Previous Chronologically: Rhythm 12

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For some reason, UA always had a minimum day around Valentine's Day, and Eijirou wasn't sure if he wanted to curse Principal Nezu for this planning or thank him for the opportunity because now that the first cat was out of the bag and everyone in band "knew" that he and Katsuki were "dating" (Katsuki had said something about the Camie girl, from Shiketsu, and Eijirou knew he should have emphasized the Girl Network to his boyfriend the way Mina had to him), they were kind of obligated to go on an after-school date or else face the collective questioning of a bunch of people.

Not that Eijirou was necessarily complaining, although the sudden shift in behavior between himself and Katsuki for the sake of keeping up appearances was a lot more than just something, he supposed. (It was exciting, he could say that, at least. It was definitely all very exciting.) He'd ask why Katsuki even agreed to continue on despite the two of them now having about a billion more eyeballs on them, but it kind of made sense that they shouldn't break up so soon after everyone found out, or else it would just be all, Extra, Extra Read All About It; Fresh Band Gossip Hot Off The Press or whatever. Not fun, to say the least.

Dates to Sir Nighteye's ice cream parlor were always fun, though. Had been before the Rose Parade Rehearsal Disaster (or RPRD, as Eijirou had come to call it in his head), and so far, it was shaping up to still be fun post-RPRD.

Until he sat down in their usual booth and heard Katsuki sigh in a way that was just ten percent more annoyed than usual. Then suddenly, it seemed like all the fun was drained out of the date because oh god, oh no, did he do something wrong? Was he mad at him?

"What's up, dude?" Eijirou asked. His emotions were already preparing for the worst by twisting around in his chest, but he did his best to sound chill anyway.

Katsuki propped his head up with his elbow, glaring down at the glass table for a second, then sighing again, still pretty pissed. He looked up (Eijirou flinched at its intensity) and said, "We need to break up."

In that moment, with just the sound of those five words hitting his ears, Eijirou understood how Atlas felt, carrying the weight of the sky on his shoulders by himself. And Katsuki (Bakugou? Did he have to switch back to calling him Bakugou already, when they'd just agreed to switch to calling each other by their first names for the show?) seemed to notice, to read the fear so clearly written all over Eijirou's face, and he said, "Not immediately, you shitty Hairbrain. Even I'm not stupid enough to do that at this time of year."

Eijirou fidgeted a bit, twisting his fingers and kicking the legs of his chair gently, just to let some of the years Katsuki had just shaved off the opportunity to escape with the stress. "Of course," he said, quietly, although it wasn't as though he wanted to sound so small.

He knew this conversation would come someday, about the breaking up aspect of it all. Sort of. He hadn't really been thinking about it, since at some point between the start of the fake dating and now, he'd just come to assume that they'd kind of… just become a real thing. He didn't know how, he didn't know when; he just thought it would happen as it happened, just on its own.

(Haaah, he was such a dumbass, wasn't he?)

Katsuki reached out a hand, and Eijirou barely dodged the flick on the forehead his boyfriend had so clearly been going for. Katsuki grunted, possibly a bit ticked (though it was hard to tell for sure), and said, "The point of the charade is to get Racoon Eyes off your back, right? Because she hasn't fully killed off Heterosexual Hairbrain in her head."

Eijirou blinked a couple times, needing the moment to process everything. It had been a bit over two months since they'd begun fake dating, and it wasn't that he necessarily forgot the excuse he and Mina had made up on the bus. It was more like he hadn't thought about it in a while, and it took a moment for his brain to bring it up again.

"…Yes," he said, terribly aware of his hesitation in that moment.

Katsuki didn't seem to notice, though. He stabbed his sundae with his spoon and said, "I don't know if you've noticed, but I think we've gotten her pretty fucking convinced at this point, so we need to pick an end date now."

Eijirou fidgeted with his own spoon, stirring his own ice cream round and around in his bowl, not even caring that it made the ice cream melt faster. "Right," he said, hoping his uncertainty didn't peek through his voice. "But not today."

Katsuki rolled his eyes and swallowed. "Of course not today; it's almost Valentine's Day and everyone in band is fucking shipping us. The whole reason this was a secret was to prevent backlash when the time to break up came."

"Well, maybe if Camie knew it was a secret, she wouldn't have told anyone instead of just assuming it was okay to tell everyone," Eijirou suggested.

There was a tense pause, which made Ei realize he'd just fucked up.

"Shit, I wasn't trying to blame you or anything; I just—"

"Shut up," Katsuki said.

Eijirou shut his mouth so abruptly his teeth clacked together audibly. (This was not how he'd been daydreaming today's date would go.) He bit his tongue to keep himself from saying, "Sorry," since he knew how bad a habit it was, to always be saying that.

