💖 hajime's pretty girl 💖

this was simply the natural order of things, as stable and predictable as gravity — you walked into a room, sukuna was there, the air got thicker, you glared at each other, and the universe continued spinning.

it had been like this since freshman orientation when you accidentally took the last chocolate chip muffin from the dining hall cart and sukuna had been reaching for it at the exact same time; your fingers had brushed, and sukuna had looked at you like you'd personally insulted every single of his ancestors, and then he'd muttered something under his breath about how he 'should have known'.

from that day forward, you were locked in.

so when your professor announced the paired final project for advanced literary theory — a fifteen-page analysis of narrative unreliability that would make up forty percent of your grade — and then proceeded to assign partners alphabetically, you felt the universe's cosmic joke land squarely on your shoulders.

"aizawa is with burnham, carlson is with davis... nakamura is with park, and (l/n) is with sukuna."

the room didn't go silent, but you wouldn't have heard it if it had. all you could hear was the rushing of blood in your ears as you turned your head, slow and dreadful, like a defendant watching the jury file back in.

sukuna was already looking at you.

he sat two rows over, sprawled in his chair like he'd been poured into it, all sharp angles and lazy menace. his pink hair fell across his forehead in that careless way that made you want to push it out of his face just so you could see him scowl more clearly. his jaw was set, his mouth a flat line, and his eyes — those stupid, arresting eyes that shifted color depending on the light, red one moment and almost brown the next — were fixed on you with an expression you couldn't quite read.

you glared at him.

sukuna raised one eyebrow, slow and deliberate, like he had all the time in the world to be annoyed with you.

"great," you muttered, slumping in your seat. "just great."

the thing you didn't know — the thing you couldn't know, because nobody tells you these things, because love doesn't announce itself with trumpets and flashing signs — was that ryomen sukuna had been in love with you for three years, two months, and approximately eleven days.

it had started with the muffin.

not because of the muffin, exactly, but because of the way you'd looked at him when your fingers touched. everyone else in the dining hall flinched away from sukuna — he knew how he came across, all sharp edges and sharper tongue, the kind of person who looked like they'd bite if you got too close. but you hadn't flinched. you'd looked at him, and there had been something in your expression that wasn't fear or deference or any of the other things he was used to seeing.

you'd simply looked at him like… he was just some guy who wanted a muffin.

and then you'd taken it anyway, which was either deeply stupid or deeply brave, and sukuna hadn't been able to decide which, but he'd known, suddenly and completely, that he needed to figure it out.

so he'd started showing up at your locker, not because he wanted to intimidate you but because sukuna wanted to see if you'd look at him like that again. he'd started competing with you for grades not because he wanted to beat you but because sukuna wanted you to notice how hard he was willing to try, how he sharpened himself against you like a blade against a whetstone. he'd challenged you to the karaoke contest because you'd laughed at something utahime said — a real laugh, the kind that crinkled your nose — and sukuna had wanted to be the reason you made that sound, even if it was because he was singing badly on purpose.

none of it had worked the way he wanted.

somewhere along the way, the wires had gotten crossed so completely that sukuna didn't even know how the hell to untangle them anymore; his attention had curdled into something you perceived as hostility. his proximity had become a threat instead of a hope.

and ryomen sukuna, who had never been good at explaining himself, who had spent his whole life building walls instead of bridges, had no idea how to tell you that every time you glared at him, he felt like he was swallowing glass.

so he didn't tell you.

sukuna just kept showing up, he just kept competing, he just kept finding reasons to be near you, and let you believe whatever you wanted to believe.

it was easier that way. really, it was easier than admitting that he thought about you constantly, that he had a folder on his phone full of screenshots of your discussion board posts because he liked the way you structured arguments, that he'd memorized your coffee order from watching you get it so many times (oat milk latte, extra shot, cinnamon on top, which was objectively an incorrect way to drink coffee but he loved that about you anyway).

it was easier than saying; i don't hate you. i never have. i think i would burn the world down if you asked me to, and that terrifies me more than anything else ever has.

so when professor okamoto announced your pairing, sukuna's heart did something violent in his chest, and he had to physically stop himself from smiling. he raised one eyebrow instead, giving you his most unreadable look, and watched your face crumple with displeasure.

