Work Text:
The Yōsen library existed in a state of aristocratic decay. Sunlight filtered through stained glass, splintering over oak tables that had survived wars, economic bubbles, and three generations of alumni. Somewhere in the vaulted ceiling, the ancient ventilation system wheezed, preserved less from necessity than because modernity was considered vulgar.
The chairs, original 1920s artifacts, had clearly been designed for a generation of bookish youths who never dreamed of two-meter-tall athletes. Across campus, the basketball complex gleamed with titanium and touchscreens, while here, even the dust seemed curated for historical accuracy. Akashi would adore this place.
Murasakibara Atsushi's 208cm frame was a study in contradictions against this backdrop, a basketball prodigy folded into a chair two sizes too small, his knees jammed painfully against the undersized table's edge. A half-completed physics problem set lay abandoned before him, its pristine white pages defaced by his blocky handwriting and the occasional grease stain from the crumpled bag of shrimp chips at his elbow. The salty aroma should have clashed with the library's refined atmosphere, but after three years at Teikō, Atsushi had long since learned that genius smelled like sweat, chalk dust, and whatever snacks could be smuggled past the librarians.
Across the table, the chair legs scraped against hardwood in a sound that set Atsushi's teeth on edge. He didn't look up.
"You're in my light," he grumbled around a mouthful of chips, the crunch too loud for a room like this.
Himuro Tatsuya didn't apologize. The omega merely adjusted his notebook with a precision that bordered on obsessive, the pages filled with equations so dense they seemed to warp the very surface of the paper. His pencil, always perfectly sharpened, always the expensive imported kind, was already moving again, tracing symbols with the fluid grace of a calligrapher.
"Then move," he murmured, voice low enough that the words barely disturbed the air between them. "Or are you afraid of shadows, Atsushi?"
The alpha's nostrils flared involuntarily. That scent, sweetness laced with heat and iron, ghosted through the space between them like a living thing. It clung to Himuro like a second skin, faint beneath the sterile library air but unmistakable to an alpha's heightened senses. Atsushi's fingers tightened around his snack bag with a crinkle that sounded dangerously loud in the quiet.
He didn’t breathe in again. (It took effort.)
But then Himuro leaned forward to point at a particularly vicious-looking formula, and-
Oh.
The scent sharpened, burnt honey now, molten sugar laced with something darker that made Atsushi's gums ache with the phantom weight of unsheathed fangs. Annoying. He shoved another shrimp chip into his mouth with unnecessary force, crunching down hard as if salt and starch could drown out the sweetness clinging to his tongue.
(It didn't.)
The omega's scent was a problem Atsushi hadn't accounted for in his carefully constructed apathy. Like an unsolvable variable in an otherwise balanced equation, it refused to be factored out.
Atsushi didn’t do study partners.
Study partners were noise, endless questions buzzing like gnats in his ear ("Did you finish problem set three?"), demands poking at his concentration like impatient fingers jabbing his shoulder ("Explain Lagrangian mechanics again"), and worst of all, the judgmental stares when he cracked open a snack in the sacred silence of the library. At Teikō, he'd learned quickly that people only wanted two things from him: answers and awe. They'd crowd around his desk, peering at his work like vultures circling fresh meat, their voices rising in a cacophony of "How did you solve this?" and "Show me your notes!" until he'd snap, scattering them like frightened pigeons.
But Himuro wasn't asking anything.
The omega simply existed across the table, a mercury-eyed specter flipping through a notebook filled with equations so dense they made Atsushi's head throb just glancing at them. Symbols curled like vines across the pages, integrals stacked like ladders to nowhere, Greek letters dancing between matrices in patterns that defied immediate comprehension. It was a language Atsushi could use but never speak, not the way Himuro did, with numbers bending like willows under the weight of his understanding.
"Tch." Atsushi flicked a crumb off his workbook with more force than necessary, watching it skitter across the table's scarred surface. "Math is boring."
Himuro's pencil didn't pause. The lead whispered across the paper in quick, sure strokes, not the hesitant scratching of someone solving problems, but the confident lines of someone building them from nothing. "Says the man who calculates rebound angles mid-dunk."
