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It had all happened one afternoon during gym class. Nothing out of the ordinary had been going on all day, so when it did suddenly happen, Damian couldn’t even process it until it was too late; his hand slipped from the bars they were climbing on and he was sent tumbling to the ground. He tried to break his fall with his arms so his head wouldn’t smack against the cold, hard gym floor, but when his hands made contact with the ground, he heard a sickening snap before excruciating pain shot up his right wrist.
“AAAH, MY WRIST!” he cried out in pain as tears started streaming down his face.
It felt like lightning going through his whole arm and needles sticking into his skin from every angle possible. His wrist was burning inside and it felt like part of his body was on fire.
“Damian! Are you okay?”
He heard the worried voices of his classmates around him but he was crying so much that he couldn’t even make out who it was. Emile and Ewen, most likely. Damian tried lifting his hand to wipe the tears from his eyes, but the action made a whole new wave of pain go through him and he wailed even harder.
“Damian, what happened?” a much calmer voice spoke to him.
He wiped the tears from his eyes with his other hand and looked up to the face of his teacher. “I… I f-fell- and now m-my wr-wrist…” he tried explaining between heaves. “It- it hurts…”
“Let’s take you to the nurse’s office, alright?” the teacher said and helped him up. “She’ll know exactly what’s wrong.”
Damian nodded miserably as he followed the teacher to the nurse’s office, cradling his throbbing wrist carefully against his chest. He was still sniffling slightly; the occasional tear trailing down his cheeks, and he wished so bad for it all to stop. He probably looked pathetic right now.
He sat down in front of the nurse, and she barely even glanced at his wrist before proclaiming that it was most likely broken. “You should probably take some x-ray pictures at the hospital just to make sure, but it is definitely badly sprained, if not broken,” she explained.
So that’s how Damian found himself at the hospital later that day. His father had been very disappointed in him, saying that he shouldn’t have been so careless and that he was wasting other people’s valuable time with his stupid mistake.
The x-ray pictures showed that his wrist was indeed broken, and so they put a cast on his arm and told him that it would most likely be healed after about two months.
“Two months?!” Emile exclaimed when Damian told his friends about it the next morning. “That’s so long!”
“What are you going to do about classes now? You can’t write with your hand like that,” Ewen said, motioning to the cast on his wrist, but Damian shrugged glumly.
“I guess I’ll just have to write with my other hand.”
Ewen frowned at that. “Can you even do that?”
“I don’t know…” he answered, “but it’ll have to do.”
And so, when class started, Damian grabbed his pen in his left hand and tried scribbling down some notes but after a few minutes he swiftly gave up.
“This is a disaster,” he complained, banging his head against the table. “How am I ever going to be able to read this back?” He leaned over and held up his notes for Emile and Ewen to see, who both squinted at the scribbles confusedly with deep creases in their brows.
“What even is that supposed to say?” Emile asked him and Damian glanced back at his own notes, trying to figure out what in the world all the shaky squiggles meant.
“I… have no idea,” he admitted, sighing in defeat. “Something about what the teacher just said, I guess.”
“Damian, no chit-chat while I’m speaking,” the teacher scolded him and Damian sat up straight, his cheeks burning slightly in embarrassment.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Damian, how are you supposed to write on our test next week?” Ewen whispered once the teacher had turned his attention away from them again. “If the teacher can’t read what you wrote down, you won’t be able to get a Stella!” he said and Damian suddenly felt like he’d been punched right in the gut.
“Oh no…” He would definitely not be able to write properly on his test, and if that could cost him a Stella, then his father might be even more disappointed in him than he already was. “I’ll just have to learn to write with my left hand before the test then,” he said. “I will do everything it takes to get that Stella!”
“Damian, that’s enough talking. You can come sit up front here with Anya so I can keep a better eye on you.”
Biting his lip in frustration, Damian grabbed his books and moved to the front of the class, his cheeks burning in embarrassment. As if not being able to write wasn’t bad enough, now he also had to sit next to Anya Forger of all people. It just wasn’t fair.
He hesitated for a moment when he arrived at the desk, but Anya looked at him and said, “Anya promises she won’t punch you again,” before sending him one of her signature smirks as if she was trying to mock him.
His heart started beating faster and Damian wanted to snide back a remark, but remembered that the teacher was keeping an eye on him so he simply grumbled and finally sat down.
The lesson continued again and Damian tried his very best to focus and keep up, but it was practically impossible due to how slow he wrote with his left hand. Not to mention that even though he tried taking his time to write as neatly as possible, all of his notes were one big disastrous blotch of ink.
