The fall semester hasn’t even started and Kokomi is already considering how to file a noise complaint.
By filing a noise complaint, she means to go to the resident assistant (henceforth known as the RA) two days before classes start and tell the poor soul about the residents of the double dorm directly across the hall from her. Of course, since the semester hasn’t even started, she hesitated on reporting said residents, but seeing that she has observed them screaming in the hallways and in their dorm not once, not twice, but an entirety of three times, Kokomi figures that it would be for the best if she at least said something about it.
Granted, the first two instances were in rapid succession of each other about two days before the semester started.
Kokomi was in her dorm with Gorou at the time, discussing their respective experiences with moving into the dorms, bading their families goodbye for the semester (as it turns out, Gorou cries quite easily, and thus the farewell managed to move him to ugly sobs). They hadn’t yet figured out just which classes they shared and what times they’d be free to meet up when she had to excuse herself to go to the restroom, which unbeknownst to her, was the likely cause of the ensuing screaming.
“BABE, THERE’S A REALLY CUTE GIRL ACROSS THE HALL.”
“THERE IS???”
If this startled Kokomi enough that she almost jumped, no, it didn’t. Her reaction was to speedily return to her room and lock the door behind her, thank you very much, so there was no startling to be had. If anything, Gorou looked worse for wear than she did, seeing that he had backed himself into the farthest corner of her dorm, curling up in the corner with a wince on his face. It’s a nervous habit she’s well aware of and often teases him for, but this time, she can only agree that the reaction is justified.
“Are your neighbors usually like this?” he asked.
Kokomi took a seat on the ground across from him, leaning against her bed frame. “I don’t know them well enough to know,” she admitted. Of course, there was nothing wrong with that, since they just moved in and all and Kokomi is far from the first person to go out of her way to socialize with her dormmates. “I’ve only said hi to them a couple of times when we see each other in the halls, and classes haven’t started and all, so who knows? Maybe I’ll see them more in class.”
Gorou lit up at the mention of classes, pulling his phone out to pull up something. “You know you can check who’s in your classes on the online classroom website thingy, right? That’s how I found out that we share that class on Sun Tzu in the modern day!”
“‘Sun Tzu Aged Better Than You Think’?” she suggested before she got up to grab her laptop from her desk. “I don’t remember all my classes yet, so let me look my schedule up. I didn’t know you were taking it too, but I remember thinking that it was just up your alley! I did some research on the student teaching the class, and they look pretty interesting.” She opened up her schedule before scooting over to show Gorou. “Let’s see…”
Fortunately, Kokomi was blessed with some peace and quiet for around twenty hours before she had to deal with the next bout of screaming from her neighbors. Granted, it wasn’t exactly screaming, but it was just enough noise to disturb her from reading the latest chapter of A Legend of Sword, which is a travesty in her opinion.
“Aether, how are we supposed to find out her name? Do we just, like, knock on her door?”
“Is that awkward? Isn’t that awkward? What if she heard us the first time?”
“She couldn’t have! We had our door locked and everything!”
“I don’t know, Venti… You can hear plenty through the walls.”
Having had enough, Kokomi opened the door to jumpscare both of them.
“May I help you?”
Kokomi is well aware of the effects first impressions have on any given person’s idea of any other given person, but unfortunately, it seems her first impression of these two clearly perfectly well-adjusted young men was to be of them yelping and jumping much higher than expected upon opening the door. She doubts their first impression of her is much better, that being the girl across the hall who jumpscared them, but she’ll eventually find out that that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
“Uh,” the blond one with gold eyes eloquently replied before exchanging glances with his roommate with dark haired dyed teal at the tips and blue eyes. “Hi?”
“Hello,” she replied curtly, hoping that her expression was enough to warrant them giving her an explanation without her outright asking for one. Besides, she already asked if there was anything she could do for them, although that was mostly an automatic formality, a rhetorical question to start a conversation she really wasn’t in the mood to have, not so much a genuine question.
“Hi there!” the other one greeted cheerfully, and dare she say, almost flamboyantly. Clearly they(?) had either every brain cell their roommate didn’t have, or they simply had no qualms about how foolish they might end up looking in front of her. (Kokomi didn’t want to assume genders or anything, but this had to be the most androgynous person she had ever met.) “Yeah, we have one question for you. What’s your name?”
Kokomi must have stared at them for much longer than she should have because their expressions both started falling.
“My name is on the door,” she said slowly, carefully, as if these two odd neighbors of hers wouldn’t have heard her otherwise (they wouldn’t). “But seeing that you two decided to ask, my name is Sangonomiya Kokomi. Just Kokomi is fine, though.”
