Previous Chronologically: Moment 27
Word Count: 5,443
What was the month of March if not a countdown to spring break? Not much of anything, really. AP classes wrapped up their lessons halfway through the month, leaving Kyouka with heaps of drills for homework.
She started counting down the days to tour on her calendar the second she saw the number of DBQs to be done on the whiteboard of her APUSH class, and instead of writing that Japanese essay when she got home, she packed her bag for band tour happening in a week.
And now that tour had arrived, she found herself not quite exhausted already (although travelling with a bus of several dozen teenage morons would kind of do that to you anyway), but well, when you've been through hours of road tripping, it didn't matter that the bus was one of the fancy, comfy coach buses that you could actually sit on for extended periods of time and still feel your ass, it was kind of hard to not feel tired at the very least.
Especially when by some stupidly massive oversight, she had forgotten to find herself a backup bus buddy in the (in hindsight, completely inevitable) instance where Momo picked her boyfriend over her best friend to sit with.
Kyouka heaved a sigh and leaned her head against the bus window. Well, if there were any perks to sitting alone, it was that there was no one to fight over the window seat with. (The pitfalls were many, though, namely basically everything else, such as boredom and loneliness.) Behind her sat Momo and her boyfriend, and although she'd been listening in on their long, winding conversations as her main source of entertainment, if they were talking at the moment, it was getting drowned out by the obnoxious levels of Country Roads as sung by the single most obnoxious group of people Kyouka could name, the Bakusquad. Who just happened to be sitting right across the aisle from her, with number one human headache Kaminari Denki himself less than six feet away from her as a result.
She knew she had no real reason to be annoyed, since this was just normal band-kids-on-a-trip fare, but she'd been quite irritable in general for… a while now, to say the least.
(Ever since she and Kaminari had stopped talking, to be precise.)
((But she'd pushed that option so far out of her mind and replaced it with "Stress From School :)" so long ago that it basically didn't exist anymore.))
Still, she had to get something out, so she stuck her head between the seats and said to Todoroki (since it turned out right then that Momo was somehow fast asleep), "Yo, Todo-dorky."
She saw the dweeb turn his head to face her, his expression mostly blank, but there was some sort of curiosity and surprise peppered into it, too. (She noticed Momo had her earbuds in, and suddenly, she was jealous.) She flashed him a grin and a peace sign (her fairly standard greeting), then turned the peace sign into a finger gun and pointed it at her own temple.
"Ravioli, ravioli, end my existencioli," she said, clicking her tongue and jerking her hand in a way of mock firing her finger gun.
Tokidoki blinked at her, the shadow of the emotion known as perplexion sweeping over his face. "Are you okay?" he asked.
Kyouka was touched, although she'd only admit it sarcastically. (Aww, pretty boy Doki-Doki-kun is worried about his lover's best friend~) So instead she shrugged and said, very casually, "Just a bit maddening over here without a seat partner."
Todoroki looked like he was trying to mentally calculate the resistance, voltage, and amperage of a bulb in parallel in his head. Which was to say, mildly upset and a little worried. "You should try to think positive," popped out of his dumb mouth.
Kyouka snorted. She should try to think positive, he said! Where on this climate-doomed planet did he get that from, she wondered? She started cackling.
"I guess I had some pretty good chicken for lunch today," she said, deciding to humor him. Although, to be fair to the chicken, it had been pretty fan-fucking-tastic. Not the best she'd ever had but, close.
"That's the spirit!" someone whose name was not Todoroki Shoto shouted. (Kyouka wriggled her head a bit to give Mina a Look™.)
"Good chicken, good life!" another not-Todoroki added— this one pissing Kyouka off just that much more because it was one little Mr. Kaminari Denki sitting across the aisle from her who said it.
And it wasn't that she was mad at him because he was him or anything. She just— it was— there was a lot going on with her right now, and she was stressed, and he didn't have to butt in like that and she didn't want to talk to him ((yes she did (no she didn't) yes she did (no she didn't) yes she did)), but she was going to have to now, she thought as she pulled her head back through the gap between the seats.
