yuta in the middle of the grassy field surrounded by girls, members from other fraternities, and anything alike as you watched him converse and be silly with them all, a sweet smile on his face that you wished you could see up close for a bit, since he hadn’t stopped by the booth at all for the majority of the day and was instead working the field to bring in customers.

“i think you’re the most qualified out of anyone to take over yuta’s position next year.” you spoke gently. “so i hope you do apply.”

“i yell at the boys too much… yuta knows a good in between when needed.” his head lulled tiredly to the side. “and i don’t know if i’m gonna be able to handle the rejection if he says no.”

your jaw hung open, a bewildered look on your face.

“why would he say no? if anything it’s already yours—”

his head snapped in your direction.

“is it? how do you know? did he tell you? i feel like you’d know tell me right now—”

“tell you what?”

you straightened up upon hearing the familiar voice of your man and looked, a big smile stretching across your face once you saw yuta standing there on the other side of the booth, a cute half grin on his lips as he leaned against the table with palms on the surface.

“yu!”

“hi flower!” he beamed. “you okay?”

“uh huh!” you stood up, stepping closer to the table and leaning against it, mirroring him. “are you…?”

“i am!” he nodded, walking around the table and swinging an arm around your shoulders. “i’m exhausted though i don’t wanna talk to any more people i can’t do it.”

you giggled, little butterflies fluttering in your tummy at finally having him next to you and his attention for the time being.

“i feel like a walking corpse.” the vice president huffed out. “we can pack up early? we hit our goal in the afternoon i think we should send the boys back to the frat to set up for the after party.”

“sounds good!” yuta smiled, turning his head down to you. “you’re still going right? to the party?”

“mhm!” you nodded. “i just need to go home and get ready… do you need help setting up for it?”

“oh no flower that’s alright!” he squeezed your shoulder lovingly. “you’ve already done so much for me… just go get ready baby and call me so i can pick you up okay?”

“kay!” you cheesed, leaning up to give him a kiss when yuta suddenly turned his head to the side, your lips landing on his cheek instead.

what—

you pulled back, trying to keep a neutral expression on your face as you took a step forward and out of his arm around your shoulders, a growing ache in your chest over the fact that he’d been doing this all day.

did it look like you were going in for cheek kisses? or kisses that were anywhere but his mouth? it wasn’t— obvious?

maybe… maybe it was just you. 

maybe you were messing up again.

“thanks for making the poster by the way and helping out y/n.” the vice president mentioned, snapping you from your thoughts. “it looks so freaking good i don’t think we’ve ever had a banner look that great.”

you smiled brightly and nodded. “it’s okayyy! i hope i helped you guys out a little bit.”

“flower you did more than a little bit.” yuta laughed. “we sold so many cookies because i heard there was a pretty girl by the register… heh.”

a wave of heat rose to your cheeks and you playfully rolled your eyes, waving him off as you stepped away from the canopy tent.

“call me please when you’re ready!” yuta called out to you, you turning your body a bit and showing him a cute thumbs up before facing forward again, him and the vice president watching you walk across the busy field and towards the campus parking lot.

the vice president spoke up after a few seconds of silence.

“is it true?”

yuta’s gaze switched to his.

“what is?”

“that you’re cheating on y/n with layla.”

his face dropped, brows furrowing as yuta moved his body to look at him properly.

“you’ve heard the rumors too?”

he nodded.

“where?”

“everywhere.” the vice president responded plainly. “i hear them in class, out of class, in the student lounge, when i go take a piss—”

“from— from who?”

the borderline frantic desperation in yuta’s tone made the vice presidents gaze flicker to his, eyeing his solemn eagerness to know information that he regrettably couldn’t give concretely, but also eyeing his body language and expression to see if yuta was indeed guilty, or just a victim to annoying gossip once more.

except this time around… it was cruel. 

“it’s from multiple people that i don’t really know.” he sighed. “i just hear it floating around.”

yuta groaned and ran both hands down his face in exasperation, bitterly shaking his head while his mind ran rampant for the thousandth fucking time over the rumor of his supposed infidelity.

“so is it true?” the vice president repeated.

“no.” yuta spoke firmly, harshly. “no i would never do something like that to her. ever.”

there was another moment of silence.

“alright.” the vice president leaned back in his chair, his eyes tiredly closing again. “because it’d be a shame if you were… she’s a nice girl.”

“i know she is…” yuta mumbled, sluggishly walking over to the seat next to him and plopping down on it. “i’ve been trying to figure out who’s spreading that rumor but it’s fucking everywhere that i can’t figure it out. even toma asked me about it.”

the vice president snorted. “toma?”

“yeah.” yuta put his elbows down on his knees and leaned forward, an arm coming up to rest his cheek against the heel of his palm. “i told him if he could figure out who was doing it i’d consider lifting his probation.”

“huh?!”

yuta looked at him apologetically.

“i know… i hope it’s okay with you.” he dropped his arm and gazed on ahead. “i was only gonna lift a month off, and that’s even if he can find out who.”

“toma’s gonna stop at nothing to figure out who just because of that.” the vice president laughed. “it’s alright man... i’d do the same if i were you.”

yuta solemnly nodded.

“i’m scared of what she’s heard. i don’t want her to get hurt by any of it.”

“have you talked to her about it?”

he shook his head. “kind of… only generally but not specifically about the cheating rumor—”

“wha—” the vice president gawked. “that’s the one thing you should be talking to her about yuta she’s gonna hear it eventually—”

“but that’s the thing if— if she hasn’t yet i want it to stay that way…” he mumbled, head hanging low. “so i can try and get rid of it before it upsets her.”

“i don’t know if that thought process is a good idea or not.” the vice president spoke warily. “it kind of looks like you’re trying to cover up the fact that you are cheating—”

“i’m not—”

“then do something about it.”

the vice president stood up, arms raising up over his head to stretch and loosen up his tired limbs, them falling limp at his sides after. “talk to layla directly at the party tonight and find out if it’s her or not, then go from there.”

yuta’s brows pinched.

why the fuck didn’t he think of that sooner?

“i’ll ask around for you too.” the vice president swiped his backpack from the grass and shrugged it on, taking his jacket then from the back of the chair and tossing it lazily over his shoulder.

“but your best bet is toma.”

and the vice president was right.

because the minute yuta picked your stunning self up for the party later that day, utterly obsessed with the way you dolled up and him trying to take it all in for himself, his phone wouldn’t stop fucking buzzing inside the pocket of his pants and breaking his looney trance— him having to literally rip his eyes away from you and begrudgingly shove his hand around for his phone until he found it.

“who is it?” you laughed softly, buckling your seatbelt once you got in the car and reaching up to pull down his sun visor, sliding open the small vanity mirror and readjusting your hair a little.

yuta nearly drooled.

“oh! uh—”

he snapped his head down to see message after message pile in from toma, all of which were back to back and without a freaking break as they nearly blew up his phone, the nonstop vibration against his palm irritating him as he unlocked his device and went to toma’s contact.

toma: yo

toma: prez

toma: hello

toma: answer me right now

“it’s just toma.” he shook his head, thumbs prepping to type a response.

toma: HELLO

toma: YUTA

toma: ARE YOU IGNORING ME

toma: I BRING NEWS ABOUT YOUR CHEATING SCANDAL!

his eyes widened.

toma: LIFT MY PROBATION

yuta: say that again and i’m extending it

yuta: what did you find?

toma: wouldn’t you like to know ;)

toma: bet your girlfriend sure would!

toma: let me stay at the frat for the party and i’ll tell you

yuta: five months

toma: NO OKAY FUCK IM SORRY

toma: seriously though come to the house before i leave and i’ll tell you

toma: it’s too much to type and i’m lazy

“is he okay?” you asked kindly, sliding the mirror shut and closing the sun visor, turning your head to look at him.

“yeah he’s fine baby.” he looked up and smiled, leaning across the console to press a sweet kiss on your cheek, settling back in his seat and shifting the gear into reverse to pull out of your driveway. “you have everything?”

why wasn’t he kissing your mouth?

“mhm!” you nodded. “how many people did you guys invite?”

“it was an open invite.” he pushed the gear to drive and accelerated down your street back to his fraternity.

you scoffed in amazement.

“open invite?”

usually the parties yuta threw with his frat brothers were of select invite only, ones that consisted of anyone with any type of popularity alongside whoever they decided to bring also of status, you realizing that you were probably the only one there who didn’t have anything to their name in comparison to the others.

but with the invite now extending to absolutely anyone? and his parties already to begin with rowdy and insane?

you expected yuta’s frat house to turn into a shit show.

“what?” he laughed, turning his steering wheel to the left. “it’s a lot of people isn’t it?”

“you’re gonna have half of the student body in your house.”

he laughed again and shot you an apologetic look, him continuing to drive through the familiar avenues and paths that led up to his fraternity, when you quickly noticed the streets looked a bit more packed than usual— almost every single curb lined up with mass amounts of vehicles that were parked damn near back to back with no room left to even get out, you spotting small portions of dressed up crowds walking down the sidewalk the closer you got to his frat, already being peppy and noisy as they cackled and carried down packs of alcohol in their arms.

yuta had invited nearly the entire student body on purpose.

to find out who it was that was spreading that piece of shit rumor about his infidelity.

your boyfriend pulled into the driveway, your ears already picking up on the booming bass of the music inside as yuta flashed his lights at people who were in the way, him slowly inching through to get in the open garage as your eyes wildly scoured over the amount of students crossing the lawn or surrounding his car, empty red solo cups and trash littering the grass out front when the party had literally just started an hour ago.

there were so many people, more than you had ever seen at his previous parties.

yuta lifted an arm and pressed the small garage remote that was hooked above on his sun visor, the wide door loudly sliding shut in response as he drove in a little further before cutting off the ignition, him pulling his keys out and hooking the carabiner through one of his belt loops.

“you okay baby?” he smiled kindly, lifting his head to look at you and setting a hand down on his steering wheel. “i’m sorry about all the people… i know its a lot.”

you shook your head and gave him a cute grin, actively pushing down the fuzzy nerves that started to push up your throat for the sake of not being a burden, you not wanting to be annoying in the slightest about the crowds and just let yuta have fun, with this being his last fundraising after party and all.

“don’t be sorry yu its okay.” you reached across the console and took his hand, interlacing your fingers together. “you guys deserve to unwind like this after today right?”

he beamed and nodded, his grip tightening and eyes flickering down to your pretty little dress that made him swallow and quickly divert his gaze away, lips pursing to the side with pinky cheeks as he tried to get his head straight and remind himself over and over of the distance, of not playing into everybody’s stupid beliefs and hurting you.

but it was so fucking hard to when you were just so gorgeous to him, fondness creeping up in his chest then as he randomly thought of the night he first saw you at that one party he hosted a year ago— just as pretty if not more.

yuta was so unbelievably glad that you had rejected him then, for it woke his entire self up to the possibilities and beauty of actual genuine love rather than just quick fucks, the normalcy of meaningless hook ups something he had shamefully grown accustomed and desensitized to since high school.

your rejection had woken him up to you.

“yuta..?”

he blinked, eyes snapping back to you.

“yeah! yes flower?”

you giggled softly. “i asked if you wanted to go inside? i’m sure everyone’s been wanting to see you…”

he simply shrugged and brought your hand up to his lips, kissing the back of it.

“but i wanna see you.”

you snorted. “you are seeing me silly… you see me everyday! hehe.”

and yet it wasn’t nearly enough. it was never enough.

yuta reached across the console with his unoccupied hand and ran his thumb over your precious cheek, his touch delicate as he silently looked at you with a little glimmer in his eye, taking in the sight of you before retracting his arm and smiling.

“stick to me the entire night please.” he squeezed your hand. “if at any point you get tired or a little nervous baby just let me know. we’ll go up to my room and call it, okay?”

your heart fluttered at how considerate and sweet he was, you nodding in response.

“mkay!”

you had never seen the frat look so full and feel so humid in your fucking life, you gripping tightly onto yuta’s hand as he led you through sweaty drunk bodies and narrow hallways, keeping close to him and trying to ignore the curious confused stares you got that eyed you both as you passed, shyly switching your gaze or turning your head altogether to evade it.

the stares weren’t anything new to you, as practically with every event or party yuta threw you received them without fail, the act a given at this point as no one seemed to ever remember your face or what you looked like no matter how long you had been around yuta already, you actually preferring it that way as it allowed you to be on campus without any weird instances from random individuals asking about your relationship with him.

yuta periodically looked over his shoulder at you to make sure you were still there and okay, his head turning back ahead and scanning every single fucking face he saw in the hopes of recognizing the vice president, or better yet— toma, him desperate to find him and get as much information as he possibly could to put an end to that horrific rumor before it got to you.

“okkotsu! heeey man! how’s it going?—”

you’d lost count of how many people had come up to your boyfriend to greet him or pat him on the shoulders, you next to him through it all and not minding one bit as you kept your fingers interlocked with his— your other hand clutching at his bicep while he mingled and charmingly laughed with his crowd, some even greeting you as you surprisedly reciprocated and shyly replied back, each time yuta caressing your knuckles reassuringly with his thumb— encouraging you, a kind look to his face that eased your nerves like nothing else ever did.

“you still doing okay flower?!” he yelled over the thumping music, pulling you to a little corner by the kitchen and leading you to stand against the wall, him shielding you from the crowd as he turned his back and faced you. “you feeling tired?!”

you shook your head no and sweetly grinned at him. “i’m good yu!”

he smiled and nodded, setting a hand on top of your head and giving it a gentle rub, careful of not messing with your prettily styled hair too much.