god, you were beautiful when you were annoyed.

yeah… sukuna was so, so fucked.

you agreed to meet in the library on tuesday afternoon, mostly because you wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. the sooner you started, the sooner you'd be done, and the sooner you could go back to pretending ryomen sukuna didn't exist at all.

he was already there when you arrived.

this was infuriating because you were fifteen minutes early, specifically to avoid this exact scenario — walking in to find him already settled, already comfortable, already looking like he belonged in a way that made you feel like an intruder in your own study space.

sukuna had claimed the corner table by the window, the good one with the natural light and the extra outlets, and he was bent over a laptop with his reading glasses on.

you stopped dead.

sukuna wore glasses.

you had never seen this before, you had no idea sukuna even needed them, and the sight of them — wire frames, simple and unexpectedly kind against the boy’s sharp face — made something in your chest do a strange little flip.

he looked way softer like this, less intimidating, and you hated that you noticed. you hated that you noticed that the sleeves of sukuna’s sweater were pushed up to his elbows, exposing the lean lines of his forearms. you hated that you noticed the way his hair fell when he was concentrating, how he kept pushing it back with an absent hand.

you hated that you noticed anything about him at all.

"you're staring," sukuna said without looking up.

you bristled.

"i'm not staring. i'm assessing the enemy's territory."

now sukuna looked up, and the glasses made him seem almost approachable for half a second before his expression settled into its usual mask of mild disdain.

"the library is not enemy territory. it's simply a library. with books. which we both really need for this project we're both required to complete."

"don't sound so excited about it."

"i'm not excited about anything involving you."

that stung more than you wanted it to.

you told yourself it was because you were proud, because you hated being dismissed, because sukuna's opinion shouldn't matter to you but it did, it always had, in the same way a splinter mattered — small and sharp and impossible to ignore.

you dropped your bag on the table with more force than necessary and sat down across from him, pulling out your laptop and notebook and pens with aggressive efficiency.

"let's just get this over with."

"eager to escape my company?"

"desperately."

something flickered across his face, there and gone so fast you couldn't name it. he looked back at his screen.

"okamoto wants us to focus on unreliable narration in gothic literature. i've pulled some secondary sources. there's a reading list in the shared document i started."

"you started a shared document already?"

"i'm not an idiot."

"i never said you were."

"you were thinking it."

you opened your mouth to argue, then closed it because he wasn't wrong, and also because there was something in his tone that didn't sound like his usual condescension. it sounded almost... tired. like he was exhausted by this dance you two did, even though he was the one who kept leading.

the silence stretched between you, strange and unfamiliar.

you'd never spent this much time alone with sukuna before; your interactions were always in crowded hallways or full classrooms, always brief and barbed, always with an audience. now it was just the two of you and the soft sounds of the library — pages turning, keyboards clicking, someone's phone buzzing somewhere in the stacks.

you could smell his cologne; something woodsy and warm, nothing like the sharp, cold scent you'd imagined he'd wear. it made him seem closer than he actually was.

"so," you said, because you had to say something, "gothic literature. fun."

sukuna looked at you over the top of his glasses.

"is that a genuine statement or are you being sarcastic?"

"do i ever not sound sarcastic?"

"no," sukuna said, and then, quieter, "i know."

you didn't know what that meant, and you didn't ask.

the first week of working together was exactly as miserable as you'd expected.

you disagreed about everything — thesis statements, source selection, whether or not to use first-person in the analysis, the correct way to cite a multi-volume work.

sukuna was methodical to the point of obsession, wanting to outline every paragraph before writing a single word, while you preferred to write freely and shape the chaos into something structured later. he thought your approach was inefficient. you thought his approach was suffocating.

"you can't just write without knowing where you're going," he said on thursday, staring at your laptop screen like it had personally offended him. "that's how you end up with a directionless argument."

"it's not directionless, it's exploratory. there's a difference."

"there isn't."

"there is if you have any imagination at all."

sukuna’s jaw tightened. "i have imagination."

"huh. could've fooled me."

the words came out sharper than you intended, and you saw something shutter behind sukuna’s eyes. he looked away first, which he never did, and when he spoke again his voice was carefully, deliberately flat.