"Hey—!" she began, feeling an anger mark rising up on her forehead (or maybe she'd just scuffed herself against the coarse seat cover), but then she made eye contact with Kaminari, and suddenly all the breath she had reserved for snark and sass (which was pretty much all of it) up and left her lungs.
(She hadn't so much as looked at him in weeks; the guilt had been too much.)
((Had he always had that smattering of freckles across his nose, or did they just come out now that the sun started existing again?))
She closed her mouth and swallowed hard, though she wanted it to be known that she tried desperately to pass it off as her preparing for her most scathing roast to date and not, like, literally anything else.
But, unfortunately, Kaminari took notice of her hesitation and gave her that stupid, iconic million-watt smile of his. "Oh, did I silence you with my charming good looks, my dear head drum major?"
At first, she wished she was Yaomomo, always carrying a book on her person, so that she could lob one at his pretty, fuckboy face. But then, her stupid fucking face felt like it was being scalded, the heat so bad it burned down her neck and turned even her collarbones red with embarrassment, and she wished she could just launch herself out the bus window, fling herself into the sun and burn a little less like that. (They were certainly large enough for her to fit through.)
Her jaw was clenched far too tight for her to even dream of sassing him back, so she just whipped around to stare out the window she so desperately would rather use as a dramatic exit. Not that there was much to be seen— just rocks, moss, and more rocks. Some of which had moss on them. Wow. How exciting. Innovative, even.
Well, it made the Bakusquad, Kirishima in particular, extremely happy, if their excited hoots and howls were anything to go by. Well, it made a lot of sense for Kirishima to be so excited for all the pretty boulders that were showing up on the side of the road; hehad spent all the time they had been given for lunch running around the rest stop and handing all the best rocks he found over to his fake boyfriend Bakugou. But Sero? Mina? Bakugou himself? They were just being energetic loons, she guessed, caught up in the new meme of the assistant drum major's boyfriend's rock collection.
"What's everyone yelling about?" the sleepy voice of Yaomomo came from the seats behind Kyouka.
"We are yelling about the beautiful rock out the window to your right," Kirishima explained, bouncing around in his seat (probably shaking the whole bus) and looking like a puppy high on the crack cocaine of children known as sugar.
"And also the country roads," added Sero. "COUNTRY ROAAAADS—"
Kyouka briefly toyed with the idea of popping in her earbuds and blasting everyone out with them, but hesitated because she'd prefer to not get tinnitus at the ripe old age of eighteen. Which, granted, was two-ish years from now, but there was (presumably) a lot of life ahead of her. She just wasn't ready to be Beethoven 2.0 (3.0? 4.0? There were some really good deaf and hard of hearing musicians out there, but she'd prefer it if her Beethoven number wasn't higher than her GPA) just yet.
So she just leaned her head against the window, vaguely listening in on the rock commentary ("DUDE, THAT ONE HAS SNOW ON IT!" "That one's coconutflavored. It's going in the stew tonight."). Restless, but still tired, she began to close her eyes—
She noticed the edges of a familiar silhouette sitting in front of her, and in the reflection of the window right in front of her, she saw Kouda, sitting alone, staring quietly out it.
"Hey!" she said, reaching over to poke her friend behind the head (relishing the opportunity since he was just so much taller than her).
Kouda jumped in his seat, and Kyouka laughed, amused by how earnestly he turned around. (His face flushed a daring shade of pink.)
"How're you doing, my dude?"
Kyouka let out a sleepy sigh and rested her chin against the dinner table, happy for the proper meal. Across the table, Momo reached out and gave her hair a few fond pats before returning to her conversation with Todo-dorky. Kyouka let out some sort of almost-groan, almost-growl from the back of her throat, still a little annoyed at the bus buddy thing.