“you want anything to drink?!” he looked up and craned his neck around the wall to scope out the kitchen. “i bought a pack of sunny d and had one of the boys put it in the fridge for you!—”

“yo! okkotsu!”

yuta snapped his head over his shoulder, your own eyes peering around your man’s frame to see one of his frat brothers standing just a few feet away, pointing out into the crowd behind him with his thumb.

“toma’s still here! he’s looking for you!”

your brow quirked a little at the way yuta instantaneously straightened up and turned out a little more, wondering why toma’s presence elicited that reaction from him as his hand went from your head down along your arm, his thumb reaching your fingertips and lightly grazing over them.

“where is he?!” he asked over the music.

“out front on the porch! he’s getting ready to leave!”

yuta raised his other palm and thanked him before quickly turning back to you.

“i’m gonna go see what he wants okay flower?” he hurriedly kissed your forehead, you a bit perplexed at his urgency as you hesitantly nodded along.

“let me look for the VP really quick so you won’t be alone—”

“no yu its okay!” you let out a breathy laugh and shook your head. “go baby ill just wait here until you get back.”

he held your gaze for a moment, apprehensive.

“i— i don’t know flower!” he looked over his shoulder again, angling his body around and sweeping the crowd with anxious little eyes, turning back around to you. “i don’t wanna leave you by yourself i’d rather have someone with you—”

“yu.” you pushed gently. “it’s fine. i won’t move from here ill be in the kitchen waiting for you… okay? go baby go see what toma wants.”

yuta’s pupils were swimming in worry as he stared, feet planted on the floor and hesitant to move as he thought about the millions of things people could say or do to you while he was gone, him gnawing at the bottom of his lip as he continued to anxiously caress over your fingertips.

“o—okay—”

“okkotsu here!—”

both of your heads snapped to the right and saw the vice president, his face flushed red and goofy like as he extended a beer bottle out to yuta.

“why are you empty handed—”

“oh thank god!” yuta breathed out, taking the bottle from his awaiting hand and pulling him in with an arm for a heavy pat on the back, the VP drunkenly quirking a brow and blinking.

“what i do—”

“can you stay with y/n for like— ten minutes?” he quickly ushered. “i just gotta talk to toma really quick!”

“toma?!” the vice president spat. “the fucks he still doing here he’s supposed to be out of the house—”

“he will be once i talk to him!” your boyfriend replied by his ear. “but can you please just be with y/n for a few? I don’t wanna leave her by herself!”

the vice presidents gaze switched to where you were standing then, seemingly just noticing that you were there as his eyes lit up and he nodded, a friendly big smile growing on his face that you responded with a bashful timid one of your own.

“okay great! thanks man!—”

yuta took a few steps towards you and wrapped his arms around your waist, pulling you in snug and craning down a bit to rest the side of his head against yours.

“i’ll be back okay?” he spoke in your ear.

“o—okay but— you really didn’t have to get the VP to babysit me—”

“no i know baby i’m sorry.” he ran a soothing palm down your back. “but i worry...”

he peeled away from you and pouted. “but just hang tight alright? stick to him.”

you sighed a little through your nose and nodded, you going on your tippy toes then with puckering lips to give him an obvious goodbye smooch, when yuta turned his head again and made your kiss land on his cheek instead.

it looked like he had rejected you.

and yuta failed to see the hurt flash across your face once more as he stepped off to the side and turned, slipping his way through the crowd and basically get swallowed whole by the mass of it, you quickly losing sight of him as your shoulders drooped a little in disappointment.

what were you doing that was so wrong? usually yuta never went more than literally thirty minutes without a kiss from you… but so far he had broken his own record and went the entire day.

what was so wrong with you?

“y/n! do you want a sunny d?”

you jumped a little and turned, seeing the vice president in the kitchen now rummaging through the fridge, a small singular giggle slipping past your lips as you watched him struggle to even get his arms through, him shoving hoards of beer cans and alcohol packs off to the sides just to get his hands in the back.

“i’m pretty sure— fuck— one of the guys put a pack in for you—”

you walked over and carefully crouched down next to him by the fridge, peeking your head in and trying to spot the familiar orange liquidy bottles, more giggles tumbling out as you realized that the sunny d pack was quite literally right in front of the vice presidents face— front and center amongst the mountains of alcohol and trash.

“wait— hehe— i think—” you pointed through your little snickers. “i think it’s right there— oh!”

your arms shot out and you quickly grabbed onto his shoulders just as he was swaying off a little too much to the side, stabilizing him as he cackled and shook his head, his own hands fumbling for the edges of the fridge and gripping them.

“sorry! sorry i’m drinking my sorrows away so i’m drunk also here—”

he loopily pushed a bottle of sunny d in your arms, you scrambling slightly to retrieve it before it dropped to the ground from your hands, the both of you standing from your crouched position.

“thank you.” you smiled sweetly, your brows furrowing a little then. “why are you drinking your sorrows away?”

“because yuta’s graduating and i’m gonna have to deal with this shit on my own.” he swiped an open beer bottle from a nearby counter and took a swig. “he told me just before the party that i’m— hic!— president for next year—”

you gasped, eyes blowing fucking wide as you slapped a hand over your mouth in shock.

“oh my god!” you grinned. “congratulations! you should be so proud!—”

“i should be dead.” he muttered, dramatically drooping his upper body over the kitchen island and sulking. “i’m a dead man. after the fundraiser toma ran around the house naked which then turned into everyone running around the house naked and i couldn’t get anybody to put their fucking clothes on—”

“you—”

“i’ve never seen so many dicks in my life i didn’t even want to see any of their dicks—”

“hold on—”

“whatever happened to asking first? to consent?— OH GOD!—”

the VP sprang off the counter, spun in your direction and grabbed at your shoulders, you stiffening with big eyes as he shook you.

“you’re graduating too! what am i gonna do without you and your calligraphy?! the— the banners?!” his gaze darted over your face as he looked at you crazed and in a state of utter psychosis. “i don’t know any girls! just you by default! i’m gonna have to do bake sales with toma’s stupid fucking stick figures—”

you’d given up in trying to bring the vice president down from his erratic panicked high, deciding the best thing to do then was to just keep your mouth shut and let him ramble on his drunken worries and fears as he shook you, you laughing through it and lightly patting him on the back in comfort, knowing that deep down the VP was elated to have been granted a position so prestigious and accomplishing as you’d heard him wish on it ever since you’d met him, his emotional meltdown just a given and something that came with accepting a position as demanding as yuta’s.

he would be filling shoes that were seemingly impossible to do so in the first place… but you were more than sure that he was the one man that was actually more than qualified for it out of the flock.

and you’d wondered then as the vice president continued to shake you, if yuta had successfully sought out what toma wanted and if he was making his way back over to you sometime soon…

he wished.

“i need names toma names!”

“i tried!” toma flailed his arms out. “i swear to god i tried! but how do you think it looks when i try to come up to layla’s posse and chat them up?! they chewed me out every time i tried!”

he had a point…

“the only info i could get was that it’s her minions who are spreading the rumor.”

yuta’s gaze moved to his, arms crossed as the two of them stood in the middle of the front porch, the area thankfully deserted as the majority of students were inside.

he suspiciously eyed him. “how do you know that?”

“i stood outside the girl’s restroom by the east wing for an hour.” toma replied plainly. “god knows what the hell they were doing in there but— some of her friends were talking nonstop about it.”

yuta snorted, a palm cupping over his mouth as he thought about how much of an idiot creep toma must’ve looked standing outside of the girl's restroom like that.

he had initially planned to confront layla directly, but learning now that it may have not even been her that was at fault, made him feel a little bad and apprehensive about accusing her out of nowhere inside…

he dropped his hand and nodded. “and— and what about layla? is she spreading anything?”

toma shrugged. “dunno. didn’t get that far because i got yelled at.”

yuta laughed and shook his head, raising an arm to pat a heavy hand on toma’s shoulder in gratitude.

“alright, thanks man.” he smiled. “i’ll lift a month off your probation.”

“a month?!” toma gawked. “i thought you said the whole thing!”

“you barely gave me anything idiot.” yuta bent down and picked up his beer bottle from the ground. “you’re lucky i’m even lifting time off otherwise i would’ve added—”

“NO!” toma screamed in absolute terror, hands latching out to desperately clutch at his shirt. “i’m sorry thank you mister president...”

“okay.” he chuckled boyishly. “now go before the VP sees you—”

“i love you mister president—”

“go.”

“say hi to your pretty girl for me—”

“five months probation—”

“NO!”

you’d lost track of how long it had been since yuta left, as you were too preoccupied babysitting the VP— trying to keep him from blacking out and stay on his two feet as he swayed about the kitchen, blubbering about his position next year and then randomly switching from time to time to some girly he had a crush on in his economics class, your heart warming every time he spoke about her cutesy smile, but most of all genuinely worried about him as he almost nearly tipped over one of the keg stands in trying to perform a cartwheel in the middle of the kitchen.

if yuta saw the way that he was when he was supposed to be looking out for you… you figured your boyfriend wouldn’t be to happy with it— the biggest fear you’ve had yet quickly brewing in your chest over the vice president getting his up-and-coming position revoked.

“hey! let’s drink some water yeah?”

the VP whipped his head up, him funnily crouched in a corner and hugging his knees to his chest.

“is this what its like?”

you tilted your head as you opened the fridge, your eyes frantically scouring for a bottle of water and grabbing it once you spotted one, closing it back up and walking over to his sniffling self.

“what is?” you softly asked as you crouched to his level, uncapping the water bottle and offering it out to him.

“to have a girl give a shit about you?”

you giggled, shaking your head side to side as you watched him gratefully take the drink from your hands, chugging it down.

“just talk to her… i’m sure she’d love to go out with you!” you tried to reason. “you never know unless you just— try.”

his puffed out cheeks made you laugh again as he swallowed. “y/n you don’t get it i’m a loser she could never look my way—”

you playfully rolled your eyes. “you’re vice president of a frat. next year president. if that doesn’t get her i don’t know what will.”

he miserably shook his head and hung it.

“the difference is i’m ugly. yuta’s handsome. my boy has no trouble at all—”

“you’re not ugly—”

“layla! have you spoken to yuta tonight at all?”

you stilled, your face falling a bit as you kept your eyes on the VP, him still too drunk and teary to realize there were people in the kitchen now, you grateful that the both of you were out of sight in a tiny little corner so you could take a listen without them noticing.

“no.” she heavily sighed. “i haven’t seen him much at all actually… shame.”

you heard shuffling and the clinking of glass as you eavesdropped, praying that the vice president didn’t blabber out anything else and spoil your cover.

“i did.” a different voice spoke. “he’s with his girlfriend that’s why.”

you heard an exaggerated gasp from somewhere else.

“you saw her? what’d she look like?!”

“i couldn’t really see she was a bit far… but she is here with him.”

“geez, i’m surprised he’d even bring her around after just being with you layla. that’s embarrassing.”

your heart dropped.

“that’s their business not mine.” another spoke, you recognizing it to be layla’s voice again. “if he wants to humiliate her like that, that’s on him.”

… what?

the vice president stirred, about to open his big fat mouth when you sprung out and muffled him, his dazed little eyes confusedly looking at you.

“you’re so lucky though layla!” one gushed. “no one has been able to sleep with him lately except you.”

maybe… maybe the reason why yuta never initiated anything with you, the reason why he evaded your kisses and flat out treated you sometimes like you weren’t his literal girlfriend—

was because he was getting his fill somewhere else.

and somehow through your mental storm, the vice president realized that there were people in the kitchen now, but not just any people… but exactly who and what they were talking about, his own eyes blowing wide in panic.

the girls continued to chat as your hand slid away from the VP’s mouth, your gaze casted downward as you made an attempt to stand, when his hand suddenly shot out and grabbed yours.

“y/n—” he fought with everything in him to push down the alcohol for two fucking seconds and get his head straight. “where are you going—”

“i’m just gonna go find yuta… okay?”

your voice sounded it’s usual sweet and collected, but it was your body language that completely gave it away to him that you were not okay in the slightest.

“wait— just stay for a bit don’t— don’t listen—”

“stay here i’ll be back.” you mumbled, shaking his hand off and standing upright. “don’t try to stand please you’ll fall.”

“sweetheart whatever you heard it’s not true alright? you know that yuta would never—”

your mind wasn’t even registering what the vice president was saying at this point, you feeling your heart actively shattering in your chest as you made your way through the kitchen, passing by the group of girls and guessing that the one in the middle was layla— stunning and breathtaking and everything you’d expect yuta to hook up with and choose over you.

they didn’t even spare you a glance as you walked past them and out of the kitchen, weaving your way through the waves of sweaty people as you tried to spot yuta— you having no idea where he was and just going by the piece of information you had learned earlier of toma being out on the front porch, hoping that he somehow was still there as you squeezed through bodies, the air still humid and suffocating and it for some reason making your chest ache even more.

you wrongfully felt like you had to prove a point… like you were just as capable of being the embodiment of someone like layla that earned a rightful spot at being yuta’s girlfriend, something he not once ever made you question and yet— you shamefully succumbing up to the beliefs of his crowd no matter how many times you told yourself it wouldn’t happen.

you could only take so much… and the thought of losing yuta shook you like nothing else.

it made you desperate.

just as you practically shoved your way out of the main area to get to the front door, you spotted yuta— sitting on a short random stool by the entrance with a half drunken beer bottle in hand, cheerfully conversing with a few of his brothers with that same charismatic smile and attitude that swooned millions, you swallowing the lump in your throat as you hugged yourself and slowly walked over.

