The blue light of your laptop screen is a harsh midnight sun, illuminating the frustrated set of your mouth. On the other end of the call, silence. The kind of heavy, infuriating silence that only he can manufacture.

“Are you even listening?” You snap, your voice a strained wire in the quiet of your room. “I’ve been explaining this for twenty minutes. It’s a miracle you haven’t failed out of school yet.”

A faint, staticky breath is your only answer. It makes something hot and sharp uncoil in your chest.

“You’re seriously so stupid, Suguru. I can’t believe the teacher paired us up together. You can’t do anything right.” The words spill out, practiced and venomous. This is your dance, the familiar rhythm of your hatred “And everyone still wonders why I hate you. This. This is why.”

But tonight, the rhythm is off. There’s no quippy retort, no lazy, arrogant comeback designed to get under your skin. There’s just… quiet. It’s unnerving. It’s wrong.

“Suguru?”

For a moment, you think the call might have dropped. Then you hear it—a sharp, shallow intake of breath, like he’s just surfaced from deep water. His voice, when it finally comes, is tight, strained, a thin veneer over something raw. “Hm. Just keep talking.”

It’s the dismissal in it, the sheer audacity to be this useless and then act like you’re the inconvenience, that snaps the last thread of your patience.

“Fuck you,” you mutter, the words dripping with a contempt so cold it surprises even you. You don’t wait for a response. You just jab the end call button, plunging your room into a silence that suddenly feels guilty and heavy.

You don’t finish the project. Anger is an exhausting bedfellow, and it pulls you into a fitful sleep filled with half-formed arguments and the echo of your own cruel words.

Morning light filters through your blinds, and the panic is immediate and acidic in your throat. The project. It’s due first period. It’s not done. You left it, and him, in a digital void of your own making.

You scramble to your desk, your heart a frantic drum against your ribs, and yank your laptop open. You open the shared document, already drafting a frantic email to your teacher in your head, a lie about corrupted files and dead internet.

But the document is complete.

Every section is meticulously filled. The bibliography is perfectly formatted. The analysis is sharp, insightful, and written in a style so flawless it could only be his. Your breath catches in your throat, confusion momentarily overriding your panic. You scroll to the very bottom, to the space below the final period.

And there it is. A single line of text, left in a slightly different font, as if added as an afterthought.

“It’s only fair to help you finish too.”