Archive of Our Own

On the rare occasion you play on your Nintendo Switch 2, it is with the anguish and residual anxiety of your chemistry grades dropping.

If not for the concealer you haphazardly put on but still managed to clean up neatly, it would be painstakingly obvious how wrecked your face had gotten after midterms. The fat under your eyes is significantly darker than usual—Ieiri called it while you were calling her after Cheers practice. Mostly, it came from the fact that you got a score so low during your exams, you stayed up several nights, not even studying, just wallowing about the seventy-eight mark.

You’re sitting on your usual seat. By the window. Frankly, you don’t know if your school was suddenly taken over by new management, but the first thing you feel hitting the soft, moisturized skin of your arms, is a colder breeze. You were sure that your school had corrupted facilities and infrastructure funds, but here you were, in your class, noting how your heart felt eased at the hypothesis that you didn’t need to shower yourself in perfume to drown out the smell of sun-caused sweat.

Despite the cooler breeze, it still gets overpowered by the humidity people cause in cramped classrooms. Your head is tucked into your own sleeve, drowning out the sound of your classmates’ quiet-but-not-quiet chatter when it’s eight a.m. and homeroom hasn’t started. The chair feels a little uncomfy, and it shifts its weight every time you move; you’re sure somebody replaced your original chair with theirs. You want to complain, but it’s a pain in the ass.

It’s unfair to not say you are exhausted.

And during exhaustion, Gojō Satoru always finds a way to disrupt your life just like you disrupt his. He sits down on the seat beside you and you hear the heavy thud sound of his black, overly large backpack from some American climbers’ clothing company. His chair scrapes against the wood and that’s what gets you to look at him briefly, then turn back into your pink, wooly cardigan sleeve. He kicks the back of your chair, long leg not even needing to bend anything beyond 75 degrees.

“No starving Miis today?” he asks lazily, sipping a can of soda.

You don’t even look up. “They’ll live.”

Satoru’s eyebrows slowly raise up at that. Despite knowing of your recent departure from that darned game, Tomodachi Life, he was under the impression that it was simply because of academic obligations. He gave you back your Switch, and he did know that you eventually opened the game. He didn’t expect you, the same girl who obsessed over killing babies in The Sims for three months, to lose interest in Tomodachi Life that quickly. “That bad?”

“I got a seventy-eight on the last quiz,” you mutter under your breath, lifting your head up and adjusting it just enough for you to be able to look at him through the opening between the air and your arms. He’s looking at you with the most inquisitive expression imaginable, like you’re some mathematical equation, which makes you want to bite his head off.

“A seventy-eight?” from this angle, there’s a slightly dark coat below your eyes that Satoru catches. It seems a little natural, peachy in a way dark circles shouldn’t be, and a little cracked at the edges. He leans back into his chair, keeping eye contact with you whilst he rustles through his backpack.

“Yes,” you hiss quietly. “A seventy-eight.”

“My chemistry average was ninety-one before this. Ninety-one, Satoru,” you finally raise your head up fully,  hair falling in front of your face. You quickly push it away from your field of view. “Do you understand the slope? The trajectory. This is how smart people end up on motivational podcasts.” 

A snort escapes him before he can stop it. You glare at him immediately.

“I’m serious,” you point an accusatory finger at him and Satoru’s eyes briefly flicker to your slightly bitten fingernails. You painted them. That same finger pointing proudly curls up into a ball and hits the table with a barbed snap. One of your classmates glances at you. “I hate chemistry. I hate electron configurations. I hate stoichiometry. I hate that old white man invented moles.”

“Avogadro.”

“If I bomb the next exam my average drops below distinction range,” you’re rambling now. You’ve survived on a single Red Bull can and two hours of sleep today and your head is spinning a little. “And if my chemistry average drops then my cumulative drops and if my cumulative drops my mother is gonna look at me like I killed somebody.”

Satoru genuinely looks baffled at you. Because seventy-eight isn’t a bad score, and he’s pretty sure none of your other subjects ‘tanked’ that hard. But moreover, he’s baffled at himself because even while you’re talking about your life-ruining chemistry scores, he keeps glancing down to your lips and how they’re not even coated with anything. They’re paler than usual, no color. Just raw skin, no lip product.

“You got one bad score,” he states.

“One bad score becomes two bad scores and then suddenly I’m working retail,” you say. You’re nearly mad at yourself because even while you’re talking about something sullenly serious, you’re consistently animating yourself in a way that is not sullenly serious.

“You are not gonna end up unemployed because of stoichiometry,” Satoru rejects your idea wholeheartedly and simply. He’s already opening up that fifty-ton brick laptop of his and the fans are already whirring louder than the air conditioning.

“You don’t know that.”

He deadpans. “That’s just not how unemployment works.”

You really want to keep it light, it’s not even the first period yet. But your throat is dry and your usually well-maintained lips are cracked. “I’m serious, Satoru,” the joke drains out of your voice this time. “I can’t screw this up.”

Satoru himself looks like he’s on the edge of his front molars to scoff out another joke, but then his brain catches up to him in that annoying way. He just notices your bag, sprawled on your desk, slightly overstuffed with your binders, but never textbooks—you share them with him—and how your Switch isn’t even on your desk. Usually it is. He also noticed how your hair is less shinier than usual.

