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Was drawing instead of revising, which I should really be doing. This was a 20 minute study and I got the proportions wrong and didn’t have the time to fix them because I didn’t notice until rendering. Sad times, cause I’ve actually got to revise now💔
don’t you love the fact that my grandparents randomly have insam-ju (pickled ginseng alcohol) randomly hidden away behind their tv? It’s also 18 years old and pickled in a mixture of whiskey and soju because it’s meant to be soju but my grandma hates it😭
Tribulations of an anaesthesiologist: Surgeon! Itoshi Sae x Anaesthesiologist! reader
You like your job, you really do: you can save lives without getting your hands dirty, and still be able to hold your own in arguments with the aunties because yes, you may not have a boyfriend, but you're a doctor! Your parents are proud of you (at least you think). You have friends, adorable plants, and a lovely coffee shop owner who gives you discounts- what more could you want?
But all it takes to ruin your (relatively) perfect life is the arrival of one insufferable, teal eyed, cardiothoracic surgeon: one who seems to have made it his mission to make your life as miserable as possible.
SERIES
of stick figures and missed penalties: Vivian Hugo x reader
Hugo knows that you're special, that the two of you are meant to be together- he's known that for years, always believing that fate would bring you together. Patience was a virtue in itself, was it not? He just had to wait, to trust in his preordained destiny. But what was that looming feeling of dread that he felt every time he saw you with some weird guy, smiling? Why was it that every time he tried to get those sacred three words out, something seemed to stop him from doing so? Could it be that fate had got it wrong?
(basically just Hugo questioning fate and finally taking his destiny into his own hands)
ONESHOT
i'm posting these rough summaries/teasers on here so people can get a feel for the fics- please let me know if you'd like to be on the taglist for any of them! xxx
cw: 6.4k wc, not proof or beta read, university au, fluff, drinking, sex and alcoholism mentioned, lots of clubbing, friends to lovers, flirty friendships, mutual pining, eventual confession, kissing, slapping, gojō satoru is sadly down bad, this fic is so me (don’t drink.) | ao3 link
✶ — frat!gojo satoru x uni student!reader
Gojō Satoru doesn’t forget the fact that despite your lackadaisical nature, you can down shots like you’re being paid per glass. He expects it with a massive fucking grin when you show up to the pre-games after blowing everyone off in the group chat. It’s not long until you’re all separated at the club but somehow you stick together like two peas in a pod when he says something too honest and tells you that he’d be okay if it were just you and him at a deli eating sloppy food together. Now he’s at your apartment at two a.m. and fumbling about how much he likes you.
Unfortunately, the best parties are always when you actually show up to the pre-games.
When the analog clock hanging loosely on your wall finally ticks 7:50, there is an irritating thrum at your prefrontal cortex that completely removes your ability to think like a normal human being. You’ve been taking in your surroundings for the past fifteen minutes: the smooth very light beige plaster of your walls that you fussed over for hours, the clean, textureless ceilings and the recessed lights stuffed into them, and all you’ve gathered was that you could probably make it to the pregames your friends were having right now if you tried.
You wouldn’t say you came to these often, nor would you say you didn’t. It’s not that you don’t want to, and it’s not that you want to. Most of the time, you spend your days complaining about wanting to go out, but then not going out when the time comes. Despite the restless, insatiable way you refuse to close your eyelids, and the unforgiving workload you have in your life, you’re mostly glued to your bed doing nothing.
You give yourself about ten seconds of stillness after you sit up—because if you don’t, you probably couldn’t tell if this was gonna be a horrible idea or not, and embarrassingly, you felt dizzy getting up.
It doesn’t even last ten seconds. In the eighth second, you’re stumbling down on your bare feet to your bathroom and lathering yourself in hinoki Le Labo, scrubbing your skin as if you were trying to exfoliate your sins away. After you step out of the shower, one of the few buzzing things inside your mind is to bring a damn charger because last time you didn't and you knew what happened. There’s nothing unique about your outfit except maybe the bangles clacking loudly against your arms, but you fancy the wedges you picked out as you drag yourself around your apartment.
“Where you going?” the voice that perks up in your ear is soft and a little raspy. You turn around and the black bag hanging off your shoulder slips to the creased V inside your arm.
Utahime looks at you with mild interest. She’s leaning on the wall and eating the greek yoghurt you bought in bulk, her shirt slipping off one of her shoulders. You’re pretty sure she’s not actually questioning you. After crashing at your place and living with you for almost three months now, she’s acclimated herself to your night habits, but you answer anyway.
“Uh, out.”
“Mm,” she nods dismissively. You stare at her for a few moments and she stares at you back until her brows lift up, in acceptance probably, shrugging her shoulders then going back to the living room.
You’re in the clean, comfy seats of a ride hailed car within minutes of leaving your apartment. You remember that Utahime thinks you’re utterly performative—and in her words, acting like Gojō—for trying not to seem from your upbringing by not getting chauffeured around but you pay her no mind. You lean against the windows and watch the dark night of the city. The skies are coating layers upon layers of itself and you find yourself staring up mindlessly while twirling a strand of your hair around your finger.
You didn’t plan on coming today, and you nobly told your friends since the days before that you weren’t coming. Hell, you actually didn’t want to come. A lot of the things you do are from impulsivity.
But right now, you are entirely not minding anything at all as you step out of the car, tipping the driver. It takes about five seconds until someone notices you creeping up on your group of friends, the ability granted by the isolated, small foyer of Gojō’s apartment.
Geto is the first one to notice your appearance while in the middle of tying his hair up. The drop of his jaw comes first and then a big fucking scoff accompanied with a disbelieving grin. “Holy shit! [Name], who the fuck invited you here?”
Shoko’s there, on the couch and turning away from you until Geto’s voice rattled her ears. Her head cranes back and you watch her face contort into a similarly disbelieved expression as Geto. A Seven Stars is tucked between her lips, half-smoked. A puff of gray vapor comes out of her mouth and evaporates into a thin, hot air, and you hear the whisper of your name coming from her that makes you entirely too pleased.
You give them a light smile. “Yo.”
It’s a second later when Gojō Satoru comes into your view with an unopened bottle of Smirnoff pink lemonade vodka, that specific one you absolutely loathe somehow in his hand, and that signature grin showing off his incisors. His socks are two different colors—a stark red and the bluest blue possible, and you are absolutely sure that this insufferable prick is gonna wear those pair of neon purple running shoes he owns that you honestly think do look cool.
The sunglasses on his head threaten to fall off as he stumbles down the hardwood corridor. The laugh in his throat doesn’t die, not at all, it just satiates as he finally takes you in. He gives you a knowing grin.
“Didn’t you say you weren’t coming?”
You glare at him, though it’s half–assed. You’re never actually mad at him. Throughout your five year friendship, from high school until now as he blows up your phone with random bullshit him and Geto gets up to while you cry your ass off for your finals project, you’ve never really been mad at him. You tug lightly at the strap of your bag as you give him a sly smile.
“Change of plans, Tōru,” one of your hands fly up into the air carefreely.
Geto and Shoko don’t even bother with you two. If Geto and Gojō are bread and butter put together, you and Shoko were stuck like two miniature lego pieces put together, you and Gojō were somehow like superglue not from the Andromeda galaxy. You don’t even consider yourself that close to Gojō and yet everyone in your friend group keeps giving you knowing looks whenever you’re with the white-haired freak. Geto comes to sit next to Shoko, leg tucked under his lap. You watch them for a split second leaning in as if they’re discussing government transactions.
You saunter into his kitchen, already reaching for a slippery, red plastic cup on the counter and Gojō follows.
“Yeah?” he hums, taking a sip from a cup on the counter, nevermind knowing whose it was. “Or did you just miss me?”
You turn to him, amusement lacing your face. His pupils aren’t blown wide yet. One of the most striking features of his face to you, and you’re sure everyone else would agree, is his eyes. You have no trouble admitting it, but it’s a bit humiliating how much time you spend analyzing the soft corners of his irises where the baby blue isn’t that intense. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Too late,” he grins, the soft parts of his cheeks turning into those sharp dimples you’ve looked at since you were high schoolers. “You showed up.”
You roll your eyes at him and there’s a minute second of silence that comes after. You retaliate at it because you’re entirely bad at staying still, reaching up at his sunglasses and putting them on your own head. He’s gotten into the habit of collecting glasses now and you are entirely clueless on where this obsession came from. Though, it did start a little after he joined Sigma Chi.
Gojō has a small face. He’s proportionate, but honestly a little feminine, coupled with those long eyelashes he has. You keep wondering about their length knowing damn well they’re just genetic. The sunglasses fit on your head fine. You take out your phone swiftly from your bag, opening the front camera, greeted by your own reflection, intentionally smudged eyeshadow creasing your eyelids, sunglasses on the top of your head on a harshly cold, black night. They don’t look all that bad, but you prefer round frames, and Gojō suits round frames better anyway.
