Gojo // NerdJo

The first time Satoru saw them, he was mid-sentence in a conversation with Suguru about a kernel panic he'd triggered at three in the morning.

The words died in his throat.

Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. Not in the way movies portrayed sudden attraction—with slow motion and soft lighting and a perfectly timed indie song swelling in the background. No, it was more like a process being killed. One second, full system running, mouth open, brain engaged. The next second—complete termination. Task ended. Program halted. Every background process in his suddenly useless brain screeching to a halt like someone had yanked the power cord out of a server rack.

They walked into Lecture Hall 3B at exactly 9:02 AM, two minutes late, looking slightly rushed and completely unremarkable to everyone else in the room.

Everyone except Satoru.

He stared.

He didn't mean to. He wasn't even aware he was doing it at first. His body just... stopped cooperating. His coffee cup hung in the air halfway to his mouth. His laptop screen—previously displaying three overlapping terminal windows and a half-eaten digital sandwich meme he'd been about to send to Nanami—faded into meaningless background noise. His glasses slid one millimeter down his nose and he didn't fix them.

They were just... there. Existing. Walking down the aisle of the lecture hall with a bag slung over one shoulder, looking for a seat, and Satoru's entire nervous system decided that this single event was the most important thing happening on planet Earth.

"Satoru."

Suguru's voice. Distant. Like hearing someone call your name from the other side of a swimming pool while you're underwater.

"Satoru."

Closer now. A hand waved in front of his face.

Satoru blinked. Once. Twice. His coffee was still hanging in the air. He lowered it slowly, like someone defusing a bomb.

"What."

"You stopped talking mid-sentence. Your mouth was open for about ten seconds. I was starting to worry you were having a stroke."

"I'm fine."

"You're staring."

"I'm not staring."

"You're literally not blinking."

Satoru dragged his eyes back to Suguru with visible effort, like pulling a magnet off a refrigerator. His expression was carefully neutral, which on him meant slightly confused and slightly defensive.

"I was just... looking at the door. The door is interesting. Architecturally."

Suguru followed the path Satoru's eyes had been locked on and saw nothing but students filing in and a plain wooden door. He looked back at Satoru.

"You're an idiot," Suguru said mildly, returning to his notes.

Satoru opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. His eyes drifted back to where they'd sat down—three rows ahead, slightly to the left, near the window—and stayed there for the rest of the lecture.

He didn't hear a single word the professor said.

Not one.

And Satoru never missed lecture content. He prided himself on it. He could recite entire PowerPoint slides from memory after a single class. But that day, the only thing his brain recorded was the shape of their shoulders, the way they tapped their pen against their notebook, and the exact moment they tucked a strand of hair behind their ear.

He went home that night and told himself it was nothing. A momentary glitch. A weird brain hiccup caused by sleep deprivation and too much caffeine. He'd felt strangely about strangers before. It passed. It always passed.

He sat at his desk—three monitors glowing in the dark of his dorm room, mechanical keyboard waiting, a half-finished Python script open on the center screen—and told himself it would pass.

It didn't pass.

---

WEEK ONE.

He learned their schedule by accident.

That's what he told himself. By accident. He happened to be in the same hallway at the same time. He happened to notice them turning left toward the science building at 10:15 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He happened to be sitting in the campus café at the exact time they walked past the window on Wednesday afternoons. He happened to leave the technology lab at the precise moment they were crossing the quad.

Coincidences. Layout errors in the universe's scheduling algorithm. Nothing intentional.

By Wednesday, he knew their major, their year, and their department.

By Thursday, he knew which dorm building they lived in.

By Friday, he knew which floor.

"I saw you outside Whitman Hall today," Suguru said casually, not looking up from his textbook. They were studying in the library—or rather, Suguru was studying and Satoru was pretending to study while actually scrolling through nothing on his phone. "That's not anywhere near your class schedule."

"I was taking the scenic route."

"Whitman Hall is in the opposite direction from everything you've ever needed to be."

"Maybe I wanted to experience a different part of campus. I'm expanding my horizons, Suguru. Personal growth."

Suguru looked at him over the top of his book. His dark eyes were calm and knowing and absolutely unreadable.

"Okay," he said simply, and went back to reading.

Satoru's knee bounced under the table for the next twenty minutes.

---

WEEK TWO.

The internet was a beautiful, terrible thing, and Satoru Gojo knew its architecture the way most people knew their own bedroom.

He started with their name. Just their name. That was harmless. Everyone Googled people. That was normal human behavior. He Googled their name, found their social media accounts, and told himself he was just scrolling for a minute.