It was hopeless.
Once class was finally over, Damian let out a deep sigh, fighting away the tears that had started prickling in the back of his eyes. How in the world was he supposed to endure all of this for two more months?
“Oh… Sy-on boy can’t write anymore,” Anya suddenly said, eyeing his notes as she was packing up her own books, most likely having picked up on his sigh. However, before he could even think of how she was probably making fun of him somehow, she slid her notebook over towards him. “Here, you can have Anya’s notes!”
“I… uh- uhm,” Damian stammered, caught off-guard and not sure what exactly to think. For some reason his heart started beating a little faster, and his cheeks felt warm again.
He looked down at Anya’s scribbly handwriting, which was barely even legible, closely mirroring his own crappy left-handed writing. There were doodles all over the page, and even though Damian could barely even make out what they were supposed to resemble, he couldn’t help but think of them as kind of… cute?
No! Nothing about it was cute! Anya wasn’t cute! She was annoying, and her awful handwriting and terrible notes would not help him get anywhere, no matter how soft and sweet her voice had sounded when she’d offered them to him.
“No way!” he finally shot back. “I can’t even read that any better than my own notes. Besides, whatever you’ve written down is probably wrong anyways.”
“No it’s not!” Anya snapped back, crossing her arms defiantly with a small huff. “Anya’s been paying very good attention.”
Damian rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. That’s why there’s all those doodles everywhere.”
“Anya doodles to help remember things!” she said. “Look, this part was about a dog, so Anya drew Bond!” She smiled, and for once it wasn’t that terrible smirk of hers, it was a real, genuine smile and Damian’s heart may have skipped a beat.
“Tch, just find a proper place to doodle on. Maybe you’d get better grades then if your notes weren’t so clustered,” he said, looking away to avoid staring at Anya’s pretty smile.
Silence fell between them for a moment before Damian suddenly felt a soft tug on his arm. Anya had rolled up the sleeve of his uniform and was carefully holding onto the cast around his wrist. Before he could pull his arm back in protest, Anya drew a small smiley face right in the middle of the cast.
“Wh- what are you doing?” Damian asked.
“Doodling on a proper place.”
“How is my arm a proper place?!”
Anya pushed the cap back on her pen with a click and looked up to meet his eyes. “It looked so sad and empty, so Anya drew a happy smile,” she answered, grinning widely. Then she grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “Alright, well Anya’s going to have lunch with Becky now. If Sy-on boy wants Anya's notes anyway, he can ask for them,” she told him with yet another smile before turning around and skipping out of the classroom.
Damian just stood in shock for a moment, until Emil and Ewen turned up at his side. “What were you talking about, Damian?” Ewen asked.
“Yeah, did you snide any smart remarks at her, Boss-man?” Emile added, but Damian didn’t feel like answering them.
“C’mon, let’s just go have lunch,” he said instead, because he didn’t want to think about Anya at the moment. Not about how she’d offered her notes to him, not about the way she’d drawn a happy face on his cast and definitely not about the way she’d smiled at him ever so sweetly.
And yet, when his eyes fell to his wrist and he saw the way his sleeve was still rolled up, the smiley that Anya had drawn only reminded him more of her.
All throughout the rest of the day, Damian felt giddy for some reason. Especially whenever he looked at his cast and that stupid, derpy, little smile drawn onto it. He promptly rolled his sleeve back down, but sometimes the doodle still managed to peek out from under the edge. It frustrated him to no end, so Damian tried his very best to forget about it, and he’d almost succeeded in doing so. However, when he woke up the next morning and glanced at his cast in the mirror as he was changing, the whole cycle started all over again, with Anya’s smile stuck in his mind.
“Hey, Damian, what’s going on?” Emile asked him during lunch break a few days later.
“Yeah, you’ve been acting… uhm… a little weird,” Ewen said carefully.
Damian frowned. “I haven’t been acting weird,” he answered. His eyes fell onto the doodle on his cast again and he almost scoffed.
Okay, so perhaps his friends were right… But he didn’t want to admit that. Not to them, but especially not to himself. Because admitting that meant admitting that Anya had something to do with it, and Damian had so desperately been trying – and failing – to not think of her.
“Sorry, Damian, we just thought you might be a bit nervous for the test tomorrow, since, well, your wrist and everything.”
