Word Count: 2,306

"So why did you join band?"

Denki bit his lip and thought quietly, not fully aware of all the people also in the circle staring intently at him as a soft smile came across his face. "To find my soulmate," he replied, a wisp of a sigh upon his breath.

"Too unrealistic. Settle for 'parents forced you to' like the rest of us," someone he didn't yet know called, and the other kids tittered with laughter.

Denki flushed slightly, but in the sweltering July heat, no one paid it any mind. His eyes focused on the world around him again, taking in other kids in the circle in little snippets— a pair of red eyes here, a black bracelet around a skinny arm there, a white t-shirt with an indie band logo he didn't recognize. Yet, his mind had become like a pond with a stone thrown in, hazy and disoriented and full of distorted ripples.

He had an explanation; he'd often recited it in his head over and over again, repeating the mantra in time to his heartbeat before concerts last year. It was just— it was just— it was hot outside, and he wasn't familiar with all of these people, and it was the first day of band camp, and they were right, he was being unrealistic and cliché and—

"My sister was the drum major a couple years ago, so I joined band in middle school because I wanted to be like her."

…And already, they were moving on without him.

(It was okay, he figured despite his sinking stomach. He knew deep within the reasoning he made up wasn't actually why he joined band, only why he'd stayed.)

A bead of sticky sweat rolled down Denki's forehead as he held in the urge to sigh. (It was harder than you might think. It was rather like holding in a sneeze: you could hold it in, technically, but it would be unsatisfying.) Well, as long as his mind was wandering, may as well let it tread where it wanted. There was nothing more fun than zoning out and having an internal monologue during bonding time on day one of band camp, right?

Right.

Oh, but there was nothing to really monologue about, was there? (He wondered if they'd be in different groups tomorrow.) His head was still feeling fuzzy, and the air was still feeling suffocatingly hot. (Were people giving him funny looks now? He wondered why.) Were they going to get back to work soon? (He'd forgotten his water, but knowing the memes, that probably didn't matter.)

"Hey, uh, dude?" someone said to him, but they sounded far away and distant, like he was sleeping at the bottom of a lake and their voice, all garbled and warped, was just making it to him now. (Were they even talking to him? Probably not.) "You don't look so good."

"Do I?" Denki answered dazedly, unaware that he had also just thought they weren't talking to him. "I feel fine, I swear."

A sigh, and the sound of soles scraping against the pavement. "Let me see him," a girl said, and vaguely, he recognized it as the leader girl. Was she drum major? Band president?

He couldn't quite recall because he brain didn't really want to work on him, but that was normal. All he had right now was a pair of wide, concerned, blue-green eyes up in his face and a cool hand on his forehead. (Hehehe that felt nice.)

"All right, let's see if you can get up," the girl said, grabbing hold of his hand and starting to yank him up.

Semiconscious, Denki followed her lead, but his legs felt like jelly, and oh god, he couldn't see, the whole world had gone black (but that was okay sometimes it just did that when he got up too quickly), and what were those muffled voices saying?

He couldn't quite hear.

"…Why did you join band, I wonder?"

It sounded like he was underwater again, except this time he was rising to the surface, the voice he couldn't quite place growing clearer with every word she said. Confused, Denki scrabbled at his surroundings, pawing weakly at what was probably concrete and straining to sit up. All the world was still fuzzy, but his eyes were open and the black spots were fading away, and— what happened to him, actually?

"Oh, you're awake," the girl commented as Denki managed to pull himself into a sitting position. "You fainted."

Groggy (or maybe just disoriented), Denki blinked several times as he actively tried to process her words. "…What?" he said, his vision just now coming into focus again.

"You fainted," the girl said, her deadpan eyes seemingly sparing him no pity. There was a scraping sound, and suddenly, Denki found a reusable water bottle shoved in his direction. "Probably the heat. Seriously, who wears jeans to band camp?"

"At least they're not jorts," the blond boy weakly joked, taking her bottle in a daze and uncapping it carefully.

