Chapter Text
Yoshida Hirofumi was in love. Obviously.
He was so in love with Denji, it was pathetic. He could say it a hundred times a day, and it still wouldn’t make a dent in the buzzing in his skull whenever Denji was around.
To be very honest, Denji wasn’t even that attractive. Not in the conventional way, atleast. His hair was always a mess, his tie was either gone or wrapped around his wrist like a sweatband, and he talked like he was in a permanent wrestling match with grammar. Half the school thought he was annoying. Some people even avoided sitting next to him on purpose.
And yet, every morning, Hirofumi looked up from his desk the second he heard those stupid worn-out sneakers dragging across the floor, and there he was. Denji. Always three minutes late. Always yawning. Always scratching the back of his neck like a bored lion. And Hirofumi, unfortunately, always completely and utterly doomed.
He hadn't spoken to Denji. Not once.
That was intentional. Strategic. A tactical plan of admiration from afar.
He didn’t want to be weird. If he walked up and said something out of nowhere, what would even happen? What would he say?
(Hi, Denji. I’ve memorized the way your eyebrows twitch when you're lying about finishing your homework. You chew the cap of your pen when you're thinking too hard. Your laugh sounds like it has gravel in it and I think about it before bed.)
No. Absolutely not. He’d rather get hit by a bus. Twice.
Besides, it was better this way. Quiet. Controlled. From the safety of his desk at the back, two rows behind Denji’s seat. The observation deck. The Denji Zone.
He hadn’t always been this pathetic.
Back in middle school, Hirofumi had been sort of cool. Quiet, yeah, but not invisible. He had a bit of a reputation. A “dark horse” vibe, people said. Then high school began. New uniforms. New classrooms. New Denji.
And now look at him. Holding his breath every time Denji stretched his arms. Writing the word “idiot” in the margins of his notebook and pretending it wasn’t about anyone specific.
The day crawled on. He spent history class pretending to take notes while tracking the back of Denji’s head with military precision. He wasn’t even paying attention to the lesson until Denji raised his hand to answer a question, loud and confidently wrong.
The whole class laughed.
Hirofumi laughed, too, before catching himself. Then he looked down, ears warm.
It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t. It was just… Why did Denji always sound so sure even when he was wrong? Why did that make Hirofumi’s stomach feel like a swarm of bees?
Lunch couldn’t come fast enough. He hadn’t eaten breakfast. He’d spent all morning rehearsing in his head.
The Plan™ was simple: he’d leave class right after the bell, linger just barely in the hallway, wait until Denji passed by, and then say something. Anything. Even just a “yo.”
It didn’t have to be good. It just had to be something.
The bell rang.
Hirofumi stood, heart punching against his ribs, and…
… Denji brushed right past him, muttering something to himself, fingers shoved into his pockets, bread already in his mouth.
He didn’t even look at him.
Hirofumi froze. He could’ve still followed him. Could’ve walked beside him. Could’ve said something casual, like “Where do you buy your lunch?” or “You dropped your brain back there in science class.”
But his feet didn’t move.
He sat back down. His bento was still untouched, the chopsticks still tucked neatly under the lid. He stared at it for a while. Then sighed. Then opened the box. Then stabbed a fishcake with more force than necessary.
Tomorrow. He’d try again tomorrow. Probably.
Maybe.
Unless Denji smiled again. Then all bets were off.
Hirofumi thought he’d gotten better at this.
He'd timed it perfectly. Left his house ten minutes early, took the long route around the park, pretended to tie his shoelace in front of the convenience store, all so he could casually "run into" Denji on the way to school. It had worked exactly once, two Thursdays ago, and the memory had been fueling his delusions ever since.
Today, it was raining. And Hirofumi, in a stroke of genius or madness, had brought an umbrella even though the forecast had said it would clear up by morning.
Denji did not bring an umbrella.
By the time Hirofumi spotted him walking ahead on the sidewalk, he could already feel his pulse spike. His hands tightened on the umbrella handle. This was it. His moment.
He jogged up, his shoes slapping the wet pavement.
“Hey,” he said, trying to sound casual and failing completely.
Denji turned, squinting at him through the drizzle. His hair was plastered to his forehead.
“Oh. Hey,” Denji said, neither warm nor cold, carrying the same unremarkable presence he always had.
“You didn’t bring one?” Hirofumi asked, holding his umbrella higher, angling it toward him with what he hoped looked like natural generosity and not desperate yearning.
Denji shrugged. “Didn’t think I’d need it.”
“You wanna… uh,” Hirofumi cleared his throat. “You can walk with me. If you want. I mean. Only if you don’t mind.”