“I’m going to nail that test, broken wrist or not,” Damian answered. "I’ve been studying really hard these past few days, and if the teacher can read Forger’s horrible scribbles, then surely he can read mine.”
And there it was again. Anya had unconsciously popped back into his mind and Damian almost wanted to scold himself for it. How was it so hard to not think of her?
“Good point, Boss-man!” Emile said and Ewen nodded along.
Damian ignored them and just continued eating, hoping to get this school day over and done with so he could get back to studying for this test. It was the only thing that could distract him well enough from all the Anya related thoughts plaguing his mind.
But of course nothing could ever go the way he wanted it to. And that’s how he found himself in the library, focussing hard as he tried to decipher the awful scribbling of his notes from the past week, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up to see Anya standing next to him, a notebook clutched tightly in her hands and a soft pink blush that matched her hair spread across her cheeks.
“What do you want, Forger?” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Uhm… Anya was wondering… if…” she started, before mumbling unintelligible words that Damian couldn’t catch.
“What was that? If you want something, just spit it out already.”
“Anya was wondering if Sy-on boy…” she stopped for a moment, biting her lip before finally finishing in one breath: “ifSyonboystillneededAnyasnotesandifhecouldhelpmestudy.”
Damian blinked a couple times at her, not entirely sure if he’d hear her properly. “Eh?”
“Sy-on boy still doesn’t have the notes from the first class and Anya needs help studying,” she explained. “Anya gives Sy-on boy notes, Sy-on helps Anya study.”
So he had heard that correctly. Anya actually wanted to study… with him? He wasn’t so sure how he was supposed to respond. He’d reverted to studying so he could forget about Anya, even if for just a little.
And yet, here he was, scooting over to make room for her as she grabbed an extra chair to join him. She opened her notebook and Damian had to wonder for a second whether this was actually Anya’s notebook.
“Did you steal Becky’s notebook?” he asked her before he could stop himself.
“Nope! Anya did this all by herself!” she exclaimed proudly and Damian leaned closer to her to take a good look at the notes.
They were the exact notes that she’d shown him a few days ago, except these were written in a little less horrible handwriting and there were no doodles to be found anywhere on the page, not even in the corners.
“Are you sure?” Damian asked, raising an eyebrow at her in suspicion, but Anya simply giggled.
“Yep! Anya copied her own notes and made sure to make them less clustered and scribbly for Sy-on boy!” she explained and smiled at him.
It was that same smile from a few days ago as well, and Damian felt his face flush a little at the sight of it. “Oh…” he said, “well, uhm, thank you. I suppose.”
He read through the notes and everything that he’d been studying the past few days suddenly made so much more sense. He’d been able to understand most of everything, but having these introductory notes really helped tie everything together and made it all so much easier to remember. Not to mention that without Anya’s doodles everywhere, the notes were clear enough to read.
“So, uhm, what do you need help with then?” he asked her after he’d finished reading.
It was silent for a beat, and Damian looked back up at her. “…everything,” she said eventually. “Anya is very bad at history…”
“Well, that’s nothing new,” he answered with a snort, but grabbed his own notes nonetheless. “Alright, well, we’ll just start from the beginning then I guess.”
To his surprise, Anya actually seemed to listen intently to the things he tried explaining, even taking a few extra notes every now and then. However, after a while she leaned back in her chair with a groan.
“Okay, Sy-on, that’s enough, Anya’s brain is going to explode if we study for any longer.”
“Fine, suit yourself, but I’m going to continue revisioning.” He contemplated telling her to leave him alone to study, but for some reason he decided against it. As long as she wouldn’t disturb him, he guessed she could stay here and keep him company for a little.
And Damian was surprised yet again when Anya went silent, letting him do his thing. He was so confused that he barely registered the soft pressure of something against his cast as he poured himself over his history books.
When he himself too couldn't study for any longer because he felt like "his brain was going to explode”, in Anya’s words, he finally closed his books with a sigh.
“Wow, Sy-on boy sure studies a lot,” Anya said.
“Well, duh, how else am I supposed to get good enough grades to make me an Imperial Scholar?” he said, but then snorted softly. “Oh, wait, sorry, I shouldn’t be talking to you about good grades, I highly doubt you even know what they are.”
“So rude, Sy-on boy!” Anya scoffed at him. “And that after Anya went through all that hard work of making your cast look pretty.”
“Eh?” Damian said in shock, taking a look down at his cast which was now completely covered in doodles of stars, different types of flowers, stick figures and even a few little hearts. And of course that derpy little smiley face in the midst of it all. His breath caught in his throat for a second.
