Work Text:
Momo Yaoyorozu was peacefully studying in her dorm room one afternoon, after classes had ended for the day, attempting to commit the molecular structure of keratin to memory, when she was interrupted by a loud knock on her door.
A flash of annoyance flickered across her mind at being disturbed, until she heard her girlfriend’s cheerful voice calling her name, and her expression melted into a smile.
“Yaomomo! Can I come in?”
“Yes, of course!” Momo called back, setting her pencil down. Kyoka entered, a wide grin on her face.
“Are you busy right now?”
Momo cast a glance back to her textbooks, a yes hovering on her lips. “Not at all,” she answered, deciding that nothing could be more important than Kyoka.
“Oh, great,” Kyoka said, a familiar gleam of joy in her eyes. “I have something to show you.”
Momo stood, abandoning her studies (almost reluctantly, but with Kyoka smiling like that, it was hard to be reluctant about anything), and walked over to her. "What is it?"
"Deep Dope!" Kyoka said, her earphone jacks waving in the air.
"Ah, yes, they're releasing a new album soon, right?"
"Not soon." Kyoka grabbed Momo by the shoulders, her hands trembling with the effort of keeping them still. "Today. It dropped a few hours ago."
Momo grinned, her girlfriend's passion infectious. "It seems I mixed up the dates, no wonder you're so hyper."
"Yes! Come on, come on, I need to go tell you about it," Kyoka said, tugging on Momo's sleeve.
"Alright, alright, I'm coming," Momo said, following her out the door and down the hall. She didn’t even spare a backward glance at her abandoned textbooks.
Kyoka was always telling her, relentlessly, that she spent too much time studying and ought to relax more; but relaxing seemed a pointless idea, anything that distracted her from academics seemed pointless– except for her girlfriend. The promise of her excited rambling, Kyoka always ecstatic to share her interests with those she loved, was one of the few things more interesting to her than studying.
Kyoka opened the door to her dorm room and pushed her in, following and shutting the door behind her. "Momo.”
"Yes, Kyoka?"
Kyoka turned away from the door and stared at Momo, her eyes wide. “I can’t even begin to tell you how incredible this album is."
Momo laughed. "Do you need to tell me about it?"
"Oh my God, please." Kyoka wrung her hands, barely able to keep herself still with the excitement running through her like a live wire. "This album– I already listened to it, of course, and I cried a couple times– it's full of references. Like, insanely full. Stuff that nobody but the hardest of hardcore fans would understand– that's me, of course, I understood all of them."
Momo gestured to Kyoka's bed. "Go on and sit down, I know you've gotta get this excitement out somehow."
"Thank you, I really do." Kyoka sat down on her red bedsheets, leaning against the giant Deep Dope tapestry on her wall. The perfect setting for the topic, Momo thought.
"Ordinarily," Kyoka continued, "I'd vent all my excitement out by just playing the songs over and over until I knew them like the back of my hand, but all this knowledge is driving me crazy. You should’ve seen me when I listened to it– actually, be glad you didn’t see me when I did, I couldn’t hold still for more than a second."
"Go ahead and tell me everything, then!” Momo sat across from Kyoka on her bed. “I know I wouldn't understand any of the references unless you told me.” While Momo did enjoy much of the music Kyoka listened to, it wasn't as meaningful to her as it was to Kyoka, and Deep Dope in particular especially wasn't. Kyoka had loved the band for years, knowing every single song of theirs by heart, and was able to play nearly all of them on guitar or bass. She knew every obscure tidbit of history regarding the band's members and tours and discography– not a single fact escaped her mind. She lived and breathed this band, and Momo was ecstatic to listen to her ramble about it for hours on end. And from Kyoka's rapidly wiggling earphone jacks and her restless hands, it seemed this might, in fact, take hours.
Momo crossed her legs and rested her palms on her ankles, leaning forward eagerly. It didn't matter if Kyoka rambled for 3 hours straight, she would listen to every word.
"Okay, so– God, where do I even start, there's just so much to talk about… Okay, first of all, I’ll need to explain a lot of backstory to give context for all the references."
"I'm all ears," Momo said.
"So am I," Kyoka interjected, lifting one earphone jack.
"Don't leave out a single detail."
"Oh, believe me, I won't." Kyoka smiled, always grateful for her girlfriend's unending patience and interest in her passions. "So, first off, the album is called 'Shut In,' which I knew already because they announced the name and tracklist along with the release date, but looking at some of the lyrics of different songs, it seems like that might be a reference to the songwriting process of their last album.”
Momo leaned forward, already enraptured. “How so?”
Kyoka’s eyes lit up at the question. “Well, their last album, Treehouse, has a wild story behind it. The whole band stayed in a house together while they wrote and recorded it, and the house was heavily rumored to be haunted. They knew that beforehand, of course, that’s why they stayed in it. At first they thought it would be cool and fun, but then the bassist started having night terrors so bad he had to sleep on the floor of the singer’s room. And…”
Kyoka’s smile was wide, as wide as it usually was when talking about things that excited her so much– which was usually just music, Deep Dope, and small handful of other bands she loved– and her dark eyes crinkled adorably at the corners. Momo found her eyes straying down, fixing themselves onto Kyoka’s lips, moving so rapidly she stumbled over her words and struggled to keep her thoughts linear.