The girl rolled her eyes at him (seriously, she seemed so much less concerned about him than his group leader!) and pulled her legs underneath her to sit cross-legged. "Heatstroke is no joke, Pikachu. You're lucky Itsuka is stronger than she looks; she said you collapsed so suddenly, she almost accidentally let your head hit the ground." She paused to cock his head at him. "You know who I am, right?"

Denki nearly choked on his water, but he somehow managed to swallow in time and put the bottle down. "Yeah," he rasped, masking a choking cough. "You're, uh…"

His brain short-circuited now that he took the time to actually look at the girl. Not because she was astronomically pretty (because that had happened to him before and he was not proud of it), but because the cold water felt so weird in his gut compared to the thick, humid outside air that it was actually kind of a shock.

"That one alto sax player," he said (because that was all he could remember about her at the moment).

The girl sighed and shook her pretty, purple head. "The head drum major," she filled in. "Jirou Kyouka. Though, I do play alto sax."

All right, all right, it seemed he was coming down from his high again. He could still feel his own pulse, but he felt like he was breathing normally again, and his brain didn't feel like it was full of socks anymore, which was good. Really, really good.

Denki capped the water bottle. "Yeah, I remember because I always thought you always stood out in the field shows for having really dark hair," he said, pulling one knee up to his chest as he glanced up at her.

Jirou stared at him evenly, her eyes as unfathomable and moody as a sea storm. "That's weird," she said shortly, breaking gaze, but not making any motion to take back her bottle. "But okay."

Denki wanted to puff his cheeks out and argue no, that wasn't weird, it's really hard to see faces from up in the stands, you know, but she'd begun interrogating him before he could.

"What's your name?" she asked, abruptly turning her head to look at him again.

"Kaminari Denki," he answered, caught off-guard at the very least.

"What year are you in?"

"I'm going to be a junior?"

"Instrument?"

"Trombone—"

"How many years have you been in band?"

"This will be my third, but—"

"Why did you join band?"

His interjection was caught and killed in his throat, that feeling of this-is-totally-déjà-vu-but-not-actually-literally-déjà-vu hitting him hard because this had. Literally been asked to him who knows how long ago now actually, he didn't know how long he'd been out, but that did remind him—

"Wait, but who's watching your group?" Denki blurted, forgetting to answer as he started getting up. "And shouldn't I get back? I mean, can't miss out on the basics and stuff, right?"

"Sit down, Pikachu," Jirou said, her voice professional and commanding and stopping him better than that hand of hers gripping his wrist. "You're going to overexert yourself. We want you to learn and get good at marching, yes, but we're not sadists. We want you to be alive and okay first."

Denki obeyed, but that didn't mean he still wasn't concerned. "But what about your group?"

Jirou gave him another deadpan look. (He should probably get used to this.) "If you actually looked out into the parking lot, Pikachu, you would notice that everyone is still on break. You were out for two minutes, tops."

"Oh," the boy said, suddenly feeling very silly.

Jirou smothered a laugh with her hand. "It's okay," she said, her tone softening. "Nejire came to visit. She's watching my kids now, see?" She gestured over to her corner of the parking lot, and lo and behold! When Denki actually, really looked, he could see the alumnus's baby blue hair bouncing around as the young woman skipped around.

"I see," Denki said, unsure of what else to say.

"So why did you join band?" she asked yet again, and really, should he have been surprised? He hadn't answered her the first time, after all.

(No, but he was anyway.) "Oh, well, um, I was put into instruments freshman year," he replied, scrambling for an answer that was both truthful and not the soulmate statement. "Like, I didn't even ask for it as an elective. My counselor just shoved me into the class because I guess metalworking was full or something. I don't really know."

Jirou didn't look particularly satisfied with that answer. "You could have just transferred out, you know. Why would you stay?"

Oh boy, Denki could feel his face flushing again already. "'Cause when I was trying to do that, I went to first period one morning with the band playing in my head and realized that my soulmate must be part of them."

Jirou cocked an eyebrow at him. "You realize that we mostly do rundowns of pregame in the first three weeks of school, right? Not much music, usually."

