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Chapter Text

Chapter 2: Control Group My Ass

Section 1: The Hypothesis of Emotional Avoidance

The gymnasium fluorescents buzzed alive and vengeful—an unholy hybrid between an electric wasp nest and the failing resolve of the Yōsen team’s collective sanity. The locker room smelled of liniment, damp sneakers, and the faint, lingering ghost of chemical floor polish that never quite scrubbed out the despair.

Fukui Kensuke stood in the doorway like a man standing on the lip of a black hole.

Clipboard clutched tight to his chest. Eyes wide. Brain buffering.

Two of his foundational hypotheses were in the final stages of mutual annihilation.

Hypothesis One: Murasakibara Atsushi understands emotion perfectly well but has chosen apathy as a fortress against the indignities of caring.

Corroborating Evidence:

• The way his violet eyes narrowed in real time whenever Himuro so much as twitched. A predator deciding whether to eat the antelope or simply lie on it until it gave up.

• The grunted “Tch. Boring,” applied indiscriminately to team drama and most of human interaction—but never to anything Himuro said.

• The notorious “shrimp chip defensive maneuver,” wherein he would fill his mouth to the point of physical peril any time the word feelings came within twenty feet.

Hypothesis Two: Himuro Tatsuya could teach seduction as a sub-discipline of applied mathematics.

Corroborating Evidence:

• The way his integrals sprawled across the page like deliberate, elegant traps.

• How he could whisper “logarithmic decay” and somehow make it sound like foreplay.

• The fact that his smile had been banned from one regional tournament because it allegedly caused two power forwards and a ref to trip over their own feet at the same time.

Neither hypothesis, however, had prepared Fukui for the scene now unfolding in front of him like the world’s slowest, nerdiest sex tape.

Murasakibara was a collapsed monument on the linoleum, all bad posture and conquered territory. His legs stretched out obscenely, covering more floor than seemed physically possible, while a battered physics textbook lay in his lap, pages fluttering like they, too, wanted to flee the tension.

Behind him, Himuro leaned in, one hand braced lightly on Murasakibara’s shoulder, the other hovering over the page.

“See?” Himuro’s voice was low, velvety. The kind of voice designed to narrate high-end chocolate commercials—or, apparently, multivariable calculus. “You’re close. Just… isolate the inner function. Then integrate by parts.”

Next to him, Okamura Kenichi, eternal romantic and emotional trainwreck, made a sound that could only be described as a tragic wheeze.

“Is it just me,” Okamura whispered, eyes glassy with awe, “or was that somehow filthier than anything I’ve ever clicked on past midnight with my headphones in?”

“It’s the tone,” Fukui said. “He said ‘parts’ like he wanted to undress him with derivatives.”

Murasakibara, to his credit—or doom—made a soft noise of acknowledgment. “Mm.” It was half a grunt, half a rumble. Entirely dangerous.

And then Himuro chuckled.

Soft.

“You’re still thinking about force vectors,” he said. “Let the function breathe, Atsushi.”

Fukui turned to Okamura, eyes wide and wild, voice edged with existential panic. “That’s seduction. That’s textbook academic seduction. This is a math kink. We are witnessing math kink. In real time. No one prepared me for this.”

Okamura nodded solemnly, as though he were presiding over a funeral and a wedding simultaneously. “Should I start writing my best man speech now, or wait until they co-author a paper called The Erotics of Angular Momentum?”

“I hate everything,” Fukui muttered, scrubbing his face and wishing he could wipe away the image.

Liu Wei stalked past them with the dead-eyed resignation of a man who had seen too much and been paid too little.

He hefted a crate of basketballs against one hip.

“They’re polluting the air,” Liu said. “If I have to dry one more towel that smells like pheromones and physics foreplay, I swear to God I’m setting the gym on fire.”

“Please do,” Fukui muttered. “Maybe the blaze will cauterize the tension.”

Behind them, Murasakibara’s pencil scratched faintly against the paper. Himuro murmured something in his ear that sounded an awful lot like, “Gentler with the curve.”

Okamura made a broken noise. “That’s it. I’m done. I am not strong enough for this.”