“yu..?”

your familiar quiet voice made him stop talking and snap his head in your direction, him straightening up as he sent you a kind smile.

as soon as he went back inside after speaking to toma, yuta got caught up with a few of his frat members in regards to details about upcoming events, kicking himself over the fact that he didn’t realize how long he was actually gone for as he noticed how upset you looked right now, wondering where the hell the VP was.

“hi pretty flower!” he grinned, faltering when you didn’t smile back at all.

“can we—” you stammered. “um—”

yuta extended an offering hand out, you hesitating for a moment before you decided to just take it, him gently pulling you in to stand in between his legs and moving that same hand to cup over the back of your thigh.

you hated that his touch sort of… stung.

“sorry baby i couldn’t hear you.” he gently spoke, looking up at you with such sweet eyes that it nearly made you want to forget what you’d heard in the kitchen. “what’s wrong? i’m sorry i was gone for so long i got caught up with some of the guys.”

“n—no its okay.” you weakly smiled, and his brows furrowed at that, his hand beginning to caress over the back of your thigh.

had something happened while he was away?

“i need to um… talk to you in your room upstairs.” you shyly pursed your lips to the side. “if that’s okay…”

oh!

he reached up and took your chin in between his thumb and pointer finger, bringing your face down to plant a little kiss to your cheek.

“it’s always okay flower.” he beamed, standing and taking your hand in his as he took a swig of his beer. “you wanna retire for the night?”

not exactly.

but you nodded, him then immediately bidding some of his brothers goodbye while he tugged on your hand and led you upstairs, your head facing the ground and anxious as you both walked through the hallways of the frat house and away from the noise, eventually arriving at yuta’s door as you chewed the shit out of your bottom lip, him pushing down his lever door handle and opening it.

“you feeling a little tired?” he asked gently, closing the door behind him as you both stepped inside, facing you after. “we can call it a nigh—”

you fisted yuta’s shirt and yanked him down, cutting him off with your mouth on his as his eyes flew open, your raunchy little kisses feeling awfully familiar to that one night he was over and almost stripped you naked over them, already catching himself getting dangerously close to that again as he squeezed his eyes shut and gripped at your delicious waist.

stop stop stop—

but he couldn’t bring himself to put an end to it as he deepened the kiss, your heart fluttering at that as you led him to his bed through your sloppy make out, moving about until the back of his legs hit the edge of his mattress and he plopped down, you instantly climbing onto his lap and straddling him.

yuta felt like he was about to die over the overwhelming feeling of you perched pretty on his lap, or the way the straps of your tiny dress loosened and fell erotically over your bare shoulders— revealing a little more cleavage to him that took everything he had not to flip you on the bed and stuff his face in there.

he had to stop this… he needed to stop this to avoid losing you like everybody wanted him to, like everybody expected him to.

at the feeling of you taking his hand from your waist and sliding it down your godly body to cup your ass, yuta’s eyes snapped open and he forced his lips off yours, the both of you staring at each other in alarm with heaving breaths.

“wh— what yu?” you spoke breathlessly, you dazedly leaning in again to continue smooching when he literally dodged your lips and moved his head back, like— like you were just some random that tried to kiss him.

that was your final straw.

you sat there frozen and heartbroken as he shakily grabbed your hips and carefully sat you down on the bed next to him, him standing and wincing at the feeling of his hard dick being choked out by his jeans as he tried to block out the sight of you on his lap like that.

“man i’m so tired heh!” he began. “i’m gonna go take a quick shower—”

the sound of you suddenly sobbing made him whip his head down to you, his face utterly falling once he saw your trembling shoulders-- crying into your hands as broken hiccups and whimpers filled the air.

holy shit.

“baby? baby what’s wrong—” he quickly bent down and cupped your cheeks, his heart dropping to his ass when you practically ripped his hands off you through your tears, sniffling as you scooched back on his bed to get away from him.

oh god.

had you— had you heard the rumor?

“oh my god.” he breathed out. “you heard didn’t you? the— the rumor about layla—”

you sobbed harder at the mention of her name, and yuta’s fingers flew to dig inside the strands of his hair.

“flower i swear to god—” his chest grew erratic as he was one hundred percent convinced you were about to end things with him. “with everything i have that it’s not true—”

he dropped his arms and desperately dug around the pockets of his jeans, pulling out his phone once he found it.

“here!” he shakily unlocked it and tossed it on the bed in front of you. “here baby here please take it there’s nothing in there that—”

but you only slowly shook your head and continued to cry in your little hands, yuta feeling like he was about to lose it.

“no?” he breathed out. “why not? why—”

he frantically shoved his hands in his jeans again and pulled out his car keys, tossing it out in front of you as well as his wallet and anything else he could find in there that he thought would somehow help you believe him.

“here my— my keys are there and— and my wallet please look at them and please don’t cry—”

yuta reached out again for you, his trembling hands just barely cupping over your upper arms when you tore yourself away from him again, each time you did that making it feel like his skin was on fucking fire, burning and blistering and stinging with every hiccup that slipped past your lips.

he’d done what he was terrified of doing all this time.

he’d fucked things up with you.

“baby please don’t break up with me—” his voice cracked as he spoke, him sinking down on his knees with arms over the bed. “please i don’t know— i don’t know if i can take that i—”

“why don’t you want me?”

he froze, the little quiver in your voice absolutely shattering his heart.

“what?—”

“you never— you never touch me you never initiate anything with me—”

“flower—”

“you don’t even fucking kiss me anymore yuta…” you sobbed, wiping at your flooding tears as you sniffled. “and then— i’m in the kitchen with the VP and layla is in there talking about how you sleep with her and—”

he stood, grabbed your upper arms and held you still over your squirming and nudging to push him away, keeping you in place with wild eyes as he forced you to look at him.

“i would never in a million fucking years cheat on you y/n.” he seriously pushed. “never. everything that her and her friends are saying is fake i even— i even got toma to spy on them so i could figure it out—”

“you still don’t get it!” you sobbed. “the issue is you’ve never wanted me like you’ve wanted layla—”

“what the fuck?” he spoke incredulously. “baby i’ve never wanted that girl—”

“then why don’t you ever do anything with me?! or— or want me—”

you realized then how silly you sounded, embarrassment quickly washing over your system as you looked down and diverted your gaze with pinky cheeks, quieting down with your sniffles.

yuta’s eyes softened then, the dots clicking in his stupid pea sized brain over what you meant, the ache in his chest only growing in mass at the realization that whatever idiotic fucking plan he had about not hurting you, about enlisting distance and avoiding being affectionate with you to prove a point to everybody else, was utterly and entirely wrong.

of course it was wrong… how could he ever think that it wasn’t? how could he ever think that you’d respond positively to it or— or be okay with it?

if you ever did what he had done, he would absolutely die inside— hating himself for letting the speculations of others get in the way of his relationship with you.

his hands slowly slid up from your arms to your cheeks— gently cupping them and wiping your tears with his thumbs as you trembled.

“you have no idea how badly i’ve wanted to do things with you—”

“you’re lying!—”

“no!” he lowered his hands and wrapped you up tight in his arms, stuffing his nose into your neck. “i want you baby i want you so bad i go fucking nuts—”

how could he have neglected his girl and her precious little needs for this long..?

you continued to sniffle and shake in his arms, trying to steady your breathing as he then leisurely let you go, you too preoccupied in your thoughts of regret and ashamed at yourself for being a brat, that you failed to notice the way yuta was unbuckling his belt until you heard the tiny metal clasp clang, his face still in your neck.

“m’sorry pretty flower…” he murmured, your teary eyes widening at him slowly tugging and sliding his belt through the loops of his jeans. “i haven’t been taking care of you have i..?”

“yu—yuta—”

he planted a knee on the bed and crawled on, his upper body coming onto you and giving you no choice but to go down with him— you softly landing on your back and frozen in place with a palpating heart, him in between your thighs.

“i’ve never wanted to fuck a girl so bad in my life.” he hotly breathed out in your neck. “since we met baby…”

he picked his head up and casted his gaze down, placing his palms on either sides of your plushy thighs and sliding up your dress, further and further until it pooled around your waist and revealed your god forsaken pinky panties— see through and showing him your pretty glistening lips that made him suck in a breath and groan.

“i don’t give a shit about layla.” yuta hooked an index finger in the underside of your panties and pulled it to the side, taking a pervy peek at your pussy in the flesh. “i don’t give a shit about this stupid frat or anyone but you.”

butterflies swarmed wildly in your tummy as you watched him pop open the button of his jeans with his other hand, tugging it a little down along with his boxers until his cock literally jumped out, your words caught in your throat as you drank in the sight of him giving it a slow yummy pump, his tip already leaky and red.

“i’ve been ignoring my pretty girl and not fucking her like she deserves…” he murmured, the sudden feeling of his tip running up and down your gaping cunt making you squeak, you quickly gnawing on your bottom lip after and trying so hard to bite back your moans out of embarrassment, but it nearly impossible with the way he kept teasingly rubbing his dick over your swollen clit over and over.

“i’m sorry flower—” he positioned himself. “but i’m too impatient to take off anything else okay?”

you blinked up at him, yuta looking directly at you and fucking possessed by your gorgeous face and your gorgeous body and your gorgeous pussy, his chest heaving as he tried his best not to just throw you around and shove his cock inside.

“o—okay—”

he lined his dick up with your hole. “and m’not using a condom.”

your walls clenched at him saying that, him hovering over you as he took your wrists and set both of your hands on his shoulders before moving an arm down, pulling your panties out to the side even more.

“mkay?”

he absolutely refused to use a condom— another obvious factor that set you apart from his previous hookups, something your silly little mind shouldn’t have even compared yourself to in the first place.

why fucking would he if he’d decided the moment he saw you he would never let you go? never let you out of his sight?

you frantically nodded, your hands clutching at his shoulders then as you eagerly opened your legs a little wider for him, yuta losing it at that and shooting you a wild horny grin.

“good job baby…”

he placed both hands on your soft hips and slowly eased himself in your slippery little cunt, you immediately gasping at the sudden yummy unfamiliar stretch and tightening your grip on his shirt, a whimper escaping your throat as you attempted to loosen your hole and let him in.

“i know flower i know—”

yuta was aware that he had to go easy and gentle with you, that you (thankfully) weren’t used to cock in general… but he nonetheless found that he had to physically restrain his hips from pistoning inside you and making you cry on his dick, something he’d thought about for what felt like ages now.

your little moans and mewls spurred him on as he carefully pumped inside you, his head thrown back with a wide-open mouth and closed eyelids, practically drooling as he got off to the sound of your squelching pussy sucking him in, the mattress rocking underneath you both.

“you— you okay baby?” he lulled his head down to look at you, struggling to even keep his eyes open as he kneaded at your hips and fucked you.

“mhm!” you nodded, your sultry sparkling eyes peering up at him so sweetly that he nearly busted inside of you. “but— mm!— yu—”

“what happened baby..?”

“wanna— wanna go on top—”

yuta swore he saw the heavens then, the grip he had on your hips tightening as he held your gaze with desperate eyes, unbelieving of the privilege he was about to experience as he without another word pulled out and flipped you both over, you letting out a tiny squeal mixed giggle as he excitedly settled beneath you.

“tell me how okay?” you softly spoke, and he quickly nodded, placing a sweaty palm on your torso and carefully guiding your hole to his tip again, you holding the base of his cock as you tried to contribute and line it up, yuta assisting you by stretching your panties to the side out of the way with his free hand.

“just— sink down on it pretty flower—” he panted, you listening and slowly letting your pussy engulf his puffy tip again.

“like— like this?—”

yuta licked his lips and nodded, him unable to fucking speak as his hands found yours and interlaced them, his heart pounding and head reeling in euphoria as you started gradually lifting your hips and submerging him inside of you— your cute little self whining and bouncing so cute on it.

“gooood baby good.” he heaved. “just— god just like that please—”

your pace quickened and his jaw dropped, you absolutely lost in the feeling of him stuffing you so full as you felt his warm cum already leaking outside of your hole— sticky skin slapping together and yuta’s moaning and groaning only growing louder by the second.

“am i— hic!— am i doing okay?”

“jesus more than okay—” he took you by surprise and snapped his hips up, your tits nearly spilling over your dress at the force as he started thrusting into you at a rapid pace, you crying out as you tightened your interlocked hands and squeezed your eyes shut over the pleasure, already feeling your orgasm itching itself into your system and tickling at your swollen clit.

"f— fuuuck yu—" you gasped, your pretty moans going directly in his ears making him fucking shudder and mess up the rhythm he had going for a split second, never in his life hearing something so sugary and sacred.

"m'so fuuuull—"

"yeah?" yuta wildly smiled as he pounded, loving that he was the one that got to stuff you full of his cock and snatch you up before any other stupid man got to, your red plump lips and pinky cheeks that read nothing but an expression of being fucked out spurring him on so much that he nearly choked, wanting to be the absolute only one that ever got to see you this way.

