Chapter Text
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The thing about him was that he, without question, the most infuriating person you had ever met in your academic life.
He was also, without question, the person you had a humiliating, all-consuming, completely unreasonable crush on.
These two facts coexisted in your chest like roommates who hated each other.
You'd met him in your first week of university. Both of you enrolled in the same Applied Sciences program, both somehow assigned to the same Tuesday/Thursday seminar with Professor Yaga, both somehow ending up sitting next to each other because you'd been five minutes late and the only open seat was beside the tall, white-haired boy in the oversized hoodie who was already three pages deep into notes before the lecture even started.
You'd leaned over and whispered, "Is this APSC 201?"
He'd looked at you over the rim of his glasses — round, slightly too big for his face, the kind of glasses that should have looked ridiculous and said, "No. You're in the wrong room and wrong building. This is advanced quantum mechanics."
You'd grabbed your bag in a panic.
"I'm kidding," he'd said. "Yes, this is 201. Sit down, you're going to knock over my coffee."
That was how it started.
By October of your first year, you were spending more time in his dorm room than your own. This was partly because his dorm room had a better desk lamp, partly because he always had good snacks, and mostly because though you would never say this out loud, being around him felt like standing in a patch of sunlight. Warm and a little blinding.
His room was a controlled disaster. Textbooks stacked in towers that somehow never fell. A whiteboard covered in equations you only half-understood. A decent camera on his desk — he said he picked it up for a photography elective, but you'd noticed he never really talked about what he photographed. A mini-fridge that was always stocked with canned coffee and those little mochi ice creams he claimed were for guests but ate entirely himself.
And sometimes, sometimes when you knocked on his door and he answered just a second too slowly, you'd catch him shoving something under his bed or behind his desk chair with the panicked energy of someone who definitely wasn't doing anything suspicious.
You never asked.
You probably should have.
It was a Wednesday evening in November when you showed up unannounced, which you were allowed to do because that was the arrangement you'd settled into somewhere around week four of the semester. You knocked twice, then once, the pattern he'd told you to use so he'd know it was you.
There was a longer pause than usual.
Then: "One second!"
A thud. The sound of something being dragged. Then another thud that sounded like it came from above. Which made no sense, because you were on the third floor and there was nothing above except ceiling.
The door swung open.
He stood in the doorway in sweatpants and a white t-shirt, glasses slightly askew, hair more chaotic than usual, which was saying something. There was a small red mark on his forearm that looked like it could've been a burn, or a scrape, or something else entirely.
"Hey," he said, and his voice had that specific breathless quality it sometimes got, like he'd just finished running.
"Hey." You held up the plastic bag in your hand. "I brought ramyeon. The good kind."
Something in his expression softened completely. "You're my favorite person," he said, and stepped aside to let you in.
You did not think about that sentence for the next twenty minutes. You thought about it for the next twenty minutes.
His desk was cleared too neatly, like things had been swept off it in a hurry and piled somewhere else. You sat cross-legged on the end of his bed while he boiled water in the electric kettle, and you pulled out your phone to scroll while you waited, and that was when you saw the notification.
@DailyBugleU: SPIDER-MAN SPOTTED NEAR CAMPUS LIBRARY — THIRD TIME THIS WEEK
"Oh my god," you said. "He was near campus again."
Him, pouring hot water into the cups, didn't look up. "Who?"
"Spider-Man." You turned your phone around to show him the grainy photo. A figure in red and blue caught mid-swing between the library tower and the science building. "Look how high up he is. That's insane."
"Mm." he set your cup of ramyeon down in front of you without looking at the photo. "Cool, I guess."
"Cool? Cool?" You stared at him. "Satoru, he stopped a mugging on Fifth Street last week. And saved that kid whose skateboard went into traffic. He's literally incredible."
"He's probably just some guy," he said. He sat down at his desk chair and peeled the lid off his own cup, very intently focused on the noodles.
"Some guy who can swing between buildings."
"Overrated skill set."
You threw a packet of seasoning at him. He caught it without looking, which was one of those things he did that you'd stopped questioning because the list of inexplicable things he did was too long to interrogate.
"I'm just saying," you continued, turning back to your phone, "he's kind of everything. Brave, and strong, and apparently he's funny too. Someone posted a video of him making a pun while stopping a bike theft and it was genuinely good wordplay–"
"You don't even know him."
You looked up. He was stirring his noodles with a focus that was frankly disproportionate to the task, jaw set in a way that meant something was bothering him. You'd learned to read that jaw.
"Are you jealous of Spider-Man?" you asked, delighted.
"No," he said, too quickly.
"You are. You're jealous of a masked vigilante."
"I'm not jealous of anyone." He pointed his chopsticks at you. "Eat your ramyeon before it gets soggy."
You smiled into your cup and did not push further, but you filed it away: he–Gojo Satoru, certified genius, gets annoyed when you talk about Spider-Man. Strange. Charming. Absolutely useless information that your brain was going to store forever anyway.
Here is what you didn't know:
Three hours before you knocked on his door, he had swung back through his dorm window with a dislocated finger, a torn sleeve, and the specific exhaustion that comes from stopping an armed robbery two neighborhoods over from campus. He'd reset the finger himself, he'd gotten frustratingly good at that and shoved the suit into the locked box under his bed, the one you'd once jokingly tried to open and he'd very calmly placed his entire body in front of.
Lab equipment, he'd told you. Sensitive stuff. You'd break it.
You'd believed him because you'd had no reason not to.
The suit had started as an accident, the way most things in his life had. A lab experiment gone sideways in his sophomore year, a spider he hadn't seen, three days of fever and then the terrifying, exhilarating realization that something was very, very different about him now. He'd spent two weeks figuring out what he could do. Then one week figuring out that he couldn't just not do anything about it.
The web-shooters were his own design. His proudest engineering work, if he was being honest, and he was extremely talented so that was saying a lot. Polymer adhesive compound, wrist-mounted, pressure-activated. He'd run the calculations four times before testing them. He'd also nearly fallen off a parking garage the first time, but he chose not to include that in the mental highlight reel.
The mask was important. That part wasn't ego, that part was fear. Real, human, unglamorous fear. Because he was a person with people he cared about. His grandmother back home. Shoko, his childhood friend who was pre-med two buildings over. Suguru, who was doing his semester abroad but still texted him too much.
You.
You were, a complication. In the best possible way, and also in the most stressful possible way. Because you were his best friend in this city, the person he ate dinner with and complained to about Professor Yaga's grading rubric and watched terrible movies with on Friday nights, and you were also the person who looked at grainy photos of him in a mask and called him incredible, and he had to sit there and accept the compliment in the most indirect, useless way imaginable.
It was a specific kind of torture that he was fairly certain no one else in human history had experienced.
Especially when you'd started doing the thing where you talked about Spider-Man the way people talked about a celebrity crush. He'd wanted to put his face directly through his desk.
Because the thing was and this was the part that kept him awake past 2 a.m. with unfinished homework and too many feelings for one person to have — that he didn't just want you to like Spider-Man.
He wanted you to like him. Satoru. The one who folded your jacket when you left it on his chair. The one who'd memorized your coffee order and always had it ready when you had an 8 a.m. The one who sat next to you in every class they shared and acted annoyed when you borrowed his notes but always made them neater before he handed them over.
The mask was important. But it was also getting very, very heavy.