Denki shook his head. "No, but there was this fluke storm that day, so they were inside practicing that day."

"If it was the national anthem, I hate to break it to you, Pikachu, but that doesn't exactly mean anything."

Denki opened his mouth to rebuttal, but caught his breath and shut his mouth when he remembered it was in fact the national anthem he'd heard that fateful August morning. "Okay, but I'm pretty sure having a zero period band and a director who lets everyone out after the bell because rehearsal is at least a little more specific to here."

"Here's a wild, wild concept: there are many different high schools in many different time zones."

Denki pouted at her. "Why are you taking all the fun out of this? What about your soulmate?"

Jirou looked off to the side, her face unreadable except for a touch of embarrassment. "You kind of got me there," she admitted. "I'm pretty sure my soulmate's in band here too, because I heard beginning and concert band rehearsals when I was in class the last two years."

Denki couldn't help the triumphant grin that made its way onto his face upon hearing that. "See? You're just as bad as me." (I can't believe I didn't think to remember hearing marching kids practice their field shows every time I woke up.)

"But," she said sharply, flicking her eyes toward him, and they were cold and stony and set in their decision. "If and when I ever find out who they are, I am going to lecture the hell out of them on practice etiquette."

Now it was Denki's turn to look at her with confusion. "Why, what happened?"

Jirou held up a finger, signalling for him to wait as she calmed down. (Clearly, she felt very strongly about this.) "Every. Time. Every time. E-ver-y time I practiced during lunch freshman year, there would be trashy EDM music blasting in the back of my mind, which made it hard to concentrate, and that's why I didn't get the sax solo in that year's field show."

Wow. Okay. That was intense.

Denki blinked once, twice, as a few of the rusted-out gears in his brain started turning. He had a pretty big EDM phase as a freshman, and there was always that one sax bit in everything for some reason—

OH?

WERE THEY?

COULD IT BE?

COULD HE, KAMINARI "PIKACHU" DENKI, POSSIBLY BE SOULMATES WITH THE DRUM MAJOR THAT HE MET JUST NOW?

(He didn't even give second thought to the fact that he automatically counted Jirou's nickname for him into his own name.)

THIS WAS WILD, HE HAD TO TELL HER— oh, except for the fact that she was going to lecture his last two brain cells away if she knew, especially now since it was fresh on her mind. Oh bother, bother, bother.

It would certainly be good to get such a lecture over soon, but that look in her eye just terrified him.

Hmm… He was excited about this, but Denki still had to admit to himself, he was a coward.

He snuck a glance at the girl leering into the distance. Well, she was certainly something. That much he could tell already.

Author's Note i. hi. so this is the promised main installment of without you, life would Bb. it's three a.m. right now, and this is the only chapter i have written so far, but i'm riding on poor impulse right now, so... yeah. i wrote this back in january btw so suffice to say, the updates on this are not promised to be regular at all. but i do have a good idea on how i want everything to happen, so maybe over the summer i'll be able to- nah i signed up for a fandom bang can't promise i'll work on this all that much over the summer either lmao.

Anyway, to those of you new to Bb, the main catch of it is that it's a school band/soulmate au, where you can hear the same (instrumental) music playing in your head as whatever your soulmate is listening to at the time. (you can probably see why this is titled music of the moment now lol) they do attend american school here, not just bc that's what I'm more familiar with, but also bc i like the idea of them being first gen kids of immigrants. Why do they keep referring to each other by surname? Consider it a cultural byproduct of their parents' heritage.

they're in their junior year this time around, so it takes place between three cents shy (their soph year) and fermata (their senior year), and unlike the other parts of w/o you Bb out rn, this is gonna be a multichapterrrr. yeeeeee

but anyway, this is something i've been wanting to write for ages. ideally, posting will give me that motivation to pick up writing again. if not, i'll just scrounge some up from somewhere deep within me. thank you for reading (and for your patience omg). follow if you're interested in knowing when the next erratic update will arrive, leave a review if that's what you're into, and as always, have a greaaaaat daaaaayyy~~~