Rate & Review my Saiteru Fanfic
The following text below is chapter 1 of my fanfiction for the ship saiteru! the idea behind the plot is reluctant superhero (spiderman) saiki k x popular girl kokomi teruhashi whose presence causes reality to generate disasters around her BUT saiki is stuck in a time loop and teruhashi is the only constant around him. I'm still stuck on how to move the story forward and I feel like its too rushed because I want it to be a slowburn fic and I feel like it sounds very ai generated asw.
I would really appreciate some feedback on how to improve my writing. I have it published on ao3. My username is @/c1aoxiao. Thank you
I am the world’s unhappiest man who has had everything snatched away since the moment of my birth.
"Offu" Teruhashi sighed under her breath, tilting her head just enough for the classroom window’s sunlight to catch her eyelashes in that precise, practiced way. Three boys at the back immediately choked on their lunches.
A normal reaction.
Teruhashi Kokomi is the prettiest—no, the most perfect girl in our school. Possibly the country. Possibly the world, if you ask her. That reaction was only the bare minimum expected of any normal human; except if you're an all knowing, all powerful psychic who is tired of cleaning up after a concerning amount of disasters.
Saiki was busy calculating the trajectory of the ceiling fan that would, in approximately forty two seconds, detach from the ceiling of the café teruhashi planned to visit after school. Again.
The ceiling fan incident was easy enough to prevent.
A minor psychic nudge to the ceiling bolt, a quick rearrangement of Teruhashi's planned route via a "coincidental" run in with a classmate needing help carrying books. Simple routine. Boring, even.
Then the vending machine tipped over.
Saiki caught the vending machine mid fall with telekinesis before it could crush the first year student who’d been leaning against it.
A student who, he noted with resignation, happened to be staring slack jawed at Teruhashi as she walked by. The machine righted itself with a soft *clunk*, its contents mysteriously undisturbed. The first year blinked, then shrugged and bought a soda. Crisis averted.
Teruhashi, oblivious, hummed a christmas carol under her breath; a habit she’d picked up after hearing one playing in a department store last december and deciding it suited her "angelic" image.
The carol meant she was in a good mood.
which also, according to saiki, statistically correlated with a 68% increase in improbable disasters.
The christmas carol wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the way Teruhashi's footsteps slowed near the school gates, her head tilting just so, a telltale sign she’d decided today was the day to "accidentally" drop her handkerchief near him. Saiki sighed internally.
He can already see the chain reaction: handkerchief drops, he (hypothetically) picks it up, a truck carrying a shipment of poorly secured christmas trees swerves to avoid a cat that doesn’t exist and suddenly he’s rewriting the entire afternoon to prevent a vehicular disaster involving tinsel and shattered glass.
He teleported the handkerchief back into her pocket before it could leave her grip.
The vending machine incident should have been the last straw. Saiki had rerouted three separate buses, psychically nudged an old lady’s shopping cart away from an oncoming bicycle, and rearranged the trajectory of a rogue soccer ball, all before lunch.
Yet when Teruhashi's shoe strap "miraculously" snapped as she passed him in the hallway, sending her stumbling directly into his path, he caught her elbow without thinking. The entire student body gasped.
Bad move. Now she was smiling at him.
That particular smile, the one where her lips pressed together just slightly, as if she’d bitten into something tart, was new. Saiki recognized it instantly because he’d heard the thought that preceded it. He caught me. On purpose?
The vending machine incident should have been the last straw, but Saiki found himself cataloging another anomaly: Teruhashi's fingertips lingered half a second longer than necessary when she steadied herself against his arm.
He heard it before she did, the collective mental screech of forty seven students calculating the exact angle her body leaned toward his.
"Thank you, Saiki" she said, voice pitched just below the range of human hearing. A trick that shouldn't have worked on anyone except, of course, the one person who could hear a moth's wingbeat from three blocks away. Her breath smelled like strawberry milk and the spearmint gum she chewed when nervous.
Bad he thought. Not the proximity, he'd long since mapped the exact distance required to avoid triggering her fanbase; but the way his own pulse spiked when she didn't immediately pull away.
A physiological response to stress, obviously.
The strawberry milk scent lingered in the air between them like an accusation. Saiki counted the seconds, three, four, before Teruhashi finally stepped back, her uniform sleeve brushing his wrist with static electricity.
Forty seven mental voices crescendoed into a symphony of outrage. Someone’s pencil snapped.
Good grief.
He adjusted his glasses, a habit developed solely to avoid eye contact in situations like this.
Except Teruhashi wasn’t looking at his eyes. Her gaze dropped to his forearm, where her fingernails had left crescent indents in the fabric.
"Ah-" she reached out, then froze. A first in Saiki’s observational records: Teruhashi Kokomi, flawless by design, had flinched.
The crescent marks on his sleeve were still there. Saiki stared at them during lunch, absently tracing the faint creases with his thumb. Fabric didn’t usually hold impressions like that, not unless someone gripped hard enough to strain the threads. Teruhashi's nails weren’t even that sharp.
He’d know; he’d catalogued every millimeter of her manicures since second year. (Purely for observational purposes. Obviously.)
Across the courtyard, Teruhashi laughed at something Kuboyasu said, the sound like wind chimes in a storm. Six boys at the next table spontaneously developed nosebleeds.