"you're being so fuckin good for me baby—"

never in yuta okkotsu’s career of being a former man whore did he ever cum this quickly into sex.

but the sight of you pretty and angelic on his cock, bouncing through his pounding and whimpering your little heart out while he watched you literally squirt over his dick as you finished, his head struggling to register that he was finally fucking you full on his bed after all this time—

was the perfect explanation as to why he broke his own record.

yuta let go of your hands and lunged himself at you, wrapping his arms around your torso and yanking you down to lay on top of him, the cage he had around you locked tight as he shoved his nose into your hair and drilled his hips up to fuck you faster, your eyes rolling to the back of your head at his ruthless speed.

“m’gonna cum.” he choked out. “o—okay?”

“fuck! yes yes yes—”

“inside.”

“yes yu please please!—”

at the sound of you begging for him he released, shooting his heavy stringy load through your gummy hot walls as he loudly groaned into your neck, both of you gasping and heaving for air as he stilled his hips and let his balls completely drain inside, him holding you like his life utterly depended on it.

eventually yuta slightly loosened his hold and moved you up a little to slide his dick out, the air steamy and humid as you both panted and swallowed— trying to catch your breaths and come down from the blissful horny mess the two of you just participated in.

yuta slid a hand up to hold the back of your head, him turning his to press tiny little kisses to the side of your forehead, waiting and basking in the tender moment you just shared before speaking.

“i’m sorry i haven’t been paying attention to you flower…” he spoke gently. “i let what the rumors were saying get into my head and i—”

he struggled for a bit, you carefully pulling back to look at him properly and pouting over the guilty expression on his face.

“i wanted everybody to stop saying and thinking that i was just using you for a fuck.” he mumbled. “and i was trying to prove it to you too so… i thought it was best if i stayed away like a fucking idiot.”

you giggled softly and pressed a sweet kiss to his cheek, him blushing at that.

“you’re so silly yu...” you kindly smiled. “you’ve never needed to prove anything to me. ever… you know that.”

“i know but— everyone was saying so much shit and i got scared that it’d make you upset and it did—”

“yuta i’m dating you not them.” you gently emphasized, your hand coming up to card through his raven locks. “i couldn’t care less about what they have to say… but if you start letting it get into your head like that yu, its gonna bleed onto us and affect us. okay?”

he solemnly nodded, eyes looking up at you in shame.

“so don’t let it.” a gorgeous smile grew on your lips then. “i’ve always believed in you yuta… i don’t need anybody else’s two cents to know that, much less if they’re saying the awful things they’re saying now. they’re stinky for that.”

yuta laughed and gave you a kiss, wholeheartedly agreeing.

"i love you pretty girl."

and he believed in you.

from the moment he met you in his kitchen, from the moment your shy pretty voice rejected him in the sweetest way possible, from the moment he started working his ass off to win you over for a solid year straight— yuta believed in you.

in the both of you— in what you could purely grow and create despite the two of you being born and raised on complete opposites of the social wheel, defying the idiotic supposed laws of society and finding love in the most unlikely circumstances.

the chances of life bringing you together was one in a million, and yuta was grateful to have landed in it despite everything, for he couldn’t imagine a life where he wasn’t your man and took you on frequent trips to the aquarium, visiting a silly little penguin who wanted his girl just as much as he did, and eating lunch with you in the loveliest of flower gardens that withheld the nickname he had for you so fittingly.

his reputation upon graduating was no longer of a sleazy good for nothing piece of shit who whored around, but of yuta okkotsu— president of his frat who reigned for three years straight, the most popular guy to ever fucking exist, the only one who ever managed to throw massive parties every week…

but of also a guy who simply loved his girlfriend.

taglist!! <33 (THANK YOU THANK YOU!):

Shoko first—small, silent, blue around the lips. Her mother would later tell her she hadn’t cried, not even once. She just blinked up at the ceiling, like she’d already seen too much of the world. You had come days after—red-faced and furious, shrieking like you’d already been wronged.

Balance, their clanhead called it. One to make, one to unmake.

They grew up in a quiet prefecture, tucked between the mountains, where fog collected on windows in the morning and everything smelled like pine and old rain. Their family was not a traditional jujutsu clan—not in the way the Zenins or the Gojos were—but they still had blood that remembered power, blood that ran strangely cold.

Shoko discovered her technique early—reversed cursed energy, delicate and warm, the ability to stitch together what others could only destroy. It made her quiet, made her thoughtful, made her feel too responsible for things she didn’t understand. You, on the other hand, were all forward motion and fury, manifesting offensive cursed techniques with raw instinct and terrifying precision.

You burned. Shoko cooled. A soldier and a healer.

It wasn't rivalry. It wasn't even contrast, really. It was rhythm—two halves of a heart, orbiting each other, moving through childhood in tandem. You protected her from bullies, from curses, from the dark under the bed. Shoko bandaged your scraped knees, held your hair back with her small hands when you threw up after manifesting your cursed technique for the first time, whispered questions into your shoulder late at night about whether they’d ever be normal.

Neither of you wanted normal. Not really.

So when your mothers had suggested both of you for Jujutsu Tech—you didn’t hesitate. It is the slight chill that Spring of 2005 that Shoko remembers most. Fifteen years old, uniforms they’d taken customized to their liking just a month before—Shoko, with her wide turtleneck and midi skirt. You, in a well-tailored blazer, and much to your mother’s disapproval—a short skirt.

Even after the arguments and bickering, their mothers had cried. Their fathers had barely nodded at them. The train took them away to Tokyo with petals sticking to the window, and their only belongings in duffle bags at their feet. Shoko’s hands were cold where they held yours softly.

She was afraid. You weren’t.

You had always loved the idea of being chosen, and Shoko just didn’t want to be left behind.

And maybe that’s how it all began—not with power, or fate, or bloodlines.

Two girls stepping onto a train together, one chasing strength, the other running away from a world she’d one day have to hold together with her hands.

ii. april, 2005

Jujutsu Tech was nothing like Shoko expected.

She thought it would be colder, older, more like the hospitals she’d passed on the train—tall and sterile and gray. But it was… soft. Vines curling around wooden buildings, laundry strung between windows, the hum of cicadas already testing their voices in the trees. It smelled like dirt and chalk and something faintly sweet, like sakura or summer air caught in the stairwells.

She didn’t talk much those first couple of days. Neither did Suguru Geto.

They met on their first day of class, standing awkwardly apart. Shoko was pressed against the wall, you beside her like a shield, when she noticed him—black hair long just at his shoulder, eyes unreadable, hands folded neatly behind his back like he was waiting for something more important than small talk. He caught her looking, and they didn’t smile, but something passed between them anyway. A kind of shared silence.

Then came Gojo.

She had heard of him before, of course. The honored one, the destined boy of the Gojo Clan. He arrived like a storm—messy white hair, too-tall frame stuffed into the uniform like it didn’t quite belong to him. He talked too much, laughed too loud, tripped over his own shoes, and still managed to radiate something untouchable. He was awkward, undeniably gifted, and absolutely convinced he had nothing to learn from anyone.

Shoko didn’t really like him.

You despised him worse, found him amusing. You would say he was infuriating, sure—but interesting.

“He thinks he’s better than everyone,” you whispered one night, grimacing into your pillow. “But his ears turn red every time I catch him staring.”

Shoko rolled her eyes, gave you a half smile. “He’s insufferable.”

“You're just mad that he said you would look better if you grew out your hair.” you teased.

“That's not true. I like my hair.”

“I like it too.”

“Then why does it matter to me what he thinks?”

But slowly—so slowly it almost escaped her notice—he changed. He started making jokes with them. And regrettably, Shoko would sometimes laugh at something he said. He started sitting with them at lunch. Picked up Suguru’s habit of folding napkins into strange little birds. Borrowed Shoko’s pens and returned them. Awkwardly, with both hands and a muttered thanks.

He began learning them. Their rhythms. Their silences.

It was the end of summer when it started to feel like something real.

Missions were few and far between in those first months. They trained hard, sweat and bruises under the cherry blossoms, sparring on grass that still held morning dew. Shoko hated sparring. She wasn’t built for it—not the way you were, with your reckless cursed technique and even more reckless joy.

But she tried. Because she had to. Because she wouldn’t let herself be the weak link.

And Gojo—he always held back when they fought. Even then, before he understood how to be gentle, he understood that she needed to win sometimes. Needed to prove that she could. He let her land hits, not because she needed help, but because he saw the way she looked at herself compared to the rest of them. She knew that Gojo—the freak of nature he was with those blazing blue eyes—saw her beneath her dry sarcasm and grins and tired eyes.

Suguru, on the other hand, never let her win. But he gave her pointers after. Explained why she slipped, what her stance betrayed. His feedback was quiet, clinical, never cruel. Always gave her a nod and a smile. Shoko trusted him for it.

Those were their blue springs—their youth washed in cloudless skies and laughter and rain-soaked uniforms drying on sun-warmed rocks. Those were the days of early friendships, of discovering who they were becoming.

They took the train into Tokyo for missions, packed into cars half-asleep, heads knocking against windows. You would always take the window seat, with your far too expensive mp3 player and ratty wired earbuds. You’d hum under your breath, fingers tapping a beat on your thigh. Gojo sprawled across two seats, his head inevitably ending up in someone’s lap. Suguru read novels and pretended not to notice you and Gojo’s helpless bickering.

❀

The first storm of the summer comes sudden, like most things that mattered back then. Sheets of water turning the courtyard into a lake, petals plastered to the stones.

Gojo didn’t run for cover. Of course he didn't. He stood in the middle of it all like some idiot, arms outstretched, hair plastered white against his forehead, laughing so loud it made the rain sound shy.

“You'll catch a cold,” Suguru called from the walkway, voice dry as the towel slung around his shoulders.

“Colds are a myth,” Gojo shot back, spinning in a circle, water flying from his sleeves. It wasn't rare back then for Gojo to turn off his infinity, especially for rain storms he used to practically bathe in.

Shoko watched from the step, dry under an awning with a cigarette between her fingers. Smoking was a new habit she’d picked up, in spite of the protests from her friends, in spite of the distaste and the mini interventions and scoldings you’d given her. All these years later, she can’t really remember where it started from.

You had taken the cigarette from her fingers that day and threw it in the rain, leaving her a little frustrated. Then she watched as you tried not to smile, and bolted straight into the storm after Gojo, shoes kicking up water like wings.

The both of you were soaked in seconds—shrieking, colliding, uniforms clinging like second skin. Grinning too bright for the gray sky above them.

❀

They went on their first mission as a full team in late October.

A cursed spirit in a temple in the countryside—nothing particularly dangerous, but big enough to warrant the four of them. The four of you, as it turned out, had garnered somewhat of a reputation in the Jujutsu world by this point, even though it had only been a couple months into your first year. There was Gojo, being who he was, and then there were you and Geto, two special-grade hopefuls, and then Shoko, with her reverse cursed technique. It was hard not to hear the excitement, the chatter from your seniors and teachers and higher-ups and worse, the curses, as they marveled at what potential the four of you possessed.

On their first mission together they took the train, bundled in thin jackets, feet tangled under the seats. You sat next to Gojo this time, your knees knocking occasionally as the train curved through the mountains. You two didn’t talk much, just passed a packet of rice crackers back and forth, you opening them with your teeth and Gojo laughing, soft, like he couldn’t help it.

Suguru fell asleep with his head against the window. Shoko watched the landscape blur, temples and fields dissolving into dusk.

She remembers that October day clearly — because the first time they saw a body together was on a bridge, the river swollen black beneath it, the cold gnawing at their ankles. The mission shouldn’t have had civilian casualties. It wasn’t supposed to be anything. Yet their world didn’t care about supposed to.

Shoko stood back as Suguru exorcised the curse, her hands clenching, heart banging against her ribs like it wanted out. When it was over, the corpse of the victim lay sprawled against the guardrail, mouth full of frozen air. A little girl—her hair so matted in blood Shoko couldn’t tell what color it was anymore.

Gojo tried to crack a joke, to distill the buzzing in the air—something stupid about ghosts haunting bridges—but no one laughed, not even him. You touched Shoko's arm, light as breath, and for the first time Shoko wondered if maybe they weren’t weapons at all. Maybe they were just kids with blood under their nails and no way out.

It's that night she remembers all these years later, coming home from the mission. They stayed up talking until sunrise. They lay on futons in someone’s dorm room, the windows open, moths circling the lights.

“Do you ever think,” you had asked, staring at the ceiling. “That we’re not meant to survive this?”

There's a quiet that fills the room, uncomfortable, like understanding the inevitable.

“Don't say that depressing shit,” Gojo said sharply, but his voice still held a hint of something that could’ve been mistaken for vulnerability.

“I'm serious. We're weapons. Tools. They'll use us until we break.”

“Then we don’t break,” Suguru said quietly.

“Or we break together.”  Shoko said, so softly no one answered.

That first year, they were just kids. Cursed kids, sure. But kids.

And even though Shoko knew better—even though she could already see the shape of blood and bodies and burials in the future—she let herself believe in nights like those. The four of them sprawled on the floor, laughing at someone’s expense, playing cards and cheap candy wrappers littered on the floor.

In the way Gojo looked at you when he thought no one else saw.

In the way Suguru never raised his voice, but always listened.

In the way you gave your heart like the world hadn’t hurt you yet.

In the way they all leaned on each other like scaffolding, like maybe if they held tight enough, they wouldn’t fall.

iii. june, 2006

Summer in Tokyo hit different when you were sixteen and almost certain you’d die before twenty. 

