Sukuna’s room smelled like smoke and that shitty cheap incense he liked to burn when he was bored. The TV was on, volume low, playing something you both weren’t even watching.

You were slouched at the edge of his bed, scrolling on your phone with one leg half-hanging off the mattress while he sat up against the headboard, absentmindedly tuning one of his guitars.

You’d been like this a hundred times. Comfortable. Barely speaking.

Your parents were close, not best-friends, vacationing-together close, but the kind that showed up to the same cookouts and holiday parties, and said things like “we should do this more often” even though they never really did.

He used to pick on you in elementary school. Dumb stuff. Gave you stupid nicknames, pulled your hair. The kind of behavior teachers brushed off with a tired “boys will be boys” or, “he probably just likes you."

Middle school came. You kissed once. It just happened. Neither of you talked about it after, and it never came up again.

By high school, you were in the same friend group. Close enough to be in each other’s photos, but never really close enough to hang out one-on-one. Not really. You were always around each other, but not in a way that meant anything.

Then college came, and you were in the same university.

You’d always ended up circling back to each other like clockwork.