Saiki had stopped walking in the middle of the hallway.

A first-year had walked into his back and apologized seventeen times.

He could read minds. He could see the future in fractured, flickering glimpses. He had reduced every person in his life to a pattern: Nendou's randomness was itself predictable idiocy, Teruhashi's self-absorption a clockwork mechanism, Kuboyasu's aggression an easy arc. Even the people who thought of themselves as complicated were, at the level of their actual thoughts, straightforward. Most people wanted: to be liked, to be comfortable, to avoid the specific humiliations they'd already experienced once. Layer that over whatever surface personality they'd constructed, and you had a complete picture.

You made decisions that didn't follow.

The umbrella incident was the first thing he catalogued.

It had been raining since noon, a grey, indifferent rain that showed no interest in stopping. Saiki had identified seventeen separate people who had forgotten umbrellas and were cycling through various degrees of resentment about it. Standard. Predictable. He had walked through all of it unmoved, because he had his own umbrella and also because other people's minor miseries were not, as a rule, his concern.

You had an umbrella. He'd noted it that morning, yellow-handled, slightly battered, tucked under your arm. You'd thought, good thing I checked the forecast, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had learned a lesson the hard way and internalized it.

He saw you give it away at the school gate.

Not to a friend. Not to someone who asked. To a woman you had never met, somewhere in her sixties, who was looking at the rain with the resigned expression of someone who had somewhere to be. You'd just, held it out. Said something brief. She'd taken it with surprise and then gratitude, and you had turned up your collar, stepped into the rain, and walked home.

Thinking about something you'd read years ago. Some passage from a book he didn't recognize, the words half-remembered and warm, like something held a long time.

You walked home in the rain thinking about a book, and you didn't think once about the umbrella.

Saiki stood at the gate for a moment longer than he needed to.

Hm, he thought, which was not a thought he had very often.

The laughing thing was subtler, and bothered him more.

You laughed at things a half-second after everyone else, like you were translating a joke into a private language only you spoke.

Not slow, he'd checked, reflexively, and your comprehension was immediate. You got the joke when everyone else got it. You just didn't laugh yet. You held it for a half-beat, turned it over, and then laughed at something that was adjacent to the joke but not quite the same thing. Something you'd found inside it.

He wanted, badly and irrationally, to know what that was.

This was new. Saiki did not generally want to know what was inside people's thoughts; he already knew, constantly, and mostly wished he didn't. The wanting was unfamiliar. He examined it with the suspicion he'd give any unfamiliar object.

It didn't go away.

He started, without entirely meaning to, keeping a list.

Not a physical list. He would not have done something so demonstrably strange as write it down. But mentally, with the compulsive precision of someone who could not help but organize information: things you had done that he had not predicted.

The umbrella. The laughing. The time you'd spent twenty minutes helping a classmate find a phone that turned out to be in their own bag, and hadn't been impatient once, not even internally; your thoughts had been patient all the way down, which almost never happened, people were almost always at least slightly impatient underneath the performance of patience.

The time you'd stopped in the middle of a crowded street to look at a bird. Just a pigeon. Unremarkable in every measurable way. You'd looked at it for a full ten seconds, thinking something he could only describe as quiet, and then walked on.

The time you'd gotten a question wrong in class and your first thought wasn't embarrassment or self-criticism but a genuine, unguarded oh, interesting, I had it backwards, like being wrong was just new information. Like you were taking notes on yourself with the same curiosity you'd apply to anything else.

He caught himself watching you more than was strictly necessary for threat assessment.

Annoying, he thought.

He looked anyway.

The list grew. He resented the list. He continued adding to it.

You bought a snack from the vending machine and it got stuck, and instead of the standard range of reactions: frustration, resignation, hitting the machine, walking away... you tilted your head, considered it thoughtfully, and bought a second one, which knocked the first one loose. Then you stood there looking at two snacks you'd only wanted one of, and your thought was not wasteful or clever but simply: well. okay then.

You left the second one on a bench.

Saiki ate his coffee jelly and watched you from across the courtyard and thought, with the reluctant precision of someone completing a calculation they hadn't chosen to start:

I don't know what you're going to do next.

