Chapter Text
Chapter 1, Section 1: The Betting Pool Incident
The gymnasium air hung heavy with sweat, static, and the crushing weight of unresolved romantic tension. Fukui Kensuke had long abandoned hope of focusing on drills—his clipboard, once the proud temple of performance metrics, had become an altar of madness.
Each page bore the scribbled descent of a man on the brink:
Observation #47: Subject M (Murasakibara) tracked Subject H (Himuro) for 8.3 consecutive minutes during warm-ups. Pupil dilation suggests either romantic interest or a craving for high-calorie food. Context leans toward romance (see: Subject H’s sweat glistening like Kepler’s damned stars).
Fukui muttered to himself as he annotated a fresh margin. “This is what it must’ve felt like to be Galileo. Watching the heavens move and no one believing you.”
Across the court, Himuro laughed at something Murasakibara said. Not the smooth, polite curve of a media smile—this was smaller, crooked at the corner, gone almost as soon as it appeared.
Murasakibara’s shoulders loosened by half a centimeter.
No one else seemed to notice. The rest of the team just kept running layup lines like the axis of their universe hadn’t just shifted.
Fukui scribbled AXIS SHIFT?? in the margin and underlined it three times.
It looked ridiculous on paper. It had felt… weirdly important in his chest.
A shadow fell across the page.
“Are you… graphing their eye contact?” Liu Wei’s tone was the verbal equivalent of sipping tea while watching a train derail.
Without looking up, Fukui replied, “I’m documenting a slow-motion crisis in real time. This is ethnographic work.”
He tapped his pen furiously. “Just now—Himuro passed him a towel like it was the fucking Holy Grail. Murasakibara’s fingers lingered for 1.7 seconds. That’s yearning.”
Across the gym, Murasakibara was nibbling languidly on an energy bar, eyes locked on Himuro’s back like he was considering eating him instead.
From the floor nearby, Okamura Kenichi let out a long, suffering sigh. He lay dramatically on his back, towel draped over his face like a man defeated in battle.
“They’re worse than when I tried to flirt with that cheerleader using interpretive dance,” he mumbled.
“You broke your ankle and dignity,” Liu reminded him, folding his arms. “You’re not allowed to bring that up anymore.”
“At least my humiliation had an ending,” Okamura shot back. “These two have been blue-balling the entire team for a full season. It’s psychological warfare.”
“They’re inventing new forms of torture,” Fukui muttered, flipping his clipboard over. “It’s like watching a glacier flirt with a supernova in slow motion.”
And just like that—somewhere between observation #49 and an angry note about toe touches—the betting pool was born.
It began with a heading hastily scrawled across the back of his clipboard:
MURASAKIBARA/HIMURO: WHEN WILL THEY FINALLY SNAP AND MAKE OUT?
- Already have, secretly
- During Nationals
- After Nationals
- Never. They will repress it until one dies tragically in a plane crash
“Four,” Okamura said, not even glancing up from where he was dramatically sharpening his pencil like it had personally wronged him. “I want to believe in love, Fukui. But those two? They’re gonna repress it until one of them dies midair over the Pacific.”
“Incorrect,” Liu said with the calm confidence of someone who had long since accepted chaos as a roommate. “They’ve already kissed. Statistically speaking? More than once.”
Fukui’s eyebrows shot up. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” Liu replied, deadpan. “I have eyes. And pattern recognition. And a soul that longs for peace.”
He gestured toward the court.
Murasakibara was slouching against the wall, devouring his bar like it had personally insulted him. Himuro, calm and composed as ever, was tying his shoelaces with surgical precision—except the moment Murasakibara looked away, his eyes lingered. Soft. Focused.
Liu sipped from his water bottle. “That’s not platonic behavior.”
Fukui hesitated. The logical part of his brain screamed that he needed more data. The rest of him—sleep-deprived, emotionally damaged, and absolutely done—circled option #2 with trembling hands.
✓ 2. During Nationals.
“I’m a realist,” he muttered.
“You’re delusional,” Okamura said, throwing a towel at him.
“I’m a scientist!” Fukui shot back, ducking.
“Yeah?” Liu drawled. “Then you better start budgeting for therapy in your research grant.”
Observation #52: Subject H adjusted Subject M’s jersey collar. No verbal exchange. But Subject M didn’t flinch. Highly sus.