“Do you like it?” Anya asked him sweetly with another one of those smiles that Damian seemed to be getting used to recently.
He looked at all the little doodles on his cast and the first thing that came to his mind was, cute. But he still didn’t want to admit it, so instead he exclaimed, “what did you do to my cast?!”
“Anya made it look pretty,” Anya repeated. “It looked so empty, and Anya remembered not to doodle on notes anymore. Does Sy-on boy not like Anya’s doodles?” she asked him then, and the smile disappeared from her face, making a pain shoot through Damian’s chest.
“No!” he immediately blurted out. “No, I mean, I like them- I mean, no! I don’t, but uhm, I don’t not like them but…” he rambled before sighing and finally mumbling, “fine, okay, they’re cute.”
As soon as the words left his lips he immediately felt a burning heat rise to his face and he was starting to regret all his decisions, but then Anya’s face lit up with the brightest smile he’d ever seen and any regret he might have felt left his body in an instant. Her smile reached her gorgeous green eyes and they were practically sparkling with happiness and it was then that Damian thought to himself that, no, it’s not just the doodles that are cute. Perhaps Anya Forger is a little cute too.
Perhaps a lot.
The suddenness of that thought hit him like a brick and he immediately grabbed all his stuff, muttering that he needed to go, before bolting out of the library. He still heard the way that Anya thanked him for helping her study, her sweet voice ringing in his ears.
Damian didn’t know what to do with this sudden revelation about his… rival? Friend? What even were they? Everything about Anya Forger frustrated and confused him and he didn’t understand how to deal with whatever it was he was feeling. He hated the way that his face felt warm whenever she was near, and how his heart sometimes skipped a beat when she smiled at him, but…
He didn’t want her to ever stop smiling, because it was the prettiest thing Damian had ever seen.
And so, he found himself making less snarky remarks at her, instead making a few more jokes to make her smile and eventually, over the years, they started hanging out more and more, until Damian was finally sure that he could consider them friends. And good ones at that.
By then of course, Damian had long been rid of that annoying cast on his wrist, seeing as it had healed up nicely. Anya however, still liked drawing on his hands and arms from time to time, despite the fact that there was no longer a cast present for her to draw on.
On the other hand, Damian had kept the cast, stored away in a shoebox in his closet. It wasn’t something he wanted anyone to find out; it was a secret, and a kind of embarrassing one at that. But he hadn’t had the heart to throw it away after the doctors had asked him if he’d wanted to keep it. Especially not with all those doodles on it that Anya had ever so lovingly decorated it with.
As time went on, he eventually forgot about the box with his cast in it, so when he had finally graduated from the Eden Academy High School and had to move all of his things out of the dormitory, he finally found it again.
“Huh, what’s this?” he thought to himself as he was clearing out his closet, reaching out to the dusty shoebox that had been stuffed all the way in the back under a pile of blankets.
Damian grabbed it and blew off most of the dust that lay on top. Then he carefully opened the lid and was met with the small cast that had fit around his six-year-old wrist. He took in the scribbly little doodles that covered the whole thing, from the stick figures to the little hearts and that one stupid, derpy looking smiley in the middle.
He smiled fondly and looked at his own hands which were now covered in less crooked looking hearts (though a lot more of them), sparkles and “congrats graduate Sy-on!!” scribbled in the signature, barely legible handwriting of none other than Anya Forger.
Nothing had changed, really. Besides Anya’s drawing skills perhaps.
Carefully placing the cast back in the shoebox, Damian added that to his mental list of things to keep and continued clearing out his dorm.
A few days passed and Damian just couldn’t stop thinking about the cast. He looked down at his hands, Anya’s doodles long washed off of his skin and he sighed. How was it that after years, he still couldn’t ever get that girl off his mind? At least by now Damian had the words to define his feelings for Anya, as Becky had liked pointing out to him many, many times during their years at Eden Academy.
‘Big fat crush’ had been her exact words, and at first Damian had refused to acknowledge the truth in her words, but by now there was no going around it anymore, because Damian did, in fact, have a big fat crush on Anya Forger. Had probably had it for years, if he were to be honest for once.
And so, on one fateful afternoon, Damian Desmond found himself heading to a place he had never thought of going before, the shoebox with his cast in it clutched tightly in his hands:
The tattoo parlour.
Perhaps it was a bit of an impulsive decision, and perhaps when the needles started sticking into his skin, Damian almost started regretting that impulsive decision… But when he stared at the end result a few hours later, he couldn’t have been happier.
