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“Suguru.”
“Su-gu-ru.”
“Suuuuuuuuuuuuguru.”
“SU—”
Suguru puts his chopsticks down with more force than necessary. “What,” he finally interrupts, looking up from his lunch to find Satoru, inches away, wide eyes staring at him from behind tinted glasses. His eyes curve into a smile at Suguru’s acknowledgement of his insistent prodding.
“Notice anything different?” Satoru asks, inching even closer to Suguru.
Suguru raises an eyebrow. “About what?”
“Me, obviously.”
Suguru squints at him. There’s nothing noticeably different about him, at least not anything Suguru can spot. “No,” he finally says after his eyes do a cursory sweep of him.
Satoru deflates. He pulls away from Suguru, and Suguru can already see the beginnings of a pout pulling at the corners of his mouth. Undeterred, he turns to Shoko.
“Shokoooooooooooooooooooo—”
“No,” Shoko says curtly. She hasn’t looked up from her phone. “There’s nothing different.”
“You’re not even looking,” Satoru accuses her. Shoko pulls her eyes up for half a moment to search Satoru’s face before shrugging loosely and turning her attention back to her phone.
“You look the same,” she says, and Satoru scowls.
“You both are terrible,” he mutters. “You can’t notice anything at all?” The question is directed more so in part to Suguru, and he blinks under Satoru’s expectant gaze.
“Just tell us what it is,” is all he can offer, and Satoru rolls his eyes with a sigh before pulling off his sunglasses.
“See?” he asks, waving his glasses in front of them, only to receive a pair of blank stares in return. “I got new glasses.”
Shoko squints at the displayed glasses for a moment before raising her eyebrow. “That is literally the exact same pair you always wear.”
Satoru lets out a scandalized gasp. “Shoko,” he chides. “It’s an entirely different shade of blue!” He glances at Suguru. “Right, Suguru?”
“Uh,” Suguru responds helpfully. “Sure.”
It’s not a particularly convincing response, so he isn’t surprised to see Satoru slump further into a sulk.
“You guys are terrible,” Satoru repeats petulantly. It’s his usual childish response, but the only thing that alerts Suguru that the other might actually be a little hurt is in the way he notices Satoru still fidgeting with the glasses in his hand. Suguru makes a mental note to pay more attention to the shade of Satoru’s glasses in the future.
“Well,” Suguru starts. He glances at his half-finished lunch. “You look good in anything, anyway.”
“Oh my god,” Shoko says loudly. Suguru looks up in time for her expression to pinch in obvious disgust. “I’m so done,” she mutters, and before Suguru can ask what she means by that, she’s stood up, dusted herself off, and marched away, prodding aggressively at her phone while she does—thumbing out an exasperated text to Utahime, no doubt.
“Weird,” Suguru murmurs, watching her disappear in the distance. “Do you know what that was about…?” His question trails off when he turns to ask Satoru and finds—
“Satoru, are you okay?”
Satoru isn’t meeting Suguru’s eyes—instead, he stares resolutely at the glasses still in his hands. It’s only because he’s not wearing them that Suguru can see the splotchy red spreading across Satoru’s entire face. Suguru watches, fascinated, as the blush reaches the tips of Satoru’s ears.
“Are you,” Suguru asks again, hesitantly, “okay…?” He’s half-convinced Satoru’s got a fever, with the fiery red that now creeps down his neck, but when he moves to check the other’s temperature, Satoru scrambles backward with a high-pitched giggle.
“Fine,” he wheezes out, and he finally meets Suguru’s skeptical gaze, only for his eyes to quickly skitter away as soon as they make contact. “I’m fine!”
“Right,” Suguru says, unconvinced, and watches as Satoru hastily shoves his sunglasses back on his face. It does little to hide the still-creeping pink painted in sweeping strokes across his face.
“I need to go too,” Satoru randomly mumbles out as an excuse, and then he’s hurriedly getting to his feet and walking away. Suguru watches with no small amount of amusement as Satoru almost trips over his own feet in his haste.
What a loser, he thinks fondly.
Suguru doesn’t spare much thought to it for the next few days, but the memory once again comes to the forefront of his mind at the end of one of their frequent joint missions, watching as Satoru callously kicks the slumped body of a curse without remorse. It’s almost fascinating to Suguru—how cold and determined Satoru must seem to anyone who’s only heard of the legendary Gojo heir, and how childish and easily riled up he is in reality. Something in Suguru warms with the knowledge that he was one of the few choice people who could even know about that part of Satoru, and he finds himself unconsciously smiling.
“What?” Satoru asks defensively when he glances up to see Suguru’s lips curved up.
Suguru shrugs. “Nothing,” he says easily, instead turning his attention to the curse—still not yet exorcized, waiting to be ingested.
He extends a hand, the curse slowly warping in a path to his hand, but a loud crash from beside him momentarily distracts him. When he glances to the side, he sees another curse, smaller in stature and speedier than Suguru would expect, and before Suguru can even realize that it’s zooming in a straight trajectory for his face, there’s a blast of light that just misses the side of his head, and the curse is reduced to a mere splatter on the wall.