Your view of yourself on the phone is obstructed by a mildly tanned hand reaching over you. The squint in your lash line is instantaneous. Your eyes dart to Gojō, watching him lean over to grab something from his cupboards. You can smell the sharp citrus of his aftershave.
“Move.”
Gojō gives you a look, returning your glare. “You’re in my way.”
“You have, like, the entire apartment,” you flatly declare, dodging his arm quickly, trying not to make physical contact with him. You take a childish enjoyment from the fake animosity you harbor for your closest friend. It’s been this way since you can remember, and you know he doesn’t mind either.
You see the slight shake of his head while he processes your words. He’s buzzed, just a little. Gojō’s always been a lightweight with too much pride. When he catches on, he scoffs playfully. “And yet, you’re in this spot.”
“Insufferable,” you mutter.
Gojō chuckles. His hand comes up and retrieves the skinny, square pair of sunglasses you stole from him and you briefly glance at his watch and see the time. It’s almost ten, and you’re sure the group is still going to do whatever shenanigans they’re doing here. Geto and Nanami usually watch a movie together, something obnoxiously boring while they get a drink from Gojō’s mini fridge. Though, you didn’t see Nanami when you came here, but you’re sure he’s here.
There’s a dizziness that comes with your first proper shot of the night. You’re sure it’s because the only thing that’s been in your stomach for the past eight hours has been a Coke Zero, two Snickers, and two liters of water. You don’t wanna die tonight, not on par as usual, because tomorrow your parents invited you to brunch and you do not want to act like a buffoon nor wear sunglasses to block out the light in front of your mom and dad. So you eat the chicken wings Shoko had ordered and pray that you aren’t blacking out tonight.
You hear Gojō’s whiny voice in your ear again. The Jesus under his breath in response to it suddenly being your fourth shot is for you but you’re entirely too tired of him being so shocked at your drinking capacity ‘cause of his inconsistent tolerance. You know he secretly doesn’t even like the taste of alcohol. You call him a pussy for that fact.
“Yo, [Name],” Gojō calls out to you, voice a low rasp. “We’re goin’.”
You nod at him. You reapply your lip tint and tap your lips repeatedly—and there’s Gojō, for some reason stopping in his tracks and simply looking at you. You don’t even pay attention to it.
It’s not long after, you’re cooped up in Nanami’s sedan and being driven by him to the designated club at a speed you should definitely not be comfortable with if you weren’t already loosened up. If someone asked your opinion, it’s stupid to ask Nanami to be the designated driver when he actually does like the taste of alcohol, not to mention he’s down ever since Haibara said he couldn’t make it. Still, you make it to the dimly lit club that you were so adamant on saying no to a couple of hours ago.
Neon drips between your ears, eyes, and mouth. The music is loud just the way you prefer it and the DJ is actually laying something listenable. The lights flash an array of bright colors and you swear you can already taste another bottle of vodka in your throat. It smells entirely of perfume and sweaty dancing bodies.
You follow Gojō’s silhouette naturally so you end up at the bar. You don’t want to know what Shoko is doing in the back, Geto’s nowhere to be seen, and Nanami went to the toilet.
You watch as his white hair, previously ruffled but not messy now mixes with his own sweat, parts of his bangs sticking to his own forehead. You watch the cloy of hair but then your eyes shift downward and locks with his, watching his pupils already blown out, and the satisfied little smile on his face. He’s already ordering another drink. You’re sure in the next ten minutes he’s going to buy a bottle—hell, he reserved a table, you read it in the group chat.
His movements are slower now, sloppier. The bartender hands him a drink within the second and you watch him lean on the fake marble counter. His head drops a little. The pink of his lips touch the rim of his glas—he’s going to drink it, but he doesn’t, choosing to put the drink to his nose instead, taking a whiff of the aroma.
You quirk an eyebrow at him, watching his lips. “You’re already tipsy.”
“I’m always like this,” he responds matter-a-factly, swishing around the drink. It’s something sweet and you love that you know it that easily. Gojō never drinks hard when he’s coming in, and he especially hates ruining his night by drinking the bitter stuff first. You love that you know his habits.
“No, you’re worse,” you disagree, turning to the bartender and giving him a small smile and signal. You see him looking at your lips and you wonder if it’s the lip combo.
He hums at your answer. He takes the first sip from his glass and you give him a half-shot glare at the obnoxious, refreshed ahh sound he makes. The drink travels down his mouth and his throat bobs softly as he swallows. He finally counters. “You’re just noticing more.”
He gives himself a few seconds before starting a conversation, something he admittedly picked up from you. You were both impulsive beings, someone had to develop sooner than the other. “Holy fuck, you’re actually here,” he chuckles to himself. “Hey, how’s that project you have? With the—modules shit?”
“Going great,” a smile tugs at your lips at his question. Your shoulders bunch into a small shrug as you add, “Fushiguro wants me on a stick though.”
“Uh, sexually?”
“How can that be sexually?” you ask, sitting down on the round sofa of Gojō’s reserved table.
There is a moment where Gojō genuinely seems to be in thought. A very white, very cloudy thought up in a blue sky, but a thought nonetheless. He settles on the plush black sofa as well, sitting as close to you as someone would usually disagree with but it’s alright. His knee bumps yours and you let them touch, curving your body mildly so you’d be hit by the warmth of his side.
“Dunno, you’re fucking terrible to be around with,” he finally states, in that mocking tone you want to punch so bad. He throws you one of those arrogant little grins again. “It’s ‘cause of daddy's princess treatment, maybe.”
“I work for my shit,” the edge of your voice goes down with the dryness in your throat. Nevertheless, you shoot him a smile of your own, flushed cheeks making you entirely too hazy to remember to order water somehow.
“We all do, princess! Some just work harder!” Gojō slurs out, adjusting his sunglasses and putting them properly on his face. You don’t recall how he got a bottle of gin wrapped around his grabby hands, but he sets it on the glass table anyway, the bottle making contact with a small clink.
“I’ll slap you,” you sip on the last of your drink before you threaten him lowly.
He doesn’t even seem to be bothered. You’re not buzzed enough to not be able to decipher clear signals, thank the gods, and he’s clearly either into this, or being his creepy self as usual. But you’re buzzed enough to not see the fond way his eyes crinkle at the corners, and you don’t know that Gojō, who’s currently fucked out of his mind, is somehow still seeing you with rainbows and dolphins around you.
“Do it.”
You want to hit him. Not in a real way. Not in any way that can cause him harm, absolutely not. But you do absolutely want to hit him, and you do. Your hand comes up and the soft, moisturized skin of your palm collides with the meat of his cheek. It’s entirely too harsh for what you wanted to do, but then you remember it’s Gojō and you know he’s had two girls slap him across that specific cheek and he goes to the gym. He probably felt nothing. Still, his head tips to the side sharply.
The fluff of his hair is a little addicting to you, if you were being honest right now. It bounced as you slapped him. And you don’t know why, and you mostly blame it on the alcohol, but you’re starting to not mind his cologne, the one that you once said was a little bit too citrusy for your liking (which was code for you absolutely hated it). It suits him, maybe if the bergamot notes were stronger it’d suit him more.
He stays still in that position, head turned, adjacent to the floor for a few seconds. You wonder if he was sober if he’d feel the weight of the slap or not and whether he’d be insulted or not.
“Holy fuck,” he finally chuckles out.
You screech at him but the corners of your mouth curve up. You almost spit the drink in your mouth out, and it in fact splashes on Gojō. “Idiot!”
There’s not even seconds until you’re both laughing hysterically. A faint red mark in the form of your palm and the slender fingers you used stretches across his cheek, branding him with what you just did to him, humiliatingly. You don’t even understand why you find it so funny but there’s tears brimming in your eyes as you clutch your stomach with one hand softly, the other hand slipping out and crawling its way up Gojō’s arm.
You don’t feel the shift in his bicep, the subtle flex when your fingernails, with twenty dollar press-ons in those piano-themed sets, brush against his upper arm. It’s subtle. The contort of his face both smoothens and deepens.
You take a moment to feel the music in your veins, and the Suntory in your system, of course. The music is something with a lot of bass, and the club speakers are banging against the door of your brain. You really want to dance and you’re sure Gojō wants to as well, granted he doesn’t black out before you do. You tug him. You really only live once and go clubbing once in a while if you aren’t lackadaisical.
It’s fun for about five minutes. Actual dancing, you mean. It’s because when you’re tipsy you honestly don’t want to move all that much. But still, you make an effort to wrap your arms around Gojō’s neck, pulling him closer and jumping around to the rapid beat of the music. You watch Gojō putting his glasses back up.
It’s loud, it’s stupidly loud but you loveit.
“You’re actually here,” Gojō suddenly says, the thick and gravelly parts of his voice settling as dehydration takes over him too.
You give him a raised eyebrow, moving your hips to the hi-hats of the specific song playing on the speakers, eyes coming up to look at him. You were originally looking at a couple who were obviously fighting at a private booth not far from where you two were standing. “You’ve said that already.”