Staring right back at him from his hand was that stupid, derpy, little smiley that Anya had drawn, along with all her other adorable doodles. Permanently, this time. The thought of these dumb drawings being with him forever from that moment on made him feel warm inside. He couldn’t wait to show Anya.
“Sooo… what’s going on, Sy-on?” she asked him with a small chuckle when he came over to visit a few days later. “You’ve been so mysterious lately.”
“Just wait,” he said, smiling back at her as he took off his coat. Then he reached over to pet Bond, who’d come bolting over excitedly. “Hey, boy! Good to see you again.”
“Not good to see me? You’re so mean, Sy-on.”
Damian playfully stuck his tongue out to her. “Well duh, I obviously only come here to pet your dog.” Then he ruffled the fur on Bond’s head and said, “isn’t that right, boy?”
“Bworf!” he answered and Anya huffed, pretending to be offended, but then suddenly gasped.
“Oh my god! Did Sy-on boy get a tattoo?”
He felt a slight warmth rise to his cheeks as he rolled up his sleeve and held out his arm for Anya to inspect it. “Yeah, I did, actually.”
Anya carefully grabbed his hand and held up to her face, turning it slightly to look at Damian’s new tattoo from different angles. Her touch made electric sparks run up and down his arm and Damian still didn’t know how this one girl had the power to make his heart beat faster than the speed of light.
“What do you think?” he asked tentatively after a stretched moment of silence.
Anya looked at him and giggled. “It’s cute, but not something Anya would have expected from Sy-on.”
Damian smiled fondly at the way she sometimes still slipped into her old habit of referring to herself in the third person. “Well, I’m glad you like it,” he confessed. “Because they’re kind of your doodles.”
“Huh?” Anya looked at his hand again, and then back at him. “So that’s why they seemed familiar.”
“Yeah, I kept that cast from first grade that you decorated for me,” Damian explained, feeling his cheeks grow hotter and hotter by the second as he awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck. “And well, I kind of got used to the way you always doodled on my hands but I never liked seeing them wash away after a while.”
Anya hummed softly and Damian looked away from her, not daring to meet her eyes. Instead he opted for inspecting the floor because, boy, the floor sure was interesting!
“You mean a lot to me, Anya,” he said, “and I know that we may have started off roughly, but you know, we were kids and you’ve grown to be one of my closest friends now. And I…” He paused for a moment, not entirely sure what he was supposed to say. Taking a quick glance at his hand and watching that derpy smile look back at him, he felt a surge of confidence rush through him and he heaved out a breath. “I like you, Anya. I like your stupid drawings that are always all over your notes and my arms and your absolutely horrible handwriting. I like your smile and how bright and beautiful it is and how it never fails to make me happy. And I like how this silly smiley face reminds me of you. Because I really, really like you, Anya Forger.”
Silence filled the air and Damian bit his lip before looking back up to finally meet Anya’s eyes. They were sparkling, just like they always were, with a bright smile on her lips to accompany them. However, she wasn’t saying anything and Damian’s heart was beating wildly in his chest and his hands were starting to get clammy from all the nerves.
But then Anya stepped towards him, leaning in close to plant a soft, featherlight kiss on his cheek. “Anya likes Sy-on too,” she then whispered in his ear and oh, the happiness Damian suddenly felt surge through him could not be put to words.
“Y-you do?” he stammered dumbly and almost wanted to smack himself in the face for how incredibly stupid that was had Anya not giggled.
“Yes, Damian, I like you. A lot,” she repeated.
The way she said it, so easily with that gorgeous smile of hers lighting up the whole room, and the way she’d used his actual name made Damian’s heart flutter. “Oh, uhm. Okay,” he then said, like that wasn’t equally as stupid as his last words.
“So…?”
“…So, what?”
“Are you going to ask me to be your girlfriend now? Or are you still only going to come here for my dog?”
Damian felt his cheeks grow even warmer, if that was even possible. His face must have been even redder than that sweater he always saw Anya’s mother in. “How about both?” he somehow still managed to joke through his embarrassment.
Anya chuckled and looked over to her dog, who was lying lazily in his bed. “What do you say, Bond?” she asked him.
“Bworf!”
She chuckled again and shook her head, before leaning over to Damian once more. “Both is good,” she whispered before pecking him on the lips. “Just make sure you come over to visit Bond extra much from now on.”
Damian smiled at her and gently rested his forehead against hers. “Deal.”