#cutecouple

Suna Rintarou was not a jealous person. At least, that's what he'd have told you if you'd asked him a month ago. He didn't get worked up over much of anything — not over Atsumu's teasing, not over losing at Mario Kart, not even over Osamu eating the last onigiri he'd been saving for after practice. He drifted through most of life with the same half-lidded, unbothered expression, like nothing was worth the energy of caring loudly.

So when he found himself standing in your kitchen at eleven at night, arms crossed, staring down a stuffed Luffy plushie like it had personally wronged him, he had to admit — something had gone very wrong.

It had started innocently enough. Three weeks ago, Suna had seen the plushie in a claw machine at the arcade near your apartment. It wasn't even that good a machine — the kind that ate your money and gave you nothing back, rigged within an inch of its life. But he'd dropped in coin after coin, ignoring Osamu's increasingly loud sighs beside him, until finally, on his ninth try, the claw actually gripped instead of slipping, and out came a slightly lopsided, extremely soft Luffy doll with stitched-on sunglasses that didn't come with the original design — some limited edition variant you'd mentioned wanting, off-hand, weeks before, in a conversation Suna hadn't even seemed to be paying attention to.

That was the thing about Suna. He always seemed like he wasn't paying attention. And then he'd go and prove that he'd caught every single word.

"Here," he'd said, tossing it into your lap without ceremony, like it was nothing, like he hadn't spent forty minutes and way too many coins on it. "You wouldn't shut up about it."

You'd nearly tackled him. You definitely squealed loud enough that he'd winced and told you to quiet down, the neighbors were going to think he was hurting you. But even as he complained, there'd been that small, satisfied curl at the corner of his mouth — the one he only got when something had gone exactly the way he wanted.

You'd known his name immediately, obviously — Luffy, straw hat and all, if a little lopsided from the stitching. From that day forward, Luffy had a permanent spot on your bed, propped against your pillows like some kind of straw-hatted sentinel.

Suna hadn't thought anything of it. Not at first.

The problem, if you could call it that, started small. You'd taken a picture of the plushie sitting on your windowsill in the afternoon light and sent it to him with the caption he's living his best life. Suna had smiled at his phone like an idiot on the train home, which Osamu had mercilessly clocked and would not let him live down for the rest of the week.

Then you started giving the thing a personality. "Luffy says good morning," you'd text. Or, during a particularly boring class, "Luffy is judging me for not studying." Suna found it funny. Endearing, even. He liked that something he'd given you had become a whole bit between you two.

But then it kept going. And going.

You started sleeping with it. Which — fine. Normal. People slept with stuffed animals. Suna had definitely still had a beat-up old cat plushie somewhere in his closet that he was never, ever going to admit to owning. But then you mentioned, completely offhand, over a phone call one night, that you'd started talking to it before bed. "Just to like — process the day," you said, laughing a little. "Don't judge me."

"I'm not judging you," Suna said, even though something in his chest had pulled tight in a way he didn't have a name for yet.

"Good. Because Luffy is a great listener. Better than some people." A pause. "No offense."

"...None taken," Suna said, in a voice that suggested offense had, in fact, been taken.

He told himself it was ridiculous. He was a nineteen-year-old man getting weird about a stuffed pirate. There was no version of this where he came out looking normal, and he knew that, and yet the feeling didn't go away — it just sort of sat there, low and stupid, every time you brought the plushie up like it was a third party in the relationship.

Things came to a head on a night he'd come over to study — or that was the plan, anyway, before you'd both given up on productivity within twenty minutes and ended up sprawled on your bed, half-watching something neither of you were really following. Luffy, as always, held his post against the pillows.

At some point you shifted, curling slightly into Suna's side, and grabbed the plushie to hug against your chest, sighing contentedly. "Best cuddle buddy," you murmured, patting its head.

Suna, who had been in the middle of getting comfortable himself, stopped.

"I'm right here," he said.

"I know." You didn't even look up. "You can both be my cuddle buddies. It's not a competition."

"It's a stuffed animal."

"He has a name."

"He's made of polyester."

"Rude," you said, hugging the plushie tighter, like you were protecting it from him. "Don't talk about Luffy like that in front of him."

Suna stared at you. Stared at the plushie. Felt, with a rising and deeply humiliating clarity, that he was — somehow, impossibly — losing an argument to a stuffed pirate.

"You know I bought that thing," he said.

"I know."

"I spent actual money on it. Multiple times. The claw kept dropping it."

"I know, and it was very romantic," you said, entirely too sincerely for someone who was still hugging the plushie instead of him. "That's why he's earned his spot."

"His spot," Suna repeated flatly.

"Yeah. Right here." You patted the space between you and the plushie, which, Suna noted with some indignation, was closer to you than he currently was.

He didn't say anything else. He just reached over, plucked the plushie out of your arms with the same unbothered efficiency he did everything, and set it down on the nightstand, facing the wall.