“Alright,” he says after a while.

You blink at him tiredly. “Alright what.”

“I’ll tutor you,” he says conclusively. His tone makes you all the more needing to punch his stupid little head. In fact, you might log into Tomodachi Life just to coerce your Mii to break up with him, maybe.

“Absolutely not.”

“I have the highest chemistry grade in the year,” Satoru’s eyes rake over your bag again. Now he’s not looking at it normally; he’s actively scanning it. It’s a simple sukuba, brown, not black, and entirely too accessorized when compared with his own backpack. He remembers hearing you scoff at Ieiri for buying something from Pop Mart and suddenly you have this pink SKULLPANDA dangling from the ring on your bag along with a cat pendant and the excessive amounts of strawberry-themed charms bound to it.

“You’re insufferable,” you scoff, continuing more to yourself. “You play games where men with leather jackets beat each other with traffic cones, how are your grades better than mine?”

“It builds resilience.”

Your head actually snaps towards him. Your expression folds in on itself, lips snarling for just a moment before you just can’t help yourself. It curls up and a half-assed giggle erupts from your throat. There it is.

Satoru doesn’t even ask. He leans forward and quickly snatches the chemistry worksheet sticking out of your bag. It’s not the one from cram school, it’s just from Mr. Miyagi, the one you asked anxiously for after that chemistry exam, just in case you tank. He hums, eyes skimming over the words, and definitely looking at your at the time tired handwriting.

You point at him again. “Don’t make that face.”

“What face?”

“That one,” he looks genuinely perplexed, but most of the time he looks perplexed with you in the room anyway. What you mean is the radiating smugness face that has gotten Satoru in more trouble than not from people he’s accidentally insulted. “The tutoring fetish face.”

“I don’t have a tutoring fetish,” he half-grumbles, giving you a repulsed frown.

“You do,” you accuse decisively, quoting your own self and him just mere days ago. “You looked excited when I said I didn’t understand equilibrium.”

Satoru takes it as a sign to be an asshole. His hand reaches into your bag like a raccoon in the dumpster again, though you’ve similarly been in that situation with how cluttered your bag gets by the end of second period. He retrieves the decorated Nintendo console and dangles it carelessly by the key charm on it. His glasses fall slightly on his nose, looking down at you. “That’s because now I get to fix you.”

You physically recoil. “Jesus Christ.”

“Academically,” he corrects smoothly, turning on the console and opening up that damn social simulation game.

Chemistry fortunately doesn’t knock on your door, or more technically, schedule today. You learn very quickly that you nearly failed history, barely scraping a B, but you felt weirdly positive about it knowing that a third of your grade had the shittiest scores to have ever become of that subject. You got reprimanded once by your math teacher for using your portable fan in the classroom once and you had to close your eyes momentarily from the embarrassment and teeth-gritting irritation simultaneously.

Satoru learnt from you grumbling at your lockers while changing into your shoes that you got busted at the school gates putting on lip tint. He barked a laugh at you for it and asked what happened after. Your makeup pouch got confiscated and you, very dramatically, told your teacher that your lip balm—tinted—was a necessity for you like you were fighting for your human rights. You got it back, but still, what does lip balm do in the grand scheme of things? Now he knows why your lips look so drained of the usual pinkish color he spends a little bit more than too much time looking at now.

Class goes by in swift movements. You barely skipped class today because all the teachers actually delivered and decided to go to class. Even Satoru was a little fucked by how Yaga, who usually never even comes to class because he’s busy dealing with administrative school duties, glided the sliding door to your classroom and went to the teacher’s desk to immediately ramble about his teaching subject.

By the end of it, you’re asking Satoru if he’s free today or if he has to go to cram school. Satoru doesn’t even go to cram school most of the time. And that’s how you end up at one of the cafés right across from your school, the one you frequent a lot, and is conveniently placed beside the Family Mart to its left.

Head buried deep in your chemistry textbook—not yours, Satoru’s actually, from his locker—you’re sipping on a red velvet yoghurt concoction that made Satoru grimace just by looking at the burgundy color. Satoru is eating Calbee honey butter chips very discreetly, and you’ve told him two times for the two of you to move to the outdoor café if he’s going to directly disrespect the establishment by doing this. His refusals came with the excuse that it’s hot outdoors.

Satoru’s watching you closely. Watching your stuff closely as well, which you notice, don’t mind, and don’t care enough to because you’re thinking about how your mother would react once report cards came out. His hand twitches once, then fiddles with the furry keychain on your bag. Your Switch is flat on the table, having not been played for three minutes because Satoru is obnoxiously munching on potato crisps.

Your mechanical pencil scribbles once, then twice. Then the pink star charm attached to the end of your Pentel keeps rattling against the body of your pencil in a way that Satoru knows means that you’re frustrated.

“You know,” he starts casually, “if you wanted help, you could just ask.”