It had been years since he'd thought that about anyone. He'd forgotten what it felt like. He was relearning it now, incrementally, one unpredicted action at a time, and the feeling was strange and bright and faintly maddening and he was not ready to name it yet.

You picked up your bag and headed back inside.

A half-second later, for no visible reason, you smiled.

Annoying, Saiki thought again, with considerably less conviction than the first time.

He looked anyway. He was always going to look anyway. He had given up pretending otherwise somewhere around the umbrella incident, if he was being precise, and Saiki Kusuo was always precise.

He added the smile to the list.

It was not the last entry.

The list, by November, had become a problem.

Not in size, though it was, by any reasonable metric, too long for something Saiki insisted was purely observational. The problem was qualitative. The nature of the entries had shifted in a way he had noticed and documented and was actively refusing to analyze.

Early entries: gave umbrella away, laughed at a half-second delay, genuine curiosity about being wrong. Behavioral data. Anomalies logged in the same way he'd use for anything else; a statistical deviation, a pattern that didn't fit the model, a variable worth monitoring.

Recent entries were different.

Recent entries included things like: made a small noise of betrayal when the cafeteria ran out of the soup they like. Sat very still for a moment. Accepted this. Got something else. Did not mention it to anyone. The noise was very small.

Saiki had mentally recorded: the noise was very small.

He reviewed this fact with the detachment of someone finding an unfamiliar crack in a load-bearing wall.

It had started, as best he could trace it, sometime in late October.

You had been doing homework at your desk before class, and you'd made a mistake; he'd seen you make it, seen the small frown, watched you erase it with more force than necessary. Standard. He'd filed it and moved on.

Then you'd looked at what you'd written after the correction, tilted your head, and written a small star next to it. Not a grade. Not a mark. Just a star, apparently for your own benefit, apparently because you'd decided the corrected version deserved one.

Saiki had stared at his own desk for a moment.

That's, he had thought, and then stopped, because the end of that sentence was that's endearing, and that was absolutely not the kind of data he was collecting.

He'd recategorized it as unusual positive self-reinforcement behavior and moved on with his life.

He'd thought about the star twice more before lunch.

The problem compounded in the way that problems did when you failed to address them early.

You talked to plants. Not full conversations, just small acknowledgments, passing remarks, the verbal equivalent of a nod. Looking good, you'd said to the potted fern outside the science room, without breaking stride, without any apparent self-consciousness, and Saiki, who had been three steps behind you, had nearly walked into the door.

You named inanimate objects that inconvenienced you. Not out loud, internally. The chair that always caught your bag was the chair. Said with a specific italicized resignation that suggested history.

When you were thinking hard about something, you pressed your thumbnail to your lower lip and your eyes went to the middle distance and your thoughts made a specific sound, not quite words yet, more like the feeling of words about to happen. Saiki had become, without authorizing this, familiar with the sound of your thinking.

He had also become, without authorizing this, familiar with the face you made when you found something genuinely funny versus politely funny versus funny in the private half-second way. They were different faces. Cataloguing them had taken approximately no time at all because he had apparently already done it without noticing.

This is purely observational, he reminded himself, with the frequency of someone who had stopped believing it.

December brought new data.

It was cold enough now that everyone had shifted into winter routines; heavier coats, morning complaints, the particular social bonding that happened when people were collectively miserable about weather. Saiki observed all of it from the same fixed distance he observed everything.

You arrived one morning with your scarf wrapped incorrectly, one end significantly longer than the other, listing to the left. Your thought upon noticing this was not embarrassment but a brief philosophical well, it's still warm, and you'd left it.

Saiki looked at the uneven scarf.

He looked at it for longer than he should have.

It's asymmetrical, he noted, as though making an objective observation.

It looks, he continued, extremely reluctantly, somewhat-

He stopped the thought there. He was a man of discipline.

The mittens were worse.

They were mismatched, not dramatically, not clown-levels of different, but one was slightly darker than the other, the kind of thing that happened when you bought replacements and the dye didn't quite match. You'd clearly decided this was acceptable. You'd clearly decided this weeks ago and not thought about it since.

