Hey, I just got back into Kuroko no Basuke recently and I reread this story I made long ago. I really enjoyed going back to this and I thought it deserved to return to my profile as a one shot and maybe, you might like reading this, or if you read it before, I hope you have fun reading it again.
"Ahhhh! Kuroko-cchi I feel so stupid!" Kise whined as he held up his iPhone.
"Kise –kun . What are you doing? We have a practice game after Momoi-san and the coach finish planning. Or did you forget?" Kuroko sat on the bench beside Kise in the locker room and looked over the small forward's shoulder. Displayed on the iPhone's screen were graphs and colored dots which were coincidentally colored with the Generation of Miracles' hair.
"It's a game one of my fans told me to download," he explained, never taking his eyes or fingers off the screen. "It's called Flow Free. It's so frustrating but for some reason, I just can't stop…"
"Oh I see." After saying that Kuroko disappeared or Kise thought he did but he didn't care because he was too absorbed with the game to actually notice and besides, Kuroko always did that anyway.
After a few minutes of a 6x6 grid, Kise finally lost his temper, flung up his arms in exasperation, and cried "Stupid green one!"
"Who's the stupid green one?" Midorima had the misfortune to walk into the locker room just as the words left Kise's mouth. Guess his Oha-Asa was a tad inaccurate today about blonde people not bothering him.
"Oh that's just from this game called Flow Free," Kise said hastily, not wanting to waste any time talking that he would be using to find the path for the "stupid green one" and at the same time, fill up that one last grid. "It's really addicting," he added.
"I can see that," the bespectacled young man said, but Kise offered no reply—he was too busy with the "green one".
Midorima wasn't used to being ignored, especially not because of a mere game app. Being the attention-seeking brat that he was (we don't hate Midorima; it just happened this way), he grabbed the iPhone from Kise's hands and, despite the latter's protests, restarted the puzzle and worked on it. Using one hand to keep Kise away, he attempted to fill up the grid. A few seconds later, he began to mumble to himself, a lot like a strange member of the occult would—it sounded a little creepy to Kise… a lot like demonic curses or something… "This goes here… and that one—damn! No that's not right… Goddamn yellow—!"
"HEY!" Kise whined, looking over Midorima's shoulder. "You isolated the yellow dot on purpose!"
"I did not!" Midorima replied indignantly, pushing up his glasses. "I just found the yellow one to be less necessary than the green one." He snorted and dropped the iPhone into Kise's hands before Kise could punch his lights out. He made his way to his gym bag and, picking it up, said, "That game is stupid. I'm going to get some real practice. And by real practice, I mean actually doing something productive." And with that he left and Kise returned to his beloved Flow Free.
Later, Kise would find some troubles with the dark blue dot. Thankfully (or not), that was when Aomine strode into the room with Murasikabara following behind him who was, as usual, munching on a special edition of Pocky which was only available for one hour on that particular day and is actually not on sale right now, because you missed it and besides, only he would care anyway. Murasakibara began to dress up, politely ignoring everyone. Aomine, on the other hand, was very loud.
"HOLY SHIT, YOU GOT THE NEW iPHONE 5?!" Aomine practically lunged for the iPhone but Kise expertly dodged him with subconsciously copied moves from a random jujutsu practice he happened to watch just a few hours ago. "LEMME SEE THAT!"
"No way! I'm in the middle of a game!"
"What game? Something only iOS 6 can handle, I bet!"
"Shut up and go away! I just need the blue one!"
"Give. Me. The. Phone!" At some point, Aomine's godlike agility—which Kise wasn't able to copy yet (remember, this is middle school)—got the better of him and the sleek iPhone was now in the hands of Daiki Aomine. He glanced at the screen and frowned. "What game is this?"
"It's called Flow Free," growled Kise, reaching for the phone in vain. "Now gimme back my phone!" His voice was deeper than usual, his eyes more than a little feral—like a wild beast staring down his prey.
Aomine was unperturbed—he is after all, the original BEAST. He tilted his head to the side and studied the grid, which was nearly complete. "How can this be hard, stupid?" he said, restarting the puzzle.
Kise moaned in despair. "I WAS ALMOST DONE WITH THAT!"