“Control group my ass,” Fukui muttered, staring at his clipboard as if it had personally betrayed him.

He scribbled with the fury of a man trying to exorcise demons in bullet points:

NEW VARIABLES DETECTED
• Academic vocabulary now laced with erotic subtext
• Murasakibara engaging in sustained concentration (dangerous)
• Himuro performing calculated touch proximity like a seduction algorithm

And, underneath it, in increasingly deranged handwriting:

THEY’RE GONNA MAKE OUT OVER A FUCKING WORKSHEET

Liu glanced back over his shoulder, unimpressed. “At this point I hope they do. Maybe then we’ll get our water pressure back.”

“Shut up, Liu,” Fukui snapped, erasing half a line and rewriting it with more exclamation points. “This is a scientific crisis.”

The hum of the fluorescent lights grew louder.
Murasakibara asked something about coefficient shift.
Himuro’s laugh brushed the back of his neck.

Fukui’s pencil broke in half.

Section 2: The Revised Betting Pool

That night, Fukui approached the team’s dorm whiteboard as a man preparing a eulogy—for reason, for science, and for whatever scraps of emotional composure he had left.

Gone were the earlier columns—“Eye Contact Duration (Seconds ≥10?)”, “Unexplained Growling Incidents”, and the tragically short-lived “Jersey-Sharing Thermodynamic Analysis”. Fukui erased them with methodical brutality.

In their place, he scrawled the new header with all the gravitas of a physicist penning his own descent into madness:

NEW CATEGORY: POSSIBLE PRE-MATING RITUALS (MATH EDITION)

Below, he listed—bullet point by damning bullet point:

• Shared graph paper (intimate)

• Whispered derivatives (pornographic)

• Parallel notes on projectile motion (they’re going to kiss)

• Synchronized sighing while solving for x (married)

• Murasakibara remembering the quadratic formula unprompted (legally binding)

He stepped back, uncapped a different color, and moved to the next section:

ODDS OF CONFESSION

• Via long-winded analogy about Newtonian mechanics: 3:1

• Post-defensive drill body slam: 6:1

• One of them blurting it mid-calculation in an emotional sneeze: Even money

• Neither confessing and instead publishing a joint paper on the physics of repressed yearning: 2:1

He underlined repressed yearning twice. For emphasis. And vengeance.

Behind him, a door creaked.

“Still at it?” Liu’s voice floated in, dry as black coffee and twice as bitter. He padded over in socks, holding a notebook and a nearly-empty protein shake. He squinted at the board and gave a single, unimpressed sniff. “You forgot ‘accidental love confession by mislabeling x as a heart.”

“I’m not ruling it out,” Fukui muttered, scribbling ‘[possible variable substitution error: x = ❤️ ]’ into the margin.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Liu said, rubbing his temple, “but they’ve actually broken math.”

“Bent it,” Fukui corrected. “Shattered the spirit, not the law.”

Liu raised an eyebrow. “Tell that to the trigonometry quiz Murasakibara passed last week. The one with ‘sinθ = ur cute’ written in the margin?”

Fukui’s marker stopped mid-sentence. “…He did not.”

Liu held up his notebook. “Photographic evidence. It’s taped to my fridge.”

Silence stretched between them. And then—

“Okay,” Fukui said slowly. “We’re moving from predictive modeling into emotional quantum mechanics. The math has feelings. I’m scared.”

“Good,” Liu replied. “You should be.”

At that moment, Okamura shuffled in like a man fresh from battle—or more accurately, from microwave warfare with a packet of instant ramen.

“What now?” he asked, eyes scanning the whiteboard carefully. “Did someone finally combust from sexual tension, or are we still playing ‘Will They, Won’t They, Should They Be Allowed?’”

“They solved a physics problem together,” Liu said. “With synchronized sighing.”

“Ah,” Okamura muttered, nodding grimly. “So we’ve entered the domestic academic honeymoon stage. Fantastic.”

He sat down heavily on the couch, slurped noodles with the morose dedication of a man trying to drown his feelings in dehydrated shrimp flavoring, then added:

“I swear to god, if they start making out during wind sprints, I’m walking off the court. I will not be the emotional third wheel to equation-based foreplay.”