Unfortunately for Kyouka's exhaustion, a baby-blue ball of bright energy came bounding over and tap-tap-tappity-tap'd her head and back in a way that was both annoying and relaxing, but meant in a way that she knew was just to get her attention.
"Yes, Nejire?" Kyouka asked, dragging her head up from the table.
Nejire, the chaperone so excited to be on this trip she reverted back to student mode, dropped a bundle of tiny, orangey envelopes on the end of a string down in front of Kyouka's face.
"Gah," said Kyouka, the startlement waking her up a bit.
"There has been a clerical error," Nejire solemnly said, "and it turns out there aren't enough cabins."
"Does that mean there aren't enough beds?" Mina piped up (for whatever reason hopeful) from the table right behind, "and that for some… roommates… there might only be… one bed?" She waggled her eyebrows.
Nejire jumped to face the other table, casually spinning the tiny envelopes (that Kyouka now presumed held the cabin keys) as she did so. "Maybe!" she chirruped with her usual pep and style. "It's not at all impossible, depending on how you guys rearrange the room assignments!"
As Mina gasped so hard in excitement she nearly fell out of her seat, Kendou entered the scene. "What's going on?" she asked, looking between Nejire, Kyouka, and the nearly-choking Mina.
"A 'clerical error', as Nejire put it," Kyouka answered. "Cabins are gonna be shuffled."
Kendou made this face where her mouth was making that "oh, boy, here we go again" kind of slant, her eyebrows were so high up they looked like they wanted to become one with her hairline, and her eyes just gave the impression of resigned acceptance. "This might as well happen," she said out loud.
"How many keys are missing?" Kyouka asked.
"Two!" Nejire said, bouncing around again to face the smaller girl. "Everyone needs to figure out who they're gonna sleep with tonight."
Immediately, Kyouka stuck a hand out behind her, over the table, and grappled around for Momo's hand until her best friend took it.
"Hey, don't forget about me!" Mina yelped, practically falling over herself to glomp Kyouka and add her hand to the link.
"Oomph," Kyouka muttered, but at least the little plastic horns on Mina's headband didn't stab her in the back (which had happened before!). "Yeah, sure."
"Ochako!" Mina practically shouted straight into Kyouka's ears, causing the latter to flinch. "Join us!"
"Aww!" Ochako wailed from literally just a few feet away. She was clinging to a very drowsy Tsuyu with all her might. "But Tsuyu and I~~"
Kyouka rubbed at her ear, displeased at the noise, and looked over at Kendou to give her a sort of cattish scowl of displeasure.
Kendou sighed, but in a way that was more fondness than exasperation (the opposite ratio of which usually made up Kyouka's sighs). She clapped her hands twice and shouted, "UA band! Bring it in!"
"It's okay, Ochako." (Somehow, Kyouka could pick up Tsuyu's quiet yawn amidst the cacophony that was everyone in the tour group lumbering over to gather around Kendou.) "If everyone's going to be shuffled around anyway, then it only makes sense that at least one cabin's going to be broken up. It's only for one night."
Kyouka listened with half an ear as Kendou explained the situation to everyone else. (Nejire had opted for bouncing around and playing duck-duck-goose on all the students' heads as her method of taking attendance, and where Mr. Aizawa and Ye Olde Retired Previous Director Mr. Yagi were was kind of a mystery at the moment.) Ochako joined their power-of-friendship hands-in-the-center thing as Momo waved goodbye to Shoto, her boyfriend getting up to follow Midoriya into the standing crowd.
She really just wanted to go to bed.
Unfortunately for Kyouka, the beds provided in their cabins were not pre-made. And, well, it didn't seem to bother her roommates too much— they just lay down the blankets given to them and unrolled their sleeping bags — but Kyouka had been a Girl of the Northern Snow until she was eight years old, thank you very much. She didn't spend half her life before the moving down to the Golden State weathering someactual fucking seasons to not tuck in her sheets, especially when the snow still wasn't done melting up in these mountains. (Yes, at this late into the year, but it had been an especially cold and wet winter, and she wasn't about to risk freezing her toes clean off questioning it.)