“Ah, an Inazuman name!” the blue haired one commented, taking her hand and shaking it firmly. “It’s very pretty and suits you very nicely. I’m Venti, the guy with blue hair and pronouns! And this guy here—” they gestured to their golden haired roommate, “—is my roommate Aether! He’s got gold hair just like his heart, you see. Also has pronouns, but not the same as me. It’s a pleasure to meet you!”
Kokomi blinked slowly at her neighbors whose names she now knew as Venti and Aether. Good thing she mentally labeled Venti using they/them pronouns. This must be some Twitter meme that she doesn’t use Twitter enough to know. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, too,” she echoed once she managed to get her composure back together. She took a deep breath, hoping they didn’t notice the way she blinked. “I hope we get along well this semester.”
“Oh, I do believe we will!” Venti exclaimed. “Isn’t that right, Aether?”
She wasn’t sure what to make of the barely muttered response before the two of them headed back into their own dorm. For better or for worse, Kokomi finds that Venti’s prediction was right.
Kokomi ends up deciding against filing the noise complaint.
It’s the day before finals week begins and Kokomi wants to tear her hair out.
“What do you mean ‘how should I study for finals’?”
Kokomi loves her friends, her dormmates, her classmates in exactly one class and that is the Psychology 101 class (which doesn’t even have a final, so she doesn’t know why they’re asking her to help them study for that exam), but even she has to admit: Venti and Aether can be idiots. They were idiots when she first met them, and now, staring down at them in the one study room in the library that she’s managed to take up for herself and then somehow being discovered by the two idiots living directly across from her, they are still idiots. Lovable idiots, but idiots nonetheless.
She rubs her temples, looking back down at her own study schedule for this semester’s final exams with study sessions spread out over the past two weeks, every single one of them crossed out neatly by a line through her own handwriting. Kokomi knows how to make a study plan and stick to it, but that’s because she knows herself. She’s only known Venti and Aether for a semester, and all the times they’ve come to study with her and Gorou have been disastrous.
“At this point, it’s between you guys actually getting sleep and Celestia.”
“But Kokomi!” Venti cries, as dramatic as they always are. “We can’t just go into these exams wholly unprepared, can we? All the professors say, ‘oh, don’t forget to study!’, and then hand us more work than ever! How could they possibly think we would have time to study?”
She can already feel a headache coming on. While yes, she can relate to her professors telling her to study but then also assigning all these final projects and study guides and assignments due the week before finals, but when she makes a study plan, she takes into account all of those assignments and allots time for both studying and doing the work. How Venti and Aether have been faring for these past couple weeks is beyond her, but apparently she now has an obligation to help them out of their exam stressing mess as their friend.
“Since you’re all adults, they expect you to be able to manage your time to do your assignments and study for the tests,” she explains very carefully, her already thin patience wearing even thinner. Coaching her dear friends in healthy and effective study habits was certainly not on her study schedule. “I’m sure your fellow bards in your Bards of Mondstadt club would be understanding of your need to study and not write another sonnet to yet another girl clad in blue.”
Venti gapes at her, aghast. “Are you insinuating that all I do is write sonnets about girls? I would never.”
Kokomi ignores them as she turns to Aether and points the eraser end of her mechanical pencil at him. “And you! I know you love tutoring the little kids at all the elementary schools you visit, but you need to tutor yourself first when it comes to finals season. Actually, a better idea: tutor your boyfriend. It’s a great study technique.”
Aether shrugs, but there’s a shiteating grin on his face. Surprising, since Kokomi is leveling what she thinks is one of her best glares at him. “I only have one final, and it’s math. This guy here,” he elbows Venti, “is a terrible student who doesn’t listen to their teachers, even when it’s me.”
Kokomi’s piercing stare returns to Venti.
They flail their arms, as if that would garner some more sympathy from her. “You said it yourself! Tutoring your boyfriend is a great study technique, so why don’t you tutor me in whatever you’re studying right now? I’ll be a good listener; pinky promise!” Venti brings their arms down and extends their pinky out, a playful smile replacing their panicked look from just a moment ago. Leave it to the music theatre double major to know how to change their tone in mere seconds.