Saiki thought about it.

He thought: they don't match.

He thought: they don't notice or don't care.

He thought, very quietly, in the most guarded and well-defended corner of his mind: that's-

A first-year sneezed nearby, and the interruption was so welcome he almost thanked them.

The incident that cracked something open happened on a Tuesday.

You had stayed late, he knew because he had also stayed late, for entirely unrelated reasons that he had documented thoroughly. The classroom was empty by the time you packed up, and you didn't notice the pen that rolled off your desk and under the radiator until you were already standing with your bag on.

He watched you look at the pen.

He watched you calculate, visibly, whether it was worth it.

You got down on the floor and retrieved the pen. This was not remarkable. What was remarkable was that while you were down there, you apparently noticed something else, a small piece of origami, a crane, the kind that ended up in strange places when Aiura got bored. Slightly dusty. One wing bent.

You picked it up. Smoothed the wing with your thumb, carefully, the way you'd handle something that had been through something. Set it on the windowsill.

Then you picked up your bag and left.

You didn't think anything in particular while you did it. There was no internal monologue of how kind I am or someone might want this or even the vague social self-awareness of a person performing niceness. You just, fixed the wing. Put it somewhere better. Left.

Saiki sat with that for a long moment.

The crack he felt, somewhere in the architecture of purely observational, was not loud. It was very quiet. The quiet of something that had been under pressure for a while finally, incrementally, giving.

Oh, he thought.

Just that. Oh. The single syllable of a person who has been carefully not arriving at a conclusion and has arrived at it anyway.

He walked home in a direction that was technically correct but longer than necessary, hands in his pockets, reviewing the situation with the grim thoroughness of a man auditing his own finances.

The umbrella. The laughing. The star next to the corrected answer. The small noise about the soup. Looking good to the fern. The uneven scarf. The mismatched mittens. The origami crane with the smoothed wing, sitting on the windowsill.

He was not, Saiki Kusuo told himself, the kind of person who found things cute. He was a telepath with the power to stop time. He had moved a satellite once. He had rearranged the magnetic poles of a small region. He was constitutionally above the experience of finding someone's mismatched mittens-

The mittens, said some small and treacherous part of him, were very cute.

Saiki stopped walking.

A cyclist swerved around him. A dog looked at him with the blank sympathy of an animal that had seen everything.

I'm aware, he told the dog, which could not hear him.

He stood there for a moment in the cold, with the city moving around him, and conducted a final, thorough, completely objective assessment of the data.

The data was not ambiguous. The data had not been ambiguous for some time. He had simply been, and this was embarrassing to admit, wrong, not about the facts, but about what the facts were facts about. He'd been cataloguing anomalies when he'd actually been cataloguing, with obsessive and comprehensive detail, every small thing about you that he-

He started walking again. Faster.

It didn't help. It hadn't helped last time either. He was beginning to suspect it was never going to help.

Annoying, he thought, for what was probably the hundredth time, about you, about himself, about the origami crane and the mittens and the half-second laugh and all the rest of it.

He added annoying to the list.

It was, he recognized with the resignation of a man who had run out of options, the least accurate entry on it.

☆ ★ ✮ ★ ☆☆ ★ ✮ ★ ☆☆ ★ ✮ ★ ☆☆ ★ ✮ ★

Seeing you splayed out in distress over a desk is a sight Saiki has become accustomed to with all the time you spend studying together. Typically, a couple of "motivating" words from him telling you to just pull yourself together and break down the material is enough to get you to begrudgingly pull yourself up and work. As of late, however, he'll tells you to stop moaning about your work when it gets too difficult to understand or you’re too tired to comprehend any of the material, and to just copy off him. He words it in a way that makes it seem that it's to his benefit, but usually Saiki wasn’t the type to lend you his work, believing that you should put in effort yourself, even when you’re whining about it. 