Your frantic scrawling has stopped a second ago, but your eyes narrow over the rim of your cup. You turn the end of your pencil towards him and kick him under the table, earning you a barely there offended look from Satoru. “You are never beating the savior complex allegations.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’d be unbearable about it,” he’s already unbearable about it, unfortunately.

“I’d be helpful about it,” he replies, eyes involuntarily dropping to your lips again when you catch your straw with your mouth, sipping on the half-devoured too-sweet drink inside the clear cup. He specifically has to rip himself away before the little man in his head punches him to death for thinking about the way your lips curl around the plastic straw.

“You’d hold it over my head forever,” your knee accidentally brushes his.

While you noticed everything around whatever it is he’s been doing earlier, it’s unfortunate you don’t notice his breath shallowing and the color momentarily draining from his face the second your knee makes contact with his. He’s staring at the bare skin exposed by your uniform skirt—which you constantly roll a slightly too-short length than proper dress-code—and it makes him feel like an utter buffoon.

“That is also true,” he manages to choke out, hiding his loss of composure behind one snappy bite to his chip.

You huff quietly.

A brief silence settles between you, not enough to be prickly, but just enough for it to be filled only by the soft hum of the café speakers and the distant screech of milk steaming behind the counter. And your pencil charm hitting the plastic of the pencil itself. Your eyes shift upwards to Satoru, who has this faint pink dusting his cheeks, which you chalk up to humidity. He’s looking at your Switch displaying the Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream title screen, playing faint music that deliberately sounds island-y.

He finally opens the conversation, swallowing his chip first before talking. Your mouth twists like you’re tasting battery acid at the realization he’s still eating—and inside. You lurch to grab a chip from the bag as well, either way. “You still haven’t checked the island today.”

You groan immediately. “Don’t remind me.”

“Your little people are probably dead,” he shrugs, though he himself knows that’s not true. Even if Miis could die, Gojō Satoru has congruously become your island’s second guardian. It was inevitable the second he agreed, half-amusedly, that the player name Big Boss was awesome. He plays your game more than you do these weeks, at this point. Not to mention, he emulated the game on his laptop to make a ‘Test Island’ for god knows what he wants to do at your island.

“They’re alive because you’ve basically become their stepfather,” you wave him off. Your fingers reach to slide the Switch towards you.

You press the enter key and play the game for exactly five minutes; feeding Mii Nanami, or Nanamii as you call him in game now, watching Ieiri take her cigarette dog on a walk, and dragging Mii you to Mii Satoru to watch a cutscene of Mii you stir-frying vegetables while Satoru nervously hands you the ingredients for it. You found out that the virtual versions of you and Satoru had hooked up and have ridden their status as Friends and are now Sweethearts exactly four days ago.

You didn’t react all that poorly, and when you talked to Satoru in person after finding out, he fully defended his honor. You’re pretty sure your cheeks were a little tingling at that time. Satoru’s breath hitches a little every time you drag your little self—now clad with a frog outfit—to his own little self.

He is too unwillingly engrossed in this game for his own good. You close the game not long after those five minutes and you immediately boot up Animal Crossing. It’s not like you lost interest in Tomodachi Life. It’s just very fast-paced, and you had sunk-cost fallacy digging at your shoulders because you’ve played Animal Crossing for years and made a dedicated Shibuya-based island that you didn’t even think you created because of how pretty it was.

“Anyway,” you hum, “I need to check if my villagers miss me.”

Satoru stares at your screen the whole way through, from you clicking save and exiting the main menu to now your Animal Crossing island. “You know,” he mutters quietly, mostly to himself, “this is humiliating.”

You glance up immediately. “What is.”

Satoru stares at you for one long second and his gaze genuinely gets to you. Your eyes threaten to shift away from his, but before you could—concidence, or maybe him actually sensing you were about to chicken out—he reaches over and flicks your forehead instead.

“Ow—bitch?” you hiss.

The next day, it’s chemistry. It’s a little jarring, to yourself mostly, how you complained endlessly yesterday that you might become unemployed and homeless because your chemistry exam got an almost A B, and now you’re not even paying attention in Mr. Miyagi’s class, wholly absorbed by your video game console.

Satoru leans over slightly. “You’re back on your capitalist debt simulator.”

Your desks have been pushed together. Mostly because the school has decided that having deskmates is healthier than not, and now that it’s not exam season, it’s the logical option. This change was done during the afternoon of yesterday, right before you and Satoru went to a cafe where he embarrassed you by having no manners. Your nails occasionally clack on the body of your Switch, and Satoru genuinely wonders how it’s not a hazard to you that your nails are that long, and how you haven’t been given any disciplinary procedures for having painted nails.

You continue moving your character through the island absentmindedly while talking. You’re starting to agree with Satoru’s usual disparaging rambles about how Animal Crossing is made for chicks who want to feel corporate power or simulate capitalistic greed, albeit joking. And somehow, Satoru has started agreeing with your takes that your games build… something. He defends them for some reason you don’t understand when you initiate mocking your own villagers.

“…Wait.”

You blink innocently. Your character, stubby and wearing the flowy robe dress Mao Mao from The Apothecary Diaries wears, though planted a little bit gracelessly due to the textures, doesn’t stop moving around. An area to the left of your screen is completely different compared to the rest of your oriental island. “What.”