Denji stared at him for a second too long. Then stepped under the umbrella.
“Whatever,” he said.
Hirofumi nearly died.
They walked side by side, their arms almost brushing. Almost. Hirofumi kept adjusting the umbrella tilt subtly so that it covered more of Denji than him. He didn’t mind getting wet. He could melt in the rain for all he cared, if it meant Denji would stay a few more seconds near him.
Denji sniffled. “You smell like menthol gum.”
Hirofumi wanted to apologize. Or say thank you. Or dig a hole in the ground and disappear.
Instead he mumbled, “I chew a lot of gum.”
Denji gave no response, continuing forward without putting any distance between them.
When they reached the school gate, Denji stepped out from under the umbrella without a word. Hirofumi hesitated, watching him jog up the steps, his uniform a little damp at the edges, his hand raking through his messy hair.
He could’ve said something. A joke. A goodbye. Do you wanna share again next time?
But his mouth refused to work.
Hirofumi walked into school five steps behind Denji, five steps behind every chance he ever got.
Hirofumi’s day started with a pencil.
More specifically, it started with Denji’s pencil, which was halfway out of his sleeve pocket, dangerously close to falling. Hirofumi noticed it during the first period, and then he couldn’t stop noticing it. His attention bounced between the black mechanical pencil and the outline of Denji’s hand as it tapped absently on the desk. Every tap sent a tiny tremor through Hirofumi’s spine.
He tried to focus on the teacher’s droning voice about something mathematical and doomed, but it was no use. His brain, traitorous and hormonal, had decided the pencil was a metaphor. Hanging on. Slipping.
If it falls, I’ll catch it, he thought, stomach tightening. I’ll give it back to him. He’ll look at me. Say thanks. Maybe smile.
It didn’t fall.
It stayed perfectly in place the whole period, and Hirofumi wanted to scream.
At lunch, Hirofumi lurked again. He didn’t mean to be creepy about it. He just… didn’t know where else to go. His friends from middle school had all been absorbed into other cliques, and joining new ones felt like trying to climb into a moving car. So instead, he sat two benches away from Denji’s table and listened to him talk.
Denji spoke like he was always one second from getting up and leaving. Even when he laughed, low and short, his voice carried a weird kind of weightlessness, like he wasn’t tied to anything.
Hirofumi didn’t understand half the things Denji talked about. This week it was some old martial arts anime and how his friend Power had convinced him to reenact scenes in the hallway until a teacher caught them.
“She did a flying knee and almost knocked out a third year,” Denji said, grinning around a mouthful of bread. “It was so fucking cool.”
Hirofumi smiled into his bento, pretending not to hear a single word. His cheeks were hot. His rice tasted like absolutely nothing.
After school, Hirofumi didn’t mean to follow him.
He just… happened to finish cleaning duty early. And happened to see Denji walking down the stairs alone. So of course, he found himself trailing behind at a perfectly non-suspicious distance.
Denji stopped at the vending machine near the gate, hands stuffed in his pockets. Hirofumi ducked behind a column, immediately regretting every life decision that led to this moment.
Just say hi, he told himself. It’s not a crime to like someone. Just say hi. He won’t kill you.
Denji turned suddenly.
“Yo.”
Hirofumi flinched. “Hi!”
Denji squinted at him. “Were you, uh. Standing behind that wall?”
“Absolutely not,” Hirofumi said too quickly.
Denji raised an eyebrow. Then shrugged and turned back to the vending machine. “These things never take my coin,” he muttered, jamming it in again.
Hirofumi stepped forward before he could think better of it. “Here,” he said, offering one of his own. “Try this one.”
Denji looked at the coin, then at him. Their fingers brushed.
“Thanks,” he said.
He took a grape soda. Hirofumi thought he might explode.
Denji cracked it open, took a long sip, and then without looking, offered it back. “You want some?”
Hirofumi’s soul left his body.
“No, I’m-uh-I don’t mind-like, I’m okay-”
“Cool,” Denji said, already drinking more.
That night, Hirofumi lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, replaying everything in a loop. The almost-falling pencil. The grape soda. The finger brush. The Yo.
He buried his face in his pillow and groaned.
“I’m so screwed.”
Yoshida Hirofumi was in love. Hopelessly, pathetically, disgustingly in love.
Sure he maybe thought about Denji every five minutes of every day. Sure, he had doodled his name in the corner of his notebook once, twice, okay, maybe seventeen times, but that was only because his hand yearned. And sure, sometimes when Denji laughed at someone else’s joke, Hirofumi wanted to strangle the joke-teller with his bare hands and toss the body into the river. But that only proved how deep, how all-consuming, how romantic his feelings were.
