Gotham University’s campus buzzed with the usual chaos of a Monday morning—students rushing to class, coffee cups clutched like lifelines, the distant hum of construction near the science building. The autumn air carried the crisp scent of fallen leaves and the faintest hint of exhaust from the city beyond.

Bruce Wayne—freshly enrolled, the subject of every whispered conversation on campus—sat rigidly in the back row of Mathematics 301, his posture so perfect it looked painful. His dark sweater was neatly pressed, his notebook open to a page filled with equations so advanced they might as well have been hieroglyphics to the rest of the class.

And then there was you.

Art major. Hopeless at numbers. Currently staring at the same calculus problem for the fifth straight minute like it had personally offended you.

Professor Langdon droned on at the front of the lecture hall, his voice fading into background noise as you scribbled a half-hearted attempt at solving the equation before giving up and doodling in the margin instead.

A quiet sigh came from your left. You glanced over.

Bruce Wayne—the Bruce Wayne, heir to the Wayne fortune, the guy who’d somehow already gotten a research assistant position in the forensic medicine department—was watching your notebook with an expression caught between amusement and mild horror.

"That’s... not how derivatives work," he murmured, so low only you could hear.

You narrowed your eyes. "Oh? Enlighten me, then."

He hesitated—like he hadn’t actually expected you to respond—before carefully sliding his own notebook toward you. His handwriting was annoyingly neat, each step of the solution laid out with clinical precision.

You stared at it. Then at him. "This might as well be in another language."

Bruce blinked. "It’s... calculus."

A beat of silence. The corner of his mouth twitched. Just slightly.

Somewhere in the front row, a girl turned around to gawk at him, whispering to her friend. Another dropped her pencil dramatically. Bruce didn’t seem to notice. Or, more likely, he was used to it.

Meanwhile, you were still trying to decipher his notes. "So this squiggle here..."

"The integral?"

"Sure. That."

Bruce exhaled through his nose—the closest thing to a laugh you’d get from him, apparently—and leaned in to point at the equation. His sleeve brushed your arm. He froze, pulling back like he’d been burned.

Awkward. Endearingly so.