"Hey—"

"He can watch the movie from over there," Suna said, resettling himself against you, arm looping around your waist like he was reclaiming territory. "Or not. I don't really care what he does."

You were laughing now, delighted, propping yourself up on one elbow to look at him properly. "Suna. Are you seriously jealous of a plushie."

"No."

"You just turned him around so he couldn't look at us."

"He doesn't have eyes that work. It doesn't matter which way he's facing."

"Oh my god." You were grinning so wide it had to hurt. "You are. You're jealous of Luffy."

"I'm not saying anything else about this," Suna said, which was, in itself, a confession, and you both knew it.

He tried to play it off over the next few days. That was the Suna way — deflect, downplay, pretend the moment had never happened and hope it got buried under enough time and unrelated conversations that nobody brought it up again. It worked on most people. It did not work on you, because you had apparently decided that Suna Rintarou being quietly, absurdly jealous of a stuffed animal was the funniest thing that had happened to you all year, and you were not going to let it go.

You brought Luffy everywhere, suddenly. Not really — you weren't actually carrying a plushie around campus like a lunatic — but every text became an opportunity. A picture of the plushie "helping" you study, propped up next to your notes. A picture of it wearing one of your hair scrunchies like a headband. A message that read, simply, Luffy says hi with no further context, sent right in the middle of Suna's practice, so that he had to read it standing on the court with Osamu leaning over his shoulder asking who Luffy was and why Suna's ears had gone red.

"It's nothing," Suna muttered, shoving his phone back in his bag.

"Doesn't look like nothing," Osamu said, entirely too pleased with himself. "You're the color of a tomato, Rin."

"I will end you."

"Who's Luffy?"

"I said I will end you."

Osamu, naturally, told Atsumu. Atsumu, naturally, would not shut up about it for the rest of the week, cackling every time he caught Suna glancing at his phone, asking loudly across the club room whether "the plushie boyfriend" was doing okay, whether Suna needed to fight a stuffed animal for his honor. Suna endured it with the long-suffering patience of a man who had brought this entirely upon himself and knew it.

It was you, in the end, who put a stop to it — mostly because even you had limits on how long you could tease him before it stopped being funny and started being mean, and you liked him too much to actually make him miserable over it.

You showed up at his apartment on a Friday evening with the plushie tucked under one arm, and when he opened the door and saw it, his expression did something complicated and resigned, like he was bracing for another week of this.

"Relax," you said, stepping past him inside. "I come bearing peace offerings."

"You brought the enemy into my own home."

"He's not the enemy. He's actually here to help you." You set the plushie down on Suna's couch, propped upright, facing the two of you. "Luffy, as official witness — Suna Rintarou, you are, and have always been, my favorite. Not a stuffed animal. Not anyone. You. I just thought it was really funny watching you get worked up about it, so I kept going. That's it. That's the whole thing."

Suna looked at you. Looked at the plushie. Something in his shoulders that had been quietly tense for the better part of two weeks finally eased.

"You did that on purpose," he said. "This whole time."

"Obviously. You should've seen your face at practice. Osamu sent me a video."

"He what—"

"Focus," you said, laughing, stepping closer and looping your arms around his neck before he could spiral into another rant about Osamu's betrayal. "I like you an unreasonable amount, Suna. Way more than a stuffed pirate that I asked you to win me as a joke, and that you then spent forty minutes and probably ten dollars in quarters trying to get."

"Twelve dollars," Suna corrected, arms settling automatically around your waist, some of the sharpness draining out of his voice now that he had you instead of an empty apartment and a green-eyed grudge against felt and stuffing. "I counted."

"Twelve dollars," you agreed. "Which is genuinely the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me, so. I'm sorry I turned it into a bit for two weeks."

"You're not sorry."

"I'm a little sorry."

"You're not even a little sorry."

"Okay, I'm not sorry at all," you admitted, grinning up at him. "But I really do like you more than the plushie. For the record."

Suna huffed something that was almost a laugh, tipping his forehead down against yours. "You'd better. I have a reputation to protect. Osamu already thinks I proposed to a stuffed animal."

"You kind of did, a little."

"I'm breaking up with both of you."

"You can't break up with a plushie, Rintarou, he's not your girlfriend."

"He's got more screen time in your texts than I do, so I'm not sure that's true anymore."

You laughed again, pressing up to kiss the corner of his mouth, and whatever was left of his sulking dissolved entirely. Behind you, forgotten now on the couch, Luffy sat propped against the cushions, permanently smiling, permanently oblivious to the chaos he'd caused — a twelve-dollar rubber-armed reminder that even someone as unbothered as Suna Rintarou could, apparently, be brought entirely undone by something as small as watching you love a gift more than you loved bragging about the person who gave it to you.

He decided, privately, that he didn't mind so much. As long as he still came first.

Which, obviously, he did. Even if it had taken him an embarrassingly long two weeks and one entire volleyball team's worth of teasing to actually believe it.

@korasunae