They weren’t supposed to go out—they had curfews, missions stacked like bones at the start of their second year—curses growing restless, schools asking for protection, strange whispers threading through reports about ancient prisons and shifting power balances. Still, they trained. Still, they laughed. Still, they stole naps on rooftops and dared each other to eat expired convenience store pudding.

Still, they were kids.

Gojo whined until Suguru sighed and gave in, and you had tugged Shoko by the wrist before she could protest.

The festival was a crush of lantern light and smoke, sweet batter curling through the air, fireworks cracking open the dark. You darted ahead, yukata swaying, hair pinned up with something glittering like starlight. Gojo stuck by your side, wolfing down skewers two at a time, Suguru following at a distance with his hands tucked in his sleeves, gaze flicking toward the crowd like a man always counting exits, but still roaring in laughter as Gojo almost chokes on his third kebab.

“Try this,” Gojo said, shoving a stick of candied fruit under Shoko's nose.

“I don’t want your leftovers,” she muttered, unimpressed. But after a bit of nagging she took it anyway, quietly unwrapping it and biting through the sugar shell and pretending it wasn’t good—just to spite him.

Fireworks bloomed overhead—white, then red, then a scatter of gold that turned every face strange and beautiful. For a moment, Shoko saw them like strangers: Suguru haloed in crimson, Gojo’s grin carved bright in the dark, and you tilting your head back to watch the sky like it would never fall.

The boom of the next firework swallowed her thoughts, and she let it.

❀

Shoko always thought the end would come like a firework—loud, blinding, impossible to ignore.

But it hadn’t. It came instead like fog. Slow, creeping, impossible to trace where it started.

By the time they noticed it was already over, the fog of it had already filled the room.

She thinks she can trace every lamentable moment of her life back to that August of 2006. 

Gojo, Geto, you and the star plasma vessel mission she hadn’t been a part of. When she thinks back on it, she can’t exactly understand what happened in that week to have changed the course of their entire lives. Was it before Gojo died in a bloody mess? Was it after he came back, blood-stained, eyes dark, buzzing with an energy that she acknowledged—with bated breath—had finally crossed to godhood?

Gojo was stronger. Far stronger. Six eyes sharp as knives, his cursed technique threading into infinity like it had always been waiting for him to catch up. The elders watched him now—not as a student, but as a threat. You noticed it too. Started staying closer to him, stepping between him and the higher-ups during briefings.

“They're grooming him,” you told Shoko once. “Not for leadership. For war.”

Shoko looked at you—at the calluses on your hands, the scar on your jaw you hadn’t let Shoko heal.

“They're grooming all of us.”

You didn’t deny it anymore.

❀

There are softer things that year, where Shoko can’t remember the exact moment things changed.

Only that something had slowed, gone hazy. Like the last layer of frost on a windowpane, melting so gently it almost went unnoticed.

It felt like fall had come early. The leaves on the tech’s old trees went gold and red like they’d been waiting to burn. There were still wounds to be tended to, and there were still things they couldn’t talk about from the end of that summer.

But Gojo had grown taller over the summer, like his body had finally remembered he came from giants. His hair had grown shaggier, uniform didn’t fit right anymore, and he refused to ask for a new one. Shoko watched him adjust his cuffs every morning like it was some kind of ritual, then pretend not to notice when you offered him your spare hair tie for his sleeves. He took it without meeting your eyes, and wore it like armor.

Shoko noticed the shift in the air. Maybe it was the way that you had started lingering after training, towel around your neck, laughter caught in your throat like a secret. Or the way Gojo stood straighter when you walked into a room, blinking too slow, like he hadn’t meant to look. Maybe it was how the two of you had stopped fighting in that way you used to—loud, fast, like lightning cracking open the sky—and started teasing instead. Light, easy, ridiculous. Like you didn’t know how else to be near each other.

Shoko noticed it in the quiet, in the pauses between conversations, and in the way you touched your own wrist absentmindedly whenever Gojo spoke, like grounding yourself. She noticed how Gojo—always so proud of his attention span—started forgetting what he was saying mid-sentence if you laughed too loud.

“You're obvious,” Shoko told you one evening, as you stood in front of her dorm mirror brushing your teeth. It was practically your dorm now, too.

You spat into the sink. “He’s worse.”

“You're both insufferable.”

“He’s insufferable. I'm charming.”

“He told Nanami you punched him in the throat during training.”

“I did, so what? He totally deserved it.”

“I just can’t believe he let you in the first place.” Shoko shook her head, and thought of the infinity around Gojo, the invisible barrier between him and humanity. The thing that put him closer to godliness. A smile curling at her lips despite herself, understanding the implications of Gojo turning it off around you. “And yet you still gave him your last Milkis at lunch.”

“It was strawberry-flavored.” a shrug. “I don't like strawberry.”

Shoko didn’t say anything else. Didn’t point out the way you lingered when Gojo wasn’t around, or how your voice got quieter when you talked about him. Didn’t say that she’d seen Gojo staring out windows when he thought no one was watching, fingers tapping the rhythm of your laugh on his thigh.

There was something sacred about their closeness. Something fragile and half-formed, still soft at the edges. Shoko didn’t want to break it by naming it too soon.

She just watched. Just remembered.

Suguru was the only one who never commented.

He saw it too—of course he did—but he never overtly teased, only gave a knowing smile quietly to Gojo who would glare back, but never really poked at the obvious tension between the two. Maybe because he understood it, or maybe because he was the kind of person who noticed things and let them be.

He grew quieter that fall, but not in a way that worried her yet. It was more like he was watching, gathering. She felt like something was shifting behind his eyes, too slow and too early to name yet. He still joked with Gojo, still helped Haibara with his footwork, still spent long evenings reading next to Shoko in the common room without saying a word.

But he didn’t smile as easily. And sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, he would close his eyes like the world was too loud.

Shoko didn’t ask. She didn’t know how.

Maybe she should have.

❀

It's late November and the mission went fine.

They exorcised the spirit, cleansed the space, burned the remains. But it was what happened after that stuck.

They stayed overnight in a small inn at the base of the mountain, just two rooms—boys in one, girls in the other. The floors were tatami, and the air smelled like cedar and sulfur from the hot springs nearby. it should’ve been peaceful.

But Shoko couldn’t sleep.

You lay on your side, back to Shoko, eyes open in the dark. She listened to the wind outside, the drip of water from a leaky faucet, the quiet hum of something that felt like change.

And then, sometime past midnight, you slipped out of bed.

Shoko didn’t move, just watched the shadow cross the room, slide the door open, and vanish into the hallway.

It wasn't long before Gojo left too.

You weren’t subtle. Maybe you didn’t want to be.

Shoko waited a full minute before getting up. Her feet were cold on the floor. She didn’t know what she expected—to interrupt them, to tease them. She heard echoes in the hallway, but couldn’t make out a word. Just the shuffling of feet, and the wind blowing against the door.

But when she found the two of you — you weren’t touching.

You were standing in the snow-dusted garden outside the inn, facing each other, breathing visible in the cold. Your arms were folded tight across your chest. Gojo's hands were shoved deep into his coat pockets.

You weren’t saying anything, but she felt this air around you two. In your distance, in the heavy breathing and puffs of smoke between your lips, like you had run out of words to say.

Now, you were just looking.

And maybe that was worse. More intimate, somehow.

Shoko didn’t move. She stayed hidden by the shadows, her breath caught somewhere in her throat.

Then you reached forward.

Your hands touching Gojo’s cheek, just barely.

He flinched.

Not away. Not exactly. Just — startled. Like he hadn’t expected you to be real.

Shoko could see it then—how scared he was. Not of you, but of what it meant to want something in a world like theirs.

“You don’t have to say anything,” you said quietly.

Gojo looked at you. “I should.”

“You never say anything you don’t mean.”

“I don’t know how to mean this.”

A pause. Your breath hitched.

“Just don’t look away.”

He didn’t.

And she watched as you leaned in, closing your eyes for your first kiss. How his lashes had brushed against your cheek as he let you pull him in, his hand finding its way to gently hold your waist. 

Shoko had left after that — witnessing a moment so intimate she felt shivers just watching it, intruding in it. Or maybe it was the cold that got her. But, she waited to sleep until you went back inside. Waited until you crawled into bed beside her again, colder than before, but smiling softly into the dark.

Neither of you said a word.

Shoko stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about how everything had already started to change.

❀

The next few weeks felt warmer, somehow. Like something had opened in their group that wasn’t there before. Not just between Gojo and you—but all of them.

They trained harder. Laughed more. She wanted to believe they were healing the cracks from that August, that the feeling of finality sinking into her wasn’t real.

Even Suguru seemed lighter again. He stopped frowning at the radio when the news came on. Started humming again while he read. He taught Haibara about a complicated binding technique in the training yard one afternoon and let out a laugh when their junior tried it himself. There was a moment—a brief, impossible moment—where Shoko almost believed in forever.

They sat on the school rooftop one evening, all four of them, sky streaked violet and pink and gold. Someone had brought a speaker, and someone else had brought a bottles of various soda. Music played low. She noticed that you had rested your head on Gojo's shoulder, and he didn’t move, just leaned into it like gravity.

Suguru was telling a story about a curse he saw shaped like a crab. Shoko laughed. The wind was cool and sweet. The world didn’t feel like it was ending yet.

“You ever think we’ll get out of this?” Suguru asked, voice low, cigarette between his lip.

“Out of what?” you asked.

“This. Jujutsu. Destruction and death and chaos—whatever it is.”

Gojo stared at the sky. “No.”

“Maybe,” Shoko took the cigarette from Geto’s lips, and took a puff. “but not whole.”

They sat in silence for a long time after that.

The sun set, and Shoko watched the light disappear behind Gojo’s glasses, behind your smile, behind the quiet curve of Suguru's mouth.

It felt like a beginning.

But all she could think about was how beautiful things always seemed, right before they broke.

iv. march, 2007

It’s cruel to her, how the missions only seemed to get worse after that.

Higher-ranked, more volatile, more death. More nights in strange towns with blood on their hands. They started seeing each other less and less. After last August, in the aftermath of Riko Amani’s death, Gojo had been assigned onto more missions alone—acknowledged for the first time in finality as the strongest. Started carrying all the mission files himself, memorizing them down to the street corners. Shoko started collecting more tools, more supplies, more sutures for the clinic at the tech, where she stayed more often than not now. She stopped wearing earrings because they got in the way of her face mask. You had learned how to kill without hesitation.

And she swore Suguru never complained about the missions he went on alone. But now he flinched when they passed playgrounds. Tensed when civilians asked for help. The curses he swallowed grew sharper, crueler. nastier, he had once told her late one night, the word leaving his tongue like he had coughed up bile.

“Don't let them suffer,” he said once, without blinking. “Fast is better.”

Shoko nodded.

She didn’t ask what he meant.

❀

The last mission they took together was in the early spring of 2007, before the start of their third year. 

A cult in Hiraizumi—dark rituals, civilian disappearances, cursed users hiding behind holy symbols and incense. They traveled light, only the four of them. It felt like the early days again, for a moment—suitcases and jokes and Gojo making dumb puns as they checked into a cheap ryokan.

But the mission itself was ugly.

Children locked in closets. Blood on the temple floors. Curses formed from fear and starvation, clinging to walls like rot.

Suguru lost control halfway through.

Not of his technique. Not of his mind. But of his restraint.

He killed too quickly. Didn’t wait for surrender, and didn’t leave the last cursed user breathing long enough to answer questions.

Gojo grabbed him by the collar after.

“What the hell was that?”

“They were killing kids.”

“They were running away.”

“And they would’ve kept going.” 

Gojo's hand tightened. his voice dropped. “We follow orders.”

“Do we?”

Suguru's eyes burned—hotter than Shoko had ever seen. “Whose orders, Satoru?”

Shoko watched you step between them. A hand on Gojo's chest. Your voice low. “Not here.”

Gojo dropped his hand, and Suguru had turned and walked away, scoffing.

The two of them didn’t speak again the rest of the trip.

❀

Haibara died not long after.

He had been bright—sun-bright, laughter-bright, too-young-to-fall-bright. He said “good morning” like it mattered. He addressed them all formally even when they told him to stop. He sparred with you like he was dancing, ate lunch with his mouth full, had dreams about being a sorcerer who saved people and meant it.

The mission was supposed to be simple.

Shoko remembers the call. A cursed womb, grade 3, nothing extraordinary. She remembers you saying, “they’re strong. Nanami'll be with him. they’ll be fine.”

They weren’t.

What came back wasn’t a body, not really. It was a mess of limbs and red and something too silent to be the Haibara she had known.

Nanami carried him. Wouldn’t let go, even as his uniform soaked a darker shade from the blood.

Shoko stitched Haibara's body together with shaking hands—not to save him. Just so his mother could recognize his face.

You threw up in the courtyard after the funeral. Gojo didn’t speak. Suguru didn’t cry.

Grief had finally split the group like glass under pressure—fracture lines running between them, invisible until the light hit just right.

Gojo got louder. More obnoxious, more ridiculous. He made jokes during meetings, fell asleep in class, tripped over his own feet just to make you laugh.

And you did laugh. Loud and real and reckless. But there was something sharp underneath it. A glint in your voice. A kind of defiance.

Suguru got even quieter.

Not the peaceful kind of quiet, the kind that meant calm or ease.