"just write the outline. we can argue about methodology later."

you wanted to push. you wanted to know why he looked like you'd actually hurt his feelings, which was ridiculous because ryomen sukuna didn't have feelings, not ones that could be hurt by the likes of you. but something about the set of his shoulders stopped you, something about the way he'd gone very still, like he was bracing for impact.

so you wrote the outline.

and sukuna was right, which made it worse.

by the end of the second week, something had shifted.

you couldn't point to exactly when the hell it happened, but somewhere between arguing about the reliability of jane eyre's narration and debating whether rochester was a gothic hero or just a guy with too many secrets, the edges of your interactions had started to soften.

you still bickered constantly, but it felt less like warfare and more like... a game. a familiar rhythm you'd both fallen into without meaning to.

sukuna started bringing you coffee.

not every day, and not in an obvious way either; he'd just show up to your library sessions with two cups from the campus cafe, one black for himself and one that smelled like cinnamon and oat milk, and he'd set yours on your side of the table without a single comment.

the first time it happened, you stared at the cup like it might explode at any moment;

"what is this?"

"coffee. it's a beverage. people drink it to stay awake when they're doing academic work."

"i know what coffee is. i meant—why did you get me one?"

sukuna shrugged, not meeting your eyes. "you always look like you haven't slept. figured you needed it."

it was such a strangely considerate thing to say, so unlike the person you thought you knew, that you didn't know how to respond. you just wrapped your hands around the cup and let the warmth seep into your palms, watching sukuna over the rim as he settled into his chair and opened his laptop like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

the coffee was perfect, exactly how you liked it.

you didn't think about what that meant.

you definitely didn't think about how sukuna would have had to pay attention to know your order, how sukuna would have had to remember, how sukuna would have had to deliberately choose to get it for you even though you'd never asked and never thanked him properly.

you just drank the coffee and tried to ignore the way your heart was beating.

on the third week, you caught sukuna staring at you.

not the usual staring — the kind where he was waiting for you to finish a thought or watching your face for a reaction during an argument. this was different; this was soft, this was the way people looked at things they wanted to keep.

you'd been reading a passage from wuthering heights aloud, doing the voices for the different characters because you were a huge nerd and because it made sukuna's lip twitch in a way that was almost — almost — a smile. you were in the middle of heathcliff's "i cannot live without my soul" speech, and you'd gotten dramatic with it, leaning forward with your hand pressed to your chest, and when you looked up to gauge his reaction, sukuna was just... looking at you.

not at the book, not at the table, but at you.

sukuna’s expression was naked in a way you'd never seen before. all the usual armor was completely gone — the sneer, the boredom, the casual cruelty he wielded like a shield.

instead he looked almost... awed. like you'd done something miraculous just by existing in his general vicinity.

your voice caught in your throat.

"sukuna?"

he blinked, and the mask slammed back into place so fast you almost believed you'd imagined the moment before.

"what?"

"you were staring."

"no, i was just listening."

"you looked—"

you stopped, not sure what you'd been about to say. you looked like you loved me, maybe, but that couldn't be right because ryomen sukuna didn't love anything, certainly not you, certainly not like that.

"you looked weird."

"i always look weird."

"you don't," you said, before you could stop yourself. "you look, you know, normal? i mean, not weird. usually."

sukuna's eyebrows went up.

for a long moment, neither of you spoke. the library's heating system kicked on with a low rumble, and somewhere across the room, someone laughed quietly, and you were acutely aware of every single inch of space between you, of how easy it would be to reach across the table and touch sukuna’s hand, of how badly you wanted to.

you didn't. of course you didn't. but you wanted to, and that was new, and that was terrifying.

"finish the passage," sukuna said finally, his voice rougher than usual. "you were at 'i cannot live without my soul'."

you looked down at the book, at heathcliff's desperate words, and felt heat rise to your cheeks.

"right. yeah. okay."

you finished the passage, but you couldn't look at sukuna while you did it.

the confession happened on a thursday, and it happened because of a paper cut.

you were both hunched over a stack of printouts, cross-referencing quotes, and you were tired — the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that came from too many late nights and too much caffeine and the slow, creeping realization that you didn't actually hate the person sitting across from you, that maybe you'd never hated him at all, that maybe you'd been wrong about everything for three entire years.

you reached for a page at the same time sukuna did, your fingers brushing against his, and you both froze.

his hands were warm.

you'd expected them to be cold, because everything about sukuna seemed cold, but no, they weren't. his hands were warm and broad and surprisingly gentle when he pulled back like you'd burned him.