Atsushi's scowl deepened. He'd never admitted to doing that. “I don’t.”
(But of course Himuro had noticed. The omega noticed everything, the way Atsushi's eyes flicked to the backboard a fraction of a second before he jumped, the unconscious tilt of his head as he gauged trajectories, the way physics lived in his bones as much as basketball did.)
“You do.” Himuro’s voice stayed calm, but his eye flicked up, catching Atsushi’s for a heartbeat before dropping back to the page. “You look at the backboard 0.2 seconds before you jump. Every time.”
Atsushi’s grip tightened on the shrimp chip bag, plastic crackling. That was too specific. Too observed.
“You count,” Himuro added. “Even if you don’t call it that.”
“Tch. Creepy,” Atsushi muttered. His ears felt hot. He shoved another chip into his mouth. “Stop watching me.”
“You’re hard to ignore.”
Himuro said it like a neutral observation, like stating the mass of a planet. It still landed heavy, wedging itself under Atsushi’s ribs and staying there.
He watched, despite himself, as symbols flowed like water across the page under Himuro's pencil. The omega worked with a quiet intensity that was nothing like the performative brilliance of Teikō's so-called geniuses. No grand gestures, no smug glances, just the steady, inevitable march of logic toward truth.
"Physics is just applied math," Himuro murmured, as if commenting on the weather.
Atsushi's scowl could have curdled milk. "Wrong." He jabbed a finger at his open textbook, where a diagram of a pendulum mid-swing froze time into neat, measurable increments. "Physics is real. Math is just... made-up rules. Numbers don't do anything. They just sit there."
The words tasted like heresy in his mouth, but he stood by them. Physics was the world, the way a ball arced through the air, the way muscles contracted and released, the way a backboard shattered under the right amount of force. Math was just the ghost that followed afterward, trying to explain what had already happened.
Finally, Himuro lifted his gaze.
Oh.
That was dangerous.
The omega's single visible eye, quicksilver sharp, the other hidden behind the dark curtain of his bangs, fixed on Atsushi with the intensity of a laser sight. "You say numbers aren't real?" He flipped to a dog-eared page in Atsushi's own notebook, where the margin was crammed with haphazard calculations. "Then tell me—" His fingertip landed on a scribbled Δv = 9.8 m/s². "—why did you write this? That's just a number, Atsushi. But it rules your physics."
Atsushi's fingers twitched. The equation stared back at him, undeniable in its simplicity. Gravity's acceleration. The reason a ball thrown straight up would always come back down.
"That's different! It—" The growl rumbled low in his throat before he could stop it, surprising even himself with its defensiveness. His canines ached with the urge to bare them, an instinctive response to being challenged. "—it means something!"
Himuro's lips curved. Without breaking eye contact, he tapped an equation in his own notebook, a sleek differential formula Atsushi recognized as describing parabolic motion. "So does this." His voice dropped, intimate as a secret. "It's the shape of a parabola before you throw a ball. The ghost of motion, waiting to be born."
Something clicked in his chest with near-physical force, an unfamiliar sensation like the first time he'd truly understood torque, when the relationship between force, lever arms and rotation had suddenly crystallized into perfect clarity. Or that revelatory moment when he'd finally grasped why Kuroko's misdirection passes worked, how the human eye's blind spots could be weaponized on court.
The gymnasium flashed through his mind, Himuro executing his Mirage Shot during practice, the ball warping midair as if reality itself had stuttered. The way opponents always flinched a fraction too late, their brains refusing to process what their eyes couldn't reconcile with known physics. That impossible arc hadn't been magic. It had been this, this cold, beautiful equation given flesh. And Himuro had known.
"Can you touch a quantum field?" Himuro pressed, leaning forward just enough that his sleeve brushed Atsushi's wrist. The contact lasted less than a heartbeat, but it jolted up his arm like bad wiring. His hand twitched. Stupid. "Or is physics just describing things you'll never actually see?"
Atsushi's breath hitched. The library's air suddenly felt too thick, too warm.
Damn him.