It was a crush. No… worse. It was love. Obviously.
The kind of love people wrote novels about. The kind of love that ruined your GPA.
“I wonder what kind of shampoo he uses,” Hirofumi muttered to himself during lunch, crouched behind the gym storage shed, aggressively stabbing his yakisoba bread with his chopsticks.
Then he paused.
“God. I sound insane.”
He dropped the bread.
A breeze passed through the school grounds, and from his hiding spot he could just make out Denji’s silhouette across the courtyard, standing near the vending machine. He was talking to that one girl (what was her name, something with a ‘Y’?) and his stupid hair was shining in the sun like he was in a commercial. Hirofumi squinted. He couldn’t hear a thing, but Denji’s laugh carried, brief and careless.
“…Tch.”
He wasn’t jealous. He just didn’t like girls who smiled too much. Or people who talked to Denji.
Suddenly, Denji turned. For a second, a blink really, it looked like he was staring straight at Hirofumi. Hirofumi ducked so hard he whacked his forehead on the edge of the shed. A bird somewhere cawed in judgment.
He sat there, clutching his head and whispering curses, wondering what divine punishment he’d incurred to be born like this. Was this karma? Was this because he bullied that one kid in second grade who said octopi are lame? Was he doomed to feel his stomach churn every time Denji was in a ten-meter radius?
After a long silence, Hirofumi pulled out his notebook and opened to the very back page. He scribbled furiously.
Denji
Height: 173cm (est.)
Hair: messy. nice. hate it.
Voice: dumb. (kinda cool)
Favorite drink: ??? Must find out.
Smile: unquantifiably awful
Note to self: STOP STARING AT HIM TOO MUCH. IDIOT.
He tore out the page. Ate it.
Then he stood up, brushed himself off, and marched back toward the classroom like nothing had happened. But then, as he stepped inside, Denji glanced his way and said, “Yo,” with that lazy grin and no idea what kind of chaos he left in his wake.
And Hirofumi muttered back a weak, “Yo,” before nearly tripping over his own feet.
God help him.
The gym reeked faintly of varnished wood and sweat. Hirofumi was already regretting showing up. He dropped onto the mat, trying to focus on his push-ups. One. Two. Three-
A squeak of sneakers across the court derailed everything. Against his better judgment, he glanced up, just a flicker, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Denji was running laps. Shirt clinging. Hair plastered to his forehead. Sweat rolling down his neck like it was choreographed by some vengeful god determined to ruin Hirofumi personally.
His arms gave out. Face hit the mat. Groaning, he rolled onto his back. Bad move. Because now he had a perfect view of Denji stretching by the bleachers, shirt hem riding up just enough to flash a strip of pale stomach. The fluorescent lights hit at the exact wrong angle, gilding the moment like a Renaissance painting.
This is indecent, Hirofumi thought savagely. Criminal, even. Someone should cover him up. Preferably me. No- He smacked a palm over his face. No. Stop. Look away.
“Yoshida, you good?” a classmate called.
“Yes,” Hirofumi croaked. He was not good. He was combusting.
Basketball scrimmage started next, and Hirofumi decided: this was the moment. He’d approach Denji. Something casual. Good game. You’re good at basketball. Totally normal, totally sane.
He walked across the court, pulse hammering, rehearsing in his head.
But before he could open his mouth, another classmate jogged up and snagged Denji’s attention. “Hey, we need you to sub in!”
“Yeah, sure,” Denji grinned, already moving.
Hirofumi stopped dead. Half a sentence on his tongue. Half a lifetime of regret weighing him down.
He pivoted away like a spy aborting a mission. Under his breath, he muttered, “This is a sign. The universe doesn’t want me near him. I’m destined to love him from afar, like some tragic poet wasting away in candlelight.”
It wasn’t melodrama. It was prophecy.
When the game ended, Denji’s water bottle rolled across the floor. Without thinking, Hirofumi stooped, grabbed it, and tossed it back in one smooth motion.
“Oh, thanks, dude,” Denji said, catching it without breaking stride.
That was it. Nothing special. Just casual.
But Hirofumi froze.
Thanks, dude.
The “thanks” was quick, but not dismissive. The “dude” was casual, but warm. Did Denji call everyone dude? Or was it reserved? Selective? Secretly intimate?
By the time he collapsed back onto the bench, Hirofumi had convinced himself the words carried hidden weight. A coded message. Practically a confession.
Thanks, dude, echoed in his skull like church bells.
The whistle blew. PE was over.
Everyone else trudged out sweaty and tired. Hirofumi walked out dazed, narrating his own downfall: He said “thanks, dude.” He meant it. He has to have meant it. I am cursed, I am blessed, I am… ruined.