"You're making life so hard," the power forward said bluntly. "You just connect everything right? See… There…" He connected all the dots together—light blue, red, purple, yellow, green, then orange, and finally, the dark blue one was connected with just a tad more flourish than the rest. All the dots were connected… but the puzzle wasn't clear. His eyes widened. "What the… I think this is broken, Kise. I'm already done, but it doesn't say so."
"Idiot." Kise snatched the iPhone, taking advantage of Aomine's momentary daze. "You're supposed to fill the grid with the colored paths, get it? Like this." And he went back to th grid (a.k.a. the easiest one, which supposedly anyone can finish) just to show Aomine, and finished one puzzle in front of him.
Aomine scowled and got the phone back. "Let me try that." Within a few minutes, Aomine's brain was so overheated, that you could practically see the steam pouring out his ears.
"Uhh, Aomine-cchi…?" Kise asked experimentally, waving his hand in front of Aomine's face. The latter showed no sign of response. The blonde carefully pulled the iPhone out of Aomine's grasp and when he realised Aomine wasn't trying to strangle him, happily returned to hi heaven… or should we say, hell, since that was about his seventh time trying the exact same puzzle in the past forty five minutes.
Aomine on the other hand, realised that he wasn't being pressured anymore and something in his brain told him to take a ball and go somewhere far, far away from that monster called Flow Free. He stiffly picked up a conveniently placed ball and went over to one corner, his short-circuited brain forgetting that there was an actual court beyond the door. He began to dribble, staring into space. After two successful dribbles, it bounced off his foot—a rookie mistake—and away it went. He paused. "Oh." He turned to the direction of the ball and walked to it with mechanical strides and picked it up again and repeated the same procedure over and over.
The next one to enter the room was very displeased. Akashi looked around at his team with a grimace. The scream of "EFFING RED ONE! Just a little more, dammit!" prompted Akashi to turn to the direction of Kise. The screen was practically one millimetre away from his nose, his finger carefully tracing the path between the two red dots. "Just a little more…" Kise carefully traced the final path and one more square in that grid and that level would have FINALLY been finished. That is, if Akashi hadn't taken the iPhone from his hand. That sudden shout of "effing red one" had definitely hit the right spot or should we say the wrong one.
"What exactly are you doing , Ryota?" As far as Akashi could infer, all these cases were connected. The disappearance of Shintarou, the disappearance of the sanity of Daiki, the increase in Tetsuya's transparency, the neutrality of Atsushi who was always neutral, were all a result of whatever Ryota was doing since Akashi knew he was always one of the first ones in the locker room due to his recent recruitment into the starting five. When Akashi finally took a look at the screen, he had to stare hard at it, wondering how this simple-minded game could have caused such pandemonium to his minio—er, teammates. Once he saw it, he had already devised 50 ingenious ways to solve it. His only question was which one had to be the best—because all of them were.
Completely aware of how much effort Kise had put into the puzzle, he restarted it. That being the second time his beautiful hard work had been completely overlooked, Kise had to keep himself from breaking down after seeing the dark smile that crept up Akashi's face. Akashi however, was feeling generous, so he sat down and began to explain where Kise went wrong using highly advanced and completely useless mathematical jargon that only Gauss, Jordan, Hawking, and Archimedes would have understood together.
"… And there you have it," Akashi finished smugly. Of course, the puzzle had been finished at his hands, but the process by which it had happened was something completely out of Kise's reach. The blonde stared in silence at the new dialog window displaying the words congratulating the user for clearing the level. It didn't give him any satisfaction however, because he wasn't the one who solved it and he didn't even understand how it happened in the first place.
Akashi noticed none of Kise's miserable disposition, and went on to the next level, along with more convoluted explanations how where this dot should go, and where this pipe will lead, cornering that one, etcetera, etcetera. Finally, unable to bear any more of his captain's prattling away, Kise burst out:
"Look, Akashi-cchi, I know that you're very enthusiastic about this bu—"
Akashi scoffed. "Enthusiastic? What makes you say that I am at all enthusiastic about this?"
Kise blinked. "We-ell, you've been talking nonstop about it for the past 10 minutes…"
The red-haired basketball genius was astonished. He didn't let this emotion surface, however—he had supreme confidence in his acting skills—and simply narrowed his heterochromatic eyes at the blonde. Enthusiastic? About a… an app? A silly, childish, simple-minded application? HIM, Seijuro Akashi, basketball genius and extraordinaire at this young age? Impossible! There was just no way that could be…
"Aka-chin," Murasakibara said between mouthfuls of a random bag of chips that probably wouldn't have been bought by anyone other than someone who didn't think things like food through… in other words, that would be the purple-haired center player.