This was the kind that clung to him. That narrowed his eyes when he passed civilians on the street. That curled his lip when they reported to elders who hadn’t lifted a hand in battle in years. That made him look at Haibara’s photo like it was a question that would never be answered.

Shoko felt it most at night.

Suguru used to accidentally fall asleep reading in the common room, head tilted back, glasses slipping. Now, he sat up long after everyone else had gone to bed, staring at nothing, fingers curled like he was still gripping a weapon.

She said something once. Tried to, at least.

“Are you okay?” she asked quietly, as they stood in the hall one night. She can’t recall why, or where, but she remembers this moment because there has never been a part of her that hadn’t wished she had pushed back harder.

Suguru looked at her.

His smile was soft, fake. “Yeah.”

By then she knew he was gone.

❀

A couple weeks later, in the midst of an August heatwave — Suguru Geto disappears.

He left a note on the dorm kitchen table and a photo of the four of them.

Just one sentence: I can't do this anymore.

The rest was silence.

Shoko found it first. She read it twice, then sat down at the table and stared at the handwriting until you walked in and asked where everyone was.

Gojo didn’t say anything after meeting with Yaga. Didn’t come out of his room for the rest of the morning.

Though it’s the last time she sees Suguru, she understands this is it.

She had heard, just a little after reading his final note, what he’d done. A town massacred, burned to the ground and cursed residuals that couldn’t have been anyone’s but the man next to her — his own mother and father killed by their only son’s hands. 

Yet here he was, lighting her cigarette for her and laughing. At least she could pretend for a moment that this didn’t have to be over.

She gives Gojo a call and waits with Suguru for his best friend to arrive and she wonders if Gojo could change the outcome of this. If Gojo Satoru could save Suguru Geto from himself. But another glance up at him, long hair disheveled, the purpled skin under his eyes deeper than she’s ever seen, and the emptiness behind his smile, that she realizes she doesn’t know the man next to her. Not anymore. Maybe not at all.

So he waves goodbye, and she nods and lets the smoke cloud her lungs.

And she never spoke to him again.

❀

That winter, the sky felt heavier. The air full of ghosts.

You stopped wearing bright colors. Started sleeping in your uniform, like you expected to be called into battle at any second. Gojo trained until his hands bled, and didn’t let Shoko bandage them.

“What if he’s right?” he asked her once. His voice barely audible. “What if we’re just killing things to delay the inevitable?”

Shoko didn’t answer, because she didn’t know. (Because something in her still wanted to believe.)

But by the end of that year she had found herself alone more often.

In the morgue. On the roof. In the silence between patrols. She smoked less, not because she wanted to live longer. Just because it didn’t feel worth the taste anymore.

You had stopped talking about the future.

Gojo stopped calling himself the strongest.

They were eighteen then. Too young to have seen so much. Too old to unsee any of it.

v. 2008

The years felt blurry after.

Like the sky after a firework show, after the beauty of it wears and you are left with the remains. Of the sky billowed in smoke, and the ground covered in ash. Shoko remembers the firework show during the summer festival in their second year, how she had watched the lights change your faces. How when she thinks of Suguru, she remembers him back then, hair in a half bun, wearing a yukata, his profile cast under the red glow of fireworks.

Mission after mission. Report after report. Half-empty dorm rooms. Birthdays that passed unnoticed. Names that became numbers. More curses. More blood. Fewer friends.

By then she had stopped smoking entirely, not because she wanted to live. But because you had always hated the smell.

And for a long time after Suguru left, Shoko couldn’t sleep without dreaming of the morgue.

The lights were always too bright. The steel trays too cold. Her gloves slick with blood that would never dry. In the dream, you always walked in first—whole, alive, laughing. And Shoko would reach for you. Call your name. But you would just smile, step onto the autopsy table, and lie down.

“You're early,” Shoko would whisper.

“I know.” you would say.

Then the door would swing open, and Suguru would walk in next. But his face would be hollowed out, eyes dark like tunnels. He'd sit beside your body, light a cigarette, and say nothing at all.

Shoko always woke up with her hands clenched tight around the sheets, fingers aching.

❀

Gojo never talked about Suguru.

Not once.

Not even on that day all those years ago when he came back from the confrontation in Shinjuku with blood in his nails and grief in his eyes.

He got stronger. Faster. Untouchable.

The elders stopped looking at him like a student and started looking at him like their greatest tool. He didn’t flinch, just started smiling bigger, make louder jokes, wore sunglasses indoors, and flirted and teased and deflected.

Shoko could see it, thought. In the slump of his shoulders, or the way his laugh caught wrong in his throat.

He was grieving like a dam breaking. Slowly and inevitably.

But never where anyone could see.

You stayed close to him after that. Stopped being fire and became gravity. Quiet and steady. The only thing that could bring him back when he started spinning too fast. You were the one who waited outside meetings. The one who kicked open his door and pulled him out of bed on the days he refused to get up, muttering, “If you don’t move, I'll set your curtains on fire.”

He always moved. Shoko thinks that it’s less because he believed in your vague threats, and more because he just believed in you.

Shoko watched it all from the edge.

The way you stopped waiting for him to say how he felt. The way you just stood there—open, unwavering—until he stopped running.

The two of you never made it official. Not with labels. Not with grand declarations or anything, But Gojo started showing up late to meetings because he walked you home.

Shoko didn’t know if it was healing, but for a while, it was peace.

vi. april, 2009

Around this time, the Fushiguro’s arrived.

Megumi. Six years old. Too serious. Too quiet. walked around everyone like he was ready to hit, or be hit. His older sister, Tsumiki. Not older by much, just eight years old, but she was sunshine, warm and motherly beyond her years. Shoko saw that you took to her instantly, buying her hair clips and braiding her hair — showing her how to throw a punch if she ever needed to.

Gojo brought them to the school with a box of takeout and a stubborn glint in his eye. "Don't say anything weird,” he told you and shook. “He already thinks I’m an idiot.”

“He's not wrong,” you smiled, and Gojo pouted at you.

Shoko bent down to meet the boy’s eyes, unsure of what to say. “Hmm. What’s something you like?”

He shrugged, and gave her an unimpressed look. “I like dogs.”

“Me too,” she said. “They’re honest.”

That night, they all sat in the common room eating cold noodles. Gojo told a story about a cursed tanuki that stole his left shoe. Megumi didn’t laugh, but he leaned into his sister when she did. Shoko watched as he leaned by Gojo's side as the lights went out.

You and Gojo had opened your arms and made space for the two of them.

Or maybe you had filled in the spaces left behind.

❀

Gojo cooked more, and wasn't great on his first try, surprisingly. Shoko had to supervise so he didn’t poison anyone, and you would’ve eaten anything Gojo cooked, regardless.

Shoko watched as the four of them fell into something like a rhythm. Not a family. Not quite.

But something softer than she had become used to.

The kids brought color back to the halls when they came to visit. Laughter that didn’t feel borrowed. It wasn't like before—but nothing ever was.

Gojo had bought an apartment for Megumi and Tsumiki, and the two of you stopped by almost everyday that year. You and Gojo made bento boxes. You went on grocery runs. You argued over what show to watch on Saturday nights. When Shoko would come over, Tsumiki would beg to paint Shoko’s nails, and once she had given in with her nails painted badly in rainbow and glitter, and you and Gojo had made fun of her for weeks when Shoko didn’t wipe it off.

You stopped wearing your uniform outside missions. Started wearing sweaters with loose sleeves, earrings again, mismatched socks.

You started reading books and magazines and things that weren’t just mission reports. Bought a plant for their windowsill. Put post-it notes on the fridge.

Shoko found one once that said, “Satoru, if you forget to buy me dorayaki again, I swear to God.”

He forgot anyway, but he came back late that night with flowers.

Shoko watched from the couch as you opened the door, just to see you blinking down at the bouquet like it had grown a second head.

“They didn’t have dorayaki,” he said, sheepish. “But they had these.”

You didn’t speak—just grabbed the collar of his coat and stepped into the apartment hallway with him, shutting the door without looking.

Shoko looked away, and gave them the evening. She hung out with the kids, because they were cooler, and let them sleep on the couch watching movies.

It’s after they had fallen asleep, and you and Gojo were nowhere to be seen, that she sat on the balcony and watched the city lights flicker, listening to the hum of traffic into the night.

For the first time in months, she felt… full.

Not happy. Not yet healed.

But full, like maybe all her pieces had stopped rattling.

Just for now.

❀

She still worked long hours, because the clinic never slept.

New students. New injuries. New names she tried not to memorize.

She stitched and cut and stabilized and cleaned. Practiced her technique until it no longer felt like a gift but a reflex.

She stopped praying, though she had never been good at it anyway.

But every time a body came in, not yet cold, not yet gone, she held her breath.

Please, not them.

❀

They didn’t talk about the past. At least not often.

But sometimes, when you had already fallen asleep and the wind whistled through the hallways, Gojo would sit next to her on the balcony and say things in a tone older than his twenty years.

“He liked soba more than ramen. I never knew that.”

And Shoko would nod.

“He read faster than anyone,” she’d add. “even me.”

“He believed in this more than we did.”

“Yeah.”

Then silence.

Then the night.

Then the world turning, regardless.

❀

Shoko isn’t sure what time it is now, but it feels like a bit past midnight. In here, it’s just the two of you on the couch with the weight of exhaustion like a second blanket. The balcony door is half-open, and the September chill is blowing in softly. There’s a glass of wine balanced precariously on the edge of the coffee table, that she keeps forgetting to drink, and you’ve got your legs tucked underneath you, hair damp from a shower, wearing one of those shirts that’s probably his — though neither of you ever acknowledges it out loud.

Shoko tips her head against the back of the couch, eyes tracing the ceiling like it’ll tell her the future, and mutters, “I feel so old.”

You laugh, soft, incredulous. “We’re twenty-one.”

“Exactly. And yet my back feels like I’m fifty.” You give her a side glance, smiling.

“My back feels perfectly fine, granny.”

“That’s because you have two little minions who give you back massages whenever you ask. And they can’t say no because you house and feed them.”

You nudge her knee with your own, half-amused, half-affectionate. “They’d starve if it wasn’t for us.”

“They’d at least learn how to cook instant ramen properly,” she fires back, though her tone is fond. She knows it as well as you do—how Megumi sometimes falls asleep at the kitchen table with his homework still out, how Tsumiki always insists on washing the dishes even when her fingers are pruned from her bath. How the apartment has begun to feel not just like a place to sleep, but like the kind of home you were never supposed to have.

It makes her chest ache.

She glances at you again, more carefully this time. “You’re happy, right?”

You blink at her, then tilt your head like you don’t quite understand the weight of the question. “Happy?”

“You know what I mean.” Shoko shrugs, too casual. “With all this — and with him.”

There it is. Not accusatory, just curious, like she’s been holding this thought in her mouth for months, letting it turn over until it smoothed into something she could say without breaking it.

You’re quiet for a moment, your gaze lowering to the glass of wine you still haven’t touched. “It’s not simple.”

“Nothing ever is with him.” She huffs a small laugh, but she doesn’t look away from you.

“Sometimes,” you admit, your voice softer, “it feels like we’re still kids, sneaking out after curfew, daring each other to jump rooftops. And then sometimes I look at him and I feel like—” You break off, shaking your head as though it’s too fragile to name.

“Like what?”

You exhale slowly. “Like he already belongs to the world, and I’m just borrowing him for a while.”

That hits Shoko harder than she expects. She shifts on the couch, watching the way your fingers worry at the hem of your sleeve. There’s something unguarded in the way you say it, something that makes her throat tighten.

Shoko leans her head against the couch cushion, her glass dangling loosely from her fingers. “You talk like he’s a library book or something. Checked out, due back in three weeks.”

You laugh, though it’s small and tired. “Maybe that’s all love really is. Borrowing someone for as long as they’ll let you keep them.”

“Morbid.”

“Honest.” You glance at her, and your smile is crooked, fond. “You know him. He’s… a hurricane in human form. Everyone wants a piece of him, and half the time I feel like I’m just holding on, hoping he doesn’t blow past me.”

Shoko hums, noncommittal, but her eyes are sharp. “And yet you’ve been holding on for who knows how long. Most people can’t even last five minutes with him in a room.”

“Don’t remind me,” you mutter, though your lips curve. “He still leaves his socks everywhere. Still eats candy for breakfast if I don’t stop him. And he—” You pause, and the softness of your voice betrays you. “He still looks at me the same way he did when we were sixteen. Like he can’t believe I’m real.”

Shoko conceals her smile, and masks it with a sip of wine. “He’d be an idiot not to.”

“I think about it sometimes,” you admit. “If we hadn’t met so young. If we hadn’t been thrown together in that pressure cooker of a school — would it have still been him? Would he have still found me?”

Shoko stretches her legs out, her gaze slipping toward the ceiling. “I think he was always going to be yours, you know. Some things just… fix themselves in place before you even notice.”

You fall quiet, staring at the wine in your glass, watching the way the light fractures against it. When you speak again, it’s hushed. “I’m scared, Shoko. I– I think I’m scared of losing him. Of the day the world asks for more than he can give, and I have to watch him walk toward it anyway.”

Shoko doesn’t answer right away. She looks at you — really looks — the girl who grew up at her side, who always chose kindness even when it cost you. You, who Gojo has loved since he was growing into his height, awkward and half-feral with grief and brilliance. You, who still look at him like he’s worth the trouble.

Finally, she says, “You know, when we were teenagers, I used to wonder if you’d grow tired of him. If one day you’d realize it was too much.”