Denji, trailing behind, yawned, scratched his neck, and called, “Hey, Yoshida, you forgot your jacket.”
Hirofumi nearly fainted.
Literature class was already ten minutes late starting, and Hirofumi still had a headache from the sadistic math test that had devoured the last period. His workbook lay open, his pencil limp in his hand, his soul halfway out of his body. But all he could focus on was the back of Denji’s head. His hair was sticking up stupidly in the back, like he’d woken up late and wrestled his pillow instead of brushing it.
It was… adorable. Infuriatingly so.
He was still debating whether or not it was normal for a grown teenager to want to reach forward and smooth someone’s hair down when the sound of raised voices cut through the classroom.
“Oi, where the hell’s my drink? You deaf or what?”
A taller boy was looming over his so-called errand boy, a smaller kid clutching two vending machine cans in his hands, face pale. The taller one snatched one, cracked it open, took a sip, then sneered. “Wrong one. I said lemon tea, dumbass. How many times do I gotta tell you?”
The smaller kid stammered, bowing his head, fumbling like he was about to run back and try again. Hirofumi felt his stomach twist with secondhand dread.
And then, Denji’s voice cut through the room.
“He brought you a drink, didn’t he? Shut the hell up and drink it.”
The words was sharp and loud, carrying a sense of finality that cut through any possibility of pushback. The phrasing was blunt, firm, and unmistakable.
The taller boy faltered, his mouth opening like he wanted to bark back, but Denji was already staring him down, slouched lazily in his chair, chin in his palm, like he couldn’t even be bothered to stand up for the confrontation. He didn’t even look scared, or uncertain, or even particularly invested. He just looked… annoyed. Like someone swatting a mosquito.
The taller boy clicked his tongue and backed off, muttering under his breath. The errand kid, still stiff and shaky, shuffled back to his desk, clutching the unopened can like a shield.
And Hirofumi…
Hirofumi’s heart detonated in his chest.
He stared, wide-eyed, clutching his pencil like it was a lifeline. He’s… he’s kind. He’s actually kind. Beneath the attitude and the rudeness, he protects people. He’s so…
Kaboom. There it went again. His whole ribcage felt like a faulty grenade.
He scribbled nonsense into the margins of his math notes, trying to disguise the way his hand was shaking. Focus. Focus. Don’t stare. Oh my god, he’s amazing. Shut up, brain. Keep it together.
The day moved on, but Hirofumi was ruined. Every time Denji so much as shifted in his seat, Hirofumi’s eyes flicked toward him like a magnet.
And then, catastrophe, part two.
“Hey, uh. Got a pen?”
Hirofumi nearly dropped his entire pencil case. Denji was turned toward him, hand out, face expectant. He was, he was talking to him. Addressing him directly.
“Y-Yeah!” Hirofumi croaked, shoving a pen into Denji’s hand too fast, too desperately. Their fingers brushed. Hirofumi saw his life flash before his eyes.
“Cool, thanks.” Denji turned back around, completely oblivious to the storm he’d unleashed.
Hirofumi spent the rest of class in a catatonic daze.
The real kicker came the next morning.
Denji strolled into homeroom, tossing his bag onto the desk with his usual reckless energy. Hirofumi barely dared to breathe in his presence, until Denji turned, casually held something out, and said,
“Oh, here. Your pen.”
Hirofumi blinked. “…What?”
“From yesterday. You let me borrow it.”
The pen dropped onto Hirofumi’s desk with a small clatter. Denji was already halfway through yawning as he sat down, like this was nothing. Like this wasn’t monumental. Like he hadn’t just remembered something small and personal about Hirofumi when no one else ever did.
Hirofumi stared at the pen as though it were a sacred relic. His chest constricted. His palms were sweating. He remembered. He noticed. He cared.
The bell rang. Hirofumi didn’t hear it. He was too busy falling apart inside.
At home, that night, Hirofumi cracked open his journal. The page was already filled with random scribbles and doodles from other days he’d been overwhelmed. He pressed his pen down, hard, trying to form words.
He defended someone yesterday. He didn’t even hesitate. He’s good. He’s so good. I hate him. I love him. I am sick. He remembered my pen. He gave it back. Who does that? Who remembers? Nobody. Except him.
He scrawled Denji’s name in shaky letters. Then again. Then again. Soon the whole page was Denji Denji Denji in different sizes, with messy hearts doodled around the margins.
He tossed his pen aside, fell back on his bed, and covered his face with both hands. His whole body was buzzing, like he’d downed five energy drinks laced with fireworks.
“How am I supposed to survive high school like this?” he whispered to his ceiling.