"sorry," you said, and meant it.

"don't be sorry for touching me," sukuna said, and his voice was strange, tight, like the words were being pulled from somewhere deep. "i don't—i don't mind."

you looked at him.

really looked, the way you hadn't let yourself look in years; his hair was messy from running his hands through it, his glasses were slightly crooked, and there was a tension in his jaw that you'd always read as anger but now seemed like something else entirely. something held back, something waiting.

"you always mind," you said quietly. "you always mind when i'm near you."

sukuna's breath caught, and you saw it, the way his chest stopped moving for just a second, the way his fingers curled into fists on the table.

"is that what you think?" he asked. "that i mind?"

"you act like you do. you've always acted like—"

"i know how i act." sukuna cut you off, and there was something raw in his voice now, something that made your stomach drop. "i know exactly how i act. do you think i don't know? do you think i haven't noticed that you flinch every time i walk into a room, that you tense up when i stand too close, that you look at me like i'm something you stepped in?"

you opened your mouth, but nothing came out.

"i know," he continued, and now he wasn't looking at you anymore, he was looking at the table, at his hands, at anything but your face. "i know you hate me. i've known for years. and i don't—i don't blame you. i'm not good at this. i'm not good at people. i don't know how to be anything other than what i am, and what i am is someone who makes you uncomfortable, apparently, which was never—"

his voice actually cracked, and you felt something splinter inside your chest.

"that was never what i wanted."

"sukuna—"

"just let me finish."

sukuna pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice was muffled.

"i need to say this. i've been trying to say this for three whole years, and i just keep messing it up, and i don't care if you hate me after, i just really need you to know so i can stop—so i can stop pretending—"

he dropped his hands and looked at you, and his eyes were red-rimmed and bright, and all the air left your lungs.

"i don't hate you," sukuna said. "i have never hated you. not once. not even when you took the last muffin at orientation, which was a crime against humanity and i'm still not over it. not when you argued with me about romantic poetry in sophomore lit. not when you told professor tanaka that my interpretation of frankenstein was 'reductive and borderline misogynistic', which, for the record, it wasn't. i don't hate you. i've never hated you. i—"

sukuna stopped, swallowed, and looked at you like you were the scariest thing he'd ever seen.

"i love you," he said, and the words came out small, almost bewildered, like he was discovering the truth of them in real time. "i love you so much it's embarrassing. i love your laugh and the way you argue and how you do the voices when you read out loud even though you think nobody notices. i love that you're competitive and stubborn and terrible at asking for help and you always push your hair behind your ear when you're thinking. i love that you took that muffin even though you knew i wanted it because you don't back down from anything, including me, especially me, and i—"

his voice broke again, and he laughed, a short, helpless sound.

"i've been in love with you since freshman orientation. i've been in love with you for three years, and i've been so busy trying to get your attention that i didn't notice i was just making you hate me. and that's—that's on me. that's entirely on me. but i needed you to know. before we finish this project and you never have to talk to me again. i needed you to know that none of it was hate. not on my side. it was never hate."

the library was silent.

you could hear your own heartbeat, loud and unsteady, you could feel the blood rushing to your face, your hands, every part of you that had suddenly come alive.

sukuna was looking at you like a man awaiting execution, his chest rising and falling too fast, his hands shaking slightly where they rested on the table.

you thought about three years of mornings at your locker. three years of competitive grading. three years of him finding reasons to be in your orbit, even when you made it clear he wasn't welcome at all.

you thought about the coffee, the glasses, the way he knew your reading voice and your coffee order and the fact that you pushed your hair behind your ear when you were thinking.

you thought about how you'd actually never hated him either; at least, not the way real hatred felt cold and dead. your feelings for sukuna had always been hot, always been alive, always been demanding your attention when you wanted to focus on anything else.

you thought about the muffin.

"you're an idiot," you said.

sukuna blinked. "what?"