Liu leaned over and added to the chart in sharp, deliberate print:
Hypothesis: This isn’t basketball anymore. This is courtship under duress.
Fukui didn't even blink. “I’m titling the paper Objectively, They’re a Statistical Anomaly.”
Section 2: The Calculus of Desire
(or: Newton Would Be Crying in the Locker Room Right Now)
Fukui had always prided himself on being observant. Not just “noticed a new haircut” observant, but “spotted a lie in a statistical trend line from thirty feet away” observant.
He noticed things. And lately, the things he was noticing were… concerning.
Case in point:
Incident #1: Flirting via Physics
Murasakibara was slouched over a spiral-bound notebook in the gym after practice, his enormous frame hunched like a boulder on a math problem.
“Math is boring,” he grumbled, dragging his pencil across the page like it personally offended him. “Too many numbers.”
Himuro, crouched beside him in clean sweats, leaned over just slightly—shoulder to shoulder, the way someone might rest against a tide and trust it not to pull them under.
“Only when you assume constants that aren’t,” Himuro said. His voice was soft, but had that razor-sharp edge that made Fukui sit up straight.
He pointed at a particularly dense section of Murasakibara’s chicken-scratch notes. “Your friction variable’s off. It should be 0.56, not 0.60. That changes your whole slope.”
Pause.
“Air resistance isn’t constant when—”
“—the ball deforms during spin. Yeah, yeah,” Murasakibara muttered. But his fingers twitched toward Himuro’s wrist like they wanted to stay there.
Not touch. Not quite. Just... hover. Hesitate. Linger in the field of gravity that seemed to pull them toward each other like charged ions refusing to bond but aching to.
Fukui, standing a polite six meters away behind a row of gym benches, leaned back slowly as if he’d been struck by revelation.
“Are they... flirting over Newtonian mechanics?” he whispered.
Okamura, passing by with his usual towel turban and an air of righteous exhaustion, didn’t even slow down.
“Just wait,” he muttered, “until someone graphs their repressed feelings and wins a Nobel.”
Fukui nearly dropped his clipboard.
Incident #2: Unspoken Court Chemistry
Third quarter. Game tied. Tempo brutal. Sweat flying.
Himuro had the ball. Fast-break. Defense was closing in.
And then, from behind him—a grunt.
Barely audible. Most people wouldn’t even register it as language.
Himuro adjusted his angle mid-stride like a satellite receiving new orbital coordinates. He pivoted on the outside of his foot, recalibrated the arc of his shot by three degrees, and launched.
The ball curved, sharp and elegant like a physics diagram. It kissed the backboard, then slid clean through the net. Nothing but the most arrogant kind of silence.
Fukui’s pen skittered across his page.
Murasakibara didn’t even flinch. He flared his nostrils slightly and resumed jogging up the court like he hadn’t just participated in a telepathic basketball crime.
Himuro smiled—barely. The kind of smile a mathematician gives when they solve something no one else even saw as a problem.
Fukui wrote in all caps:
UNSPOKEN BASKETBALL TELEPATHY:
✔️YES
WHO’S GOING TO SNAP FIRST:
Pending...
He chewed the cap of his pen for a second. Then underlined it.
Section 3: The Moment Over Math
(or: Schrödinger’s Omega, and Other Equations That Shouldn’t Work)
It started normally enough.
Okamura threw himself onto the bench like a tragic lead in a low-budget romance drama—arms splayed, towel askew, his expression the very picture of athletic despair.
“I’m going to die alone,” he moaned to the ceiling, as if it were the only one still willing to listen. “Buried under a mountain of rejection letters and unsold Valentine’s chocolates. This is my fate.”
Liu didn’t even glance up from the wrapper of his protein bar. “Hydrate before the despair sets in.”
“I am hydrating,” Okamura snapped, brandishing his bottle like it was key evidence in a courtroom drama. “With electrolytes and grief.”
Fukui, perched at the end of the bench with his ever-present clipboard and a harried look that suggested he hadn’t slept in two nights (and he hadn’t, thanks to last night’s “omega proximity scent drift” data set), tuned them out. The real experiment was across the gym.
He followed the angle of instinct more than conscious thought, and sure enough—there they were.
Subjects H and M.