“Yeah, but like—you’re here,” he says again as if that’ll make things clearer. You understand the sentiment and you think it’s ridiculous, especially with the hazy fog in his eyes.
You respond flatly, “...you’re drunk.”
“A little.”
“More than a little,” you snort at him. Your hands, previously intertwined together behind his head, slide down to his shoulders, finding the hard muscles that he trained—what, every two days? For—at the gym and the angular lines of his body. They settle there firmly.
“Don’t ruin it,” he deadpans.
“You love me ruining things,” you pout at him, and suddenly you’re struggling to keep eye contact with him. It’s not the height difference, that would be a stupid reason, but something else. And for some reason, you think he’s struggling to keep eye contact with you. The pointed tip of your stilettos dig into his shoulders softly.
He sighs, but a smile, almost an amused sneer makes way to his face. His hands, respectfully placed on your own shoulders at first, slide slowly down your back to your waist, sitting snugly on the dip above your hips. He breathes out. “You’re annoying.”
“Then why are you still here?” you murmur challengingly. You nearly don’t register the way your bodies are leaning in closer, body heat mixing into one giant heat. The leather of his jacket feels a bit scruffy at your hands as you paw him. He’s being an excellent test for you to test the durability of your press-ons, as you continuously dig into his body and apply pressure at the tips of your nails.
He doesn’t even give it a thought, he just says it. “Cause you’re here.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” you reply as if it were a fact. The space between your eyebrows transforms into a jagged crease as you say it. You’re starting to fully grasp what he’s trying to say, or whatever he wants to say but can’t or isn’t doing under all his drunken bravado.
He takes another moment. The warmth of his hands are nice against your waist. “I know.”
Somehow, nothing is really awkward after what he just said and admitted. Nothing as bad as it should be. Maybe it’s because throughout your friendship, you’ve always had a touch-heavy dynamic, or maybe it’s how you suddenly feel fond of the citrus smell concentrated on his neck. It’s not as awkward as you would expect for an innuendo so blatant.
And that's exactly the problem. Gojō’s head droops down slightly. There is a sunken, ashy circle beneath his blue eyes that you’re sure shouldn’t be there because you know damn well what his hardest class is. The cold tips of his fingers briefly graze your skin under the top you’re wearing. He huffs out, he doesn’t even mean for it to come out of his mouth: “You’d hate me if I was serious.”
It doesn’t hit you as it should; a joke. Instead, it feels genuine and an uncomfortable pink dust against your cheeks.
“You’re not serious about anything,” you break the five second silence with a mutter, a nervous scowl playing on your face, though not from actual hostility. Just a small complaint at where this is going—but deep down, you don’t mind, which you don’t even realize why fully.
His lips curl down. “...not true.”
“Prove it,” you say.
He shoots back instantaneously, but you could see the way the gears grinded in his head as if genuinely debating it, the momentary hesitation that came after you said that, and the insignificant lean he made into your space. Your stomach twists in a good way, and you’re somehow not drunk enough to not miss that cue. He grumbles out. “Not here.”
You whisper to him, though what is a whisper in a club where the lights are this everchanging and the music is this loud? “You’re wrecked.”
You’re glad it’s not a rave or else you’d know you’d have a colossal headache in the morning and a white ringing in the middle of your ear since you didn’t bring ear plugs. But even then, the silence in your own head, your own heads, is enough to clog the sound. You barely register someone bumping into your backside, stumbling from their inhibition, only noticing after Gojō’s grip on your waist tightens a fraction.
“You’re so fucking pretty,” he whispers to you pathetically.
That is not the last thing you remember on this night, only the one that kept you up tomorrow night as you finally stopped recovering from the slight hangover. Nothing in the night felt as important to you after you sobered up, mostly because it was you guys finding Geto downing shots alone with a group of strangers he met and losing Shoko as per usual at functions like these.
You’re pleasantly surprised the headache wasn’t banging at the deepest parts of your brain, and even more pleased at how nothing embarrassing happened, not enough for you to suck in your teeth when lost in thought during your brunch with your parents. You didn’t even have to wear sunglasses to hide the bloodshot in your eyes.
You go cold in the group chat. It’s something you do regularly after parties so nobody really checks up on you, and you aren’t the type to answer quickly in hindsight. You don’t talk much in it in general too, though occasionally you come out with a horrible story about one of the guys that keeps wanting to see you. But it gnaws on you this time, and apparently on Gojō too. Within the two days of you living your life, he’s texted you double the amount he usually does.
Read receipts are turned off. You scroll through his texts thoroughly and you do want to respond, but you’re entirely too mortified. There’s this sudden realization that what happened last Saturday was real and you don’t know what to feel about it.
The lights of your flat aren’t the fluorescent stark white you were greeted with when you went away from your parents for the first time and stayed at a dorm. They are a deep, intimate yellowed color that soaks up into the dew of your skin. Utahime isn’t awake, she’s fast asleep in her room since between you and her, she’s the only one with a proper and strictly enforced sleeping schedule, which is probably why her skin is so good. It’s your fault for being restless, but it’s also the can of Red Bull’s fault, and the grueling assignments your professor thinks your class can manage and not cry during.
There’s a hesitant, woody knock against your door. You didn’t order any takeout.
You drag yourself out of your room and your fingertips briefly touch the single taupe accent wall you have in your apartment. Why is someone at your door at two in the morning. You carefully slide the peeping hole of the door and place your eye aligned with the circle, focusing on whatever is on the other side. You see a hoodie you know all too well is Gojō’s.
You open the door with two unlocks of the latches.
“Hey,” he greets you first.
“Satoru?” you test his name in your mouth quizzically. He doesn’t look like a wreck, doesn’t look like he’s been drinking, but entirely looks way too tired and fueled merely by caffeine. You want to give him a lecture about taking care of himself properly instead of eating gym slop everyday and drinking every weekend but you’d be a hypocrite. “Why the hell are you here?”
“Wanted to crash,” he replies simply, but Gojō is a terrible liar because his ears perk up when he does. His nails are a tad bitten down, you notice that you also notice the way he’s fidgeting with the hem of his hoodie, rolling it around in between his fingers.
“Iori’s here,” you state cleanly. You remember the last time Gojō stayed over, he took Utahime’s not-yet room—you were too pretend germaphobic to let him into your room. You laughed as Utahime whined to you about having shared a mattress with the ‘pompous freak.’ “And uh, she would mind you sleeping on her bed if she weren’t—”
“I wanted to see you,” his voice overlaps yours, cutting you off.
“...oh.”
You’re entirely too tired for this conversation, or any conversation at all if you can be honest. You should have probably slept hours ago, but you were so deep in your sunk-cost fallacy that now you’ve somehow opened a door to your best friend saying he wanted to see you at two in the morning.
“Fuck—I think I like you,” he starts, the ends of his voice fraying with a stiff dryness. Gojō forgets to drink sometimes, especially if he’s been chewing his stupid teal gum he keeps in his back pocket. “No, I like you. I really fucking like you.”
“Oh,” what else can you say right now?
You watch him run a hand over his hair. It’s greasy, especially his bangs. You remember the disgusted look you gave him after you found out he doesn’t wash his bangs, nor does he push up his hair when he’s washing his face. Your eyes stare at him and those intensely blue things, then they drop down to the shoulders you were holding just days before, the relaxed but chiseled lines of his forearms, and the still-there fidget of his hands.
“I don’t even know what I’m saying,” he frustratedly mumbles, almost like it was meant more for himself than for you. The pathetic sincerity in the way he says the next part is what gets to you. “I just—wanted to see you.”
Something blooms inside your stomach. You punch it down for a second so you’d not make irrational decisions. You ask, instead. “Did you sleep?”
The look he gives you after that question is priceless. The hot, trickling feelings inside your abdomen you just felt is just slightly replaced with mortification. It was a dumb question, granted. “It’s two a.m., what do you think?”
Silent settles between you two, something common now for some reason.
“Well, do you want to come in?” you offer hesitantly. You almost don’t catch the way your own hand fiddles with the pointed tip of your press-ons, but you do after feeling your own hand touching your jugular in slow strokes, feeling the artery to ground you to something.
He simply nods. “Yeah.”
Not even a second later, and you hate yourself a bit for seeming too eager, you open the door wider and step aside to let him in. His right foot moves first and he enters your foyer with those vivid purple running shoes. You’re a hundred-and-one percent sure he hasn’t run a day in those shoes. He hates cardio.
Gojō’s been to this flat a couple of times. Most times, before Utahime were here, to crash at your place and watch Quentin Tarantino movies that he swore were the absolute peak of fiction. But with Utahime moving in with you, the visits were more infrequent—mostly because you refused to let Gojō come since Utahime, while she didn’t have a hate boner for him, would give you the most loathsome lecture about why you let him in. You don’t really understand how their beef started and you didn’t take mind to it. Utahime didn’t actually hate him, Gojō was just a prick, in fact, she was perfectly fine with you hanging out with him. For some reason, now the knowing looks she gives you when you mention Gojō are starting to make a little sense.
