#and even now i don't actually know quite how far down the rabbithole goes; i'd have to consolidate info w/other girls to get a better image

[hua-fei-hua]

Extra Notes: Rhythm of the Heart Ch. 3

chapter is available on ao3 or ff.net

i chose crush by tessa violet for this chapter’s title bc y’know. all that stuff going on last chapter where i infodumped abt kiri’s actual motive being “ugh i like him but the idea of being vulnerable and real scares me” and so now he’s going out w/his crush and it’s just like. idk man hanging out w/your crush be like that

and also all the bits where it’s like “holding haaands” like touch touch touch touch touch wheee

this is the first chapter of the fic to actually mention the soulmates thing

i actually have this habit of forgetting abt it bc i treat it so casually tbh

idk if this is a good thing or not tbh but i mean like spoiler alert they are soulmates anyway but how they find out is part of the fun

when i needed to have a long, private chat w/cody the almost-fake-boyfriend and the band room was closed (meaning, no practice rooms), i’d take him on a long walk where we’d kinda talk about the thing along the way, but mostly at the place we were going

i’d honestly always wanted to have a long, dramatic talk on a swingset bc i think it would have been FUN and DRAMATIC and probably also a little POETIC but i never got the chance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i probably definitely mentioned this in an earlier extra notes post, but it always surprises me with how much i end up projecting onto the characters for this fic hahaha

stuff like “pfft, no, [i know your name] i was just testing you” and wanting to hold smth bc Anxiety(tm) and stopping in the middle of the walk are examples

i also told people “the more you push the crosswalk button the longer it takes” a lot bc that’s how i got myself to stop spamming it so much, and surprisingly people believe it so i’m making this an urban legend now

the shiketsu stuff (i.e. the lockdown, bakugou previously having attended there, etc) will all be addressed and/or covered in the fic itself so gonna skim over that for now

however, if you’re also reading moment, you might have previously noticed references to bakugou being gone from ua for a time but still being present at band memories where it’s specifically mentioned that shiketsu was there as well. that’s just consistency across stories but yeah~!

“[camie] was just a prop” haha lol so fun fact when cody told me that he didn’t want any part of the fake dating to benefit him (before proceeding to repeatedly ask why it had to be specifically him), i told him, “[cody]. you’re a prop.” and i always felt kinda bad about that

the bit where kirishima just stops but bakugou keeps on going actually means a lot to me because despite the fact that cody often agreed to play along with my shenanigans, sometimes he’d sound a lot more like he was just humoring me and he actually hated the idea of doing it

so i had a similar moment with him where we were out on a walk, and it was raining and i had the umbrella and i just stopped, but he kept going even though he’d been the one to insist on having the umbrella. and i was like, “you don’t have to do this if you’re not gonna take it seriously, dude.” 

and i’d dropped down the umbrella bc i don’t care abt the rain and so we were just there, alone on the sidewalk, far apart and yet staring at each other, with the rain coming down on both of us, and it was silent and really fucking dramatic but yeah, that’s why the stopping bit means a lot to me

it’s also there bc even though this fic is told primarily from kirishima’s perspective, i figured readers would probably be able to pick up on some subtleties of baku’s character regardless

i think what i’m trying to say here is that “it makes bakugou realize he’s being kind of an asshole”

while this isn’t my first time writing krbk as a pairing, it is my first time writing them where they’re the focus and have very little in terms of established relationships, so it often surprised me with how prickly bakugou was being

something else that would probably be good to realize now is that at this point in time, bakugou doesn’t actually like kirishima back. he means it when he says, “like as in ‘as a person’, right?”

this could also be interpreted as him kind of maybe starting to figure out that kiri has a crush on him and giving him an opportunity to confess

but yeah since this isn’t exactly a meet-cute, they have a really rocky dynamic starting out, but it’ll develop into something good later on as they get more comfortable w/each other

bakugou's "I have so many fucking questions" from last chapter means that he mostly just wants to know why now and what this all is gonna entail. 

the second you actually ask him what his questions are, they actually kind of fly out of his head bc he's also kinda just saying that in order to best express his disbelief. by the time after school rolls around and he's actually processed the event, he doesn't actually care anymore about kiri's motives and just wants to help, which is basically what happened here in this chapter

bakugou having a side preference when talking and walking is actually something i do. 