He sacrifices life and limb to help you with your daily tasks. Mundane things he knows you can handle yourself, but now his absolute first instinct is to immediately look for ways he can help you, even if he rolls his eyes and reprimands you at first. Lost something of yours? He’s using clairvoyance to track it down. Forgot something at a certain place when you go out? He’s fighting off traffic, interrogations from his friends, and all the other absurd obstacles he often finds interfering in his everyday life just so he can bring it back to you without raising suspicions of his powers. 

And if all those things weren’t obvious enough he’s been trying to atone, he buys you sweets. All of your favorites over the past couple of weeks, paid in full by him whenever the two of you order or stop by a bakery or restaurant. Maybe one found on your desk throughout the school day. He even shares with you his own if you ask or eye them longingly. 

All of these seemingly menial acts leave you a little suspicious, especially since it had been days since the event happened, and it hadn't taken much time for you to come around from the incident and continue being yourself. You expected that his offer to listen to your rant would be the extent of his atonement. Could he really still be stuck on it?

Your speculation is pretty much confirmed that these things were all attempts at making up for his poor behavior when he finds him yet again in a similar situation, exhausted and frustrated thanks to all the nuisances in his life. And then you come skipping along happily, greeting him with news of your day. His brows furrow, his eye twitches, and he’s about to open his mouth. And then he meets your gaze and he pauses. Takes a second. Remembers what happened last time, can see a flash of that pained face you made. 

You give him a look of confusion as you observe his expression. At that point, he can only sigh and slump back. 

"Saiki?”

"Let’s just go home and talk.”

l

            “One Nendou…Two Nendous…” murmured Kaidou deliriously on a bench.

            The group stood outside of the cafes and haunted house to talk properly instead of being in the dark (though the students had yet to take off their costumes). It turned out Nendou’s mother was there touring the PK Festival with Saiki’s parents, so they were there, too.

            “You should’ve told me if you were gonna come,” said Nendou.

            “I’m just stopping by because I’m on break,” said Mrs. Nendou.

            “We happened to run into Nendou’s mother and became friends!” said Mrs. Saiki cheerily.

            This is one friendship I wish you wouldn’t make.

            “Well, now that I’ve seen your class’s attraction, I’m going home,” said Mrs. Nendou matter-of-factly. “Good luck with your haunted house.”

            “Hm? We’re not doing a haunted house,” said Nendou.

            “Oh, yeah, we’re borrowing these,” said (Y/N), taking off their zombie mask and setting it to the side.

            “What, you aren’t?” said Mrs. Nendou.

            “Our class is displaying rocks we found in the schoolyard,” said Nendou.

            Saiki sighed. “I’ll go wash my face.” He didn’t need to walk around looking like an idiot.

            He headed into the bathroom and set his glasses to the side while he washed the fake blood from his face.

            Yare yare. This is why school events are such a pain. Lots of minor characters keep showing up and causing trouble for me. And I didn’t manage to go and get coffee jelly with (Y/N) yet, either. This all happened for nothing.

            He finished splashing his face with water and straightened, picking up his glasses. Except when he put them on, he found fake eyeballs instead of green-tinted glass.

            What the heck is this?

            “What do you think, pal? They look good on me, don’t they?” said Nendou, resting Saiki’s glasses in front of his own face.

            “Give those back to me, you idiot,” said Saiki, reaching out. His eyes widened, and he tried to cover his eyes. “Shoot!” He couldn’t help but exclaim out loud with his telepathy.

Too late. As Saiki looked up again, Nendou was already a stone statue, transformed by Saiki’s unfiltered gaze. The stone glasses fell and shattered on the floor. Saiki just stared. Not good.

            “Kusuo?” Outside of the restroom, (Y/N) called out in concern. “I heard you cry out, is everything alright?”

            They always become observant at the wrong moment.

            “Kusuo, I’m coming in!”

            Yare yare, not my dad, too.

            Sure enough, Mr. Saiki nearly kicked down the door, and (Y/N) slid in with them, unable to stay out since they were worried (and there was no one else around, so…).

            “Ah!” cried Mr. Saiki as he saw Nendou.

            Saiki had turned around to avoid eye-contact with anyone. The last thing he needed was more people getting turned to stone.

            “Hey, this is—” Mr. Saiki cut himself off and looked at (Y/N) worriedly.