Aka: Himuro Tatsuya and Murasakibara Atsushi.
Aka: The Human Emotional Traffic Jam and the Sexually Repressed Monolith.
Bent over a shared notebook.
Shoulder to shoulder.
Thighs brushing.
Spines bent like a mirrored hinge.
Himuro was saying something, gesturing with his pen, the tip gliding across the page with all the poise of someone who alphabetized their textbooks for fun. Murasakibara, inexplicably, was nodding.
Fukui’s pen faltered mid-scribble.
“He’s…” he started, eyes squinting like he couldn’t quite trust them. “He’s… concentrating?”
It was true. Murasakibara’s gaze was locked on the notebook, brows drawn, pencil poised like he might actually use it. His head dipped forward with another slow nod—like he understood what Himuro was explaining.
Like he cared.
Then—it happened.
Himuro laughed.
Not the smooth, social smile he used on the team. Not the faint, razor-edged smirk he wore during interviews. No, this was different—soft, and stupidly real, like a beam of sunlight breaking through overcast.
Murasakibara froze.
Like he’d been hit by it. Like something in his chest misfired and didn’t know how to reboot.
Fukui leaned forward, elbows digging into his knees. “Oh my god. His pupils dilated. Did you see that? His pupils just dilated. That’s biological arousal—his alpha response kicked in. The math isn’t even done and he’s done.”
Liu, without lifting his head, murmured, “They’re having a moment.”
“I knew it,” Okamura breathed, clutching his water bottle like a prayer bead. “I told you all. I told you Murasakibara was secretly soft. You laughed, but who’s laughing now?”
“No one,” Fukui whispered, eyes wide. “No one is laughing. This is a scientific anomaly. This is—this is Schrödinger’s Confession Scene.”
Okamura blinked. “I’m sorry, what now?”
“They’re in the box,” Fukui hissed, waving vaguely at the gym. “Both confessing and not confessing. Both pining and mutually repressed. Until we observe the outcome, it exists in a quantum state.”
Liu finally looked up, and it was a mistake. He caught exactly 0.5 seconds of Himuro gazing at Murasakibara like he’d just discovered a new proof of gravity, and Murasakibara looking back like he wanted to wrap himself around that gaze and hibernate in it.
Liu’s soul left his body.
“Nope,” he muttered, standing up and throwing away his half-eaten protein bar with unusual aggression. “I am not emotionally equipped to witness the Big Bang of their relationship. I have school. I have goals.”
“They touched elbows,” Fukui croaked. “It wasn’t incidental. There was… intention. Pressure.”
Okamura was already halfway across the gym, muttering, “They’re gonna kiss. They’re going to kiss over calculus and ruin romance forever—”
They didn’t kiss.
But Murasakibara’s pencil dropped to the floor, and when he reached down to grab it, Himuro moved at the same time, and their heads bumped. Just enough that their eyes met, barely centimeters apart.
It was a moment of suspended breath.
One second.
Two.
An eternity of not doing anything that somehow said everything.
Okamura, hiding behind a towel rack, squeaked. “He’s going to nuzzle. That is a pre-nuzzle pause!”
Fukui scribbled furiously:
Incident #63: Near-Contact Event. Eye Contact Duration: 4.6s
Himuro Smile Type: Type B2 (genuine, slightly crooked)
Murasakibara Response: Static. Shock? Internal panic? Awaiting data.
Overall Emotional Impact: Catastrophic. For witnesses.
Liu returned, holding the betting pool spreadsheet like a resignation letter.
“We need a new category,” he said flatly.
Fukui didn’t look up. “Define the parameters.”
“‘Moment That Will Break the Entire Locker Room.’ Odds: 1:1.”
“Approved,” Fukui said immediately. “Add sub-columns for ‘first touch that counts’ and ‘physics metaphors used during eventual confession.’”
“I bet it happens in the middle of a game,” Okamura whispered. “Right at the buzzer. Himuro hits a three, turns around, and Murasakibara just grabs him.”
Fukui stared at the far bench again.
Murasakibara was still watching Himuro, like he didn’t know what to do with that look. Like it scared him and he wanted to keep it forever all at once.
“They’re gonna destroy us,” Fukui said numbly.
“They already are,” Liu replied. “Slowly. With math.”