The ceiling, cruelly, did not answer.
Hirofumi was mid–tragic sigh, sprawled across his bed, when his bedroom door creaked open without warning.
“Whatcha doin’?”
He bolted upright like he’d been electrocuted. “E-Emika! Knock, damn it!”
His younger sister padded in anyway, wearing oversized pajamas and holding a juice box like a trophy. She squinted at the open notebook on his desk. Her face lit up like she’d just discovered a state secret.
“Oooooh,” she sang, dragging out the syllable. “You’re writing about someone.”
Hirofumi lunged for the notebook, nearly tripping over his blanket in the process. “Get out! Private! It’s private!”
But Emika was already darting around the room like a gremlin, trying to get a better look. “Who’s Den… ji?” she read aloud, stumbling over his scrawled handwriting. Then she gasped dramatically. “It’s a boy?! Oh my god, nii-chan has a boy crush-”
“Shut up shut up shut up!” Hirofumi’s ears were flaming. He managed to snatch the notebook away and slam it shut, hugging it to his chest like a shield. “You didn’t see anything!”
Emika grinned, wide and toothy. “You drew hearts. Around his name. That means you like-like him.”
Hirofumi covered his face with one hand, groaning. “I hate you. I hate this family. I’m moving out.”
“Can I come to the wedding?” she chirped, sipping her juice box innocently.
“Get. Out.”
Emika hopped out of the room, sing-songing, “Nii-chan has a boyyyfriend! Nii-chan has a boyyyfriend!”
He collapsed face-first into his pillow, muffling a scream. His life was over. Forget high school survival, he wouldn’t even survive dinner tonight.
Hirofumi was a tragic man. A man doomed by fate, shackled by cruel circumstance, betrayed by his own cowardice.
Because it was March now. The second year of high school was ending, the sakura buds were almost ready to bloom, and once again he had spent an entire year failing spectacularly at the simplest task: talking to Denji.
Not befriending him. Not laughing with him. Not walking home together under the warm glow of streetlights like in the daydreams Hirofumi secretly staged in his head every night. No. Just talking. A normal, everyday conversation that wouldn’t end with Hirofumi’s brain short-circuiting and his palms sweating like he’d just been interrogated by government agents.
And he had wasted it.
Another year gone, gone to dust, gone like the fleeting youth he was supposed to be spending wisely, and all he had to show for it was an encyclopedic knowledge of Denji’s timetable and an impressive collection of Denji-related daydreams.
The universe had been generous to him, two years in the same class as Denji. Did fate ever grant anyone such a blessing? Did the gods not smile upon him by placing his desk a mere six feet away from the sun that was Denji?
But blessings had expiration dates. Third year loomed like a storm cloud on the horizon. What if they weren’t in the same class next year? What if the school shuffled them apart, and Hirofumi was cast into some windowless room while Denji’s laugh echoed elsewhere?
He imagined it: waking up, trudging into his third-year classroom, scanning the room, only to realize Denji was not there. Not at the desk by the window. Not anywhere. A void. A yawning absence. Hirofumi would die. He would crumble into dust and be swept away by the spring breeze.
Yes. That would be his fate.
Another year wasted, and the next one promised only despair.
Unless… unless he somehow summoned the courage of a thousand samurai and spoke to Denji before it was too late.
But no. That was ridiculous. Talking to Denji was like scaling Mount Everest barefoot while carrying a refrigerator on his back. Impossible.
And yet the thought gnawed at him: One more chance. One last year. If he’s not in my class again, I’ll never survive it.
The end of semester brought a lot of free periods.
Hirofumi had sat on his desk, cracked open his copy of The Setting Sun, and was determined, determined, to look like the picture of cool composure. He wasn’t reading the book, not really. His eyes scanned the words, but his brain was elsewhere, as usual. Occasionally drifting toward the boy sitting only ten paces away.
Denji.
Denji, hunched over his own desk, doodling something in the margins of his notebook. Denji, who existed in Hirofumi’s orbit but never turned his gravitational pull in Hirofumi’s direction. Denji, who, if Hirofumi played his cards right, might, by some miracle, speak to him before the semester ended.
A quiet free period. A golden opportunity to pretend like he wasn’t pathetically lovesick.
And then it happened.
“Denji, you loser! I missed you!”
The voice boomed across the classroom like a gunshot. Hirofumi jolted, his book slipping in his hands. He looked up, and his entire world tilted on its axis.
A boy, a stranger, had thrown himself at Denji. Literally thrown himself. Arms slung around Denji’s shoulders like they were lifelong friends reunited after years apart.
