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Denki always told everyone who stopped to listen, as many times as they would hear it: He’d make it big. His parents, his friends, that one particularly judgemental guidance counsellor in high school, they all heard him say it, rolled their eyes fondly at best, laughed in his face at worst, tried to supply him with alternative and more detailed and realistic career plans.
But he didn’t listen to any of them, and now he is an illustrious guitarist in a successful band, illustrious and successful enough that the mere mention of his name had gotten him into VIP sections at clubs a total of three times already. (Or maybe it had been Bakugou glaring at the bouncers. He will never know.)
They went on a domestic tour last year, and have a handful of overseas gigs booked for the next one. Their songs are on (genre-specific, independent) radio stations. Tokoyami’s pet parrot has an Instagram account that just hit 500k (Denki, as the founder and main admin of said account, is particularly proud of this one). About three months ago, Yaoyorozu was delighted to learn about the cult-like lesbian following she specifically has among their fans (“Look how precious! They make shirts! The proceeds go to charity! ”). She bought out the stock of said shirts and gave them away at some of their events. Jirou’s not-so-secret drawer of fanmail that she always reads and never throws away has been overflowing for weeks now.
So, yeah, he’s making it big.
But right now Denki wishes someone, anyone, had tried harder to stop him.
Maybe he should have taken college more seriously and gotten that secure desk job like the guidance counsellor suggested. Would he be happy? Absolutely not. Would he, getting down to it, trade his current life for that reality? Hell no. But would his manager have kicked him out of bed this morning, stormed into his apartment and physically dragged him out of bed? Very unlikely.
“This is serious , Kaminari, you’re supposed to be at the office five minutes ago,” Uraraka urged while shoving Denki’s toothbrush into his mouth.
“The others are there already! Would it kill you to have your phone on vibrate at least?” as she wrestled a clean-looking shirt on him.
“Aizawa’s going to have my head. Both of our heads,” as she shuffled Denki out of his apartment and locked it behind him. Denki doesn’t remember giving her a copy of his keys.
He doesn’t have a chance to question this, because before he’s entirely awake, Uraraka has maneuvered him through the parking lot (“One foot in front of the other, there you go, wonderful”), through sleek corridors (“Sorry, sorry, hi, hello, we’re in a hurry, Aizawa wants us, sorry, COMING THROUGH!”) and, with a final “We’re here!” into their boss’s much less sleek office.
Every time Denki enters this room, coming in from the corporate chrome and glass of their label’s building, he feels catapulted through space and time. He guesses that, if he were dedicated, he could find the same impersonal cold appliances that the rest of the rooms sport in this one, but he would have to be very dedicated. Every surface in the office is littered with paperwork, sheet music, proposals from the visual department, coffee mugs, a blanket or five. There’s three different guitars strewn around the room, the walls are covered in awards and credit plaques as well as newspaper clippings and some photos. The curtains, smooth and heavy and the only ones across the entire five floors of the building, as far as Denki is aware, are always at least partially drawn, plunging the room into a perpetual sleepy twilight that you have to blink against, stepping in from the bright white corridor.
As Denki steps in now, his eyes are still half-closed, and they stay that way as Uraraka pushes him down into the only free chair.
“Sorry for being late, this one’s a little hard to get a hold of in the mornings,” She directs at the vague shadowy silhouette of their boss that Denki can make out somewhere behind the littered desk as he yawns.
Aizawa comes into focus more sharply as the pain from a hard rap to the back of his head registers. “Look at your fucking phone,” Bakugou hisses from next to him.
A little more awake now, Denki has a laundry list of things he wants to say, starting with something annoying to Bakugou and to Uraraka, for both of their uncalled-for abuse so early in the morning, and ending with asking if anyone has a granola bar. The last thing he ate was some leftover lemon chicken last night, which he wasn’t sure was still quite good.
The laundry list is cut short when he turns to Bakugou with a brilliant quip on his tongue (Something along the lines of “too busy with your mom to check my texts”, an absolute classic). Bakugou isn’t looking at him, but instead at Aizawa, which Denki could excuse, if the look on his drummer’s face wasn’t so tense .
Looking around the room, he finds Uraraka standing next to Tokoyami, both of them looking at something on her iPad that couldn’t be very elating, judging from the way both of their eyebrows knit in unison.
Yaoyorozu is worrying her lip with her teeth, something that reminds Denki uncomfortably of long, emotionally taxing recording sessions, where the five of them are cooped up in a tiny studio for way longer than could be humane and it is getting late and Jirou and Bakugou have started to be passive-aggressively nice to one another. A small shiver runs down his back.
Yaoyorozu catches his gaze, and he mouths What’s wrong? but all he gets in return is a hurried shake of her head.
So he turns to Jirou on his other side, who is ignoring him (not entirely uncharacteristic) and twisting a sound cable around her fingers in a way that is not at all sound-cable-handling-procedure (very uncharacteristic, where did she even get that?).
Something is very, very wrong.
He bets at a boring desk job, this wouldn’t be happening.
He also thinks that after making good on his promise to “make it big”, nothing should be filling him with as much existential dread as this moment is. He has half a mind to reach out and cling to Bakugou’s arm, or Jirou’s, or both of them, like he had when they had been waiting to sign onto the label, out in the hall, two years ago. Denki didn’t expect anything could ever be worse than those ten minutes when he had been convinced someone would kick them out, tell them they’d never be good enough, or call security on them.
But then Aizawa says: “I think you all know why we’re here,” and Denki has never been this stressed in his entire life.
Nobody answers, which might be because it was a rhetorical question, but also because everyone else knows why they are here. He is definitely missing some crucial information, but the silence is so heavy that he doesn’t dare to disturb it.
But it drags on, and after a couple of beats the question doesn’t seem so rhetorical anymore.
Bakugou clears his throat. Denki has never heard him make that noise. It sounds nervous .
“It’s all over Twitter,” Bakugou says.
“There’s two trending hashtags,” Uraraka supplies.
Tokoyami shakes his head, pointing to something on her iPad screen. “Three.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Jirou hisses under her breath. Denki thinks he’s the only one who heard, but he’s still stuck on the hashtag bit. Three? About them? They had two for a couple of hours when their single dropped on Tokoyami’s birthday last year, but something is telling him this isn’t quite as joyous an occasion.
But now he’s thinking about Tokoyami’s birthday party and the incredible buffet they’d gone to and— yep, that’s his stomach growling into the tense quiet of the room.
He opens his mouth to apologise, but Aizawa barrels on then: “Can anyone explain to me how exactly this happened?”
The prospect of finally finding out what the everloving fuck is going on sounds even better than any buffet, and as Aizawa looks at them all expectantly Denki barely stops himself from doing the same— at this point it might be safest to pretend he knows what’s going on.
“Jirou?”, Aizawa prompts. “Bakugou?”
Internally, because he is a professional, Denki gasps. Were the two of them in trouble ?
They answer at the same time.
“Nothing happened.”
“It’s bullshit , is what it is.”
One thing that Denki can always count on is that Bakugou is able to cut the tension in any given situation with sheer willpower and vulgarity. Right now it does not work. Aizawa is unamused at the lack of explanation he has gotten, everyone is avoiding his eyes, including Bakugou, excluding Denki because he doesn’t know why he needs to.