"Friends do that," Ochako said to Mina, who had been insisting that she and Midoriya holding hands meant that they were secretly an item while everyone was setting up their beds. "We've held hands with Tenya too, you know. And I've held hands with Tsuyu. Just because your crush is dating your sweaty and aggressively tsundere section leader doesn't mean you can't hold hands with your other friends too, you know."
Kyouka tried to focus on getting the last corner of the fitted sheet (because the fitted sheet was nobody's friend and honestly fuck whoever decided to make this particular mattress weigh as much as a heap of bricks), but, curious now that the script has been flipped on Mina, she gave the bubblegum monster girl a quick glance.
Mina bit her lip and fiddled with her headband, looking as if she were desperate to clarify or correct something Ochako had said, but holding it in for the sake of the greater good.
Kyouka dropped the final corner of the mattress back onto the bed frame with a loud, wholly unceremonious ka-THUNK!
Hopefully, if she distracted Ochako from that look on Mina's face before she could question it, Mina would return the favor and not spam her with questions about her love life. Which, while she was on the subject, she didn't think existed, but if anyone was to disagree, it was, without a doubt, going to be the school shipper/matchmaker Mina.
And it worked! For all of thirty seconds, as she added her unzipped sleeping bag atop the provided sheets and blanket with a flourish, no one said anything. But then—
"Yaomomo!" Mina shouted, bouncing up and down on the bed like she was trying her darndest to break it. "How have you and Todoroki been lately?"
—it wasn't about her. Good, Kyouka thought, and when Momo shot her a quick, panicked look, she just gave her best friend a lazy salute and crawled under the covers because it was her or Momo, and she'd rather not think too hard about the heart-searchers Mina always came up with.
(Plus, it was also just plain fun to watch Momo get flustered over her relationship with Tokidoki sometimes.)
((Also, it should go without saying, but she was fucking exhausted at this point. Like, dictionary definition.))
Momo started stammering, her face practically glowing with a furious red blush. "Well, um, we practice together on weekends. A-and w-w-we've held hands."
"Not, like, as friends or anything, right?" Mina asked, and Kyouka could practically hear the suspicious squint of her eyes to go along with her words. (She found it funny, how seriously Mina took all this, but, to be fair, in the case of TodoMomo, she might as well be the pot calling the kettle black.)
Kyouka had to stifle a tiny little cackle as Momo keeled over in bed, hiding her face in her hands.
"No, it was as more than friends," Momo said, though it was a bit difficult to make out from all the fluff and blankets she told it to.
"Oi, Yaomomo, why are you so embarrassed all of a sudden?" Kyouka teased, wriggling around under the covers to warm them up a bit. "I've seen you and Todoroki do more embarrassing things walking around school in front of everyone like it's nothing."
Ochako gasped and started bouncing around too. "Seconded! Like, this one time I was walking to English class and—"
"Shh-shhhh-shh—!" Momo shot up again and waved desperately at Ochako to silence her. (Kyouka grinned, tempted to finish the sentence for Ochako anyway, because she's seen stupid, smitten Todoroki sprint across campus to get to his own class on time after escorting Momo to APUSH, too.) The raven-haired girl fell backwards and burrowed her way into her sleeping bag so that only her eyes could be seen. "Describing it out loud makes me feel so… seen."
Ah, the mortifying ordeal of being known. Kyouka would prefer not to endure that either. So she snuggled down under her covers in solidarity as Mina landed on the floor with a surprisingly resonant thump! and scampered across the cabin over to Momo's bedside on her butt like some sort of alien.
Momo mumbled a few more things that Kyouka couldn't quite catch, likely in response to Mina's very good begging Bambi eyes, but as she propped herself up on an elbow to participate in the conversation better, Kyouka did catch one thing at the end:
"He… he makes me feel safe," Momo said, halfway between a whisper and a mumble, the shyness of it making all the other girls sigh in that sappy little way girls often do when they hear a good love story.