Saiki frowned internally. Her shoulders were tense.
Teruhashi’s fingers flexed at her sides, her usual poised grace replaced by something Saiki couldn’t immediately categorize. The tension in her shoulders wasn’t just fatigue, it was anticipation, the kind that let the smell of anticipation linger around her and the kind that didn't make it past a certain psychic.
He’d seen her nervous before, but never like this.
The realization hit him with the force of a misplaced vending machine: she was waiting for him to react. To the crescents on his sleeve, to the way her breath had stuttered when she’d pulled away.
It was absurd. Teruhashi Kokomi didn’t wait for anyone’s approval. Yet here she was, stealing glances at his forearm.
Saiki adjusted his glasses, feigning disinterest. But his mind cycled through possibilities with uncharacteristic hesitation. Has she noticed?
The way his heartbeat had synced with hers for those three seconds? The way he’d memorized the exact shade of pink her nails turned in sunlight?
Good grief. He was overthinking. Again.
The bell rang, and Saiki didn’t move. Teruhashi lingered at her desk, smoothing her skirt twice, three times before standing.
A statistical anomaly.
Her usual post class ritual involved precisely five seconds of gathering her things, then a graceful exit timed to coincide with the crowd’s dispersal.
Today, she fumbled with her pencil case. Today, her gaze flickered toward the window where he sat.
Saiki pretended not to notice. He also pretended not to notice the way her fingers trembled around her textbook’s spine or how her breath hitched when Nendou barreled past her desk.
These were things he shouldn’t have catalogued. These were things that, if Teruhashi knew he’d noticed, would complicate everything.
The classroom buzzed with the usual post lunch laziness, but Saiki’s focus narrowed to a single anomaly: Teruhashi’s pencil case, left abandoned on her desk. Not just forgotten but placed there with deliberate precision. A trap.
He sighed. Of course she’d leave it behind today, when the cleaning committee (three of her most passionate admirers) would find it. The ensuing chaos would involve tears, a dramatic reunion and inevitably, someone falling out a window (don’t ask.)
Saiki grabbed the case before the bell rang. Not because he cared. Because recalculating the trajectory of a falling body was tedious.
The case was warm.
He almost dropped it.
Teruhashi’s pencil case shouldn’t be warm. It shouldn’t smell faintly of vanilla chapstick and the bergamot hand cream she used between classes. It definitely shouldn’t have a tiny scuff on the corner from when she’d accidentally knocked it off her desk last Tuesday. He’d noticed that too, apparently.
He shoved it into his bag with telekinesis, ignoring the way the zipper caught on a loose thread.
Saiki.
He didn’t turn around.
"You took my-" Teruhashi’s voice cut off abruptly when he silently held out the case. Her fingertips brushed his wrist as she took it.
The air smelled like ozone before a storm. Not literally because Saiki would’ve sensed an actual weather shift but the charged silence between them might as well have been thunder.
Teruhashi opened her mouth, closed it. The pencil case clicked softly when her grip tightened. He wondered, absently, if she realized how much force it took to leave marks on fabric.
"Thanks," The word landed somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. Not the practiced, melodic one she used on everyone else, this one sounded almost…relieved. Saiki nodded once.
He didn’t ask why she’d left it behind on purpose. She didn’t ask how he’d known where to find her.
(He’d always known.)
(She’d always known he would.)
The pencil case was still warm between them. Teruhashi flexed her fingers around it, and Saiki catalogued the exact way her thumb traced the scuffed corner
right where he’d gripped it.
The bell had rung three minutes ago. "Class," he echoed through her mind instead, because it was easier than acknowledging the way her pulse jumped at his voice.
“Right.”
But neither of them moved.
The classroom clock ticked loudly, each second stretching tight between them like a wire about to snap. Teruhashi's fingers twitched around the pencil case, not enough for anyone else to notice, but Saiki.
The first anomaly: she hadn't immediately thanked him with her usual rehearsed grace. The second: her pulse, thrumming at the base of her throat where the top button of her uniform had come undone. (A third anomaly: Teruhashi Kokomi didn't have undone buttons.) Saiki adjusted his glasses, but the motion was aborted halfway when Teruhashi's breath hitched.
"Your lenses….. they're smudged."
A lie. His glasses were maintained by microscopic telekinetic adjustments every 0.3 seconds. But Teruhashi was already reaching up, fingers hovering just millimeters from the frame.
Saiki had approximately 0.7 seconds to react before contact.
Saiki had 0.7 seconds to react before Teruhashi's fingers made contact with his glasses; which was approximately 0.6 seconds longer than he needed to teleport halfway across the school.
Yet his feet remained rooted to the floor.
A statistical impossibility.
A personal failure.
Teruhashi's thumb brushed the left lens. The smudge she'd invented materialized under her touch, a single fingerprint blooming across the glass like frost on a winter window.
The classroom air thickened with the scent of her bergamot hand cream and something sharper beneath it; nervous sweat, the kind that only manifested when she thought no one was watching. Her pulse thundered in her fingertips where they trembled against the frame.
"Better” she whispered, but her voice cracked on the second syllable. An imperfection. Another first.
Somewhere in the distance, a chair scraped against the floor. Reality snapped back into focus with the screech of a familiar voice not too far off.