Previous Chronologically: Rhythm 11 / Moment 17
Word Count: 2,425
Denki had never cared much for long-winded lectures, especially ones that had nothing but a person up front with a droning voice and were all too often made worse by the shitty powerpoint with the font size far too small to be read from literally any distance other than two inches from the computer screen it was written on. So when the Rose Parade Parents' Dinner turned out to be mostly just that, Denki did what he'd been meaning to do for quite a while now, actually: hit up Kirishima so that they could abscond together to chat about their lives.
"So, my dude, what did you want to talk about?" Kirishima asked him as they crashed down together on some benches right outside the cafeteria where the Parents' Dinner-Turned-Lecture was happening.
Denki sighed, propped his legs up on the seat of another bench opposite them. "Jirou," he said, letting the name out with a puff of breath that condensed into a little, white cloud before his eyes.
Kirishima didn't respond immediately, allowing the both of them to take the moment to take in the night. The winter had been a cold one so far, with almost every morning having at least a little drizzle to it (although they were lucky enough to not have any water falling out of the sky at them at that particular moment), so sitting alone together in the dim, yellow light of the cafeteria really allowed for the chill to sink in.
"Like, what about her?" Kirishima asked after a spell, and it occurred to Denki that the long pause probably wasn't just for dramatic effect (which is what he would have had it for).
"Oh," said Denki, a little flustered now that he realized he'd kept his friend waiting. "So you know how I kinda pissed her off last week?"
"Last week?" Kirishima scrunched his eyebrows together, racking his brain for a second before his entire face and neck turned a bright, burning scarlet. "Uhh…"
"Dude, maybe we should talk about your thing first," Denki said, raising an eyebrow. "You said you had a thing to talk about, right? So what's up?"
"Uhm." Kirishima faked a cough and looked away, down a dark, empty hall. There was a long, long pause during which Denki held his breath from excitement. "Katsuki kissed me."
Denki wasn't expecting to be the one with the eyeballs popping out this conversation, considering he'd been the one who initiated it, but there he was, staring at Kirishima with his eyeballs popping out of his skull in surprise.
"Oh!" he said. (He had a fleeting, joking thought about how differently he'd said 'oh' just now compared to about fifteen seconds ago.)
"Yeah," agreed Kirishima.
"Yeah," said Denki in a slightly deeper voice than what he usually used.
"Yeah!"
"Yeah!"
(This went on for nearly a minute, with both boys vigorously nodding their heads at each other.)
"So! I'm pretty sure I fucked up last week!" Denki blurted out, although he still maintained the lighthearted, aggressively-ignoring-the-point tone and mood. "I think Jirou's avoiding me now!"
"Oh? That's rough, buddy!" Kirishima said, continuing the conversation style and even adding to it by pointing at Denki with a finger gun. "You wanna tell me more, bro?"
"Remember how I called her over to play Careless Whisper for her after class on minimum day?" Denki asked, the cheerful façade starting to slip (though credit where it was due: he still tried). "I decided to wait until the next day for her to calm down enough for me to apologize, but ever since then, it feels like she's been running away every time I try to approach her." He sighed miserably, the mood well and truly killed by now. "God, fuck my life, man."
Kirishima whistled.
Denki leant back, resting his elbows on a table right behind him, staring up at nothing in particular. "You know what's weird, dude?"
"What?"
"I think this is the longest I've ever liked someone."
Kirishima whistled. "Really, dude? Three to six months?"
"I do not control the rate at which I meet pretty people, my dude." Denki sighed again, trying to get rid of a nasty, little black hole of anxiety that had been eating away at him for the past week. He bit his bottom lip, thinking about Jirou.
(It had been good, so, so good for a while at the start.)
"Kirishima?" he said, voice cracking.
"Yeah?"
"I think she likes someone else."
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"You… wanna talk about it?" Kirishima asked, carefully shifting around to face Denki better.
"Tell me about you and Baku-bro first," Denki mumbled. "I need to feel good for a second first."
Kirishima laughed nervously, and Denki saw his ears starting to turn red. "I don't know if I can deliver on that, bro, to be honest."
Denki picked at the hem of his shirt. There was a thread sticking out that he wanted to pull on, but he also knew that doing that would cause more problems than would be worth the split second of joy it would spark.