You walk to your living room, soft ruffled socks hitting against the wood in a muffled rhythm. Gojō follows, hands in his pockets but looking too tense for the situation at hand. You slide over to your kitchen and open your fridge. You feel utterly hopeless for yourself for a brief moment as you stare at the lack of produce in your fridge—the only healthy things in your fridge being from Utahime’s cooking side hustle and her actual ability to cook. You grab a can of Red Bull.
Your bedroom still has the soft diffused lights as you did prior to Utahime, Gojō recognized. You offer him the can of Red Bull as if it were a peace offering. He gives you a look but takes the blue and white can anyway.
“Take off your clothes,” you say blankly, staring at his gray hoodie.
Gojō blinks at your request, taken aback. He looks down at his clothes, then back to you. He doesn’t know where the hell this fake habit of being clean came from that’s been trailing around him for the past six months came from. “They aren’t dirty.”
“Take off the jacket,” you compromise.
He stares at you for roughly three seconds before he unzips the hoodie, revealing a compression shirt that looks entirely too small on him now. He’s broader and leaner than he was a month ago and now you’re wondering how aggressive his cut is right now. Because Gojō has a vanity problem, just slightly. He doesn’t even complain at your request, normally he does.
“You sleeping with me?” you didn’t mean for that to sound the way it did, voice a little throaty.
“Are you offering?” he quirks an inquisitive eyebrow at you, staring down at your frame.
Under typical circumstances, you’d scoff at him and the implication violently. You don’t. While you didn’t want to sleep with him now, and even if in the movies, when the tension hits it's breaking point and the love interest confesses, they’ll end up fucking, you were too tired to even want the idea of sex. So you respond half-assedly. “Maybe later.”
You climb back into your bed and tug up the off-white bedding, a mess from your previous lack of stillness while you were working on a class project. You pull the duvet up and kick up your legs, wrapping your entire body with the thick blanket. Your head falls back on an understatedly out of place Cinnamoroll pillow, plush feet caging your neck in.
Gojō just stands there like he doesn’t know what the hell is happening or what to do.
You sigh. “Just come into bed. It’s already awkward as it is.”
He blinks, yet he moves. His lanky body awkwardly shuffles against the sheets and you are suddenly painfully aware that Gojō Satoru is just that tall. You feel the silky fabric of your duvet being pulled from your side lightly as he steps in and you cage it in with your body weight. When he settles in, he’s staring at the wall in front of him, and you’re staring at the smooth ceiling.
You finally blurt it out.
“I like you too.”
You don’t expect his response to be so entirely noncommittal. If it were any other man, you’d have to punt him from across Virginia to a rural city in China. But sometimes Gojō’s simply this. “Mhm.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?” he asks and you can see from your peripheral the shift in the muscles of his forehead, one raising up in another questioning furrow. It takes him a second, but then his expression changes and he turns to look at you, eyes wide. “Oh wait, shit. Really?”
The silence that lingers between you two is heavy, but not bad at all, more akin to a weighted blanket than a wall. Gojō is still staring at you, those impossibly blue eyes searching yours from the side of your face as if he’s trying to memorize the exact shade of your irises in the dim, yellowed light of the room.
“Yes,” you finally breathe out.
“So.”
“I don’t think I wanna talk about it right now,” you say, cutting off whatever nonsense he’s about to spew in your bed, laying next to you, grinning until the fine lines near his eyes crinkle at the corners. The adrenaline of the confession is fading, leaving you bone-tired and completely limp.
“Okay,” his voice drops into that heavy register that makes your stomach do another somersault.
“I wanna sleep.”
“...Yeah.”
You look up at him. Despite the absurdity of the situation—how it’s almost three a.m., his mere arrival, the Red Bull on the nightstand, the purple shoes currently abandoned at your door—you can’t help the small smile tugging at the corners of your mouth. He returns the soft and private expression. It feels entirely too intimate for a kitchen counter and clubs kind of friendship.
You scoff at the mere domesticity of it, the sound muffled by your duvet. Gojō takes it as a challenge, or probably just an invitation. He leans down, his movement fluid but deceptively slow, and you’re crowded with his citrusy cologne again—no doubt reapplied before he came—and his natural scent, just something entirely Satoru.
When his lips finally press against yours, there’s no swell of orchestral music, only the quiet hum of your refrigerator in the background and your air conditioning amplifying the sound of your own thrumming heart against your ribs. It’s warm, a little desperate, and tastes mildly of his mentholated gum. You reach out, fingers interlocking with the soft white fluff of his hair, pulling him closer to reciprocate.
He pulls back just a fraction, his nose brushing against yours, breath warm against your skin.
“Go to sleep.”
“Yes ma’am,” he murmurs, finally settling his long frame into the mattress. He doesn’t try to pull you into a cuddle, he just rests his hand near yours in the sheets. The tension in your shoulders finally release. You’re going to have to explain a lot of things to Utahime in the morning, but for now you just close your eyes, a satisfied smile on your lips.
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Hi anon! You’re very much welcome to send me fic ideas as long as they’re not nsfw or really dark, but I can’t promise you that the fic ideas will be written sorry. xx
I’m definitely thinking of writing most if not all of these sometime in the future, but I was wondering if there are any people would particularly like to read!
Surgeon! Sae x Anaesthesiologist! Reader- this would be a hospital au with appearances from a lot of other characters from bllk. Enemies to lovers au, mutual pining, slow burn. I’m also planning for it to be absolutely crammed with as much comedy as I can put in. SERIES, slice of life vibes
Rin x Pianist! Reader- childhood friends to lovers (I’m absolutely obsessed with this trope), he fell first and fell harder, Bildungsroman (coming of age) story, slowburn. SERIES
Vivien Hugo x reader- reader is an art history major. Friends to lovers, romcom vibes. The plot is basically Hugo trying to confess to an extremely oblivious reader, but hear me out!!!
Pairing: Michael Kaiser x reader. Summary: You’ve been searching for you soulmate your whole life, the one that’s meant to be. But what after all those years, you finally realise: what if that perfect love was closer than you thought it was? Tropes and extra info: Childhood friends to lovers, pining, slow burn, fluff. Not canon unfortunately :( Wc: 6.9k. A/n: First time posting my work on here, so a little nervous! This wasn’t proofread, so please forgive me if there are any errors. Happy reading!
AGE 20
“I can’t believe you’re actually still reading this rubbish,” Kaiser scoffed.
Frowning at the blonde boy, you looked up from your current position, peering up over the top of your magazine.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” you said airily, adjusting your leg slightly. You prodded him with your toe, chuckling as he slapped the offending foot, pushing it away with an irked expression.
“No but seriously though,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Haven’t you outgrown horoscopes and palmistry and all that?”
You shook your head disapprovingly, reading the magazine pages before you with renewed concentration. The palmistry today was no good: the only people with that many wrinkles on their hands had to be approaching their century year mark. Humming, you redirected your gaze to the horoscope pages. Today, you should avoid the colour orange and take your chance- luck is in the air! Well, it was always nice to have a bit of luck on your side, you thought. Looking for Kaiser’s, you grinned. Beware of the old woman in black. Misfortune lies ahead.
You nodded approvingly, looking at Kaiser smugly. “Well Mihya, you’re just salty because your horoscope’s not as good as mine.”
Kaiser scowled, snatching your magazine and placing it on the table, just as you were setting your gaze upon a particularly interesting section- Your soulmate may be closer than you think!
You glared, temporarily sitting up in indignation before flopping back to your original position, blowing a few stubborn strands of hair off your face.
Kaiser groaned in exasperation. “You’re stupid to think that some sort of greater being out there controls our lives. Why would you even want them to, anyways? Chances are they’ll just be yet another shitty god.”
“Optimism, my dear Michael,” you grinned, gesturing with your hands wildly. “Fate has to be real, as evidenced by the fact that you have such an amazing best friend.”
The man in question rolled his eyes at you, letting out a huff of exasperation. The pair of you had always been this way: you were the starry eyed romantic and Michael your cynical skeptic.
He called you gullible, naive; unable to let go of your childhood fantasies, saying it with such comic disdain in his voice that you couldn’t help mock glaring at him every time. Somewhere down along the line of your friendship, he had decided to take it upon himself to keep you from falling for the ‘impossible shit’ of people. Whatever you did he would be there, a tall scowling figure looming behind you. You had told him time and time again that you were a fully functioning adult now, that you’d be fine on your own, that you most definitely would not get scammed out of all your life savings. It was simply that you liked believing in pre-destiny, liked believing that everything would be okay. That someone out there was taking care of everyone.
Michael was just worried that you’d dive headfirst into the first cult you crossed paths with.
AGE 6
It’s two days past your birthday when a strange man came into your kindergarten. His clothes were strange: black robes neatly ironed with an odd white collar around his neck. You, along with the rest of your class, watched wonderingly as the man cleared his throat and turned towards you all, smiling. He introduced himself as ‘Father Frederick’, telling your class that he was a priest sent from the Church to talk to you about God, about religion. The fidgeting kid beside you muttered under her breath.