            “Did you accidentally turn Nendou to stone?” said (Y/N), staring.

            “He took my glasses and looked me in my eyes. That’s his fault,” said Saiki.

            “Kusuo, you can’t just say that!” said Mr. Saiki.

            “They know.”

            “I know,” said (Y/N).

            “About his powers?” said Mr. Saiki, blinking in surprise. (Y/N) nodded. “Oh…alright then.”

            “Can we focus?” said Saiki, irritated. “Just give me your glasses.” Mr. Saiki’s glasses floated through the air and landed on Saiki’s face. Now he could look at people without turning people to stone. “Okay, that power is blocked.”

            “I like your eyes,” blurted out (Y/N) instinctively as they saw Saiki’s purple eyes properly. They had always been obscured by a green tint, but they could see the violet clearly now.

            Saiki short-circuited and froze at the compliment while Mr. Saiki babbled about not being able to see without his glasses.

            Turning pink, (Y/N) coughed. “So, uh, how do we turn him back?”

            Saiki tried to focus. “The effects last twenty-four hours.”

            “Uh-oh, his mom is waiting for him outside,” said (Y/N), frowning.

            “Oh, no, what are you going to do, Kusuo?” said Mr. Saiki, blindly patting Nendou’s shoulder.

            “You’re talking to Nendou. Don’t ever make that mistake again. It ticks me off,” said Saiki.

            “Can you teleport him back to your house?” suggested (Y/N). “Then we can at least make an excuse that Nendou left instead of anyone seeing them.”

            Saiki was reminded of one of the reasons he liked (Y/N): they were actually helpful.

            “Are you listening, Kusuo?” said Mr. Saiki, still patting Nendou’s shoulder.

            Crack

            (Y/N) and Saiki froze before turning. Nendou lay in stone pieces on the ground. (Y/N) covered their mouth in shock, and Mr. Saiki was stricken.

            “Kusuo…Look after your mother, okay?” He raised his phone. “Hello? Is this the police? I’ve killed someone.”

            Saiki grabbed his dad’s shoulder before his sobbing could actually be listened to. “Calm down.” (Y/N) took the phone and ended the call. “You don’t have to go the police. It’s fine.”

            “What?! Really?!” cried Mr. Saiki.

            Saiki picked up Nendou’s head.

            “That’s just a disturbing sight,” said (Y/N).

            “I can turn back time and restore it to how it was,” said Saiki, doing so and letting the statue of Nendou come together once more. (Y/N) breathed a sigh of relief.

            “Whoa!” exclaimed Mr. Saiki.

            “What was that noise?!” Mrs. Nendou banged on the door from outside.

            “Shoot, Nendou’s mother is gonna come in,” said Saiki. “Dad, go hold the door.”

            “Okay!” Mr. Saiki grabbed the door handle and gave a thumbs-up.

            Wham!

            “Ooooh.” (Y/N) winced as Mr. Saiki was thrown into the wall as Mrs. Nendou broke down the door.

            “What happened, you guys?!” cried Mrs. Nendou. She saw the statue. “Huh? What? What?! Riki?!”

            (Y/N) and Saiki exchanged a glance as she walked closer. Then, she patted Nendou’s shoulders.

            “This is amazing! So this is the rock display you guys were talking about!” she exclaimed. “This looks exactly like my son.”

            “Well, I guess this is natural,” said Saiki.

            “They’re definitely related,” said (Y/N).

            “Riki? Huh, where did Riki go?” wondered Mrs. Nendou.

            “Well…probably the restroom,” said Mr. Saiki.

            “We’re in the restroom,” said Saiki, amazed by his father’s terrible attempt at lying.

            “He headed out to check on some other classes. He volunteered to help them earlier in the week since some people are sick,” said (Y/N), smiling.

            “Oh, really? That’s so nice of him,” said Mrs. Nendou.

            Thank you, (Y/N), thought Saiki, thankful as always to have them around.

            “Well, I should help out, too, and give you all a hand,” said Mrs. Nendou.

            “What?”

            “Huh?”

            “You’re taking this to your classroom, right?” said Mrs. Nendou, gesturing to the statue of Nendou. “Now, let’s go!”