Because that was the thing: Atsushi knew physics. Knew it in his bones, in his muscles, in the way his body moved through space. He understood the way forces balanced like a perfectly weighted scale, the elegant economy of action and reaction. He'd internalized how energy conserved itself with the stubbornness of a child refusing to share toys, how the universe bent to rules he could prove with a well-placed experiment or a well-thrown punch.
Himuro moved through spaces Atsushi couldn’t even picture, building structures in dimensions that didn’t exist on court—and worst of all, made it look effortless.
The thought sat like a rock in his gut. Stupid. Heavy. Wouldn’t move. He had spent years cultivating indifference as armor, perfecting the art of not caring enough to be disappointed. At Teikō, he had learned the hard way that curiosity was a liability, that wanting something too much made it hurt worse when it was taken away. So he had buried his hunger beneath layers of apathy, pretended that nothing mattered, that he was above it all.
But here, in this quiet corner of the library with equations spread between them like a battleground, Himuro had found a chink in his defenses.
The omega's pencil resumed its dance across the page, the sound suddenly deafening in the charged silence. The lead whispered against paper, each stroke deliberate, each symbol placed with the precision of a master craftsman. Atsushi realized with dawning horror that he was leaning forward again, elbows inching over the midpoint of the table like he was crowding a defender. He was staring again. Dumb. Couldn’t stop. Like gravity but worse.
Pathetic.
He could feel the heat creeping up the back of his neck, the way his pulse stuttered when Himuro's fingers paused just slightly over a particularly thorny part of the proof. The omega's brow furrowed, just for a second, before smoothing out again as the solution came to him. Atsushi wanted to see it. Wanted to follow the path of his thoughts, to understand how his mind worked when it was untangling problems that left others stumped.
"Fine," he grumbled, shoving his workbook across the table hard enough to make Himuro's pencil roll. The graphite cylinder teetered near the edge before settling again. "Explain this stupid integral, then."
Himuro's fingers brushed his as he caught the paper, and Atsushi felt it, that spark, that friction. The contact was weird. Too familiar. Like a puzzle piece that shouldn’t fit but did anyway.
Didn’t make sense. Felt too easy. Probably a trap.
"It's not stupid," Himuro murmured, his pencil already moving. The lead whispered across the page, transforming Atsushi's clumsy attempts into something elegant, something alive. "It's just waiting for you to see it right."
Atsushi understood that, Himuro was solving the problem. He was rewriting it. Turning something Atsushi had dismissed as boring into something beautiful, like the way he'd turned basketball into a dance, his footwork a Fibonacci spiral unfolding across the court. Like the way he turned Atsushi into...
Atsushi rolled his eyes so hard his head lolled back against the chair. "Still boring."
But he didn't look away.
Himuro smiled.
The library's overhead lights flickered, casting shifting shadows over the table as Himuro flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. His pencil carved lines with surgical precision, graphite hissing softly with each stroke, forming symbols Atsushi recognized but didn't understand. Not like this. Not the way Himuro did, with numbers bending like willows under his touch, equations unfolding like origami in reverse.
Atsushi watched, chin propped on his palm, shrimp chip forgotten.
The omega's fingers moved with the same precision he used on the court, no wasted motion, no hesitation. Every line was deliberate, every symbol placed with intent. Atsushi had seen him dismantle defenses with that same focus, slipping past opponents like they were standing still.
And now, here, with nothing but paper and pencil between them, it felt like another kind of game. One Atsushi wasn't sure he knew the rules to.
Himuro's pencil paused. He glanced up, catching Atsushi mid-stare.
"Problem?"
Atsushi's lip curled. "Tch. Just wondering when you're gonna get to the point."
Himuro's lips curved again, slow and knowing. "The point is the process, Atsushi."
Atsushi exhaled through his nose, annoyed. "Sounds like an excuse for taking too long."
Himuro laughed, soft, barely there, but it curled in Atsushi’s chest like smoke. "Some things can’t be rushed."
Atsushi’s fingers twitched. He wanted to argue. Wanted to snap that he could solve things faster, that brute force was just as effective as finesse.