i’m not sure when it happened (might’ve been when i was a freshman and walking around w/a friend during pe, and she’d sometimes have a side preference bc her hearing ability varied in one ear from day to day; might’ve been when i got into band and i had to always be watching the center from my peripherals), but it’s basically just foreshadowing here

maybe you figured it out from that alone, but i’m not gonna say bc while the characters do notice it and think it’s a little weird, none of them say anything about it and just get used to it

“well, i’m not gonna grab your face and make out with you in front of everyone we know, if that’s what you’re getting at” :)

this is probably one of my favorite lines tbh

:) :) :)

anyway, so yeah all the bits from kiri abt ~*holding hands*~ n stuff is partly in reference to canon and oh my god the hand holding part of the bakugou rescue arc, but it’s also partly bc that was smth i mentioned to cody when we were first figuring out what fake dating for a night would look like

he was like “wait if i’m your fake boyfriend, like, i’m gonna have to get in character for this huh. what am i supposed to do, like?” and i was like “dude idk! hang out with me, maybe hold my hand??” and his face was extremely D: and so i was like “what, embarrassed? lmao” and he was like “yes. what if i wanted to save this hand for a girl i actually liked?”

lmao

there’s more to that story but it’s not mine to tell

also omigod finally we get to the fake secret dating thing

like i guess i was a little hesitant to tag the fic under “fake/pretend relationship” and “secret dating” bc i’m pretty sure for most people, the point of fake dating is to look EXTREMELY TAKEN to the rest of the world, and if there’s secret dating involved, then it’s at the point where the fake couple has confessed their true feelings after a point where the fake dating becomes an open secret, and then they start secretly dating for real while maintaining the facade of it all still being fake for whatever reason, but that is like, the opposite of what happens in this fic

the pretending-to-be-secretly-dating thing was smth i came up with w/my bff when i was still figuring out the details of the whole shebang before Committing(tm) and asking cody, and for me it was a necessary measure bc cody and i were going to spend ONE (1) night pretending to be dating at a concert that was taking place at one of our sister schools

basically, it meant that like 2/3 - 3/4 of the people performing in the concert knew who we were, and they all had friends who went to our school that they were in regular contact with, and so if it became “public knowledge” at the sister school that cody n i were “dating”, this would become a huge nuisance when the news inevitably came back to our school like two or three days later and fuck man now we have to pretend to date here too?? 

the solution? to pretend to be secretly dating to (well, reason zero, keep cody more comfortable bc he doesn’t like public displays of affection) one, give us an excuse to not look like a couple in the honeymoon stages; and two, if and when i had to use our “relationship” to complete my mission(s), we could add on, “but it’s not been made public yet, so don’t fucking tell anyone” to stifle the girl network and keep people from asking us about it next time the bands met up

our band was in the middle of the two-year prep period for the rose parade at the time, and since we were doing the rose parade in collaboration w/our two sister schools, we would be meeting up w/the people we saw at the concert within a month, so it wasn’t an unfounded idea

of course, i had plans of action that covered the possibility of cody n i “dating” getting out, but he backed out of the whole thing at the last second anyway so it doesn’t matter

ANYWAY, the secret part of the equation is something i really liked, and i wanted to keep it for this fic, but bc krbk was doing this as a more long-term thing than one (1) night, i needed to change things up a little bit, but the motives are essentially the same

people paying particular attention to bkg bc he’s ass. dm? that was actually from cody, whose main objection at first was, “i’m head drum major, everyone knows me and is paying attention to me at all times!!”

girls being absolutely ruthless about the spread of information? yeah, that’s called the girl network, and (you would not believe the amount of stuff i’d heard abt cody via the girl network) that is something mina absolutely would have a grip made of iron over

the bit about girls hyping up kirishima to mina if krbk breaks up pretty soon after she’s officially declared to be over him would be a problem bc in the girls’ minds it’s like, “oh my god he’s actually free now dude wait you haven’t actually missed out now’s your shot you can like him still dude” bc it’s all fresh y’know, and easy to slip back into that mentality of liking someone

i feel the need to again clarify that mina absolutely does not have any romantic intent towards kiri in this fic, and her letting everyone think that is honestly kind of a sacrifice on her part bc like. ew people knowing who you have a crush on and double ew if it’s someone you hang out with all the time. 