Aizawa looks at everyone for a moment more, then sighs deeply and lifts his phone up with much more flourish than necessary. He clicks something, and then reads, his tone bright and sarcastic and terrifying: “Breaking! Is this elusive bachelor off the market, and has he maybe been all along? Read everything about love blooming between the members of Heartbeat Distortion here! Or this one: Fans are shocked to learn that the inspiration for Heartbeat Distortion’s leadsinger’s emotional love songs has been sitting 10 feet behind her this entire time! Top 5 Katsyouka moments: Everything you need to know about music’s new it-couple.”
And, well. That is a lot of information to get first thing in the morning. So Denki says, into the silence that follows: “They couldn’t come up with anything better than Katsyouka ?”
It earns him scathing glares from his left, right and from across from him. That’s probably fair. He’s in shock. Two of his best friends are suddenly deeply in love, and no one told him, and he hasn’t eaten breakfast.
Aizawa sighs again, putting the phone down and leaning forward on this desk. “So, what do we do with this?”
Faintly, in the back of his mind, Denki can appreciate that he said we , as if he isn’t absolutely capable of dropping them from the label and leaving them and their career to the press-vultures at any given moment, as if Denki hasn’t had nightmares about that since they signed on. This isn’t quite fair, he knows, because Aizawa is a great guy deep down, but something about the terrifying novelty of having a boss in an office to report to never quite wore down.
“Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do?” Bakugou spits, which means he is entirely out of his depth, which absolutely never happens.
“What do you suggest we do?” Jirou translates, more delicately. The cable in her hand looks like it’s about to rip.
Denki reaches out in her direction. He’s not quite sure why, to just guide her attention to the equipment she’s torturing, or to pat her arm like a grandmother would, or to hold her hand in support since she is clearly stressed. Or because he is stressed. The underlying desire to hold her hand never goes away, he finds, even as she is suddenly off the market and their career in a publicity crisis. A for consistency.
Jirou doesn’t react, not even when his hand hovers awkwardly, right in her line of sight. So he says “Um,” to catch her attention, and suddenly all eyes are on him, and they’re expecting him to say something.
“Um,” he repeats, letting his hand drop back to his own lap. Anything that he says right now can and will be used against him, and he just threw the right to remain silent to the wind.
What he wants to say is somewhere between “This is insane!” and “Why did neither of you tell me?!”, but Jirou is this close to ripping the cord and Bakugou looks the closest to scared Denki has ever seen him, and if he has to see either of them like this for even a second longer he will spontaneously combust, so he needs to come up with something substantial, and fast.
“Can we… work this?” He tries.
Aizawa folds his hands. “Work this?”
Denki hoped someone, especially Aizawa would free him of his misery if he just said anything at all, but now he has to scramble on: “Yeah! Like… Uhm. If— The single!”
“The single?” Aizawa repeats again, and Denki has half a mind to take the sound cable from Jirou and strangle the man right there and then.
“ Cloud 9 ? It’s supposed to drop in a month, or something. Right?” He looks around for approval, and gets it in a distracted nod from Uraraka. He will never understand how she has their entire schedule memorised at any given moment, but he is thankful. “Right! And it’s a love song, too. So— So this is a lot of press, a lot of attention. So why can’t we— work it?”
Yaoyorozu perks up at this: “For publicity?”
“Exactly!”
Tokoyami nods sagely. “A classic Robsten ,” he hums.
“Precisely!”, Denki cheers.
“A publicity stunt?! ” Bakugou sneers, incredulous.
Aizawa inclines his head. “Well, it’s not unheard of…”
He is cut off by the sound of Uraraka rapidly typing on her iPad. “I can have Monoma in PR on it right now, I just need the go-ahead”, she rushes out, more to the screen than to anyone. To Denki, it looks like she is just glad to have anything to do at all.
Jirou sits up a little. “Wait—”
“We will need to have PR do something in any case, as soon as possible,” Aizawa decides.
He doesn’t seem to hate the idea. Even if Denki didn’t know what would come out of his mouth until it did, he feels a little accomplished. Because, the more he thinks about this— Isn’t this a win-win situation?
Sure, Jirou and Bakugou have never even breathed a word about their relationship to him, and that kind of blows. But, in the end, wasn’t that because they would have had to hide to the public anyways? Surely it would have hurt, if more people knew what they have to be going through. And Denki is their friend , so if his absolute bullshit idea is going to help them live their truth and be open and honest about their feelings, well, he is going to rally behind it.
“It could work!”, he emphasises. “And the press would do most of the work by themselves. They’re already doing it!” He gestures vaguely in the direction of Uraraka’s iPad. “Three hashtags!”
“It’s not only the press, fans are going crazy. I’ve scrolled by four different threads of people analyzing lyrics and performance videos,” Uraraka adds.
Denki is grateful for the support, but it makes him stop too: Lyrics? Performances?
Jirou writes most of their songs, and Denki has been sitting next to her doing it ever since their freshman year of college. He can remember the exact moments when Jirou finished about 80% of their discography, because whenever she finishes a song there is something in her smile that he couldn’t forget if he tried, something glowing and radiant. Denki has been a part of the process for as long as they’ve known each other— So why didn’t he ever question what, who , all of the love songs were about? Why didn’t Jirou ever tell him?
He stands right next to her on stage, every time they perform. He spends substantial parts of concerts looking at her, even when he shouldn’t, because the headlights cast her in that same glow she gets when she deems a song perfected, and Denki can never look away. Why didn’t he ever notice where she was looking? When fans, strangers, noticed enough to post their analysis on the internet?
Of course, none of this matters right now. Right now, Denki needs to get his shit together and be there for his friends, even when he clearly hasn’t been there enough for them to be let in on this particular piece of crucial information. Yaoyorozu and Tokoyami don’t seem fazed. Did they know? Did Uraraka?
Denki shakes his head. He has to focus .
Aizawa is speaking when he tunes back into the conversation. “...as Tokoyami so helpfully pointed out: things like this are common, and that’s because they work. Ultimately, it’s up to you two, though.”
What did Tokoyami say again? Robsten ? Denki doesn’t think that’s very fair. That had clearly been fake, and for a movie, and thus an entirely different ballpark than what they’re dealing with right now.
Being where he is, right between Jirou and Bakugou, Denki gets a front row seat to one of the strangest exchanges he has ever witnessed: They don’t talk, just lock eyes and rely heavily on their eyebrows to convey emotions Denki can’t hope to decipher. Once, Bakugou jerks his head very overtly in his direction, but Denki is so well and truly lost at that point that he doesn’t even wonder about it. Jirou huffs, lets the abused sound cable fall to her lap. It seems to mean something because Bakugou throws up his hands, in defeat or insouciance.
“Fine!”, he huffs. “For the record, this is dumb as shit.”
Uraraka perks up. “You’ll do it?”
Bakugou just huffs again and slumps back in his chair. Denki is really trying to stay on topic here and push his own emotions away, but it irks him: If he was presented with the opportunity to openly, loudly and publicly be with Jirou— Again, he shakes his head. Unproductive.
Aizawa settles his unreadable gaze on their singer. “Jirou?”
She closes her eyes and looks for all the world like she would rather be anywhere else but here. Denki wishes he could just reach out and— Unproductive.
“Sure,” Jirou sighs finally. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Aizawa nods and turns to Uraraka to give her instructions she surely has to relay to Monoma and Kendou and the rest of PR. He also says some things that are probably important for all of them to hear, but Denki isn’t listening anymore.