“That area wasn’t there before,” Satoru remarks easily. He shifts closer to you and you don’t know what came over you, but there’s a slight warmth crawling to your face from the back of your neck. Unbeknownst to you, Satoru completely regrets shuffling closer to you, because he can smell the intensely sweet body mist you use. Strawberry Pound Cake or something. He hates himself for knowing your perfumery, and he hates himself more for knowing what perfumes—plural—you use based on occasion.

“Oh. Yeah,” you nod casually.

The area he’s talking about is a blue and white little nook, tucked away discreetly in your cozy island. It clashes completely with your warm and otherwise pinkish-brown leaning city. There are multiple blue windflowers scattered around neatly and intentionally, and there’s a bridge connecting the main area from this. You don’t even like blue all that much in large amounts, it’s cute, but you could count on your fingers how many blue items are in your wardrobe, and how many things you’ve made in game that are blue.

It’s stone path-y and also weirdly futuristic. There are multiple waterfalls, which you heard Satoru told you he liked in basically every medium possible. Real life, video games. The area is also stupidly nerdy. Because there’s a telescope there and other weirdly nerdy things you wouldn’t be caught dead putting on your island because it ‘clashes with your aesthetic’ or it’s just a way to dunk on Satoru.

“…What the fuck,” is his only response. His eyes zoom into the tiny corner. It’s terraformed. It looks like a garden.

You look up at him finally. “What.”

“That’s—” Satoru gestures vaguely at the screen like he’s been personally attacked by landscaping and tiny humans and animals at 120 Hz refresh rate. He finally settles with something that doesn’t make him sound like a bumbling mute person. “That’s my spot.”

“It’s not your spot,” you say.

“It literally has my favorite flowers,” he points. Recently, you’ve noticed how big his hands really are when compared to yours, and just how horrible his nail health is. His right pinky is constantly shorter than the rest, and funnily only his right pinky. He chews on it during class when he’s bored. He continues like it’s both obvious and an accusation. “You made a Gojo exhibit on your island.”

You feel the heat that began at the back of your neck earlier begin to rise up to your face. You wonder if he can see it, or if anyone else could see it. You glare at him. “It is not a Gojo exhibit.”

“You made me a habitat,” his hand reaches out to your joystick, taking control of your character’s movements. She voluntarily moves with his direction. He walks around the area and finds more tiny details that strengthen his speculation that this part of the island is meant for him. There’s a flag in the middle that contrasts humorously with the rest of the decorated area. It just says Lehninger’s Principles of Biochemistry. It confirms his suspicion in an instant.

“I made a relaxing cliff area!” you sneer, tugging the Switch back to your flank. Your character walks in circles on the bridge that connects the blue sanctuary-like place and the bustling Japanese town to the screen’s right. You are suddenly very confused and very indecisive over what to do next on your island.

“With my favorite flowers,” he repeats.

You scoff at him, paying close attention to his otherwise blank face if not for the fact his lips were threatening to curve up into a sly little smile. You turn back towards your game violently, your hair flailing and hitting your friend with enough gentle force to drive Satoru to release an ‘ow’ sound. “You’re narcissistic.”

“You made me an ocean-view reading nook,” he says matter-a-factly. You’re expecting him to be smug and smirky like he always is, but it doesn’t come. Well, it doesn't come in an extreme way. Very understated. It irritates you more than if he was more smug. “…Can I see the rest?”

You look at him genuinely appalled, like you met Antoine Lavoisier himself and he offered you biscuits. “You wanna see it?”

“Uh, yeah,” Satoru nods. You still smell like strawberries.

You wallow about chemistry and the properties of acids two periods after Mr. Miyagi (with you not paying attention to whatever it was written on the green chalkboards). You showed Satoru your little secluded nook. Your nook. His nook. Whatever. If you had a say in your own creation, which… you do, you’d call the place gaudy and ‘over-engineered’ whatever that meant. Too much blue, too striking. Too Satoru, despite him constantly saying he doesn’t like attention on himself. Everyone knows that’s a big fat lie.

Then came after school, in which you asked Satoru again if he was free today. He wasn’t, because he was going to an arcade alone, which you barked a laugh at. But what gets you is that Satoru follows up, after much thinking that you did not register, with him asking if you’d wanna call tonight instead.

Which led you to now, with your phone, texting Satoru about him going to call soon. It takes about fifteen minutes of his silence because he was commuting back to his house, doing whatever hygiene and nutritional things he needs before the ringing comes. You filled the silence with doom-scrolling your phone, watching short form content that would no doubt destroy your brain in five to ten years.

It’s chemistry again. But slightly more tolerable because you get to hear the silence of Satoru’s room from your phone screen. The thought that you thought that horrifies you. Your mic sensitivity is turned on pretty high, you don’t necessarily know how to change it. Maybe it’s just the way Line is.

“You did that wrong,” Satoru’s voice cuts in crisp through your phone’s speakers.

“How?”