Section 4: The Revised Betting Pool
(or: Love in the Time of Differential Equations)
Back at the dorms, Fukui slammed the door open with all the righteous fury of a man betrayed by numbers.
The clipboard—his holy tome, his data bible, his last defense against the creeping entropy of those two—was already in his hands as he stormed across the common room and collapsed onto the couch like a war general who had just lost a battle he didn’t know he was fighting.
He drew a thick, angry line through 2. During Nationals.
The ink carved through the paper like a knife.
Then, beneath it, in all caps and slightly unhinged handwriting, he scrawled:
THEY JUST HAD A MOMENT OVER MATH. THIS IS SERIOUS.
There was a long pause. The room, usually buzzing with leftover practice noise or Okamura’s tragic playlist, held its breath. Only the quiet hum of the mini fridge dared to speak.
Fukui stared at the paper like it owed him answers.
It didn’t.
It just stared back, smirking in Helvetica.
With a groan, he scribbled a new subheading beneath the betting brackets:
EMOTIONAL CODEPENDENCE MASKED AS ACADEMIC SYNERGY
He slapped the clipboard on the coffee table and walked away.
Liu Wei was the first to find it.
He wandered in post-shower, towel slung low on his hips, earbuds in. Half a protein bar still in his mouth.
He read the updated chart. Paused.
Spat out the protein bar into the trash like it personally offended him.
Then grabbed a pen.
“They’re 93% likely to pair bond before Murasakibara learns how to spell ‘parabola.’
—Liu (regretfully)”
Underlined twice.
Liu capped the pen with a fatalistic snap. “It’s not even nerd flirting anymore,” he muttered to no one in particular. “It’s—you know what it is? It’s emotional long division.”
He flopped onto the couch like it owed him money and pulled a blanket over his head.
Ten minutes after that, Okamura stumbled in wearing a facemask, fuzzy slippers, and a hoodie that said ‘Emotional Baggage Handler.’
He spotted the clipboard.
Read it.
Gasped like a period drama heroine seeing a lover returned from war.
Then uncapped a pink glitter pen (where did it come from? no one knew) and wrote in all caps:
“I BELIEVE IN LOVE AND ALSO MUTUAL NERD FOREPLAY.”
—Kenichi ♡
He added a tiny drawing of Murasakibara holding a calculator and Himuro sighing in fond despair.
Then, after a beat, he whispered reverently, “They’re going to invent a math language. Like—romantic calculus. Love functions. Kissing vectors.”
From under the blanket, Liu muttered, “If they develop an emotional theorem before they hold hands, I’m committing arson.”
Fukui returned with tea.
Saw the new annotations.
Paused.
Took a slow, painful sip.
Then—resigned—he added one final checkbox at the bottom of the betting sheet, labeled with the weariness of a man who once believed in science:
“WILL THEY INVENT A NEW FORM OF MATHEMATICS JUST TO AVOID ADMITTING FEELINGS?”
He ticked it.
Hard.
And just beneath it, as an afterthought—maybe a prophecy—he scrawled:
“We’re observing the birth of a post-romantic academic death spiral.”
—Fukui, probably losing his mind.
Okamura set down a bowl of instant ramen with a heavy sigh. “They’ll probably name it after each other. Mura-Muro Theorem. Solves everything except their inability to make out like normal people.”
Liu didn’t even argue. “At least then we’d get a Nobel Prize out of it.”
The three of them sat in silence for a long moment, staring at the clipboard.
Somewhere down the hall, someone laughed. Soft. Familiar.
The unmistakable sound of Himuro’s voice, low and indulgent.
A door creaked.
Then the unmistakable thud of a giant body slumping into a twin-size bed.
Fukui flinched. “That was his bed. I know that sound. I’ve recorded that sound.”
Liu peeled the blanket off his face, dead-eyed. “Add another checkbox.”
Okamura perked up. “Ooh, what for?”
Fukui clicked his pen.
His hand trembled only a little.
“ARE THEY CUDDLING IN THE NAME OF MATH?”
He ticked it.
Then circled it.
Twice.
And underlined it in red.
Section 5: The Interdisciplinary Theory of Them
Fukui wasn’t a romantic.
He was a statistician. A realist. A man who believed that numbers, when properly graphed, could save lives—or at the very least, prevent locker room heartbreak.