tbh it felt kinda weird having tdmm mentioned so casually as an established relationship but i mean, get this: i love them they were the first pairing i wrote for this au, so it makes sense in-universe to have it just be this given no one thinks twice about

“i don’t want to have to learn your taste in music that well” even though i most definitely mentioned this in the first a/n, i think now’s a good time to remind y’all that the soulmate gig is that whatever music you’re listening to atm your soulmate can hear as well

basically, the implied action going on here is that a form of casual affection (or form of showing off the soulmate bond) would be to do smth like humming along to whatever your soulmate’s listening to at the moment, and so krbk would have to learn each other’s preferred music really really well in order to be able to pull out something the other liked with essentially zero notice. 

also, bakugou’s basically saying, “your taste in music is probably shit and i don’t want to have to subject myself to it if i don’t have to”

“ ‘Nah,’ said Eijirou, as casually as he could after a pause as long as the one he’d just taken. ‘I’m not that good at lying, so I don’t think it’s worth the trouble.’ ”

*inhales* 

*starts screaming into the void*

okay so like aside from the fact that he’s telling the truth about being a bad liar IN THE MIDDLE of telling an ELABORATE FUCKING LIE, the long pause bit is sort of inspired by smth from (guess what) my elaborate drama w/cody

blah blah blah context isn’t important but basically i was vaguing abt smth that pertained to him, and he looked me dead in the eye and was like “it’s [the exact thing i was vaguing about], isn’t it” and i hesitated for so damn long (bc fuck i wasn’t supposed to tell him the thing) that if i said no, i’d look like a goddamn liar, so i broke and told the truth

but yeah, when in the middle of an elaborate lie, i took a long pause when confronted with a question that meant either breaking and telling the truth or digging myself into a deeper hole by blatantly lying some more, and i told the truth in a way that blew up in my face later

of course, for eijirou, this truth isn’t going to blow up in his face an hour after it’s told. 

:)

i actually kind of wanted to have a bit where kirishima’s just like “wait what four-year-old crush??” when bkg says he won’t let him take the decision back bc i mean, when you put it like that, holy fuck that’s an intense crush, and then bakugou would internally file that away under “smth’s not right here” bc how do you just not notice that a crush has been going on for four years. i decided against it bc

1. “we’re [all] in this together now” c’mon

2. bc i sometimes regret letting cody take back his decision at the last second, i wanted to solidify that difference between my experiences and what i was writing about by having both boys say, “hey. we’re committing to this, and we’re not going to back out no matter what happens” and meaning it.

i’d seen “bakubabe” thrown around in krbk stuff before, and while i totally agree that kirishima is the pet name type, there was always just smth abt using “babe” on a s/o that rubbed me the wrong way, so the bit where it was just like “aight that felt weird to say” was mostly just me trying to get used to typing it bc he probably will be using it again later

i’d like to think that bakugou picked up “hon” as a pet name (if you could call it that) from his mother, whom i think would probably call him n her husband “hon” a lot

if not that, then compared to my usual 95% confidence interval on writing bakugou in-character, i’m like 23% sure that baku calling anyone “hon” on impulse is in-character, but it’s also fun to imagine so i’ll let it slide

there was a moment in talking out the details w/cody that i told him, “okay, one last thing. [band pres] has to know everything” and he had this extremely unreadable expression on his face, but more in the sense that it looked kinda “oh shit” and i couldn’t tell what he was thinking than it just being ridiculous. 

the difference here is that there’s more context around cody’s expression that changes depending on how much you have, whereas with bakugou it’s just like a “what the fuck?” w/o any deeper meaning

“if i don’t have someone to talk to about all this, i will probably go insane”

i went months without telling the majority if not all of my squad about the elaborate web of lies and dramatics that i was involved in when it came to cody, and my mental health really did suffer for it because 

first of all, i don’t like telling lies, even little white lies or simply withholding the truth, but in order to keep the delicate social situation from positively exploding and hitting everyone with the shrapnel, i had to keep problems to myself, which leads into

secondly, i, like, need to talk about my problems, or at least write about them in a place where people will read and respond to them in some way. (i do have fic up for other fandoms where i closely map my experiences onto the characters and let people say what they will abt their actions, although it’s difficult to consider rhythm one of those bc the goal is to tell a story that merely draws from the experiences) it’s like, i know what to do when i hurt. i write, and i talk, and i use my words, so that i can understand how it feels and tune out its sharpness.