“You’re not my dad,” she said bluntly to the growing giggling. The man ignored her.
The weirdly dressed man talked on for too long, you thought, about things that did not interest you in the slightest. You were 6: what need did you have for a man with ugly clothes to come into your classroom and tell you about God and his rules? You had your own rules- listen to your parents, don’t talk to strangers; don’t drink hand sanitizer.
Until he talked of soulmates.
You perked up, intrigued at the new word, only to realise that you’d missed the man’s explanation of the curious word when you were daydreaming.
The strange man left 10 minutes later, black robes flapping.
“So,” you said to the girl next to you, “did you hear what a soulmate was?”
Your current best friend nodded at you, her fingers sticky with paint just like you. Now 14 years from then, you could no longer recollect her name.
“It’s when you’re meant to be with someone else. I asked my parents at dinner yesterday and they said that they were soulmates,” she said proudly, puffing out her little chest. Her voice was assured, full of that immature confidence that kids your age tended to have.
Michael, sat next to you, scoffed. He was taller than you, his blonde hair frizzy and wild. There was paint streaked on his face and scrapes on his hands. Years later, you would remember the boy as one of the first people that you could remember meeting, but when you were six, he was just the tall, annoying kid that sat next to you. He wasn’t someone you disliked in your class, just a sarcastic six year old that seemed to know so much more than any of you. The boy whose parents never came to pick him up. The boy who never took part in any of the class make-believes.
“It’s not real. Just because someone tells you it is, doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said.
Your friend gasped in indignation. “I don’t lie! It is real, okay?!” She turned to you, grinning. “Mommy says there’s signs. I’ll show you later.”
“Oooo, what sort of signs?” you replied.
Michael looked at you incredulously, as if shocked that you were willing to believe your friend. You frowned at him. So what?
Your friend shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ll ask my mom later.”
The following day, your friend came clutching a glossy magazine page, coloured in bright hues. Detailed on the page were all the signs that you had met your soulmate. The pair of you analysed the pages with fascination in every possible pocket of time for at least a week, highlighting and underlining the sections you deemed important- although you could barely read all the words, let alone comprehend their meaning.
The following week, your friend began a new obsession with unicorns and ponies, and the magic of soulmates was completely erased from her mind. You however, carried the magazine page everywhere you went until the page, previously glossy and vibrant was left faded and torn. Then you copied down the page onto another sheet of paper, writing painstakingly slowly in your neatest handwriting. It lived in your desk from then on: The Signs that you’ve met your soulmate- and that he’s closer than you think!, written with pink and purple glittery pen on pink sugar paper.
AGE 10
“I hate pickles,” you scowled, nose scrunched up as you looked at the very last slice of pizza on the table- one heaped with the nasty green things.
It was a school disco, and the food that had been stacked in piles on the table was now almost entirely depleted as the end of the night drew near. Now, why it was decided that pickles were a good idea on pizza? You truly couldn’t see how the people who decided it came to that conclusion. Only a select few toppings belonged on pizza, in your very humble opinion. That was, pepperoni and cheese.
A girl from your class, Julia, stood next to you. Looking at your reluctance, she clapped her hands in delight. “I love pickles! I’ll pick them off, and then you can have the pizza.”
In the end, you swore you could still taste the pickle juice that was probably soaked into the cheese, but it was miles better than what it would have been like, you thought. From then on, you found a new best friend in Julia, close to the point of inseparability. Where she went, you went and vice versa. Sleepovers were scheduled on weekends, play dates and dinner in the holidays. You were meant to be together, you decided. After all, soulmates weren’t always romantic.
You and Michael still talked-or perhaps it was more accurate to say that you chattered at him while he occasionally butted in with a rebuttal and a sarcastic remark. Julia joined in with your conversations sometimes. Julia didn’t like Michael. Julia doesn’t like most boys, to be honest, saying that they’re gross and carry disgusting ‘boy germs’. You think that boys are gross too, since Julia thinks so.
You sat, huddled in a ball under the shadow of the trees around you. Your current spot, the middle of a circle of plum trees, made for a rather good hiding spot, you thought. Nobody had bugged you in your little corner until you felt a shadow above you; looking up, you found a scowling Michael standing above. Of course he found me, you thought, angrily wiping away the tears on your damp cheeks.
“…what happened,” he asked, sounding reluctant.
His cheeks were flushed rosily, his hair wild- he had most likely been running around with the other boys. Refusing to look up, you shrugged and began shredding a leaf onto the floor, the grass already heaped with the remnants of your habit. Michael sighed, looking up at the sky.
“Julia said she doesn’t want to be friends with me anymore,” you said, rubbing your knee with a piece of grass. “She says I’m not cool enough for her.”
Julia liked pickles. You didn’t. It was on the soulmate list- you were meant to be best friends, so how could she discard you so readily?
Michael was quiet, toe scuffing into the ground. Sniffling, you continued tearing leaves.
Suddenly- “Shut up, Sunshine. That’s stupid. You’re the coolest person I know.”
You finally looked up at him, and his face softened.
“Really?” you whispered.
“Mhmm.” He stretched his hand out to you. “Want to come play football with the weird boys?”
You glared at him, watching as the boy broke out into laughter.
“You can watch,” he said, grinning. “You know what? I won’t play and I’ll watch with you instead. Happy?”
You sniffed and took his hand with one of yours, while the other wiped the last traces of tears away. “Happy enough.”
AGE 12
The morning was bright, light streaming in through the windows. The merry chirping of birds floated through the room while you sat placidly eating your bowl of cereal on the kitchen island.
“Are you and Dad soulmates?” You directed the question to your mother, watching her wiping down the countertops. A half-eaten piece of toast lay on a plate, and her mug of tea was also only half drunk. Turning to look at you, she put down the cloth and smiled warmly. “What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“You know when you and Dad met. Did you just get a feeling? Like, that he was the one you were going to spend the rest of your life with?”
She laughed. “Definitely not. We were as different as you could possibly be! I mean, I completely hated his guts for the first few months, and he didn’t even talk to me until a year after.”
You stared at her in surprise. “But then why did you marry him? What changed?”
Gazing wistfully into the distance, she chuckled. “He peeled my orange for me.” She grinned, staring into her mug. “When he asked me for an orange and I said yes, he’d peeled it for me when he gave it to me.”
You laughed in delight, clapping. “Because you hate peeling oranges!”
“Bingo,” your mother agreed. “I just need you to remember that love isn’t always about the sudden feelings: it’s what a person does that matters. Their actions. The choices we make, how they make you feel special. So don’t spend your entire life waiting for a sign from the stars, okay? Just notice, sweetheart.”
AGE 15
You were 15 when you got your first boyfriend: Oskar. Oskar was on the basketball team; he had dark hair, a deep voice and a smile that made 15 year old you weak at the knees. Oskar didn’t like pickles like you, but he had a group of moles arranged in a shape that vaguely resembled a squashed heart, and if you looked closely enough, you had a matching birthmark on the underside of your bicep on your left arm. Grinning like an idiot, you stood in front of the mirror, gazing at the birthmark that he had pointed out earlier.
He was your first kiss too: after he kissed you for the first time, whilst dropping you off outside your house, you stared at your lips in the mirror for hours too. You thought that something must have changed- you must look different. After all, a boy had showed you his action of love. No one had ever kissed you before, but Oskar hadn’t seemed to mind, laughing and calling you ‘sweet’ before silencing your endless rambling with his lips on yours.
Your parents thought you were too young; you dated him anyways. You went on group dates, to the movies, the park, the mall nearby: the first time you felt like you had really grown up into a teenager, not the excited 10 year old with the pigtails.
Michael had grown up too: but he was still tall and blonde, and he still looked down at you with that infuriatingly sarcastic glance.
The two of you were sat in your backyard, your legs outstretched, basking in the sun. Michael was under an umbrella, squinting in the light as he turned to look at you, eyebrow cocked.
“So,” he asked you, “do you really like that Oskar guy?” His leg bounced, fingers drumming on the arm of his chair.
“Obviously,” you said proudly. “I think he’s my soulmate.”
Michael clicked his tongue, head tilting as he looked at you. “Why’d you think that?”
“Our birthmarks are the same,” you said matter of factly, nodding at him with a straight face.
Michael clicked his tongue, long fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. You looked at him wonderingly, his face looking rather troubled.
“There’s no reason to be worried, Mihya.”
The boy in question gave you a dirty look. “Who said I was worried? But you can’t deny the fact that he’s an absolute arsehole.”
The swear word comes out of his mouth as easily as breathing. Michael’s been playing football even more than before, not that you thought that was possible anyways. He had been scouted into the Bastard München youth team. According to him, the boys at the youth team had an extensive arsenal of curses at their disposal, choosing to use them much more often than not.