Kirishima let out a sigh that was somewhere between resigned and some sort of yearning. "I don't wanna say that I took advantage of him or anything, since it wasn't really like that at all. But, I feel bad about it anyway because I was definitely being selfish about it."
"Uhhh, so what exactly happened, dude?" Denki asked, about three percent unsure of whether he wanted to hear more or not.
The redhead (not the best word for him at the time, though— the other boy needed to redye his hair soon, what with his black roots starting to show again beneath faded orangey-red) leaned back, staring at the ceiling of the sky. "I asked him to kiss me," he said. "Why? Well, it was the Valentine's Minimum Day (fuck you, Nezu), and so you know. I saw some couples kissing. And I wanted that, too."
Denki relaxed. "I mean, I don't blame you for that," he said. He got it; he could understand the feeling. I'd definitely do that, too, he thought. "So what are you feeling so bad for?"
Kirishima blew out a long breath, and for all of a minute, Denki was mesmerized by the thin, white streak that came from his mouth. "Because it wasn't real. It wasn't because he wanted to, because he liked me. It was because we have an image to maintain. Because I fucking lied to him because I'm a spineless piece of shit."
Denki reached out and linked his arm with Kirishima's, just like how Mina always did with them. He didn't say anything, just leaned his head against Kirishima's shoulder.
"We're going to break up in June," Kirishima continued, his voice dull, almost robotic. "'Cause it's that or we keep going until next year, after Rose Parade is done and we don't run the risk of having people from the other schools questioning everything."
More of just the sound of their breathing intermingling with the low, perpetual electric hum of the lights.
"I don't want this to end without something changing," Kirishima said, quiet. A little unsteady. "I'm scared, man."
Denki didn't ask for specifics. That wastoo many cans of worms for the moment, man. So he crossed his legs and patted Kiri's arm. He said, "Me too, man." Quietly, just as his friend had done.
Another pause. Just two bros, sitting on a cafeteria bench, way less than five feet apart because they were kinda gay, dude.
Denki decided that it was time to bring the attention back to himself, to keep Kiri from wallowing too much. "I don't know what I'd do if Jirou rejected me," he said honestly, his heart tightening in his chest at just the thought.
"That's kind of dramatic, bro," Kirishima mumbled.
"Well, tough titties, man, because I'm a dramatic bitch," Denki lazily replied, shifting his head around on Kirishima's shoulder, trying to get a bit more comfortable.
"Touché."
"I don't know how to describe it," Denki said, still shifting around, which in turn made Kirishima start wiggling next to him. "Like, you've seen me in action before. If it's got a pulse and it breathes, I'm gonna try asking it out. Getting rejected was just normal Tuesday business for the last two years."
"When we go to college, I'm gonna tell people you're my man-whore best friend."
"I'm your best friend? Also, isn't the word for man-whore gigolo?"
"I don't know."
Denki sighed, that dialogue tree apparently reaching its end point, which now forced him to return to his main point. Which he wanted to talk about (obviously, he wanted to talk about it, or else he wouldn't have called Kiri out for a dramatic heart-to-heart between bitches like this), but, like. (He was also kind of a weenie.) He'd rather just keep cracking jokes about himself and the shitty hole he'd dug himself into.
"Ahh…" he breathed. He let his head slide off Kirishima's shoulder, joining him in looking upwards. "It hurts."
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Crickets joined in with the electric buzz of the lights, the muffled drone of the Rose Parade speaker, and the quiet, raggedy half-laughs of two dumb, teen boys to make the night's noises into a shitty song.
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Denki shivered. Despite all the cuddling, it was still getting pretty cold outside. Besides, it was clear from what vague mumblings they could hear through the brick wall separating them from the cafeteria that the main event was coming to a close.
"Let's go inside," he said, rubbing his numb cheeks. It was so cold out, it felt like there was dew condensing on him or some shit.
Kirishima sniffled, but stood up and shook his arms out. "Yeah, let's go!" he said, though his enthusiasm rang hollow.
Denki cracked his back, deciding against calling his best friend out on his tone. Instead, he linked his arm with Kiri's again and started dragging him back into the cafeteria.