A minute turned into two hours.

He found their Instagram first. Then their Twitter. Then their old Tumblr from high school that they'd probably forgotten existed but was still publicly accessible. Then their Pinterest, their Goodreads, their Letterboxd, their Spotify—god, their Spotify. He spent an entire evening listening to their public playlists in order, from most recent to oldest, mapping their emotional history through song choices like a forensic audio analyst.

He learned their favorite color (it changed seasonally, which he found fascinating), their comfort food, the names of their pets growing up, the specific phobia they'd mentioned once in a deleted tweet he'd pulled from a cached archive. He found their family—mother, father, siblings, extended relatives—through a combination of tagged photos, public records, and one embarrassingly detailed Facebook album from 2017 that hadn't been set to private.

He knew their mother's maiden name. He knew their older sibling's university. He knew the street they grew up on, the elementary school they attended, and the name of their childhood best friend who they'd had a falling out with in ninth grade over something that seemed to involve a group project and unequal effort.

He absorbed all of this like a sponge soaking up gasoline—quietly, completely, and dangerously.

"It's just research," he muttered to himself at 2 AM, six tabs open on his left monitor, their face in a photo on his right monitor, a half-empty energy drink balanced precariously on a stack of computer science textbooks. "Everyone does background research on people they find interesting. It's called being thorough. It's called—"

He stopped.

He was talking to an empty room.

He stared at their photo—the one from their Instagram, a candid shot someone else had taken of them laughing at something off-camera, sunlight catching the side of their face—and felt something tighten in his chest that he didn't have a name for and didn't want to name.

He saved the photo.

Then he created a folder.

Then he created subfolders.

By the end of the night, he had a structured, alphabetically organized digital archive that would have impressed an intelligence agency and horrified any sane person.

---

WEEK THREE.

Laundry day was Thursday. Their laundry day was Thursday. He knew this because he'd memorized their schedule by now—had it color-coded in a private calendar app that no one would ever see, each entry marked with a small star emoji that he refused to examine the psychological significance of.

He was doing his own laundry. Legitimately. He genuinely needed clean clothes. That was his cover story and he was committed to it.

He saw their laundry basket sitting unattended in the laundry room of their dorm building—a building he technically had no reason to be in, except that the university's laundry system was shared across residential blocks and anyone could technically use any laundry room on campus. It was a policy loophole. A beautiful, convenient, institutional policy loophole.

He stood next to the washing machine they'd loaded. It hummed. Their clothes tumbled behind the glass in soapy water, ordinary and domestic and completely unremarkable.

He glanced at the door.

He glanced back at the machine.

His hand moved before his brain finished calculating the risk.

He pulled the machine open mid-cycle, water sloshing, and reached in. His fingers closed around something soft and fabric and utterly, horrifyingly personal. He stuffed it into his hoodie pocket with the practiced efficiency of someone who had thought about this exact motion far too many times to still be uncertain about it.

He closed the machine. He walked out. He didn't run. Running would look suspicious. He walked at a normal, casual, I-am-just-a-tall-white-haired-guy-doing-laundry pace across the quad and back to his own dorm, closed the door, locked it, and stood in the middle of his room with his heart hammering against his ribs like it was trying to escape.

He pulled the fabric from his pocket.

Underwear. Their underwear.

He stared at it.

"Oh god," he whispered.

He pressed it to his face and breathed in and the world narrowed to a single point of sensation and he hated himself and he didn't stop.

---

WEEK FOUR.

The shrine started small. He didn't call it a shrine. He called it "the shelf." It was a shelf above his desk, previously occupied by anime figures and a mechanical keyboard he'd built and broken and rebuilt three times.

He moved the figures to a different shelf.

He placed their underwear on the shelf first, folded neatly, centered, like a relic in a display case.

Then a pen. Their pen. The one they'd dropped in the hallway outside their Wednesday class. He'd picked it up and they'd already been gone and he'd told himself he'd return it and he never did.

Then a receipt from the campus café, timestamped and crinkled, listing the exact drink they ordered, which he now had memorized and could recite from memory like a prayer.

Then printouts. Photos he'd screen-captured from their social media, printed on glossy paper at the library's printer at odd hours so no one would see. He arranged them carefully—stepped, overlapping, curated. He chose the ones where they looked the most like themselves. Not posed. Not performed. The ones where they seemed unguarded.

He stepped back and looked at the shelf and felt a complicated mixture of shame and satisfaction and something that might have been devotion but was definitely not healthy.