            No one could argue with her, and within a few minutes, Nendou was situated in Class 3’s display. People instantly crowded around it, amazed and surprised at the exact likeness.

            “H-Holy crap,” said one student.

            “Why Nendou?” exclaimed another.

            “How did they carve something like this?”

            “Things have gotten worse,” said Saiki as he, Mr. Saiki, and (Y/N) stood to the side. “It’s so obvious that high school students couldn’t make something like that.”

            “Maybe they won’t notice?” (Y/N) offered as much support as they could.

            “Oh, what is this?” The principal walked in. “Oh, my!” He stared at the statue, and (Y/N) and Saiki’s hearts dropped. This situation was quickly growing out of control. “This is an incredibly elaborate stone statue! Is it a gorilla?”

            “Very close, but not quite,” said Saiki.

            Poor Nendou, thought (Y/N).

            “I’m so moved…” The headmaster smiled. “The Best Class Attraction Award goes to Class 3!” he declared.

            (Y/N) and Saiki stared in dismayed shock as even more people crowded into the room to get a look at the winning class’s display and the Nendou statue. They really had lost any semblance of control of the situation.

            “It’s become the showpiece,” said Saiki, crossing his arms.

            “This isn’t good, Kusuo!” cried Mr. Saiki. “Can’t you teleport it out and steal it?!”

            “There’re too many people,” said (Y/N), frowning.

            “Or better yet, should we break it? You can restore it just like you did earlier!” said Mr. Saiki.

            “My power to turn back time can only be used once per day per target,” said Saiki.

            “What?” said Mr. Saiki, panicking. “But that means—”

            “Let’s make sure it doesn’t break again, then,” said (Y/N), concerned about Nendou getting hurt.

            “Whoa, I wonder how tough the stone is,” said one boy, pretending to hit the statue.

            “It’s really hard,” said another, pulling on Nendou’s ear.

            “Don’t touch!” cried Mr. Saiki, running up and pulling them off.

            “Huh? Whoa, what’s with this guy?!” cried the first boy.

            “A scary middle-aged man is shouting,” whispered a girl worriedly.

            “He’s suspicious!”

            “Someone, go get a teacher!”

            Saiki facepalmed, and (Y/N)’s eyes widened, but neither could exactly stop the teachers from dragging Mr. Saiki out. After all, they couldn’t just explain “oh, yeah, that is actually Nendou, Saiki turned him to stone, so please don’t hurt him.”

            “I guess I have no choice. I’ll make Nendou’s safety my top priority,” said Saiki.

            “He is your friend,” added (Y/N).

            “Don’t say that, I don’t have friends. Other than you,” said Saiki.

            (Y/N) just grinned. “Uh-huh.”

            “Take this, Baron Cola!” A young boy had climbed onto Nendou’s shoulders and was pretending to shoot him with a toy gun.

            “Get down, Yuuta,” said Saiki, stepping forward.

            Yuuta brightened upon seeing his neighbor (and, in his mind, favorite superhero). “Cyborg Cider-man No. 2! Look, look! I capture Baron Cola.”

            “No, that’s a gorilla, so get off,” said Saiki.

            (Y/N) didn’t ask what that all meant, but they reached up as Yuuta began to rock Nendou back and forth.

            “You can’t climb on exhibits,” said (Y/N) calmly, setting him down.

            “But it’s Baron Cola!” exclaimed Yuuta.

            “It’s not the real Baron Cola,” said (Y/N). They put their hands on their hips. “Do you understand?”

            Yuuta stared up at them, and Saiki nearly groaned as the image of a superhero in pink superimposed on (Y/N).

            Yare yare, not them too.

            “I understand, Cherry Blossom Lemonade!” cheered Yuuta.

            (Y/N) cocked their head and blinked at Saiki. “Who?”

            “A superhero from a show he likes,” said Saiki.

            “Are you two undercover, Cherry Blossom Lemonade, Cyborg Cider-man No. 2?! Is that why you’re being nice to Baron Cola? Are you on a date?” babbled Yuuta.