The boy was tall-ish, lanky but broad enough to look like he played some kind of sport. His hair was a little too long, curling at the ends like he didn’t care enough to get it cut properly, and his uniform tie was loose, shirt untucked. His grin was wide, sharp, mischievous, like he had never once in his life thought about consequences.
He looked loud. He looked reckless. He looked like someone who would ruin everything.
Denji scowled. Any second now, he would shrug him off, hiss a rude insult, call him annoying, like he did with every other boy foolish enough to get too frank with him. Yes, that was the natural order of things. Hirofumi braced himself for it.
Instead, Denji smiled. Not just smiled. He leaned back, shoved the boy lightly, and said, “Hey, dumbass.”
Hirofumi died on the spot.
He sat there, ten paces away, utterly invisible, utterly unimportant, and consumed by a sudden and overwhelming urge to throw himself out the nearest window.
What the hell was that? What the hell was that smile?
Denji didn’t smile like that at anyone. Hirofumi had been keeping track, casually of course, discreetly, like any normal admirer. (He was definitely not a stalker. He had a system. That wasn’t stalking. That was… observation.) Denji didn’t do warm smiles. He did smirks, scowls, eye-rolls, annoyed grunts.
But now? Now he was smiling like he’d just been reunited with a long-lost lover.
The traitor.
Hirofumi’s book lay forgotten on his desk as he watched in mute horror. The boy and Denji fell into easy conversation, laughing, jostling shoulders, talking as if no time had passed between them. Old friends. Comfortable. Casual. Exactly the kind of relationship Hirofumi had dreamed of having with Denji, but never managed to achieve because he couldn’t even say hello without risking cardiac arrest.
Who is he? Why is he here? Why is Denji allowing this? Why is the universe cruel?
Hirofumi seethed silently, his jealousy simmering hotter and hotter as Denji laughed at something the boy said. Laughed. Out loud. With teeth.
It was unbearable.
And then, just when Hirofumi thought his suffering had peaked, the boy’s head turned. Their eyes met.
For a fraction of a second, Hirofumi locked eyes with the interloper. And in that fraction of a second, he saw it: a smirk. Quick, sly, knowing. Like the boy had looked directly into Hirofumi’s heart, seen every pathetic, pining thought written in bold letters, and decided to mock him for it.
The smirk vanished as quickly as it came, and the boy turned back to Denji, clapping him on the back with another laugh.
Hirofumi blinked, dazed. Had he imagined it? Surely he imagined it. Surely this random stranger hadn’t just smirked at him knowingly, hadn’t just broadcast to him alone: I know you like him. And I’m going to ruin you.
But the damage was done.
Hirofumi’s mind reeled, spinning with jealousy, humiliation, rage, despair. He stared at the scene unfolding before him, Denji smiling, laughing, talking, while he sat ten paces away, invisible, unnoticed, drowning in a pit of his own tragic longing.
This is it. This is my villain origin story.
When he got home still hot with rage.
It wasn't reasonable. Nobody's anger should be able to boil at the velocity Hirofumi's did after witnessing two idiots, one of them a blithe, infuriating Denji, laughing like conspirators ten paces away. But reason had left him at the classroom door, packing a small overnight bag and a resignation letter to his own dignity.
He dropped his bag, kicked off his shoes like a man discarding his last shred of composure, and stalked straight for the one cultural artifact that had never failed him in moments of crisis: the first-year photobook.
The photobook was a ridiculous thing to obsess over, but Hirofumi treated it like sacred evidence. Names, faces, alliances, seating charts, the faint fossilized scent of glue, all clues. If someone had been in his class in first year, the book would expose them. And if they were the smirking interloper he’d seen today, it would bleed their identity right onto his lap.
He slung the book onto his desk with a thud that made his pens skitter. He flipped to the index, heart performing a dramatic stumble, like a cello plucking a note of doom.
Page one. Page two.
The photobook was mercilessly ordinary: portraits, names, club photos. He scanned rows of faces, faces that had become anchors of the last two years. He checked the sports club spreads (no), the festivals (no), the back-of-the-book “miscellaneous” shots (no). Twice. Thrice. He cross-referenced with a mental map of classmates who sat near Denji, who ate near Denji, who dared to tease Denji and survived the scowl.
Nothing.
He turned pages as if speed could conjure new facts into being. Maybe the guy was a transfer. Maybe he was from another section. Somehow Denji had two lives now, one that involved Hirofumi's lunging panic and another that included a loud, loose-limbed man who hugged him like a reunion scene from a trashy drama.
He went through the photobook again, more slowly, like a man trying to find a missing button in the dark. He squinted at a photo of the cooking club: students with flour on their cheeks, two boys grinning behind a collapsed pancake. He flipped to the third-year representatives (not there, of course not). He checked the baseball team roster, no one matched the grin or the hair or the casual menace of the smirk.