“That’s Gay-Lussac,” he says simply. You’re frustrated. Satoru speaks in fucking riddles over calls, not actually, but he speaks so concisely, it takes more effort to get a proper response out of him than to learn the laws of chemistry in detail. But still, you do it anyway.

“Fuck you,” you whine, slumping down into your study desk.  “I give up.”

A decile of a minute engulfs you in silence. It’s there, despite you not knowing just yet, that Satoru has realized you’re genuinely tired. He recalls you saying if you slip now, you’ll fall forever and truthfully, he feels bad for you. And he can’t really get a bunch of ugly feelings out of his heart whenever he looks at you—the ugliest of all is when you’re actively barring yourself from the joys of what you like. Like the Switch. Then relapsing, then feeling like complete and total shit after touching the thing.

“Visited your Miis yet?” he asks.

“No,” you respond blankly like it’s common sense. “I’m being intimately caressed by Gay-Lussac. I can’t.”

“Why don’t you just check your island?” he suggests after a soft breath escapes his mouth. He's lying down now judging from the way his voice subtly changed, and the rustling from the other side. You feel that same warmth from the classroom threaten to crawl up your neck and tickle at your jaw. “Tutoring over the phone seems… inefficient.”

You blink. “Ew,” you say under your breath. The way he worded and enunciated that made you cringe and grit your teeth a little. He sounded like a character from an otome video game talking to the main player. He sounded like a Love and Deepspace character in a teasing scene. The comparison makes the flush on your neck worse, and the cringe feeling inside your heart triple.

Your fingers move to grab your Switch and boot it up. You click on the colorful square and wait for the yellow loading screen to take you to the main menu, drumming your fingers on the smooth surface of your desk. When it opens, Suguru’s Mii is waving at you from the title screen and saying welcome to your island, tropical music humming from the speakers. “I have Tomodachi Life open.”

“Show me,” Satoru responds simply, rustling who knows what. It stops for a second, then resumes. You’re pretty sure he’s shuffling around in his bed because his long ass limbs can’t find a good position to rest and they keep dangling off his bed. Though, you’ve been to his house before—you know his bed is more than enough to host the average person. He’s just not the average person.

You turn your video camera on. Hooking up your Switch to your laptop and opening up OBS is way too much of a hassle, and even if you like Satoru, he is not worth that much. Nah, you don’t like Satoru. The most he’s getting is your phone’s camera pointed directly at your Switch and the pretty sprinkles of your personality being adorned by it, even if the lighting gets sometimes fucked up.

There’s an imperceptible breath hitch from the other side of the phone after your camera opens and it points at your face, just a little bit worn down from school. You’re wearing some ridiculous Sanrio skincare headband on your head and somehow it still pathetically fucks up his brain. A second later and the camera flips. “Turn yours on,” you request.

He does, and my god do you notice how lazy he looks right now. Entirely devoid of the usual nerdy little get-up he has. You rip your eyes from the phone though. Not the time to look at the facial symmetry and long eyelashes of a guy who barely has any time for girls because he’s too busy emulating PlayStation 2 games on that gigantic laptop. You click on your Mii—who’s now been living together with Satoru’s Mii for five days. “Satoru, we’ve been Sweethearts for two weeks. How cute is that?”

“Gross,” Satoru mumbles. His voice is muffled by his blanket.

“You were the one who made us date, Toru,” you reply. On screen, you feed your Mii calamari and she taps her tummy, satisfied. You immediately get out of her menu and drag her up and throw her right in front of Satoru and just to mock the both of you, a cutscene starts where Mii Satoru and you are having a contest on who loves each other the most. You can feel Satoru’s eyes drilling into your phone—his phone, whatever.

It’s past midnight and your room is lit entirely by your desk lamp and the glow of your Switch screen. “I was forced,” he argues, though his voice is a little strained and quieter than he normally is. You pretend you don’t notice that and continue watching digital versions of yourself flirting with each other.

Under the unhelpful tutelage of Satoru, you have successfully managed to understand the complicated word of stoichiometry moles. Over you reluctantly, though funnily enough, consistently over and over again asking him how the fuck one concept works and the other, you got it eventually. Satoru asked for grammar notes for English—because even if he was fluent, he had one hell of a grammar problem in that language and you had to ironically flex that you read explicit fan-fiction on internet sites.

Though, you’ve realized: Satoru is a bad teacher, and one of the most annoying things about Satoru, which you’ve voiced out already, is that he speaks so convolutedly you can’t make sense of him. That’s probably one of the reasons you only understood exactly one concept within the topic. You frantically yelled at him four times during that entire call—the studying part, the kinda real one—because he wasn’t being descriptive. He’s a terrible teacher.

But beyond that, you don’t mind at all whatever it is this arrangement you have with Satoru is. Throughout your whole friendship with him, even if he was favorable to have as your friend in class, you never really hung out for studies willingly. Sure, you had a study group, but did you really study during it or did you spend most of the time playing on your console or talking shit with Ieiri about the girls who have five pounds of makeup caked up on their face? You didn't bother opening up about anything related to your pain-in-the-ass studying goals, and somehow, you end up with him offering to tutor you and have late night calls.