            Saiki froze, and (Y/N)’s cheeks warmed.

            “Yuuta, there you are,” said his mother, walking in. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. It’s time to go.”

            “Aww, but I just managed to find the bad guy,” said Yuuta.

            His mother chuckled. “I’m sure you did.” She took him by the hand and led him out.

            “You called her, didn’t you?” said (Y/N), looking at Saiki.

            “Yes,” said Saiki. He had called Yuuta’s mom with his telepathy, but although it had mostly been to keep Yuuta from hurting Nendou, it was also to avoid more of Yuuta’s questions. Him and (Y/N), on a date? Saiki had barely gotten over figuring out he had a crush on them. That was too much for him with so much else going on.

            “Well, the festival is almost over,” said (Y/N), glancing at the clock and trying to push aside Yuuta’s assumptions (and their blush). “I don’t think we’ll be able to taste our classmates’ coffee jelly, but I think we’ve earned a trip to Café Mami after this.”

            Okay, so maybe a date—which this wasn’t—with (Y/N) was something Saiki would get excited for.

l

            (Y/N) and Saiki both let out a content hum as they took a bite of their coffee jellies. They had successfully kept Nendou in one piece and teleported him to his bathroom at home so, come tomorrow, he’d transform back like nothing had happened.

            “I’m glad Nendou will be alright,” said (Y/N).

            “I’m glad we avoided more trouble,” said Saiki.

            (Y/N) nodded. “What about your glasses? Are you going to keep borrowing your dads’ or can you get yours fixed?”

            “I can get mine fixed,” said Saiki, but, unfortunately, that would mean dealing with a certain someone.

            “Are you going to go back to the green tint?” said (Y/N).

            Saiki nodded.

            “Too bad,” said (Y/N), smiling. “I like your eyes.”

            Saiki felt his heart stutter, and (Y/N) looked firmly down at their coffee jelly in order to not over-analyze his reaction in case they had just made a fool of themself. Still, they couldn’t help it. They did like his eyes. They liked everything about Saiki.

            For his part, Saiki found he liked the compliment. Appearances weren’t something he cared about or judged since, for the most part, he just saw people as bones or muscle, but hearing that (Y/N) liked something about him was nice. He wanted them to like him, too.

            But for now, (Y/N) and Saiki were content to sit across from each other in content silence with coffee jelly. Still, though, thoughts of how much nicer it would be if this was a date flitted through their mind.

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@constellationguy

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@sweatyinternettrash

@paastaboi

@unorthodox-gob

@girlswhopanic

@h-i-g-h-w-a-y-t-o-h-e-l-l-l

saiki wasn't sure when he started caring, but after bumping into you in the hallway that one time, he started noticing you more and more.

you two weren't in the same class but he would start looking forward to the short "hello's" you would exchange at the end of the day as you make your way out of the front door.

he thought it was weird, the way he'd start seeing more four-leaf clovers and ladybugs - both beings signs of luck - after seeing you. he deduced it to just being because the weather was getting warmer and the two events were completely unrelated.

if he was having a bad day, he'd spot you somewhere in his vision and it immediately brought his mood up.

he didn't notice the way his ears perked up whenever someone in his class mentioned you, unintentionally eavesdropping into the conversation to hear more.

once summer came, he rarely saw you. he wasn't sure why that bothered him. if kaidou and nendou dragged him out of his house, he would unconsciously hope to see you.

nendou decided it would be a good day to go to the beach, showing up at saiki's house with kaidou, the two of them holding blankets and pool noodles, along with a beach ball. saiki was not eager in the slightest, but he had a feeling in his gut that something would happen. that's how he decided to tag along.

also just so nendou and kaidou would get away from his house...

arriving at the beach he was immediately aware of your presence, looking around until he spotted you laughing in the water with a few friends.

he felt slightly relieved to see you after so long.

that day, all he said was a simple "hello" to you. but he felt unfulfilled as he made his way home, thinking about how he said something more. he knew you were happy to see him, your expression had lit up as you set your eyes on him.

he remembered how his heart rate went up a little as you showed him that smile you had on often.

he hopes that next time it's serendipity.