Fukui didn’t even turn around. “At this rate, they’re going to confess during a team huddle by misquoting Euler.”

“You shut your mouth,” Okamura said sharply. “That’s sacred ground.”

Liu leaned against the fridge, flipping a pencil between his fingers. “You think we can weaponize this? Get them to admit it before pre-season ends?”

Fukui scoffed. “You don’t weaponize chaos. You survive it.”

There was a long pause.

Then Okamura, in a whisper barely above prayer: “Can we… add a column for mutual thirst-induced academic breakdown?”

“Already in version five of the spreadsheet,” Fukui replied grimly. “Labeled it ‘Critical Equilibrium Breach.’ Color-coded in red.”

They sat in silence for a moment, watching the whiteboard like it might answer them back. The room buzzed softly with anticipation, caffeine, and impending disaster.

Outside, laughter echoed faintly down the hallway—low, amused, and unmistakably Himuro.

Then, a grunt. “Mm. Muro-chin’s notes smell like pencil and sugar.”

Okamura inhaled his ramen in horror. “Nope. No. I refuse. That’s foreplay. Do they realize? That’s olfactory foreplay. I’m out.”

Fukui crossed himself with the marker and updated the board:

New Term: Scent-Based Academic Intimacy
Prognosis: Terminal.

Liu reached into the cupboard and took down the emergency bottle of instant coffee.

It was going to be a long season.

Section 3: The Incident (Tangents, Literally)

It started innocently.
(It always did. That was the problem.)

Himuro Tatsuya stood at the whiteboard in the practice room. His handwriting was elegant, slanted, and absurdly neat for someone working with a dry-erase marker half-dried from neglect.

“Arc velocity,” he began, in that smooth, measured tone that made everything sound seductive, “is defined by the product of angular velocity and the radius of the circular path.”

Fukui, sitting two rows back, dropped his pen. It bounced once against his knee and rolled away. He didn’t retrieve it. His soul had already left his body.

Murasakibara Atsushi was perched—slouched, really—on a low bench, legs extended in front of him like bored tree trunks. He blinked slowly, watching Himuro with the intensity of someone trying to decipher whether he was in love or just hungry.

His brow furrowed.

The others assumed it was a sign of confusion.

Fukui knew better. That was his engagement face. It was the same expression Murasakibara made before a game-winning block. Or when a new flavor of Kit-Kat came out.

It was unnerving. Like watching a black hole experience yearning.

Okamura squinted at the board from beside Fukui, towel still flopped over his head. “Why is this... kind of erotic?”

“It’s math,” Fukui hissed.

“It’s math with tension,” Okamura countered.

Across the room, Liu sat cross-legged with a roll of athletic tape and dead-eyed focus. “You’re all complicit in this,” he muttered, winding the tape around his knuckles. “I hope you know that.”

On the bench, Murasakibara tilted his head and made a low, thoughtful noise.

“Hmm.”

Not quite a grunt. It was the sound he did when he was beginning to… process.

Himuro turned, expression open, encouraging. “Do you want me to go over the tangent velocity equation again?”

Murasakibara shook his head. Then—carefully, like he was remembering how limbs worked—he lifted one massive hand to the edge of the notebook between them.

And Himuro placed his hand over it.

The gesture wasn’t romantic, at least not obviously. Not in a way you could write off or point at. It was the kind of touch that spoke volumes precisely because it didn’t try to speak.

This wasn’t a K-drama poster, so their fingers didn’t interlace. But Murasakibara’s hand stilled beneath Himuro’s. And he didn’t pull away.

The silence in the room went from casual to devotional.

And then Murasakibara looked up and said, deadpan—but softer than usual, his voice had remembered how to whisper:

“I like the way you explain stuff.”

Fukui’s water bottle slipped from his grip and hit the floor with a clatter that sounded like the fall of Rome.

Himuro blinked.

His mouth softened into a smile without armor. Quiet. Real.