The photobook might as well have been blank, as far as his brain was concerned. Frustration metastasized into a feverish, cartoonish paranoia: perhaps the guy was a phantom. Perhaps Denji had conjured him from a box of ramen and a shred of nostalgia. Perhaps he was a special kind of demon that only existed to ruin Hirofumi's life.
He slammed the book shut. The sound echoed; his room seemed unnaturally quiet in the aftermath. He shuffled to the kitchen, poured a dramatic measure of barley tea, and then remembered that dramatic gestures were for villains with capes. He had no cape. He was, quite frankly, just a very messy teenager.
Defeat is an ugly look on him. He knew this because he had tried it on for style, and it did not suit him.
He draped himself onto his bed with the theatricalism of someone practicing for a one-man play about disappointment. The ceiling was a blank stage, the kind that received his sighs like unwanted mail.
Beside his desk, under the soft lamp light, Takochhi, his pet octopus, spun in his aquarium, eight small limbs folding and unfolding with alarming composure. Takochhi was a soft-pink lump of molluscan serenity, the marine equivalent of a wise old sage who did not carry the emotional baggage of terrestrial creatures. People would call him an uncanny pet. Hirofumi called him his best friend.
“Okay, Takochhi,” Hirofumi said, flopping down with his photobook open to the middle like a defeated archaeologist. He pushed his long bangs back with the back of his hand, the gesture equal parts melodrama and actual attempt at cooling his burning cheeks. “We have an interloper. He is smiling. He is touching Denji. He is… he is everything I fear.”
Takochhi blinked a glassy, indifferent blink, which in the pantheon of pet responses meant roughly: do not project human treacheries onto me.
Hirofumi put his face into his hands and muttered conspiratorially, as if confiding in a very quiet, very aquatic therapist. “We have to find him. We must discover his name. We must find his…” he trailed off, because the correct word was “intent,” and the incorrect one was dangerously theatrical, but his inner villain kept pounding on the wrong door. “We must… confront him.”
He imagined all the ways he could confront. A direct approach: impossible. A strategic undermining, obvious, but it sounded like effort. A cunning reveal in the cafeteria: too public. A whispered threat under the bleachers: too movie. His mind, always fond of exaggerated climaxes, slid gleefully into imagining the most satisfying of anti-romantic justice: he pictured himself brandishing a metaphorical torch (there were laws, and also the need not to be sent to juvenile detention), solemnly lighting the metaphorical pyre of smugness that was the smirking stranger.
“Oooor,” he amended, because even his ridiculousness had to duck back under reality’s curtain, “we could just… find out his name and then coldly say, ‘Oh. You.’ And then leave. That might be almost as good.”
Takochhi rotated, the aquarium light painting tiny moons on his skin. He looked like a small god, serene and immune to human melodrama.
Hirofumi spoke aloud his plans like a child rehearsing a coup. “Step one: check the photobook, done. Step two: ask around the clubrooms with casual nonchalance… but poised… Very poised. Step three: torch him alive. Wait, no, that would be illegal.”
He glanced at the photobook again as if it might cough up the man on command. The inked faces looked back with pleasant ignorance. He tapped the page with a finger. “You will be mine,” he told a stranger’s portrait which, obviously, had done nothing to deserve such a threat.
A knock sounded on his door.
He sat up so fast his lamp nearly toppled. “Emika?” he called before he had sorted fact from panic.
The door opened anyway, and in she popped, eyes wide like she’d been sniffing gossip on the wind. “Nii-chan, you look like you just saw a ghost,” she said, skipping over to where he crouched by the tank.
“I saw the ghost of my future-” he started, then, because honesty was an emotional grenade, cut it to: “I saw someone today.”
“And?” Emika leaned in, fascinated. She loved this. She lived for his drama. “Is he cute? Does he wear a cool jacket? Did he steal your heart?”
Hirofumi glared at her, the way a person glares at an accomplice in a heist that just went wrong. “He hugged Denji.”
Emika’s eyes went saucer-wide. “Ooooh.” She hummed conspiratorially. “Is Denji gonna get a boyfriend? Is that why you’re so mad?”
“That’s precisely the problem,” Hirofumi said, giving Emika’s shoulders a mock shove that was mostly earnest. “I am not mad at Denji. I’m mad that some interloper dared to smile at Denji with impunity.”
“You should torch him alive,” Emika announced solemnly, sipping her juice. “And then make ramen for me.”
Hirofumi blinked. The childlike verdict was somehow the perfect plan. He opened his mouth to protest decency and laws and the fact that arson was both immoral and inconvenient.