Akashi turned to him with a warning glare that foretold of severe punishment should his time be wasted… and also that Murasakibara was not to call him "Aka-chin" in such a familiar way. He was their kin—erhem, captain, after all.
Murasakibara was unperturbed and jerked a thumb in the direction of the corner—er, Kuroko, who was fiddling with his phone quietly on his own. "Kuro-chin is already doing 10 x 10 stuff. Just thought I should let you know and all."
"Aaaaahhhh?! You're kidding!" Kise was dumbfounded, starting forward and pushing Akashi aside a bit.
Akashi fixed an icy look at Kise and he cringed back. Then, Akashi stood up and went over to Kuroko, finally coming to stand over him. Kise, out of curiosity, scooted over to see if Murasakibara was telling the truth or not.
The purple-haired young man had no reason to lie, though, and he himself went back to gorging himself on junk food.
Meanwhile, Kuroko looked up at Akashi. "Oh, Akashi-kun, you're already here?"
"Yes, that's right, Tetsuya," Akashi said with a small smile that spoke dangerous lengths. "By the way, what might you be doing?"
Kuroko raised his eyebrows but lifted his phone for Akashi to see. "A game," he said simply.
Kise let out a loud, "OOOOHHHH!" and was the spitting image of The Scream for about three seconds. One of Akashi's eyes twitched slightly. Yep, Kuroko was on the last 10 x 10 puzzle and he was just about three moves away from clearing it.
Akashi tried to keep his outward manner coolly upbeat, but the evil aura that leaked out of him was pretty hard to miss. "So, how would you say that you got that far in such a short time, Tetsuya?" the red-haired young man asked levelly.
Kuroko was a little confused, seeing as Akashi was never interested in knowing about anything other than basketball-related things when it came to his team. For example, while Kise was constantly asking questions about what Kuroko did after getting home, in his free time, or what his hobbies were, Akashi generally didn't give a rat's ass about any of that and only wanted to know if he had any unique basketball skills, etcetera. It sort of explained why the guy didn't have any real friends (unless you count pawns as friends). But, Kuroko also knew that he was in no place to argue.
"Um, you just work from the outer dots towards the inside," he said. "The border inwards."
Kise's eyes widened. "Wow, I didn't know it was that simple!"
Akashi said nothing and turned on his heel before walking away to his locker. He changed quickly and glanced over at Ryota, who was now eagerly starting fresh beside Tetsuya. Atsushi was eyeing them some ways away with five seaweed crackers in his mouth. Daiki was starting to recover and was dribbling normally at the very least. Shintarou arrived a short while later, and it was obvious that most of his time had been spent on a certain game app.
When Akashi called them to attention, they obeyed and approached without question. He explained the strategy for the practice match, while Shintarou and Tetsuya gave their observations on the opponents. Ryota dropped a question or two while Daiki just put up an air of indifference even though he was clearly listening intently.
Once the time had come, they exited the locker room together, prepared for what lay ahead of them, knowing that they would win, without a doubt, because they had each other and trusted one another.
Akashi closed his eyes for a second.
Maybe… I…
The buzzer screamed, the game began, and Akashi left all thoughts behind.
AN: Aaaanndd, this is what happens when we two co-writers have a whole seven hours to brainstorm. You know, it was really fun reviewing basketball jargon, writing fictional names in my Death Note, and watching basketball-related videos plus Kuroko no Basuke eps, listening to the KnB drama Cd (trying to translate desperately), and singing along to the music… Haha, it was a productive day!
And… That's it. I still have my old chapters of rebound, my friend and my time travel fic collab. We might repost it but probably after I finish my other stories since I have too much going on already, I may not but you can give me your opinion and if the feedback is good, I may continue it.
I also have an unfinished FMA and KnB crossover lying useless in my files that talks about Roy and his efforts to turn his great great great grandson Izuki to some soldier or something. It's pretty much crack, like this oneshot kind of crack.
I'd probably bring out again if feedback is good but for now, I'm gonna focus on QFO and my Snk fic which I hope you could check out if you're familiar with the fandom.
Note: It'd be awesome if you left a review :D. I'd love to know what people think.