"La, la, la, la-la~" They clumsily skipped their way over to the back doors, arm-in-arm and singing as badly as they could, just to make themselves laugh again. They opened the doors— the warm, stuffy air hitting their faces full force and making it hard to breathe for but half a second— and squeezed their way back into the packed cafeteria (Denki poking his tongue out at Bakugou and mouthing, "Got your man~" when he caught the blond boy's eye).
He wasn't too sure what was going on anyway. Like, yeah, the guy up front (was that the superintendent? No, it couldn't be— he heard the superintendent was a woman; he just knew jack shit about admin) was droning on about something, but unfortunately for him, Denki had perfected his tuning-out-men-with-white-hair-and-droning-voices skills long before the start of freshman year. All he could tell was that there were two dudes he vaguely recognized as being the KetsuKetsu drum majors, as well as, uh, hmm.
(He pretended he couldn't see the tiny punk with the dead eyes and purple hair up there, too— there were just too many people blocking his view, you know?)
"What's going on?" he asked Kirishima, whispering as quietly as he could while still being heard in the setting they were given.
"Fuck if I know," Kirishima replied at a normal volume. Which, in comparison to the ambient noise levels, might as well have been a whisper had it been anyone except Kirishima, whose normal speech landed somewhere between a bellow and a shout by normal people scales.
Denki elbowed the redhead, and together, the two of them sheepishly waved off the stunning barrage of disapproving looks sent their way by an array of nearby parents.
"They're announcing who's going to be leading the triband for the Rose Parade, by the way," a familiar voice said from behind, causing Denki to jump, like, three feet into the air from surprise.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Sero," Kirishima whispered. "Just rise up on a platform from the depths of Hell next time; you'd certainly scare me less."
Next to Sero, Mina suppressed a cackle.
"Anyway, guys, shut up!" Sero said. "We're gonna miss—"
A round of cheers and applause came from the audience in the middle of his sentence, a sure sign that they had indeed missed the announcement. Denki grinned sheepishly at Sero, who was giving the rest of them an "I told you so" kind of look, for all of a tenth of a second before throwing his gaze at the stage, his eyes automatically searching for—
Jirou.
He recognized the panic flashing in her eyes, though neither of them looked away. Vaguely, he heard the man up front with the microphone say more words that probably meant the meeting was over and they could all go home now. Though, he only knew it because in the blink of an eye, his parents had swept him up, and he was already sitting in the back seat, staring out the window at the dimly lit roads, without even the thought of walking up to Jirou given the chance to enter his mind.
Denki blinked at his reflection in the car window, just barely registering that the Green Day in his head was not coming from the car speakers.
Is she okay? he wondered, tracing the outline of his phone's on button with his thumbnail. He chewed the inside of his cheek for a minute before finally turning it on.
Chargebolt:
[9:22] | hey dude so i hear ur gonna b leading teh rose parade
[9:22] | hows that going for u
[9:22] | how u feelin abt it
Almost immediately, he saw the little Earphone Jack is typing… text show up at the bottom of his screen, but after almost a solid minute (maybe more) of typing on Jirou's end, it vanished without a reply. Denki waited, of course. He was a dumbass in love, after all, like all the pining nineteenth century maidens perpetually awaiting love letters before him.
It never came.
author's note xviii. first things first, let's get smth out of the way: the boys were crying outside towards the end of their talk. or, well, kind of afterwards. like, definitely after kaminari's "it hurts". that felt like such an anime moment actually, but i liked it. i felt very evil writing that. anyway obvs the crying wasn't loud or anything, and kaminari didn't rlly want to admit that they were crying, hence why you can just pass this off as an interpretation. bc it is! if you don't see it that way, then death of the author hehehe.
i considered titling this after "brave" by sara bareilles but when i started writing it and looking at my chapter outline i was like "oh no no no oh heart is PERfect." bc it's just like, "heart, oh heart, stop making a fool of me" and it just has this kind of... i guess, "you fucked up and now your heart is aching" kind of feel to it.
i wonder, would anyone notice if i took a mysteriously long break to work on the tour arc before returning? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
thank you for reading, follow me on tumblr (a-piece-of-shipping-trash), leave a review, and stay safe out there
Next Chronologically: Rhythm 26 / Moment 27