As blindsided as you were by love, you did have to admit it: at times, Oskar wasn’t the nicest person to almost everyone.
“He’s not an arse to me,” you protested, “and besides, isn’t that all that matters? I don’t get why you have such a problem with him!”
Saying nothing, Michael just looked at you, something twitching in his jaw. Letting out a long suffering sigh he reached out, patting you on the head. You laughed and reached out to ruffle his hair in turn, surprised when you weren’t met with any protests.
He said nothing, simply leaning into your touch with a lean of his head.
Oskar broke up with you a month and a half later, admitting to cheating on you with a cruel smirk on his face.
Michael was the one who brought you flowers when you sat, barricaded in your room. Michael was the one who silently left, exchanging the flowers for bread because when you saw him, you had thrown a pillow at his head and demanded through your tears that he got you something that you could actually eat. Michael was the one who sat by your side, a hand on your shoulder even as you cried. Michael didn’t question, didn’t say the ever dreaded I told you so.
Michael just stayed.
When your family moved to the States, you waved a cheery goodbye at the airport, trying to stay strong: both of you were (you could swear that you saw him discreetly wiping a tear though). On the plane, you cried yourself to sleep, harder than you ever did about Oskar. Was Michael crying as hard as you were right now, you wondered?
Your dreams end up being full of tears too.
AGE 18
University was overrated: you were promised fun, a new chapter of your life starting; the golden time! That was why you’d worked so hard for it, anyways.
Now in university, you had no idea if those promises really were true except for everyone else, but for you it was most certainly not. So far, all university had come with was stress, caffeine addiction and dark circles that couldn’t be covered by any amount of concealer.
One thing you did gain however, was a new friend. Your roommate Lily was born on the same day as you, the same hour and the same minute. You find out on your second day sharing a room. It’s fate, destiny, written in the stars. The stars after all were aligned in exactly the same position when the two of you were brought into the world.
Michael, although dismissive of your written in the stars spiel, does admit that it is an interesting coincidence. You were on the phone with him, telling him about your first week at university. He was still in Germany, now some sort of hotshot football player, but despite the distance, you still talked a lot. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and so on.
You and Lily weren’t the same major; in fact, you didn’t have a single class together. In spite of that, the two of you became inseparable in university circles. You met up for breaks, studied together, binge watched movies together on the weekends. When you were invited to your first party, you brought Lily with you. Your closets became one, your stationery moved between your pencil cases.
Lily’s family lived by the beach in California, and when you stayed with her family for a week during the winter break, you took ample use of the opportunity to bask in the sun, unlike the cold weather of Massachusetts. Michael texted you all the while, asking when you would be coming back to Germany- I hope being an Ivy League girl hasn’t blown your ego up, Sunshine- you better still have time for me when you come back.
When you go back to your childhood home, he was standing by the kitchen counter as if he had been there all along. He was scoffing and pushing you off when you threw yourself on him, trying to act impassive.
“Why would I even miss you,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You may be some sort of a genius, but I’m still better than you, you know.”
You know he’s lying, that he missed you just as much as you missed him. It’s written all over his face, especially with that stupid grin.
Lily ended up visiting your family later in the break, the two of you squealing and jumping for joy when you picked her up from the airport.
A few days into her stay, you introduced her to Michael at a barbecue. That ended up causing your first fight.
“No, you don’t get it- there is no way that that man is not in love with you!”
Lily had been insisting for the past half hour from her place on the air mattress on your bedroom floor now. You were very much beginning to regret your decision to introduce Lily and Michael now after all the time she had spent stubbornly pointing out the apparently obvious signs.
“That hand on your shoulder,”
“The way he bent down to listen to you”
“Oh God, you need to see how that man looks at you! You are starving that poor guy right now.”
You huffed in exasperation, looking at Lily drily.
“No, Lily, he is not in love with me. Men and women can just be friends you know, and that’s all we are. Really good friends.”
Lily shook her head emphatically. “No, no, no. This isn’t just a case of you’re really good friends! You are not just friends!”
“Are.”
“Not!”
You glared down at your friend, before giving up and rolling so that you were facing the wall instead of her stubborn gaze. Lily cackled as you did so, pointing an accusatory finger at you.
“So you admit it, witch!”
You threw a pillow at her.
When Lily left a few days later, Michael was waiting behind you impatiently, having come to drop the two of you off before practice. He nodded stiffly at your grinning friend, who was energetically wagging her eyebrows in your direction. Groaning, you waved her off as she disappeared into her gate.
When the two of you came back to campus, Lily was insufferable, badgering you constantly as to when your relationship with the blonde was going to develop. Much to your dislike, she seemed to have gotten into a habit of doing her daily check in front of as many people as possible; also in the loudest voice she could possibly muster.
She gives up after about a month of persistent complaining, and your friendship goes back to normal. Lily ends up finding a soulmate of her own when she hits him with her car after driving back from her successful driver’s test. She insists that it was love at first sight, although the poor guy ended up with a fractured foot and a broken bicycle. It’s okay though, you think. He looks at Lily with the sweetest eyes when he thinks she isn’t looking, and they’re a cute couple. It’s just what she deserves.
At the start of the year, you and Lily had talked about spending the summer holiday somewhere warm, somewhere exotic. Backpacking in South America had almost been a certainty. But Lily ended up going home with her new soulmate, and you wondered: when would that kind of preordained love come your way?
Instead, you booked a flight home to see Michael, who somehow managed to make time for you despite his ungodly schedule. For the month that you’re there, he transforms from football player to personal chauffeur and tour guide, slipping back into the role of best friend easily. Again, you cry when you part ways at the airport. Again, he does the same but tries not to let it show.
You end up having a new roommate next year, Lily having moved in with her new boyfriend. She doesn’t have the same immediate click with you.
But you think that it’s okay now.
AGE 21
You’re in Germany yet again, from money scraped from tutoring and part time jobs. It’s your 21st birthday, and Michael’s teammates dragged the two of you to a nightclub at the heart of Munich. Music blares, the lights throb, and you feel weirdly out of place in your silver ‘disco ball dress’, as like to call it, amongst all the artistically draped and torn fishnets the German people your age love to wear. Most unfortunately, since your move to the States, you had become deprived of ‘true culture’, as Michael called it, and was now ‘severely Americanised’.
Michael had disappeared into the club somewhere to close the tab. Don’t get into trouble, he had said before he left. 5 hours into clubbing, you feared that you wouldn’t be able to get into trouble even if you wanted to. Your feet stung, covered with blisters from your heels. The techno music and strobe lights had begun to give you a headache, and for some reason, your usual persistent headache was transforming into stabbing pains behind your eyes. You grimaced, rubbing your head.
“No, Romeo and Juliet were the greatest love story of all time! I mean, think of all the tragedy.”
You perked up at the mention of Shakespeare, head whipping around to try finding the discussion. Although constantly teased about it by your friends, you’d chosen to study English Literature at university. Now, if anything in a nightclub was right up your alley, this most definitely was. And from the sounds of it, someone understood your appreciation of Shakespeare.
You pinpointed your eyes towards a man and a woman sat on a table. The man was still talking emphatically, but the woman looked rather disgruntled. You smiled at the sight. Until-
“Juliet had to lay everything down for Romeo, don’t you get it? That’s just the duty of a woman. And then you get the crazy ones like Lady Macbeth. That man Shakespeare really knows how to write a good woman though, I admit.” The woman with the man was looking very uncomfortable, shifting awkwardly whilst looking around herself continuously.
You frowned, disgusted. How dare this raging misogynist come out to spout his ludicrous opinions and disrespect Shakespeare’s name in the process? Furious and spurned on by the alcohol, you stumbled over to their table.
The man looked up, confused. “What do you want?” He asked, sounding suspicious.
Hands on your hips, you glared at him as the woman looked at you, sighing in relief.
“I just heard your conversation,” you said, speech embarrassingly slow but thankfully coherent. “I just wanted to ask- what makes you think that you have the right to come out here and confidently voice those horrible opinions? Don’t you think that we deserve to be respected too?”
The man spluttered for breath, evidently shocked. You better keep this short, you thought. Too long and your feet might actually give up on you from the torturous heels.
“What the hell are you doing?! This isn’t any of your business whatsoever-“
You raised your voice, cutting across the man. “I’m not finished! And also, what do you mean Juliet had to lay everything down for Romeo? Yes, I agree it was a tragedy, but that was clear from the exposition! I mean, come on, they’re introduced as coming ‘from forth the fatal loins of these two foes’. But it really shouldn’t be romanticised! I mean, they were just two teenagers madly in love, although Romeo’s intentions are a bit dubious at the start, considering his age and previous record but-“
You felt a large, warm hand clamp at your wrist pull you back, disrupting your rambling. You stumbled, crashing into a broad back as you frowned. Michael glared down at you. You glared just as hard back.
Peeking out from behind his back, you caught sight of the misogynistic rager, who seemed to have been rendered speechless by your less than conventional rant. Unable to see Michael’s face, you opened your mouth once again, hand still clutching the back of his shirt for fear that your sore feet would give up on you.