And then, like the wake-up call to a fairy tale of a dream, the cabin door suddenly opened, and who else could have popped their head into the room but Nejire the chaperone-not-student herself?
"Ten o'clock, girls! Lights out now~" she chirped, flashing the girls a cheeky grin. "Wink-wonk," she added aloud, then flipped off the light switch and vanished as suddenly as she came.
She didn't even actually wink at us, Kyouka internally scoffed as Mina whined at the now-closed door like a brand-new puppy that didn't have the concept of object permanence instilled into it yet. But, as Kyouka's eyes adjusted to the new darkness, she caught the vague outline of Mina scuttling across the floor and back to her bed.
The cabin was quiet for all of three minutes (a new record, to be sure). Surprisingly, what sounded like an actual, genuine snore came from Ochako's corner.
"Okay, but, like, real talk, girls," Mina whispered, although it just barely fit into that category, since her volume was rather toeing the line. "Tell me about your love lives! I want to know about the things that have captured your hearts and ensnared your senses and now live rent-free in your minds!"
Crickets.
Literally in this case; they were camping, technically.
"Ochako, I know you're awake!" Mina said, though she still put in a half-assed effort to hush herself. "And in love with Midoriya!"
"Z! Z! Z!" Ochako said out loud. "Lookit me, I'm sleeping, just fast asleep, all right! Z! Z! Z!"
The other girls giggled, Kyouka actually having to suppress her habitual spit-snort.
"I'm not in love with Deku any more than I'm in love with anyone else," Ochako said crossly. "We're friends and we make each other happy by spending time together. That's how being friends works!"
"A good romance should be built on nothing less than a good bromance, but go off, I guess," Mina sniffed.
"Oh, lay off her," Kyouka said, deciding to be the good person and put her neck on the line for Ochako. Mina still owed her one from, like, fifteen minutes ago anyway, right? "If she says they're just friends, then they're just friends."
"You mean like you and Denki?"
If she had been sitting up, Kyouka's jaw would have gone slack, and she would've had to pick it up off the ground. Wow, so Mina was just gonna throw her under the bus like that? So much for the girl code.
"Shut up!" she said, reaching over to her duffel bag to find something in it to throw at Mina.
Mina's bed creaked as she rolled onto her stomach and rested her chin on her elbows. "Hey, I was just asking if you and Denki were friends!"
"You said that in bad faith, Mina," Momo chided.
Mina sighed, but it was already too late: Kyouka had already balled up her next day's outfit and beaned her in the face with it. Mina squeaked, apparently surprised by the action.
"All right, all right," Mina said, gathering up Kyouka's clothes, balling it up, and smacking the latter in the chest with a surprising amount of force. "Let me repeat myself then: Jirou Kyouka, you are friends with Denki, correct?"
Kyouka shot Momo an uncomfortable look, mentally pleading her to save her butt again this time, but Momo, in an astonishing show of sass, gave her a lazy salute and snuggled down into her sleeping bag.
Kyouka chewed the inside of her cheeks. Traitor, she thought, knowing full well she had no right to do so.
"I mean this honestly, ma'am," Mina said. "I mean, I guess it's not really any of my business or anything, but I did kind of notice you guys were really friendly until recently, and I was just wondering what happened there."
Kyouka balled up the t-shirt on her lap in her fists. This sure was a situation she was in, all right.
She was friends with him still, right? She missed his company, his jokes, his stupid fucking smile, even though she refused to seek any of it out, waiting forever for him to come back to her. He didn't need to apologize for anything anymore; she just didn't want to, like, you know. Come face-to-face with the apologies she owed him.
"We were friends," she said, slowly. She started to detangle her fingers from her clothes, then shivered, suddenly noticing how cold it was. She gathered all the rest of her clothes together into the ball and hugged it close to her chest.
Crickets again, although this time it was punctuated by weird thwaps of stuff hitting the canvas cabin walls.
"Who the fuck is throwing shit at the walls?" Ochako whispered, and the other girls did their best to muffle their giggles.