She was talking, now, about some obscure demos the band had recorded in their early days, some that had leaked online and could be listened to if you knew what to look for, and some so niche that no proof of their existence remained except a few dead hyperlinks on the band’s old website– but as much as Momo tried to hold onto each word as it left Kyoka’s mouth, genuinely eager to hear every tidbit of information, she found it nearly impossible to latch onto. Not with how soft Kyoka’s lips looked– always looked– and how smooth her voice was, like a wave rising and falling, with just a little bit of roughness and of airiness as her tone dipped up and down.
To Momo’s credit, she tried to listen– she loved hearing Kyoka talk, she always did– but she was being drawn a little closer with every word out of Kyoka’s mouth, until their knees touched each other on the bed, until she couldn’t help herself anymore and Kyoka’s rant was cut short by Momo’s lips, softly against hers.
Kyoka eyes went wide with surprise, but she didn’t pull away. She leaned closer, raising a hand to cup Momo’s face, and sliding back to curve around the nap of her neck beneath her ponytail. Momo’s hand did the same, her palm against Kyoka’s cheek, and just as she always did, Kyoka’s earphone jack twined around Momo’s fingers.
They lingered there for a moment, before Momo pulled away with an apologetic smile.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
Kyoka shook her head, her bright eyes wondrous as she gazed at Momo. “No. Not at all, it’s okay, but– why’d you–?”
Momo looked down at her lap, at her hand resting now on her knee, with Kyoka’s jack still intertwined between her fingers. “You just look so pretty, and– and sound so pretty when you talk like that. So excited.” She raised her eyes back to Kyoka, whose cheeks were tinged bright pink. “It’s cute.”
“Oh.” Kyoka, always embarrassed at every compliment she got, pressed a palm to her warm cheek. “Well, if you want to–”
“No.” Momo leaned in again, her lips brushing briefly against Kyoka’s for a moment, before she tilted her head to run them beneath Kyoka’s jaw, nose nudging against her ear. “Don’t stop, I want to hear you keep talking.”
“O-oh.” Kyoka stuttered for a moment, too flustered to remember where she’d left off. “Um. Well, like I was saying, those demos– One of the tracks off the newest album, New Wave, it has a lyric that references the title of one of the lost demos, the ones that have never been leaked–”
Momo’s lips strayed lower, feather-light on Kyoka’s neck, feeling the gentle flex of the tendons at her throat as she swallowed and continued to speak.
“So, anyway, a lot of people are wondering– I’m wondering– if that means they’re planning to finally release one of those demos, or maybe rerecord it. It’s a little weird for them to acknowledge it after so long, and it’s way too specific to not be intentional. It goes–”
Kyoka hummed a couple notes to find the rhythm before she quietly sang the lyric. Momo’s mouth rested just against her voicebox, and she felt the vibrations of Kyoka’s voice thrum down into it and reverberate through her throat, as angelic as it was enchanting.
“See what I mean; it’s definitely an intentional reference.”
Momo looped an arm around Kyoka’s waist to tug her a little closer, and Kyoka obliged, shifting and stretching her legs to either side of Momo’s to slot their bodies closer together.
“I don’t know why you like listening to me talk so much, I mean it’s… it’s gotta get annoying at some point,” Kyoka muttered, her words now directed straight at Momo, who finally lifted her head from its place against Kyoka’s neck to give her an aghast look.
“It’s just nice to listen to,” she said. “It’s like– this is music to me.” Momo’s palm laid in the dip of Kyoka’s waist, her other hand on Kyoka’s thigh, where Kyoka’s earphone jack still twisted idly around Momo’s fingers and up around her wrist. It wasn’t uncommon for her to twine her jacks around some part of Momo– her hands, fingers, waist, or her thighs when they were intimate. It was like holding hands, she always said, and since sensations were always amplified tenfold when felt with the delicate appendages, the feeling of Momo’s skin on hers felt even more comforting and electric. Momo liked it, too– liked the idea that Kyoka just wanted to touch her in any way she could.
Kyoka let out a soft giggle, her hand coming to tuck around Momo’s neck and guide her head back to the crook between Kyoka’s neck and shoulder, where Momo’s lips could press comfortably to the warmth of Kyoka’s skin. “That’s sweet,” she murmured, face still burning red with a blush so fierce that Momo could feel the heat even down to Kyoka’s neck.
“Keep going. Please,” she added, lips moving against Kyoka’s throat as she spoke, sending tiny electric flickers across her skin with every brush of their bodies against each other. Her heart fluttered, never used to the feeling of Kyoka so close to her.
Her eyes fell shut as Kyoka continued, detailing in depth the relationship tragedies suffered by the singer and each lyric that corresponded to the public drama. The smooth rhythm of her speech lulled Momo into relaxation, any thoughts of studying a thousand miles away from her mind now. She couldn’t even bring herself to care about the test that was coming up in a few weeks– a test that, ordinarily, she’d spend hours studiously researching for. Now, though, she cared more about studying Deep Dope, committing every reference and easter egg and detail to memory, just to see the delighted look on Kyoka’s face when she brought them up later and Kyoka realized that she cared enough to remember it all.