For some inexplicable reason, Jirou turned to him, and if he didn’t know better, Denki would say she looks sad .
He scrambles for something dumb to say, some silly face to pull to make her laugh, literally anything, because he can’t stand to see her like this when she should be happy, happy that everything is out in the open now, happy to finally live her truth, happy with Bakugou. Why isn’t she?
“Well, that’s all I need from you for now,” Aizawa is saying. “You can thank Kaminari for his quick thinking on this.”
Jirou turns away from him, slips the sound cable into the pocket of her hoodie. The others around them get up. Uraraka is chattering about a rehearsal slot they have booked later that week and that she’ll arrange a meeting with PR for Bakugou and Jirou.
It suddenly hits Denki that his immediate future will contain a lot of the girl he likes being in love with someone who isn’t him, for all the world to see, and that it’s sort of his fault.
And he still hasn’t had breakfast.
Jirou once told him that it’s a little sad, but Denki thinks that his freshman year of college was the best year of his life.
It’s not that he peaked then. He was always scared he peaked in high school without noticing, and sure, college was great, but the last few years in the music business taught him that peaking is a relative term and he is better off accepting life for the rollercoaster it is. But the point stands: Freshman year was the best year of his life, if only by the quantity of good things that happened.
First, it was the year he realized that having no clue what to do with your life was okay: His roommate came from a crazy rich family, with a father who had been wanting him to go into business and finance, something about the family company and an inheritance and at least one disgraced older sibling. A couple weeks into the year, he changed his major from business to literature, because it was Denki’s major and he liked what Denki said about it. A year later he dropped out entirely— Shouto is still his friend to this day, they try to meet up for coffee a couple times a month. He works in a bookshop right now, just moved in with his boyfriend, doing very well for himself.
The second thing that Denki learned freshman year was that no matter how stressful it got, not knowing what you’re doing with your life, the library on campus was open until 2AM, and the vending machines were always fully stocked with chocolate and energy drinks. There was something comforting about the fluorescent lights of the foyer, some modern art statue in the center of it, some sleep deprived students here and there.
It was in that liminal glow, at 1.47AM on a Monday night, about halfway through the term, that Denki made a third great realization: Love was real.
He doesn’t remember now what had him so stressed out back then, an assignment maybe, or a midterm or maybe just the neverending torture of being 19 and confronted with the trials and tribulations of life. It doesn’t matter, because all of Denki’s trials and tribulations ended the moment he went to grab the last can of iced espresso and heard a very elegant string of curses from behind him.
“Sorry, were you gonna get that?” , he meant to say as he turned around, but the girl's glare cut him off. She wasn’t particularly intimidating, reaching only about his shoulder, her short dark hair a mess and what looked like the previous day’s eyeliner smudged over bruised eye bags. She clearly had been meaning to get the espresso Denki was holding.
Without a word, he held it out to her and watched her regard it for a second, take it, struggle with the lid and then down it in 3 seconds flat. And he realized in those 3 seconds that love, the all-encompassing and life-altering emotion of it, was real.
Or maybe he only realized that when, after the can was empty and put safely in a recycling bin, the girl introduced herself as Jirou Kyouka, freshman, Contemporary Music major, apologized for stealing his coffee and explained about her practical midterm that was kicking her butt, all while nervously fiddling with the headphone cord dangling from her ears. Or maybe it was when she accepted his number with an eye roll and a small embarrassed smile after he blurted that she seemed really cool and he didn’t mind that she stole his drink and he would like to be friends.
Maybe it wasn’t that night at all, but much later when he was sitting in her dorm room, and accompanied her on her beat up acoustic guitar as she went through a song she wrote on a whim. She was happy with the end result and she smiled at him, and if none of their time together before had done it, Denki’s heart definitely skipped a beat there.
They found out that Jirou’s roommate Yaoyorozu knew Shouto from the fancy private middle school they had gone to. Yaoyorozu was a Classical Music minor, for piano, and she joined their jam sessions sometimes. Shouto suggested the idea of a band, and it seemed crazy at first— two guitars and a keyboard could hardly entertain any crowd, even if Denki strongly believed that Jirou’s talent alone should be selling out arenas.
So it had been a while, but eventually Jirou convinced a friend from high school to take over the rhythm guitar while she switched to bass. Tokoyami was great, he had a pet rat living in his dorm room at the time, a white lab rat that a veterinarian major friend saved from their school’s bio labs and that Denki was convinced was smarter than all of them combined. The rat died before it could use its superior intellect to murder all of them, a few years into senior year. Or it simply faked its own death and was secretly still out there, plotting their demise. (Denki’s running theory.)
In any case, that was when Tokoyami took in his parent’s parrot— The most photogenic bird Denki has ever met. @shadow_distortion was his magnum opus, his music career notwithstanding, and Tokoyami’s scary rat could have never become Instagram-famous anyways.
One night a couple of weeks after introducing Tokoyami to them, Jirou was late to hanging out, coming in from Music Theory II wrestling with her a very disgruntled classmate who, lo and behold, played the drums and didn’t seem too opposed to sticking around after deeming them “not terribly fucked, talent-wise”. One time, right after it had bit Denki’s finger, Tokoyami’s rat climbed onto Bakugou’s head, and Denki thought they looked oddly similar, in their affinity for uncalled-for violence.
(Denki always assumed that Bakugou had been a more or less random choice to join the band. He can’t imagine that anyone else would have been even half as good a final addition, but he believed it to be dumb luck on Jirou’s part, picking and convincing the first drummer she found to join them.
Apparently there was more to it than that.)
Freshman year introduced him to most of the important people (and birds) in his life, and it laid the groundwork for some of the best things that ever happened to him, so until they win an Emmy, or he gets married, or finds the cure to cancer, freshman year takes the cake.
In some significant ways though, freshman year also laid the groundwork to his current predicament. Which is: Laying upside down on Shouto’s and Sero’s couch, a half empty chocolate milkshake somewhere by his head, and being absolutely miserable.
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Sero says, very carefully. “And correct me if I’m wrong. But wasn’t it your idea?”
Denki hides his face behind his arms. “Was it my idea to have to bear witness to the love of my life being disgustingly happy with one of our friends? To have to suffer through paps asking me what I know about a date I will never be taking the girl of my dreams on?!” He drops his arms to the ground. “Yes, kind of.”
“If it helps, she doesn’t seem disgustingly happy in these pictures,” Shouto hums around his straw, scrolling through something on his phone idly.
Denki is up and by his side in a heartbeat. “She doesn’t? What pictures? What are they doing?”
Wordlessly, Shouto tilts the screen in his direction. It’s blurry shots, the window front of some restaurant uptown partially obscuring the view inside with the camera flash reflecting off it. But Denki can just make out Jirou and Bakugou at a table right by those windows — no doubt a strategic reservation by Uraraka.
There’s not much else to it: they’re having dinner. Only, they’re having dinner together, in a nice restaurant that a couple years ago, they all joked about being too poor for. There’s a single tall candle in the middle of the table, and Denki feels like it’s taunting him because in the shine of it, very well visible for the cameras, and for Denki on Shouto’s couch, they are holding hands. Bakugou’s thumb is resting across Jirou’s knuckles. Maybe he is brushing across them gently. Denki would be if it was him.
“Now you don’t look very happy,” Sero quips and pulls Denki from his train of thought and back to the matter at hand.