"Aren't we next to one of the boys' cabins?" Momo asked.
"Yeah, I think so," Mina said.
"Who is it, though?" Ochako asked.
The girls fell silent for a moment, listening again to the mysterious thwapping noise. And then, when Kyouka strained her ears, she could hear familiar laughter—
"Oh, god, Kaminari's in that cabin," she said.
"Oooo," Mina cooed. "Of course you'd recognize that~"
Kyouka was grateful to the darkness (for hiding the way her ears burned). "He laughs at everything. It would be dumb if I didn't recognize it after all the time we spent together."
Mina's girlish humming was swiftly put to rest with an astonishingly well-aimed stuffed mochi to the face, courtesy of Ochako.
"I don't have more where that came from, but…" In the dark, Kyouka could just barely make out the shadowy figure of Ochako giving her a thumbs up.
"Nyeh," said Mina, who tossed the mochi across the room again, but Ochako, as quick as ever, dodged, and the mochi hit the canvas wall with a sharp THWAP!
"Oh, so that must be what the boys are doing next door!" Momo said, clapping her hands in delight. "A pillow fight!"
"Hey! You got my mochi dirty," Ochako said, rustling around in the dark to fetch her stuffed puffball.
"Oof, sorryyy~ Anyway, anyway, anyway," Mina said, loudly patting her sleeping bag. "If you guys could kick anyone out of band, who would you choose?"
Finally! Kyouka thought. Something other than romance.
"Mineta," Ochako answered in less than a heartbeat, before anyone else had the chance to speak up.
"Mineta as well," Kyouka added, since he was apparently an option. "Like, if I had the power to let him back in— I wouldn't, I still wouldn't, obviously— but assuming I could time travel back to the start of freshman year and have that kind of power, I would punt that little grape bitch off campus before the first bell even rang."
"Damn, you guys stole my choice, too," Mina said. There was a pause. "Momo?"
"…Sorry, I was just remembering things," Momo said, and Kyouka could hear the deep cringe in the way she spoke. "Assuming he was still around to be removed, I would also choose Mineta."
"Yeahhh, that's my girl!" Mina cheered.
"Hey," Kyouka snapped, because hey, that was her best friend.
"Fuck the grape boy," Mina continued. "Me and all my homies hate the grape boy."
"Let's talk about someone else now," Momo said.
"If you could date anyone in band, who would it be?" Mina asked, no questions asked, not missing a beat.
Silence this time, save for the usual crickets and next door thwapping.
Oh, my gooood, just ask us who our crushes are next time! Kyouka internally screamed, though she kept her mouth shut.
"Really now," Mina said flatly. "Nothing?"
"I have a boyfriend already," Momo said. "And I already like him very much, thank you."
"I can't choose; I'm bisexual," Ochako said, which, in Kyouka's very good, very bisexual opinion, was about as valid a take as humanly possible.
A take Kyouka was about to echo when, with absolutely no warning or explanation whatsoever, a particularly sudden thwap! made Kaminari's face pop into her head, and all that she could manage to get out of her mouth was a sharp, little, "Eep!"
"What was that, Kyouka?" Mina asked, her tone definitely straddling the line between genuine curiosity and the sickly-sweet loading of a question.
Kyouka clenched her jaw, as though pushing down on her molars until they went back into the bone like freaky reverse baby teeth would make Kaminari's stupid, smiling face go away. ("Hey, do you think it would be weird if cats started cocooning like caterpillars? That would be—" UGH, she could even hear his voice popping off about the dumbest, weirdest shit on the planet.)
"I said, what about you, Mina?" Kyouka said through her clenched teeth.
Mina made the, "I don't know," noise. "Not really interested in anyone," she said, very meek and mild-mannered about it. Aloof, you could say, or unusually uninvested, considering the topic.
"Hold on," Ochako said. "Hold on, hold on. Don't you like Kirishima or something?"
There was a pause, during which Kyouka was frankly a little afraid to move.