Katsuki sighed and looked out the window, his expression mostly blank, but Eijirou could read some of the more subtle emotions running beneath. Like the exhaustion that clung to the edges of his eyes, or the tension in his jaw as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.

Neither of them said anything for a minute, allowing Eijirou to zone out to the classical music playing in the parlor. (Katsuki really could be very pretty sometimes, if he chilled out enough, though Eijirou knew better than to say that to his face.)

Suddenly, Katsuki's expression flashed with panic, though it was quickly replaced by something else, and though Eijirou couldn't quite place its exact name, agitation and spite mixed in with a bit of what could be determination would probably describe it well enough.

"What is it, boy? What do your little bitch eyes see?" Eijirou asked, but Katsuki slapped a hand over his mouth to keep him from continuing the bit and pulled him very, very close. So close Eijirou could see the little, dark flecks in Katsuki's ruby-red eyes, and when he tried to look elsewhere (so as not to feel so awkward, to escape the pounding in his chest), the next thing he noticed was that Katsuki did, in fact, have eyelashes. Surprisingly long, pretty ones, in fact. Ei had actually been wondering about that for a while, if he actually had eyelashes and shit, since the other boy's hair was so pale and all, but— fuck, he was getting off-track.

Katsuki jerked his thumb in the direction of the front door, which opened with a pleasant ting-a-ling right as Eijirou looked its way, and there was Todoroki, holding the door for Yaoyorozu. Eijirou watched them, another couple everyone knew and saw around.

Katsuki removed his hand from Eijirou's mouth. The redhead chewed his lower lip, keeping his eyes trained on the other couple, no one noticing or caring that he was watching (almost staring at) them, and he wondered if maybe he and Kacchan should imitate them more.

"I don't want to keep talking about this shit while they're here," Katsuki grunted, and if Eijirou had been really listening to him and thinking about what he was saying, he would have probably noticed that this sounded like character development, since his fake boyfriend now learned not to talk about things in front of other people because it turned out they actually gave a shit about what he was saying sometimes. However, the redhead was transfixed, watching the other couple.

And it was funny, he supposed, although funny probably was not at all the word he should have used. But it was weird, then, how suddenly and strangely jealous he became when he saw Todoroki briefly kiss Yaoyorozu, if only on the cheek. Because he wanted to do that, with Katsuki, and in that moment, he realized: he could. And, considering the context of their relationship, he probably should.

"Kiss me," whispered Eijirou, though he made sure his tone was not without its challenge.

Katsuki narrowed his eyes. "I'm sorry, what the fuck? Are you high? Is it crack? Is it crack you're—"

"No!" Eijirou hissed, accidentally hitting the table. It drew the attention of several other patrons, and he had to awkwardly smile and wave them off. This was nothing but an excitable high school boy getting excited again, as he did. He leaned into Katsuki again, lowered his voice even more, and said, "We need to make sure no one finds out it's fake, too."

Katsuki's lips formed a thin line as he looked away, out the window again.

"No balls, dude," Eijirou said, right as his boyfriend stiffened a bit. "Do it—"

A spark of something returned to Katsuki's eyes as he suddenly grabbed Eijirou by the collar of his shirt, dragged him forward, and mashed their lips together like the point of kissing was to come away with bruised lips or something. A tiny sound of startlement escaped Eijirou, something he'd rather not have admitted, but he cut it off quickly, closed his eyes, and leaned into the kiss until—

Ting-a-ling! The front door bell rang again, and Eijirou broke away, turning his head towards the door to see a bug-eyed Midoriya and crew walking in.

"K—" Midoriya began, but Iida immediately slapped a hand over the shorter boy's mouth, and Eijirou could vaguely hear his and Uraraka's hushed, furtive chidings.

"It'll be a long time until things calm down," Eijirou said, looking away and trying to get the conversation going again despite his dizzied head. He had to fight the urge to gnaw on his lips; they felt strange, but he didn't want to draw attention to it.

"No shit, Sherlock," Katsuki snipped in reply. He was chewing his bottom lip and definitely not meeting Eijirou's gaze, but it was worth noticing, at least in Eijirou's eyes, that he also wasn't wiping the kiss off his mouth.

There was a pause, during which neither of them said anything to each other, but Eijirou watched the other patrons as they all went around their usual business, as though they hadn't seen anything. Which, in all likelihood, they hadn't. It was surprising how few shits strangers gave about what other strangers were doing when the other strangers weren't hurting anyone else or dying.