"you're an idiot," you repeated, and your voice was shaking, and you couldn't stop the smile that was spreading across your face, wide and disbelieving and probably ridiculous. "three years. three years of fighting over grades and arguing about literature and competing in karaoke contests, and the whole time you were just trying to get me to look at you?"

"to be fair, it worked. you looked at me constantly. just—not in the way i wanted."

"because i thought you hated me!"

"yeah, i know! i realize that! i'm aware that my communication skills are—"

"abysmal?"

"i was going to say 'deeply flawed', but yes, abysmal works."

you laughed.

you couldn't help it; it bubbled up from somewhere deep, somewhere that had been wound too tight for too long, and suddenly you were laughing so hard that tears were streaming down your face, and sukuna was staring at you like you'd lost your mind, which honestly you might have.

"i don't hate you either," you managed, between gasps. "i never hated you. i thought i did, but i don't think i know what hatred feels like anymore because every time i tried to hate you, i just—i just kept noticing things. like the way you tap your fingers when you're reading. and how you always hold the door for people even though you pretend not to. and you helped that freshman find their classroom last week even though you were late to your own class. and you look at me like—"

you stopped, swallowed, and looked at him.

"you look at me like i matter," you said softly. "and i didn't know what to do with that, so i called it hatred. because it was easier than admitting that maybe i wanted you to look at me forever."

sukuna made a sound, something wounded and hopeful all at once, and then he was moving — not dramatically, not the way they do in movies, but slowly, carefully, like the boy was approaching something that might spook.

he reached across the table and took your hand, his fingers sliding between yours, and you both looked down at where you were connected like it was the most incredible thing either of you had ever seen.

"so," sukuna said, and his voice was unsteady, "just to be clear. we both wasted three years being convinced the other person hated them, when actually—"

"when actually you have the emotional intelligence of a brick and i'm apparently blind."

"i was going to say we're both complete idiots, but yes, that's also very accurate."

you squeezed sukuna’s hand, and he squeezed back, and the smile he gave you was nothing like the ones you'd seen before; this one was real, this one reached his eyes, softened all his sharp edges, and made him look so sweet and so hopeful and so terrifyingly beautiful.

"what now?" you asked.

sukuna looked at your joined hands, then at your face, then back at your hands.

"well. i have a fifteen-page paper due in two weeks, and my partner is very distracting."

"your partner is sitting right here."

"i know." sukuna lifted your hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to your knuckles, feather-light, his eyes never leaving yours. "trust me. i know."

you spent the rest of the afternoon in the library, but you didn't get any work done.

you talked instead — really talked, for the first time in three years. you told him about the muffin, how you'd only taken it because you'd seen him reach for it and wanted an excuse to touch his hand, how you'd spent the rest of the day convinced you'd imagined the whole thing. he told you about the karaoke contest, how he'd picked journey specifically because he'd overheard you say it was your guilty pleasure, how he'd sung badly on purpose because he wanted to see you smile.

"i can't believe you can actually sing," you said, propping your chin on your hand. "and all this time i thought you were just terrible at music."

"i have many hidden talents."

"like secretly being in love with me for three years?"

sukuna’s ears went pink.

"that's not a talent. that's a crisis."

you reached across the table and touched his face, just because you could now, just because he was yours to touch. his stubble was rough against your fingertips, and he closed his eyes when you traced the line of his jaw, leaning into your palm like a cat seeking warmth.

"i'm sorry," you said quietly. "for all the times i was mean to you. for assuming the worst."

"don't be." sukuna turned his head and pressed a kiss to the center of your palm. "you gave as good as you got. it's one of the things i like about you."

"one of the things?"

sukuna slowly opened his eyes, and the look in them made your chest ache.

"i could give you a long list. it would take a while. we might need to order dinner."

"we're still in the library."

"the library has a cafe."

you laughed, and he smiled, and when he kissed you for the first time — soft and slow and a little awkward, both of you smiling too much to do it properly — you tasted coffee and cinnamon and something that felt like coming home.

the thing about loving ryomen sukuna was that it had never been a conscious decision either.

it just happened — it happened the way spring follows winter, the way flowers naturally turn toward the sun, the way your hand found his under the library table and held on like you'd been doing it your whole life.

you'd been wrong about so many things.

but this was absolutely, perfectly right.