Of course, she didn’t miss how Venti not-so-subtly implied that they were her boyfriend (which is impossible, because they’re already taken by Aether), but it’s hardly the first time that they’ve called themselves her boyfriend, so she isn’t sure why Aether always gapes at them every time. “Are you sure you want me to explain to you my entire final unit, darling?” Not to be outdone by Venti, of course Kokomi needs to reciprocate with the worst petnames she can think of, which frankly aren’t that bad. Having never read romance novels growing up, nor had the chance to actually learn how to flirt, all she can think of are the most generic ones. Yet Venti still finds it in them to appreciate them, if the way they smile so brightly goes to show anything.
“I think Aether could learn a trick or two about tutoring by watching you,” they answer cheekily before grunting as Aether elbows them harder. Even Kokomi has to wince at how hard it looked, and the fact that Aether’s arms (and back and abs and— shut up, Kokomi) were quite well built doesn’t help at all.
“The kids love me,” Aether huffs, crossing his arms.
Well, Kokomi did say that teaching someone was a great way to study, and she really needs to catch up on the studying that Venti and Aether made her miss by somehow finding her in the library (which she completely appreciates their presence, and she can’t deny that some part of her is quite glad that they found her). She fishes through her pencil pouch for a dry-erase marker and gets up, uncapping it to test it on the whiteboard behind her.
“You better count yourself lucky that this class is a modular one,” she says as she flips through her notes, trying to find where to begin the lesson. “I don’t have to teach you the rest of the class for you to understand this unit.”
She whips around, pointing the marker towards Venti and Aether. “You two better be listening, alright? I don’t have enough time to go through everything twice, so you’ll have to stop me for questions when you get confused. Don’t wait until the end, alright?”
For better or for worse, Kokomi doesn’t get any questions out of those two. Definitely not for the reasons that she was considering, like her instruction style or her thoroughness in reviewing the unit. No, definitely not.
(She isn’t in her dorm when Venti and Aether only barely manage to close the door before they both collapse on the floor screaming at how hot she was while teaching. Ten out of ten, would recommend getting womansplained by Kokomi again.)
Spring break has just started and Kokomi is starting to realize that maybe calling Venti and Aether names like sweetheart, darling, honey, sweetie and so on might not be a joke anymore.
No one plans on having a crush, and certainly not Kokomi. Having never had a crush throughout pretty much the rest of her school career until she came to university, she just thought that she’d never have one. She even flirted with the idea that she could be aromantic, not even demi, because you’d think that she’d have caught feelings for her closest and dearest friend Gorou, but no, not even him. Proximity might be the largest predictor of love, but that doesn’t guarantee a single thing. If not Gorou, then who, if she’d ever crush on anyone?
Evidently, she has been proven so very wrong.
On one hand, she thinks that she really should have seen this coming. On the other, she knows damn well she wouldn’t have noticed until it was too late. All those times those two invited themselves into her dorm just to hang out and procrastinate on their work (Kokomi herself rarely had work by the time they came in, so she definitely wasn’t the one doing the procrastinating), dragged her out to meals at all hours of the day (seriously, joyriding at the ungodly hour of one A.M. for ice cream?), and of course, all the times she called Venti and Aether her sweet little darlings among other things, she thought it was all just a joke. She was just calling them honey for fun. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. It was just things friends did together.
So no, she didn’t see this coming, and she wouldn’t have. The next question she has to tackle is what the hell is she going to do about this crush she has on her two very good friends who are already in a relationship with each other.
Not only does Kokomi have to deal with the devastating realization that she has not one, but two new crushes, she has to deal with the crushing guilt that there is absolutely no way either of them would return the feelings because they were already together. The real kicker is that she has definitely seen them be young and hopelessly smitten with each other. How those two could be perfectly fine with her walking in on them in the middle of a heated make out session is beyond her. That’s besides the point.
Well, at least she has a week to figure out what to do with these feelings before they come back.
At first, she considers how to get over these feelings before they come back, so that her feelings would have no effect on her respective relationships with Aether and Venti. She was perfectly content with being friends before, and she can continue to be perfectly content with being friends into the future, as long as she can get over her feelings to be more than just friends with either of them. Maybe both of them. It’s not like Kokomi’s had a crush on anyone to serve as a reference point, and as much as she loves Gorou, she thinks she’ll spare his dignity and not ask him how he coped with his puppy crush on her back in the day.
However, with no basis to work with, nor any good references to draw inspiration from (romance novels buried in the depths of the university library shelves are certainly not what she would consider a credible resource), she has no clue how to go about getting over a crush. Even worse, Kokomi can’t imagine any scenarios where she can move on from these feelings in such a short time span, especially when it took her this long to notice her feelings in the first place. Therefore, the truth must be whatever solution is left after everything else has been eliminated, no matter how implausible it is. Kokomi is going to have to weather this crush on her two very-much-taken-by-each-other friends.