The angle of the pictures and the glare of the window make it hard to see either of their faces clearly, but in one shot, Jirou is turned to look out of the window. Her brows are furrowed, and Shouto is right, she doesn’t look happy. For a second, a weird sort of righteousness, something he is very familiar with, flares up within Denki: She should be having fun on her fancy dinner date, she should be smiling her soft, radiant smile.
He can’t tell whether this irritation he feels is directed at Bakugou, for not making sure Jirou is enjoying herself, at Uraraka, Monoma and Aizawa, for putting her into this position, or at himself. As Sero pointed out: this was all his idea. Jirou is miserable and it’s his fault.
Shouto gently takes his phone back and lays it face down on the coffee table. “I don’t think you should be looking at those anymore,” he decides.
Denki sighs. “I can handle it, I’m a big boy.”
“I don’t know if crashing our evening plans and making Shouto buy you a comically large milkshake counts as ‘handling it’, bud.” Sero nods at the milkshake in question, condescension sweating off the cup. Denki bets if he looked under the lid it would look just like he feels: melted and sad and useless.
And, well, that’s a depressing thought.
“I should be handling this,” He amends, decisively. “I will. ”
Sero nods. “I love that for you.”
“How?”, Shouto asks.
Denki hasn’t thought this far. He doesn’t actually know how to deal with this, because the last two weeks since that fateful morning in Aizawa’s office have been one thing after the other.
Last weekend Bakugou walked into practice straight from a meeting with Hakamada, with a duffle bag full of clothing that didn’t belong to him but was told he had to incorporate into his wardrobe, so that in a few weeks time, Jirou can start wearing them out in public. Something about #relationshipgoals, Uraraka called it, and couple’s items .
When Denki asked why Jirou wouldn’t just wear some of Bakugou’s actual hoodies, since surely she had taken some by now (Jirou ran naturally cold all the time, he didn’t say, lest it would seem like he is obsessed with her), Jirou threw a guitar pick at his head.
No one answered his question. Denki wondered if Bakugou had just never noticed when Jirou was cold while they were hanging out.
Monoma had informed them that they were required to tweet about it— all of them, not just the happy couple themselves. Yesterday, Tokoyami posted a selfie from a meeting room, which Bakugou and Jirou just so happened to be standing in the background of, very close together. The fans went crazy, but then, Denki thinks, they hadn’t been there for the meticulous arranging of people and Tokoyami’s phone before the picture was taken. They’ve done official photoshoots that took less time.
Next weekend, they’re all scheduled for a really popular late night talk show. They don’t do those a lot, mainly because Jirou, Bakugou and Tokoyami despise variety programs, and Yaoyorozu gets worse stage fright for interviews than actual shows, so this is “new and exciting”, as Uraraka put it.
All of these things are happening, and Denki isn’t even an active participant in most of them, but maybe he should be.
Very seriously, he looks at Sero and Shouto. “I will be a supportive friend and teamplayer.”
“Those are just words,” Sero admonishes.
And he might be right, but so help him God, Denki will stop being a pathetic cup of melted milkshake about his friends’ happiness, and he will do it very soon.
“Well, I promise you, this is the most charming bird I have ever gotten the pleasure of following on the internet!” Camie Utsushimi gushes, as pictures of Shadow get projected on the screen behind them.
Tokoyami nods solemnly, “I’ll be sure to let her know.”
“Wonderful,” Camie smiles. She turns to the camera then. “We’ll head into a quick break, but stay tuned, because we’ll be back with what you’ve all been waiting for! Personally I absolutely can’t wait to learn everything about everyone’s favourite couple. Exclusive hot goss’, right here on Illusion for you right after commercials!”
They all wait for the camera man to give them the cue that recording’s stopped, and then Jirou is slumping backwards into the plush couch. Denki is crammed onto it, with Jirou between him and Bakugou, Tokoyami and Yaoyorozu are sitting on stools behind them.
Yaoyorozu leans forward so she can look at Jirou’s face, halfway obscured between plush and Denki’s arm, like she’s trying to crawl into the cushions or hide behind him for the remainder of the taping.
“I think you’re doing really well, Kyouka!”, Yaoyorozu assures her. Her smile is a little too wide and Denki can see her wiping her hands over her skirt.
Tokoyami is fiddling with one of his bracelets next to her, and Bakugou is glaring off into space, his fingers busy drumming an insistent beat on his thigh. Denki sighs. It’s like the beginning of a terrible joke: Four introverts walk into a very popular talk show…
But that’s what he’s there for!
“I think you’re all doing well!”, he cheers.
Bakugou scoffs and throws up a middle finger in his direction. Denki can hear some of the live audience laugh at that, even as they’re too far away to hear what they’re saying without their mics on.
“Don’t patronise us,” Jirou’s muffled voice comes from somewhere behind him.
He twists a little to pat her head in the most patronising way he can manage. “There, there,” he hums, “It’ll only get worse from here.”
He’s not quite sure why he said it, because he genuinely wants to make them all feel better and this certainly did not do that, judging from the long-suffering sigh Jirou lets out, but it is true.
This is the first official appearance they’ve made since Jirou and Bakugou went public about their relationship, so Camie and the fans are expecting juicy details . Denki isn’t sure what exactly that means. He’s also not sure he’s all too keen to learn any juicy details, he has a feeling it would push him into a bottomless pit of despair to learn any unnecessary detail about their grand love story.
No. No, that’s not right. He’s supposed to be a supportive friend. In fact, he wants to learn absolutely everything about their relationship. He’s going to enjoy listening to them answering Camie’s questions, and afterwards when the taping is done he’s going to ask more , that’s how good of a friend he is.
As if he summoned her, Camie saunters over to their couch from where she was having her makeup touched up.
“I’m so excited, you guys!”, she sing-songs.
“That makes one of you,” Bakugou grumbles back.
Jirou reaches out blindly, most of her still buried in the cushion behind Denki and swats at their drummer’s arm. “Don’t be rude.”
Camie lets off an honest-to-god squeal. “Oh, you two are adorbs !” Denki thinks he can probably learn a thing or two on enthusiasm from her.
She turns to him now, leaning in conspiratorially. “Are they always this cute? I bet they flirt a lot, huh?”
“Uhm,” Denki gives back intelligently.
“Oh, you’re right.” Camie waves a perfectly manicured hand through the air. “I gotta save my questions for the recording!” Said hand then goes on to do the impossible— she boops Bakugou’s nose. “It’s gonna be so much fun!”
And then she’s off, chattering something about getting someone to bring them refreshments. She leaves behind a super weird air that Denki can’t quite explain. Sure, Camie is a lot but she’s great at what she does and she’s actually super nice. Even social catastrophes such as the rest of his band should be able to handle her.
In fact, Tokoyami and Yaoyorozu have been handling a brunt of the questions Denki wasn’t quick enough for and he meant what he said earlier: They’re doing great!
But Jirou is still hiding behind him and Bakugou is staring off into space and— Huh.
Is something the matter? Did something happen? Are they in a fight?
He doesn’t think they spoke much on the way over here or in the dressing room. Then, Denki never paid attention to that, so maybe he just wouldn’t notice. But surely now that everyone knows about them, they would feel more comfortable interacting in front of others, right? So why aren’t they?
They aren’t even attempting to look at each other. Sitting next to them, Denki would know. If Bakugou wanted to look at Jirou right now, he would have to quite literally look through Denki, but he’s not even making a little bit of an effort. He is just resolutely glaring at the scaffolding holding up the studio lights.