But then Himuro slid the notebook toward him, and the words died in his throat.
The page was filled with a single, sprawling proof, Atsushi’s messy integral rewritten into something sleek and inevitable, each step laid bare.
Himuro tapped the final line.
"See?"
And that, that was the most infuriating part. That this omega could take the tangled knot of Atsushi's frustration and unravel it with a few strokes of his pencil. That he could make the incomprehensible suddenly, painfully clear. That he could look at Atsushi's messy scrawl and see not just the mistakes, but the potential hidden beneath them.
"Tch." Atsushi slumped lower, resting his chin on folded arms in a show of indifference that fooled exactly no one. "Still boring."
But his gaze held, helpless against the magnetic pull of logic rendered beautiful. Not when Himuro's work held him captive with the same gravitational pull as his Mirage Shot on the court, impossible to ignore, impossible to predict, impossible to look away from until it was far too late.
Himuro smiled, different from the polite, practiced expression he used with teachers and teammates. It was something smaller, sharper. Something meant only for Atsushi in this quiet space between equations and ego.
The library's overhead lights flickered as Himuro flipped to a fresh page, the sudden fluctuation in brightness casting his profile in stark relief for a heartbeat, the sharp line of his nose, the curve of his lashes against his cheek, the way his bangs fell just so to conceal one mercury-bright eye.
Atsushi watched, chin propped on his palm, the forgotten shrimp chip crumbling between his fingers. The salty tang on his tongue had long since faded, replaced by something sharper, something more electric.
"Tch. What's that?"
Himuro didn't look up. "An equation."
"Obviously." Atsushi scowled, the words rougher than he intended. "For what?"
The omega's lips twitched. His pencil hovered over the page for a dramatic moment before descending with a flourish, the lead carving bold characters above the formula:
The Fundamental Theorem of Us.
Atsushi blinked. Once. Twice. The words stared back at him, absurd and impossible and—
"That's not a real theorem."
Himuro's fingers moved before Atsushi could react, tearing the page from the notebook with a precise motion, folding it once along a perfect diagonal, and tucking it into the pocket of Atsushi's jacket. His fingertips lingered for a breath too long against the fabric, the heat of them searing through the material to brand Atsushi's skin beneath.
"It is now."
Atsushi's ears burned. The paper in his pocket suddenly felt heavier than it had any right to be, the crease sharp against his thigh. He should crumple it. Should toss it back in that infuriating omega's face with a scoff. Should pretend it meant nothing at all.
Instead, his hand closed around it through the fabric, his thumb brushing unconsciously over the edge where Himuro's fingers had been.
"Tch. Stupid."
(He didn't let go.)
(He wouldn't, not for all the shrimp chips in Japan.)
One week later
The scent ambushed him the moment he pushed open the library doors, honey giving way to gunpowder, thick enough to coat his tongue.
Above the study tables, the faint buzz of the scent-neutralizer ward trembled in the fluorescent lights, a low hum designed to erase alpha and omega pheromones into sterile nothing. It wasn’t working. Himuro’s bleed slid through the gap like smoke under a door, spreading until it drowned the air in molten amber.
Atsushi’s fingers clenched around the doorframe hard enough to make the old wood groan. His hindbrain roared two contradictory orders: Flee and Claim.
Across the room, a poster curled at the corner: RESPECT BOUNDARIES. REPORT PHEROMONE VIOLATIONS TO THE PROCTOR. The librarian’s gaze flicked toward their table once, sharp behind her half-moon glasses, then away again. Himuro hadn’t tripped the ward hard enough to warrant intervention. He never would. Too precise.
Himuro sat bathed in jaundiced lamplight, his suppressant patch peeling at the edges like parchment held too close to flame. His pencil moved with surgical elegance, graphite whispering across the paper. A bead of sweat traced the line of his jaw, catching the light before vanishing beneath his collar. Atsushi’s gut clenched at the sight. His teeth ached. (Stand down, don’t flinch, control)
This wasn’t Teikō. At Teikō, precision had meant Akashi’s control, the leash tightening, the suffocating certainty of a command before it was even spoken. Himuro’s precision was different. It didn’t choke. It pulled. Gravity instead of guillotine. And that was worse. Because Atsushi knew what it felt like to be owned. He didn’t know what it meant to want to give in.