The call lasts six hours. Most of it wasn’t even spent on studying, and you both don’t remember anything from it and everything from it. Eight p.m. to two a.m. the next day. You only hung up because Satoru fell asleep first, and he didn’t even open his gaming laptop which you found strange because he’s always on that thing. He opened it once for chemistry notes and to check on the Tekken subreddits which you called him a loser for. That game has fallen off now.

You ended up accidentally falling asleep too on call. And really, it was an entirely unproductive waste of your time to  have called him for six hours. Several of those hours and minutes were spent on you just listening to each other’s breathing. You find it crazy that you did that. When you turned off your phone, you were actually a zombie days after being infected in Resident Evil, you could barely get up to wash your face and brush your teeth. Alas, you stayed awake until three a.m. on your phone while your heart is washed with irritation you don't know what for, like actual heart palpitations. You woke up fifteen minutes later than usual and you were a minute away from the school guard from shutting the gate on you.

Homeroom doesn’t come and so you’re sleepy on the second floor of your school’s library, the usual place when homeroom is being idle without caring what the state of your class’ failing students are doing. Your head is tucked into your sleeve again, pink cardigan still, but not the same one. This one has ruffles on it, the last one was plain. You asked Satoru rather shamelessly to come to the library with you—and Ieiri pursed her lips into a thin line at that—to study, you say.

Satoru is skimming through your worksheet, one leg on his other leg, his upper body leaning back against the sofa. You’re off on the other end of the sofa, because during these recent weeks, touching him feels a little bit more awkward than usual. He hums. “You got question twelve wrong again.”

“I need enrichment,” you mutter almost inaudibly. Your hair keeps falling into your face, and even if it shields your eyes from the strobing reading lights above, the strands keep poking at your eye. You’re a little restless, but your entire eyelids keep wanting to close simultaneously.

“You need chemistry.”

“I need whimsy,” you don’t even pretend you aren’t already giving up on chemistry. You like Satoru, really, and he’s greater at teaching in person, but you are also way too prideful to ask for more help, and your procrastinatory brain keeps telling you to study by yourself. Later. After school.

Satoru raises an eyebrow at you. His stare lingers a second too long again at your lips, something you’ve noticed has been increasing in frequency since he started playing Tomodachi Life with you, but especially after midterms. “You failed your last quiz.”

“I almost failed my last quiz,” you correct, already rummaging through your overstuffed bag to find your Switch which had slipped itself between one of your pink-cover notebooks. You don’t see Satoru clicking his tongue and pushing his glasses up with his index finger, but you do hear him mutter the words fucking unbelievable under his breath.

When you boot up Tomodachi Life and enter the game, check your Mii statuses,you are immediately greeted with Satoru’s Mii with pink hearts around his face and a pink thought bubble over his head. Your eyes widen just a fraction. “…Oh no.”

“What?”

“Your stupid Mii has something to say,” you mumble, shifting closer to him instinctively. You shuffle around the dull gray sofa and land right beside him, your head landing on his shoulder. You pull it away just as quickly as it landed, even if by technicality, you did do that a lot, and you were so comfortable with each other you were sharing earbuds with each other despite the constant ear wax concerns disguised as jokes by both you and Satoru. You click on the thought bubble. “…Your Mii wants to propose.”

With this proximity, Satoru can smell your perfume. Not Strawberry Pound Cake, something a little airier—you switched perfumes to the lighter one which he did not know how to feel about. d’Annam, maybe. He spent last night hitting his head on the wall because he’s now associated strawberries with you—he visited a patisserie because he couldn’t help himself and the strawberry shortcake displayed on the glass case instantly made him remember your hair. “What?”

“He wants to get married,” you reiterate plainly. You want to shift closer to him, but you also don’t. You don’t know that Satoru is genuinely getting dizzy because your hair smells good.

Satoru chokes instantly. You forgot that for the past few days, you’ve gotten your grabby hands on your console again and started playing this stupid simulation game more. He doesn’t know that your Sweetheart status with him—your Mii’s Sweetheart status with his Mii went from Falling in love to Wants to marry! “Already?!”

“It’s been like a week.”

“That’s not enough time,” he argues, backing away from your touch. There’s a subtle curl of your mouth, downwards, that he catches. He briefly thinks he’s hallucinating, then he thinks why the hell you frowned the second he moved a millimeter away because your smell is overwhelming him (in a good way). You have lip tint on again now, but definitely not because you got your confiscated makeup pouch back because he heard you talking to Ieiri about how student affairs still hasn’t given it back, and the shade is just a little warmer than usual. It’s also topped with lip balm—glossy.

“You confessed after like two weeks,” you mutter.

“That wasn’t my fault.”

Satoru frankly hates himself because arguing with you is simply the greatest and worst activity he is allowed to do. Because your voice is nice to listen to, and sadly, after being pressured by Suguru over whether he even thinks girls are hot, he’s realized he thinks your arguing voice is hot. You turn your head to look at him and you give him a disapproving joke sneer. “You made him confess.”

“I want to marry [Name]!” the Mii says in its flat little voice. Besides the fact that this is a little Satoru asking how he should marry little you, you feel an absurd giddiness from the fact that Mii Satoru is saying all of this while wearing a toga outfit you made him wear. The Mii liked it a lot. “I’ll gather up all my courage and then I’ll propose to her.”