And, well, Jirou is camera shy, Denki knows this. But the cameras aren’t running right now. So why would she be hiding?
Is she hiding… from Bakugou?
It’s the only thing that makes sense to him right now. If this was a normal day, the two of them would probably not be acting much different. But Denki is sure that on a normal day, they’d be seeking solace with each other, not behind him or in the studio scaffolding.
But it’s not a normal day. Because they’re not speaking. Because they are fighting. Denki wonders if it’s a bad fight, if he should try and mediate. But then he’s not a part of it, of course. It’s their business. Because it’s their relationship. But they’re on a talk show.
Oh, god. Camie is going to ask about their relationship. She’s going to expect a lovey-dovey couple. But they’re not speaking .
This is going to be a disaster. This is going to be absolutely terrible. Monoma is going to start crying. Denki has to do something, he has to fix this, he might be hyperventilating a little, it’s—
“Hi! Cam said you guys might need some rations?”
He needs a second to orient himself but when he looks up there’s a guy standing in front of the couch, holding a box with some packaged snacks and soft drinks. His hair, bright red and spiked towards the ceiling is so distracting and his smile so sunny that for a second Denki can forget all his troubles.
But then Bakugou speaks and it all comes crashing back down on him.
“Got anything harder than that?”, Bakugou asks, nodding at the cans of soda.
It’s clear to Denki that he is not joking (in fact he immediately goes into a little spiral about Bakugou’s and Jirou’s lovers’ quarrel developing into terrible alcoholism on both parts), but the guy just laughs. “Nah, man, sorry. These hot chips can knock a man out, though!”
He holds the bag out to Bakugou who regards them and the guy for a few moments before taking them without a word.
Which is terrible. Because normally Bakugou would have said something else, something socially entirely unacceptable and probably way too loud. But normally, Bakugou isn’t on the brink of alcoholism. Normally, Denki doesn’t have to worry about having to choose sides in a divorce that is surely going to pull their band apart and destroy their career and some close friendships. Bakugou is eating his chips in silence and there’s going to be two christmases and it’s going to be a nightmare.
“What about you, bud? You look a little freaked out, do you want a water?” The staff-guy’s smile is so kind and his teeth are kind of pointy— but then Denki is freaking out and might be seeing things.
“He’ll take that water,” Jirou from beside him says. Only then does Denki realize he forgot to answer.
But the guy, bless his heart, just grins. “It’s normal to be nervous, dude,” He assures as he hands him a water bottle and Jirou a can of soda she points out. “For all it matters, I think you’re doing great!”
He rounds the couch to talk to Tokoyami and Yaoyorozu and Denki is tempted to just hang onto him with his eyes because his presence is very soothing, but it’s cut short when Jirou turns his face to her by his cheeks.
“What’s up with you?”, she demands, her voice suspicious.
“Oh, it’s just, uh, you know…” He gestures vaguely at the studio at large.
“No it’s not,” she decides. “You love this stuff. You’ve been excited all week. What’s actually wrong?”
Denki just blinks for a second. He didn’t tell her he’d been excited.
“Are you sick?”, she asks, her hands moving a little on his cheeks. “You don’t feel like you have a fever or anything.”
“No, I’m fine!”, he assures her.
He thinks it’s probably for the better if she stops touching him. He was freaking out before but now his heartbeat is going haywire and she is going to notice at any second.
“Just— adrenaline!”, he tries. “This is exciting!”
“Sure,” she says drily. It’s obvious she doesn’t believe him.
It’s mind-boggling to Denki. Here she is, in a serious fight with her boyfriend that might alter the paths of all of their lives, and she is worried about him !
His traitorous little heart gives another flutter. He really needs her to stop touching him.
So he reaches up and takes her hands into his and away from his face.
“I promise, I’m fine,” he tries again, as sincerely as he can manage. And he does feel a lot better somehow.
She looks at him for a long moment more, like her eyes are searching for something. When it seems like she found it, she sighs and deflates a little back against the cushions.
“Good,” she hums. “I’ll need you on your A-game for the next part of the interview or I’ll die out there.”
Him. She needed him!
Denki is glad she’s not holding onto him anymore because there is no way she wouldn’t have noticed the heart-palpitations this sends him into.
For a moment it’s great to bask in it. But then Bakugou shifts on her other side and Denki remembers that he is a terrible friend. Bakugou probably noticed too and is about to give him a piece of his mind for having a heart attack about his girlfriend— only when Denki carefully chances a look, Bakugou isn’t even looking at him. His focus has shifted from the scaffolding to the cheery staff-guy.
“Alrighty!”, the guy is saying. “That’s all then! Cameras should come back on in about five minutes so I’ll leave you guys to huddle.” Before leaving though, he turns his grin back at Bakugou, a peculiar sort of glint in his eye. “Doing okay with those chips? They nearly killed my co-worker a while back, no shame if they’re too much for you, honestly.”
Instead of answering right away, Bakugou plops another chip into his mouth and keeps eye contact while chewing and swallowing. Weird choice. Then he looks the guy up and down for some reason and when he reaches his face again, he hums: “I’ve had hotter, honestly.”
“That so?” The guy gives back, with a nervous chuckle.
Bakugou nods sagely. “I’ll have to tell you about it sometime,” He says.
What’s this about again? Right, Chips. At least Denki thinks so.
“Well, I have to run, taping’s about to start. I’ll see you later,” Staff-guy chirps. Denki has half a mind to say he looks nervous. Or deeply confused.
Bakugou pointedly looks back down, at the guys’ chest. No, Denki realises. His nametag. “See ya, Kirishima,” he says.
Kirishima chuckles again, slightly hysteric, and then he’s off. Whelp, that was weird, but Denki can count on Bakugou to offend helpless TV staff just because he’s in a bad mood. It’s a shame, Kirishima seems really nice.
A choked off sound makes Denki turn back to Jirou. She has a hand pressed to her mouth in what looks like a desperate attempt to not… start crying? Her eyes look a bit watery and her shoulders are shaking.
The others seem to have noticed too, because Bakugou hisses: “Not a word.”
It just seems to make Jirou’s shoulders shake harder and that’s when it hits Denki: Of course she’s sad. Bakugou was just really nice to Kirishima, for his standards. Probably nicer than he’s been to Jirou all day, them being in a fight and all. It must feel like a slap to the face for her to just sit here and watch that. And what Bakugou just said was super rude.
Denki furrows his eyebrows and is about to say something, even as he’s not sure why, but Camie walks back onto stage then and gestures to them that the mics are going to turn back on any second now.
So Denki has to swallow his tongue and fume a little about Bakugou and worry about Jirou in silence. And still, beneath all that, he knows he’s going to do his best to help both of them maneuver through the questions they’ll get. Because he’s their friend and that’s what he does. And because Jirou needs him.
The night their episode of Illusion airs, Denki is staying late at the company. He had a “meeting” with Hakamada, which is what their stylist calls his monthly attempt to talk Denki out of growing his hair out. Denki likes Hakamada, he really thinks the man knows his shit, and he has truly perfected maintaining Denki’s “ridiculous but marketable” dye-job. The only thing they don’t see eye to eye on is that Denki doesn’t want a stylish undercut, he quite likes his hair ridiculous and marketable in colour and length. One day, Hakamada will make his peace with it.
