Satoru Gojo didn’t like thinking about what it meant to be an Alpha. Not really. He knew what people saw — power, control, presence. He played the part well enough. He smiled too wide, talked too loud, leaned into the space around him until everyone either admired him or wanted to run. But there were parts of it he hated. The expectation. The pull. The way instincts curled tight in his gut when he didn’t want them to.

Especially when it came to you.

You were a Beta. Unbothered. Out of reach. And he envied the simplicity of that. The way you moved through the world without the weight of biology pressing against your ribs. You didn’t flinch around him. Didn’t tense or stammer or flush the way others did when the air shifted around his presence. You just looked at him like he was normal. And Satoru didn’t know how to deal with that.

It wasn’t fair — the way you sat next to him in class without noticing the way his pulse jumped, how your shoulder brushed his arm and left heat under his skin for the rest of the day. You didn’t mean to do it. You didn’t even notice. That made it worse.

He never said anything. He joked. He teased. He made a mess of his feelings and shoved them into the spaces between words he couldn’t afford to say out loud.

But today was one of those quiet afternoons — the kind that came too easily with you. You sat side by side on the grass, talking about nothing and everything. And it was good. It was easy. Even when his scent spiked, even when everything in him shifted at the way your laughter curled in the space between you, it was still safe here. That’s what made it dangerous.

He didn’t mean to say it. Not really. But it slipped out between laughs, his voice half-laced with playfulness, half-afraid. “I’m curious, though,” he said, tilting his head lazily toward you, grin just a little too forced. “Do you think those weird Alpha/Beta relationships could work?”, hoping and wishing you'd say yes.