“Oh,” Suguru says dumbly, eyes trailing from the hissing matter on the wall to Satoru, still with his hand extended outward. “Thanks.”
Satoru simply hums in response, letting his hand drop. He shoves his hands in his pockets, leaning back with his head tilted to the side. “Finished?” he asks, nodding his head towards the half-absorbed curse Suguru’s entirely forgotten about.
“You saved my life,” Suguru says instead with a slow blink. It’s not the first time it’s happened, not with the amount of missions they’ve gone on together, but there’s a hypothesis now that Suguru wants to test out. “You’re amazing, Satoru.”
Satoru stills to stare stupidly at Suguru. His lips part slightly.
“Huh?” Satoru finally blurts out after a moment of elongated silence.
Suguru stares back with a now fully condensed curse in the palm of his hand. “You’re amazing, Satoru,” he repeats quietly, and in the time it takes him to swallow the curse, Satoru’s entire face flares into a familiar shade of red. He watches as Satoru presses a hand to his face, mumbling something unintelligible that Suguru can’t make out before spinning on his heel and marching out of the alley they had been standing in. With a grin, Suguru follows, and when he reaches the street Satoru now stares resolutely out to, hands shoved in his pockets, he doesn’t miss the way Satoru’s blush remains high on his cheeks.
“You okay?” he throws out casually, and Satoru’s eyes quickly dart to him before glancing away again.
“Peachy,” comes the grumbled response, even as Satoru’s shoulders move up—in an attempt to hide the bright color adorning the tips of his ears, Suguru assumes, but it’s largely unsuccessful.
Huh, Suguru thinks. Okay.
Once was a slip-up, twice might have been an odd coincidence, but with each time Suguru notices Satoru visibly flustered, Suguru starts to notice a trend. The trend in question? That Satoru’s face turns a horribly flattering shade of red any time Suguru so much as off-handedly compliments him. The more direct ones naturally garner more obvious reactions, but even one day, when Satoru’s spread out in Suguru’s bed, leaning his head against Suguru’s shoulder as he rambles about something—Digimon, probably—Suguru learns that anything even mildly resembling a compliment would light up Satoru’s face faster than any heat wave could.
“Your fingers are really long,” Suguru notes, quietly interrupting Satoru’s monologue by lacing his fingers through Satoru’s. “See?”
Suguru’s eyes trail from their entwined hands to Satoru’s face when he’s met with nothing but silence. He can’t help the amused grin that spreads across his face when he sees Satoru, mouth pinched in a pout, eyebrows drawn together, and, most noticeable of all, fiery blush spreading across the bridge of his nose. It only takes a few moments later for Satoru to pull his hand out of Suguru’s, sitting up straighter before tilting his head away.
“Whatever,” he says, and although the word comes out sounding utterly unaffected, it does little to hide the wide strokes of red that splash across his face.
So maybe Suguru starts doing it on purpose. It’s not like Suguru was previously purposely reticent with compliments, but the visceral reaction he consistently gets with every venture into more open and daring compliments is much too entertaining for Suguru to go back on.
A simple “thank you” when Satoru throws him a gift from his latest mission turns into “you’re so kind, Satoru.” A hum of appreciation when Satoru’s fingers carefully untangle Suguru’s hair at the end of the day turns into “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Satoru.” A usual “one more?” during a sparring match turns into “you’re getting stronger, Satoru.”
Every time, without fail, it garners almost the exact same response.
“Shut up,” Satoru will bite out, turning away as if it would hide his flushed cheeks. “It’s whatever,” he’ll mutter, even though Suguru can almost feel the heat radiating off of his face. “Obviously,” he’ll bluster, “we’re the strongest,” but even that doesn’t seem to prevent the blood that rises under his skin to paint his cheeks pink.
Suguru is starting to realize he enjoys watching Satoru get flustered a bit more than strictly platonic.
He wonders if that might be a problem.
“It’s not staying,” Yaga’s voice booms.
“Sensei…” Surprisingly, it’s Shoko who’s pleading with their teacher, for once. “We can’t just leave it to roam outside.”
“Sure you can,” comes Satoru’s dismissive response. “It survived this long, it’ll survive a little longer. It’s a wild animal, you know.”
The wild animal in question—a tiny black kitten barely bigger than the size of Suguru’s hand—mewls in protest. It rubs its head against Shoko when she moves a hand protectively over it. At Shoko’s glare, Satoru pulls down his lower eyelid with a finger and sticks his tongue out. Shoko flips him the middle finger.
“Come on, Satoru,” Suguru murmurs before the two can escalate their bickering any further. “It’s just a cat.”
Satoru scoffs. “So? Who cares?”
Suguru frowns, but any further protest dies on his tongue when he sees the careful way Satoru watches the cat, now rolling on its back atop of Shoko’s desk. A realization slowly forms in his mind.
“Okay,” he finally says. “I’ll take it.”
Shoko, Yaga, and Satoru all turn to stare at him with wide eyes.
“It can’t stay in the classroom, right?” Suguru continues. “I’ll keep it in my room, then.”