Today was not that day, so the sun has set as Denki leaves the stylist’s office. He is lost in thought as he waits for the elevator, so lost that he doesn’t hear Uraraka’s voice down the hallway, only notices her as she slips into the elevator with him.
“Great that you’re still here,” she rushes. “I need to talk to you about something.”
That shouldn’t be stressing him out. She’s their manager. She needs to talk to him about several things all the time.
But there’s something tight and nervous in her smile and the way she taps around her trusty iPad as she continues: “ Illusion aired just now! And it went great, you guys were great!”
Denki is stressed out.
“It’s just,” Uraraka says, “Since it’s officially released now, the live audience from the taping started posting behind-the-scenes pictures. They legally can’t do that before the episode airs, there’s a waiver and everything.”
Denki knows about this, vaguely. He thinks it’s Monoma’s job to screen those pictures, or someone else’s at PR. He never really worried about it. He’s worried right now.
“I already talked to Kendou and we both think it’s not a big deal, it’ll blow over quick and I don’t think Aizawa needs to be involved. I just wanted you to be aware of these, and, well. Talk!”
She seems to have found what she was looking for because she turns the screen in his direction.
There’s several pictures. Denki remembers scrolling through similarly blurry shots on Shouto’s couch, but this is different. Not only is he in these, he is the focus of most of them.
There’s some of Jirou slouched over into the studio’s couch behind him, some from when she resurfaced from there when Kirishima came up to them.
There is a lot of pictures of her hands holding tightly onto his cheeks, their faces mere centimeters apart. Denki feels his face heat up at it, and at the next set of pictures, where he is holding onto her hands and smiling at her brightly.
His face burns because it’s so obvious in his face in those pictures, how he feels about her.
Of course people would notice. No one could look at these and not know. Not the fans, not Uraraka or Kendou. Not Jirou.
Denki swallows. “Uh,” he starts. He doesn’t know what to say. Uraraka said it’s not a big deal, but how can’t it? “Well…” Everyone knows, they have to. “Fuck,” he settles on.
“Oh, no!” ,Uraraka hurries. “Like I said, it’ll be fine, these aren’t even circulating that much! I just wanted you to know that they are.”
She smiles, and it’s probably supposed to be assuring, but to Denki it just seems pitying. Look at the poor loser, in love with a taken woman.
Uraraka is already barrelling on: “This whole situation is super out of the ordinary, just as new to you guys as everyone in management. So of course there’s going to be some weird things to handle. But we’re handling it, so don’t you worry!”
The elevator stops, the doors open and Denki suddenly doesn’t want to step out because the world outside knows now.
But Uraraka grabs onto his elbow when he doesn’t move and pulls him out with her. “It’s alright, I promise!” She chirps. “Just, you know, keep that under wraps a little.”
She smiles at him, conspiratorially. Like there’s anything for just the two of them to conspire about. Like Denki doesn’t feel absolutely exposed to the world.
“Anyways, it’s late, I’ll let you go now! I met Jirou for coffee earlier, I think she mentioned a movie night? Have fun!”
And then Uraraka is off, and Denki’s in the lobby and everything’s out there now but the sky isn’t falling down on him somehow and he’s supposed to be at Jirou’s apartment in twenty minutes.
The way over is excruciating. Denki isn’t a paranoid person, even after they got popular and people started recognising them on the street once in a while, he never felt the need to go out of his way to hide.
He really wants to hide right now. Tokoyami relies on a combination of facemasks and a rotating set of hats and scarfs as disguises, Bakugou on plain hostility and Yaoyorozu on a private driver— the closest Denki can get to any of that spontaneously is getting an Uber to Jirou’s place instead of taking the tram he usually would have. And still, the nagging thought that the driver will turn around and cuss him out as a homewrecker doesn’t go away until he’s standing at the curb to Jirou’s apartment complex.
Which is ridiculous. He doesn’t act any differently around Jirou now than he always has.
He’s just always been in love with her. And now that’s a problem.
The doorman waves at him as he passes, says something about how he saw them on TV just now. He’s smiling, but Denki feels sick.
He’s alone in the elevator and tries to convince himself that he’s being ridiculous. Nothing’s changed. Uraraka said it’s alright.
It doesn’t work, when he’s in front of Jirou’s door his hands feel sweaty and he has half a mind to turn on his heel and march right back home. But he already rang the doorbell and he can hear Jirou in the hallway and the door is opening and—
She’s in the same ratty hoodie she was wearing when they first met in the library, and Denki wants to fling himself out of a window.
“You’re late,” she says, but she’s smiling. Like she’s happy to see him. Like it’s okay that he’s here.
And maybe it is. They’ve had movie nights since freshman year, more or less regularly, always just the two of them. They’ve seen movies with the others of course, but that’s different, separate from when they get together in either of their apartments and have mediocre microwavable popcorn and watch objectively terrible movies just so Jirou can talk shit about them the entire time. That’s just for them. And maybe it’s okay that it is.
Denki grins back apologetically. “Hakamada didn’t let me go,” he explains as he shrugs out of his jacket and toes his shoes off.
Jirou’s living room is lit up only by the Netflix menu on the TV and a comically large lava lamp Denki and Yaoyorozu had gotten her for a birthday a while ago. (Denki chose it, but it was a fortune, so Yaoyorozu funded it while Denki only paid for the equally large bow they put around it.) It’s cozy and warm and familiar, and so is the buttery smell of the popcorn and the way Jirou settles in next to him as they sit down on the couch.
She’s telling him about something that happened in the coffee shop she went to with Uraraka earlier while the opening credits run, but it soon devolves into a rant about the leading actor.
“...So, I can never take this man seriously again. But this movie is fine, I guess.”
“Because…?”
“The rest of the cast is wonderful,” she says, as the scene changes. Jirou gestures to the screen. “Case in point.”
Ashido Mina is playing the female lead. She’s fairly recent to success but popular, Denki knows, because they got invites to an award show Ashdio is hosting a couple weeks ago and Uraraka went on an unprompted but very informative TED talk about why exactly they should be honoured.
“Can’t believe you’re stealing Uraraka’s woman,” he jokes.
Jirou snorts. “Oh, believe me, I’ll leave all of you in the dust if Ashido Mina even breathes in my direction at that award show. Look at her!”
“Even Bakugou?” Denki asks, and immediately regrets it.
Jirou is undeterred. “ Especially Bakugou,” she laughs.
It’s quiet for a few minutes as she focuses back on the movie and Denki overthinks. Clearly, they’d been joking around, hyperbolizing. But what did she mean ‘ especially Bakugou’? Should she be saying that, if she was happy in their relationship? Should Denki be concerned? Should he be happy?
No, no he shouldn’t be happy. He’s a good friend and he should want Jirou to be in a good relationship. Mostly, he should stop obsessing over said relationship.
He’s sure, if any of the doubts and worries Denki has had about Jirou and Bakugou were true, Jirou would feel comfortable confiding in him about it.
Right?
Jirou’s phone buzzes.
“Speak of the devil,” she mutters before she picks up. “‘Sup?”
Denki didn’t catch the name on the display, but even as he can’t make out what it’s saying the voice sounds distinctly like Bakugou’s.