You blink at her, startled. “And now?”

Shoko shrugs, her expression softening. “Now I think — if anyone was ever built to love him, it was you. Stubborn, patient, stupidly brave. He’s impossible, but you’ve always made the impossible look easy.”

Your laugh catches in your throat, trembling somewhere between joy and sorrow. “Don’t make me cry, Shoko.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” She lifts her glass in a lazy toast. “To you and him. To sixteen and twenty-one, and however long you can keep borrowing each other.”

You tap your glass gently against hers, the sound ringing low and warm. “To growing older.”

Shoko watches the way your face lights up at the thought, and takes a long sip from her glass. She tries for levity, though it comes out a little rough. “Well, if he breaks your heart, I get to kill him. That’s the rule.”

You laugh—really laugh this time, the kind that crinkles your eyes and warms the air between you. “You’d have to fight him first.”

“Please,” she scoffs. “He’s all bark. I’d win.”

“You’re funny, Shoko.” You smile a little sleepily, and lean your head against her shoulder, the way you used to when you were girls hiding from the elders in the back hallways of the clan compound. She doesn’t move, just lets you settle there, the weight of you a reminder that some things never change.

There’s a long stretch of silence, broken only by the city hum outside. Then, almost shyly, Shoko says, “Well, I hope he loves growing old with you as much as I loved growing up with you.”

You still against her, then let out a breath that sounds dangerously close to a sob. She doesn’t look at you, doesn’t push. That’s never been your language. Instead, she reaches for her wine, takes another sip, and adds, almost casually, “And if he doesn’t, then screw him. You’ll still have me.”

You laugh again, watery this time, and lean closer. “Always.”

❀

In the mornings, she drank coffee alone.

In the evenings, she liked to come to your apartment to the sound of laughter, and nonsense on the TV. To the smell of your cooking, which had gotten better than Gojo’s after a couple months. To Tsumiki and her hands that grabbed Shoko’s wrists and led her to the dining table. To Megumi, who Gojo tried so hard to make smile at his awful jokes.

Sometimes, she let herself believe it could last.

Sometimes, she let herself want more.

That was enough.

vii. 1997

When they were seven, you and Shoko built a grave for a bird.

They’d found it after a storm — a small thing, all bones and feathers, collapsed in the mud beneath a persimmon tree in the compound’s garden. You crouched beside it, poked it with a stick. “Is it sleeping?”

“No,” shoko said. “It's dead.”

“How do you know?”

“Its chest isn’t moving.”

“How do you know?”

Shoko didn’t answer. Just knelt down, tiny hands damp with soil, and began to dig.

They buried it beneath a square stone, lined the edges with pebbles. You picked wildflowers and bundled it with twine from the kitchen. Shoko pressed her fingers to the earth and whispered something she didn’t really understand — a wish, maybe, or a prayer.

They sat there until the wind died down, until your mother called them in, until the sky turned the color of ash.

“We should’ve saved it,” you whispered, wiping your nose with your sleeve.

Shoko didn’t say it, but she knew it then: sometimes you’re too late.

❀

january, 2014

The call comes at 2:19 in the afternoon, a higher-up’s voice, clipped and formal.

“She’s been recovered. We’re bringing you the body now.”

The world doesn’t spin, it just stills. Though Shoko sits at her desk for a long time after, the phone silent in her lap, her hands empty.

Shoko doesn’t ask whose, because there’s only one person left.

She's already standing.

Her coat’s already on.

Her tea’s gone cold. The light in the infirmary has gone muddled and slanted, painting long shadows over everything like a warning.

Her hands move automatically. Clipboard.Pen. Gloves.

The air starts to feel static.

The mission was supposed to be easy. “A clean-up.” A second sweep.She repeats, and repeats. Yet how many other times has she thought this?

You weren’t supposed to go alone, but someone backed out last minute, and you were never one to wait around.

Grade one curse. Warehouse District.

Shoko remembers the briefing because she was in the room. Because you had smiled — tilted your head, chewing gum, loose-limbed and tired. “I’ll be home quick.”

❀

Shoko gets a morbid sense of déjà vu when she sees you laid out on the table, covered with a sheet pulled too high. 

But when she sees the body, it doesn’t feel like you.

Not you. Born five days apart. The soldier to her healer. Balance, the clanheads had once called them. One to make and unmake.

Not the same girl who used to share her shampoo, or talk in her sleep. Not the girl who burned bright and reckless and kissed Gojo Satoru like it was the only truth left in the world.

The word balance keeps running through her head as she stares at your face. So still.

No, it wasn’t you. This body is cold, and broken in ways Shoko doesn’t have the words for.

Her gloves are on. Her cursed energy thrums at her fingertips.

But it’s all useless.

The wounds are clean. Carved into you like declarations. Chest collapsed, Ribs fractured inward. Shoko's already cataloging the report in her head. Trachea crushed. Internal hemorrhaging. Cursed lacerations across the sternum.

Then she moves.

Like a surgeon. like a healer with something to prove, even if there’s no one left to prove it to.

She doesn’t try to bring you back. Not really. She's seen too many bodies to believe in resurrection.

She stitches muscle back together like it’ll matter. Seals split skin. Brushes blood from your scalp. A ritual, maybe. or penance. And as she runs her fingers through the ends of your hair, she thinks of being five years old when you had taught her how to braid it.

When she feels her vision blur she whispers, “don’t be stupid,” just like you used to.

Her voice doesn’t tremble until the end.

Too late, she thinks, and she sees a dead bird cupped in your small hands. Wildflowers wrapped in twine.

Too late, too late, too late.

She writes the report with mechanical precision.

Her handwriting doesn’t shake.

She signs it, and place it on top of the clipboard.

Then folds your arms across your chest, straightens your uniform collar, uses a towel to wipe a smudge from your chin, and the drawer of the morgue clicks shut with a hollow finality.

And she finally lets herself cry.

Just once.

Quietly.

Like a confession.

❀

Shoko takes the train without really knowing why she’s chosen this route over the school car. After she explained what she was doing, Ijichi had told her he could drive her with a solemn look in his eyes, always so insistent. She had declined, so now she sits by the window, forehead pressed to the cold glass, the tunnel lights strobing against her reflection until her own face starts to look like a stranger’s.

She's still in her work clothes, still smells faintly of antiseptic and smoke, and the folder in her lap feels heavier than it should. She keeps one hand pressed flat to its cover like she’s holding a wound closed.

People filter in and out of the train at each stop, their chatter muted, just faint shapes moving through her periphery.

She doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. The only thing she lets herself look at is the glass, and the snow on the other side of it—each flake blurring against the motion of the city, small and perfect and already gone.

Yaga had told her, after, that Satoru wasn’t told yet, but she wonders if he already knows. If some part of him—whatever raw, uncanny instinct makes him the strongest—registered it the moment your heart stopped. Maybe he felt it like an earthquake deep in his bones, the sudden, wrong absence in the air. Maybe he was sitting on their couch, turning toward the door without knowing why.

Her mind drifts, unspooling memory:

Summer afternoons, the four of them sitting on the roof with drinks to cool the sweat on them. Your hair tangled from the wind. Gojo leaning back on his palms, his sunglasses pushed to the top of his head so she could clearly see the way his gaze snagged on you like he didn’t even notice he was staring. The quiet shift over months from banter to something slower, gentler, like they’d started speaking a language that Shoko didn’t know but could still recognize in the spaces between words.

A late night after a mission, all of them exhausted, half asleep in the common room. Shoko had woken to see them leaning together on the couch, your head on his shoulder, his hand resting loosely on yours. The kind of touch that wasn’t accidental.

There had been other moments—quieter, private ones she hadn’t meant to see—that told her this was the thing that had changed him. He'd always been brilliant, unbearable, untouchable. but with you, his edges softened. He laughed differently. He listened.

Now she wonders how much of that she’s about to take from him in a single sentence.

The train slows into her stop, brakes screeching. She rises, folder in hand. She doesn’t know why she carries the hardcopy—maybe it makes it feel more real, more final, more like evidence of something she already failed to prevent.

She had stopped by a gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes and a small black lighter for the first time in almost six years. There’s now a cigarette clamped between her teeth, though she hasn’t lit it.

Snow is falling.

It catches in her hair, her sleeves, her lashes.

When she reaches their apartment building, she stops at the bottom of the stairs and thinks about turning around. But she doesn’t. She climbs each step like she’s approaching a grave.

The light’s on under the door.

She raises her hand.

And knocks.

❀

The door opens almost immediately.

And for a second — just one, flickering, incandescent second — Shoko sees the look on his face.

Gojo Satoru opens the door like he expects you to be behind it. Not Shoko. Not grief incarnate. But you. The woman he loves. The only thing in the world that could quiet his mind and hold his entire future in her palms.

He opens the door like someone in love. Like someone relieved. Like someone who still dares to hope.

And then he sees Shoko.

And everything stops.

His face doesn’t fall.

It freezes.

She watches the hope die in his expression. It doesn’t vanish — it dies. Like something physically collapsing inside of him. A structure caving in, silently, under its own weight.

His shoulders lock, and she watches his jaw tense. He doesn’t move aside to let her in, doesn’t say a word.

Just stares.

He looks at her like he had known this would be how it ended all along, but still — still, deep down, some piece of him had been holding on. Had left the light on. Had made her side of the bed. Had waited.

Shoko clears her throat.

The words don’t want to come.

"I’m sorry—she’s gone.”

That's all it takes.

Gojo doesn’t flinch.

But she sees it in the way his hand clenches around the edge of the door. The way his breath leaves him — sharp, shallow, wrong. The way he looks past her, like he’s trying to reframe the hallway, the scene, the moment.

Like maybe he can rewind it.

Undo it.

See you behind her, scolding her for delivering bad news so bluntly.

But Shoko is alone, and the silence is loud.

He steps back, and turns.

Walks into the apartment like everything inside was knocked over.

Shoko follows and shuts the door behind her.

The apartment is dim. Bathed in soft warm light. The heater hums gently in the corner, and there are two mugs on the table, one empty and one half-drunk. Your sweater is still hanging over the back of the couch, sleeves inside out. Your boots are by the door. The windows are covered by sheer white curtains, but the shade of blue that appears just after sunset peeks through, framing the room the same color as melancholy.

Shoko wants to scream.

Instead, she places the folder on the table.

Neither of them look at it.

She taps the folder once, not to push him, but to make its presence undeniable.

“Are you going to read it?”

His back is still to her. She can see the angle of his spine through the thin cotton of his shirt, every muscle tight, like he’s bracing for impact.

With no hesitation, “No.”

Shoko expected that answer, but she still feels something drop in her chest.

“You sure? It’s not… it’s not just medical jargon. I kept it clean. No gore.”

He turns his head just enough for her to see one sharp eye over his shoulder.

“You want me to read the autopsy for the love of my life?”

She pauses, feeling herself hold her breath.

“I want you to know what happened,” she says, voice level. “Exactly what happened. Without the stories you’ll tell yourself later.”

He scoffs—a sound halfway between disbelief and exhaustion—and shakes his head.

“The story I want is that you’re lying.”

Silence.

He pushes away from the counter, crosses to the table. His height makes the space between them smaller without him even trying. He puts a hand on the folder like he might open it—thumb brushing the edge, fingers curling.

And then he just… freezes.

Shoko watches him, and for the first time she sees it—not the usual walls, the sarcasm, the easy dismissal. This is different. This is a man standing at the edge of a cliff, staring down, knowing there’s nothing but rocks and cold water below.

“I can't,” he says finally, and it’s not defiance. It's quiet. almost gentle.

“Why?”

he swallows, eyes still on the folder.

“Because the second I read it, it’s over. She's gone in ink. In numbers. In your handwriting.” he glances up at her, and there’s no shield in his expression now. “If I don't read it, she’s just… late coming home.”

Shoko's throat tightens.

For a moment, she wants to tell him she understands. That she’s done the same—taken certain pages out because the words make her feel sick. But she doesn’t. She just nods, takes the folder back, tucks it under her arm again.

He exhales like he’s been holding his breath the whole time.

He’s not moving.

Not breathing, maybe.

His hand rests on the counter like it’s the only thing keeping him upright and she watches his shoulders shake.

Once.

Then still again.

His face is unreadable.

But his eyes — god, his eyes.

Shoko has known him for more than a decade, has seen him bloodied and laughing and blind with pain and victory. But she has never seen him like this.

Not even after Suguru.

Not even after Toji.

This isn’t rage.

This isn’t despair.

This is something else.

Something jagged. Something bottomless.

He looks at her like she’s the executioner. Like she didn’t just bring the news — but she made it true. But maybe, in some way, he’s right to feel that way.

“You’re sure that she’s—?” he asks, voice quiet. She could’ve mistaken his tone for desperation.

Shoko nods.

That's when it happens.

He laughs.

Short, ugly, and bitter.

An instinct, like flinching.

He runs a hand through his hair. Leans back against the counter.

The quiet settles like dust.

Shoko sits down on the couch. something crackles beneath her — one of your notebooks. She picks it up, flips it open without thinking.

The last page is filled with sketches. a little cartoon version of Gojo, grinning, speech bubble saying “have you seen my honey?”

Her throat tightens.

She doesn’t speak.

“I thought I had more time,” he says. Shoko doesn’t have it in her to speak.

“I wanted to take her to Okinawa again. Not for a mission this time. Just because.”

