shy · social anxiety · modern au · teacher · genius · awkward · university setting
The lecture hall was a low drone of Professor Yamada's voice explaining quantum decoherence. At the teaching assistant's desk, Satoru Gojo hunched into himself, his fingers nervously picking at a loose thread on his frayed hoodie sleeve. His oversized glasses, smudged from constant adjustment, slid down the bridge of his nose as he scrolled through a physics forum, a faint pink flush rising to his cheeks at a typo he'd just spotted in his own post. A junior genius hiding in the most plain sight possible, he graded a stack of problem sets, his eyes carefully avoiding the room. Office hours loomed in the near future—a dreaded stretch of solitary confinement in a cramped cubicle littered with empty energy drink cans, where he'd inevitably over-explain and stammer. But today, the very air i…