Instead he picked up the photobook again and, very seriously, said to Takochhi and Emika both: “Tomorrow I will find his name.”
He curled up on the bed with the ridiculous photobook clutched to his chest like an emergency talisman. Even if he failed, and modern probability strongly suggested he would, he had made a vow. And vows, however absurd, were the backbone of villain origin stories and terrible romantic comedies alike.
“Get some sleep, please,” Emika said, bouncing a little before she retreated, leaving the room like a stagehand after the curtain call.
Hirofumi turned his face to the dark and addressed the octopus like a conspirator. “If you are a god,” he whispered, “whisper his name into my dreams.”
Takochhi blinked.
Hirofumi sighed, curled his arms around the photobook, and let his ridiculous fury drift into the more manageable bubble of exhausted scheming. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow he would become the small, petty detective his life apparently required.
The new school year began with the same pale pink blizzard it always did: cherry blossoms sneering down at him like fate’s confetti, too pretty for the pit in his stomach.
Hirofumi adjusted the strap of his bag and tried not to look like he was about to vomit. He told himself he didn’t care. He told himself this was just another year, just another homeroom assignment, just another hallway full of students swarming to check the class rosters.
But he did care. He cared so much his pulse was in his throat.
Two years of ridiculous luck had kept Denji within arm’s reach, two years of watching him from across classrooms, of swallowing every word he wanted to say, of finding excuses to hover in the same airspace. Hirofumi had started to think maybe fate wasn’t cruel after all. Maybe it had thrown him a rope.
But ropes frayed. Luck ran out. And third year wasn’t something you could redo if the dice rolled the wrong way.
He pushed through the crowd, heart hammering, scanning the class lists plastered up on the board. The names blurred together. He saw his own, Yoshida Hirofumi, Class 3-2, and almost didn’t want to look further, because the truth could end him before homeroom even started.
He dragged his gaze down the list, line by trembling line.
And then, there it was. Denji.
Same class. Again.
The relief punched the air out of his lungs. He had to grip the strap of his bag like a lifeline, force his face into something that wasn’t the unhinged grin clawing its way up. He was absurdly, stupidly lucky. One more year. One more year of being near him, of maybe getting it right this time. The gods of probability had personally bent over backward for him.
Unless, of course, the interloper returned.
Hirofumi glanced over his shoulder, paranoid, half-expecting to see that stranger’s smug grin blooming out of the crowd. He didn’t. But it didn’t stop the knot of dread from tightening under the relief.
“Third year,” he muttered under his breath as he turned toward the classroom, cherry blossom petals snagging in his hair. “Don’t screw this one up.”
He stepped into the new classroom, smooth as ever on the outside, heart drumming like an out-of-tune taiko on the inside. His eyes flicked, casual (not casual), across the room, until they landed on the head of blond bedhead sitting slouched in the second row. Denji.
There he was. Alive. Surly. Radiant.
For a moment, Yoshida let himself bask. This was it. His chance. His year. The start of the great revolution of his life.
And then he noticed it.
Denji, his Denji, object of two years’ silent devotion, sitting at his desk, deep in conversation with that guy.
The same one from before. The mysterious interloper. Dark hair, easy grin, posture too relaxed for someone who hadn’t earned the right to breathe Denji’s air. He was leaning close, saying something that made Denji actually laugh.
Laugh. Out loud. Again.
Hirofumi stopped mid-step. His good mood evaporated so fast it could’ve been a magic trick.
He stood there like a ghost, books clutched to his chest, watching as Denji leaned back, grinning, like this was perfectly normal. Like people just… got to be friends with him that easily.
Hirofumi wanted to crawl into a trash can and set himself on fire.
Who even was this guy? Why did Denji look so comfortable with him? Why was the universe such a cruel, godless place?
He sat down, mechanically, eyes fixed on his desk, pretending to be calm. He wasn’t. His pulse was performing a drum solo in his throat. Every laugh Denji made in that direction was another nail in his coffin.
So much for a fresh start.
Homeroom began with the drone of their teacher’s voice reading through the roll call. Hirofumi kept one ear half-tuned, eyes boring holes into the back of the stranger’s head.
And then it came. “Sugo Miri.”
“Here.” The voice was unmistakable.
Hirofumi’s stomach dropped through the floor.
Name acquired. Enemy identified. And, to his horror, cemented forever, because this Sugo Miri was in his class. Which meant, by cruel extension of the universe’s sense of humor, he was also in Denji’s class.
Hirofumi sat back in his chair, a calm, polite expression fixed on his face. Inside, he was already drafting war strategy.
The year had only just begun, and the battlefield was already drawn.