A/N: Happy birthday, Ahomine! Go get Kise to buy you a stripper cake with Kuroko in! Though this isn't a great birthday fic...
This is what happens when I write too much humour. It's kinda twisted and very incoherent, but I'm happy enough with it. I enjoy making characters lose their sanity and slowly recover it! :D
I have a thing for giving shounen characters families and clichéd backstories. Sorry.
I do not own Kuroko no Basuke.
"Don't," he says, tired. "Don't say anything."
Kuroko stands back from him, watching carefully as he pulls himself up, blue eyes darker than ever. "Aomine-kun."
He's supposed to be at practice. Instead, hi's staring at the sky on the roof, light blinding to his eyes.
Kuroko opens his mouth again. Aomine gets there first. "Please."
Kuroko watches as he lumbers off, and as Aomine commanded him, doesn't say a word.
Aomine doesn't hear him again until they're wearing different jerseys, not until Kuroko has replaced him with a new light.
The team falls apart piece by piece.
The catalyst was, obviously, Kuroko. Somehow, they'd managed to arrange themselves around him, like flowers towards then sun, and then-
He leaves, because a basketball team is a team of five, not five almost-friends who play separately.
It's such a fucking joke, Aomine thinks, Momoi boring holes into his back with her eyes. Kuroko isn't much more than a scrap of pale skin and placid eyes, yet the shadow is their sun, despite Akashi.
Akashi. Did he plan this? Their fall from Everest to the ground? It wouldn't surprise him.
After Kuroko, Aomine is the first to quit, rubbing salt off his cheeks and forgetting his kitbag.
He doesn't care, he tells himself. Kuroko isn't there anymore, and he couldn't give a flying fuck about the others-
Could he?
He doesn't know. Aomine doesn't know a lot of things, even stuff about himself. What kid doesn't know the reason behind their dark skin, their too-young father?
Kise follows him out of the gym, motor mouth silenced.
"Aominecchi-"
"Shut it."
"I-"
"Kise, be quiet."
"We-"
"Shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up-"
"I won't!"
Kise's fists clench, peaceable Kise, who puts on a tough face buts runs from conflict. Kise, who started playing basketball because of him, Kise who slings an arm over Kuroko's shoulder and gives them his Valentine's chocolates, because 'no way will I eat all that!'
"I thought you were different. You're running away! I thought you liked basketball!"
Aomine stares at him, nostrils flared, shoulders heaving.
"I hate it."
Kise's face collapses, like a colossus caving. "Don't-"
"I hate basketball!" he yells to the sky. Something is lifted from him, a ton weight from tanned shoulders.
And then he runs, because he wants to, and no one will make him stop.
No one can.
In high school, silence is his constant companion.
Aomine digs his fingers into his skin, watching the force of his hand drive the blood out of his arm, leaving it pale. Dully, he thinks he should stop, but he doesn't. It could be ten minutes or it could be two hours, but when he takes his stinging fingers away the skin has darkened again, darker than his coffee coloured skin, to an ugly purple bruise.
When he looks up, Momoi's eyes bore into him, and he remembers the feral pink-eyed rabbit he used to own before it ran away.
Petulantly, he turns his cheek to her and she slaps it, but Momoi's weak and it hurts her more than it hurts him. She does it again and again until a small, pink imprint of her hand is left on his dark skin. She goes to hit him again, but he catches her wrist and lays his fingers alongside hers. The contrast is astounding.
She snaps her hand out of his grip and pounds away, hair tangled in the breeze.
He's not going to practice. Why should he? He's the best, anyways; unsurpassable, his personal wall, and he throws himself at it again and again and again-
Is he going insane?
He laughs, a hollow sound that hurts his chest, and he doesn't notice the magenta eyes staring back at him, ones filled with something like pity.
Bastard was the word the childcare lady called him. Foreigner. Retard. Bastard was the most prominent, though. He remembers not understanding the cruel words, and asking his father what they meant.
The next day Da comes home and tells him he's not going to that place ever again. He's glad. All the other kids monopolized the toys, except for the half inflated basketball. That was his.
He stole it. It's under his bed somewhere, pushed out of his sight like so many other things.
He is a bastard, though. Not really a foreigner. He's never been out of Japan; hell he hasn't even gotten as far as Hokkaido!
He's learned to cope with retard. Brains aren't everything, not if you have his sporting genius. He tells himself this on numerous occasions, and every time it works a little less.
His father is barely eighteen when his tiny nameless son is pushed into his arms by an uncaring Swiss nurse.
There was a woman, nine months ago, with mocha skin and too white teeth and no Japanese at all. That was common, in Europe. His father had used his college money, coin by careful coin saved by his father, Aomine's granpa, to go travel the world for a year.
It's pure luck he's even in the country when he gets the call from the hospital, telling him a woman had skipped town, leaving a baby behind with nothing except a slip of paper with his number on it.
His father goes home straight away, gives him a name and a home, but not much else. Two jobs is a lot for an eighteen year old to work, but Pops, a retired police-man, steps in and raises Aomine He teaches him how to walk, to speak. They have a bit of trouble with the potty-training, but he's saved by his father, who seems to be better at this stuff.
Pops teaches him other things. How to smile when nobody else is; how to make sure you're not caught when you slip sweets from the candy shop; how to make a fishing net from a stick and a few pieces of string; how to differentiate between male and female crawfishes, mean people and nice ones; how to fry a teriyaki burger to perfection; how to ignore the comments. Even if he didn't mean to, you learn pretty quickly when you're dark and short and he's pale and limping.
His father doesn't love again.
He beats Kuroko, which was expected.
And then he doesn't. Kuroko is blinding, Kagami is perfect, and Kiyoshi stands behind them like a proud father.
They're all crying. They're all fucking crying, even the mute dude who doesn't say anything, tears streaming down their faces. Their coach tackles them in a hug, screaming with joy.
He almost wants to punch them, but he can't.
Not while Kuroko is smiling like that.
He leans against the railing and watches.
Rakuzan and Shuutoku are playing in a perfectly executed war, each player a chess piece in Akashi and Miodrima's intricate game. They're not playing to their full ability, but even this half-throttle is still beautiful, and makes him itch to catapult down onto the court and play in a way he hasn't felt in an age.
Kaijou and Seirin, on the other hand are hungry to play, to crush each other. Kuroko and Kagami are good, he knows; they've beaten him. Murasakibara's defeat was a surprise, but right now the giant is slumped beside Kagami's friend, pacified with a mouthful of pocky, childish tears swept away. Murasakibara, like Aomine, has been on the receiving side of Seirin's genius, and neither underestimates it a single bit. If Kaijou are smart, they won't either.
But Kise is not the type to sit around. He has trained, hour after hour, to this. Haizaki didn't stand a chance, not like the brute ever did, not against this subtle stealing that has managed to replicate even him.
He doesn't know who'll win. He doesn't even know who he wants to win. Aomine doesn't know a lot of things.
They're his friends, like it or not, and he's accepted them. They've accepted him.
For now, he'll just hang over the railing with Momoi pulling him back so he doesn't fall over and split his head open, screaming for his friends 'til he loses his voice, until someone wins.
Not him. It won't be him. But he's accepted that, he thinks. He doesn't really know. He doesn't know, and he doesn't care, and it's like sunlight, except, for once, not his.
It's his friends' light.
Aomine smiles.
Please review! They really motivate me. I'd reply to every one if I could, but I get internet stage-fright and then I can't. ~Gryfo