You laugh once. Too high-pitched. “Your Mii moves fast.”

Satoru grabs the back of his neck aggressively. He looks visibly pained. You don’t know that he’s actually in pain and not doing this for theatrics. “Why does he want marriage already?”

“He’s committed,” you suggest, then after a moment of engineered silence, you add, “he loves hard.”

The silence that follows after isn’t engineered. Mostly because you’re thinking and he is too, at the question of can you help Mii Satoru stay focused because his heart is raising. He picks the option yes without your permission and you turn to look at him again with the most offended look you can muster, mouth wide into a gasp. Satoru tries so hard not to look at you. Nor your lips.

“…Beach was statistically the best one,” he mutters to himself, not even a little bit meant for you, recalling that night he laid awake playing a damn game and being a wingman for his own self. You momentarily hear something about how fast Mii Satoru is.

“Seriously?” you ask speculatively but in reality you have no clue either. “You sound like you researched this.”

“I did not research Tomodachi Life confessions,” he says. He didn’t, he actually just said that because both of your Miis are practically soul-bonded into each other and he remembered a conversation he had with you just a month ago about what your favorite place is. He remembers that you said you liked the beach the most, even though you hate the horrible sun burn you get after. That’s also a third of the reason he helped you remodel your beach in your game. “Nor proposals.”

“You definitely did,” you accuse teasingly.

It takes a second or two for the cutscene to load and Mii Satoru to fidget and nervously fiddle around with his words through your low volume speakers. The library doesn’t have a very strict policy about noise pollution, but you figured you ought to be respectful, especially when you’re ditching class. You should’ve changed Satoru’s Mii to give him a blue pinstripe suit, the one that matches his eyes quite nicely, at least you think.

You’re immediately hit with a mini-game that catches you off-guard. Thankfully, not enough for you to fail, because you managed to shoot down the irrelevant thoughts—everything Mii Satoru has ever thought about probably—and made his head be completely filled with you. “I have something really important that I wanted to talk about, [Name],” the Mii starts.

You genuinely click your tongue when the mini-game repeats two or three more times. You genuinely just want the damn human thing to propose to you. “[Name], will you marry me?” you reach it eventually and you let out a sigh that you didn't even know you were holding. You and Satoru, the real and physical one, lean in closer to look at the screen.

After five seconds of silence, your Mii finally responds, blushing. “Yes! A squillion times yes!”

Piano music instantly plays and blasts against your speakers. You rapidly press the A button and clap for the two engaged Miis, and you suddenly remember again that it’s literally just you and Satoru but tiny and tinny. You look over to your left and you see Satoru still intently, but kind of zoning out, staring at the screen. He really doesn’t know what’ s wrong with him, besides the fact that he’s now being haunted by his own feelings for you and the fact that he became competitive with a digitalized version of himself a week ago, who confessed to a digitalized version of you. In a pocket dimension, a version of himself has already proposed to you and you said yes.

“…Wow,” you say weakly.

Satoru doesn’t respond for five seconds just like an actual Tomodachi Life cutscene. Then he clears his throat, joking. “He’s got better game than I do.”

You laugh nervously. “That’s not exactly difficult.”

“Wow.”

You don’t move for a while, and your shoulders are touching in a way that seems inappropriate for a reason you cannot name unless you want to stick a gun up your throat with your own hands. Your knee drifts from its place and falls to the right slightly and hits his own knee. You really want to say something. Someone comes in through the door and ruins whatever it was at the tip of your tongue.

Throughout physics, you are weirdly entranced with your Switch. Not necessarily because it became funner, but because you keep circling back and thinking about how your Mii blushed when Satoru’s Mii proposed, and how Satoru’s Mii looked like he was having so much fun on your honeymoon—their honeymoon. They’re pocket creatures though, they probably should always look fun. English had you and Satoru talking, knee touching the other’s knee so scandalously, and you asking him if he was free after school.

It’s through Satoru that when you asked Mr. Miyagi for extra credit during first break, because you genuinely can’t let your scores drop just like that, he says in his softly spoken voice—or rather, monotonous—that you seemed like you were working hard. You don’t even know what to respond for a second because who thinks you work hard when all you do is slack off and play video games? He was gleeful when giving you extra worksheets you could complete for extra points.

Satoru also buys you strawberry milk during second break and both of you eat your bentos while bickering about Elden Ring lore of something along those lines at the back of the school near the vending machines. It weirdly reminds you of your Miis.

Not long after, you’re at that same cafe you went to with Satoru just days ago.

Your uniform skirt rides slightly higher when you slide into the booth right beside him, one knee tucked beneath the other absentmindedly while you shove your bag beside you. The evening sunlight bleeding through the windows catches against your skin and Satoru immediately looks away like somebody caught him committing tax fraud or pirating a game he isn’t supposed to. 

You had touched up your makeup before coming to the place but your face is already melting. Your powder is basically peeling off from your face but you don’t really care about that, as long as your mascara stays intact and doesn’t ruin your entire lower lashline. 