Which is why it infuriated him on a spiritual level that they had no interest in following any observable law of human interaction.
Murasakibara and Himuro weren’t even flirting.
They were conducting a multi-disciplinary thesis on the slow, excruciating combustion of repressed emotion.
Himuro, of course, moved like Euclidean geometry—every motion clean, elegant, and intentional. He carried pens in his breast pocket like surgical tools and tied his sneakers with a precision that screamed “former honor student with unresolved authority issues.”
Murasakibara, meanwhile, was entropy in motion. Gravity. A walking contradiction of slouch and power, of bored monotone and bone-shaking dunks. He spent ninety percent of practice pretending he couldn’t be bothered to stand upright, and the other ten percent casually obliterating the concept of "resistance."
They had no business working together.
And yet.
There they were—again—across the gym floor, sitting too close, shoulders brushing. Himuro pointed something out in Murasakibara’s physics notes, and the alpha—miracle of miracles—nodded. He even muttered something that could be interpreted as engagement. Himuro laughed, soft and warm, and Murasakibara flinched like he’d been stabbed with light.
Fukui watched this with the dull, pained resignation of a man whose soulmate had become his worst case study.
“They’re doing it again,” he muttered.
“Doing what?” Liu asked from behind a protein shaker that looked like it had been through war.
“Being... an interdisciplinary disaster.”
Liu raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to have to explain.”
Fukui gestured, wildly, toward the court like a man pointing at a black hole mid-formation. “They’re physics and poetry. Calculus and catastrophe. Murasakibara’s a force, and Himuro keeps angling himself into his orbit like he wants to be consumed.”
Liu stared. “Did you sleep last night?”
“I had a dream in graphing paper,” Fukui said flatly. “They were in it.”
From the bench, Okamura let out a wistful sigh. “I think they’re beautiful,” he said dreamily. “Like a gas giant and a rogue satellite in an eternal waltz of gravitational inevitability.”
Fukui blinked. “That... was oddly poetic.”
“I downloaded a stargazing app,” Okamura said. “Everything is feelings now.”
Liu leaned back against the bleachers, arms crossed. “Feelings or not, this thing between them? It’s not linear.”
“Oh, God,” Fukui said, already scribbling. “Don’t say that. I’ll start mapping nonlinear dynamics next.”
“You already did,” Liu deadpanned, pointing at the newest section of the clipboard:
FLIRTATION TRAJECTORIES - CURVED / CHAOTIC / BARELY CONTAINED
Fukui rubbed his temples.
Because here was the truth he didn’t want to admit, not even to himself:
This thing between Murasakibara and Himuro—this absurd, glacial, statistically improbable slow-burn—was... kind of romantic.
Horrifyingly poetic, even.
A case study in Newton’s Third Law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
For every lazy drawl from Murasakibara, there was a sharp reply from Himuro, feathered with amusement.
For every casual brush of their hands, there was a look. A pause. A shift in gravity.
And Fukui—poor, helpless, clipboard-clutching Fukui—was stuck in the blast radius.
He looked down at the betting pool, now riddled with sarcastic doodles and aggressive post-it notes from the entire team. Somewhere between Liu’s updated odds chart and Okamura’s poetry corner, there it was—his original bracket. Still intact. Still mocking him.
He drew one last line.
Circled 1. Already have, secretly.
Pressed his pen down hard enough to dent the paper.
Then, beneath it, he wrote:
“Objectively, they’re a statistical anomaly.
Subjectively? They’re insufferable.”
—Fukui, probably going to scream
He stared at it for a long time, like it might blink first.
It didn’t.
Sighing, Fukui stood, tucked his clipboard under his arm like a worn thesis, and muttered, “If one of them actually says something out loud, I’m transferring.”
“Transferring where?” Liu asked.
“Someplace safe,” Fukui replied, already walking down the hall. “Where physics behaves, math is pure, and people talk about their feelings.”
“Sounds fake,” Okamura called after him.
“Sounds ideal,” Fukui muttered.
In his room, he shut the door, dropped his clipboard on the desk, and turned off the light.
The graphs still glowed on the backs of his eyelids when he closed them—curves that never quite intersected, lines that circled the same point without touching.
Statistically, he told himself, as sleep dragged him under, something had to give.
He just hoped it wouldn’t be him.
(Q.E.D.)