and i wrote about everything in excruciating detail in my diary, but because it was the basic equivalent of talking to a wall (yeah, you get it out, but you don’t always know what to do about it next), it really sucked, to put it lightly.

i told them abt it eventually and things got better tho like i’m fine now

so yeah. even though kirishima won’t be getting into as much of a sinkhole that i found myself in, i still wanted to put this line in there for myself, to at least provide him the external support he’d need in something as i guess emotionally complex as this

i did NOT suffer to wish it upon my fictional characters whom i want to give a neat little happily ever after ugh

“if [sero, kaminari, and i all] have to keep [the fake bit] a secret from [mina] [...] it’s all just gonna fall apart” oh hey look at that foreshadowing

“who the fuck would i tell” / “i was thinking smth along the lines of your friends” 

so unfortunately, bc of the nature of the bakusquad, bkg doesn’t really have a whole lot of friends in this au, especially no one he’d think worth talking to abt the fake dating thing. however, it wouldn’t weigh on him in the same way it does kirishima for reasons that’ll be discussed more in like... at minimum, mentioned in chapter 6, but not properly covered until chapter 19.

reasons that’ll be explored later in the fic, and he just has less to worry about in general. to him it’s just fake dating; there’s nothing emotional at stake for him until later on when surprise, “fuck, feelings” stuff happens

anyway, he does eventually come to trust jirou and become friends with her bc they have the shared solidarity of being the drum majors

okay so fun fact that ties in with moment, but i’ve been pretty careful to not describe kirishima as a redhead until they reach this point in time (december) bc he doesn’t start dying his hair until pretty soon before asking bakugou to be his fake boyfriend

what this means is that basically, in the few later chapters that’ll jump back to november (as well as any chapters of moment that take place before december), i might call his hair black

this is less of a plot point than it is a residual effect of my original plans for kiri’s fake dating motives of “he wants to be braver and come out of his shell and be more social and stuff, so he decides to go big or go home and ask bakugou, someone who kind of scares him and whom he’d never talked to before, to be his fake boyfriend”

i changed them bc i wanted to divorce the story more from my experiences and motives going into my own fake dating shebang, and also bc i feel like paralleling his canon desire to become braver by pushing himself to do good recklessly (in order to become a better hero) with wanting to become braver by picking out this dude to pretend to date (with my own authorial agenda of getting them together) would just be a bit of a disservice to his canon character tbh

in a way, i feel like keeping the hair color change as a reflection of his resolve to stick this through and face the questions the situation poses head-on is still a bit of a disservice to his character, so i might not even explicitly state his hair color in chapters happening before december. like i said, it’s not important at all; it’s just a random detail

“kaminari was at least a little addicted to the sandwiches at the deli” this is a reference to moment! just a minor easter egg tho

i have a deleted scene in my notes where instead of kirishima going “i don’t have money” to bakugou telling him to bet, he says “no i have sweet beefy arms, not sweet beefy legs” (to which bakugou says, “your fault for skipping leg day”), which would have led into the “make me” bit, but i decided against it bc it just didn’t sound right tbh

i kept the “make me” bit tho bc wow that’s just a good trope y’know

this was the first time in writing perfect harmony that the discord server kaminari, mina, sero, and kirishima share is brought up, though i swear i’d at least referenced it before

anyway, calling it “my idiot, my idiot, my idiot, and me” is actually a bit of a nod to the podcast my brother, my brother, and me

it feels very weird typing mbmbam out all in full and properly italicized like that lol

they would absolutely call it mi-mi-mi-me out loud

#kaminari-eats-bees is just their name for the general chat, and i have no idea where i got that idea bc it fell into my head one night as i was trying to fall asleep

anyway, their discord names are just their hero names, though within the server, their server nicknames are their first choices for a hero name, which is why mina’s “alien queen” instead of “pinky”