Your thighs press against the soft cushions and Satoru regrets looking down. He’s mostly a little fixated on the exposed skin of your upper leg, and while not thinking necessarily adult thoughts, he desperately wants you to cover up because the soft fat of your thigh, exposed by a ridden up uniform skirt that you rolled up way too high most of the time is killing him more than the heat. Satoru shifts his legs closer to yours accidentally, but also because his legs feel uncomfortable bent like this.

“This place is trying to slow-cook me,” you mumble, fanning yourself with the menu.

“You’re wearing a cardigan,” Satoru helpfully observes. You are. The cardigan is hot and probably one of the reasons you’re genuinely overheating and turning into a puddle. The material is thick and mostly suited for colder weather, or at least somewhere that isn’t this stuffy.

“You notice lots of things about me,” you remark simply, skimming the menu, eyes scanning from the various coffee drinks to matcha, tiramisu, intensely sweet abominations you can’t even fathom, before you end up ordering the same red velvet concoction you did the first time you came here this week. You mean it as a joke, with a small dry chuckle attached to it.

Satoru laughs weakly with you, trying to escape the feeling up his spine—and that same feeling crawling up yours. “Hard not to.”

Your heartbeat trips over itself, then starts running faster. You genuinely feel warmth rising up from the start of your chest, climbing towards your neck, then the apples of your cheeks. You wonder if it’s visible behind the complexion you put on.

“Are you flirting with me?” the accusation feels like you’re placing an unclenched palm over an open fire, and you’re genuinely worried you can’t go back from this. Because if he brushes it off, you’ll genuinely scream into your pillow tonight telling yourself how stupid you are. If he was, you think you’d flirt back. You don’t flirt with people often, not intentionally at least, and most definitely you do not flirt with any guy you’ve ever liked, let alone Satoru.

Beneath the poker face Satoru is putting on, his brain glitches once, twice, thrice, then for the fourth time. He doesn’t even know what to say to that because has he been consciously flirting with you? He doesn’t know. Does he want to flirt with you? Yeah. So he settles with pretending he didn’t hear. “Hm?”

You don’t even bother at that. You chicken out, and you’re too tired for this whole song and dance. So your head falls upon his shoulder, stiff and rounded in a very quintessentially male way, and you feel him physically tense up below you. Your eyes genuinely do feel heavy. But you also just want closeness to him without confessing that you want to spend most of your school days with him. You do it anyway.

“…Satoru,” you mumble sleepily.

“Hm?”

You suck in a small breath. You watch the waiter wearing a black work uniform with purple lining carrying a wooden tray set down your drinks. The red velvet, and the coffee he ordered with a double shot. You called him a pretentious bastard. Most of the time he doesn’t even like coffee, let alone a double shot of espresso. You insisted on adding more sugar. “I think I’m in trouble.”

You smile at the waiter right after he says those welcoming, trained words about your order and you shift your head closer to the base of Satoru’s neck. His heart physically stutters and does the same thing as yours did: trip over a hurdle and start running faster despite the injury. “What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t think this is platonic anymore,” the way you say it is tired. It’s sincere, but at the base of it, it is incredibly tired. Not sure whether it’s from how tiring it is to be aware of everything he does now, or the fact that you only got three hours of sleep today, or maybe it’s just from the fact that the humidity is making you sleepy. Still, the words fall out of your mouth like a heavy canon ball.

There’s silence once, then Satoru slumps into his seat. His shoulders relax and you feel yourself sinking deeper against him. “Thank fucking God.”

You shoot up from your position and you feel that heat starting from your chest begin to crawl up again. You turn to look at him and your sleepy expression is already crumpled instantly into embarrassed disbelief. “You too?!”

“You fell asleep on me!” he defends, voice raising up like he’s genuinely defending something he’s been guarding away since forever. There’s a soft pink glowing from his cheeks and the sun hitting his face accentuates the cherry blossom dust on top of his skin.

At that, you furrow your eyebrows, pointing an accusatory finger at him. His eyes trail down your finger again and find the chipped paint on your nails. To anyone else, you’d probably look like a couple, or at the very least, two teenagers very obviously in the talking stage. “You got jealous of your own Mii!”

“That little bastard proposed before I could!”

There’s a small, horrifying second where you just stare at each other while both of you succumb to heat—real and bodily. Both of your brows are knitted into a thin line and your faces are curled in a way that would indicate you’re in a fight, if it weren’t for the trembling, almost fond expression that keeps flickering between your embarrassment. Satoru’s eyes involuntarily drift down one last time and he sees the same pinkish lips coated with strawberry lip balm and whatever fucking women’s product you use.

You kiss him first and he tastes the sweet and waxy salve. You taste mostly like strawberry hard gummies, and it might be his bias, entirely too sweet, even for the scented, tasting lip balm. Satoru mostly tastes clean and nothing funky. The kiss doesn’t even last two seconds. You pull away with the nastiest warmth all around your body, and his face is entirely red, shocked, and thoroughly pleased underneath at the same time.

He just looks at you, then when he finally registers you, miserably says. “My Mii is never letting me live this down.”

You laugh directly into his shoulder.