“Wait, wait,” Jirou interrupts whatever Bakugou was saying. “You were doing what?... I see. At that really good Italian place?... Nice. Did he like it?... Of course. Then what happened?... Actually hurry it up, me and Kaminari are— Huh? Oh, shut the fuck up, I could be saying the same to you!... What do you mean no ?! You literally called me to talk about how you’re going to hook— Oh, is that Kirishima? Alright, I’ll let you go… Yep. Yes. Go get ‘em, tiger. No, you fuck off.”
Denki knows that he only heard half of the conversation but he feels like he got maybe 10% of it. “Kirishima?”, he repeats, incredulous. “The guy on staff at Illusion?”
“Oh, yes,” Jirou says. “I made Bakugou ask Camie for his number. Seems to be going great.”
Denki doesn’t know what exactly is going great and he’s very confused but before he can ask, Jirou excitedly points to the screen. “Oh, I’ve seen this scene, the special effects in it are insane, look at all that blood!”
And that’s that, and Denki doesn’t really get the chance to ask more about Bakugou and Kirishima the talk show staff.
He’s happy their reclusive drummer is making friends, he guesses.
At some point towards the end of the movie, Denki falls asleep. After the cool scene with all the blood, the plot quickly lost tension, and he’s had a long day at the label, and Jirou’s living room is warm and her couch is comfortable and she’s sort of leaning into him and everything is cozy and drowsy and one moment, he blinks, the next he wakes up and there’s soft morning light filtering in through the curtains and a weight across his torso.
The lava lamp is still on, and he tries to reach out to switch it off but when he moves there’s a soft noise of protest beneath his chin as Jirou shifts.
Jirou. Who is laying across his chest. Who he has an arm around. Who is nuzzling into the crook of his neck.
Denki freezes and stares down at her for a very long moment. What is he doing? What were they doing?
He wants to tell himself he’s fine, because this isn’t the first time something along these lines has happened. A lot of their movie nights ended with either or both of them falling asleep, and other people make for very comfortable pillows. But the other times it has happened, Jirou hasn’t been dating their friend. It had just been Denki being selfish, and hurting only himself in the process. Now, being selfish meant jeopardizing his friends’ relationship.
He absolutely can’t do that, so he starts carefully pushing at Jirou’s shoulder.
Slowly, she wakes up, and Denki’s heart clenches because it’s the most adorable thing he’s ever witnessed and he really needs to stop thinking that.
Jirou groans and swats at his insistent hand on her shoulder. “Denki, stop,” she slurs. Her voice is raspy with sleep and she said his first name and Denki’s going to have an aneurysm.
“You gotta get up,” he says. He can’t bring himself to raise his voice above a gentle whisper, and it sounds intimate and gentle and he wants to swallow his fist whole.
“I don’t wanna,” Jirou protests, resolutely burrowing deeper into his chest. “‘M comfortable. You’re warm.”
Maybe he’ll just die.
“Jirou, please—” She reaches up and slaps a clumsy hand across his face.
“Just let me have this for a bit,” she mumbles. What does this even mean ?
The doorbell rings.
Wonderful. There’s going to be a neighbour there, or a delivery person, or a psycho stalker fan, and they’re gonna see them, all cozied up and everyone will know that Denki is a terrible person, a horrific homewrecker and an absolute dick, if they don’t already know from yesterday’s pictures. And Bakugou is going to hate him, and Jirou’s going to never speak to him again when she realizes, and everything is going to go to shit.
The doorbell rings again, multiple times in quick succession, very urgently. It seems important.
“Jirou, the door,” he tries.
“I don’t wanna go,” she gives back. “You go.”
“... I have to get up for that.”
She groans. “Fine.”
It takes Denki only two seconds to jump up after Jirou rolls off of him and continues dozing on the couch. Immediately, he misses how warm and comfortable she felt against him, and immediately he wants to kick himself for thinking that.
The doorbell has been joined by incessant knocking, and he practically sprints to the door.
“Is someone dying?!”, he asks as he throws it open.
Bakugou blinks at him for a moment and Denki’s soul actually leaves his body. So this is how he’s going to die.
Somewhere behind him, there’s rustling. If he turned around, Denki guesses he would see Jirou peeking out over the back of the couch, because he can hear her clearly when she says: “Come inside and close the goddamn door, it’s freezing.”
But he doesn’t turn around because he’s rooted in place, staring at Bakugou whose blinking is slowly morphing into an absolutely insane grin.
“I’m going to rip both of your heads off,” Jirou announces.
Bakugou starts cackling, and pushes past Denki’s shoulder into the apartment. He beelines for the couch and drops something onto Jirou’s head— one of the hoodies Hakamada curated specifically to be a couples’ item .
“You forgot our date, sweetheart ,” Bakugou admonishes, and he sounds positively delighted by the fact.
Denki has managed to close the door but is still rooted to the same spot in the hallway, awaiting his demise.
“Fuck off,” Jirou groans.
“But honeycakes , the PR-bastards already called the paparazzi to follow us around all day, it’s going to be blast!” Bakugou has sauntered over to Jirou’s kitchenette and is starting the coffee machine. “Yet here you are, cozying up with Pikachu, completely forgetting about li’l ol’ me.”
Denki is going to be sick.
Bakugou takes the now filled mug and, instead of bringing it over to Jirou, like Denki for some reason assumed, takes a long sip. “One warm embrace from Denki , and I’m old news, hm, sugarcookie ?”
“Fuck off ,” Jirou repeats. Then raises a sardonic eyebrow. “How’s Kirishima, anyways?”
“Very good,” Bakugou replies gleefully. “He’s great.” Denki doesn’t think he’s ever seen him in this good a mood before 11AM
“I bet,” Jirou gumbles, then points at Bakugou’s chest. “Because that’s definitely not your shirt.”
The shirt Bakugou is wearing sports the logo and album cover of an ancient country or folk band that hasn’t been around for decades. Denki knows for a fact that Bakugou changes the station when their music comes on the radio. The shirt is also at least two sizes too big on him.
Bakugou waves a hand through the air. “Yeah, his taste in music is fucking horrendous.” He grins smugly. “But very much worth it for everything else.”
Jirou shakes her head. “Please spare me the details.”
“Oh, so you don’t wanna hear how he can pick me up with one—”
“I’m about to commit a homophobic hatecrime.”
Bakugou cackles again as several wheels in Denki’s head start turning at worrisome speeds.
Yesterday, approximately 11PM, Bakugou called Jirou, talking about dinner at an Italian place, and, inexplicably, about Kirishima. In fact, Denki would chance that Bakugou had been with Kirishima, at 11PM Japanese Standard Time, the previous night. Jirou ended the conversation with Go get ‘em, Tiger.
At around 11.45 PM that same previous night, Jirou cuddled up to him. She was wearing the same hoodie she wore at around 1.47AM many years prior, when they first met and Denki had emotions about that. he also had emotions about how close she was to him, how comfortable he felt like that, how right. At 12.13AM, they were both asleep, cuddled up like that, comfortably.
The following morning, at about 9.57AM, Denki woke up after frankly the best night’s rest he’s had in a while. At 10.03AM he started panicking and at 10.11AM he started trying to wake Jirou up. At 10.13AM the doorbell rang for the first time. A lot of things happened in very quick succession then, and Denki’s perception of time is a little messed up. But it is now 10.29AM and Bakugou is presumably still talking about Kirishima’s biceps, or something. Denki can’t really make it out because Jirou is drowning him out with increasingly colourful threats. She is wrapped up in one of the fluffy blankets she keeps on her couch and looks absolutely adorable.