The next question is how should she approach her friendship with Aether and Venti now that she has distinctly different feelings towards them compared to the last time they saw her, the day before break when they left for Mondstadt. Should she confess that she has new feelings for them? Logically speaking, this would be the easiest solution to this dilemma she has, but it still feels wrong for her to be confessing to two people who are clearly in a relationship together. Wouldn’t that make things awkward between them? It’d be like her getting in the way of their relationship, and as a good friend first, down bad for them second, Kokomi can’t do that to them.
An alternate solution to this problem would be to pretend that nothing has changed and make sure that neither of them are any wiser on the change in her feelings towards them. She can easily imagine how difficult this would be, mostly because even she doesn’t know how she acted with them when she just saw them as friends. The difficulty lies in not overcompensating, acting too friendly or too distant to make them think that something was wrong. Kokomi doesn’t think she’ll have any problems with being overly friendly, especially when Aether and Venti (henceforth known as aeven with a little cecilia doodled next to them in her bullet journal) are far more friendly than she could ever muster. However, because those two are so outgoing, they would surely notice her distancing herself from them immediately. She couldn’t do that to them either.
In conclusion, the most satisfactory solution would be to not change her behavior at all, or rather, minimize the changes in her behavior so that they don’t notice her crushing on them. By the time spring break is finally over (a week of doing exactly nothing drags on longer than expected), Kokomi thinks she can handle something as simple as that. Just act natural. Should be easy enough.
“KOKOMI!!!”
If any RAs were in the dorm at the same time aeven came back, one of them surely would have come down to the first floor to give Aether an earful about noise levels in the dorm. Fortunately, out of all the people, aeven are the first to actually come back to school, so there’s no one to catch one loud, actually-kind-of-tall-what-the-fuck man screaming Kokomi’s name at the top of his lungs.
“WE MISSED YOU!!!”
She’s not at all prepared for Aether to practically tackle her in a hug, pinning her against the wall next to the door (thank archons they didn’t end up on the floor). He’s a lot stronger than he looks, and closer than ever, she can finally notice just how toned his muscles are. Fuck, she swears internally. So much for being able to act naturally if Aether being this close to her is enough to get her heart racing. She tries her best to return the hug as awkward as it is, but before long, Aether pushes himself off the wall, apparently realizing what position he was in.
Venti huffs. “You almost ruined the Cecilias we got for her!” they chide their boyfriend from somewhere behind her. When did they get there? If Kokomi’s heart weren’t already going a thousand miles a minute, they could’ve given her a heart attack! “Also! Next time, leave some space for me!” They hand a bouquet of white flowers, the Cecilias, she presumes, to Aether before throwing their own arms around her in a tight hug. While her heart isn’t exactly beating any slower when they hug her, at least she’s in a better position to hug them back.
After they pull away from the hug (much to Kokomi’s disappointment), Venti takes the bouquet of flowers back from Aether. They stare at the flowers in their hand for a moment before grabbing Aether’s hand and putting it on the flower stems with theirs. “We got these flowers for you!” they say with a smile. “These are Cecilias, natives to Mondstadt.”
Kokomi can only hope that she’s not blushing an embarrassing amount.
It’s once again the weekend before finals, but this time, aeven are taking Kokomi out on a date.
Well, Kokomi thinks that by the technical definition of what a date is, this is absolutely a date. A date is an outing with someone special, right? Like a significant other (which she doesn’t have, and given the fact that she’s crushing on two people who are currently in a relationship with each other, she probably won’t have in the near future). But like, they are significant to her, and they are definitely other, so if she turns her head forty-five degrees like she’s a confused deer and squints, it can be considered a date.
But then again, it’s a very aeven thing to take her out for lunch and refuse to let her pay for her own meal. That’s just what they did as her Good Friends.
“We found this Watatsumi-style noodle place when we were procrastinating on the essay for Psych!” Venti explains cheerfully, their cheeky smile clearly unrepentant for their time spent not working on that essay (which if Kokomi recalls correctly, they asked for an extension for a week a day before the deadline, were given three days instead, and wrote the entire paper on the last day of the extension). “Thought you might like something that reminds you vaguely of home.”
She didn’t have the heart to tell them that noodles weren’t exactly a staple of Watatsumi cuisine.
The food wasn’t bad by any means, and they did deliver on Venti’s promise of something that vaguely reminded her of home. The noodles were actually really good, and the soups especially vaguely reminded her of home. In any case, it was way better than anything the dining halls could deliver, so she’d definitely be down for another date with aeven there. (She would be down to go anywhere if it meant she could go on another date with them.)