He closes his eyes.

“She never got to see it in winter. She would’ve liked the cold.”

And she stays the night on their couch. Like old times, except there is no wine and no laughter and your warmth isn’t beside her. Shoko never really registered that she’ll never see you again. Even now, it feels like you’ll call her at any moment and ask her if she wants a drink.

But that first night without you, she doesn’t think she could really fall asleep.

And he doesn’t really cry.

But in the morning, he makes coffee with hands that won’t stop shaking.

She drinks hers cold, and so does he. But she watches him press your mug to his lips and set it down again, like it burned him.

❀

august, 2014

Gojo is twenty four, and he’s older than he was meant to be. More tired than he lets on, and somehow still waiting for something that already ended.

Sometimes, when it’s late, and the city is loud, and the stars don’t show themselves—Shoko catches him leaning against the doorway of his apartment balcony, looking at the buildings and cars and passerbys like he’s trying to remember the shape of your face.

And that, she thinks, is love.

Not flowers.

Not vows.

Not even the waiting.

But the remembering.

The carrying.

The way his world stopped. The way he never quite leaves the doorway, just in case you might still come home to him.

viii. 2015

Grief, when it lingers long enough, becomes routine.

Shoko wakes the same way every morning: early, cold. the city a dull hum outside her window. The kettle clicks on. She measures out coffee. Drinks it black, because that’s how you liked it, and then cooks konnyaku because you hated it.

The irony keeps her company.

The mornings are always quiet now. The kind of quiet that settles into your bones and stays.

And Nanami leaves the Jujutsu world around that time.

Quietly. Respectfully. Without fuss.

He came to her clinic on a Tuesday, knocked once, sat down across from her, and said, "I'm leaving.”

She didn’t ask why, because she felt like she already knew.

He was twenty three and already looked like he’d seen the end of the world twice.

“You'll be good,” she said softly. “Too good for this place.”

Nanami looked away. “I just want to live like a person.”

She envied him for thinking it was still possible.

Before he left, he placed a small paper-wrapped gift on her desk.

Inside was a lighter, clean, silver, unused.

She held it in her palm for a long time that night.

But she didn’t smoke.

Not yet.

❀

She sees Gojo more often these days.

Not because they talk more, and not because they seek each other out. Just because there’s no one else left.

They don’t need to make plans anymore. They just end up in the same places. The clinic. The faculty room. The convenience store on that street with the broken traffic light.

Sometimes he brings her canned coffee. Never says anything when he hands it to her.

She drinks it anyway.

It’s the only thing he offers that she can still take.

And he laughs a little more now, but it’s not the same.

When he does, it’s wrong. Jagged. Like something trying to escape from under his skin. It reminds her that he’s still grieving, even when he tells her “he’s over it.”

The students adore him. Still think he’s invincible, and think the blindfolds and wit and charm are who he really is.

 But Shoko knows better.

❀

december, 2017

Suguru's death didn’t come like she expected, though to her, Suguru Geto had died the August they were seventeen.

From the outside, he went out in flame and fury.

But then again, it feels like he went out quietly. Gently. By Gojo’s own hands.

Because, in the end, that was the only way it could’ve happened.

Not in hatred or vengeance, but in recognition of what they’d been. Of what they’d lost. Of the thin line between who you are and who you become when the world stops making sense.

“It was quick,” Gojo told her afterward, his voice steady, eyes blown wide with something far beyond pain.

Shoko believed him. Not because she trusted the words, but because she trusted the silence between them.

❀

She thinks of Suguru now more than she admits.

Remembers how he used to hum under his breath while taking notes. How he’d hand her highlighters during meetings without looking. How he used to let them braid his hair on missions just to make them smile.

Remembers the way he stood the last time she saw him, on the night of the cursed parade—back straight, curses curling around him like smoke, eyes tired in a way that made her want to scream. 

He broke long before he died.

Shoko knows this.

She also knows he would’ve been a wonderful teacher.

If the world had been kinder, and if someone had stopped to tell him that softness wasn’t weakness. That wanting to save people didn’t make him naïve.

That watching them die wasn’t his fault.

❀

Gojo comes to dinner sometimes.

Not often or predictably. Sometimes he just knocks, steps inside, doesn’t take his shoes off properly, and drops onto her couch like he owns the place.

She used to yell at him for that, but now she just lets him.

He eats whatever she makes. Doesn’t complain, even when it’s instant ramen or cold rice or nothing at all.

They don’t talk much during those nights.

But sometimes, he falls asleep.

And sometimes, she covers him with the old blanket you used to use when you were over — just because. Just to remember what it felt like to care for someone who was still breathing.

There's one night that she remembers, after a long day of treating a couple injured sorcerers in the midst of a mission, that she finds him already waiting.

In the kitchen, cutting vegetables.

“What are you doing?” she asks, flatly.

“Trying to give you a break,” he says.

“By mutilating my carrots?”

“They fought back.”

She puffs a breath from her nose and smiles.

It’s the closest she’s come to laughing in days.

He makes curry. It's too spicy. The rice is slightly undercooked — but it’s not half bad.

She eats every bite, and doesn’t thank him for showing up.

They’re not close, not in the way people imagine. They don’t tell each other secrets. They don’t hug. They don’t reminisce out loud. Their bond lies in the memory of what it meant to be sixteen and still whole. Of how it felt watching the strongest boy in the room slowly learn how to be gentle. Of seeing him break and build and break again.

Of surviving the wreckage together.

He keeps her from vanishing. She keeps him from shattering.

They exist near each other.

Orbiting.

Keeping each other tethered.

❀

Shoko's the only one who doesn’t have a grave.

Not really.

Haibara's is now marked in a clean Kyoto cemetery. Suguru's ashes were never recovered, but there’s a stone for him outside his old temple. You have a simple plaque under the oak tree they used to study beneath.

Shoko visits them all, but she doesn’t linger.

Because it’s not the places that hold them.

It’s the way she still turns her head when someone says “Geto” in a briefing. It’s the way she keeps chopsticks in her drawer for four, not one. It's the way she wakes from a dream, disoriented and reaching for an image of herself, of when her hair was cut to her chin and she is surrounded by people who were once her home — before she remembers that no one’s coming.

Though, there's a new photo on her desk now.

Four teenagers. Uniforms on and grins wide.

Gojo has his eyes closed. Suguru is pretending to look annoyed. You’re flipping off the camera. Shoko is mid-laugh, mouth open, eyes crinkled.

She doesn’t remember who took it.

Doesn’t remember what they were laughing at.

But she leaves it there.

Next to the medical files and the pills and the list of new students.

It’s a reminder — not of who they were, but that they were. That at one point in time, the four of them had existed together. That at some point, that was all that mattered.

ix. december 24, 2018

The first snow falls unceremoniously. No warning and no wind to carry it.

Just flakes, slow and fat, drifting sideways over the rooftops of Shinjuku like ash from something that’s already burned.

Shoko watches it from the roof.

She doesn’t move.

Not yet.

It's the holidays, and she hates this time of year. There’s too much pretending, too many bright windows, too many mouths grinning like the world hasn’t ended five times already.

This year, the snow comes early.

And with it—him.

She thinks the city is strange under snow. Not soft. Not pretty. Just muffled, hollowed out. Sirens echo longer. Footsteps vanish quicker. The skyline dissolves behind a white veil, lights blurring like bruises.

She walks through it alone. Past vending machines glazed in frost and power lines sagging beneath the weight. There are paper lanterns swaying over shuttered storefronts, their glow smudged and dim.

Her boots crunch the snow like something brittle and alive. She isn’t wearing gloves. She likes the cold biting at her skin. It feels honest.

She finds him in the square.

Tall. Unmovable. Eyes like winter distilled into glass.

He's facing Sukuna, and there’s no backup. No panic. No speeches or horns sounding in the dark. Just two gods standing where no man should be.

She doesn’t call his name or break the silence. Only stands at the edge of it all, smoke slipping from her mouth, her eyes dry as bone.

He knows she’s there.

He doesn’t turn.

But he tilts his chin, barely, like a gesture carved out of stone.

And she understands, like she did all those years ago in August, when Suguru Geto had lit her cigarette. When he smiled and waved and she had turned away, for the last time.

That this is the end.

Not just of him. Not just of this fight.

But of everything that tethered them to a time when living felt possible.

Springtime in Jujutsu Tech. Sunlight tangled in white hair. You, singing too loudly, Suguru sighing like the world rested in his lungs. Sandos split in half. Train cars rattling at dusk. Leaves falling as soft as promises they never kept.

All of it.

Ending here.

Under a sky in a city stripped down to bone.

He burns too bright, even now. Bends space like a god, cuts air like a blade, shoulders the infinite and makes it look like art. And still—Sukuna is cruel. patient. inevitable.

Shoko watches as it begins: sharp, merciless, a brilliance that blinds and dies just as quickly.

She sees him hold and hold and hold—until he doesn’t.

He doesn’t scream.

He just folds.

Quietly.

Finally.

And the moment he hits the ground, the world doesn’t shatter.

But something in her does.

Everything slows.

The air thickens. Her breath fogs in front of her. Her hands are shaking, not from fear, but because she’s remembering. Nostalgia has always had its way of killing her, of creeping up on her and leaving her feeling sick. There is nothing left to reminisce now, as the last remaining part of her youth lies split in half in the show.

❀

The lab smells like steel and antiseptic, like every failure she’s ever catalogued. Fluorescent lights hum above her, sickly and bright, making her want to tear them out of the ceiling. She doesn’t. She just sets the instruments in place, lines up scalpels with the precision of someone who cannot afford to think.

Yuta lies unconscious on the table, his chest rising shallow, his pulse steady under her fingers. Now, she moves over to the drawer, where she placed Satoru’s body after stitching it back together. When she pulls back the sheets, she touches his hair once, brushes it off his forehead the way she remembers you used to when he was too stubborn to sleep.

Now she stands over him, and for the first time in years, her hands shake.

Not from inexperience. Not from fear of failure.

But from knowing that if she succeeds, it won’t really be him. And if she fails, she will have killed the last piece of her friend’s legacy with her own two hands.

Her cursed technique hums, steady, inexorable. Flesh unravels, rewrites. Neurons glimmer under her touch like constellations in a dark sky. She threads them carefully, patient as a weaver, until she feels something spark. Until she feels him.

Not Yuta, not exactly.

But not Satoru either.

Something between.

A gasp, sharp and wet, tears through the air. fingers twitch. The body arches against restraints she swore she wouldn’t use, but had to.

And then—eyes.

Too blue. Too familiar.

Her knees nearly buckle.

Because for an instant it feels like the dorms again and being a teenager. Then for an instant, she is twenty two again, and she watches Gojo lean down to talk to Tsumiki and Megumi, to give them reassurance, to protect their youth.

But then the boy blinks, coughs, chokes on his first words, staring at his hands. and Yuta is suddenly speaking to her, from Satoru Gojo’s lips.

And it’s not him.

It’s not him.

She forces her hands steady, swallows down the tremor in her throat. “Well, it worked.” She says, clinical, detached. Like she didn’t just carve open time and stitch it into something monstrous.

The snow keeps falling outside.

❀

Later, they ask her what happened. after transferring Yuta back to his own body, after dismantling Satoru, pieces lying on a table in her clinic — while Yuta walks, unscathed.

She gives them the facts. stripped bare, like bone. No softness. No poetry.

“Gojo fought. He fell. He's dead.”

Nothing more, because she refuses to let them dress it in glory, refuses to let them write a hymn where there was only silence.

He was tired.

He died.

And there’s nothing beautiful about that.

❀

She cremates him herself. In the same furnace that once took you. Her gloves are soaked by the end of it, dark and slick, but she doesn’t take them off. Doesn’t cry either. Not this time.

x. 青春

Tokyo feels different after. Like the city is holding its breath, waiting for something that will never come.

That evening, she stops beneath a streetlamp outside the school. Cigarette trembling faintly between gloved fingers. Snow catching in her hair, turning her into something ghostlike. Embers glow like memories in the dark.

For the first time in forever, she speaks. Not to anyone. Just to the cold, to the shadows that linger in her bones.

“You win.” she whispers.

The lamp above her flickers once, then dies.

And Shoko stands alone in the dark. Utterly. Finally. Completely.

Yet that night, she finds herself dreaming in color that she thought had left her vision over a decade ago now.

Dreams not of blood. Not of battle, or of bodies in a morgue, or the harsh December air.

But of summer. The old apartment bathed in sunlight. Then, you’re next to her, seated cross-legged, fingers deftly braiding Tsumiki’s hair. Gojo at the table, laughing, trying to pry the cap off a bottle of soda with his teeth while Suguru shakes his head, pretending not to smile at him. Somewhere on your balcony, Haibara’s voice rings out, bright with Nanami’s deeper murmur tucked inside it.

Shoko feels a weight in her hands, and forces herself to look down for just a moment just to see that she is holding a camera. She lifts it. Frames them in her viewfinder — her whole heart in one room. Click.

A still life. A stolen moment that no one else notices.

They’re too busy being alive.

(終わり) END.

When August comes, I don’t count the days Transitory views from the subway train How strange, when life unfolds this way In the drift less zone, sky’s prone to stay off-gray Clouds are omens too, fading at the rate That most pleasant memories do

mae's note. first chapter of "of love & lesson plans" out tomorrow, and i pinky promise it won't be this sad </3 likes + reposts are appreciated, thank you soso much for reading