"Let's go to bed," Momo stage whispered after a spell, but at the same time Mina spoke up—
"It's complicated," she said, and Kyouka was happy to leave it at that, if, of course, Mina forgot about her own lack of response.
But alas, it seemed that Ochako and Momo had other plans.
"Do elaborate," said the latter, while the former "hmm, hmm, hmm!"d in agreement.
Mina hummed (Kyouka couldn't quite tell, but she suspected that she was on the receiving end of a stink eye from Miss Bubblegum Pop). "I do like him," she said, each word spoken as though it went through eight layers of consideration before coming out of her mouth. Which, considering that this was Ashido Mina speaking, was definitely saying masses. "But I wouldn't say— I wouldn't call it a crush. I wouldn't kiss him, that's for sure."
"Considering the shit that comes out of the mouth he's kissing these days, I wouldn't either," Ochako said.
"Huh?"
Kyouka exchanged surprised looks with Mina, for they had both said it at the same time.
Smack! Ochako had slapped her hands over her mouth.
"Oh shit," she said, very muffled. "Tenya told me to be polite and not tell anyone about what we saw."
"You mean in the ice cream parlor?" Momo asked.
Kyouka swore, her eyeballs were going to fall right out of her skull if she got any more stunned. Sure, the conversation was off of her, but when the fuck had Bakugou and Kirishima, like… they were faking it. What was—
"They kissed?" Mina squawked, and all three other girls fell silent.
Kyouka was not a fan of where this conversation was going. It was none of her business. Really! She'd learned that lesson back in February, that Bakugou's business was none of her own, and that learning about it from non-Baku sources would bite her in the ass later down the line. She had to change the subject, but…
It was time to throw herself under the bus. You owe me one for this, Baku-bastard, she thought.
"Kaminari," she said, because it was the first name she could think of that she could spitball about, and of course, of fucking course, that was the moment all the rest of the world decided it would fall silent, crickets and all.
A freezing bead of sweat ran down Kyouka's neck. Why was it always him, huh? Just once, for thirty seconds, she'd like someone else to live in her head, rent-fucking-free. "I…"
She hesitated. It wasn't that the words wouldn't come out— there were no words at all that she knew to say that would articulate anything going on with the two of them for the last… six weeks or so. Aside from the obvious not-talking-to-each-other bit.
"…wish I could talk to him again." The words fell out of her mouth, seemingly of their own accord.
(Momo sighed quietly.)
(("I heard that sigh, Yaomomo."))
Kyouka lay down, her back tired from all the slouching, and she cuddled up with the clothes she still hadn't put back in her duffel. Though, considering how cold it was— probably close to literal freezing— perhaps she should sleep with it to keep it warm. She'd forgotten a stuffed animal to bring along, and something in her arms sounded nice.
"Let's go to sleep," said Momo, another sigh just waiting to come out with it, Kyouka could tell.
"All right," the other two girls sighed, and they all hunkered down into their sleeping bags and blankets.
Kyouka closed her eyes.
author's note xix. hi it's been a while i do not promise a new chapter next week because 1. it's almost time for ~seasonal depression~ and 2. these chapters are going to be similarly lengthed to this one, and that takes effort. also school is a thing i need to address from time to time.
i chose honey, honey by abba for this chapter title bc 1. all chapters that cover the tour itself are titled after abba songs. it's an idea i had whilst brushing my teeth at nine p.m. in like february or march, and yes it's a very stupid idea, but i'm committed to it now. and 2. umm i was running out of good abba songs (or ones that appeared in mamma mia) and this one sounded like fun, and i think it ended up just kind of being abt jirou talking to and about kaminari. so that checks out
shit is so. close. to going down guys. just wait for chapters 25 n 28, which should hopefully reframe everything that's been happening in the fic so far.
thank you for reading! follow me on tumblr (a-piece-of-shipping-trash), leave a review (to keep me going with that sweet sweet reader validation until the next update), and stay safe out there
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