Which isn’t important. The important bit of information is what Denki processes next: 10.30AM and Bakugou is setting down his now empty coffee mug.
Bakugou drinks exactly one cup of coffee every morning. Something about caffeine, and how it’s unhealthy. Or a gateway drug. Or both. And he only drinks one very specific brand of it, because he’s a snob. The same brand Jirou buys, because she is only slightly less of a snob.
10.31AM and Denki comes to the conclusion: “You didn’t sleep at home last night.”
Jirou and Bakugou, who had both been trying to talk over each other, stop and turn to him.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Bakugou says.
“We’ve established this,” Jirou adds with a laugh.
Denki’s brain-wheels are not quite done turning yet. “You slept at Kirishima’s,” he continues, “The nice staff-guy from Illusion . He gave you hot chips.”
Bakugou’s eyebrows knit up in incredulity and he opens his mouth, but Jirou holds out a hand. “Give him a second, he’s working through something. Maybe he has a point.”
Denki is sure he does, but he doesn’t know what it is because the next part of his conclusion doesn’t make sense.
Because it’s becoming increasingly clear, that Bakugou slept with Kirishima, the nice staff-guy, who had given him chips.
And now he is here, at Jirou’s apartment, who is his girlfriend and who he has a date scheduled with. He also found Denki, hopelessly in love with said girlfriend, in her apartment after clearly having spent the night there (albeit innocently), yet he doesn’t seem particularly bothered.
Neither does Jirou.
Denki tries to put this into words several times, opening and closing his mouth. What he settles on is: “Cheating is wrong.”
Jirou laughs, loud but quick, like he didn’t mean to but couldn’t quite help it. Bakugou is still staring at him with confusion verging on mild anger, but after a moment it morphs into utter disbelief.
“No way,” he says, quietly, nearly reverently.
Jirou is still trying to keep her laughter at bay. Denki is sure his ears are smoking.
“No way,” Bakugou says again, louder this time. That insanely delighted grin is slowly coming back. Denki has the off-thought that they might need to call an ambulance for Bakugou.
Jirou looks between them as her giggles slowly dissipate. It’s stupidly cute, and Denki wishes he was less confused so he could appreciate it more. “Wait, what’s going on?,” she asks.
That’s what Denki wants to know!
“He—” Bakugou starts. “He thinks— Oh my fucking god.” He laughs, the slightest bit hysteric, and runs a hand through his hair. “This isn’t happening, holy shit.”
Yes, they definitely need to call an ambulance.
Bakugou walks across the room so he’s right in front of Denki. Oh, Denki thinks, there it is, he’s going to die now. It’s a little delayed, but expected. Bakugou puts both hands on his shoulders and looks at him, very seriously.
“I’m gay,” he says.
“No you’re not,” Denki immediately gives back.
“Yes, I am,” Bakugou says.
“Yes, he is,” Jirou also says, at the same time.
Denki looks between them once, twice, three times, before he tries, weakly: “But—”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Bakugou interrupts. “No.” He points at himself. “I’m gay.” He gestures between Jirou and him. “We’re not actually dating. It’s a publicity stunt.” he points at Denki. “One that you came up with.” Finally, he gestures between Denki and Jirou. “You two are in love with each other. Which shouldn’t be any of my fucking business. But thanks to you, it is!”
Denki hasn’t died, but he thinks this is vaguely what it would feel like.
Jirou is gaping from her spot on the couch. “You didn’t seriously think…”, she starts.
“Yes, he did,” Bakugou says. “So here’s what’s going to happen.”
What happens is this: They’re all scared of Uraraka’s wrath, so Bakugou and Jirou have no choice but to go on the date that she scheduled for them. They escape it and the paps earlier than planned though and return to Jirou’s apartment in record time. Denki, in the meantime, goes entirely insane while sitting on Jirou’s couch.
When Bakugou and Jirou come back, Jirou hands him an overpriced pastry she got for him and her face is beet red when their hands brush. Bakugou makes a retching noise and exiles himself to Jirou’s bedroom until the paps leave from in front of the apartment complex. Before he goes, he announces that he has to call Kirishima, because he can’t deal with their dumb asses anymore.
And then the bedroom door falls closed and they’re alone.
It’s quiet for a very long moment, until Jirou says: “I wanted to strangle you when you suggested it.”
“Why?” Denki all but squeaks. It’s a great start to this conversation.
“ Why?! How would you feel if the guy you’ve liked for years casually suggests you get into a pretend-relationship with your gay mutual friend?”
“I didn’t know he’s gay!” Denki defends himself. “Or that it was pretend, for that matter, I just wanted to help, I thought—” What Jirou said registers. “...What?”
Her cheeks look hot to the touch and she is staring off to the side resolutely. “You heard me.”
“I… When… I mean, what?” Denki tries again.
“I’ve liked you since college.” Jirou’s voice is barely above a whisper.
“Okay, but what does that mean?”, Denki asks. Because it can’t mean what it sounds like. Because that would be ridiculous and entirely too good to be true.
Jirou looks at him, incredulous. “It means that one day you barged into my dorm room and proclaimed that you broke three guitar strings trying to learn the chords to my favourite song and showed off your dumb-ass dinosaur band-aids and my first thought was how badly I wanted to kiss you.”
“You must really like dinosaurs,” Denki chokes out. What is he saying?!
Jirou is looking right at him, her fingers are knotting together the strings of the hoodie Hakamada picked out, her blush is reaching the tips of her ears, and her lips are pressed together into a nervous line.
“I… really like you,” Denki amends.
And that opens the flood gates.
“No, actually— I’m very sure I’m in love with you. Have been, since freshman year, since that espresso in the library. Well, maybe I wasn’t in love back then. But I am now. And I wanted you to be happy, I always do, because— because you’re it , for me. And I was thinking that maybe I can’t be that for you, but I can still help you be happy. And I realize now, that that was very stupid and also— There were so many times where I just nearly said something but I chickened out and if I’d just— But I didn’t obviously. But I wanted to, so bad. Because sometimes I look at you and it feels like… like I’m being struck by lightning. No, actually, that would probably hurt, that’s a terrible comparison, but it feels e lectric and—”
“I really need you to stop talking,” Jirou rushes out.
He messed up, he said too much. This is all actually an elaborate prank, or a very sad misunderstanding, clearly. She was joking. In fact, Bakugou had been joking. In fact, Bakugou’s going to come out of Jirou’s bedroom any second now, to announce that he and Jirou are happily engaged to be married and Denki had just put everything out there.
“Not like that,” Jirou says, and suddenly her hands are on his cheeks again, like back at Camie’s studio. “Look at me.”
Denki does, looks her right in the eyes, and … yeah. Yeah, okay. There is no prank. He didn’t mess up.
Jirou said she likes him, and she’s looking at him like that , like he has dreamed about her looking at him, and this is real.
She takes a deep breath. “I wrote Cloud 9 for you. I wrote every song for you, a little bit.”
Denki thinks about every time he’s watched her do that, thinks about the light in her eyes when she did, the smiles she would throw him when she was happy with a finished song. Yes. Yes, this is real.
It’s real and it’s happening, and it took an awful long time to get here, and some very complicated misunderstandings, with consequences that they will have to deal with in the not so far-off future.
But right now, it’s real, Jirou is pulling him in even as Denki can’t stop smiling and he feels her smile against him. He couldn't care less about the consequences.