Himuro didn’t look up. Just kept writing, wrist bent at that precise angle, as if the air between them wasn’t heavy enough to bend light.
The omega's scent was a calculated assault, violating every library etiquette and Atsushi's carefully cultivated apathy in equal measure. Graph paper spread before him like a battlefield, dense with partial derivatives that spiraled into fractal patterns, equations bleeding into the margins in that cramped, elegant script Atsushi had come to recognize instantly.
Atsushi's feet moved without permission.
"You're—" His vocal cords strangled the words, his voice dropping into an alpha register so deep it vibrated in his chest. He cleared his throat, forcing his tone back to something neutral. "—your patch."
Himuro's pencil stuttered mid-derivation. He didn’t look up immediately. When he did, his mercury eye lingered not on Atsushi’s face but lower, a flicker at his mouth, quick and deliberate, before rising again. “I’m aware.” His voice stayed steady, but his scent betrayed him, sharpened sweetness curdling. Gunpowder laced with honey. A test.
Atsushi swallowed, throat clicking louder than it should have. Himuro's eye flicked to the movement for half a second, then to his hand on the doorframe where the old wood complained under his grip. Of course he was aware. Himuro didn’t do accidents. If the patch was peeling, it was because he’d decided to let it peel.
Annoying.
The omega leaned forward slightly to circle a problem on the page, sleeve brushing Atsushi’s arm, the move too clean to be coincidence. “I’ll leave when I’m done,” Himuro said, like they were discussing library hours instead of whether Atsushi’s self-control survived the next five minutes.
Atsushi's molars ground together. Every instinct screamed at him to act, to either press a fresh patch to that vulnerable gland with clinical efficiency or sink his teeth through the failing one and claim what was clearly...
No.
Instead, he slammed his physics textbook onto the table hard enough to make nearby students flinch. The sound echoed through the quiet library like a gunshot, earning a chorus of hissed protests and a withering glare from the librarian.
His fingers twitched at his sides. The urge to pin him down and fix it warred with the darker impulse to rip the patch off completely and let the omega's scent flood the room, let every alpha in a five-kilometer radius know exactly who...
"You're distracting," Atsushi growled instead, dropping into his chair with enough force to make the legs screech against the floor.
Himuro tilted his throat, the peeling patch exposing a sliver of scent-gland. "And yet you're still here." His pencil tapped the unsolved integral. "Curious."
The words hooked under his ribs. Too close. Too smug.
The wood creaked as Atsushi’s grip tightened on the chair. Physics never lied: every action had an equal reaction. He’d be damned if he let the omega dictate this equation.
Atsushi sat.
For a long moment, they simply stared at each other, Atsushi's violet eyes locked onto Himuro's mercury gaze, the air between them thick with unsaid things. The library's usual sounds, the whisper of turning pages, the occasional cough, the distant hum of the ventilation system, faded into white noise. Atsushi could hear his own pulse thundering in his ears, could feel the way his canines ached with the need to bare themselves. The omega's scent coiled tight around him, sweet heat edged with smoke, volatile, impossible to ignore
Then, with deliberate slowness that felt like torture, Himuro slid a sheet of paper toward him, a triple integral scrawled in that cramped, elegant handwriting Atsushi would recognize anywhere. The kind of problem he usually dismissed as "math for masochists," all nested limits and obscure transformations that made his head hurt just looking at them.
"Solve it," Himuro said, voice deceptively light. As if he were commenting on the weather rather than issuing a challenge that made Atsushi's alpha instincts bristle.
Atsushi scoffed, forcing his shoulders to stay loose even as his fingers twitched against his thighs. "Why?"
"Because I want to see if you can."
The words hung between them, weighted with more than just academic curiosity. There was something else there, something that made Atsushi's fingers itch with the need to prove himself, with the urge to strangle this infuriating omega, with the desperate, clawing want to—
He grabbed his spare pencil with a snarl, the wood creaking in his grip.