"Okay," he said to his empty room, to his multiple monitors, to his LED lights glowing soft blue in the dark. "Okay. This is... this is a lot. This is a lot. I know this is a lot."

He didn't take anything down.

---

WEEK FIVE.

The notes began.

He told himself they were harmless. Friendly. Casual little messages from a secret admirer, which was a phrase he hated but couldn't stop thinking about.

The first one was simple, written on a square of pale yellow paper, folded once, slipped under their dorm door at 11:47 PM when the hallway was empty.

"You looked nice today."

Anonymous. Harmless. The kind of thing anyone could receive and think, oh, how sweet. A secret admirer. How charming. How ordinary.

The second one came two days later, slipped under the same door at a slightly later hour.

"That color looks really good on you. The one you wore on Tuesday. You should wear it more often."

Still sweet. Still cute. But there was a specificity to it now. An awareness. Tuesday. A specific color. A specific day.

He knew it was crossing something. He felt the boundary like a physical wall, and he leaned against it gently, testing its give.

The third note was longer.

"I noticed you changed your phone case. The clear one with the stickers. I liked the cat sticker. The one in the corner. I also noticed you always sit in the third row, second seat from the left, near the window, in 3B. I know because I sit behind you. You probably don't know I exist, and that's fine. I just wanted you to know that someone is paying attention."

He folded it carefully, twice, and slid it under their door at 1:03 AM and walked back to his dorm with his heart in his throat and his hands shaking and a strange, electric thrill running through every nerve in his body that he couldn't suppress and didn't want to.

The fourth note:

"Your Spotify playlist updated at 2 AM last night. The new song at the top of your Recently Played—I listened to it on repeat for three hours. It made me think about what your voice sounds like when you're falling asleep. I wonder if you talk in your sleep. I wonder a lot of things about you."

The fifth:

"I know your middle name. I know your mother's name. I know the name of the street you grew up on. I know what you ordered at the café last Thursday. I know what you were wearing. I know you slept at 11:42 PM because your Spotify stopped playing at 11:42 PM. I know you got up at 7:15 because it started again. I know everything I need to know. I just don't know what your hand feels like yet."

The sixth:

"I have something of yours. You don't know I have it. You'd be angry if you knew I had it. You'd be scared. But I keep it close and it smells like you and that's enough for now."

---

NOW.

Lecture Hall 3B. Monday morning. 9:00 AM sharp.

Satoru sits in the back row. Always the back row. Far left seat, against the wall, near the power outlet he'd claimed as his personal territory since first year. His laptop is open. His glasses are on. His hoodie is two sizes too large and his hair is messy and he looks exactly like every other day—tired, brilliant, and completely unremarkable.

Three rows ahead, slightly to the left, near the window, they sit.

They're talking to their friends. Laughing. He can hear the sound of their voice—not the words, just the tone, just the rise and fall of it—and his stomach tightens. He watches the way they lean forward when they're amused, the way their hand moves when they're explaining something, the way their head tilts when they're listening.

He's memorized all of it.

His laptop screen displays the usual spread—terminal windows, code editors, a textbook PDF he's pretending to read. But behind the active windows, behind the academic façade, a script is running. Quiet. Efficient. A small, elegant piece of code he wrote at 4 AM last night, tested three times, refined until it was perfect.

It's a proximity exploit. A vulnerability in the campus Wi-Fi's device pairing protocol that the university's IT department hasn't patched yet because they don't know it exists yet because Satoru found it first and hasn't told anyone.

Their phone is connected to the campus network.

His laptop is connected to the campus network.

Distance: approximately twelve meters. Signal strength: strong.

His script pings their device. Handshake. Authentication bypass. A small, invisible door opening in the architecture of their phone's security that they will never see or know about.

He has access now.

He can see their notifications in real time. Their messages. Their search history. Their photos. Everything on their device, mirrored in a read-only stream to a small, unmarked window on his second monitor that he keeps minimized behind a Stack Overflow tab.

He types something into his terminal. The script responds instantly—clean, fast, efficient. A directory listing of their recent activity. Their latest messages scrolling in plain text on his screen.

He watches the data populate. Their digital life, laid bare. Intimate. Unfiltered.

He glances up from his screen.

They're still laughing with their friends. Relaxed. Unaware. Beautiful in the most ordinary, devastating way.

He looks back down at his laptop. Adjusts his glasses. Types a command. A new notification appears on their phone screen—a message preview they haven't seen yet, sitting at the top of their lock screen, waiting.

It reads:

"You laughed just now. I like that laugh. I like it a lot."

He watches their face.

He waits to see the moment they see it.