Fukui sucked in a breath through his teeth as if he’d been stabbed in the chest with a compass. “Oh no.”

Okamura yelped, towel flailing. “What?! What happened? Did they kiss? Did they—” he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “did they math-kiss?!”

Fukui turned slowly, pale and horrified. “They’ve achieved emotional resonance.”

Okamura’s eyes widened to saucer-like proportions. “You mean—”

“They’re validating each other’s academic identities,” Fukui croaked. “That’s worse than kissing, right? That’s... affectionate mutual cognition.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then, from the shower room, Liu’s voice rang out like a death knell.

“Burning everything. Twice. With bleach.”

Section 4: Post-Incident Analysis

Casualties (Post-Tangent Incident Report):

• 1 clipboard, snapped clean in half when Fukui attempted to demonstrate the line of best fit for Murasakibara’s emotional growth curve and accidentally used too much force. It had served bravely. Its death was not in vain.

• 3 freshmen, currently huddled in the far corner of the hallway, whispering and Googling things such as “what is academic intimacy and why am I crying?”

• 1 untouched bento box, left behind by Murasakibara. Uneaten. Forgotten. A chilling omen akin to the sun failing to rise. Okamura knelt beside it and muttered a quiet prayer.

• Team practice, canceled by Coach under the official reason of “ambient tension disrupting drills.” Unofficially: no one could look at the chalkboard without feeling like a voyeur.

Fukui stood before the team’s whiteboard like a war general mourning the loss of good men. He raised a marker—still slightly smudged from sweat and tragedy—and scrawled with slow, deliberate strokes:

"They Understand Each Other’s Learning Styles."

There was a pause.

Then, underneath—almost hesitant, as if the pen itself didn’t want to admit it:

Subcategory: “Honestly, this is worse than scent marking.”

Fukui stepped back. Studied his handiwork. Exhaled the kind of breath a man releases when he knows, in the marrow of his bones, that logic has betrayed him.

He considered walking away. Leaving the board behind.

But instead, he leaned in again, marker hovering. For a moment, he considered writing:

“MAKE OUT OVER A FUCKING WORKSHEET.”

He paused.
Crossed it out.
Wrote, smaller:

“They’re going to fall in love while solving a problem set.”

Then, under his breath—defeated, furious, maybe a little fond:

“Same thing.”

A beat.
Another sigh.

“And I’ll still be here.
Refilling the whiteboard.
Waiting for my cut of the winnings.”

“Tragic,” Liu muttered from the couch behind him, arms crossed, expression unreadable. “Like Oppenheimer. If Oppenheimer had a math kink and a notebook full of omega pining statistics.”

“I think we need hazard pay,” Okamura added from the floor. He was eating dry cereal straight from the box. “Or at least therapy. Group therapy. Team-wide. I want matching robes.”

“Why are you like this,” Fukui asked, not rhetorically.

“Because love is real and it’s doing long division in front of us,” Okamura said, brushing crumbs off his shirt with heartbreaking sincerity. “And I’m fragile.”

Epilogue: Three Days Later

Fukui entered the locker room, binder under one arm, emotionally preparing himself for another day of post-practice entropy.

He stopped.

He stared, a small, wounded sound escaping his throat—the kind of sound a man makes when his entire hypothesis shatters.

There they were.

Murasakibara and Himuro. Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bench. One calculator between them. One.

Himuro was calmly pressing sine function keys, his fingers poised like a pianist. Murasakibara watched the numbers populate the display with the reverent awe of a man reading ancient scripture.

They weren’t even speaking.

They didn’t have to.

Their silence was intimate. Academic. Mathematically loaded.

Fukui’s breath caught. He turned slowly, pressing his palm to his forehead as if to compress the reality back into something manageable.

“That’s it,” he announced to no one in particular. “I’m calling it. Nationals is going to be their fucking wedding.”

From the shower stalls, Liu’s voice echoed like divine judgment:

“I told you.”

A second beat.

Okamura, poking his head around the doorway with a wet towel draped over his shoulder, beamed. “Can I wear lavender? I look great in lavender.”

Fukui slumped against the wall, eyes glazed.

(Q.E.D.)