"Fine." The lead hit the paper with enough force to leave an indent, graphite dust scattering like shrapnel. "But when I solve it," he growled, already scribbling the first clumsy attempt at a substitution, "you admit physics isn't just applied math. It's real math."
Himuro's smirk deepened as he leaned back in his chair, the front legs lifting slightly off the ground in a move that would have earned anyone else a scolding from the librarians. The lamplight caught the sharp angle of his jaw, the faint sheen of sweat at his temples.
"Define real."
"Numbers describe. Physics happens." Atsushi jabbed his pencil toward the textbook lying open between them, where a diagram of a pendulum mid-swing froze time into neat, measurable increments. "That pendulum? It moves whether or not your precious equations exist."
"Then why does this description predict the exact moment it reverses direction?" His voice dropped, intimate and dangerous. "If math is just scribbles, how does it know the future?"
Atsushi's jaw clenched hard enough to make his teeth ache. Damn him. The omega had a way of turning arguments into Möbius strips. No beginning, no end, just one continuous surface of frustration that left Atsushi dizzy and off-balance.
A rustle broke the spell, someone snapping shut a worn anthology three tables down, the thud of it startling in the hush. A chair scraped, footsteps retreated. The ancient clock above the reference desk ticked past five.
Outside the stained glass, late-afternoon light had begun to amber, angling across the parquet in blades of dusty gold. For one breathless moment, it was just the two of them in this crumbling cathedral of calculation.
Atsushi shifted in his seat, suddenly too aware of the heat gathering behind his collar. Of the way Himuro’s knee had drifted half an inch closer under the table.
Of how the ghost of a challenge still clung to the air like static.
Thirty minutes in, Atsushi's forehead pressed against the cool wood of the table, his bangs sticking to his temples in damp strands. The integral laughed at him from the page, taunting. He'd approached it like any physics problem: identify the variables, apply the proper formulas, brute-force his way through. But the solution kept slipping through his fingers like quantum foam, dissolving every time he thought he had a grip on it.
His notebook was a warzone of crossed-out attempts, each failed approach more frustrated than the last. Atsushi’s knuckles whitened around his pencil, this was why he preferred physics. At least gravity didn’t mock him with imaginary numbers.
Across the table, Himuro worked with infuriating calm, his own notes a masterpiece of precision that made Atsushi want to flip the table just to see that composure crack.
A warm finger tapped the crook of his elbow, once, twice, the contact brief but electric enough to make the fine hairs on Atsushi's arms stand at attention. The touch lingered just a fraction too long to be accidental, the pad of Himuro's finger pressing deliberately against the sensitive skin where his pulse jumped erratically. Atsushi's breath hitched before he could stop it, the sound embarrassingly loud in the quiet library.
"Here."
Himuro leaned over him, close enough that his scent drowned out everything else. The musty library dust, the faint chemical tang of old paper, even the metallic bite of Atsushi's own frustration that had been clinging to him since he'd first stared down that impossible integral, all vanished. The omega's breath ghosted over the shell of Atsushi's ear as he circled a line of work with a pencil stroke as precise as a surgical incision, the lead barely grazing the paper.
"You forgot to account for the boundary condition."
Atsushi's skin burned where their arms brushed, the contact sending sparks skittering up his nerve endings. He could feel the heat radiating from Himuro's body, could count the individual lashes framing those mercury-sharp eyes from this distance.
"Tch. Doesn't matter." The protest sounded weak even to his own ears, his voice dropping into a register too deep to play off as indifference.
Himuro's breath hitched, just slightly, as he exhaled, the air carrying the faintest hint of spearmint gum and something warmer, something uniquely Himuro that made Atsushi's mouth water.
"It always matters."
His knee brushed Atsushi's under the table, once, twice, a deliberate feint like his damn Mirage Shot on the court. The contact was electric, sending a current up Atsushi's spine that short-circuited his higher reasoning and left only base instinct thrumming through his veins.
"You—" Atsushi moved without thinking, his hand snapping out to grab Himuro's wrist, his thumb finding the rapid-fire pulse fluttering beneath paper-thin skin. The omega's wrist was slender but strong, the bones shifting slightly under his grip. "—cheat."