“And when it comes to-“
Once again you were cut short as Michael dragged you out of the club. You protested, your headache still hammering in your head.
“Hey, Mihya! I wasn’t finished with Juliet, and you stopped me before I could even get to Lady Macbeth!“
Michael looked at you, clearly unimpressed. He cleared his throat. “And what part of don’t get into trouble do you not understand?”
You ignored him, crossing your arms and sitting on the pavement before flashing him a middle finger. You fiddled with the hem of your dress, looking at the sprawling buildings in front of you. Sighing, Michael sat down next to you, your head immediately making its way onto his shoulder.
“I’m a fighter, not a lover.” You grinned, laughing at your own joke. Michael remained unimpressed.
“You don’t need to fight, you know,” he muttered. “I’ll fight them for you.”
You tutted disapprovingly. “Nah, I like fighting. We can take turns though- for when I get tired.” You kicked your leg. “You can beat them up with a kick. ‘Cause of football. You can just wallop them. Pow pow.”
He chuckled slightly at that, and the two of you fell into comfortable silence. Silently, you watched the cars go by, yawning.
“It just sort of got to me,” you murmured. “The way that we’re always expected to do everything. I’m just scared, I guess. Scared that once I’m in a relationship, I’ll be the one who has to do everything.”
You kicked a rock out into the road. Michael was watching you with an indecipherable look in his eyes, silent before he replied.
“You shouldn’t be.”
You squinted at him, confused. “Shouldn’t be what?”
“Scared. You’re not that kind of person: you’re the kind of person that people will want to lay everything down for.”
Still confused, you frowned at him. Since when was he this nice to you? Michael was still looking at you with that soft gaze, blue eyes staring intently into your own. He raised a hand, then patted you gently on your back. You felt the weight and the warmth of that familiar hand, smiling at him slowly.
“Finally,” you said, grinning. “You appreciate my true worth.”
He shrugged, that familiar smirk of his once again settling over his features. Dusting his hands off on his knees, he stood up.
“Come on.”
You groaned. The pain in your feet and the throbbing of your head still present, you clumsily got to your feet, rubbing at your heels. Curse these heels, you thought. Why did the ones that look nice always have to hurt the most? Instead of taking a step, you promptly outstretched your arms.
“Carry me,” you stated expectantly.
Michael narrowed his eyes at you back.
“No. Walk.”
“Yes. Won’t walk.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
The two of you caught the attention of the people walking by, onlookers curiously observing on your spat. To be fair, it was an odd situation with no context. An angry looking blonde with a sparkly girl dressed as a disco ball having a full-blown argument with just two words: ‘yes’ and ‘no’. You glared at your best friend playfully, eyes twinkling. He scoffed back at you, but the corners of his mouth tugged upwards slightly, as if against his will.
Michael mouthed something that you couldn’t recognise in your drunken haze. Frowning, you moved closer. He ducked his head lower, blonde hair glinting in the moonlight. You felt the gust of air in your ear as he whispered, body angled towards yours.
“No.”
He ended up carrying you home anyways.
AGE 22
You end up going to watch Michael in some sort of massive football match: he flies you out, you go for the opportunity of spending time with your best friend. This is a dream come true for him, you know, and so you spend the 90 minutes screaming at the top of your lungs for him, clutching a gaudy banner with his face on it and decked in so much Kaiser gear that you looked like a walking advert. By the end of the match, your voice is hoarse and your palms red and tingling from clapping.
When he comes out to meet you, you engulf him in a bear hug and pinch him when he flashes you that infuriating smirk. You’ve been thinking a lot lately, over analysing poetry late at night, over reading sappy romance novels.
For all your efforts of rummaging through the stars for your perfect match, for all the souls you’d searched for, nothing had emerged. Maybe you weren’t meant to have a soulmate, you thought. Perhaps there truly wasn’t anyone out there for you.
Letting go from your dreams however, it left room for other dreams to grow. They weren’t thought of, they weren’t forced, but they sprouted and they grew into little bits and pieces of joy. Somewhere along the line, another dream had grown. Now, the flower had bloomed, and it spread, threatening to take over your entire heart.
For months now, your heart had jumped and missed a beat every time you saw Michael’s texts flood your Notification Centre. You would giggle uncontrollably every time that his name flashed on the screen of your phone. You were beginning to feel that you were growing mad- suddenly all you had in your head was Michael. Michael, Michael, Michael.
Lily teased you relentlessly for your revelation, shrieking at you time to time again to ‘get your man!’. You feel like you’re going mad, because what was this sudden change?
Maybe your mother was right- love was about the choices you made, after all. You had to be decisive, had to start choosing him. Choose him, no matter what. But would he choose you back?
The following weekend was Lily’s wedding. You’d prepared your speech as the maid of honour, and all there was left to do was to not start bawling in the middle of it. The preparation for the wedding however, was far from uneventful: it was absolute chaos. You and the best man had ran to the florist and the baker respectively, the orders having somehow been mixed up with another couple’s. After having recited the order for the wedding bouquet so many times whilst stood nervously in front of the florist’s counter, you swore that if you had to say ‘tulips’ one more time you might actually break out in stress hives.
Michael, who Lily had also invited for her ‘last chance to matchmake before becoming a married woman’, was annoyingly unperturbed by the ordeals you had gone through for the wedding. He laughed at your face, flushed from running and joked about having to carry around an XXL pack of tissues for your tears.
Miraculously, the actual wedding day went smoothly, apart from Lily’s one joke about running away at the altar- you and the rest of the bridal party screamed in genuine fear when that joke reached your ears. The flowers were fresh, the cake was moist and chocolatey, and the entirety of the hall was enraptured by the beautiful couple.
You had already shed too many tears before it was even the time to say your speech, and so you stepped onto the pedestal with slightly damp cheeks. Breathing out slightly, you began.
“I expect everyone here is impatient to dance with the glow sticks, so I’ll keep this short. I met Lily in our first year of university when we were put int a room together by the higher powers of the world. By the way, I am of course referring to the administrative team at our university when I say higher powers. We’ll have to thank Janet from admin for the rest of our lives for this.”
The room chuckled, and you paused before starting again.
“Lily was a first year chemistry student, so she basically chose to torture herself. I was a first year English literature major, so I can’t really say I was better off. I will say though, you can thank me for Lily’s obsession with Pride and Prejudice, Jack,” you said, looking at the groom with a grin. “You’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night to her muttering Mr Darcy and Elizabeth quotes under her breath.”
“Despite her questionable choice in major, there are a few things that I can most definitely say about Lily. One, she is pretty damn good at chemistry. Two, she’s an amazing person. Three, she’s an even better friend.”
You looked at your friend fondly, smiling at the tears she was hurriedly wiping away. “Lily’s the kind of person who lights up every room she’s in. She’s also the funniest person I’ve ever met- she’s made me laugh so hard that I thought I had appendicitis on multiple occasions. I’m pretty annoyed at you for stealing her Jack, but I do get you. I mean, who wouldn’t want that wonderful lady there?” Jack nodded in agreement, smiling widely.
“Now, these two met in a definitely less conventional way, I think we can agree. I still remember the day that Lily came home crying because she ran over the cutest guy she’d ever seen and she’d ruined her chances with him. By that, I thought she was trying to imply that she had just killed this mystery man,” you said drily. “So you can imagine my relief when she told me that no, she had not just committed manslaughter, and my later joy when I found out that she had somehow managed to make it up to him. Now, we’re here watching them get married, the most sickly in love couple I’ve ever seen, and I think we can all agree that there’s no one who deserves it more than these two here. I’ll be looking forward to watching the rest of your lives progress, and I hope that I’ll have a little corner in your house of dreams as your friend, Lily. Be happy.”
You choked on your last sentence, the tears suddenly coming rushing in. Before you could even step down from the block, you were tackled by Lily, nearly bowled over by her heavy wedding dress. You hugged her back, both of you spluttering absolute nonsense through your tears.
“Congratulations,” said Michael
sarcastically, “you still have 3 tissues left.”
The wedding was now over, the crowd having sent off the happy couple to their honeymoon. Michael stood next to you in the hotel elevator, still holding that ridiculously large box of tissues. He’d been toting it around the entire day, and although you had adamantly refused to use it at the beginning of the wedding, the box was now almost entirely depleted, much to his amusement.
You glared at him, eyes still puffy.
“Shut up,” you groaned.
Laughing, he placed his arm around your shoulders, hugging you into his side. You felt your face grow uncomfortably red, hoping that he didn’t notice.
“It’s okay,” he said dramatically. “I’ll carry around your tissues for you every time.”
The elevator beeped having reached your floor. Walking down the corridor, Michael scanned you into your shared hotel room. Two bedrooms, a couch, a balcony and a kitchen where you had almost set off the fire alarm trying to make scrambled eggs. Yawning, you walked over to the couch and laid, flopping down with a thump.