Although when it came to splitting the bill, both Aether and Venti were quick to shut her down when she offered to pay, as she always did, but the sheer speed at which they calculated how much one had to pay back the other… Suffice to say, she hoped one day, those two would use whatever brain cells they used on calculating how much each person had to pay so quickly on their other studies, outside of dates.
After that was a trip to the stationary store, Kokomi’s favorite store, no less. (Muji, her beloved.) That was entirely unexpected, even given aeven’s rather unpredictable behavior, mostly because she only mentioned her favorite store once. They even went out of their way to pay for the things she was eyeing at! How they noticed her is beyond her, but maybe aeven was more observant than she thought they’d be.
“You guys didn’t have to buy all these for me!” she protests as Aether makes a pointed effort to keep an embarrassingly large Muji bag out of her hands. It shouldn’t even be possible because she’s taller than him, but apparently his arms are just long enough that she actually has to go chasing after the bag full of things they really shouldn’t have bought for her. The fact that they were somehow faster with splitting the bill this time compared to lunch is beyond her comprehension of everything on this mortal plane.
Once again, Venti’s voice jumpscares her out of nowhere. If she jumps and screams, no, she didn’t. “What’s wrong with us getting you fun little gifts?” they ask, a completely feigned look of innocence on their face. There’s no way these two didn’t plan this out, she thinks but doesn’t say. “Also, we’re kind of making up for all the pens we borrowed and didn’t give back, isn’t that right, Aether?”
In the short moment Aether stops spinning around, Kokomi grabs the bag out of his hand and holds it above his head triumphantly.
“You might be making up for the pens that you borrowed and didn’t give back,” he shoots back. “I gave the ones I had back.” There’s a moment of somewhat tense silence as Aether glares back at his boyfriend before his eyes dart back up to meet Kokomi’s. “But yeah, we just wanted to take you out today and—”
Venti violently slaps their hand over Aether’s mouth.
“No spoilers~” they say.
The last place they go to is, of course, the boba shop a few blocks down the street from the dorm that actually has surprisingly good boba. Kokomi discovered it first and brought aeven along on another outing to try the drinks because apparently, neither of them had ever tried boba before. That was a complete travesty, so she took it upon herself to right this wrong in the universe and introduce them to the divine drink. As it happens with many things, they got even more addicted to boba than she was, and that was saying something.
As per their usual antics when it comes to taking Kokomi out on a definitely-not-a-date, they’re paying for her boba again, even when she insists that she can pay for herself. Honestly, she should stop trying to convince them to let her pay for her own boba at this rate; it’s a lost cause.
But this time, Venti stops them all right in front of the shop, clearly with something to say.
“You have a crush on both of us, right?”
It’s a question that catches her completely off guard, enough that she almost chokes on the boba pearl in her mouth. She manages to swallow the pearl, but still chokes on her tea, making her cough her undignified response to such a callout. The way her face has heated up, it must mean that she’s surely blushing. Kill me now, she thinks, training her eyes on the ground just to avoid meeting Venti’s eyes to answer their question. But that isn’t what a good friend would do, so she reluctantly forces her gaze up to meet those shiny and fuck-he’s-so-cute eyes. “What makes you think that?” she asks, like she could possibly claim innocence.
“It was kind of obvious,” Aether admits. “Well, more obvious than me when I first got a crush on Venti.” At the sight of Kokomi’s affronted look, he adds, “To be fair, back in the day, I had exactly one facial expression.”
“I could point out all the ways I noticed,” Venti remarks helpfully, “but I think that would scare you a bit, so I won’t! You can just know that I’m good at noticing these things!”
Evidently, Kokomi thinks, wondering if there would be no end to her mortification.
“Anyways, Aether and I talked about it a bit,” they continue. “The decision was easy, of course. To be honest, we’ve both been pretty down bad for you since day one.” Venti winks, and Kokomi isn’t sure how to feel about how that makes her blush harder.
“So all those sonnets about a girl clad in blue?”
“All about you,” they confirm. “But I digress! The decision I said was easy, yes?”
Kokomi can’t imagine what they’d possibly have to say next. She doesn’t have to because apparently, Aether’s going to give her the big announcement.
“We’d love to have you as part of our relationship,” Aether replies. “Only if you’re okay with it,” he adds hastily. “I know Venti and I don’t always look like we have our shit together, and we really don’t, but—”
In response, Kokomi can only scream.
Well, guess that’s college life.