"Let's get out of here," Katsuki muttered, the sound of his chair scraping against the tile floor drawing Eijirou back down to earth.

"Oh. Sure," Eijirou replied, feeling like a robot had taken his brain and was autopiloting his actions. He picked up his backpack, slung it over his shoulder, reached for his wallet— oh wait, never mind; Katsuki already slammed down a five dollar bill on the table— and then his legs went kinda brrr, and his brain went, left! Left! Left! because he wasn't all that sure what to think otherwise.

They tramped out of the ice cream parlor together, hand in hand (but not making eye contact), down the street without a word exchanged between them (and, in Eijirou's case, with no thoughts in his head, although that wasn't so bad, since his brain at least had the courtesy to play some MCR at him) until they were walking through a quiet residential area.

"Summer," Katsuki said, quietly, gruffly, as if he didn't actually want to be heard and understood.

"Huh?" Eijirou asked, his brain having spent the last god-knows-how-many-minutes replaying the events of the ice cream parlor over and over for him.

"Can't break up now; it's too close to Valentine's Day," Katsuki said, pulling an earbud out of his ear. "Can't break up in March; tour will get messy. April is prom season, and I'm not going to spend two hundred bucks to hang out with you for one night, that's absurd, but I don't want to deal with people's pity over a breakup then, either. May gets busy with AP testing and graduation and shit, so we could've stopped then, when no one's watching, if it weren't for fucking Little Miss Phone Addict."

"Who?"

"Camie."

"Ah," said Eijirou. He was starting to wonder if he should meet this chick.

"Mr. Aizawa's been saying in council meetings that the May Days parade is gonna be another triband collab as practice for the Rose Parade, so she'll be shoving her nose down our business when that happens."

"The Fourth of July parade is also a triband thing, though," Eijirou pointed out. "And then after that, it's band camp, and then school starts again, and then there are gonna be more and more Rose Parade rehearsals, 'cause that's in… less than a year now."

"What the fuck," Katsuki agreed. "But also fuck that shit, because we can't keep dragging this on forever." He let go of Eijirou's hand to crack his knuckles, four sharp sounds ringing out in the quiet neighborhood followed by one more with the deliberate decision to crack his thumb as well. "June."

"Fourth of July parade," Eijirou pointed out again, feeling bad for hoping that this would let them keep going longer, until he was brave enough to consider telling the truth again. He'd almost done it before, until the ferocity of the rest of the band (and what appeared to be hostility from Katsuki) scared him back into his shell again.

"We can't keep dragging this shit on forever," Katsuki repeated. "That's stupid. Fake dating is a means to an end. We have achieved the goal, have we not?"

They stopped walking, faced each other on the sidewalk. Eijirou could feel Katsuki's hard gaze on him, but he could not meet it, if he tried, all he could feel was a tiny, little knife sloooowly prick at his chest, push its way into his heart, and he didn't want to cry, but he was scared that if he looked at Bakugou, he wouldn't be able to stop himself, so he looked over his shoulder, to give the appearance of looking at him.

"We need to decide when it's going to end," Bakugou said, and the finality to it made Eijirou flinch. "So, June. After graduation, when we stop seeing everyone every day, we break up."

We're still friends though, right? He swallowed hard, but the lump still remained in his throat, keeping the words inside.

He opened his mouth, and he couldn't make a sound, so he made a face instead, frustrated. What could he do? What could he say? He'd forgotten all his sign language, the kiddie shit they taught in elementary school.

He nodded. A tiny little bit at first, then more and more, and it felt almost a bit robotic, like he was a puppet on a string, agreeing with what Bakugou said. And he still couldn't say anything, but hey, at least he wasn't crying. He didn't mind crying; it was just that he wouldn't know what to tell Bakugou if he did.

Bakugou turned around and started walking again. Eijirou picked up his feet and followed him, and when he caught up, he habitually reached for Bakugou's hand—

—and he paused.

He kept walking, of course, but his hand hesitated, and slowly, slowly, he brought it back to his own side and left just their fingertips brushing, just barely, as they walked down the empty street together.

author's note xi. hewwo hewwo and welcome back to the show~ this is a good mini-arc. it doesn't rlly have a name but it takes place in february around valentine's day so i just call it the february arc. anyway when i was streaming myself working on this chapter i kept on going "I'M SORRY KIRISHIMAAAAAAA" so rest assured that i feel bad for him too. don't worry there are reasons. that will be explained next week. in the next chapter. but don't worry it could be worse; you could be waiting like thirteen chapters like in moment for some answers. :)

so yeah! ! tune in next week for more. leave a review mebbe? thank. stay safe out there

Next Chronologically: Moment 18 / Rhythm 26