Humming quietly, you stared up at the ceiling. Something light landed on your stomach, your fingers automatically reaching for it to feel what it was.
Your heart caught in your throat, holding up the thing to see an orange. A peeled orange. Michael stood at the stove, fiddling with the stove heat. You couldn’t see his face, but you gulped.
“You peeled it for me,” you whispered.
He turned round to look at you with raised eyebrows. “You hate peeling them,” he said matter of factly, almost bored. “If I didn’t you’d whine for hours about the bits getting caught underneath your nails.”
You stared at him, really looked, the shape of him sharp and angular. His eyes however, were soft as he looked at you with that look you had become accustomed to. You stood up, walking over to him with the orange still held in your hands. Love is an action, your mother had said.
Silently, you held the orange out to him. Nodding his thanks, he took it.
“I love you,” you said. “You know, right?”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course you do. Who doesn’t love me?”
You faltered. “No, not like that. Like- “you stopped suddenly. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this. You’d chosen him, but what if he didn’t choose you? What if you just ruined this friendship forever?
It was too late to take it back however, and you watched as the realisation dawned upon him. His mask of indifference chipped away, his eyes going wide and his pupils dilating. His hand stopped in its track, the orange segment still held between his fingers.
“You mean that, right?” He said, voice suddenly hoarse. You nodded shyly. Michael’s face split into a wide grin.
“God, that took you a long time to realise.”
The orange segment dropped onto the carpeted floor as he stepped towards you in the space of a breath, swallowing your gasp of surprise with his lips on yours. Startled, you dropped the rest of the orange. That was okay though, you thought as you wound your arms around his shoulders. He’d peel another one for you without you asking.
It was then that you realised: maybe soulmates were the ones who stayed. Maybe soulmates were the ones who throughout the chronology of all the relationships of your life, would be the ones who were featured in every chapter.
Somewhere deep in the mess of your drawer in your childhood desk. The edges are taped, and it’s permanently creased from being folded and unfolded a thousand times over. It’s titled The Signs You’ve Met Your Soulmate-and that he’s closer than you think!, scrawled in sparky gel pen. Gently, you took out the piece of paper and smoothed it out, uncapping your purple marker.
At the bottom of the list, you added a few more points:
-Peels your oranges for you
-Childhood best friend
You start wanting to choose him.
A/n: Thanks to everyone who made it this far! Also I don’t know why the summary and the a/n thing at the start aren’t on the same line but it’s okay!….. I think….
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Me and my baby at a nyo course. Genuinely need help right now because this is the 4th hour of Stravinsky and I’m actually about to die, but a least there’s only two hours left to go… Right????
(I really need to clean the fingerboard but regrettably I am a pro level procrastinator)
Perfection is just an illusion.
This is a take that is so commonly repeated everywhere, but here is my take on it as someone who’s fought with this so called illusion for most of my life.
Excuse my dramatic rant here, but I just feel like this is something that I need to get off my chest, and something that a lot of people could possibly relate to.
I’ve played violin and piano for 12 years now (I’m 17 turning 18 at the end of July) and I love music- I truly do! I’ll be going to Royal College of Music to study violin performance next September, which I am very much thrilled about, so it’s not like I hate my instruments and was just forced into them by my very Korean parents. I genuinely love violin and I’m so excited I get to study it further into music beyond sixth form.
But despite my love for music, I think I’ve always felt the inherent pressure that comes with playing a musical instrument so acutely my whole life. I started playing the violin when I was 5 because I watched this tv show called ‘Secret Jouju’ and there’s a character there called Sasha who plays violin, so I just nagged at my mother endlessly until she took me to my first violin lesson, and then my first piano lesson.
I don’t think I was actually that naturally talented as some other kids I saw when I was younger, but the difference was that I was oddly dedicated for a 5 year old (who usually had an extremely short attention span). As you would expect, I got better over the years at both my instruments, and I think that I had my first progress spike when I was around 7 for violin and probably at 8 for piano. This was probably because that’s when I moved to England from France (I moved to France from Korea when I was 4) so I was a 7 year old who spoke no English whatsoever and had no friends- automatically all of my time just went into practice.
That’s probably when the imposter syndrome/ insecurities I struggle with now really started to emerge. Suddenly, I went from being just another promising kid to now being the small town prodigy playing concertos at local concerts. All the adults in my life: my parents, my violin and piano teachers etc. were the most lovely, sweet, supportive people I could have had, but I just kept struggling with this imposter syndrome that just kept growing and growing as I aged.
Now, my love for music never diminished, but I grew increasingly paranoid about my playing.
It got to the point where I would dread going to my lessons because what if my playing was bad? What if I actually sounded like absolute rubbish and everyone told me to just stop already, or thought that I was just a fraud? I would practice excessively each day, and because I would do this for both instruments, it was like I just never stopped playing. I would record every single second of these practice sessions and analyse them at night to make sure that my nightmares of regressing weren’t happening.
I ended up going to Cheltenham Ladies’ College and not a music specialist college (I was going to go to the Yehudi Menhuin School), where I’ve met so many of my closest friends and the most wonderful people I know. They and all my other friends were the ones who helped me to realise that no, what I was doing was not normal. These people were the ones who got me out of my dark moments, the ones who actually made me feel happy about my own playing.
This concept of ‘perfection’ is simply just so prevalent in our society that we can never rid ourselves us of the want to be ‘perfect’. Whether that be in the arts, sports, academia and just everywhere, you’ll find people crippled by this paranoia and pressure. The world is filled with so many incredibly talented people whose talents never got to fully bloom because of this restraint that constantly holds them back from reaching their maximum potential.
Even those well meaning people who promote ‘shattering the illusion of perfect!’ really aren’t helping those who struggle with perfectionism, because even those people who campaign to rid the world of perfectionism will inevitably have their own expectations of a ‘certain standard’ themselves, and that is what’s truly damaging. The thing that actually makes people so afraid are not the expectations of perfection but rather the fear of judgement and scorn from others due to not being able to uphold those particular standards.
And this is everywhere.
You see it in every field and aspect of life, in every person. You see it in the beginners trying out something new for the first time and in the professionals who still don’t feel that they are worthy enough. You see it in children not bringing home report cards, people losing weight because they feel as if they need to, in people who desperately try to curate the ‘flawless’ lifestyle on Instagram: it is completely unavoidable no matter what you do.
So, to all of you who may be seeing this, I won’t offer advice that won’t work on 99.9999% of you (cause of the individuality of humankind and so on) but instead, I sincerely hope that all of you who have made it this far into this rant take a moment out of your day to just think about what you’ve read.
I hope everyone has an amazing day!!!❤️❤️❤️
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“Olympic gold medals are given by gods”.
As you can tell, it talks about how you can be the person that has a 99.99999% chance of victory, but that 0.00001% chance can also end up happening, and you can still lose horribly!!!
The Olympics are the place where pressure is going to be at the utmost highest on athletes, with their respective federations breathing down their backs and it’s going to be a fight of who can remain calm and collected under all that horrendous pressure. With what happened with Ilia Malinin today, it really shows how you can seem invincible and untouchable and so good that you don’t even seem human, but ultimately we are humans.
I just think it’s really telling how this isn’t the first time that an American skater who was almost definitely slated to win the Olympics actually ended up completely bombing it!!! When someone is presented in the media globally as not even human, as someone who is above the human capacity at their sport, the pressure grows exponentially and unfortunately I think we saw the culmination of it today. We saw the fall, and the fall was hard. Instead of winning gold, Ilia was off the podium. Hopelessly off of it in fact.
I sincerely hope that Ilia has his loved ones who are supporting him at the moment because this must feel unspeakably horrible at this moment.
Nathan Chen, the Tuberidze girls and now Ilia Malinin to boot: federations, please take this as a lesson and learn from your mistakes that everyone is human….
WHAT IN THE PLOT TWIST JUST HAPPENED IN MEN’S FIGURE SKATING?!?!?!
Ilia Malinin, aka the person who had the highest certainty out of ANYONE in this Olympics to get a gold medal ended up 8th!!!!
and Yuma Kagiyama aka the one person who people thought could dethrone malinin (if anyone even could) succumbed to the pressure as well and messed up his beginning quads…(earning silver)
but then Mikhail Shaidarov who literally no one excepted to be the Olympic champion probably just skated the skate of his life to win the Olympic gold!!!! HE GOT GOLD. GOLD GOLD GOLD!!!!
And then Shun Sato, the little cinnamon roll, got a bronze medal!!! I REPEAT HE GOT BRONZE!!!
This is literally a podium no one expected (apart from Yuma): it’s a lifetime skate from Mikhail, an elated Shun Sato, and a Yuma Kagiyama who managed to hang on to silver.
this is genuinely, as the commentators phrased it, the fall of a god-the fall of ilia malinin, who showed us that he is a human after all. Now I’d say this is the greatest upset in this Olympics so far: plus two of the greatest figure skating upsets, two Olympics in a row….