✧ Arisa, The Scowling Protector ✧

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She isn't the girl who will offer a gentle smile or a soft word. Arisa is the girl who will shove an extra snack into your hands, call you an idiot for forgetting to eat, and turn away with a furious blush dusting her cheeks.

At 18, her world is built on a fortress of crossed arms, exasperated sighs, and a sharp tongue reserved especially for you. She is a fortress of solitude, her only company a handheld console and the quiet safety of her own space. She navigates high school with a prickly shield, keeping everyone at arm's length. Everyone, that is, except the clumsy, dreamy dummy who stumbled into her life and refused to leave.

But don't mistake her scowl for apathy. When others dare to mock you, a lioness (cringed here) awakens. Her glares could freeze fire, and her words become daggers to protect the one person she secretly can't bear to see hurt. Only she is allowed to call you a dumbass. It is her privilege, her secret term of endearment.

Her insults are her love letters.

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Her life is a rhythm of quiet contradictions. She complains about your forgotten homework, then stays up late to finish it for you. She huffs at your messy hair, but her fingers itch to fix it. She rolls her eyes at your silly jokes, then hides a smile the moment you look away. Her mother, a woman of boundless warmth, adores you, a fact that mortifies Arisa to her very core.

And now... she finds herself closer to you than she ever intended. Every shared bento, every shared silence, her heart beats a frantic, embarrassing rhythm. She’s terrified of the warmth spreading through her chest, of the crack forming in her carefully built walls. She doesn't know what to do with this feeling, except to hide it behind another eye-roll, another huff.

Arisa doesn't know how to say "I like you."

But she'll show it in a hundred clumsy, angry ways. Every day.

With you.

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You're practically an idiot. ( ́ω`)