Himuro went perfectly still, his breath catching audibly. His scent spiked violently, honey curdling into something darker, more dangerous, gunpowder igniting into something that smelled like challenge and promise and mine.
"Only when the opponent's worth it." The words came out rough, stripped of their usual polished edges.
Atsushi didn't let go. Couldn't. The warmth of Himuro's wrist against his palm felt like the only real thing in the suddenly too-bright library, the fluorescent lights overhead buzzing like a swarm of agitated bees. His thumb moved without permission, tracing the delicate tracery of veins beneath the omega's skin.
Himuro didn't pull away. His free hand remained splayed across the problem sheet, fingers tensing slightly against the paper but not retreating. A drop of sweat traced a slow path down the column of his throat, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt.
The equation lay between them, half-solved, a truce neither would voice aloud. In the margins, in handwriting that wasn't quite Atsushi's blocky scrawl and wasn't quite Himuro's elegant script, a hybrid of both as if their very essences had bled into the paper, a single phrase materialized:
Q.E.D.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
What was to be shown.
(And oh, how it had been.)
Himuro leaned in again, calm as ever, explaining another proof like Atsushi was the one trailing behind.
Atsushi watched the omega’s mouth move, silver tongue curling around words like symmetry and integration. Smooth. Always so smooth.
“You talk like math makes you better than everyone else,” Atsushi muttered, not quite looking at him.
Himuro blinked, just once.
“But you only ever explain things once you already have the answer.” Atsushi’s pencil scratched out a rough integral with too much force. “That’s not teaching. That’s showing off.”
Himuro’s mouth opened. Closed.
The pause was small. Barely a beat. But it was there.
Victory. Ugly, quiet, real.
The pause stretched just long enough to sting.
Then, quietly, without looking up:
“I wasn’t trying to show off.”
Atsushi scoffed. “Then you suck at not doing it.”
Another pause. This one drier. More amused.
“I’ll try harder,” Himuro murmured. “Next time.”
But he didn’t stop smiling.
Atsushi didn’t either.
(Not really.)
The air between them crackled with unsolved variables: the distance between their chairs (too close), the failed suppressant patch (too weak), the way Himuro's pulse jumped when Atsushi's thumb pressed just slightly harder against his wrist (too telling).
Somewhere beyond their bubble of tension, a book slammed shut. The sound jolted them both back to reality. Himuro was the first to move, withdrawing his hand with deliberate slowness, his pencil returning to the paper as if nothing had happened.
Atsushi flexed his empty hand under the table. The ghost of Himuro's pulse still tingled against his skin. Still buzzing. Still annoying. Worse than any damn equation. He reached for his pencil, determined to finish the damn integral if it killed him.
That blade-fine smirk surfaced again, subtle and unsparing.
Boundary conditions.
In class, they were rules at the edge of a problem, values you pinned down so the math didn’t spiral into nonsense. On the court, boundaries were the paint, the three-point line, the places you could lean until the ref blew the whistle.
Here, with Himuro’s knee brushing his under the table and that scent still clawing at the back of his throat, the word meant something else: the line between restraint and giving in. Between keeping his teeth to himself and finding out exactly how soft the skin over a scent gland felt under pressure.
He hated that the thought made his pulse jump. Hated that Himuro could look at him like he already knew the calculation and was just waiting for Atsushi to catch up.
"Boundary conditions, Atsushi."
His voice was all polished calm again, but his scent still carried that dark, dangerous edge.
"They change everything."
Atsushi’s throat clicked as he swallowed. The ghost of Himuro’s pulse still tingled under his fingertips, phantom heat where skin had met skin.
“You—” The word came out rough. Too rough. He didn’t finish it.
He didn’t say, you smell like mine.
He didn’t say, I don’t want anyone else solving you.
He didn’t have to.
Himuro turned the page, the equation between them still unsolved, the air still thick with the kind of tension that didn’t go away when you walked out of the room.
Some problems weren’t meant to be solved.
Just claimed.