what this means is that some of them have different names between DMs and the server messages, although i don’t think that’s going to come up

as for why they’d do that, the answer is probably some concept of professionalism in other servers they might be in. like, my discord name used to be roast ze trash, but when faced with the idea of joining a zine discord under that name, i changed it to 愈花 bc i wanted to look a bit more professional lol

side note i chickened out on applying to that zine or joining the discord, but i was satisfied w/just having roast ze trash as a server nickname w/friends and never changed it back

anyway, the way discord messages are styled in the fic is different than the way i typically style chats in fics (particularly on ao3 where i’m actually allowed to have paragraphs justified to the right) bc of the simple nature of discord having a different layout than typical text messengers

it actually took a little bit of playing around before i settled on doing it the way i did bc while i had written a short group chatfic before, this was my first time writing out a discord chat log, and for the sake of accessibility (to people who might download my fics for whatever reason) i absolutely refuse to use ao3 skins. this has no relation whatsoever to the terror i feel looking at the code for ao3 skins and thinking about potentially editing them.

anyway, fun fact that isn’t shown in any published edition of the fic, but on my google doc, the characters’ usernames are all colored the way they would in an actual discord server lol

this has no relation to the fact that if i do not have different colored names in a discord chat, i WILL lose track of who’s talking, especially when scrolling through backlogs to track down a quote or whatever

i did my best to give the four of them at least slightly different typing styles (all while aggressively avoiding my own personal texting pet peeves (bias of me i know)), but i don’t think it showed too much here hahaha

i also don’t know how often mimimime logs will pop up in the fic, so maybe it won’t matter in the end

“bakugou facepalmed so hard, eijirou was pretty sure it would have knocked any more thinly-skulled person out cold” idk how clear this sentence was (bc it took some work to construct it in a way that made sense to me), but basically that’s kirishima’s very obtuse way of saying bakugou is a thick-skulled hardhead

bakugou offering kirishima a ride home is another bit that means more to me than might first meet the eye bc even though i couldn’t drive, i lived far from school (bc the district lines were wack), and i had chill parents, and so i’d often offer friends rides home if things were getting late, assuming i hadn’t biked to school that day ofc

i also have a soft spot for this moment bc of the way it hits kirishima that bakugou’s being, like, genuinely sweet here, in his own way. like, for most of the chapter, they’re bickering, or they’re being snippy and aggressive with each other, and then, right when kirishima learns to expect bakugou to get mad at him, he doesn’t. 

and idk man! at some point i just got used to people being annoyed when i ask for or offer things that when people respond in a way that signals their genuineness, i’m just taken aback a little, and i gave that response to kiri here

an alternate reaction to bakugou saying “i can drive” was kiri going, “what?! then why did we walk here?!?” to which bakugou says, “i don’t know!!” and then kiri laughs bc holy shit this is real, and this is what it’s like to date bakugou fucking katsuki, huh? 

i’m not entirely sure why i changed it, but it probably has something to do with wanting to show a glimpse of bakugou actually being well-intentioned by agreeing to this bc while bakugou katsuki isn’t necessarily a good kid, he means well most of the time, dammit.

overall, this chapter ended up being a lot longer than i anticipated, taking up more than half of the fic so far, and i was originally going to have them talk about more things, such as:

 more on boundaries in a “do not cross this line” way (vs. the “this is about as far as we’ll have to go” way that was covered) and

behavior in a “in this hypothetical situation involving people who each have different ideas of what we are, how do we act around each other” kind of way

but i have the opportunity to cover those sorts of things in a later chapter anyway

wow okay long notes post. there’s always a lot to talk about with this fic bc of its relationship to my complex, uh, past and dealings with similar experiences. hopefully, as the fic moves more into territory less related to my own personal experiences (thus becoming more fictional), the notes will focus less on explaining the authorial context and more on character relationship meta. it will eventually move back into events inspired by my dumb life, but like i said, it’s not a retelling, so we’ll have to see how those notes go then.

anyway jesus christ if you read all that, you’re hella invested in either this fic, my life, or both, and i’m pretty impressed. send your thoughts and/or further questions to my inbox (or comments section on ao3, if you’d prefer a longer character allotment lol)!! 

next chapter should be out next monday~