Shoko grins. “And I can visit whenever, right?”
“Sure,” Suguru agrees easily. He eyes Satoru knowingly. “You can visit too, Satoru.”
Satoru quickly schools his expression into one of carefully crafted indifference. “You wish,” he mutters, but Suguru doesn’t miss the way his eyes dart from the cat to Suguru’s face, then back to the cat.
Two days, Suguru thinks to himself, barely trying to fight the rising grin on his face. It’ll take two days.
In the end, it takes less than two hours before there’s a tentative knock at the door.
The knock itself is unusual on its own. Shoko, he knows, would only ever knock confidently, three times in a row, a habit he doesn’t know the explanation for, and Satoru, well—never really knocked at all.
At the same time, he’s not surprised to see Satoru, shifting awkwardly on his feet, when he cracks the door open.
“Can I,” Satoru starts, his eyes darting everywhere but to Suguru’s eyes. “Hm.”
Suguru’s lips twitch. “Yeah, Satoru, come in.”
Satoru gratefully takes the easy entrance Suguru offers him and shuffles into the room, and he doesn’t miss the way Satoru’s eyes scan the floor of his room. To spare Satoru the mortification of asking, he nods his head towards the center of his bed, where the cat lies curled in a spot of sunlight. Its eyes are gently closed, but it shifts a little in its slumber when the bed dips as Satoru sits by the edge.
“What’s her name?” Satoru asks quietly. Suguru blinks. He hadn’t even noticed the cat was a girl.
“I’m still thinking about it,” comes his own quiet response, and Satoru nods. He hasn’t torn his eyes away from the cat since he’d first entered. After a few pauses of silence, his hand cautiously stretches out. It hovers, for a moment, above the kitten’s head, and when his hand slowly makes contact, the kitten shifts under the touch. Satoru freezes while she does, but relaxes a few moments later when she stills. Suguru watches as his hand continues to rub gently at the fur, and although the kitten’s eyes remain closed, she starts purring softly after a few moments. Suguru watches with growing fascination as a fond smile traces its way on Satoru’s lips.
Huh, Suguru thinks.
“Cute,” he murmurs out loud, and Satoru turns to him with a grin.
“Isn’t she?” he says, and Suguru blinks.
“Not the cat,” he corrects. “You.”
Suguru thinks, by now, he should probably be used to the way red creeps across Satoru’s face, but he’s still taken aback by how quickly Satoru’s skin flushes once Suguru’s words register. This time, Satoru brings both his hands to cover his face. When he removes them, his face is still a bright red, but there’s a determined slant to his eyebrows that has Suguru’s own eyebrows raising.
“Stop,” Satoru mutters. “Stop doing—” He waves a hand in the general direction of Suguru. “—this.”
“Stop what?” Suguru asks innocently.
The glare Satoru sends him is rather weak. “You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think I do,” Suguru responds easily, a hint of amusement creeping into his voice, and Satoru huffs an exasperated breath before looking away. The tips of his ears still burn pink.
“FLIRTING,” Satoru finally blurts out. “Stop flirting with me like you don’t—” His mouth snaps shut.
“Flirting,” Suguru repeats incredulously. “Me?”
Satoru gapes at him. “You,” he responds emphatically. “What—you haven’t noticed?”
Suguru blinks. He quickly runs through the past weeks in his head, his interactions with Satoru, and—
“Oh,” he says stupidly. “I guess I have.”
Satoru’s eyebrows raise high enough to disappear under his bangs. “Yeah,” he finally mutters, shifting his eyes away. “So stop.”
Okay, sits on the tip of Suguru’s tongue, but he swallows it down.
“Wait,” he says instead. “You didn’t finish your sentence.”
“What?”
“You said,” Suguru remembers, “that I should stop flirting with you like I don’t—something. Like I don’t what?”
The blush that had been dying down on Satoru’s cheeks returns with a vengeance. “Nothing,” Satoru mumbles out, but he knows as well as Suguru that his face betrays him.
“Like I don’t what, Satoru?”
“Like you don’t—” Satoru’s jaw clenches. “Stop flirting with me like you don’t mean it, Suguru.”
Suguru stares. “Who says I don’t?”
“Wh—huh?”
“Who says I don’t?” Suguru repeats carefully. “I think you do look good in anything. I think you are amazing. I think you are kind. I don’t actually know what I’d do without you. I think you are strong.” He can’t hide his grin at Satoru’s stupefied expression. “I think you are cute, Satoru.”
Satoru buries his face in his hands again. The bright red tips of his ears stand out between his shock of white hair.
“Shut up,” he mutters. “Shut up shut up shut up.”
Suguru’s smile softens when he bends down to pull Satoru’s hands away from his face. “I’m flirting with you like I mean it,” he murmurs. “Because I mean it.”
Satoru glares at him, even with Suguru’s hands wrapped around his. “I hate you,” he says weakly, and Suguru doesn’t quite manage to resist the urge to peck him on the bridge of his nose, where the red is most prominent. When he pulls away, he’s delighted to see Satoru turn an even darker shade of red.
“Love you too, Satoru.”